“Hey,” Liam said, a good-natured grin lighting up his face. “I’m glad we finally get to meet. Barbara has told me all about you.”
Beka grinned back. “Not as much as she’s told me about you, I’ll bet. Is it true that you are more powerful than a locomotive and can leap tall buildings in a single bound?”
“I think you’re confusing me with Superman,” Liam said. “I’m just a small-town sheriff. Barbara is the one with the superpowers in this family.”
“Are you kidding? You got Barbara to marry you. If that isn’t a superpower, I don’t know what is.”
Liam laughed. “You might have a point there. She wasn’t exactly easy to woo.”
Barbara scowled. “I was easy.” She thought about it. “I didn’t kill you and bury you in the backyard. It could have been worse.”
Little Babs stuck her head out from behind Liam’s knee to say, in a piping tenor voice, “You lived in the Airstream. You didn’t have a backyard.”
Barbara laughed. “Don’t mind Babs; she’s very literal. That’s what spending the first few years of your life in the Otherworld will get you.” She turned to the girl. “This is Beka, one of the other Baba Yagas I told you about. Can you say hi?”
“Hi,” the girl said, pushing a hank of short, dark hair behind one ear. “I’m going to be a Baba Yaga when I get bigger. But I’m only five, so today I get to see the Pacific Ocean. That’s good, right? I’ve never seen an ocean before.” She looked at Beka, tilting her head to one side like a crow eyeing something shiny. “Barbara says you get to see the ocean every day. Is it nice?”
Beka nodded, completely enchanted. “It is nice,” she said. “Are you going to go swimming?”
Babs looked up at Liam. “I am, right? You’re going to teach me to swim and I’m going to wear my special clothes for getting wet in.” She gazed at Beka with a slightly baffled expression. “Barbara says there are clothes for getting wet in, and clothes for staying dry in. That seems silly to me. Does it seem silly to you?”
Barbara smothered a laugh under one hand. “Babs is still getting used to being in the mundane world. A lot of our rules don’t make a lot of sense to her.”
Beka squatted down so she was on Babs’s level and said in a whisper, “Don’t tell anyone, but I think some of those rules are silly too.”
A tiny smile tugged at the edge of the little girl’s rosebud lips. “Okay,” she whispered back. “I won’t tell.” And then added in a louder voice, “I like her. Can we go swimming now?”
* * *
BEKA AND BARBARA sat on a blanket on the beach and watched Barbara’s new husband patiently showing little Babs how to float. They’d left their respective Chudo-Yudos up at the bus getting reacquainted and catching up on whatever dragons gossiped about. It was distinctly possible that their two erstwhile huts were gossiping, too, but it was always hard to say with semi-aware buildings. Especially once they acquired wheels.
“So,” Barbara said after a while. “What’s going on?”
Beka tried to remember what she’d put in the letter she’d sent, apologizing for not being able to make it to Barbara and Liam’s wedding. “Well, there’s a problem with the trench the Selkies and Merpeople live in; something is poisoning the water, and I’ve been tasked to find out what and fix it. And apparently there is a renegade riling up the local paranormal community and risking exposure of all our secrets.” She looked down, playing with a tiny shell. “I’m, um, not making a lot of headway.”
Barbara sighed. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about you. I got a message from Chewie saying that you were having a crisis and needed someone to talk to—it’s pretty unusual for one Baba’s Chudo-Yudo to contact another Baba, so I thought I’d better come by in person instead of just calling.”
Oh, great. She couldn’t believe her dragon had interrupted Barbara’s honeymoon because he thought she couldn’t handle the situation. There might have been another moment in her life that had been more humiliating than this one, but she couldn’t think of it offhand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, dropping her head into her hands. “I can’t believe he dragged you all the way out here for this. I’m fine, really.” Other than being completely mortified, that is.
“We really were in the area,” Barbara said, patting Beka clumsily on the shoulder. She wasn’t all that comfortable with Human gestures, having been raised by a Baba who’d been at the end of her career and not very good at being Human anymore. But she was trying. “We’ve been traveling across the country so we could show Babs some of her new world. And of course, with the Airstream being magical, it doesn’t take as long to get from place to place as it should. I’d already promised to show her the ocean, so coming here was no big deal, although we need to get back on the road later today.”