* * *
MARCUS SAT IN the hospital waiting for his father to finish up his chemo. Since the incident with the shredded nets, his da seemed to fade away day by day, as if the fight had drained out of him like air from a leaky balloon. Marcus had held true to his promise to replace the nets, but he might as well not have bothered. All they brought up was seaborne debris—a dismal harvest of empty plastic bottles, bubble-edged once-white plastic cooler lids, and bedraggled bits and pieces of sunken ships that had suddenly been imbued with a mysterious desire to return to the surface. Every once in a while there was a fish or two, but they were all dead or diseased, with blank staring eyes and ragged fins.
Marcus was a little depressed, too, although only part of that could be blamed on the lack of fish or his da’s ill health. Truth be told, he missed Beka. He missed having her around the boat, always there to lend a hand with cheerful enthusiasm. He missed seeing her bright smile and gleaming hair, missed the way he felt when he was around her. The Wily Serpent seemed to have lost some of its little remaining shine without her aboard. Hell, the whole world was darker without her daily presence in his life. He was an idiot.
An idiot for having fallen for her so hard. But an even bigger idiot for having let her go.
He still found it hard to believe what she’d told him—that she was some kind of magical being, like out of the stories his da used to tell. But her demonstration had been unmistakably real, and it certainly explained a few things that had baffled him, including how she ended up in the middle of the ocean to be caught in his nets in the first place. And a man didn’t survive a dozen years in a war zone without seeing a thing or two that couldn’t be explained away by the rational mind.
She was a witch. An honest to god, magical witch. Hell. He couldn’t decide if that was worse or better than thinking she was just some flaky surfer chick. Either way, she was completely unsuitable for him. Completely, totally, and irrevocably not his type. So why did he miss her like a phantom limb?
He’d turn a corner and see some woman with a fall of long yellow-gold hair, and for a moment, his heart would seize up in his chest, thinking it was Beka. Or he’d catch a whiff of strawberries, impossible on the ocean breeze. At night, she haunted his dreams; swimming, laughing, scowling at him with those big sapphire eyes, or naked, writhing in pleasure beneath him, all tanned flesh and glowing joyfulness.
Waking alone and realizing he’d lost her—that was the worst.
Well, that and wondering if she was seeking comfort in the arms of that damned too-good-looking Kesh, who no doubt had been just waiting for Marcus to do something stupid, like walking away from the best woman on the entire planet.
He was an idiot squared. An idiot times infinity. He’d kick his own ass if the universe wasn’t already doing such a good job of it. Damn, he missed that woman.
* * *
DAMN, SHE MISSED that man. Beka tried to focus on Alexei’s report, but she was feeling even sicker and shakier than ever, and having a hard time focusing. That was the only reason she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on topic. It had nothing to do with Marcus.
“Beka, are you listening to me?” Alexei rumbled, his deep basso voice bouncing off the paneled walls of the bus. “I haven’t spent the last three nights crawling through every dive bar in town where paranormal creatures are known to hang out just for my health, you know.” He gave her a broad grin that was almost lost within his beard. “Of course, I did have a bit of fun breaking heads and twisting arms so people would tell me the truth.”
Gregori rolled his eyes at his larger comrade. “A bit of fun? We’re banned from half the bars down by the wharf now. And the other half are just too scared of you to try it. Why can’t you learn to ask politely?”
“Like you do?” Alexei said with a snort. “I seem to recall one poor Selkie lad you held up over your head for an hour while you drank beer with the other hand.”
“Well, I didn’t need both hands to hold him up there; why not drink beer? And he did eventually tell us what we needed to know.”
“Boys,” Beka interjected, not up to listening to any more gleeful recaps of the Riders’ unique methods of information gathering. “I assume that you actually did learn something from all this carousing and harassing of the locals, beside which tavern serves the best ale.”
“The Cranky Seagull,” they both said in unison.
Swell. The one place she could never go again, for fear of running into Marcus or his father. It figured.
“Lovely,” she said in an uncharacteristically snappy voice. “I’ll be sure to pass along your recommendation to the Queen. Now, if we had something a little more helpful to tell her at the same time, that might be good too.”