Alexei stared into the bottom of his beer mug and sighed. Not over the beer - it was good enough, some local brew as dark and bitter as his spirits. But drinking wasn’t the same anymore. Nothing was the same. He’d never liked sitting still for long, but now there was no next mission, no next adventure. He had no idea what he was going to do next, and Alexei had never been very good at doing nothing. He took another swig of the very good beer. Even that didn’t seem to help anymore. Dammit, he was turning as broody as his brother Gregori. That wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. One deep thinker was all any family could stand.
And that person had never been him.
Gregori was the thinker, Mikhail was the charmer, and Alexei was the fighter. Which was all very well and good when there was something to fight. Besides boredom.
It wasn’t as though he minded sitting in a bar drinking. He liked sitting in bars. But he’d usually had his brothers for company, and it had been a lot more fun traveling and drinking and brawling with them than it had turned out to be when he was on his own. Damn it.
But that had all changed when they’d been captured by Brenna, a deranged former Baba Yaga, who had tortured him and the others in an insane attempt to gain immortality, which had ended up draining them of theirs instead. That had seriously sucked. Yes, Bella’s dragon-cat Koshka had eventually burnt the witch to a crisp - that was kind of satisfying, admittedly - but the damage had already been done.
Alexei gazed sightlessly at the dark liquid in front of him. He was the eldest. The strongest. He should have kept his brothers safe. But he’d failed, and they’d all paid the price. Nothing he could do would ever make up for that. He hadn’t even been able to face them, after. Everyone said that no one blamed him, but he blamed himself.
So as soon as the worst of his wounds had healed, he’d left the Otherworld without a word to anyone. Just started moving and kept moving, drinking and fighting his way from the coast of California all the way across the country. As long as he was moving and drinking and fighting, he wasn’t thinking. And that was a good thing, because thinking only depressed the crap out of him, and seriously, what was the point of that?
It wasn’t as though he’d been completely out of touch. He’d kept track of his brothers’ progress through the network of paranormal creatures still on this side of the doorway; the sprites tied to their earth-bound trees, the Selkies and Merpeople who had no ocean to retreat to on the other side. And he’d sent occasional postcards to the Baba Yagas, Barbara and Beka and Bella, so they wouldn’t worry. He wasn’t a complete jerk.
True, he’d skipped Mikhail’s wedding, but he’d sent a present. At least, he was pretty sure he had. And frankly, not showing up was probably a bigger gift. He was happy to hear that his brothers had managed to build new lives for themselves, but to be honest, he just didn’t see the point. If he couldn’t be the man he was meant to be, then he was going to embrace his lack of purpose with gusto, just like he’d always done everything else.
Speaking of which, his mug was empty. “Barkeep, I’ll take another,” he said, banging it down on the counter. With gusto, of course.
“If you break that mug, you’ll get glass splinters and no more beer,” Bethany said, rolling her eyes at him. “And if you spend one more night watching old cowboy movies on the television, I’m disconnecting the cable in the guest house. They’re clearly a bad influence on you.”
“Ha!” Alexei said. “As if I need a bad influence.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Bethany said in a wry tone, but since he’d just finished watching her father for eight very long hours, he looked at her pitifully until she poured him another one anyway.
A thin, weather-beaten man wearing a damp waterproof jacket and an exhausted expression slid onto the stool next to his and nodded at a couple of his compatriots who held down the seats further down the bar.
“Lousy fishing today,” he said to no one in particular. “Bethany love, who does a man have to kill to get a beer around here?”
Bethany put a bottle down in front of him. “Tough day, Joe?” she asked. “The weather seemed okay. A little rain doesn’t usually bother you.”
“Weather’s fine for this time of year,” he said, draining half the beer in one long swallow like a man who had been dying of thirst. “Fish just don’t seem to be around a lot of the regular spots the last few days. Don’t know why.”
“Robbie did okay yesterday,” the guy sitting on the stool next to him said. “He was in here bragging about it last night.”
Joe shook his head and gave a half-hearted laugh. “He’s not bragging today. They had to tow his boat into the dock. What’s left of it. He’s telling anyone who will listen this crazy story about some kind of giant squid attacking The Marlin when he was on his way back in. He swears the thing was so big, it nearly tipped the boat on its side and then ripped a hole in the deck to get at the fish in the hold.”
The guy next to him guffawed. “Come on, pull the other one. A giant squid?”
The thin man shrugged. “That’s what he’s saying. Some of the guys think he was drinking and had some kind of freak accident, just made up the story so his wife wouldn’t kill him. But I saw his face. Something spooked the hell out of him, that’s for sure.”
Another guy further down chewed thoughtfully on a toothpick. “Wouldn’t look forward to putting ‘giant squid attack’ on all that damned insurance paperwork, that’s for sure. He’ll be lucky to get a penny.”
“Oh, I dunno,” a third man said from a table nearby. “I remember my grandfather talking about a monster that was seen further down the coast in his time.”
Alexei perked up a little at the word monster. This was more like it. Nothing boring about monsters.
“What did your grandfather say it looked like?” he asked, swiveling around on his bar stool to face the man who had spoken.
“Well, I was only a kid at the time, and my mother used to shush him when he brought it up - I think she was worried he’d scare us little ones - but seems to me he could have been describing a giant squid. Said it had lots of legs and huge suckers, and maybe some kind of a beak, and it was so strong, it tossed a big ship around like it was a children’s toy in the bathtub.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” the guy next to Joe said with a scowl. “There’s no such thing as monsters or giant squids. It’s impossible.”
Alexei shook his head. “Ha. The impossible is just the possible you haven’t met yet.” He’d met a lot of impossible things in his time with the Baba Yagas.
The guy snorted. “Want to bet?”
Excellent. Finally, some fun. “How about fifty bucks?” Alexei said.
“How about a hundred?” the guy countered, obviously thinking Alexei was kidding.
“Done,” Alexei said, sticking out his hand for the man to shake. “I bring you back some proof there’s a monster and you owe me a hundred dollars.”
“Sure,” the man agreed. “And when you can’t get any proof, you owe me a hundred. I hope you’re good for it.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Bethany hissed, leaning closer over the bar.
“I’m going looking for a monster,” Alexei said cheerfully, downing the rest of his beer. “Want to come?”
* * *
In the end Bethany went with him, more to keep an eye on him than out of any belief that he was going to find anything. She didn’t even want to think about where he was going to come up with a hundred dollars to pay off Duke, who wasn’t exactly known for his forgiving nature. She was starting to second-guess her maybe-not-so-brilliant-after-all plan to have Alexei take care of her father. The man was clearly three pretzels short of a snack bag.
Although she had to admit, at least he’d gotten Calum up and dressed and fed with a minimum of fuss and a relatively small amount of cursing the last few days, and then walked Lulu without being asked, although it was a little odd the way he kept up a one-sided conversation with the dog. So the next day, as soon as the lunch rush was over, she’d called in her relief bartender for a couple of hours and asked Mrs. Masters from next door to come over for a bit while Bethany drove Alexei down to the wharf.
Calum complained bitterly about being forced to watch the neighbor’s soap operas, but Bethany figured without a minder, there was no telling what kind of trouble Alexei might get into. Even with one, she wasn’t feeling all that complacent. She had a feeling he could get into trouble in an empty room with all the doors and windows locked and one arm tied behind his back.
Maybe both arms.
She pulled the truck up to the wharf and put on the parking brake, overwhelmed for a moment by a flashback to the days she and her mom used to drive over to meet her father at the end of a long day’s fishing. When they’d first moved here from Scotland, he’d taken whatever jobs he could get, going clamming or lobstering when he couldn’t get a job on a fishing boat. Eventually he’d saved up enough money for his own boat, which should have made things easier, except it was right around then that her mom had started getting sick.
Nothing was ever easy after that. Still, right up until the point where she couldn’t get out of bed, Bethany’s mom had insisted that if she was going to keep their only vehicle during the day, she’d go pick up her husband when it was time for him to come home. Margaret McKenna might have been the only person in the world as stubborn as the man she’d married.
She had also been the only one in the world that Calum listened to, and sometimes actually behaved for. Bethany shook off the feeling that she might be starting to be that person for Alexei. That was just nuts. He meant nothing to her, and she sure as hell meant nothing to him. She’d be crazy to think otherwise, and while she had her flaws, Bethany was anything but crazy.
“You okay?” Alexei asked, sounding more curious than concerned. “You’re gripping that steering wheel like you’re trying to choke it.”
Bethany relaxed her white-knuckled fingers and took a deep breath. She never got tired of the briny scent of the ocean, flavored with the slight tang of fish. She’d missed it, when she’d been going to law school in Boston. She hadn’t missed Calum’s temper and bad moods, or their constant disagreements while they were stuck together in that small house after her mother died, but she’d sometimes gone to the harbor just to breath in air that smelled like home.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just childhood memories rearing their ugly heads. You know what it’s like.”
He raised one shaggy eyebrow. She’d never noticed before, but they were slightly pointed in the middle, which added to his general devilish air. “I do not, actually,” he said, his Russian accent stronger than usual. “My childhood was…unconventional.”
Ha. And why didn’t that surprise her? “Raised by wolves?” she asked, getting out of the truck and slamming the door hard so it would close.
“A few,” he said. “Also some very nice bears.”
She glanced at his huge body, long brown hair, and braided beard. Somehow, that wouldn’t surprise her at all. “Right,” she said. “The Marlin is usually docked down this way. If the damage isn’t too bad, they might be trying to do the repairs in her berth, instead of putting her into dry dock. Cheaper and faster.” Fishermen couldn’t afford to miss too many days on the water. Most of them were barely making a profit as it was.
Various men greeted them as they made their way down the pier.
“You seem to know a lot of people,” Alexei said after one particularly exuberant “hallo!” “Do they all come to your bar?”
“Plenty of them,” Bethany said. “But you have to remember that I grew up on these docks. Fishermen are a pretty close-knit community. There are some newcomers, of course, but half these guys brought me cookies when I was a kid, or showed me how to bait a line. When my dad sold his boat to buy the bar after my mom died, most of them showed up out of loyalty and kept him in business. A few of them even helped me with my algebra homework.”
Not well, of course. But she’d kept her grades up, even through the grief of losing her mother at fifteen, because even then she knew that getting into a good college on a scholarship was her ticket out of town and away from her father.
She came to a stop in front of a familiar spot.
“Wow,” she said. “I guess Joe wasn’t exaggerating after all.”
The boat in front of them was listing slightly to one side, its usually neat red and white paint marred by scratches and gouges. A sizeable hole gaped in the splintered wood plank deck, although fortunately the damage seemed to be restricted to the area above the waterline.
“That doesn’t look like a drunken accident to me,” Alexei said, his grin suspiciously bright. “And I ought to know.”
“I’ll bet,” she muttered. “Hey, Robbie, you here?”
A grizzled head wearing a warm navy blue cap and a wispy beard popped out of the ship’s cabin. “Bethany, darlin’, what are you doing here? Did your father send you here to gloat? He always was jealous of my Marlin.” A crooked smile belied his harsh words, but it didn’t touch the shadows behind his eyes.
“Just checking in on you,” she said. “This giant person is Alexei. He’s helping me look after my dad for a few days. Permission to come aboard?”
“Not sure why you’d want to,” Robbie said glumly. “But sure, come on up.”
Once on deck, the damage looked, if anything, worse. “Holy crap, Robbie. This is terrible.” Bethany gave the older man a hug. “I’m surprised you’re not already trying to repair it.”
“Have to wait for the man from the insurance company, don’t I?” Robbie said, tugging fretfully at the edge of his worn wool pea coat. “Can’t so much as hammer a nail into a board until they take fifty zillion pictures, measure everything, make me repeat my story another seventeen times, tell me they don’t believe me, and then hopefully, cut me a check anyway.” He slumped against the side of the boat, his entire body a study in discouragement.
“About that story,” she said hesitantly. “Joe was in the bar and he was telling everyone you said, well - ”
“He said there was a monster,” Alexei chimed in, as though that was the kind of thing people said every day. “Was it a big monster or a little monster? What color was it? Did it have tentacles?”
Bethany thought he sounded more excited than a kid on Christmas morning, as though a monster - not that there was such a thing - was the best kind of present anyone could get. Looking at the huge hole, she suspected Robbie didn’t share his sentiments.
“Sorry,” she said. “Alexei isn’t exactly sensitive about other people’s feelings.”
“Hey,” the big man said. “I’m taking care of a gigantic ugly pregnant dog and a cranky crippled old man. I’m completely sensitive.”
Robbie coughed, clearly covering up a laugh. At least Alexei hadn’t offended him. That was something. Bethany shrugged, offering him a wry smile.
“There actually was a monster,” Robbie said, taking a pipe out of his jacket pocket and lighting it up. The smell of apple tobacco filled the air. “Not that anyone is going to believe me.”
She looked at the gaping wound in the deck again. Something had made it, that was for sure. And short of someone dropping a huge safe from a ten story building, the way they used to do in the old movies her dad liked to watch, she sure as shit couldn’t figure out what.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did you run into another ship?”
The old sailor snorted. “Weren’t nothing on the water out there but us, honey. We were coming back in after catching a pretty good haul when all of a sudden the boat gave this funny shake, like it had run aground on something. But we were in deep water, and there weren’t nothing to hit. I ran to the aft side and saw this long rubbery thing flopping around on the deck; I thought maybe one of the men was pulling some kind of practical joke until the damned thing wrapped itself around a spar and tore it right off the boat.
“Whatever it was, it was big. Really big. I only saw two of them tentacles, but what I saw was bigger than a grown man, and they weren’t but part of the way out of the water.” He shuddered. “I don’t ever want to see the rest of whatever they were attached to. One of the men who was on the other side of the ship said he saw what looked like a giant beak sticking up. Looked like an enormous squid to me, but I ain’t never seen no squid that could grow to that size. The thing tore open the deck over the hold like it was opening up a can of tuna, and rooted around inside like it was searching for something. Took a few fish, but I don’t reckon that was what it was after, since it left most of ‘em behind.”
He chewed furiously on the stem of his pipe. “Damned cod are still in there, rotting in the hold instead of making me good money selling them at market. Insurance guy was supposed to be here an hour ago, but it won’t matter none. Too late now.” He spat on the deck, then gave Bethany an apologetic look.
“I’m sorry, Robbie,” she said in a quiet voice. “This all sucks.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Alexei said cheerfully. “Sea monsters are pretty rare these days. Maybe you can get on one of those reality shows Calum watches.”
Bethany smacked his arm. It was like hitting a brick wall. With a rubber mallet. “Ow. No more TV for you, I mean it. Now unless you can think of a more helpful idea, I suggest we get out of Robbie’s hair. I have a bar to run, in case you’ve forgotten. And you have a crabby old man to deal with.”
“Um,” Alexei said. Which might or might not have been agreement. “Did you say the fish are still in your hold?” he asked Robbie.
“Yep,” the sailor said, sighing. “The ice is starting to melt down there, so you’ll be able to smell ‘em soon enough.” He turned and gazed down the length of the dock, as if doing so could conjure up the elusive insurance inspector.
“Mind if I go have a look?” Alexei asked, already heading in that direction.
“Help yourself,” Robbie hollered after him. “But if you hurt yourself down there, you’re on your own.” He blinked at Bethany. “He’s kind of an odd duck, isn’t he? Where did you find him?”
“In the bar,” she answered.
“That explains a lot.”
“You have no idea,” she said.
A few minutes later, a whooping noise echoed up from the hold and Alexei hauled himself over the crushed edge, holding on with one hand and tossing a couple of large cod with the other. The fish hit the deck with a wet, meaty thwap, almost hitting Bethany in the legs.
“Oops, sorry,” Alexei said, clambering the rest of the way up and ambling over to where Bethany was staring down at the cod at her feet.
“Any particular reason you’re throwing fish at me?” she asked in a milder tone than she actually felt.
“Look,” Alexei said, picking up the biggest one and turning it over so she and Robbie could see the other side. One huge finger prodded at a strange mark on the fish’s skin.
“What the hell is that?” Bethany asked. She put out a much smaller fingertip and touched it gingerly.
“That’s a damned sucker mark,” Robbie said, his voice a study in mixed awe and alarm. “But I ain’t never seen one that size in all my years on the water. It must be fifty times bigger than any sucker on even the biggest squid I’ve ever come across. Holy crap. It really was a giant squid.” He held up the fish gleefully. “I can’t wait to show this to that damned insurance guy. You shoulda heard him laughin’ at me on the phone.”
Alexei quirked an eyebrow and gave Bethany a look she couldn’t quite decipher, but which she figured boded nothing good for her peace of mind. “Can I keep this other one?” Alexei asked Robbie. It too bore the mark of an unusually large sucker. It was also starting to give off a distinct odor of not-quite-fresh fish.
Bethany scowled at Alexei. “You are not carrying that thing in my truck.”
“Got to,” he said. “I have to see a man about a bet.”
Oh, hell. This was not going to end well.
* * *
When his shift with Calum was over for the day, Alexei took the cod out of the fridge where he’d stuck it at Bethany’s insistence (wrapped in two layers of plastic bags) and drove his motorcycle over to The Hook and Anchor. Luckily, the man he was looking for was already there, sitting at a table with a couple of his cronies.
“Ha!” Alexei said, slamming the fish down between their beers. “Take a look at that.”
Bethany looked up with alarm as Duke shoved his chair back, out of reach of the beer that slopped over the edge of his mug.
“What the devil is wrong with you?” Duke bellowed. “You owe me another beer.”
“Ha,” Alexei said again, at a slightly lower volume. “You owe me a hundred bucks. You wanted proof of monsters, there you go.”
Duke rolled his eyes. “I don’t see how that cod is proof of anything other than the well known fact that dead fish smell. Jeez. Get that thing off my table, will ya?”
“Sure,” Alexei said with a grin. “As soon as you give me my hundred dollars. Look at that sucker mark and tell me that didn’t come from a kraken.”
“A kraken?” Duke guffawed, and his two friends joined in. “There’s no such thing as a kraken, you jackass. Maybe Robbie ran into a giant squid - they’re rare, but they do exist - but krakens are no more real that mermaids and fairies.”
“Some of my favorite people are mermaids and fairies,” Alexei said in a low rumble that would have signaled trouble to anyone who knew him better. “And even an idiot like you should be able to tell the difference between the sucker mark from a giant squid and one from a kraken that could eat it for dinner and still have room left over for a whale or two. A bet’s a bet.”
“Who are you calling an idiot?” Duke said in a threatening voice. He stood up so fast he knocked his chair over, and his friends rose to join him. “Because as far as I can see, the only idiot in this room is the one that thinks I’m stupid enough to pay him a hundred bucks for a dead fish.” He knelt down to pick the chair up, then swung it at Alexei’s head with all his might.
All right then! Finally, a decent fight. True, it was only three against one, so it wouldn’t last long, but at least for a minute, Alexei felt like himself again, instead of lost and untethered the way he had for months. “Son of a goat!” he yelled in Russian, turning over the table as he ducked away from the chair as it whistled through the air right over his head. “Is that the best you can do?”
Another chair connected with his shoulder, but he barely felt it as he picked up the man wielding it and tossed him across the room. More men joined into the fight as their drinks got knocked over, or more probably, just for the fun of it. Alexei roared, his blood pounding in his head and his muscles bunching as he held a sailor over his head with one hand.
A piercing whistle rang out and everything stopped as all heads swiveled toward the bar. Bethany stood on top of it like a red-haired avenging angel, a baseball bat gripped in both small hands.
“Put him down, Alexei,” she said through clenched teeth. “And the rest of you, you know the rules here - no fighting, and no breaking the furniture. What would Calum think of you lot, destroying the bar he worked so hard to build? Shame on you.”
All around him, men sheepishly straightened tables and chairs, sitting down and trying to act like they hadn’t all been trying to kill him a minute ago. Alexei carefully lowered the guy he’d been holding until the man’s feet were securely on the ground.
“But Bethany,” Alexei said.
“Do. Not. But. Bethany. Me.” She swung the bat in his direction. “I warned you. Didn’t I? No fighting I said. No breaking things. But no, you just had to do it.” She glanced around the room, her jaw set rigid with anger. “The place is a wreck. You’ve seen the way we live. Do you really think I have the money to replace all this stuff?”
The bat swung around until it was aimed at Duke. “Speaking of money, you owe Alexei a hundred bucks. He may be an ass, but he was right about the monster. I saw Robbie’s boat, and no normal squid did that. Pay him, and get out. You started this fight, so you’re banned for a month.”
Duke narrowed his eyes at her, looking for a moment as if he might argue, then reached into his wallet, pulled out five twenties, put them on top of the now three-legged table, and stalked out of the bar without another word.
“See, it wasn’t my fault,” Alexei said. “He started it. You said so yourself.”
Bethany hopped down off the bar and stood in front of him, five feet three of steaming fury. “You provoked him. And don’t think I don’t know you could have stopped him without creating this disaster area. I think you just like destroying things. I grew up with a man just like you, remember. And for now, I suggest you go back to the house and figure out a way to explain to him that you helped tear his bar to pieces. Maybe it will finally motivate him to get his ass back in here, so I can get on with what I laughingly refer to as my life.”
She waved the bat toward the door, and Alexei opened his mouth, closed it again, and left. He suddenly missed his brothers so much it made his chest hurt. Even fighting wasn’t fun anymore. Nothing was the same, and he had no idea what the hell to do about it.