In the end, she let him stay. The apology helped, but in truth, Bethany didn’t have much choice. The agency said the earliest they could sent someone new would be the beginning of the following week - if they could find anyone willing to work with Calum at all. She tried convincing the manager that Calum was being a lot better, but in her heart, she knew that was mostly because of Alexei’s combination of sneakiness and sheer brute force, and not an indication that Calum was likely to be more cooperative with anyone else.
Besides - when she’d gotten home, he’d gone and cut his beard. He didn’t say a word, just left the braided end sitting on the table, like a note from Samson to Delilah, and shown up at breakfast the next day with it shorter and more neatly trimmed. A little less wild man, a little more civilized. Not subtle, but then neither was Alexei.
So she gritted her teeth and told him he could stay for another week. But he was banned from the bar, and at the first sign of trouble, he was out. Alexei didn’t argue. Didn’t even balk at her cool tone and the distance she kept. Just took her father’s woodworking tools, left over from the days he did repairs on his boat, and set to work fixing the worst of the wrecked furniture that she had hauled home in her truck.
The tables, when she got them back, were a revelation. She’d seen him working on them in the evenings when she’d gotten home from the bar, his huge form bent over in the dim light of a hanging lantern in the back yard, wood shavings littering the ground at his feet like late snow. But when she took them back to The Hook and Anchor and really looked at them, she was taken by surprise. Stunned, even.
The broken pine legs had been replaced with sturdy pieces of oak, adorned by fanciful carvings. Mermaids danced up one set of legs, frolicking amidst the seaweed and chests spilling over with treasure. On another table, dolphins swam in pursuit of schools of fish, the details so clear that the regulars chortled and pointed, recognizing the different types they caught so often. A third table featured fierce pirates, battling with each other or sailing the sea through shark-infested waters. The tops of each table had been stripped of their worn varnish and refinished, so they glowed in the soft lights of the bar. Here and there small scenes were etched into the surface - shallow enough so they wouldn’t interfere with the function, but matching the more intricate carvings down below. The damn things weren’t just repaired. They were works of art.
The customers were fascinated and word of mouth brought in the curious to see them, all of them staying to drink a beer or two. Bethany made enough from the extra business the first few days to more than make up for whatever she’d lost in cheap broken glassware.
At the end of the week, she came home from work, slammed the door, and glared at Alexei, who was putting together a picture puzzle with her father in the kitchen.
“Fine,” she said. “Come back to the damned bar. You might as well fix the rest of the chairs there; I’m tired of hauling them back and forth. But no drinking. And if you so much as chip a coffee mug, I’m going to kill you and bury you in the back yard, even if I have to hire three guys to carry you there for me. Got it?”
The two men stared at her.
Alexei nodded slowly. “Got it,” he said. “It was okay, what I did with the tables? Not too fancy? I can do them again if you don’t like them.” His accent was stronger than usual, which Bethany had found usually indicated some strong emotion. This time, it probably just meant he was tired or something. Not much to get emotional about when you were talking about furniture.
“They are…nice. People like them. They’re a conversation piece,” Bethany said. “You’re very talented.”
Alexei blushed, something she would have guessed was impossible. “Bah,” he said, ducking his head. “Just an old hobby. Something I used to do to pass the time by the campfire. I started out carving little wooden toys for…for some little girls I knew. I’ve just had a long time to practice, that is all.”
“Well, whatever. They’re okay. People like being able to keep finding new little details whenever they look at them. I keep getting requests.”
“Like what?” Calum asked. “Naked ladies?”
Bethany rolled her eyes. The mermaids had been bad enough. “No, more like favorite sea birds, or whales. One guy even asked for dragons. Who knew our customers had such vivid imaginations?”
Calum snorted. “There’s a lot of time to daydream on a boat, in between the hours of backbreaking work and the long trips in and out of port.” He got a distant look in his eyes, and he rubbed his stubbly chin, his whole body drooping a little.
“Time for bed,” Alexei said, his sharp eyes picking up on the signs. He looked at Bethany. “You’re sure it is okay I come back? I promise this time I’ll remember. And I’ll carve you some dragons. I like dragons.”
“Fine,” Bethany said. The truth was, she’d kind of missed having him hanging around the place. It had been oddly quiet, and there always seemed to be a giant, Alexei-shaped hole at one end of the bar. “Just until the agency finds a new aide to send.”
Calum made a rude gesture and wheeled his chair toward the bedroom.
“Good night to you too, dad,” Bethany said with a sigh, and went to go walk the dog.
* * *
It was Monday and Alexei was back at the bar and something was wrong.
Bethany couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He was behaving. Which, let’s face it, maybe was part of what felt off, but it was more than that. He’d come in at ten in the evening, gotten a cup of coffee without a protest, and sat in the corner using some hand tools to mend a chair that had seen better days even before it had been whacked across someone’s shoulders.
This was the third night since she’d allowed him back in, and he’d mended a few more pieces of furniture, along with a few other things around the place that her father had let go. Occasionally he’d joined in on a game of darts or pool, but his heart hadn’t seemed in it. In fact, if she had to pinpoint what was wrong, she would have said that something inside him seemed as broken as the chairs, but she didn’t know what, or how to fix it.
She’d had to remind herself that Alexei Knight wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t her job to fix him, or anyone else, except maybe her father, who she was pretty sure was beyond help. Alexei was just passing through and would be gone in a week or two. It was a waste of her extremely limited time and energy to worry about him.
Needless to say, that didn’t stop her. She wasn’t even sure why she bothered to talk to herself if she wasn’t going to listen. She was almost relieved when, later that night, his interest was caught by a conversation between her and two men sitting at the bar.
“So what is it you do, exactly?” Bethany asked the tall, quiet one wearing glasses and carrying a bag bulging with files, a small laptop, and a stuffed parrot, of all things.
“I’m an oceanographer,” he explained. “I work out of Woods Hole. I’m supposed to be researching changing ocean currents, but we’ve had so many reports lately of disappearing fish and sea mammals, I was assigned to look into it.”
“Sea mammals,” the fisherman sitting next to him said in a disparaging tone. “He means whales and dolphins. I don’t know why you science geeks can’t just say what you mean.” He drank down a huge gulp of his beer. “Every damn thing in the ocean is disappearing. Might as well say so.”
The oceanographer shook his head, but drank down his own beer faster than usual.
“You mean because of global warming and such?” Bethany asked. There was always an ongoing debate among the locals as to whether or not climate change was to blame for the worsening fishing.
“Well, that too,” the oceanographer said. “But in this particular case, there seems to have been a dramatic change in the last week or two. We can’t find anything to explain it. The water temps have stayed more or less steady, there are no unexplained shifts in the current patterns, salinity is unchanged. But the fishermen who called us are right. The fish aren’t where they should be, and there aren’t nearly as many whales or dolphins as there normally are. Frankly, we’re baffled.”
Bethany noticed Alexei listening intently to the conversation, so when she brought his a refill for his coffee, she asked, “Do you think what they’re talking about has anything to do with your hypothetical kraken?”
Interest sparked in his eyes for the first time since the night of the bar fight. “I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, think about how big a kraken is. It has to eat something, right? Probably a lot of somethings.”
Bethany shuddered, envisioning a great monster lurking under the ocean’s surface, just waiting to grab a passing dolphin. Or maybe one of the fishermen who went out every morning, no matter what the weather, trying to keep their families fed.
“Should we tell the scientist from Woods Hole?” she asked. The research institute was widely respected locally, even by people who usually had little patience with what the other man had called “science geeks.”
“Or warn the fishermen?” Although what they’d warn them about, she wasn’t quite sure. She’d seen the sucker marks on the cod Alexei had found, and against her will she believed there was something large and dangerous in the waters off the Cape. She doubted it was a kraken, or anything else mythological. Still, even a real life giant squid could clearly take out a sizeable boat.
Of course, there was probably no need to spread the word among the locals. The fisherman’s grapevine had probably already done that. Nonetheless, the ships still set out every morning. They had to make a living, no matter what.
The light went out in Alexei’s eyes again. “There is nothing to do,” he said, sounding unusually bleak. “It’s not my job anymore.”
What the hell was he talking about? “What do you mean, not your job anymore? Did you used to work with oceanographers or something? How was tracking sea monsters possibly your job?”
But he just grunted at her and gouged a large chunk of wood out of the chair leg he was working on, sending it flying through the air to land in someone’s mug. Bethany sighed and gave up for now, reminding herself yet again that the big man was Not Her Problem as she went to get the poor guy staring into his beer a new mug.
She had watched her mother practically twist herself into a pretzel for years, trying to please a man who was determined to be discontented. Hell, Bethany had done it herself for the first couple of years after her mom lost her battle with the cancer. Bethany was still a teen, trying to fulfill a deathbed promise that it would have taken a saint crossed with a fairy godmother to achieve. It had taken her a long time to realize that you can’t make someone happy if they are set on being miserable; all you can do was make yourself miserable too.
Then she’d spent another few years dating men who were so undemanding, they were practically catatonic. That hadn’t been much better, although it was less exhausting. But at least it was better than beating your head against a brick wall over and over again.
Bethany liked Alexei - hell, if circumstances were different, maybe more than liked him. But there was no way she was going to turn into her mother. If the man wanted to sit in the corner and brood, she had better things to do than try and talk him out of it. All those drinks weren’t going to pour themselves.
* * *
Len had been out to sea every day for a week, trying to get the damned talisman to work for him again and failing miserably. He’d done everything he could think of to recreate the moment it had called up the monster, but nothing had worked. If it weren’t for the solitary gold coin, hidden securely under his mattress, he would probably have decided he’d imagined the entire thing.
Just his luck. He had finally caught the break he deserved, only to have it let him down. Figured. Wasn’t that always the way?
He staggered home from the dive bar he frequented, pretty sure he’d been running his mouth off when he shouldn’t have been, but equally certain that none of those cretins had believed a word he said anyway, when he suddenly became aware that he was being followed. Or at least, that there was a set of loud footsteps echoing his own. If someone was following him, they weren’t being subtle about it. Len wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.
He stopped under the street light closest to his house, leaning against it slightly for support, and turned around. “Come on out, whoever you are,” he said. “I don’t know what you want, but I got nothin’ worth stealin’, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
A man stepped out of the shadows and took a confident step in Len’s direction. “No worries, my boy. I don’t mean you any harm. In fact, I think we might have some business together that will benefit us both.”
Ah, someone who needed a smuggler. That would explain why the guy followed him, instead of approaching him in public.
Len peered blearily into the darkness. The man was a stranger, an odd-looking fellow with a faintly menacing air. He was large - burly, tall, and wide - with a third of his head shaved and the rest with straight graying hair combed over so it dropped to the edge of his chin, along with a slightly wild beard, hooked nose, and cold gray-silver eyes. Gold hoops hung from each ear and tattoos peeked out from the top of his navy pea coat and on the skin of his wrists. As he took another step forward and lifted a pipe to his mouth and lit it, Len spotted one on each finger, which read Black on one hand and Beard on the other. Smoke drifted toward him on the night wind, smelling like cold iron and bitter ashes.
Ha, Len said to himself. Another guy who grew up wanting to be a pirate. Len thought maybe the fellow had taken the look a bit too far, but he wasn’t about to say so out loud. Not if the guy was a paying customer.
“What can I do for you?” Len asked cautiously. The guy looked pretty wild, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t some kind of undercover cop.
“It is more a matter of what I can do for you,” the man said smoothly, taking another step forward. For a second, Len thought he saw a huge shadow of something with a long spiky tail stretching out into the night, but another step brought the bearded man into the shining circle of illumination from the street light and the illusion disappeared.
Still, the hair stood up on the back of Len’s neck. “I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s late and I’m tired, and whatever it is you’re selling, I’m not in the mood to buy. So buzz off.”
“Buzz off?” the man repeated, sounding puzzled.
Len swayed, holding on to the lamp post. What was this guy, stupid? “You know. Buzz off. Fly away.”
The man laughed, a great big guffaw that came up from his belly and shook his whole body, such a natural sound that for some reason it put Len more at ease.
“Fly away,” the stranger said. “How amusing. You know what would be even more amusing? If I made you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Len said. “I’ve got some pretty wild dreams. And why should I believe you?” He didn’t really think the guy was some kind of cop - he just didn’t have that feel to him. But something was off about him. Mind you, that could be said for most of the people Len knew who sailed on the wrong side of the law.
“Perhaps because you have something that used to belong to me,” the man said. “An amulet, in the shape of tentacles wrapped around a central stone of mysterious origin. Sound familiar?”
Len took a step backward, his heart stuttering. “What do you mean it used to belong to you? The thing has been in my family since before my grandfather’s time. There’s no way it’s yours.” He clutched the front of his sweater, where the talisman hung on its chain, tucked underneath his worn flannel shirt.
“Ah, I misspoke,” the man said. “Of course it could not have been mine. Time is so fluid. I meant it had been in my family for years. Then, alas, it was lost, I thought forever. But I sensed, rather, I heard, that it had come into your possession.” His craggy face twisted with frustration, like an immigrant struggling to speak in a foreign language. “I can help you learn to master its magic.”
“Magic!” Len snorted. “There is no such thing as magic.”
“Then how do you explain the monster you called up from the depths with its aid?” The man grinned, showing sharp white teeth that glinted in the glare of the streetlight. “I know how the amulet works. I know how to summon the kraken to sink the ships of your enemies, to bring long lost treasure back to the surface. So much wealth, waiting on the bottom of the sea for the man brave enough to claim it. Are you that man?”
Long lost treasure. Wealth waiting on the bottom of the sea. Enough to satisfy the Russian mafia for the loss of their product, and still have something left over. The guy might be a little creepy, but he clearly knew about the talisman, so maybe he really did know how to make it work. Len remembered the shine of the gold coin, and longed to see it sitting in a pile of many like it. And let’s face it, there might be something a little off about this guy, but Len was a lot more scared of the Russian mob than he was of some big guy with a strange haircut. “Hell yeah, I’m that man,” he said. “Len Morgan, descendent of pirates,” he said, holding out his hand. “And you are?”
“Hayreddin, also of the pirate kin. You can call me Red,” the man said, sticking out the hand not holding the pipe. Smoke drifted through his beard and up to wreath around his head. “Together, we shall make the seas run the color of my name, and reap a bounty of gold and precious jewels.”
“Gold and jewels,” Len said. “Excellent.” And when we’re done, maybe you’ll meet with a terrible accident and fall overboard, so I can take your half and not worry about you running off with my talisman.
* * *
“Excellent,” said Hayreddin. Stupid Human. And maybe when I’ve reclaimed my treasure, I’ll eat you, and spit your bones into the sea. He didn’t quite dare break the Queen’s rules against Paranormal folk influencing the Human world, but if he found a Human who already wanted to do what Red needed, well, that didn’t exactly break the rules. The Fae folk were big on technicalities. He could almost feel his treasure back in his grasp. Finally, it would be his again.
The queen might punish one who actively used a magical tool in the Human realms…but nothing said he could not get a Human to use it for him. Not one damned thing.