Beka peeked around the side of the building. Marcus’s father stood by the door he’d just crashed shut behind him, leaning against the wall next to it and holding one hand to his chest. His breathing sounded rough and uneven, and his face was white except for the flush of anger riding his sharp cheekbones.
“Are you okay?” Beka asked, stepping around the corner. Behind her back, she made a gesture that pulled a bottle of water out of her fridge on the bus. That trick didn’t work when she was in the ocean—too much water could inhibit magic unless you prepared for it in advance—but here on land, it barely took any effort at all. She held the bottle out to the older man. “Here, I haven’t even opened this yet. You look like you could use it.”
The elder Dermott glared at her from his piercing eagle eyes but took the bottle anyway, gulping down half its contents along with a pill from a container in his pocket. After a few minutes, his color looked better and he had enough breath to thank her grudgingly.
“You’re that idiot girl we brought up in the nets yesterday, aren’t you?” he said, looking at her more closely. “What the hell are you doing down here? If you came thinking you could sue me, don’t bother. There’s nothing to win.”
Beka suppressed a sigh. She could see where Marcus the younger got his charm and good manners. “Actually,” she said, “I came to offer your son a job. Well, both of you, really, since I wanted to hire the boat. But he turned me down flat.”
One graying eyebrow rose toward the battered cap perched above it. “Hire the boat? You want to go out fishing?” He looked unconvinced. “Is this one of them Greenie tricks?”
“Not at all.” Beka was suddenly struck with an idea. She dug the bag of gold coins out of her pocket and held it out. “I want to hire someone to take me out to that stretch of water so I can go diving on a wreck I heard about. I’m willing to pay.”
The old sailor gave her a dubious glance that turned thoughtful when he looked inside the pouch she’d handed him. “Huh. I never heard of no wreck out there.” He looked into the sack again, poking at the coins with one gnarled, black-rimmed fingertip, before gazing into her eyes. “You know how to dive, do you, girly?”
Beka laughed. “How do you think I got what’s in that bag?” She gave him her most earnest smile, although it mostly seemed to go unnoticed. “I won’t get in your way, I promise, and you can still fish while I’m diving.”
“Huh.” Dermott thought for a moment, bouncing the little bag up and down in one hand. “You’ll sign a waiver afore you come on board? Sayin’ I’m not responsible if anything happens to you?”
She nodded, trying not to look too eager.
“And if there happens to be something down there, I get ten percent as a bonus,” the old man added. “Only fair, seeing as how you couldn’t get out there otherwise.”
Beka bit back a laugh. She kind of liked the greedy bastard. At least he wasn’t pretending to be looking out for her. And it wasn’t as though she was expecting to actually bring up anything valuable. “You bet,” she said. “Have we got a deal?”
Dermott tossed the bag into his left hand, spat into his right, and held it out for her to shake. “We’ve got a deal. Although I’ve got to tell ya, my son ain’t gonna be too happy about it.”
A grin hovered around her lips, despite her attempts to hold it back. “Consider that my bonus,” she said. Mr. Crankypants was going to have a cow.
*
KESH DROPPED THE last canister into place in a deep crevasse and swam easily toward the surface, completely unaffected by the depth or the change in pressure. He was a creature of the ocean, and magical to boot, and this had been his home, not too long ago. Now it was the blighted landscape of his revenge—home to no one at all.
He laughed as his sleek head crested the waves, changing instantly from his seal form to that of a handsome, dark-haired Human man. As a man, he slid over the side of the boat as gracefully as he had eeled his way through the tangled gray-green seaweed and jagged brown underwater rock formations of his former kingdom. Kesh was a prince of the Selkie people, equally comfortable above and below the ocean, unlike some of his kind.
He pointed his black speedboat in the direction of land, the first rays of the rising sun glinting off its menacing prow as it sliced through the waves like a weapon, innocuous now that that its deadly cargo had been tucked away to leak its perilous Human poisons into the lifeblood of the sea.
Kesh’s striking face reflected brooding thoughts, twisting his attractive features into something more revealing of his own inner landscape, as jagged as the rocks below. The much-gloried eldest son of the King of the Selkies, Kesh had always enjoyed a life of privilege and self-indulgence.