Beka rolled stormy blue eyes at him, like the sea before a big blow. “You don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. Hell, I wouldn’t believe me either.” She gestured widely. “I don’t expect you to take my word for it, any more than I would expect you to accept that this bus used to be a hut on chicken legs.”
He glanced around the bus. It was unusual, certainly, but there was nothing enchanted about it. “Look, Beka—I should tell you that I can’t deal with this kind of paranormal nonsense. My father brought us up on idiotic tales of Selkies and Mermaids and sea monsters. Hell, he even told us that a Mermaid had rescued him once during a storm. My brother believed all that shit. I don’t. The world isn’t a romantic place full of magic. It’s a hard, dangerous jungle, which will kill you if your head is in the clouds. So if we’re going to continue to get along, I’m gonna have to ask you to drop it, okay?”
“I can’t,” Beka said in a small voice. “Because it’s all true.”
“And next I suppose you’re going to tell me that Chewie really is a dragon,” he snapped.
“Actually,” Beka said, almost managing a smile, “he is. But I don’t expect you to believe that either. Not without proof.”
“Fine,” Marcus said. He would be patient. He would be calm. And when she failed to come up with her so-called proof, he would patiently and calmly drag her off to see the best shrink he could find. “Are you going to turn me into a frog?”
She made a face. “Not while you’re sitting in my bed, I’m not. I like frogs just fine, but ew.”
Before he could decide if she was taking a joke too far, or just plain crazy, she snapped her fingers with a decisive motion, and her surfboard appeared in the middle of the kitchen with a crisp pop. It spun lazily in midair for a moment before gently coming to rest on the polished wooden boards.
“Your mouth is open,” Beka said, a tad acerbically. “Need something else?”
He closed his mouth with a snap and nodded, completely speechless. He had to have imagined that. Or it was some kind of trick. That was it—it was a trick. Crazy people did all sorts of things to support their version of reality. She must have somehow arranged that stunt ahead of time.
“How about if I pick something?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, cool as a rock. “Go for it.”
“Okay,” Marcus said, wracking his brain to come up with something completely impossible. Maybe if he could get her to face reality, it would help her to snap out of this. He leaned down and picked up a pillow from where it had fallen—or been shoved—onto the floor during their passionate lovemaking. “Can you turn this into, oh, I don’t know, a bird?”
She raised an eyebrow, but took the pillow out of his hands. “I can’t change an inanimate object into a living being; no witch has that kind of power,” she said.
Aha!
“But I can make it seem like a bird, if that would help.” She tossed the pillow up into the air, making some kind of swirling gesture with two fingers on her right hand as she did so. As he watched in stunned amazement, the pillow became a vivid crimson cardinal that flew across the room before coming to rest on a countertop and returning to its original form. It even sang a few melodic notes along the way.
“What the—”
“I’m sorry,” Beka said. “I know it is a lot to take in. But if we were going to have any chance together at all, you had to know the truth.”
Marcus felt like he’d been standing too close to a mortar strike; as if the ground underneath his feet suddenly shook and disintegrated, filling what had moments before been clear air with sharp and deadly debris. Nothing was what he had thought it was. Least of all Beka.
“The truth?” he said, raising his voice as he got out of bed and started pulling on clothing as fast as he could. Shock made his head spin. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it hit you over the head with a brick. I can’t believe you let things get this far without telling me you’re some kind of magical creature out of a storybook. Does anyone else know?” He spun around and stared at her, tee shirt crushed in his hand. “Does Kesh?”
Beka dropped her gaze. “Yes. Kesh knows. But I didn’t tell him. I mean, he’s always known.”
Marcus jammed the shirt on over his head, not caring that it was inside out. “What, is he a Baba Yaga too?”
“No,” Beka said. He could tell he was upsetting her, but at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Baba Yagas are always women,” she said. “Kesh is a Selkie.”
“A Selkie. Like the people who can turn into seals. My da used to tell stories about them too.”
“More like seals that can turn into people,” she said, then brushed away the correction with a wave. “It doesn’t matter. But yes, Kesh is a Selkie. Um, a Selkie prince, actually. So he knows what I am. But nobody else does. I mean, nobody who isn’t magical.”
A freaking prince. It figured. He never had a chance, did he? “Well, I’m sure as hell not a prince,” Marcus growled, shoving his feet into his shoes. “But I can do magic.”