Barbara snorted. “You’re a Baba Yaga. It always is.”
They sat in companionable silence for a moment, and then Beka asked, “Did you ever consider walking away before it was final? Being a Baba, I mean.”
Barbara gave her a startled look. “And give up magic? Never.” She narrowed her amber eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re really thinking about quitting—that’s crazy.”
“Brenna said—”
“Screw Brenna,” Barbara said, scowling at her friend. “She was way out of line saying you should resign, and you know it.”
“But—”
“There are no buts here, Beka,” Barbara said, “other than the big, fat, hippie butt I’d like to kick into next week. For one thing, retired Baba Yagas don’t ever get to come back. There’s a reason they retire, and it usually has to do with them being too old or too crazy to do the job anymore. Or too dead, I suppose, but that’s another issue. For another thing, all Babas struggle with their first assignments on their own. I did, and Bella did; that’s the nature of the job. You’ll do fine in the end, I promise.”
A tiny blip of hope felt like a hiccup in Beka’s chest. “Really? You felt overwhelmed by your first task too?”
Barbara threw back her head and laughed so loud, Liam glanced up the beach at her and smiled quizzically. She waved at him before turning her attention back to Beka. “Honey, during my first solo task, I blew up a volcano. The very volcano I was supposed to stop from erupting, in fact.”
“Holy crap,” Beka said, feeling perversely better. “What happened?”
“After it blew up, it stopped erupting,” Barbara said. “Problem solved. There was just a bigger mess to clean up than I’d planned on.” She put one arm around Beka’s shoulders, awkwardly but kindly. “You’re going to be fine. I don’t care what Brenna said. She wouldn’t have chosen you to train as her replacement if you didn’t have what it took to be a Baba Yaga. You just need to have a little faith in yourself.”
Beka sighed. “That’s not always easy.”
Barbara shook her head. “If it were easy, everybody would do it. And you’re not everybody; you’re a Baba Yaga. That’s way better.”
*
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.