The small tremor happened again, more of a mental twitch than a physical one, and he realized why he’d awoken thinking of his adventures in the Human lands. During that last storm, he’d lost a magical talisman, created for him by a particularly talented witch with a taste for the delicacy called haggis which could only be procured on the other side. Hayreddin had used the talisman to summon a kraken to attack other ships and empty their holds as they tumbled to the bottom of the sea. He’d thought it was lost forever, but now someone, somehow, had activated it. It called to him through the impossible distance, like an old friend singing his name in the night.
And if it had been found, it would be his again. Nothing and no one would stop him from finally reclaiming his lost treasure. Hayreddin would be a pirate one more time, and the oceans would run red with blood. It was going to be so much fun.
Chapter 5
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.