“You barely know me,” he said, not wanting to give in too easily. “Are you sure you want to trust your father’s care to a stranger?”
She shrugged. “A stranger who can get him to eat and do his exercises? You bet. I trust him to strangers all the time; they just come from an agency instead of a bar. Besides, there’s nothing here worth stealing, and you’re not likely to murder him while he’s watching Jeopardy. So, what do you say?”
Alexei pretended to ponder the offer for another minute. “I get to drink for free? Beer and vodka? And I can play pool?”
Bethany rolled her eyes. “Fine, beer and vodka. But not the good stuff. Not at the rate you swill it. And as long as you’re honest about it, you can play all the pool you want. But no ripping people off and no fighting.”
“Bah,” Alexei said, but held out one huge hand anyway. He was tempted to spit on it, just to see how desperate she was to have his help, but decided he’d just wait and torture her in other ways. This was going to be fun. At least, as much fun as you could have with a stinky dog, a cranky old man, and a bar owner with silly rules. “Deal.”
A small, callused hand reached across the table to clasp his. “Why do I have a feeling I’m going to regret this?” Bethany said, a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “For what I’m going to give you in food and booze, I could probably have sent him on a cruise for a week instead.”
“Yes,” Alexei said with a grin. “But then you wouldn’t have the pleasure of my company. And that would be just tragic.”
Chapter 4
Len Morgan was out on his fishing boat much too early in the morning, as usual. Fishing was definitely the wrong occupation for a man who hated to get up early. But hell, he hated fish, too. And the truth was, he was a lousy fisherman. Unlike his two older brothers, who seemed to love the life they were all raised to, Len despised the hard work, the smell of fish, and the constant ache in his back and shoulders. Given the choice, he’d much rather be a pirate. But since there wasn’t really such a thing anymore - and if there was, it would probably be hard work too, if he was realistic about it - he settled for supplementing his meager legitimate earnings with some judicious smuggling on the side. Now that was easy labor with a good return.
Just today, he’d earned five thousand bucks. And all he’d had to do was meet up with a Russian trawler out in international waters and pick up an innocuous-looking duffle bag filled with heroin. Said duffle bag now resided underneath a load of cod, waiting to be handed off to a guy once he got back to shore. It had taken him a few years and a bunch of successful trips like this one to work his way up to being trusted enough to do the big hauls - that plain gray bag contained two million dollars worth, so he’d been told by a mean-looking dude with a scarred face, a gravelly voice, and a nose that had been broken more than once. “Don’t lose it,” the man had joked. As if Len would be crazy enough to lose two million dollars of the Russian mob’s money. He was lazy, not insane.
A crackle from his radio roused him from his musings. Then the message he heard woke him up the rest of the way, slamming his heart into overdrive and sending his pulse racing. Shit.
Crackle. “This is the Coast Guard. Please bring your vessel to a halt and prepare to be boarded. I repeat, this is the Coast Guard.”
Shit, shit, shit. Len looked frantically over his shoulder and saw a small boat approaching rapidly from behind him. Should he try to outrun them? No, their boat was much faster than his. Besides, maybe they were just looking for lost tourists or something. No, no, they’d just radio and ask if that was it. Shit. He was screwed.
He slowed the fishing boat to a stop as directed, then ran to the hold while the Coast Guard ship was still easing up alongside. He couldn’t risk them finding the heroin, he thought in a panic, sweat dripping down the back of his wool sweater. He’d never make it in jail. Frantically, he rooted around under the pile of slimy fish until he finally found the handle of the duffle bag. It pulled loose with a plop and he raced to the aft side and dropped it overboard. It sank below the waves without a sound. There. Safe.
Len sauntered around the end of the boat to meet the two Coast Guard men on the port side, hoping that the perspiration on his face would be taken for spray.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. “What can I do for you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” the larger man said. “We had a tip about a ship about this size bringing in illegal aliens. But we got a call just now telling us it has been found near Provincetown. Thank you for your cooperation.”
He and his companion headed back toward their boat. The smaller man tipped his cap. “You have a nice day, now.”
A nice day? A nice day? Len watched them go with stunned disbelief. He’d just dumped two million dollars worth of the Russian mafia’s heroin overboard for no reason. Unless he could figure out a way come up with the money to replace it, he was never going to have a nice day again. Of course, that might be a challenge, since if he’d had that kind of money, he wouldn’t have been smuggling for the mob in the first place!
* * *
Nothing. Nothing. Len tossed the contents of another box over his shoulder and continued rooting around in the attic of what had been the family home, now occupied only by him and the occasional disappointed rat. (Len didn’t keep much food in the house, mostly preferring to subsist on diner meals and beer.)
He knew it was up here somewhere. Along with the rest of the crap that he and his brothers had accumulated over the years. In theory, his brothers had taken their stuff with them when they’d moved out to get married, but so far Len had found a stack of his older brother Cal’s yearbooks and high school trophies - useless - and a box of his younger brother Phil’s old Playboys. Marginally less useless. Still, Len wasn’t any closer to finding the object he sought.
Not that it was likely to do him that much good; it certainly wasn’t worth any two million dollars, or he would have dug it out and sold it already. But in his desperation, it was the only thing he could think of that might have any value. Or that maybe he could convince someone else it had value, even if it didn’t. Len didn’t much care which.
Another box went flying, creating an even bigger mess than the one he’d found up here when he’d pulled down the folding stairs that led to the small room at the top of the house. The sides of the space sloped down on either side, so he had to do part of his search bent over like an old lady. His back hurt and his calves ached from crouching, and his nose was stuffy and dripping from all the dust. Bah.
Len wiped his sleeve across his face and pushed open the lid of an old steamer trunk. The thing promptly snapped shut again, almost taking his fingers with it. His cursing scared the dust motes away as he propped it open with an old umbrella that was missing half its ribs, then leaned forward to root through the chest. He’d hidden it so long ago, he had no idea where he’d put it and only the vaguest idea of what it looked like, beyond being ugly and kind of odd.
His grandfather had called it a talisman, whatever that meant. Family legend said that the old man was descended from a pirate, and the gnarly taciturn seaman swore he’d inherited the strange piece from his own father, who had stolen it from some more famous pirate. Len’s grandfather said he’d used the talisman to help the Nazis sink boats during World War Two, but Len had always dismissed that as the rambling bragging of a crazy old man. Just like he’d dismissed the talk of a lost treasure ship off the coast of Cape Cod, which was how his grandfather had supposedly wound up there, chasing after mythical gold. The man was a drunk in his later years, so no one took him very seriously.
But right at this moment, Len was desperate enough to try anything, even a wild family legend.
The talisman had actually been left to Cal as the eldest grandson, their father having been lost to the sea many years before their grandfather finally made his own journey to the briny depths. But it looked like it might have been valuable, so Len had taken it when they’d cleaned out his grandfather’s hous
e. As far as Len knew, Cal never missed it. Len had tried to hock it off island, but no one had been interested in it except as an oddity, and its dull yellow metal turned out to be brass and not gold.
He finally found it under a faded framed photograph of his parents’ wedding, his brother Cal already making an appearance in the slight bulge of his mother’s second-hand dress. A dusty black leather pouch, only slightly gnawed around the edges. It didn’t look like much, but Len clutched it close and took it back down to the first floor, heaving the stairs back into place and leaving the mess behind for another day.
At the grimy kitchen table, he finally loosened the leather thong that held the pouch closed and spilled the talisman out into his hand. It wasn’t any more impressive than when he’d first seen it, and if anything, even odder than he’d remembered. Still, there was something about it that set his blood humming in his veins.
Slightly larger than his palm, the gold-colored metal was still shiny, although the brass should have tarnished over the years. A large stone was set in the center, with detailed metal tentacles writhing all around it, suckers and all. The medallion hung off a thick metal chain. Truth be told, the thing was ugly and not a little creepy, but it must have had some value, or the men of his family wouldn’t have kept it all this time. Not a sentimental one in the bunch, Len included.
The couple of pawnbrokers he’d taken it to had poked at the stone in the center and shrugged. Some kind of rock, they’d said, but nothing they could identify. And if they couldn’t identify it, they couldn’t put a price on it. Len had shrugged back, tucked the talisman into its bag, and gone home. Even then, he hadn’t really wanted to sell it, and was almost relieved to discover there wasn’t any point. Now, well, now he was just desperate enough to see if there was anything to the family legends.
* * *
Once his boat was far enough out to sea that the only witnesses were a couple of gulls swinging in aimless circles above the mast, Len took the talisman back out of its bag, feeling more than a little foolish. The problem - besides the fact that the family legends were probably all nonsense - was that none of the stories gave any details on how to use the thing. Tales about pirates and gold, those they had plenty of. Fantastical stories of monsters that sank ships on command, fishing out the treasure they carried like pearls from an oyster? Those too, although Len had stopped finding them entertaining when he hit about ten. It would have been a lot more useful, he thought bitterly, if the damned thing had come with written instructions.
Rather sheepishly, he tried saying a few so-called magical words out loud: abracadabra, alakazam, open sesame. Even he knew that last one wasn’t going to work. He tried to think like an ancient pirate, but what he knew about ancient pirates was pretty much limited to talking parrots and telling people to walk the plank, and he didn’t see how either of those would be helpful. Finally, he just cursed at it, which seemed as pirate-like as anything else, but it just sat there, a useless hunk of ugly metal and rock.
He was pretty sure the damn thing was laughing at him.
Finally, he bashed it against the side of the ship in a fit of temper. The talisman didn’t even get a dent, but the edge of one brass tentacle slice into the hand holding it, making him yell out loud as blood beaded up on his palm and dripped onto the stone.
An odd vibration seemed to make the talisman ripple and the greenish-brown gem developed a crack down its center. Then the crack opened like two round eyelids, and a swirling golden eye with a green tempest at its center stared up at him, unblinking.
“What the hell!” Len yelped and dropped the talisman onto the deck, where it rocked back and forth with the motion of the boat, still staring upward. The eye seemed to follow his movements, the whirling green pupil shifting slightly from side to side.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered, crouching down to look at it more closely. “What the hell kind of thing are you?” There was no answer, just an uncanny glow. “Can you get me some treasure?” he asked. “Gold? Jewels?” A two million dollar bag of heroin?
The eye blinked at him once, and the wood planks under his feet shuddered. Off the starboard side, the water began to churn and bit by bit, a monster emerged from the sea. A bulbous head with two eerily shining eyes, and tentacles longer that Len’s boat thrashing the sea into a froth.
“Holy crap,” he breathed. “What the hell are you?”
One dripping tentacle hovered over the bow and Len just about peed himself, but all it did was uncurl its suckered tip and drop a small object on the deck with a muffled thud. Then it vanished back under the waves as silently as it had arrived. When Len looked at the talisman again, it was simply an ugly, inert piece of family history.
He placed it almost reverently back into its bag and tucked the leather pouch carefully inside his shirt. Then he examined the gift the monster had brought him. It wasn’t much; just an old coin. But Len knew it was the beginning of something much, much bigger. He just needed to figure out what to do next.
* * *
Hayreddin stirred in his cave, startled from his decades-long nap by a restless tremor that made his massive body shift atop its bed of golden coins, precious gems, antique vases, and other treasure. In his natural dragon form, he took up most of the space in the underground cavern, his shimmering black scales and yellow belly - almost the same color as the metal he hoarded - gleaming dully in the dim light. A ray of sun snuck in through a crack in the rocks above, illuminating the bounty that stretched from wall to wall, bits and pieces slithering down to the floor as Hayreddin stretched and yawned, trying to pinpoint exactly what had awoken him.
He looked about rather hopefully for a would-be thief, but this was the Otherworld, and few of its denizens cared for Human treasure, and none were foolish enough to brave a dragon in his den. Too bad. He would have relished a little excitement. Since the high queen had decreed that all paranormal creatures retreat to the Otherworld permanently, life had been rather quiet. Boring, even.
And the queen had made it clear that killing any of her other subjects, no matter how stupid or useless, was a fate punishable by whatever whim struck her fancy at the time. Too bad. Hayreddin liked killing things. Most dragons weren’t as bloodthirsty as Human legend painted them. Some, like him, were. But the queen’s whims were nothing to be trifled with.
He missed his days of adventure on the other side of the doorway, where he would take on the guise of a Human and lead bands of pirates in search of treasure and glory. Mostly treasure, of course, but he’d rather enjoyed being feared and admired, too. Through the years he’d had many names and faces, and had gathered much wealth which he’d brought back to his cave in the Otherworld. Gold and jewels had no intrinsic value here, of course, where you could find entire paths paved with rubies and trees whose bark was made of precious metals, but he was a dragon, and for dragons, it was more about the having than the value in the items themselves.
The having and the getting. Being a pirate king had been fun. There had been a lot more freedom on the other side and no one to tell him what to do. Or who he could and couldn’t kill.
Hayreddin sighed, causing a cascade of tarnished silver goblets. When the queen’s edict was issued, he had assembled one last huge haul, but the ship it was on had sunk in a storm before he could get it to land and through the doorway he was using back to the Otherworld. The Queen allowed occasional short, authorized visits to the Human lands, as long as you kept a low profile, but on his few visits there, he’d never been able to track down his lost treasure.
It had become something of an obsession - not an unusual hazard for a dragon who didn’t have enough purpose in his long, long life - but he still felt as though his hoard would never be complete without that final piece. It was annoying, like a broken scale that itched at the back of one’s neck, just where it couldn’t be reached by claws or teeth.
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.
Dangerously Fierce (The Broken Riders Book 3) Page 4
