She turned from the sink, a cloth in her hands, and thrust it at him. “Dry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She gestured toward the counter stacked with dishes. “I’m running out of room. I need you to dry.” A sudden gleam appeared in her eyes. “You do know how to dry, don’t you?”
He regarded her with mingled appreciation and annoyance. Was she laughing at him?
“I believe I can learn,” he said and took the cloth.
They worked in silence until all the dishes had been dried and put away.
“What about that one?” he asked.
She glanced over her shoulder at the big pot on the counter. “It’s fine.”
“There is food inside.”
Not much. Conn had filled his plate twice. But . . .
“It will be wasted,” he said.
She took the dishcloth from him without meeting his gaze. “My father might want something when he comes in.”
Might?
“He goes to the bar at the inn,” she had said, “and drinks until they won’t serve him anymore.”
“And if he is too drunk to eat?” he asked.
Lucy fussed with the cloth, arranging it over the bar of the oven door to dry. “Then in the morning before I go to work, I’ll throw it out.”
“Will you wash the pot then, too?”
“Yes.”
“And prepare something else.” Not a question, this time.
She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I guess you think that’s stupid.”
Stupid, yes. And gallant.
He admired her tenacity. He understood what it was to meet one’s obligations, day after day, year after year, without hope or expectation.
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
She smiled crookedly. “Who else will?”
He understood that, too.
Their gazes locked. Beneath the surface of her eyes, kelp green shadows swayed. Conn’s chest tightened. Why was the sea reflected in her eyes?
The doorbell rang.
She dropped her gaze.
For a moment, he could not breathe.
No, he thought. Stay.
But she was already moving past him to the door. “That will be Cal and Maggie.”
She sounded relieved. Or perhaps she was merely pleased to see her brother.
Conn observed their greeting, the tall, quiet police chief in his rumpled uniform, the tall, quiet schoolteacher with garden dirt on her jeans. They did not embrace. But their silent exchange—his long, assessing look, her quick, reassuring smile—revealed their bond.
“Touching, is it not?” Margred murmured in Conn’s ear. “The Hunters are a very loyal family.”
He recognized her warning.
“And you, Margred?” He challenged her softly, this woman who had once been selkie. “Where do your loyalties lie?”
She widened her eyes. “Why, with my husband, my lord,” she said and moved away.
The door opened again, and Dylan entered with the small, dark, pregnant woman he intended to marry. Around his neck, he wore the silver medallion, the warden’s mark: three interconnected spirals representing the domains of earth, sea, and sky. The sign of Dylan’s new power . . . and his duty to his prince.
He did not make the mistake, this time, of addressing Conn by title. He bowed stiffly.
Conn nodded in acknowledgment.
“Well.” Dylan’s woman cocked her head like a bird, her gaze darting around the hall. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve been on my feet since four this morning, and I’d like to sit down.”
Lucy jumped. “Of course. Why don’t we use the living room?”
“Actually, Lu . . .” Her brother Caleb’s slow voice dragged her back from the doorway. “Maybe you could put up a pot of coffee.”
“I don’t . . . Tea?” she offered.
“Tea would be great. Thanks.”
She changed course toward the kitchen while the others flowed into the darkened living room.
Dylan switched on a lamp, casting a pool of yellow light over a table. “That’s better.”
Did he refer to the light? Conn wondered. Or his sister’s absence?
Caleb took a stand with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. “What have you told her?” he asked Conn.
Conn raised his eyebrows. “Very little. Though I am curious why you have not told her more.”
“She is human,” Dylan said.
“So is your brother,” Conn said.
On the sofa, Margred crossed her legs. “Caleb faced a demon for me. He deserved to know who I was. And what their mother was.”
“Milk or sugar?” Lucy asked breathlessly from the hall.
Silence thickened the air.
They did not want her there. Conn felt their discomfort as a living, pulsing barrier, drawing them together, leaving Lucy alone on the outside.
She felt it, too. Conn saw the red tide sweep her face.
He had already learned what he could from her. He needed Dylan’s report.
Yet looking at her flushed cheeks, her soft, stricken eyes, he felt almost sorry for her.
“Sugar, please,” Margred said.
The other woman, the pregnant one, pulled herself to her feet. “I’ll help,” she said kindly.
But Lucy was already backing away, shaking her head. “I’ve got it.”
“Why don’t you set out everything in the kitchen,” Caleb suggested. “We’ll join you when we’re ready.”
Lucy flinched and then was still, like a wounded animal that will not call attention to itself. “Actually, I just . . . I have lesson plans to do. Upstairs.”
They sat, listening to the sound of her retreating footsteps.
The pregnant woman crossed her arms over her stomach and shot Caleb an accusing look. “Smooth, Cal. Very smooth.”
Caleb rubbed the back of his neck.
“She couldn’t stay,” Margred said.
“Not after that,” the woman—Regina, that was her name—said.
“Not at all,” said Dylan. “She’s not involved. She doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
Conn was struck by a sudden vision of Lucy’s face burning in the water of the tide pool.
She was involved. Somehow.
He had to find the reason, a pattern, a clue.
He clasped his hands behind him and directed a look at Dylan. “Neither do I. Yet. No doubt you are about to enlighten me.”
3
CONN WAS NOT HIS FATHER. HE DID NOT EXPEND energy in needless emotion. But listening to Dylan’s report, Conn was aware of a hard, cold lump beneath his breastbone, a warning pulse in his blood, that felt disconcertingly like anger.
Buggering hell.
He tightened his hands behind his back. “They tried to kill your child,” he said. “A selkie child. A daughter of Atargatis.”
It was the threat he feared.
And the answer he had come looking for.
Regina spread her hands over her stomach. “We don’t know yet if the baby’s selkie. Or even if it’s a girl. The ultrasound won’t be accurate for another couple of weeks. But that woman—the devil woman—was definitely trying to end the pregnancy. I was just . . . What do you call it?”
“Collateral damage,” Caleb said in a grim voice.
Conn ignored them both. “And you did nothing,” he said to Dylan.
Dylan flushed the way he used to when he first came to live at Sanctuary, a thin, sulky adolescent with more attitude than sense. “I warded the island.”
“You knew I was waiting to hear from you.”
“I sent the whaleyn.”
The humpbacks’ song was rich and nuanced. But it lacked the clarity of human communication.
“You should have come yourself,” Conn said.
He had wasted weeks in the expectation that Dylan would return to Sanctuary to make his report—a mere eyeblink in the centuries of a selkie’s existence. However, in the current contest
with the children of fire, even time was Conn’s enemy.
Dylan gave him a level look, reminding Conn he was not a boy any longer. “I couldn’t leave them,” he said.
Them. His woman. His child. The daughter of the prophecy? Conn wondered. The targair inghean.
“You could have brought them with you,” he said. Though what in all the seven seas he was to do with them . . .
Dylan shook his head. “Regina shouldn’t travel.”
“I wouldn’t leave anyway,” she said. “I’ve got family here. A kid. A life.”
Conn raised his eyebrows. “And if you lose your life? What becomes of your child then?”
She pressed her lips together.
The big man with the quiet eyes—Caleb, Dylan’s brother—stirred by the door. “She fought. We all fought the battle that came to us. Where the fuck were you?”
In his tower on Sanctuary, trying to hold a castle of sand against the encroaching tide.
“You see a battle,” Conn said coldly. “I see the war.”
Caleb stuck his thumbs in his pockets. “So we’re just more collateral damage?”
“Not if you come to Sanctuary,” Conn said.
They all gaped at him.
Not the reaction he was hoping for.
“In attacking you, the children of fire have exposed their weakness. They fear you. Or at least,” he added carefully, “they fear the children to come after you. The daughters of Atargatis are a threat to them.”
And an advantage to me, Conn thought but did not say. A tool. A weapon to be grasped.
Lucy’s face—watchful eyes between curtains of thick, fair hair—flashed briefly in his brain.
But it was her brothers who concerned him now.
“Come to Sanctuary,” he repeated. “Where I can protect you.”
“Protect?” Margred asked. “Or control?”
“You will be safe there,” Conn insisted.
“We’re safe here,” said Dylan’s woman. “Dylan warded the whole island.”
“Dylan is but one,” Conn said. The youngest and least of his wardens. “There are a dozen guardians on Sanctuary.”
Or there could be.
He would call them back, he decided. The ranks of the wardens had thinned as their people dwindled, as their magic declined. There were fewer than a hundred now. Too many of the seaborn had been lost as Conn’s father was lost to the bliss of the land beneath the wave. Atargatis had been among the last of the old ones to still take human form. Which made preserving her bloodline even more important.
“Well, I’m the only cop on World’s End,” Caleb said. “I can’t just pack up and leave. I have a responsibility to the people here.”
Conn looked pointedly at Margred. “Greater than your responsibility to her? To the children you might have together?”
Margred sucked in her breath.
“There aren’t going to be any children,” Caleb said flatly.
“There could be,” Margred said.
Her husband’s face set like stone. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“So you keep saying. Or we would have a baby by now.”
Conn, sensing weakness, pressed his argument home like a sword. “Have your baby on Sanctuary. Where you both will be safe.”
Margred’s mouth opened. Closed.
“Want a piece of candy, little girl?” Regina muttered.
Dylan shot her a warning look.
“What? We already talked this over,” she said. “I won’t leave Ma. And I’m not ripping Nick away from the only life he’s ever known to hang with the lost boys in Never-land.”
“All right,” Dylan said. “If—”
“You need time to consider,” Conn said before they could refuse.
The lump under his ribs had coalesced into a hard, cold knot. More was at stake here than their human ties or loyalties, than their practical considerations or their pride. More was at risk than their safety.
The demons were circling World’s End, drawn to the promise of power like sharks to the scent of blood. If Conn could preserve Atargatis’s bloodline . . .
He regarded them a moment: two humans, a selkie who had lost her pelt, and a warden just coming into his power. The heirs of Atargatis. The key to the prophecy.
The knot in his chest tightened.
“I’ll leave you to talk,” he said.
Caleb gave a short nod.
But at the entrance to the hall, Conn paused. “You should ask your sister what she wants.”
“Lucy?” asked Regina.
“She’s not selkie,” Dylan said.
“She carries the bloodline,” Conn said. “She has a right to choose.”
“Lucy would never leave the island,” Caleb said. “She almost didn’t go away to college. She’s happy here.”
Conn raised his brows. “Is she?”
“Isn’t she?” Margred asked.
“Ask her,” Conn said again.
He gripped the door handle when something—a noise, a scent, a sense like a breath at the back of his neck—dragged his gaze upward.
Lucy stood almost hidden in the crook of the narrow stairs, a hand pressed to her mouth. In the shadows, her eyes blazed.
His heart leaped.
Their gazes locked.
She blinked, and it was as if the brightness had never been.
Conn swallowed a snarl of disappointment. “A message at the inn will find me,” he said tightly to no one in particular. “When you are ready to talk.”
Opening the door, he stalked into the night.
Lucy stabbed her spade into the soil. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms . . .
Which was stupid. She knew her family loved her. She loved them. But the silly jingle played over and over in her head like a bad song on the radio, complete with a slide show of scenes from last night.
The Hunter family had never been big on Sharing Their Feelings. Every child growing up in an alcoholic household learned to protect its secrets. Lucy had spent most of her life avoiding questions from friends, teachers, and well-meaning neighbors. Where is your mother? How is your father? Why did you move back?
But now the things her family would not say were threatening to split them apart. And the people with the answers, the people Lucy loved, weren’t talking.
At least not to her.
She ripped a potato from the garden. The fat root exploded from the ground in a shower of dirt that did nothing to relieve her hurt or frustration.
Use words, she told her students when they were overwhelmed by the need to scream and kick and bite. Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she? After Conn had left, she’d gone into the living room to talk to her family. But all her questions, all her overtures, had died a slow and miserable death in the face of their determined noncommunication, killed by Dylan’s stubborn silence and Caleb’s dismissive reassurances.
She rubbed the potato against her jeans, leaving a long smear of dirt.
Caleb’s reaction hurt the most. Her brother had raised her from the time she was in diapers until he left on a ROTC scholarship the year she turned nine. All through middle and high school, Cal had still been there for her, making trips home for holidays and school assemblies, sending checks on her birthday. She trusted him with . . . almost everything.
He didn’t trust her. His lack of faith stung.
Well, if Cal couldn’t treat her like a grown-up, she knew someone who would.
She glanced toward the edge of the field. Assuming he came.
She thought—she hoped—he would come. Otherwise, why bother making that cryptic announcement at the door? “A message at the inn will find me when you are ready to talk.”
She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, smearing them even more. Ready to talk? Maybe. Ready to listen anyway. Anything was better than being cut off from her family by this awful not-knowing.
She watched him emerge from the shadow of the woods like a surfer sliding from beneath a wave. He was
n’t a stranger anymore.
That didn’t stop the drop in her stomach, the scrambling of her pulse.
“You came,” she said foolishly as Conn approached over the sun-streaked furrows.
No jacket today. No tie. The collar of his dress shirt—Dylan’s dress shirt—was unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up. Fine, dark hair dusted his arms. Otherwise, he looked the same, same slightly hooked nose, same unsmiling mouth, same cool eyes.
The color of rain, Lucy thought again and shivered with apprehension and desire.
She wished suddenly, passionately, that she could turn the clock back, roll the world back to the way it had been twenty-four hours ago when he had first walked across the fields and into her life. Before she knew her brothers were lying to her. Before she was forced to a decision.
His brows arched. “You asked me to come.”
“You can talk to me,” he’d said.
“Yeah.” She swallowed. She must have been out of her mind. “You said . . . Last night you said I had the right to choose.”
Silence. A long, assessing, how-much-should-I-tell-her kind of silence, while her heart beat faster and her blood drummed in her ears.
“I was mistaken,” he said at last.
Disappointment flattened her mouth. She took a step closer. “I want to know what’s going on.”
His cool, light eyes considered her face. “What did your brothers tell you?”
“Dylan didn’t say anything. And Caleb . . .” Lucy bit her lip, a small pain to counter the ache at her heart. “Cal said what I don’t know can’t hurt me.”
But it hurt already.
“They treat you like the girl they left behind,” Conn said.
She met his gaze, grateful for his understanding. “Pretty much.”
“You are very young,” he observed.
“Twenty-three.”
“Almost a quarter century,” he said, gently mocking.
She narrowed her eyes. She was tired of being shut out, frustrated at being dismissed, sick of being good and quiet and alone. “Old enough,” she said.
His gaze met hers. The air charged between them. She felt a tingle like static electricity all along her skin, the shock of wetness between her thighs.
“Are you indeed?” he murmured.
She swallowed. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t want . . .”
But her lips wouldn’t release the lie. She did. Oh, she did. She felt a contraction deep inside, powerful as a fist. It had been so long since she’d allowed herself the freedom to feel. To take. And in this moment, faced with the temptation of his firm, unsmiling mouth, the challenge of those cool gray eyes, she had trouble remembering why.
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