"Saorise said something about her skin," I interrupted through numb lips as I floundered to make sense of all this. "On that first night when she arrived. I didn't mention it because I just thought she was rambling."
"What did she say?" asked Connor, leaning forward.
The four of us were seated on the benches on the bank, and my companions had put on clothes, which was a mixed blessing from my perspective.
"It sounded like…” I hesitated and swallowed hard, “'took my skin'?" I offered.
A grim look passed between the brothers and I saw Connor grit his teeth.
"The other reason a Selkie keeps hold of their skin..." Patch began to explain.
"Patch!" Connor snapped.
"We’ve trusted her this far. Saorise did, as well, and that's good enough for me."
"Saorise was too trusting by half,” Connor muttered.
"We don’t have much of a choice right now, brother. I truly think she’s a good person." Declan was looking directly at me, his green eyes disarmingly like his sister's.
Connor stared from brother to brother then shook his head.
"Can’t do it." He looked at me. "Please don't think I'm ungrateful, but our race has a bad history with yours. Look at what's happened to our sister. She’s gone missing, and if you heard right, someone – likely, your kind - took her seal skin. There are some things about us you cannot know. At least, not yet."
I nodded, my throat tight with emotion. There was a lot of anger in Connor, but why shouldn't there be? I had faith that it all came from a place of love for Saorise. He had no reason to trust me and I wouldn't blame him for not, but I did wonder how he would react when I told them about my dream - would they believe me?
It was do or die. If he thought I was crazy, or worse, lying, he’d never trust me, and the others wouldn’t be far behind. But I had to risk it. There was too much at stake not to.
"I think I might know where she is."
They all looked up at me, hope and shock and confusion mingled in their expressive features.
"Why didn't you tell us yesterday?" asked Connor, his firm lips going tight.
"I didn't know then. I guess you could say I don't really know now, either.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and let out a groan of frustration. “Except I do. I do know and you can either accept it or not, because I know it's unbelievable – although, no more unbelievable than anything you've told me so - I don't know - maybe you will believe me."
"Maybe you should just tell us," suggested Patch, kindly.
I sucked in a steadying breath and spilled my guts. This time, I was careful to leave out no detail, no matter how insignificant it seemed to me - it was evident that some things, which seemed meaningless to me, had significance to them.
"And you know where this is?" Patch's response immediately suggested that he believed me but his older brother did not look so convinced.
"How do we know she's telling the truth?"
"Lighten up, Conn," said Declan. "Why would she make something like that up?"
"Because," said Connor, his hard gaze never leaving me, "someone or something out there is hunting Selkie. It has taken our sister and it might plausibly want us, too. What better way to get us than to use Saorise as bait?"
"So you think I'm luring you into a trap?" My patience with Connor's attitude was wearing a little thin.
It was one thing to be cautious, but another to outright accuse me of something awful when I’d done nothing but try to help.
"Maybe not deliberately, then," Connor said, raking a hand through his hair. "There are telepathic species out there which could put a fake dream in your head to trick you into tricking us."
"Why would they target her and not us?" asked Declan.
"Because we would know if it was really Saorise," pointed out Connor. "We could not be fooled."
"I know it was Saorise," I insisted. I was a lot more confident about it now than I had been when I arrived, but there's nothing that bolstered confidence so much as having your word questioned.
"You've gotten a lot of experience of telepathy, have you?"
"No. But I still know," I shot back, lifting my chin and glaring at him.
"Also," Connor went on, "as long as we're asking why anyone would target her instead of us - why would Saorise contact her instead of us?"
"Does she know you're here?" I asked. “Maybe she thought you were in Ireland and she couldn’t…reach that far.”
"That's not how telepathy works," Connor muttered.
"We haven't seen her for weeks," Declan pointed out. "Her connection with Sienna is much stronger. Fresher. If she were struggling to get through at all, then, of course, she would go with the stronger connection. And more to the point, she would also know that we might not have been able to piece together her location. If we didn’t know she was in New York, what would a neon sign have told us? Nothing."
"True enough. But she's human," insisted Connor, crossing his muscular arms over his chest. "Saorise would hardly rely on getting through to a human. Most of them can't receive at all, let alone interpret a message."
"But she did. So perhaps Sienna isn't like most humans. And perhaps Saorise was well aware of that. Whatever the case," Patch said conclusively, "we can't ignore the dream."
Connor nodded. "Agreed. But we also can't run too many risks. It still might be a trap - whether Sienna knows it or not."
"Please don't talk about me like I'm not here." That I was able to talk so defiantly to Connor even after I had seen him transform from a seal, I thought was pretty impressive. Trying to help Saorise made me more assertive.
"What are you suggesting?" asked Patch.
Connor turned to me. "You can show me this place?"
I nodded.
"Then you can take me there. Patch and Declan - you guys stay here. That way, if something happens to me, you'll still be free to help Saorise."
I had to admit to being quietly impressed by Connor, and not just by his appearance or physique. He didn't trust me, it was evident in everything he said and it was written all over his handsome face. And yet, he was willing to go with me, into whatever danger I might be leading him into, to help his sister.
How could you not be impressed by someone like that?
Patch and Declan nodded their reluctant agreement. They, I think, did trust me, but were still wary about letting their brother go off alone with a stranger to seek the danger that had already taken their sister. They might argue a lot but they were clearly a close and loving family, which reminded me a little of my own.
Connor turned to me. "Alright then, I'm in your hands."
I stood up from the bench in front of him, my eyes coming about level with his broad chest. "I won't let you down."
He looked down at me, his green eyes distrustful but full of meaning.
"Don't let her down."
He didn’t have to finish that thought for his meaning to be clear because I’d heard the two words he’d left off, loud and clear.
Or else.
Chapter 5
Connor didn't talk much as we walked away from the park.
He also didn't talk much when we got on the bus or when we changed buses or when we got off a bit earlier than necessary so that we could casually walk past, assessing the area.
I had gotten the impression from the brothers' conversation that Selkie mostly communicated with each other through whatever telepathic skill they had, not with other species and certainly not with a human like me. I wasn't sure if this 'speciesist' attitude was the sole reason for Connor's antipathy toward me, or if I had done something else to upset him, but I was determined not to just accept it. This was Saorise's brother and I would rather we were friends.
"Can I ask a question?" The normal way of getting to know a person through small talk was obviously not going to work with the taciturn Connor, so I tried some business talk.
Connor shrugged. "You can ask, but I can't guarantee that I'll answer."
&n
bsp; "We're making the assumption that Saorise is, for some reason that you won't explain to me - and that's okay; your call - unable to properly use her telepathy to get in touch with you. Do you mind me asking why you can't get in touch with her?"
It was hard to say if he minded or not as he continued to walk, staring straight ahead as he had through most of our journey. Possibly, he was considering whether or not to answer because, eventually, he did speak. "Only female Selkie are fully telepathic. Males like me are receptive to messages, but we can't send them ourselves."
"Like an office phone that only takes incoming calls?" I suggested.
His eyes went flat as he turned away. "Not really."
His sharp retort stung and the words rushed to my lips before I could stop them.
"Why don't you like me?"
Well, that was direct. Maybe for the best. Sometimes it was easiest to confront these things head on. In the normal course of things, it wasn't something that I would do as I was a relatively mild-mannered person. But having Saorise back in my life, and the current situation, had brought out the more forthright side of me that usually lay dormant.
"Who says I don't?"
"Everything about you says it,” I chirped back frankly.
"I don't trust you. There's a difference. If it helps; you seem perfectly nice. Is that the sort of validation you had in mind?" he asked, one brow hiked high on his forehead.
Part of me wanted to say that it was hard to believe that someone so unfriendly could be related to Saorise. But that would have been intensely cruel in the circumstances, and would have just highlighted that it was quite possibly her own open friendliness that had landed her in this situation.
Also, it would not have been completely true. Though he lacked, or was for the moment suppressing the ease Saorise had with people, there was much about Connor that immediately reflected his sister. His devoted loyalty and his love for his siblings might be expressed differently to hers but those were traits they surely shared. His courage was something I had always seen in his sister.
Physically, he was the least similar to her of the three brothers, his hair was dark brown and his tall muscular build was a million miles away from the petite Saorise. But there was a deeper similarity. Saorise had a wildness about her, both when she was young and now. It would have been easy to have written Connor off as straight and buttoned down, but he carried with him a sense of wildness beneath the skin. He was here searching for his lost sister and so would focus on that, but there was a fire that danced in his eyes and an energy in the way he moved that I dearly wanted to see released from its constraints.
It was probably not where my mind should have been right at that moment, but I was increasingly aware of how attractive I found him. I used the word 'attractive' in its most literal sense. It was not simply that he was handsome with a great body. He attracted me. I felt drawn to him with a tug that was almost physical, as if that wildness in his soul had reached out from his chest, coiled its tendrils about me and fastened me to Connor.
"Where now?"
Connor's voice brought me out of the fanciful daydream into which I had self-indulgently allowed myself to slip. I pointed.
"Down here. The building I could see through the window in my dream is just on the right."
"And try not to be too suspicious while we're doing it."
It had not occurred to me that people might be watching. I recalled how Saorise had looked over her shoulder nervously when we were at Newtown Creek.
Did whoever had taken her have lots of henchmen? Perhaps that would make the place easier to spot.
"The window looked to be at ground level," I went on, struggling to remember every detail of the dream, which was now our only link to Saorise. "A basement window."
Connor nodded but added, "Just keep your voice down a little. There may be people listening and some of them may have hearing better than you would think possible."
"How good?"
"Some of them can probably hear what you're thinking."
I wasn't sure if he was joking or not - it was hard to distinguish possible from impossible these past couple of days - so I tried hard not to think anything suspicious.
It now occurred to me that we might be a more obvious target than I had considered when I suggested this. Although Connor looked perfectly human to me, there were presumably people who could spot a Selkie in human form without any difficulty. For the first time, I realized that I might actually be in danger here. I had known that there was danger involved, but I had never really thought of it as something that applied to me. Even now, though I was more aware of it, part of me still insisted that nothing bad would happen to me because I was me - bad things only happened to other people. It's that attitude that gets most jaywalkers killed.
We walked down the right-hand side of the road, both of us innocently scanning the opposite side for a window on sidewalk level. But there was nothing. I looked around for other roads that might give a similar view of the building and the store’s sign but, likewise, came up with nothing.
"I don't understand."
"It's okay," said Connor, gruffly. "You've been thinking about Saorise a lot, it came out through a dream. It's understandable. I rather wish it hadn't led to you finding out things about us that are generally kept on a need to know basis but," he shrugged, "I'd sooner that you made a mistake than you turned out to be on the other side."
It was nice that he now seemed to trust me, but his reason for doing so would seem to be that I was just some naive idiot.
"No..." I stuttered. "It was real. It was her."
"Then where's the window?" He didn't say it cruelly, but somehow the kindness of his voice was worse. He was humoring the poor human who wouldn't know a telepathic message if it smacked her in the face.
For a moment there, I doubted it, too. I had been consumed with thoughts of Saorise, it was perfectly natural to be thinking of her, and with all the odd circumstances surrounding her reappearance in my life and disappearance from my apartment, my brain might well have concocted some outlandish vision.
But I had seen the flipper.
In my dream, Saorise's hand had been a flipper. Not a fish's one but a seal's flipper. I had not known she was a Selkie until I saw her brothers, hours later. I had not even known what a Selkie was. How could that have been in my dream when I did not have that information?
It would have been an incredible thing to guess.
Was it possible that I had learned this twenty years ago and my brain had suppressed the information till now? It seemed like the sort of thing I would remember. And I had dreamed about Saorise regularly throughout my life without ever seeing even a hint of her turning into a seal until last night - again, that was the sort of thing that I would have remembered. It was too much of a coincidence.
"In my dream she was a seal," I said, turning to Connor defiantly. "How would I have known that? How could I have just dreamed it?"
His face had narrowed to a frown before I had even finished speaking. "She was a seal in your dream? You're sure?"
"It's not exactly a grey area."
Connor's eyes flashed from side to side as if he was trying to keep up with a fast-moving train of thought that was passing before his eyes.
"This store; did you ever point it out to Saorise?"
I nodded. "Yeah, we passed it on our way to get pizza the first day we went out. There was a cool-looking guitar in the window."
"And that doesn't strike you as fortunate?"
Now he said it; yes, it did. Saorise was imprisoned with a view of a building on the block she could positively identify. That was very fortunate. Though I wasn't sure what that had to do with her being a seal or how it helped us find her.
Connor began to walk back quickly the way we had come, talking as he went. For the first time since I had met him, I got some sense of the man behind the serious, concerned brother, as his enthusiasm made him careless of being overheard.
"Saorise isn'
t a seal. Not right now."
"How do you know?"
"Because they took her skin and, believe me, they will only give it back to her if they have to."
"Why?"
"Doesn't matter."
I had a feeling it did, but it was one of the things he was not willing to share with me. "The point is, you were seeing something that wasn't real."
"So it was a dream?" I was increasingly confused.
"No," Connor went on. "Like you said; there's no way you could have known about her being a Selkie. You weren't seeing through Saorise's eyes..."
"That's how it felt."
"I know. But you were seeing what she wanted you to see. She wanted to show you where she was and what she was. Telepathy isn't like a text message or a voice in your head. It's like getting someone else's thoughts in pictures. It never occurred to me that Saorise might be sending you a message - truth be told, I had enough trouble accepting that she was sending you an image of any sort. I've never encountered a human who could receive a message from a Selkie. I would have bet it wasn't possible. But I think it's the only explanation. In which case..."
"What I saw through the window might not be literally what she can see through her window."
I was getting the idea, and hope fluttered again in my chest.
"More than that," said Connor. We were now in front of the building from my dream and he had stopped to tie a shoelace, using this as an excuse to look around, before moving on. "There might not even be a window. In fact, it makes much more sense that there isn’t, because whoever has her wouldn’t want her to be seen from the outside. Which means, she's likely not saying, 'this is what I can see'…"
"She's saying 'this is where I am',” I finished with a gasp.
To our left as we walked by, I saw a narrow alley that burrowed between two buildings. A large man, who might as well have had 'security' tattooed across his forehead, stood in front of a flight of steps leading down.
Once we had gotten a safe distance away, Connor stopped and turned to me. "That's where she is. I'm sure of it."
The lethal expression on his face left no room for doubt, so I nodded.
Her Selkie Harem Page 4
