Jenny’s gaze slid toward him as his tail receded, those silver scales rippling and dividing into pale human flesh. She watched every moment of his transformation, unblinking and intense, until he lay in front of her. Human. Naked.
She didn’t stop staring.
Perrin rolled over and sat up. Too quickly. His head spun. He pressed his palm against his forehead, steadying himself.
Swim trunks flew into his lap. He glanced over his shoulder, and found Jenny struggling from her wetsuit. When she shimmied it down, her soaked shorts went with it. He glimpsed the edge of her hip, the smooth pale curve of her backside, and was hit with another jolt. Hot, aching.
She hitched up her shorts. His gaze ticked upward, meeting hers. Her cheeks were red, but this time he didn’t think it had to do with her fever.
Perrin cleared his throat and stood. Slipped on the swim trunks.
Behind him, Jenny said, “I dreamed.”
He closed his eyes.
“From the first night I found that boy,” she went on, softly. “Until eight years ago. And now . . . now it seems . . . you were really there, inside my head. It wasn’t just . . .”
“No,” he finished. “It was real.”
She was silent too long. He opened his eyes and turned. Found her staring at him with a terrible vulnerability that the grim line of her mouth did nothing to hide.
“This is too much,” she whispered.
Perrin could not move, except to look away, at the sea. “I didn’t expect to find you here. Or to ever find you, at all.”
“You remembered me.”
He glanced back at her, sharply. “You changed my life. You were with me, always.”
He might as well have hit her. The look she gave him was so stricken, so devastated, he wanted to drop down on his knees and crawl to her. The strength of his reaction frightened him. He had never felt this way. Even those dreams felt pale in comparison.
Perrin couldn’t face it. Eight years, burying himself. Eight years, forcing himself to feel nothing.
Bleeding now, on the inside.
He turned and walked away.
Not far, before Jenny caught up with him. He heard her feet digging into the sand, and her soft labored breathing. Still weak from the fever.
Or from being tied up, kidnapped, terrified, nearly drowned. Stolen away into the sea by a virtual stranger who refused to return her to her people. Take your pick.
As if one of those things alone wasn’t bad enough. He could have lost her.
Because of A’lesander, he thought, and something ugly unfolded inside his chest. He might still lose her. Chances were good he would, one way or another.
Perrin slowed his pace. She didn’t match his stride but lingered behind. His skin prickled, every nerve strung tight, knowing she was there, so close. He stopped, and turned. Jenny had already quit walking. Her cheeks were flushed, and there was a look in her eyes that he didn’t like. She fumbled with the pack belted to her waist and dropped down on her knees in the sand. Hard, quick, exhausted.
Perrin crouched, and nudged her hands aside. He wasn’t certain what she had inside the pack, but when he found the ibuprofen, she reached for the bottle.
“I’ll do it,” he said, flipping open the cap. “Two or three?”
“Two for now.” Jenny swallowed the pills dry with a grimace and gagging cough.
Perrin rubbed his thigh, uneasy. “You need a doctor.”
“I need an ER,” she muttered, which frightened him. “Before all hell broke loose on the boat, something happened in the water. I didn’t know it at the time. Not until later. It’s making me sick.”
Dread touched him. “There are many poisons in the sea.”
“This isn’t poison. Not like that.” Jenny swallowed hard, her gaze pained, frightened. “I don’t even know what to call it.”
Her hand twitched, and moved haltingly to her neck. Perrin suffered the urge to mirror her movements. A jolt hit him, followed by an even deeper unease. It was the placement of her hand. Just coincidence. It had to be coincidence. And yet, he wanted to touch the hole just above his neck, in the base of his skull. To see if he felt the impossible presence of something that had been ripped away from him, eight years ago.
His head throbbed. He imagined a voice whisper through him, incomprehensible but familiar.
Jenny stilled, closing her eyes. “I’m losing my mind.”
Her voice was tight, restrained. Everything about her, tense. Perrin stopped rubbing his thigh and dug in his fingers instead, hard enough to feel pain. “No. You’re not.”
“I’m hearing things,” she said, then shook her head, small jerky movements, her right hand gingerly touching the back of her head. “A woman singing.”
Perrin stilled, and glanced around them. The mist had faded, but it always did upon reaching shore. The island was just an island—beautiful, but very much of the world. The old crone had never cared for illusions, except the ones that left her safely anonymous.
But he did not hear her song. Not here, on land.
“Jenny,” he said, but she shook her head.
“I heard her before in the water, just like you did. If this is just my imagination . . .” Jenny looked away. “Help me stand.”
Perrin drew her up, and she looked down the beach. Her hair was coming loose from her braids, tangled around her clear green eyes; and there was a wildness in her face that wasn’t fear but something darker—and vulnerable. “I hear her, that way.”
“I believe you,” he said, and watched her shoulders relax.
They walked. Slow, careful. Neither of them wore shoes, but the sand was soft. Perrin studied the shadows of the forest, listening to birds caw and trill. He saw no other animals but sensed eyes watching him. Animals, or something else. He made Jenny walk ocean side, just in case, and picked up a long piece of driftwood to hold in his hand.
Jenny glanced at it. “Not dangerous, you said?”
Perrin grunted. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
“Was there ever a choice?”
“There’s always a choice,” he muttered. “But the other options were worse. No other boats nearby, no settlements.”
Jenny looked down at her feet, stumbling a little. “I don’t understand any of this, and I’ve seen some . . . strange things. I was just never one of those strange things.”
“It won’t get easier,” he said. “Dealing with the strange and unfamiliar. Even when you think it has, that you’ve finally acclimated, something will happen, and you’ll realize that all you were was numb.”
“That’s depressing.”
Perrin had never thought of it as depressing. “It’s survival. You shut down your fear to focus only on what is necessary, until you see nothing else. Until nothing else can affect you.”
“The strange can be beautiful,” she said quietly. “Even if it frightens you. Even if it confuses.”
“And when it’s too much?” Perrin gave her a sharp look. “If you’re alone, and it’s too much?”
Jenny stared at him. He looked away, ashamed and irritated.
“You were on land,” she said. “You spent a lot of time there.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve already said plenty.”
Perrin rubbed the back of his neck. “Fine. I lived on land for eight years. I had no choice in the matter. It was difficult.”
“No choice?” He could hear in her voice, But you told me there’s always a choice, and he thought, It’s easier to lie to myself than to you.
“I was exiled,” he told her. “On pain of death.”
Jenny stopped walking. “But you came back.”
“I told you. It was important.”
Her gaze was so
full. “Why were you exiled?”
“I won’t discuss that.”
Jenny wanted to argue with him. He knew it, felt it, braced himself—wondering how long it would be before he broke, and told her the truth, and saw real fear in her eyes.
But she surprised him. In a quiet voice she said, “Was it always horrible, living like a human?”
Perrin marveled that one simple question could reach into his heart and make it stop beating. Or maybe that was her voice, the thoughtfulness of it, and the compassion he heard in each word.
It had been a long time since anyone had even pretended to care.
“No,” he told her. “It wasn’t always bad.”
“And you would have lived your whole life as human?”
“For as long as I could. Which might not have been long. My health was worsening. Household chemicals, smog, the common flu . . .” Perrin hesitated, glancing down at his arm, with its fading rash. “I planned to return to the sea if it became too bad. I didn’t want to die on land, even if it meant my own kind would execute me on sight.” He forced himself to look at her. “My soul belongs to the sea.”
And to her, whispered a dry, familiar voice inside his mind. You belong to each other first.
Perrin stopped walking. Jenny said, “What?”
What, he thought. What was that?
Something impossible. A voice he should never have heard again.
The whisper of his kra’a.
“Maybe I’m losing my mind,” he murmured, and Jenny grabbed his hand.
“Tell me,” she said, and her alarm brought him back.
“I heard something,” he told her, and closed his eyes as he heard something else, then.
A woman singing.
“Perrin,” Jenny whispered.
“Come on,” he said, still shaken.
She didn’t move. “Wait.”
“Jenny,” he said, but she squeezed his hand, and he realized she was staring behind him, at the forest. Jaw tight, every inch of her tense, straining, like she was fighting the urge to run.
Perrin turned. And saw that the forest had loosened its many shadows, the eyes he had felt watching them.
Not animals.
Children.
Chapter Nine
Jenny had never been a big fan of all those Mad Max movies. Postapocalyptic wastelands rife with brutality, bad teeth, and men in assless chaps were not her idea of entertainment. She preferred historical romances, light with banter and stolen looks; classic black-and-white films where women were dames and the comedy screwball; or those old Westerns where the men moved slow and easy—except on the draw—and talked with sparse tongues.
The children who walked out of the woods were straight from the proverbial wasteland, fitting into another world: where laws did not exist; where adults were myth; and over the next hill might stand a place where it was common to fight to the death.
Small, lean. None was older than ten. Few shared the same ethnicity. She saw an Asian girl with straight black hair, a lean blond boy covered in freckles, and another with ebony skin and no hair at all. A Hispanic-looking girl with haunted eyes stood in the shadows, and there were smaller children near her, very young, with round faces and sturdy little bodies that should have been tumbling over soft rugs dragging teddy bears and sucking their thumbs instead of standing barefoot on the border of a rain forest, on an island in the middle of nowhere.
All wore loincloths made of soft pale leather, and nothing else. Jenny counted twelve children, but she was afraid there might be more, out of sight. Their youth didn’t make her feel safe. She had heard of kids going feral—mostly to describe schools where bullies were getting rougher, more violent. That was nothing compared to this. This was old-school feral. Raised-by-wolves feral. Hunger in their eyes, and distrust, and just enough curiosity to make it all very dangerous.
“This is new,” Perrin said, mildly.
Jenny didn’t dare look at him. “Is that good or bad?”
“She’s old,” he replied. “I’m not sure.”
She decided to err on the side of bad. “I’m not going to hit a kid.”
“That would probably be for the best,” he replied, still with that soft voice. And just like that, something snapped inside her: a peculiarly rich vein of anger, throbbing in her gut. Anger, combined with a streak of wild protectiveness.
Jenny’s hands curled into fists. “Who is this woman, and why are these children here?”
Perrin tensed. “I don’t know. She’s not human. Her reasons—”
“I know plenty of nonhumans,” she snapped. “Some are shit, but if any of them messed with kids? No mercy. A bullet in the brain.”
And you remember what that looks like, she thought, with disgust, and nausea. What it feels like to pull the trigger.
Jenny’s knees weakened, but she took a step toward the children, and then another. All of them swayed sideways with shambling grace—like little zombies—watching her with silent, feral hunger. She was afraid of them, but her concern was stronger.
Perrin loomed, warm and solid, close enough that their arms brushed. Jenny felt ashamed of her relief. Ashamed, and uneasy that his presence was so familiar, so comfortable, that instead of feeling like a stranger, he felt more like a constant, a touchstone, some piece of home.
He made her feel safe.
It wasn’t right. It was too easy. Her heart was going to find itself broken into pieces. Because he was a stranger, he wasn’t even human, and those dreams—those dreams, now that they were flesh and blood, and real—
Coward, she told herself. Brave until you get what you want most.
But she’d had what she wanted most, not so long ago. And lost it.
Perrin gripped her shoulder. “Careful.”
Yes, she thought, and swallowed hard, meeting the flat, assessing gazes of all those staring children, before settling on the Asian girl.
“Hey,” she said, trying to smile. “What’s your name?”
“Stranger,” whispered the girl. But the word had power, as though saying it released some strange current that raced against Jenny’s skin. The base of her skull throbbed.
She heard the woman singing again: delicate, haunting, each note shimmering in her mind like a storm of falling light. Warm air rushed over her face. Smelled like rain. She felt sticky with sweat, weak, and suffered the overwhelming urge to throw herself naked into the sea, as though that would solve all her problems.
“And why wouldn’t it?” asked a woman, suddenly.
Yes, said another voice inside Jenny’s mind, echoing oddly, as though it wasn’t quite part of her. Yes, heal.
Jenny flinched, turning. Perrin moved with her. Around them, the world spun with a sickening jolt, sky melting into sand, the sea roaring over the thunder of her heart. The parasite pulsed, trembled, fluttered like it was growing wings—
—and everything stopped.
Jenny found herself staring at sand. On her knees, in the sand. Her body tingled, and her head swam. She sucked in a deep breath, and slowly, carefully, looked up. Perrin stood beside her. Large, rawboned, his alabaster white skin carved with scars. Fresh from the fight, like the line from an old song. Frightening, intimidating.
Until he glanced at her, and she witnessed a heartbreaking vulnerability in his eyes that stole the breath right out of her. He was a boy again, that little boy, afraid and alone.
There and gone. She blinked, and found herself looking at a cold hard mask, his eyes empty, unreadable. He reached down and helped her stand. Her knees shook.
“Perrin O’doro,” murmured a low, feminine voice. “Guardian.”
Jenny stopped breathing, again. Slowly, as slowly as if her life depended on it, she turned her head.
A woman stood in the sea. Naked in
the foam, her skin ice white. Even her nipples were white, her breasts heavy and round, shrouded in tumbling waves of blond hair that lifted in the breeze like strokes of floating sunlight. Her face was not clearly visible, but Jenny glimpsed a flash of terrible beauty, and a pale light that shone in her eyes, in her mouth. Jenny felt afraid all over again. Afraid and small, and infinitely vulnerable.
The sea was a pitiless place. Maurice called it spiteful, a jealous lover, but those were human emotions. If the sea had a spirit, nothing of it was jealous, because jealousy needed love, or hunger, or need, and the sea was a god without a heart. Too powerful for mercy. Too powerful for right and wrong. A force of nature, old as the world, beyond the tethers of a soul.
Jenny was reminded of that when she studied the woman—and it sent her past terror into cold, numb horror.
Focus only on what is necessary, until you see nothing else, she suddenly remembered Perrin saying. Until nothing else can affect you.
“Lady Atargatis,” said Perrin coldly. “Or have you become Aphrodite?”
“My names slip away,” she whispered, and Jenny steadied herself, trying not to sway as she listened to that melodic voice. “My names always leave me, and I have tired of wearing new ones. Call me crone, or witch, or lonely, for those are the words that will follow me into death.”
Then her eyes narrowed. “You believe that I will kill you.”
Jenny believed it, in that instant. Death would be easy for this creature, whatever she was. Death was nothing to the sea.
For a moment she was a child again, watching a man rise from the waves. Breathless, frozen with fear. Then that passed, and Jenny heard screams and the shots of guns, and a phantom pain in her stomach made her touch herself. She had been near the ocean that day, too. Listening to the waves crash as she lay bleeding in the grass.
I would have run that day, too, if I could have.
Hot shame filled her. Shame, and the absolute certainty that it was the truth. Jenny would have run away. If she could redo that day, she would still run. For one good reason.
But that was the past, and this was now.
No, she told herself. Not again. You will not run.
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