Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  She shook her head. “I saw you. I saw . . . I thought I was crazy. This is . . . Well.”

  “A relief?” he suggested dryly.

  She met his eyes. “Not exactly.”

  His gut clenched. No, of course not.

  At least she wasn’t hysterical. At least she hadn’t recoiled from him. Not yet.

  She moistened her lips. “So, how . . . That is, what . . .”

  “I am selkie.”

  “Well, that explains everything.”

  Her tart tone almost made him smile. “I am a man on the land and a seal in the sea.”

  “But how do you do it? Are you . . . Which are you?”

  “I am both, and I am neither. Not human or animal. Before God made humankind, He created the heavens and the earth, the water, and the fire. With each creation, the elementals took form, the children of air, earth, sea, and fire. Selkies are the children of the sea.”

  “Um. That’s very interesting. Except I know your family. I know your dad, and—”

  “My father is human.” He was nothing like his father. “I am selkie by my mother’s blood.”

  Regina’s throat moved as she swallowed. Dylan waited rigidly, watching as her practical mind sorted through the implications of his story. “But your brother and sister—”

  “Take after our father,” he said evenly. “Most human-selkie offspring are human.”

  Did he imagine it, or did she touch her stomach under her bulky sweatshirt? Did she think about their offspring? Their child. His hands clenched.

  “So, when did you know that you were . . .”

  “Selkie.”

  “Different?” she finished.

  He didn’t like to think about it. He didn’t want to remember. “Thirteen.”

  “Wow.” She regarded him thoughtfully. He felt his palms grow clammy. “Like puberty didn’t suck enough.”

  Her humor eased the tight knot in his gut.

  “That was right before you and your mother left World’s End,” she observed.

  “Yes.”

  “Tough on you.”

  He shook his head. “Leaving was my idea. My choice. My . . .”

  Fault, he thought but did not say.

  “Oh, please. You were thirteen. Your mother was, what, like, forty?”

  His mouth was dry. “Older than that.”

  Regina looked at him questioningly.

  “Selkies are immortal. We do not age as humans do.”

  “Oh.” Another silence, while she absorbed this fresh bit of information and he wished he were somewhere far away in the cool, dark depths of the ocean. “But she died. Didn’t you say she died?”

  “She was killed. Drowned in a fisherman’s net within a year of her freedom.” He blamed himself for that, too.

  Regina winced. “Well, but that doesn’t change my point. Your mother was the grown-up. She could have split with you anytime. Or made sure you stayed.”

  “She could not leave. Before.”

  “Why not?”

  Black resentment boiled in him. He swallowed it. “We cannot change form, we cannot return to the sea, without our sealskins. My mother used to come ashore to . . . visit my father. Before we were born. Before they married. I think they married.” Dylan chose his words with care, but it was impossible to disguise the bitterness in his face. “One night, while she lay sleeping, he took her pelt and hid it.”

  “She used to visit him,” Regina repeated.

  He should have known she would focus on the wrong thing. She was human and female. Incapable of understanding the needs that drove his kind.

  “Yes.”

  “So she must have been at least attracted to him at some point.”

  “That did not give him the right to try to contain her,” Dylan said tautly. “To control her.”

  “She still stayed with him for thirteen— fourteen?— years.”

  He glared. “She had no choice.”

  “They had three kids.”

  Dylan could not answer. He was the one who had found his mother’s pelt. He had brought it to her. He had destroyed his family.

  He met her gaze, speechless, appalled by the emotions that raged and wept inside him. As if he were thirteen again, mortified and distracted by the changes in his own body, torn between his childhood loyalties and affections and his deep, desperate desire for the sea.

  He steadied his breathing. He was not that child, he reminded himself. He was not the victim of emotion or anything else. He was selkie, impervious, immortal.

  “Does Caleb know?” Regina asked, plunging him back into the torrent of human feeling and connection again. “That you and your mother are some kind of . . .”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Freaks?” he asked softly.

  She crossed her arms over her stomach. “I was going to say mermaid, but you can call yourself whatever you want. Does he know?”

  “He does now. He’s had some recent experience with . . . mermaids.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “Maggie?”

  Margred was her friend, Dylan thought, an odd pressure in his chest. Surely Regina, with her fierce loyalties and her kind heart, would not turn from Margred, who had been selkie. And if she did not turn from Margred, then . . . But he would not let himself complete that thought.

  He nodded.

  “Wow. That’s . . . wow.” Regina reached for her water. She took a sip, her hand tight on the frosted glass, watching him over the rim. “What about Lucy?”

  “Lucy is human. I told you.”

  “Yeah, but does she know?”

  “There is no reason for her to know. She was only a year old when we . . . left.”

  “Nick was only three months old when we moved from Boston, but he still knows who his father is.” Regina gulped more water. “What his father is.”

  “The situation is not the same,” Dylan said stiffly.

  “No?” She set down her glass, her hand trembling. “Then why are you telling me?”

  To keep her safe.

  Whether the child in her womb was the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy or merely a pawn in the elementals’ border wars, the demons would not back off when their first attack failed. The child was still threatened. Regina was still in danger. Dylan’s gut knotted.

  “You deserve to know,” he said coolly.

  She hunched in her chair, her eyes bright and challenging in her white face. “So you’ve told me. Now what? Are you going to visit me, like your mom visited your dad?”

  He recognized the strain under her flippant tone, the tension hiding behind her casual posture. Hadn’t he learned to mask his own fears and uncertainties the same way?

  Dylan scowled. It was one thing for him to deny or disguise his feelings. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t female and pregnant. He hadn’t been half strangled and thrown down a hole by a demon intent on his destruction. Her strength of mind, her practicality of purpose, as her world turned upside down awed and annoyed him. Couldn’t she let her guard down this once and let him take care of things?

  Of course not.

  In her eyes, he was one of the things she was guarding against, a threat to the life she had built with her son. She was probably dying to get rid of him. Circle the wagons. Repel the alien invader. “Nicky and I will be fine on our own,” she’d said.

  But she wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. They needed him, whether Regina admitted it or not. Whether she liked it or not. Now he just had to figure out how to tell her.

  “You should get some rest,” he said.

  She gave him a disbelieving look. “You think that’s going to solve anything?”

  “I think,” he said carefully, “you need to sleep. We can decide what to do in the morning.”

  “We don’t decide,” Regina said. “I decide.”

  “Not tonight,” Dylan said.

  He knew she prided herself on her independence. This situation, however, was outside her experience and beyond her control. Eventually, she
would have to accept that. Accept his protection.

  At least she would be safe tonight. He was here. She was warded. In the morning, he would find some way to confer with Conn, to make arrangements to bring her to the selkie island until her baby could be born. In the meantime . . .

  He reached into his pocket. “I have something of yours.”

  Her eyes rounded as he withdrew the bright gold cross on the broken chain. “Oh.” Her hand went to her neck in a habitual gesture. “I thought I lost it. Where . . .”

  “In the kitchen.” He poured the fine chain into her cupped palm, keeping his hand carefully apart from hers. “The clasp is snapped. You need another.”

  He should have gotten her another, he realized belatedly. But there hadn’t been time.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him, her eyes glowing as if he’d brought her diamonds instead of a broken necklace that already belonged to her.

  His heart constricted. “You’re welcome. You should wear it. For protection.”

  Her smile turned rueful. “It hasn’t done a very good job of protecting me so far.”

  “More than you know.” Unable any longer to resist the temptation of her touch, he closed her hand around the cross. Her fingers were light and cool. He let go before she could notice his own hand trembling.

  “It is a ward,” he explained. “Like the mark on your wrist.”

  She looked at the triskelion tattooed on her skin; at the gold cross in her hand. “A ward against what? Vampires?”

  He had intended to put this conversation off until morning. He owed her his honesty. That didn’t mean he had to batter her with the truth when she was exhausted and he was on edge.

  But she wouldn’t let it go, he thought in irritation. She kept pushing and pushing at him with her wide eyes and her soft heart and her big mouth.

  “Not vampires,” he said. “Demons.”

  * * *

  Regina’s jaw dropped. She inhaled. She exhaled. Demons. Well.

  “I was kidding,” she said weakly.

  Dylan didn’t say anything. Oh, God. Obviously, he was not.

  Regina had been baptized a Catholic, but her knowledge of demons was pretty much limited to Halloween and a few episodes of Buffy.

  She swallowed. “Are we talking horns and pitchforks here? Or The Exorcist?”

  A muscle bunched in Dylan’s jaw. “This is not a movie.”

  “No, it’s my life.” Her previously dull and ordinary life. She wanted it back.

  “This is crap,” she said. “I was attacked by somebody I know. A man. A human. Jericho Jones.”

  “He was possessed,” Dylan said. “Unlike the other elements, fire has no matter of its own. The children of the fire must take over a host to act on the corporal plane.”

  She struggled to make sense of his words, to hear him through the rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart. “Possessed or not, Jericho’s in jail. The demon—” Even the word stopped her. She wasn’t Buffy. She didn’t do demons. She was a twenty-nine-year-old line cook with an eight-year-old son. She forced herself to go on. “It’s locked up with him. So I’m safe.”

  “No. The demon was driven out of Jones by your cross. It will seek a new host to come back. To come after you.”

  “Why?” The word was nearly a wail. She coughed.

  Dylan waited while she gulped her water. When she set down her glass, he said gently, “I do not believe the demon seeks your death.”

  “Right. It just half strangled me and dropped me down a hole for fun.”

  His mouth tightened. “I should have said, its primary target is not your death.”

  “What does it want, then? I don’t have anything—”

  “The child.” Dylan’s eyes met hers. “Yours and mine.”

  Oh, God.

  Her breath went. Her vision grayed. For a moment, she was back in the caves again, in the icy dark.

  Dylan continued to watch her, his smooth, handsome face like stone, his thoughts and feelings buried. She wished he would touch her or something. Hold her hand.

  She forced another breath. Okay. Of all the pregnancy horror stories she’d been told or could imagine, “demonsseek your unborn child” had to be the worst. At least it explained why she had been attacked. Sort of. And why Dylan was sticking around.

  For tonight.

  She moistened her lips. “I don’t know yet that I’m pregnant. I mean, not for sure.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Tomorrow. I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  “I think you are. You smell . . . different.”

  Good different or bad different? She pushed the thought away. “Have you smelled a lot of pregnant women?”

  “No, you are the first.” His dark eyes flickered. “There are not many births among the merfolk.”

  “So, this baby is important, huh? If it’s, you know, selkie.”

  “Selkie and female.”

  “You want a girl?”

  Dylan’s breath was as deep, as deliberate, as hers had been. “There is a child foretold among my people,” he began. “A daughter of the house of Atargatis who will change the balance of power between Heaven and Hell. Atargatis was my mother. If you were to carry a daughter, yours and mine, the child would be of the lineage of Atargatis.”

  She took a moment to work it out. “Then . . . we’re on Heaven’s side?” That made her feel better. A little.

  Dylan did not meet her eyes. “Not exactly.”

  The lump in her throat was getting too big to swallow. “Then where do we stand? Exactly.”

  “When God made man, the elementals debated His decision. The children of air supported Him in this as in everything. The children of fire— demonkind— did not. But the majority of the First Creation, earth’s children and the children of the sea, concluded His wisdom would reveal itself in time. Or not.” Dylan’s smile revealed the edge of his teeth. “In either event, they— we— withdrew into the bones of the mountains and the depths of the seas, until mankind should either prove or destroy itself. We do not take sides.”

  “So you’re neutral.” Like Switzerland.

  “My people are, yes.”

  Regina heard his distinction. She saw past the thin, sharp smile to the turmoil in his eyes. He was not as neutral or as indifferent as he pretended.

  The realization gave her hope.

  “Yeah, well, my people are human,” she said. “Which means my kid is at least half human.”

  “That’s not how it works. There are no fractions to the Change,” Dylan said tightly. “No degrees of difference. You are human or not. You are selkie or not. The child will be one or the other.”

  She heard his cool, clipped tones and saw the rigid set of his shoulders and ached for him, for the choices his mother had forced on him, for the confusion of the boy he had been, for the isolation of the man he had become.

  But he was wrong.

  “That’s a load of crap,” Regina said. “Family is family.”

  Dylan cocked an eyebrow. “Blood is thicker than water?”

  Was it? Wasn’t it? Could she love the child within her if it were born . . . different?

  “Yes,” she said recklessly.

  “So sure,” Dylan mocked. “And so blind. Can you honestly pretend you don’t see me differently now, knowing what I am? My brother and I are not the same.”

  “Yeah,” Regina muttered. “He’s not a jerk.”

  Black laughter sprang into his eyes. “There is that.”

  “And he didn’t find me. He couldn’t have rescued me. You did. So your seal trick is actually pretty useful.”

  “Like Lassie saving Timmy in the well,” Dylan said.

  Regina narrowed her eyes. She recognized that jeering, defensive tone. She was the mother of a son, after all. Dylan was less certain, less in control of himself and the situation, than he would ever admit. Part of her wanted to reassure him, the way she would have soothed Nick. And another part of her resente
d having to try. She was tired and battered and pregnant and her throat hurt. He was here not because he wanted to be, not because he wanted her, but because the baby she carried could be part of some otherworldly power struggle.