But she would die in its embrace. That was something. She wouldn’t be dying alone.
With that thought, Meaghan let her body go limp and sank beneath the surface.
Chapter Two
“Dead girl at six o’clock!” Kyle’s cousin Tim, the youngest of the otter duals floating together in the raft, sang out. Duals’ mind-to-mind communication was known as silentspeech, but the way Tim did it, it was more like shouting directly into your brain. Everyone heard. “Cool! Haven’t seen a floater before.”
“Mind your manners,” his mother reprimanded, even as she, like the other otters in the raft, turned their attention to the floating body.
Kyle was already in motion. He’d glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye, a shape and colors that didn’t belong here. He shot out from his position in the raft and got there before the others.
Young. Fair-haired. Too thin and pale, but still pretty. No signs of injury, and a peaceful half smile that made her look like she was still alive. Kyle wondered what had happened to her. It wasn’t uncommon for humans to get washed off beaches by sneaker waves. Whatever had happened, they should try to steer the body back toward land. Someone would miss her, want to know what had happened to her.
He hoped, anyway.
Kyle had been an EMT until they started firing duals from jobs like that, jobs where they might have to care for humans. Had been in med school until they’d booted him out for refusing to take Drozz and suppress his shifting abilities. He couldn’t help caring, even though the dead human might have looked down on him when she was alive.
Kyle nudged at the body with his nose, trying to steer her toward the others. In their otter forms, it would take all of them working together to get her back to land, but in this cold water, and rough as the surf was likely to be, the otter forms were their best bet.
He nudged her again.
Her eyes opened, then fluttered shut again.
She was alive.
Not coherent if she didn’t notice an otter right in her face, but alive. Getting her ashore became a matter of urgency, not just a sad duty.
She reached out one hand, weakly, but her eyes didn’t seem to focus on him, and certainly being nudged by a purposeful otter should have gotten a reaction. Maybe she’d hit her head, or she was so far into hypothermia that she was in her own little world where she thought she was actually warm and safe.
Solve the mystery later. First, make sure she survives.
Kyle silentspoke to his kin, sending images of what he needed them to do. Quickly, the otters formed a flotilla around the woman. Swimming in sync, they pushed her back toward land. Kyle stayed at her head, keeping it above water—he didn’t trust all his relatives, animalside, to remember that normies couldn’t hold their breath as long as otter duals could. As it was, he kept them focused by sending images of playing a game. Otherwise, the younger ones might wander off when they started to get tired. A good game, though, would keep them from noticing fatigue.
And it was fatiguing. They couldn’t just surf through the breakers the way they usually would. Instead they had to swim through the roughness while making sure the woman was all right.
When they got her back to shore, she wasn’t breathing.
Kyle shifted back to wordy form as soon as he felt the beach beneath his paws. EMT training kicked in. Without worrying about clothes, Kyle went to work.
She wasn’t breathing, but her heart still beat, though weakly. And she’d been breathing when they found her. It had taken a few minutes to get to shore—hard to say how long since in otter form he didn’t have much sense of time—but, Powers willing, there was still time before she was harmed by lack of oxygen.
He commenced rescue breathing. For what seemed liked hours, but was probably about fifteen seconds, nothing happened. Kyle started to panic.
Then the young woman sputtered and coughed. Her eyes fluttered, then closed again. He rolled her onto her side so she didn’t choke on the seawater she spewed up.
Kyle glared at his relatives, some still in otter form, others wordy but naked as the day they were born and dripping wet. “Don’t just stand there,” he shouted, “someone get a blanket. She’s breathing again, but she’s freezing and humans get hypothermia. Jorie, start the fucking van!”
To Kyle’s surprise, his relatives sprang into action.
It dawned on him that for most of them, the reality of the situation hadn’t sunk in yet and it still seemed like a grand game. When they were firmly in their humanlike wordy form, otter duals could be as practical as anyone, but it took them a few minutes to settle into wordy brain after a few peaceful days otterside, not caring about much other than playing and eating abalone.
Finding a dead human who turned out not to be dead, on the other hand, jarred him back fast enough his furry inner self was still reeling and chittering, trying to understand. Oh, his otterside knew saving a life, even a stranger’s life, was important. He just didn’t care as much as the wordy side did, and some otterish part of him was still thinking wistfully about the cool, gray-green water that was no longer surrounding him, the games he wouldn’t get to play today.
He told his otterside to shut up. Sometimes he wished he were some other kind of dual. A wolf, maybe. Wolves took things seriously.
Where were his cousins with that damn blanket? Kyle, like his relatives, had a thick, dense coat suitable for standing up to chill winds and cold water. Even though it was on the inside now, it still kept him warm. The poor normy, on the other hand, shivered violently, even though she was unconscious. Her lips and fingertips were blue.
No way around it, then.
Kyle lay down on the sand and wrapped himself around the human girl like an overeager teenage lover, arms and legs snaked over her, torso half on top of her. He was damp and cool himself, but his fast dual metabolism meant he’d still radiate warmth. He hoped the poor thing didn’t come to suddenly and panic to find a strange naked guy all over her.
Some treacherous part of his brain took the opportunity to point out she felt nice. Too cold, sure. But she felt right in his arms. Almost like she’d been there before, under better circumstances, and would be again.
Which was crazy talk. She was a stranger to him, not to mention a normy. He’d get her to the hospital—as far out of town as they were, it would be faster to take her themselves than to wait for an ambulance. Most likely after that, he’d never see her again. He was certain he’d never seen her before.
He’d have remembered that waist-length fall of pale hair, almost the color of a peach, he’d guess, when it was dry. He’d have remembered those elfin features. And hadn’t her eyes been a weirdly vivid green? He didn’t sense colors well in his otter form, but the images he saw got transcribed by his wordside as well.
Yeah, he told himself firmly, he’d have remembered if he’d seen her, because he tended to remember beautiful women, and she was beautiful in her otherworldly way.
And that was all it was. No cosmic sense of oneness like Deck’s family would go on about sometimes. Nothing loopy. Just enjoying contact with a pretty girl and feeling a sense of connection because he’d saved her life.
The girl stirred and muttered something under her breath.
Donovan.
He swore he heard her say Donovan.
No, couldn’t be. It was just because he’d been thinking about Deck—Declan Donovan, his Donovan, or the one he wished were his—that he thought he heard the name.
He looked down at her, staring intently as if trying to see through her fragile, fair skin to the person inside. Could she be one of Deck’s witchy relatives, far from home and in trouble? She didn’t look familiar but he hadn’t met all of Deck’s siblings, let alone the whole huge extended family.
Still, Kyle had met a lot of Donovans while visiting Deck. They’d all been fair-skinned, mostly with fine bones and delicate fe
atures like this girl’s, though Deck and some of his siblings were blond, big, brawny Viking types, more like their Norwegian mother than their Irish-American father. But witches worked closely with natural energies, and even the most ethereal-looking of Deck’s relatives, like his scholarly cousins Paul and Portia, had a rosy glow to their fair skin, an outdoorsy vibe. So the girl was probably not one of the witchy Donovans.
But they weren’t the only Donovans on the planet, or even in the Pacific Northwest. For that matter, it could be a first name.
Besides, she’d probably said something different.
She muttered again, and this time there was no question about what Kyle heard: Donovan. Oregon. Baby.
And then she began to convulse.
Her hair stood straight out behind her—her wet, thick hair that up until now had been clinging to her shoulders like nothing would ever move it.
Kyle let out what he hoped was a manly shriek.
If it had been up to his strength of will and professional training alone, Kyle would have turned otter and humped and slithered back to the safety of the water.
What kept him by the girl’s side, making sure she stayed safe during this seizure, possession or whatever it was, was an otter’s curiosity, stronger than fear or common sense. Something freaky was up here, something he’d never seen before. He’d had a relationship (well, almost a relationship) with Deck Donovan, who rode waves like an otter and summoned lightning from a clear sky. He’d been on the Donovan estate and met the chatty family ghosts and Deck’s grandmother Roslyn who could pull cancer out of people’s bodies, and Paul’s wife, who was an immortal avatar of Trickster. Kyle thought he knew weird. But everything else he’d seen before paled in comparison to whatever was happening to the poor near-drowned girl. And he wanted to know what was going on.
When the girl began to speak, though, he wasn’t so sure he did. He hadn’t gotten a great idea of her voice from the few muttered words earlier, but this voice sounded like it belonged to a much bigger woman, a torch singer with a Valkyrie’s build to support all that lung capacity, a serious liking for bourbon and cigarettes, and a decade or so more of interesting living than his rescued blonde could possibly claim.
What she was saying didn’t make any sense, and yet, horribly, to Kyle, it did. “From five peoples the child comes, the youngest, carrying the blood of cougar and lion, human, manitou and fae, and the magic of manitou, witch and shaman. The child is not the center, but things center on her. She is both a window and a door. She travels from a place that is not in space and time, through space and time, to Donovan’s Cove. Danger… We’ve got to stop them! No!”
The last word came out as a bloodcurdling scream, not in the weird smoky tones, but in what Kyle guessed to be the girl’s normal voice. She shot up to a sitting position, knocking Kyle aside despite being about half his weight. Her eyes opened. As Kyle remembered, her eyes were brilliant green. Pretty eyes, but they twitched uncannily, moving constantly, but as far as he could tell, tracking nothing. The pupils looked too big for the bright day.
Shit, this was bad. Was she having some kind of seizure reaction? “Miss?” he asked, putting one hand on her shoulder.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes?” she answered, eerily calm. Then she said, turning so she was looking not quite at him, but just past his shoulder, “I’m alive, I guess. Where am I?”
“On a beach outside Crescent City. California,” he added, since she still looked puzzled, as if bits of her memory were missing. “You almost drowned, and after we got you to shore, you had a seizure.” He wanted to ask her “Do your seizures always involve your hair standing on end and someone else apparently talking through your body?” but thought better of it. Either a yes or a no would be equally awkward.
The woman surprised him by grabbing his arm. Her hand, small and icy cold, was surprisingly strong. “What did I say during the seizure?” When he didn’t immediately answer, she grabbed him harder and raised her voice. “What did I say? Tell me.”
His instinct was to tell the truth, but he fought it down. Probably she’d been spouting something from a movie or a book in her rattled state. And if she hadn’t been, he should probably make sure she was stabilized before bringing it up, because it might be traumatic. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing I could understand, anyway. You made some noises like you were in pain, which you probably were.”
“You’re lying.” Her voice was calm. “You suck at it.”
“Thanks, I think.” Duals were notoriously bad liars. Even otters and foxes and coyotes, who liked to play tricks, had to do it by misdirection rather than outright lies.
Kyle looked up and realized his cousins were circled around them, staring. One held out his clothes, wordlessly, and another offered blankets and towels from the stash in the back of the sixteen-passenger van. Tim, still in otter form, held Kyle’s baseball cap in his mouth.
Most of them, like Kyle, were naked. Duals didn’t worry about nudity the way humans did. The girl seemed not to see them. Either she was the most polite person on earth and was pretending her rescuers weren’t nude, or she genuinely couldn’t see.
He motioned the cousins with the blankets and clothes closer, grabbing when they got in reach. “Here,” Kyle said, holding out his fleece pullover. “Put this on.” The girl reached out her hand awkwardly, toward his voice, but missed the pullover.
She couldn’t see, but not being able to see wasn’t freaking her out. Okay, probably blind all the time then. Either that or he had a more serious problem on his hands. Damn, his training hadn’t covered how to ask this question tactfully. “Miss, are you…are you blind?”
She turned to him, and this time her wide green eyes met his for a second before her gaze slipped away. “Yes,” she replied calmly.
He managed—barely—not to say oh good. It wasn’t good that she was blind, of course, but better that it was her version of normal than a symptom she was too shocky to register.
He helped her sit up and put the pullover on, then wrapped her in a blanket.
She was cold and damp and covered with goose bumps, but where he brushed her skin, Kyle felt heat flare.
He was so going to ignore that instinctive reaction. She was an attractive woman whom he’d been wrapped around, naked, recently. And it was too long since he’d seen Deck, and way too long since he’d considered hooking up with someone else because he was hung up on Deck. That’s all there was to it. “Let’s get you to our van,” he said a little too brightly. “It’s been heating, so you can warm up. I’ll get you to the hospital in a few minutes.”
“No!”
He knew from his EMT experience that people might refuse to go to the hospital for all sorts of reasons. No insurance, being shocky and not thinking clearly, just plain hating doctors, and all sorts of dumber reasons. But this girl was in rough shape and had just had a seizure. “I’m an EMT. It’s important that you get checked out, especially after having a seizure.” Especially one which caused speaking in tongues, although he thought that might be beyond the local emergency room’s capacity to handle.
“I’m not going back to the hospital. Not going back to the Agency.” She put both of her small, white hands on his tanned arm. Her big eyes were even wider than before. There were high, hysterical blotches of red on her cheeks, the only color on her paper-white face. “Please. Just throw me back in the water. I can’t go back. I can’t!”
“Did she just say Agency?” one of the other otters asked.
“No,” Kyle covered quickly. He paused, then whispered. “You said Agency, didn’t you?”
She tried to shake her head, but it turned into a nod. Then she began to shake all over, not from cold, he thought, but from panic.
Which was a fairly normal reaction, from what Kyle understood, if you’d had to deal with the Agency.
She didn’t smell like a dual, but she could be
a magic user or some other form of Different, or even a normy who’d butted heads with the Agency while trying to help a friend.
Or, he reminded himself, mentally ill. But if she was delusional or paranoid, he might harm her by forcing her to do something she clearly feared.
And his gut told him she was sane, or as sane as could be expected under the circumstances.
There’d been that Agency horror show unearthed out in New York about a year ago. One of Deck’s cousins and her husband had been involved. The Agency claimed it was an anomaly, a few rogue agents going way beyond their mandates. But you had to wonder. Their mandate might not involve trying to mutate people like the crew in New York was, but it did involve repressing the Differents.
He knew there were Agency spies everywhere, looking for duals who weren’t taking Drozz or any other Different they could plague, as well as signs of the actual dangerous Different activities the Agency was originally created to police. And it wasn’t a big stretch to believe they had secret programs other than the one in New York.
“Miss…”
“Meaghan.”
“Meaghan,” Kyle said, trying to keep his voice calm, “My name is Kyle, and I’m going to get you to the van now so you can warm up. We’ll figure out what to do from there. You should see a doctor, but I may have another solution for that, if you really feel it would be unsafe to go to the hospital.” One that would be a hell of a long drive, but if the girl would rather die than risk going back to the Agency, he’d be tricked if he put her back in harm’s way.
Even if the harm would be to an already fragile psyche. One of Deck’s relatives would know how to help, even if Meaghan’s problem was that she was stone crazy and believed her own delusions.
“Put your arms around my neck. Here…” he added, guiding her with his hands.
He scooped her up. She weighed about as much as his twelve-year-old cousin Storm, though the weight was distributed in a more interesting way. She made a startled little sound, but clung tightly, with more strength in those thin arms than he’d have anticipated.
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