by Melissa Marr
She’d asked Murrin, but was he telling the truth? Did it even matter? If Murrin would hate her in time, she should let him go now. She didn’t want that between them.
If Vic was telling the truth, there was no reason to keep Murrin with her, and plenty of reasons to let him go. Soon. He wasn’t hers to keep. He wasn’t really hers at all. It’s a trick. He belonged to the sea, and with that came relationships, fleeting relationships, with other girls. Is the way I feel a lie, or is Vic lying? It made more sense that Vic was telling her the truth: people didn’t fall in love this quickly; they didn’t break all of their rules so easily. It’s just the selchie thing. She forced her thoughts away from the roiling mix of emotions and took several calming breaths. “So how do we do it?”
* * *
Murrin found Alana sitting at the reef, but she wasn’t happy. She looked like she’d been weeping.
“Hey.” She glanced at him only briefly.
“Are you okay?” He didn’t want to pry too much: her acceptance of him in her life still felt tenuous.
Instead of answering, she held out a hand to him.
He sat behind her, and she leaned back into his embrace. The waves rolled over the exposed reef and up to the rocky ledge where they were sitting. He sighed at the touch of the briny water. Home. He couldn’t have imagined being this content: his Alana and his water both against his skin.
Perfection…except that Alana seems sad.
“I didn’t expect…to care, especially so soon. I want you to be happy,” she said. “Even if it’s not real –”
“It is real.” He took out the pearl necklace and draped it around Alana’s throat. “And I am happy.”
She gasped softly and ran her fingertips over the pearls. “I can’t – ” She shook her head. “Do you miss it?”
“The sea? It’s right here.”
“But do you miss…changing and going out there? Meeting other people?” She tensed in his arms.
“I’m not going to leave you,” he consoled. His mother had often looked at the sea as if it was an enemy who’d steal away her family if she wasn’t careful. That wasn’t what he wanted. He wrapped his arms around her again. “I am right where I need to be.”
She nodded, but he could feel her tears falling on his hands.
* * *
Alana thought about it and decided that trusting Vic completely was foolish. He was right: she needed to let Murrin go before he resented her for keeping him from the sea. Murrin wasn’t thinking clearly. Whatever enchantment made him need to stay close to her was keeping him from admitting that he longed for the sea. If he went back…there were selchies he could meet. None of that meant that she wanted to risk being tied to Vic – so she opted to try a plan she’d come up with before, but had rejected as too dangerous.
And unnecessary because love took over.
He was sleeping when she left the apartment. She thought about kissing him goodbye, but knew that would wake him.
She let the door close behind her, and then she went silently to the street and popped the trunk of the car. It was in there, his pelt. It was a part of him as surely as the seemingly human skin she’d caressed when he sat beside her late at night watching old movies with the sound down low. Gently, she gathered the pelt to her, trying not to wonder at how warm it was, and then she ran.
There weren’t tears in her eyes. Yet. She’d have time enough for that later. First she had to focus on getting to the beach before he realized what she was doing. She ran through the streets in the not-yet-light day. The sunrise wasn’t too far off, but it was early enough that the surfers hadn’t started arriving yet.
She knew he’d come soon. He had to follow the pull of his pelt when it was in her hands, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to hurry. She felt an urgency to get done with it before he arrived, but she felt a simultaneous despair.
It’s for the best.
She waded into the surf. Waves tugged at her, like strange creatures butting at her knees to pull her under the surface. Kelp slid over her bare skin, slithering lengths that made her pulse race too fast.
It’s the right thing for both of us.
He was there then. She heard Murrin calling her name. “Alana! Stop!”
In the end, we’ll both be miserable if I don’t.
The pelt was heavy in her arms; her fingers clutched at it.
He was beside here. “Don’t –”
She didn’t hear the rest. She let the waves take her legs out from under her. She closed her eyes and waited. The instinct to survive outweighed any enchantment, and her arms released the pelt so she could swim.
Beside her, she felt him, his silk-soft fur brushing against her as his selchie pelt transformed his human body into a sleek-skinned seal. She slid her hand over his skin, and then she swam away from him, away from the wide open sea where he was headed.
Goodbye.
She wasn’t sure if it was the sea or her tears, but she could taste salt on her lips as she surfaced.
When she stood on the beach again, she could see him in the distance, too far away to hear her voice if she gave in and asked him to come back. She wouldn’t. A relationship based on enchantment was ill-fated from the beginning. It wasn’t what she wanted for either of them. She knew that, was certain of it. But it didn’t ease the ache she felt at his absence.
I don’t really love him. It’s just leftover magic.
She saw Vic watching her form the shore. He said something she couldn’t hear over the waves, and then he was gone, too. They were both gone, and she was left reminding herself that it was better this way, that what she’d felt hadn’t been real.
So why does it hurt so bad?
* * *
For several weeks, Murrin watched her, his Alana, his mate-no-more, on the shore that was his home-no-more. He didn’t know what to do. She’d rejected him, cast him back to the sea, but she seemed to mourn it.
If she didn’t love me, why does she weep?
Then one day, he saw that she was holding the pearls he’d given her. She sat on the sand, running the strand through her fingers, carefully, lovingly. All the while, she wept.
He came to shore there at the reef where he’d first chosen her, where he’d watched her habits to try to find the best way to woo her. It was more difficult this time, knowing that she knew so many of his secrets and found him lacking. At the edge of the reef, he slid out of his Other-Skin and tucked it in a hollow under an edge of the reef where it would be hidden from sight. Giant sea stars clung to the underside of the reef ledge, and he wondered if she’d seen them. His first thoughts were too often still of her, her interests, her laughter, her soft skin.
She didn’t hear his approach. He walked up to stand beside here and asked the question that had been plaguing him. “Why are you sad?”
“Murrin?” She stuffed the necklace into her pocket and backed away, careful to look where she stepped, no doubt looking for his Other-Skin, then glancing back at him after each step. “I set you free. Go away. Go on.”
“No.” He had dreamed of being this close to her ever since he’d been forced away from her. He couldn’t help it; he smiled.
“Where is it?” she asked, her gaze still darting frantically around the exposed tide pools.
“Do you want me to show –”
“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “I don’t want to do that again.”
“It’s hidden. You won’t touch it unless you let me lead you to it.” He walked closer then, and she didn’t back away this time – nor did she approach him as he’d hoped.
“You’re, umm, naked.” She blushed and turned away. She picked up her backpack and pulled out one of the warm hoodies and jeans she’d found at the thrift store when they were shopping that first week. She shoved them at him. “Here.”
Immeasurably pleased that she carried his clothes with her – surely that meant she hoped he’d return – he got dressed. “Walk with me?”
She
nodded.
They walked for a few steps, and she said, “You have no reason to be here. I broke the spell or whatever. You don’t need –”
“What spell?”
“The one that made you have to stay with me. Vic explained it to me. You can go get with a seal girl now…It’s what’s best.”
“Vic explained it?” he repeated. Veikko had convinced Alana to risk her life to get rid of Murrin. It made his pulse thud as it did when he rode the waves during a storm. “And you believed him why?”
Her cheeks reddened again.
“What did he tell you?”
“That you’d resent me because you lost the sea, and that you couldn’t tell me, and that what I felt was just pheromones…like the hundreds of other girls you…” She blushed brighter still. “And I saw you at night, Murrin. You looked so sad.”
“Now I am sad in the waves watching you.” He pulled her closer, folding her into his arms, kissing her as they’d kissed only a few times before.
“I don’t understand.” She touched her lips with her fingertips, as if there were something odd about his kissing her. “Why?”
Even the thriving reefs weren’t as breathtakingly beautiful as she was as she stood there with kiss-swollen lips and a wide-eyed gaze. He kept her in his arms, where she belonged, where he wanted her always to be, and told her, “Because I love you. That’s how we express –”
“No. I mean, you don’t have to love me now. I freed you.” Her voice was soft, a whisper under the wind from the water.
“I never had to love you. I just had to stay with you unless I reclaimed my skin. If I wanted to leave, I’d have found it in time.”
* * *
Alana watched him with a familiar wariness, but this time there was a new feeling – hope.
“Vic lied because I’d helped his mate leave him. She was sick. He was out with mortal girls constantly…and she was trapped and miserable.” Murrin glanced away, looking embarrassed. “Our family doesn’t know. Well, they might suspect, but Veikko never told them because he’d need to admit his cruelty, too. I thought he’d forgiven me. He said…”
“What?”
“He is my brother. I trusted him…”
“I did, too.” She leaned closer and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry.”
“Sooner or later, we will need to deal with him.” Murrin sounded both sad and reluctant. “But in the meantime, if he talks to you –”
“I’ll tell you.”
“No more secrets,” he said. Then he kissed her.
His lips tasted like the sea. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the feel of his hands on her skin, gave in to the temptation to run her hands over his chest. It was the same heady feeling she dreamt about most every night since he’d gone. Her pulse thrummed like the crash of waves behind her as he moved to kiss her neck.
He’s mine. He loves me. We can –
“My beautiful wife,” he whispered against her skin.
With more than a little reluctance, she stepped away from him. “We could try things a little differently this time, you know. Go slower. I want you here, but being married at my age isn’t good. I have plans…”
“To see other people?”
“No. Not at all.” She sat down on the sand. When he didn’t move, she reached for his hand and tugged until he sat beside her. Then she said, “I don’t want to see other people, but I’m not ready to be married. I’m not even done with high school.” She glanced over at him. “I missed you all the time, but I don’t want to lose me to have you. And I want you to be you, too…Did you miss changing?”
“I did, but it’ll get easier. This is how things are.”
Murrin sounded so calm, and while Alana knew that Vic had lied about a lot of things, she also knew this was something he hadn’t needed to lie about. She hadn’t imagined the sadness she’d seen on Murrin’s face when she’d seen him staring toward the water.
She asked, “But what if you could still have the sea? We could…date. You could still be who you are. I could still go to school and, umm, college.”
“You’d be only mine? But I get to keep the sea?
She laughed at his suspicious tone. “You do know that the sea isn’t the same as being with another girl, right?”
“Where’s the sacrifice?”
“There isn’t one. There’s patience, trust, and not giving up who we are.” She leaned into his embrace, where she could find the same peace and pleasure the sea had always held for her.
How could I have thought it was better to be apart?
He smiled then. “We get each other. I get the sea, and you have to go to school? It sounds like I get everything, and you…”
“I do, too. You and time to do the things I need to so I can have a career someday.”
She had broken her Six-Week Rule, but having a relationship didn’t have to mean giving up on having a future. With Murrin, she could have both.
He reached over and pulled the pearls out of her pocket. With a solemn look, he fastened them around her throat. “I love you.”
She kissed him, just a quick touch of lips, and said it back. “I love you, too.”
“No Other-Skin, no enchantments,” he reminded her.
“Just us,” she said.
And that was the best sort of magic.
* * *
Awakened
* * *
Tonight, unlike every other night I have walked on the shore, a man stands on the beach near my hiding place. I can’t pass him. He lifts his hands, palm open, and holds them out to his sides to show me that he is harmless. If he weren’t looking at me so fixedly, I might believe him, but I don’t think I should trust this one.
He is young, maybe nineteen, and fit. In the water, I could escape him, but we are standing on the sand. He has dark trousers and a dark shirt; the only lightness is his pale blond hair. I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t seen him, until I was almost upon the crevice. Until this moment, until him, I’d been singing along with the steady rising and falling of the waves as they stretched toward the sand and fell short. Now, I stand bare under moon and sky on a beach, and this stranger stares at me with a look of hunger.
No, I do not believe he is harmless at all.
“I won’t hurt you,” he lies.
Something in his voice feels like it wants to be truth, but I shiver all the same. I hadn’t expected anyone to be on the beach at this hour, and I’m not sure what to do about the man who stands watching me with such intensity that I want to flee. Men do not look at you like that without wanting something, and in the wanting, they often hurt us. My mother told me that long before I ever set foot on the shore. It is why I am careful when I come here.
Waves lap around my ankles as I try to think of a solution. I wish I could jump into the water and escape, but I am bound by rules as old as the ebb and flow of the water at my feet. I cannot leave without the very thing that he is preventing me from reaching. The best I can do is to avoid looking at the dark shadows of the crevice and hope he has no idea what I am.
“Are you alone?” he asks. His gaze leaves me then, sliding away. The moon is only half full, but it is enough to cast the light he needs. The beach has few barriers, nothing to hide others. It takes only a moment for him to determine that I am isolated, that I am trapped.
As his gaze returns, traveling over the whole of me as if to weigh and measure my flesh, words feel too complicated. Everything feels complicated. He is waiting for my answer, so I nod to indicate that I am alone, confirming what he already has discerned, showing him that I am truthful and good. Maybe that will spare me. Maybe goodness will make him turn away. Still, I tug my hair forward, hiding myself as best I can. Dreadlocks don’t cover me as truly as untangled hair might, but I am in the waters too much to have any other sort of hair. The thick tendrils drape over my shoulders like so many ropes hiding my bareness.
“I’m Leo,” he says, and then he walks over to the shadows and eliminates any chance I h
ad of escape. He pulls the carefully folded skin from the crevice where I had hidden it. He is careful, knowingly handling it as if it were a living thing. It is, of course, but I do not expect land-dwellers to know that. Not now. Not in this country.
Then he walks away, his arms laden with the part of me that I’d hoped he wouldn’t see, and I have no choice but to follow. He who holds it, holds me. It is as an anchor, and I am tethered. The sea would swallow me whole if I tried to return with my other-self still here on land. I’m trapped more truly than if I were in a cage. This man, Leo, has my soul in his hands.
“That’s mine,” I say. “Please give it back.”
“No.” He stops then, turns, and looks at me. “Since I have it, you are mine.” He strokes the skin in his arms as he stares at me. “Tell me your name.”
“Eden,” I say. “I’m called Eden.”
“Let’s go home, Eden.”
I cannot go home. I have to obey him. It’s the order of things, and so I walk away from my home. “Yes, Leo.”
He smiles, trying to appear kind, pretending he means me no harm. Hate ripples through me like the waves during a storm. As he leads me further onto land, I fill with hatred that I cannot exorcise. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. I hate many of the humans who spill their refuse into my sea, who leave their rubbish on the sands, who desecrate my world with their noise and filth.
I whimper at the weight of loss, at the freedom that might never be mine again.
His gaze falls to my bare feet. “Would you like me to carry you?”
“No,” I manage to say. I cannot say that it is not my feet, that he is carrying part of me and that is the reason I am trying not to weep. I cannot say anything to change this: while he keeps my skin in his possession, I, too, am a possession. I am bound to obey the words he speaks, trapped under his whim and will.
Leo is quiet as we walk. I study him and find that he is strangely beautiful in that way that the very assured often are. He’s taller than me, but he looks to be only a bit older. He’s young and handsome. In times long gone, he would’ve been the sort of man a selchie felt lucky to have as a captor, but I never expected to be a captive. I believed they had forgotten how to ensnare us. When a selchie woman’s skin is found, she has no choice. So many husbands could be unsightly or brutish, but a selchie must follow, must stay, where her skin is kept. Once one of them takes your other-skin, your soul, into his arms, you are his.