Sea Lord
Page 13
“Follow the vapor, feel it cool,” said Griff.
She shivered, cold. Too cold. Too wet. Behind her closed eyelids, she pictured Maggie standing in the hall the morning after Caleb brought her home, the wind blowing through the front door and her arms outstretched to the rain. Remembered the tingle of electricity in the air and along her skin, the feeling of fullness in her chest, the heaviness in her head. She felt high, dizzy, as if she floated miles above the earth. Currents flowed, droplets flashing like a shoal of silver fish. She opened her mouth to breathe. Pressure there. A push.
A pop.
A warm shaft of sunlight fell on her face.
“Well done,” Griff said softly.
Lucy opened her eyes. Blinked.
The waters of the fountain sparkled. They all looked at her: Griff with an arrested expression, Roth wide-eyed, Iestyn with open admiration.
She shivered. Not with cold this time.
“What?” Her voice was shrill. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, it was not me,” Iestyn said. “I was trying to make rain.”
“I wanted sun,” Roth offered.
Griff’s eyes narrowed. “Did you, now.” Not-quite-a-question.
Her heart thudded. It wasn’t me, it couldn’t be.
Could it?
The possibility gnawed at her insides. She felt like that Spartan boy who stole a fox and hid it under his tunic. Either she exposed herself or she let herself be torn apart. Neither seemed like a very good option.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Not really.”
Griff’s forehead creased. “Likely not. This being your first time and all.”
She sat very still, barely breathing, trying hard not to remember Margred in her wet blue dress, standing in the blowing rain.
Griff sighed. “I must go.”
He paused, as if he was waiting for her to say something.
Lucy bent her head, studying her clasped hands in her lap as if she’d never seen them before. As if they belonged to somebody else.
Maybe they did. She bit her lip.
Roth stood.
“Stay,” Griff said. “I do not want to see any of you anywhere near the hall while the delegation is here.”
The delegation.
A chill silence settled over the small courtyard, unrelieved by the singing, sparkling fountain. Lucy’s peace fled. She had forgotten the demons were coming.
Maybe she wanted to forget. Not that anyone had asked her to face demons.
Thank God.
Roth apparently did not share this perfectly healthy attitude. “I can handle myself.”
“You cannot handle Gau,” Griff said. “The demons are coming here as a show of strength. We do not respond by exposing our youngest and weakest.”
“But we are at peace,” Iestyn said.
“For now,” the warden responded grimly. “That did not stop them from murdering our Gwyneth.”
Lucy sucked in her breath. Conn had said the selkie could be killed, but . . .
“Murdered?” Her voice rose. She bit her lip again, from embarrassment and because she really didn’t want to know.
Griff gave her another long, assessing look. “This summer. On your island, on World’s End. I thought your brother must have told you, seeing as he was so involved.”
“No.” She felt numb, absorbing this fresh shock. She knew the case, of course. It had been all over the news, all over the island. An unidentified tourist from Away had been tortured, killed, and dumped on the beach.
Not a tourist, she realized now, sickly.
A selkie.
And her brother knew.
“Dylan and I never even spoke before Caleb’s wedding,” she said.
Griff nodded. “Caleb, he’s the one. He and Margred bound the killer.”
“Caleb?” Dismay was turning her into a parrot.
“Aye. It was well done, too, for all your brother’s human and Margred’s lost her pelt.”
Her mind struggled to come to grips with the fact that this summer, while she was writing lesson plans and waiting tables and working in her garden, her family had apparently been acting out episodes from Buffy. She wanted to go home. She wondered now if the home she missed, the family she thought she knew, even existed outside her imagination. “What do you mean, lost?”
Griff shrugged. “Gone. Destroyed. The demon that killed Gwyneth burned Margred’s sealskin.”
Lucy tried to reconcile his words with the fur at the foot of the bed, with her memories of her sister-in-law. She summoned an image of Maggie, bloodied and dazed on the night Caleb brought her home. But overlying that was the picture of Maggie smiling up at Caleb on their wedding day. What was real? Which was true?
“And what happens . . .” Her throat closed. Conn’s harsh face haunted her. His fierce accusation echoed in her memory. “I am more your prisoner than you are mine.” She wet her lips. “What does it mean? When a selkie loses its sealskin?”
“They cannot Change,” Iestyn said promptly.
Lucy blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s frigging everything.” From Roth.
“Ask my lord what it means,” Griff said. “And stay away from the hall.”
Before she could frame another question, he had turned away through another arch to another courtyard where the grass gave way to cobblestones. For a large man, he moved very lightly. Even on the stones, he barely made a sound. Beyond him, Lucy glimpsed more tall, curved stone walls and a big door bound in iron, standing open. The hall?
She looked at the two boys. “What now?”
They exchanged glances. “You do not know?”
She felt like a student teacher on her first day of school. Not a good feeling. “Well, he’s going to join Conn and the other wardens, right? To meet this . . . demon person.”
Iestyn nodded. “Gau.”
“Do you know why they are meeting?” Roth asked.
She didn’t have a clue. She shook her head.
He scowled. “We thought you would.”
Iestyn uncurled from the grass.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?” Lucy asked.
“To get a look at them.”
She was not their teacher. She had no authority over them at all. But she didn’t need authority to know this was a Bad Idea, like being trapped in a house with a serial killer and going alone to investigate a noise in the basement.
“Griff told you to stay away from the hall.”
“He said he didn’t want to see us,” Roth said.
“And he won’t. We can get a good view from the barbican,” Iestyn added.
They turned on her with identical smiles of pleased challenge. “They are older than they look,” Conn had said. They were selkie. Maybe they knew what they were doing.
But they looked like a couple of ten-year-olds on World’s End planning to dive off the rocks into the quarry pool.
She watched them climb the broken, narrow stairway to the battlements. They were only halfway up the wall when the castle shuddered like a horse tormented by flies. Lucy’s heart lurched. The vibration rose through the stones under her feet and shivered in her bones. Madadh pressed against her leg, shoulders bristling.
She patted the hound with a shaking hand, taking comfort from his warm, wiry bulk. “What was that?”
Iestyn turned, his face pale and his eyes brilliant with excitement. “The demons are here. In the caves under the castle.”
Roth called down. “Hurry, or we’ll miss them.”
From his seat on the dais, Conn watched as the delegation from Hell drifted across the great hall, escorted by a rigid Morgan and the northern wardens. The finfolk shimmered in silver and black. The children of fire shifted like pillars of smoke, transparent and opaque by turn, their number and their countenances constantly changing. In the shadows of the hall, their eyes glittered like sparks.
The demon lord Gau was the solid center of this entourage. Lacking matter of his own,
he adopted illusions to suit the mood of the moment, bending light and imbuing particles of earth, water, and air to sustain the form and function of a diplomat. Today, indulging a sense of humor or perhaps merely a flair for the dramatic, he had assumed the aquiline visage, flowing robe, and laurel crown of an ancient Roman. Virgil, Conn thought. Dante’s guide through the Inferno. The wise elder statesman, the virtuous pagan.
Gau was fond of misrepresentations. Even his name meant “lie.”
Gau stopped in front of the dais, the focus of all eyes. “Lord Conn.”
Conn inclined his head a bare fraction. He did not stand. “Lord Gau. You have come far from Hell to trouble our company.”
The demon smiled, his teeth only slightly pointed. “All places are Hell, my lord. It is only a matter of perception.”
Conn raised his eyebrows. “You are here to debate philosophy.”
“I come to offer my respects,” Gau said, “and in acknowledgment of the long history between us.”
“I see no respect in your recent violence against our people,” Conn said coldly.
“My prince, we are not your enemies. For centuries, the children of fire have watched in sympathy as your numbers, powers, and territories decline, as the humans despoil your oceans and abuse your patience. The demon Tan sought merely to bring your attention to an existing problem.”
“Through murder.” Conn kept his voice level and his hands still on the arms of his chair. Never admit emotion. Never reveal weakness.
“Tan’s methods were perhaps extreme,” Gau admitted. “But his intentions were good.”
Enya leaned forward, displaying her bosom and her teeth. “We all know where the road of good intentions leads.”
Gau’s smile was sharper and more predatory than hers. “Through personal experience, I am sure. How many years did you sacrifice the sea’s embrace for the tepid lovemaking of your prince? With the best of intentions, of course.”
“Careful, demon,” Conn warned softly. “I will not tolerate attacks on my own. Any attacks.”
The demon stared back at him, his eyes black, blank and shiny as dead beetles in his borrowed face. “But you do it all the time,” he protested. “You watch as humans overrun the earth, pollute the water, violate the very air, and you do nothing. What does it take to exhaust your patience?”
“You are very close to finding out.”
“Am I? Am I really? And what of your people’s patience? What of the finfolk? Your father wasted centuries in dreams and denial. Do you expect them to follow you while you do the same?”
What of the finfolk? Morgan had escorted the demons from the caves and through the castle’s outer defenses. Had Gau used the opportunity to undermine the finfolk lord’s loyalty? Or did the demon seek to sow trouble now by stirring up Conn’s own doubts?
Conn looked at Morgan. The warden of the northern seas returned his stare with expressionless golden eyes.
Doubt slid under Conn’s calm surface, quick and stealthy as a shark, a cold shadow on his soul. “The children of the sea are neutral in your war on Heaven and humankind,” he said evenly. “We will not side against the Creator.”
Gau watched him with cold calculation. “Even though we are here to offer ourselves—again—as allies in protecting all of creation?”
Anger constricted Conn’s lungs. He forced himself to breathe. “Was it an alliance you offered Gwyneth?”
Gau’s eyes flickered. He waved a hand. “One selkie. One, among—how many is it now, prince? At least she wasn’t clubbed by humans, her sealskin stripped from her living body. She has a chance to be born again on the foam. Her pelt was returned to the sea.”
“Not by you,” Griff growled.
“Not by me personally,” Gau admitted. “But nonetheless, returned. Let’s not be shortsighted.”
“I see you clearly,” Conn said. “Liar. Torturer. Murderer.”
Beside Gau, Morgan stirred. “Killing one of us does not inspire trust.”
Gau spread his hands, stretching his mouth in a parody of astonished innocence. “Did I say I had killed her?”
“Your master, then,” Ronat said impatiently.
“My master is also displeased by this unfortunate development. Was not the victim also one of us? A fellow elemental. Tan acted completely without Hell’s knowledge and approval. No, I am here . . .” Gau’s black gaze traversed the circle of wardens and lit again on Conn. “To offer Hell’s regrets.”
Conn drew another careful breath. He did not believe a word of the demon’s protestations. “You go to great effort to make an apology,” he said dryly.
Gau showed his teeth in another smile that skittered around the chamber like dead leaves in an alley. Enya looked away. “Is not your goodwill worth my poor effort?” His voice was dangerously close to sincerity. “We do not want a conflict, my lord. You cannot afford a conflict.”
His face was a mask. His voice was a lie. But what he said, Conn realized bleakly, was true.
Conn did not have the numbers or the power or the support to force a quarrel with Hell. He could not fight and win. He could not surrender and survive. All he could do was cling to his duty like a barnacle to the rocks and pray that Lucy turned the tide before they all dried up and died.
If she had his children . . .
He pictured her lean, quiet face, her eyes like the sea in the wake of a storm. But it was not that.
Not only that.
Gau was waiting for his response.
“In the interest of peace, we accept Hell’s apology,” he said formally.
Gau bowed with only a trace of mockery. “We are grateful for your wisdom, sea lord. My master would be disturbed if anything interfered with the present delicate balance of power.”
Despite Gau’s distinguished mask, despite his diplomatic phrasing, Conn knew very well he was not being thanked.
He was being warned.
Lucy sat with her hands in her lap, listening to the gentle sound of the water, feeling the sun on her face, trying hard not to think of anything at all.
“You belong here,” Conn had said to her last night. “In time you will come to accept that.”
Was he right?
She wondered how Dylan had adapted, coming here for the first time when he was thirteen, leaving behind his family and friends, the only life, the only world he’d ever known. But Dylan was selkie, and he’d had their mother with him.
She wondered how Griff’s wife, Emma, had adjusted, the only human, the only mortal on Sanctuary. Conn said she had been happy here. Fulfilled. But Emma’s husband had been devoted to her until the day she died.
Lucy pleated the red wool in her lap and wondered how it would feel to be loved. How she would feel if Conn loved her.
She remembered the look on his face as he gazed out to sea, his body carved out of moonlight and marble, and her heart ached in her breast.
Madadh growled and rose to a crouch.
Startled, she glanced down. The dog’s small ears laid back along its narrow skull. Its yellow eyes blazed. She followed its line of sight to the empty arch and beyond to the cobblestoned keep. Her chest tightened in apprehension.
“It’s okay,” she soothed, without any idea whether everything was okay or not.
Madadh took a slinking step forward.
She reached—no collar—and put her hand on the dog’s shoulders, feeling its muscles bunch beneath the fur. “Let’s not be silly.”
Something was going on in the outer courtyard. The tall iron-bound door swung silently open. No footsteps. No voices. She still had time to retreat to her room. Assuming she could find it in this pile of stones.
She stood. “Come on,” she urged Madadh, sounding unconvincingly cheery. “Let’s—”
The dog bolted from under her hand and tore across the courtyard.
“Crap.” She took off after him.
At the arch, she stopped, catching herself against the cold, finished stone, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Her blood chilled.
Madadh launched like a rock from a catapult through the shifting, shimmering crowd. The air swirled and sparkled in the dog’s wake.
“Madadh, no!” Lucy shouted as one figure—tall, robed, with leaves of some sort circling its dark head—turned and raised one hand.
The hound dropped like a stone.
Lucy pressed her hands to her mouth.
The man, if it was a man, looked from the dog whimpering at its feet to Lucy cowering against the wall. Its eyes glowed like the embers of a dying fire. They scorched her soul.
She felt the brute thrust of its invasion like an ice pick in her skull, like a broom handle between her legs. Jabbing. Burning. Tearing. Wrong.
Instinctively, she recoiled into the shadow of the arch, her heart thumping in her chest and the taste of ashes in her mouth.
11
BART HUNTER CAME HOME TO THE SOUND OF the TV and the smell of burning food. He dropped his boots by the front door. “Lucy?”
No answer.
Where the hell was she?
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be home. Usually at this hour he was at the inn. A man deserved a drink after putting in a day on the water. He shouldn’t have to chase after his grown-up daughter. She was too old, he was too old, to put up with this shit.
But while he was in line to sell his catch—young lobsters, shedders, to stock the co-op’s pond over the winter—that jackass Henry Tibbetts had joked, “Where’d you bury the body, Bart?”
Like his daughter was dead instead of just taking a couple days off sick.
Like she’d run off.
Like her mother.
“Lu!” he bellowed.
It wasn’t like her to skip work. Even when she was a little girl, she’d never missed more than a day of school. Never gave any trouble, he thought with pride and regret.