by Anna Leonard
Beth snaked her arms around his neck and gave in to the impulse she had been fighting all day—to touch her lips to his.
The moment she did that, he let out a moan deep in his throat, his fingers fumbling, and a touch wasn’t enough. Her mouth claimed his, tongue dipping inside to discover that he did, as expected, taste of warm salt and sea-spray, and something else that she couldn’t identify, but immediately wanted more of. This was her dream, all of her dreams recently, only even better.
Books by Anna Leonard
Silhouette Nocturne
The Night Serpent #48
The Hunted #86
ANNA LEONARD
Anna Leonard is the nom d’paranormal for fantasy/horror writer Laura Anne Gilman, who grew up wondering why none of the characters in her favorite Gothic novels ever seemed to know a damn thing about ghosts, vampires, or how to run in high heels. She is delighted that the newest generation of heroines has a much better grasp on things. “Anna” lives in New York City, where either nothing or everything is paranormal….
Both can be reached via:
www.sff.net/people/lauraanne.gilman or http://cosanostradamus.blogspot.com.
THE HUNTED
ANNA LEONARD
Dear Reader,
My family spent many summer vacations along the Massachusetts coast, and the sound and smell of the ocean is one of my strongest memories even now. When the idea of a selkie hero came to me, the decision to set the story on the Cape was a no-brainer. Of course, that also meant that both my hero and heroine are of the staunch Yankee breed—occasionally (often) too stubborn for their own good, but fierce when the ones they love are threatened.
Any passing resemblance to family members may not be entirely coincidental….
Laura Anne Gilman
For Amy and Larry
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Prologue
Miles away, in another world, a young male in his prime leaned back, and thought about a woman.
He didn’t know her name. Or what she looked like. Or the sound of her voice or her favorite foods. He didn’t know anything about her, not even that she, specifically, existed. But he woke one morning to the sound of rain on the water, and couldn’t stop thinking about her.
The obsession was hard on him, shadowing his every move, every hour of the day, filling his thoughts, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
He rolled over on his side and stared out over the ever-moving surface of the sea. No, that wasn’t the truth. He knew exactly what to do about it. He just didn’t want to.
Life was good, right now. The outcropping of rock was warm underneath him, his sleek, powerful muscles slack and relaxed after a day of hard swimming, and the ocean spray tingled on his bare skin, milky-pale despite the hours spent exposed to the elements. He could stay here all day, sleep out under the cool wind and bright stars. Or he could swim back home to the little village where his family lived, the comfortable cottage where there would be fresh-caught fish on the table, and a squabble of nieces and nephews to wrestle with, and the pleasure of a new season of warmth and life to celebrate on this first full week of spring.
Life was good. On any other day, any other time of his life, he would be content with the gifts he had been given, to be alive and healthy and surrounded by everything he could possibly want.
But now something tingled in his blood, making him restless and moody. Not just this day: all week, ever since the equinox. Life might be good, but he wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t satisfied with the way anything tasted, wasn’t taking pleasure in anything that he normally enjoyed. Even his temper, normally even and calm, was frayed and ragged.
His blood-kin abandoned him first, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at his growls and twitches, telling him without words that they wouldn’t put up with his behavior. His seal-kin lasted longer, their patient eyes and soft plush fur giving comfort until his increasing discomfort drove them away as well, searching out other places to bask in the spring sunshine and leaving him alone on the rock.
He knew what was wrong. Or rather, what was right. Even if he hadn’t observed it in others, instinct would drive him. The temper, the frustration, the desire to pick a fight with his nearest and dearest… He needed to mate.
No, that wasn’t accurate. He’d been through lust before, and this was…more. He needed to find the female who would stay with him, not for a night or even a season, but forever.
Somewhere out there, this woman existed. The simple fact of her being was firing his blood, making him dream of her skin, her hair, the feel of her wrapped around him, of him fitting inside her so perfectly, body and soul…
All he had to do was find her, woo her, win her.
It was a simple enough thing, in theory. Not every seal-kin partnered for life—his own mother had several mates, one of them his father, and was on good terms with them all—but it happened often enough. Always the same way: an impossible pull, tugging the male to bend to its will until the female was found and won, wooed and well mated. But the others males always seemed able to find what—who—they needed among the blood-kin, the eight Families that made up this colony. If a mate was not there, they sometimes traveled north or south, to meet up with other colonies. Places that were known, were filled with familiar names and shared histories.
He didn’t feel a pull that way. He felt pulled westward. West, across the sea, toward the setting sun.
He covered his face with his arm, trying to block out the need. There were no colonies to the west that anyone knew of. Nobody had gone west in generations. He would not find what he needed.
That knowledge did not stop the pull, inexorable as the tides.
It felt wrong, to go against what was traditional. And he resented this pull his body had on him, when it wasn’t what he had been planning. He hadn’t even thought to take a breeding-mate for another few seasons, much less life-mating.
But his people trusted their instincts. Instinct was what kept them alive and free, even when other colonies were wiped out by Hunters, by pollution, by the slow eroding of their territories. Instinct, and not being too stubborn, too stupid to acknowledge simple truths.
So when the itch became too much, the need overwhelming, and the warmth of the rock no longer soothed, he slipped shoulder-first into the cold waters of the Atlantic, ignoring the storm clouds forming in the distant east, and, without a word of farewell to anyone, swam toward the pull.
Chapter 1
Beth Havelock was restless. She moved back and forth in her workroom, touching projects but not actually doing anything with them. The paper cutter was cleared off, the trash emptied, the work counter scrubbed, pens capped and sorted, to-file box filed down to the last proof sheet and invoice. Chemicals were sorted, the older ones pulled to the front of the darkroom’s cabinet, the newer ones pushed to the back. She even changed the batteries in all the smoke detectors in the house a week early, and then, still needing something to do, went back into her workroom on the first floor and rinsed out all of the extra developing trays, setting them to dry upside down on the counter. Still, she felt the need to be moving, doing.
Her bare feet scrunched against the cold tile floor, her toes flexing and releasing as though picking up the motion her hands were forbidden, the tension thrumming through her entire body, nose to toes.
“Good lord, what is it with y
ou, woman?” Her voice echoed in the tile-and-chrome workroom, startling her even though she was the one who had spoken.
She was well ahead of her deadlines—waking early and restless did wonderful things to her to-do list, even if it was making her antsy beyond belief. Business was good right now, but not good enough to keep up with her sudden surge of energy, as though she had been mainlining energy drinks and chocolate rather than her usual healthy diet. Maybe she should switch to chocolate bars and soda for a week, see what that did for her.
“All that will do is give you zits like you were fourteen again,” she said, horrified by the thought. “It’s spring fever like usual, that’s all.” It wasn’t anything unusual for her, for all that it seemed more severe. She got like this every year, when the weather finally began to soften, and the days started getting longer. This winter had been a particularly rough one along the New England coast, and when they weren’t getting hit with surprisingly heavy snowfall, they were being battered by seemingly nonstop nor’easters. Waves and wind were nothing new to hardy Nantucketers like the Havelocks, but after several months of overcast white skies and the never-ending howl of the wind, that first day of spring, when the skies were blue and the air mild, could rouse even the most phlegmatic of New Englander into flights of relative fancy. And while Beth Havelock was many things from practical to responsible, she wasn’t phlegmatic.
She also wasn’t focusing at all. That really wasn’t like her. Normally, once she settled in to work she could shut out any distraction, not noticing anything except what she was doing. Today, even the sound of a bird singing outside was enough to break her concentration.
She sighed, moving away from the window and staring at the far wall. It was painted a darker white than the other walls, intentionally, to better showcase the photos mounted there. Her own work ran the gamut, from a traditionally posed wedding photo of a bride and groom, to three dolphins leaping in the surf, to a single lonely form standing on the rocks at night, like a human watchtower. She was a good photographer, although not good enough to make a living at it. Her technical skills were better than her artistic ones. But sometimes she caught just the right moment, like the photograph at the end that, no matter how many times she saw it, always caught her attention: a single harp seal, pulled up onto a shelf of rock, gazing up at her with sad eyes…and one flipper raised in what, in a human, would have been a rude gesture.
Even on bad days when everything was going to crap, that photo could always make her laugh. Today, instead, it filled her with a strange sense of wistfulness.
Giving in to her mood, she locked up the darkroom, put away her materials and, still barefoot, left the work space on the second floor of her Victorian-era home. That was the advantage to working for herself, rather than reporting to an office. Worse pay, longer hours, but moderately better perks, including the ability to work at 4:00 a.m.—or take off at 4:00 p.m. Rather than heading downstairs to the rambling porch and the enticements of the still-sleeping garden, however, Beth went up to the third floor, to the room at the end of the hall.
The room had been her mother’s workroom when Beth was growing up. The drafting table was still pushed up against the wall, but it was bare and empty. The pencils, papers and watercolors that used to clutter the space were long gone, as was her mother. The memories were there, but tucked away, out of daily reach. Now the room was simply something Beth walked through to get to the great wooden door set in the far wall.
That door led out to a narrow walkway running along the roof-edge of her home.
A widow’s walk, it was called. A platform, with waist-high rails all around, that circled the house’s two chimneys, and gave Beth an almost unobstructed view of the ocean beyond the boundaries of the small town of Seastone, Massachusetts.
She leaned against the railing, feeling the wind tangle in her sleek black hair and tie it into elf knots. When she was a little girl, her father would sneak her and her cousin up here. Her mother, working at her sketches, would pretend not to see or hear them as they crept, giggling, past her. They would watch the sailboats in the harbor, and the great fishing boats and tankers passing by much farther out in the green-capped waves.
Beth was older now, her family long gone, and her hair was cut short, above her shoulders, but the wind still tangled it in exactly the same way, as though a giant hand were tousling it.
And she still leaned against the railing of the widow’s walk and watched the boats slip by. Only now, rather than feeling a sense of history and contentment when she watched them, Beth felt her restlessness increase until it was an almost physical ache in her legs and arms.
Did everyone feel it, in the quiet pockets of the day when nothing else occupied their minds and bodies? Or was it just her, this strange echoing, like there was something scooped out and hollow inside, when the seasons shifted and the winds changed? She had almost asked friends and total strangers, time and again, when she was away at college in Boston, and after, when she came home, when this whimsical mood attached itself to her. Each time, something had held her back from actually saying something. Fear of an answer, perhaps. Of discovering that yes, it was only her. That only she felt it, and nobody else would ever understand.
Not that it mattered. Each time winter or summer came, the restlessness passed, and she found purpose and focus again.
“More of the same. Always more of the same.” And yet, even as she said it, trying to reassure herself, something deep inside told her that there was more to it this time than simple spring fever. Something that surged inside her like a tidal pool, swirling and wearing at her, matching the physical ache with a pool of longing for…
For what?
Beth didn’t know. This spring, for some reason, it was different. Stronger. More painful. Usually standing up here and watching the waves move on the surface of the ocean took the harsh edges off, and a bit of physical activity—a bike ride, a hike along the dunes—dealt with the rest, got her through until it went away.
She wasn’t so sure it would be enough, this spring.
Once, her father would somehow sense her mood and swing her by the arms, tossing her into the pile of leaves they had raked up on the sloping backyard, or a pile of new-mown grass. Her cousin Tal, nobody ever called him Talbot, would leap after her, and they would wrestle…her father would laugh so hard he had to sit on the ground to recover, and they would leap on him, and the restlessness would disappear, chased out and forgotten.
Had her father known the same restlessness? If he were still here, would he be able to explain it away, give her the way to deal with it, the words to explain it?
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here. All gone: father, mother and Tal, her entire family gone in one split second on a rainy highway nearly fifteen years ago. She was the only one left. The one left behind. Would she feel this way, if they had been spared? Would the feeling of separation, of restlessness be soothed by their presence? Or would it have been worse, knowing for certain that there was no one out there who could understand?
A trill at her hip interrupted her morbid thoughts, and she flipped open her cell phone to answer it. “Jake, hi.” Jacob Brown—Jake to his friends, which some days seemed to include every person living in Seastone and the surrounding towns. Open-faced and blue-eyed, with a row of freckles better suited to a ten-year-old and the physique of a high school quarterback.
Five years they had been dating, since the summer they both turned twenty-four and got drunk together while sitting on the seawall at midnight. It wasn’t a great love, but it was comfortable, and they knew what to expect from each other. Five years, and neither seemingly eager to move forward, or move away from where they were. Every month for the past year Beth had resolved to end it, and every month Jake agreed with her, and yet they still found themselves having dinner and sex on a regular basis.
There was a lot to be said for stability. For knowing what you would be doing each day, and each night, and with whom, and what was expected of you, a
nd what you could expect of them. Sudden changes had never been good things, for her.
“We still on for dinner?” she asked him, giving in once again to habit.
“Maybe not tonight. Storm’s coming up, according to the screens. Looks like it might be a doozy.”
A storm might explain her mood. Storms did that to her, when they came in off the ocean. “You afraid of a little rain?” she teased, glad for distraction from her own distraction.
“More likely a lot of wind, which means we’re probably going to lose power on half the island.” Jake was a Realtor, and the property manager for a number of nearby summer homes. If anything happened, he was the guy who had to deal with it, while the owners were safe and dry on the mainland. “Anyway, you remember what happened the last time we went out in a bad spring storm, at, I might add, your instigation?”
She did. Unlike Jake, she still thought it was funny, smiling now at the memory. How many people could say that they got chased across a beach by an irate and very lost bull seal? It wouldn’t actually have hurt them—seals were peaceable creatures, as a rule, unless you got near them during breeding or whelping seasons—but Jake’s ego had apparently been bruised something fierce by the experience.
Beth’s smile widened. “Point taken, forgive me. All right, no rain-swept walks on the beach. So we’ll eat somewhere in town?”
“Look…can we make a rain check? Literally?” He sounded distracted now, and she could hear the clicking of computer keys in the background. He must be checking on his clients, probably scanning the weather networks, too. Multitasking always made him cranky.