The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  Nathan shook his head, either impressed at Dylan’s skill, or astonished at his silence while working. “Tell you what, fix this, and install the window screens so that’s done before anyone starts yelling at me to open windows and let fresh air in, and I’ll pay you a hundred dollars, cash, and throw lunch in, like I promised. And then we can talk about what else I’m going to need done, because Lord knows, there’s work that needs capable hands.”

  Money always made his head hurt, which was why he mostly stayed close to home when he could, but it was essential to getting by in human society. A hundred wouldn’t go far, even with that, but he shouldn’t have to stay longer than a week or two, and if he ran out of cash he could always go fishing for his meals. He was already missing the feel of the waves over his shoulders, the buoyancy of the ocean around him. Land was so…heavy.

  “Deal?” Nathan asked.

  “Deal.”

  They shook on it, and Dylan went back to work, smoothing the splintered wood to his satisfaction, then reapplying the newly greased hinges and attaching the hatch to it. The work engrossed him, soothed him at least temporarily, and he tuned out everything else and let his hands take over.

  Slipping out to the other side of the counter to test how it lifted and lowered, he backed up a step, and collided with a warm, soft body.

  His own body tensed, even as he whipped around, his hands reaching up and out to hold on to his discovery. Her. After days of searching, without result, the moment he relaxed and didn’t think about it for five minutes, it was Her.

  “Oh. Hi. Sorry about that.”

  Her voice wasn’t as soft or as sweet as he remembered. Her sweat didn’t have quite the same salty musk he thought he had tasted the first time she touched him, that storm-wracked night on the beach. But he would know her anywhere, in a room of a hundred other humans. In a pitch-black room at midnight, he would know her, just from the way his pulse raced, and he felt himself grow hard at her presence.

  She backed away, and he stared. He couldn’t help it. She was slender, but well-muscled, almost matching him perfectly in height. Her skin was sun-flushed cream, her eyes warm brown with flecks of pale green, like ocean foam, and her hair, cut short and ruffled like a gull’s pinfeathers, was the same silky black as his own.

  His heart raced, his pulse leaping again in sudden realization. Human, yes. Undoubtedly human. But not entirely human. Those eyes, that hair—seal-kin blood had touched her family, somewhere, somehow. She was seal-kin!

  The relief he felt washed over him and left him wobbly-kneed and breathless. It all made sense now. His instincts hadn’t misled him, or sent him on an impossible quest for a mate who would never understand or be happy with his kind. Now he knew what to do.

  Beth almost dropped the mail she had been sorting while she waited for her lunch order to be rung up when the guy she had bumped in to turned around and grabbed her. First there was shock at being manhandled like that, and then she looked up into his face and realized that it was the man from the street—the man from the beach.

  He was as good-looking as she’d thought, from that brief glimpse, and the hold he had on her was strong without being harsh or intimidating. She should have taken offense, but all she could do was stare.

  His dark brown eyes went even rounder, staring at her as well, and his narrow-lipped mouth opened, as though in shock. She resisted the urge to wipe at her face, certain she had a smudge or something on the tip of her nose, he was looking so intently at her face.

  “You.” He wasn’t angry, or surprised, or anything else that she might have expected. In fact, he sounded…satisfied? Smug, even. A low voice: toffee-flavored and definitely not a local accent, even in that one word. British? No, with more of a burr to it—Scottish? Faint, but it was there.

  He blinked, annoyingly long dark lashes sweeping down and up again, and then those eyes looked right into her, like she had no secrets, no surprises from him, like she belonged with him, to him, and nowhere else ever again.

  A sudden rush went through her body, like being sparked with static electricity, only a hundred times stronger. Beth beat down the wild flutter in her stomach and got a firmer grip on her mail, even as the guy down at the other end of the counter called out her order.

  “Sorry,” she said again, extricating herself from his grip—he let go, the moment she resisted, she noted—and backing away. “So sorry, my mistake, gotta go.”

  Her pulse beat so strongly in her throat she could feel it. She was running away. Why was she running away? The guy hadn’t done anything, in fact, he’d been polite and soft-spoken, if a little obvious in his interest.

  Because, she realized, she was scared. Terrified. Turned on, and scared out of her mind by it.

  By him. By the rush that had turned her knees into overcooked noodles.

  What the hell was going on? She didn’t react this way. Ever. Not to anyone.

  She accepted her club sandwich and cream soda from the clerk, and risked looking over her shoulder, driven by some desire she didn’t quite understand.

  He was leaning against the counter, hands shoved into the pockets of his pants, watching her. His face was serious, his eyes intent on her. Way too intent.

  Beth looked away first, blushing. She wasn’t used to men looking at her like that, any more than she was used to reacting so strongly to a stranger. It was…disturbing.

  “You okay, hon?” The clerk looked at her as if she thought Beth was about to pass out. Maybe she was. Why else did she feel all sweaty and faint, like she’d just done a mile run on an empty tank?

  “Yeah. Just need to put some food in me,” she said with a smile, taking her change and shoving it into her pocket. She wanted to flee the café entirely, but she had gotten her meal for here, and there was no graceful way to pack it to go now.

  So she moved to a table as far away from the counter as she could get, putting several groups between her and the stranger she knew was still staring at her. The food was suddenly unappetizing, but she forced it down anyway, one bite at a time, washing it down with her iced tea methodically, never looking away from what she was doing.

  “Who was that?” Dylan asked Nathan, still trying to remember how to breathe.

  “The poor girl you almost sent running for the hills?” Nathan was leaning back, arms crossed over his chest, his face stern but his eyes alight with laughter.

  “Yes. Her.” Dylan had no sense of humor at that moment. She was there, she saw him! Touched him! And she ran. Why? Who was she? Other than seal-kin, and how, here? How could they not know? How had the community lost track of her, and were there others?

  “That’s Beth Havelock. Nice girl. Grew up here. Hell, her family’s almost one of the founders, they go back so far. Sailing family. Been a Havelock in Seastone since, oh, roundabouts mid-1800s or so. Maybe even earlier.

  “She’s also dating a local boy, name of Jake. You might want to reconsider your interest—they’ve been together a long time, even if Beth hasn’t shown much thought to white dresses and bouquets as of yet. With women, who can tell?”

  Dylan had stopped paying attention to Nathan’s chatter. A family here for generations, descendant from a retired sailor…the pieces began to slip together now.

  Clearly, he wasn’t the only seal-kin to come west for a mate. But why had they cut themselves off from the colony? Why had none of them ever come back to find a mate for themselves? That was more than unusual, it was unheard-of. Seal-kin found seal-kin, lived in a colony. It just…was the way it was.

  No matter. She was here. He had found her. It was only a matter of the wooing, now, and he could take her home, back where she belonged.

  But for the first time a shadow of real doubt moved in him. How did you woo someone who ran away from you? She wasn’t playing coy, either; he had scared her, somehow. And she was seeing someone else?

  Dylan took a deep breath and forced himself to look away from his mate—from Beth—and went back to work with the sandpaper. “How
serious are they, her and that…other guy?”

  Nathan stared at him, then shook his head, all joking gone. “Ah. That way, is it? All right, I may regret this, but what the hell. I never did think they were a good match, Beth and that boy, and we always need a good handyman in town.” He leaned forward onto the counter, as though imparting some deep and terrible secret. “First thing is, play it cool. You already went in with the blunt, caveman routine, and that didn’t work so well, did it? Beth’s a local girl, and she appreciates a little context, a little familiarity—but the appeal of something or someone new’s gonna get her, too. You gotta work ’em both. Show her you can fit into her world, but intrigue her with what you know, what you’ve seen. Make her wonder what she could learn from you, that’s the trick.”

  Dylan leaned in, and paid attention.

  In Apollo’s, a woman sitting alone at a booth near the back paid her bill, leaving a respectable but not overly generous tip, and left the diner, pausing to let a man and his daughter walk in, the little girl’s pigtails swinging in anticipation of an egg cream. She went out to the sidewalk, down several store-fronts, and withdrew her cell phone. The woman was of moderate height and weight, a long white braid coiled stylishly on the back of her head. She was dressed well but unobtrusively so; the sort to rate a passing glance from the locals, but no more. Totally ordinary. Totally harmless. She pressed a button on speed dial, and waited.

  “Report’s confirmed, two encounters and we have a lock.” Her voice was as unobtrusive as her appearance, unless you were paying close attention to the steel underlying the lack of a noticeable regional accent.

  The voice on the other end of the connection was male, and equally steely. “You’re sure?”

  She pursed her lips, staring at some invisible point in the shop’s display window. “How long have I been doing this?”

  “Not as long as I have. You need to be sure.”

  He was the boss. Obligingly, she recited the data. “He landed on the beach, naked as the day he was born—except a silver-and-black pearl bit of jewelry, which he then sold to pay his way. He is using the name Dylan Meridith, which has been recorded before in the Hunt Records. And he’s got the Look.”

  Any one of those things would have been interesting. Two might have been coincidence. Three or more, and she had justification for making this phone call. The initial outlier might have run tests, but only a Hunter was trained to make the final determination.

  “All right.” It took experience to hear the pleasure in her boss’s voice. “I’ll send the rest of the team in.”

  “You don’t need—”

  He cut her off. “You did a good job. If it pans out, nobody’s going to push you out of the reckoning. But the deal doesn’t get done single-handed, you should know that.”

  She did. She just wanted assurance that she would be the lead on this. The lead took the largest share of the profit.

  “Keep an eye on him. We’ll be in touch.”

  She closed her mobile phone with a click, then turned and walked down the street, away from the store, heading to her car. She was staying in the next town over, to prevent her face from becoming too familiar. If this panned out, and the selkie was taken? She smiled, a bright, pleased smile that made her entire face light up. If this panned out, she was on her way to bigger and better things, for sure.

  All it took was one lock and acquisition, after all, and a woman was set, financially. Demand was always high, and supply low, and that was good news for a Hunter.

  Chapter 5

  Day Seven. A full week of playing by Nathan’s advice. The need to do more, to claim his mate and take her, was almost unbearable, driving him out of bed early with the restlessness and hunger.

  Dylan slipped off his canvas sneakers and dug his bare toes into the sand the moment he stepped off the path and onto the beach. The morning was promising to be a fine one, the sun so low on the horizon it was barely a glimmer on the water, the smell of the spray sweet and bitter on his tongue. The feel of the cool wet sand under his bare feet as he walked was as familiar as his mother’s voice, and just as soothing. The tide was low, and the usual debris of stranded crabs and shellfish were scattered for the gulls to pick at, warning others with outstretched wings to stay away.

  How many mornings in previous years had he spent, just so, walking along shorelines like this one?

  Those mornings, he had been content. Alone or with company, it had not mattered. Now, the itch to be part of another was driving him insane, every moment except when he was here, near the seawater. He had named his nonexistent boat Daughter of the Sea, but he was the child of Tethys in truth, never happy out of reach of her embrace.

  But the touch of his mate’s hand…it lured him onto the land, and there it would stay, until he could claim her, once and for all.

  It was just…taking a while.

  “Taking implies action,” he told a gull, who looked deeply unimpressed. “I’ve not had the chance to do anything yet. Nothing except talk and talk and talk to everyone but her!” He knew, just seeing her, scenting her. How could she not? How could she deny it, hide from him the way she had been doing?

  Humans were strange. But she was more than human…. How did the knowledge elude her? How could she not know who he was, what he was to her?

  Love is never easy, he could hear his mother saying, laughing kindly. Do not despair, my son.

  The gull cawed once, then spread his wings and flew away, as though to mock his own lack of movement.

  “Arrrgh!” he called to the gull, envying it the freedom to just go like that.

  “Hey-ya, Dylan.” A man’s voice came from a low folding beach chair set firmly in the morning-damp sand, a few yards from the water’s edge.

  “Morning, Dylan.” Another voice, this one rougher, with longer years’ exposure to salt, sea and smoke, rising from a similar folding chair set next to the first. Fishing poles protruded from the packed sand on either side of the chairs, the line stretched out into the water, and a red bucket was placed between them to hold whatever they might catch.

  Josh and Ned: father and son, out every morning before dawn to cast their lures and drink coffee and smoke foul-scented cigars. Dylan had seen them out here every morning all week, even when it was raining hard enough to send sane people running for cover. He suspected they came out as much to smoke the cigars as actually fish.

  “Anything biting?” He asked every morning, and every morning the answer was the same. This morning, though, Ned pulled a still-live fish from the red bucket, holding it properly by the gills. “Cod’re frisky this morning.”

  “Nice. Good eating.” His mouth was watering, actually. The crisp clean taste of the flesh, served with fresh-baked bread, and a side of seaweed or salted rice…

  Seal-kin food, not human. Somehow, the oatmeal, bacon and eggs waiting for him back at the B and B didn’t appeal as much as it had when he got up and smelled it cooking. But it was included in the cost, so that was what he would have, along with the usual smoked fish offerings. Maybe Nathan would make him fresh fish for lunch.

  He left the two fishermen to their cigars and fishing lines and headed farther on down the empty stretch of beach. It was barely that, just a strip of sand below low dunes, facing out into the ocean. Shingle houses with huge plate-glass windows looked out over the bluff onto the waterfront, but the sand itself was practically invisible until you were on it. He had stumbled on it purely by accident, walking aimlessly his first day, not quite sure what to do with himself. It had become a ritual of sorts, since then, to come and watch the sun rise, and do a little sketching, to settle his thoughts and plan his day.

  He had been working at the diner for three days now, and he had managed to completely redo the broken counter hinge, refinish the counter around it so that the repair couldn’t be seen and fix half a dozen cabinets in the kitchen so that the doors swung easily and the shelves didn’t sag. He had also met at least half of the town’s population—everyone seemed
to come into Apollo’s for lunch, dinner or coffee in between.

  Everyone except Beth Havelock. Nathan said she usually came in once or twice a week, when she needed a break from work, but it wasn’t always and it wasn’t regular.

  And, Dylan suspected, it wouldn’t be while he was still working there. She was definitely hiding from him.

  “Handled that one with all the finesse of a flounder,” he muttered, finding a spare bit of beach and dropping his knapsack on the sand. She had been there, right in front of him. Aware of him, he would trade his skin on that. If he hadn’t been so…stupid, so impulsive, and scared her away like a clumsy bull…

  Well. Nothing to be done now except fix it, as his mother would say.

  He knelt down and took out the pad of paper, his Cray-Pas and a small assortment of wooden dowels. A few confident movements, and the dowels turned into a short easel just large enough to hold the sketch pad at a comfortable height for him to work on when seated cross-legged on the sand.

  No, Beth Havelock wasn’t coming to him. So he was going to have to go to her. He had met a woman, Joyce was her name. Rounded like a dolphin and almost as cheerful. She was a friend of Beth’s, Nathan said. If he couldn’t approach his mate directly, she might be the way to go. Cute, in a land-dweller sort of way—there were very few blondes among his people. More redheads, interestingly enough. Too many Celtic sailors, his grandfather used to say while rubbing his own ginger-graying hair, falling for dark-eyed selkie women.

  Maybe Joyce wouldn’t mind playing go-between and coaxing Beth somewhere so he could actually approach her, try to woo her properly?

  A go-between. Yes. He knew now who her particular friends were, the woman Joyce, and the couple who ran the diner on the edge of town. If he could win them over, convince them he was genuinely interested in Beth—and he was—then maybe they would help him.