The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  Trust her. Was it his mother’s voice? Or something deeper, sounding inside him?

  He had come for a mate, and found her. He had promised not to leave her, he didn’t want to leave her. But maybe she needed to leave him. Just for a little while…

  Ignoring the crowds around them, Dylan slid his hands up her back, feeling a much more pleasant shiver travel along her spine in response, until his fingers reached the slender column of her neck and the black mass of her hair. It smelled of the horrible shampoo from the motel, and sweat and fear, and it was still a lovely, lovely smell. How could it only have been weeks since he first touched her? Surely it had been months, a year, a lifetime…

  Trust.

  Everything in his life had come easily, by instinct. He had trusted instinct and charm to win his mate, as though it was his right, simply by existing. That he would sweep in and carry her off.

  His arrogance, his ignorance, made him want to laugh—and weep—for how easily he could have lost her. How easily he still could lose her, if he said or did the wrong thing.

  Trust.

  Trust that she would return. That she needed him as much as he needed her. That she would choose him, the way her great-grandfather had chosen the land.

  “I love you,” he said to her, the words coming, not easily, but with a sense of rightness. “I love you and I will wait for you. All you’ll need to do is call me.”

  And then his lips were on hers, silencing whatever she might have tried to say, demanding instead a nonverbal response to his promise. There was a spark of hesitation, and then her mouth—already open to speak—relented further under the pressure of his lips, allowing him access with tongue and teeth. He nipped at her lower lip, dipping inside her mouth, tasting the particular flavor that was his Elizabeth, memorizing it, storing it so that it would remain forever in his taste buds, imprinted always in his senses.

  She was flawed, imperfect, frightened, and so was he. She might be his mate, might be seal-kin blood, but there was so much between them, so much difference, he had no idea how they were going to make this work, if they could make this work.

  He only knew he would be there, every step of the way, if she would only meet him equally.

  He had to believe that she would.

  “Get a room,” someone muttered at them, and they broke apart, if only a few inches for propriety’s sake.

  “When you’re ready,” he whispered against her skin, and let go, disappearing into the crowd before she realized what he was going to do.

  To an observer, it might seem as though he had merely blended with the mass of humanity swirling around them. Only Beth, listening for it, heard the gentle splash of something entering the water at the end of the pier, and swimming away.

  She had a vague memory of walking from the ferry area, of finding a café and ordering a large coffee and a sandwich. She even had a vague memory of eating the sandwich, although she couldn’t have said what it was, or how it tasted. All she could do was taste Dylan’s lips on hers, hear the whisper of his voice in her ear.

  I love you.

  Others had said it to her before. She had even believed it, had believed that they believed it, taken joy in that belief, in the contact, the connection.

  The words had never shattered her the way they had this time. She was numb, unable to focus, unable to comprehend anything.

  He loved her. And he had left.

  Just like her parents and cousin had done. There with her one moment, and gone the next. Forever.

  No, stop it. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t. Her parents would have come home, if they could have. They hadn’t meant to die, hadn’t meant to leave her all alone.

  Hadn’t meant to abandon her.

  Dylan hadn’t abandoned her, either. She was the one who had needed time.

  But he didn’t have to leave. Not like that.

  That was what selkies did, a little voice whispered. That’s what all the legends say. They might love mortals, but they are not mortal themselves. The sea calls them home.

  “But I’m one of them, too.” She said it out loud, for the first time, not caring who heard. “I’m seal-kin.”

  The truth of that still felt strange. How could a sane human possibly believe in that, in magic? In shape-changers? Werewolves and the like were the stuff of horror movies. Dylan, her Dylan, was nothing like that.

  And yet she had seen him change, had seen—or not seen so much as sensed—his body transform from human to seal, his skin fade and stretch from one identity to the other, and yet remain, somehow, the same. She had seen the bulky, muscled bull seal, huge and glorious and terrifying, and known that it was Dylan. She would know him anywhere….

  She had known him, she realized now, when he helped her escape from the Hunters that first time, swimming beside her, keeping her moving and bringing her to safety. Had known even then that the shadow in the water was nothing to be afraid of, that it—he—would protect her, aid her.

  She hadn’t known then that he would love her, as well.

  He had come looking for a mate. A chemical reaction, lust and a breeding frenzy… There was nothing of love in that. Nothing of choosing to be with a person, no matter the risk, no matter the cost. No matter the sacrifice.

  Dylan loved her. Dylan would have died for her, to keep her safe, and considered it a fair trade.

  Beth wasn’t sure she believed in that sort of love. She wasn’t sure she believed in selkies, in the supernatural. She was pretty sure that she didn’t believe in Fate or Destiny or any of those things.

  But she believed in Dylan.

  Dylan of the warm brown eyes and tender embrace: the impossible innocence and sudden streaks of fierce passion. Dylan. Shape-changer. Selkie. A creature of wind and wave, not human society. Impossible. And yet there, for her. I came for you.

  None of the labels applied. He was himself, no matter if he wore seal or human form. Not a warrior, not a fighter; he admitted that himself. But brave when it counted. Braver than she was, in so many ways. Truthful, always, even when it hurt. Loving, and protective, and…

  And if he told the truth…her great-grandfather had been like him. That was what the dream-memories were telling her. Her great-grandfather had been able to change between seal and man, land and sea. Had chosen, for whatever reason, in whatever deal with the devil, to tie his children, and his children’s children, to the land…and yet never be able to let go of the sea. Never, in four generations, to let go of where he had come from, what he had once been.

  Not a horror movie. A love story.

  Another memory came back to her, while the dregs of her coffee grew cold, and the restaurant began to empty around her. A true memory, from her own life.

  Blood breeds true. Blood is thicker than water, but the water keeps it flowing. Salt in your veins, Beth. Her father used to say that, then laugh and say that he never knew what it meant, either, that it was just a family saying.

  Now she knew. More, she understood. Or thought that she did, that she might, anyway.

  So now you know, what are you gonna do about it, Miss Elizabeth? Ben’s voice asked her. It’s your time. What are you gonna do?

  That, she didn’t know.

  Chapter 14

  The waitress came by four times, pausing briefly each time by the table, before Beth shook off her emotional paralysis enough to take the hint.

  “Sorry, I was just…thinking.”

  The waitress, a teenage girl with a long blond ponytail, looked as though she’d never thought of anything deeper than what to do that evening, but her expression and her words were both kind. “Don’t you worry about it. I just go off-shift soon, and I like to get the tabs cleared before then, in case there’s a problem. Sit as long as you like.”

  Beth smiled and handed over enough cash to pay her bill, and tucked a generous tip under the mug. She had done enough sitting. There was just one thing she had to do, before anything else.

  As Beth had hoped, the town had their own l
ibrary, a pretty, small, one-story brick building just off the Green, next to Town Hall, and it had evening hours. Once inside, she discovered that their inventory was heavier on children’s books, DVD rentals and local tour and restaurant dining guides than anything else. It was still a library, though, and with luck it would have what she needed. Beth accosted a harried-looking volunteer, and was directed to a small back room that smelled of lemons and dust. Their mythology section was small, but unsurprisingly heavy on ocean-related topics, and there was enough material there to answer a few questions about selkies—and raise half a dozen more. She brought the books and pamphlets to the table and skimmed through them, not bothering to take notes. When she was done, she sat at the table and stared into space, slotting what she had read into the appropriate places in her mind and memory.

  Selkies. Seal-kin. Shape-changers.

  How much was legend based on fact and how much was complete fairy tale she didn’t know, but several pieces of her own experience fit together better now.

  Dylan had been right: selkies, or some similar creature, seemed to appear in every culture that had a coastline, and human/selkie love affairs were pretty much the focus of every story. Unfortunately, what she had discovered was that they were usually—at least the ones that got written about—ill-fated. The human mate was usually the one to blame, capturing the selkie by dint of taking his—or more typically her—skin, and thereby trapping her on land until she could reclaim that skin and escape. Even the marriages that were by mutual consent hardly ever had happy endings. Love didn’t seem to conquer the difference between land and water.

  Offspring likewise—mostly they were left without their seal-parent when she or he left, or ran off to sea to follow as soon as they could, and were never heard from again. Those who stayed on land, however, grew to be charming, smooth-tongued…and, allegedly, great fisherfolk.

  Her father hadn’t been able to catch a haddock in a supermarket, from what she remembered. So much for that myth. He had been charming, though.

  And yet…these stories were myths, fairy tales. That meant they were told and retold not merely for entertainment, but to prove a point, or teach a lesson. And somehow she was cynical enough to believe that the lesson wasn’t “happily ever afters come easily.” Was that all there was? Or somewhere, was there something more? How had her great-grandfather managed to leave the sea behind, to die an old man, on the land?

  On a whim, she went into the children’s section and found and read the Hans Christian Andersen story of The Little Mermaid, skimming over some pages, lingering on others. The original story was vastly different from the Disney version she remembered—darker, bloodier and far more believable.

  That was the moral. There was a price for everything, and the greater the request, the higher the price.

  Don’t ask, if you can’t pay. Don’t pay, if you can’t live with the results.

  By the time she emerged from the library, dusk had come and gone, and the town was gently lit like an old-fashioned oil painting. Still in a fog of thought and confusion, she made a phone call, got on the last outbound ferry of the evening and went home.

  Joyce met her at the dock, as requested. Her old friend took one look at her face, the exhaustion and preoccupation there, and didn’t ask questions about where she had been, even though she clearly wanted to. She didn’t even do the usual second-best of friends in distress, and pelt her with mindless, distracting, hopefully amusing chatter. The car radio, left to a classical station, hummed gently, not enough to disturb the swirling, murky green depths of her thoughts.

  It was only when they pulled up in front of her home that Joyce said anything at all. “Beth.”

  “Hmm?” The sound of her name barely roused her from the depths.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  The wistful concern in her friend’s voice demanded an answer. “Yeah. It’s okay. I’m okay.” But she didn’t know that for certain. Didn’t know anything for certain at all, right then. She leaned over the shift stick, awkwardly, and gave Joyce a hug. “Thank you,” she said, and got out of the car.

  Walking up the stoop and through the familiar door of her family’s house, Beth stopped and let the surroundings envelop her in the decades of history and comfort. Home. One room after another, she paced through them, letting her hand trail over the tops of bookshelves and along window ledges, touching a chair here, an antique there. Her fingers lingered over one of the hand-crafted boats, a small, perfectly reproduced square-rigger, barely the size of her palm. She picked it up and held it gently, a finger stroking along the satiny wooden sides. The care and craft that went into it, the hours spent ensuring every detail was perfect, amazed her all over again. To love something so much, and yet never go out on the real thing, never place your feet on the full-size version or feel the waves and wind rocketing you forward…where was the disconnect? How could so much love be focused on something so small? How…and why?

  What was the price her great-grandfather had paid?

  Without answers, Beth moved on, up the stairs and down the hallways.

  She had grown up here. Her father had grown up here. Her grandfather had helped his own father build the house, adding room after room as his family grew and prospered, before it narrowed and shrunk to just her. Always looking with one eye to the shoreline, and another to the town. Never straying too far from the waters they rarely entered. Building boats they never used.

  And they had been restless. Every spring, feeling the change of seasons, the pull of another world. What she had felt wasn’t strange, or sick, or weird…not by her selkie-blood, anyway. If her father had lived…he might not have been able to tell her why she felt that way, but he would have told her she wasn’t alone.

  She had never been alone, if only she had known.

  Her feet took her, finally, inevitably, and without conscious thought, to the widow’s walk.

  The night sky was filled with silvery-gray clouds, threatening rain, and the air was cool and salty off the ocean. Not storm-weather, but the possibility, the potential was there. Now that she allowed herself to feel it, she couldn’t avoid the knowledge.

  The potential was always there. Violence in even the quietest moments. Love out of chaos, across distance.

  She looked at her skin. It was pale, like Dylan’s. Like her father’s, and her grandfather’s. It fit snugly on her flesh, covering bones and sinew and blood the way it was designed to, protecting the delicate workings inside. Shape change. Change your shape. Dylan in seal form was…he had been a seal, totally, as far as anyone could tell. But he had been Dylan, too. How did you slough it off, and become something else, and keep yourself inside? And the mechanics of it: it happened so fast, but how? How did bones change form, and what happened to the soul, the self, the human organs within? Did they change as well, become something else, or was it just the outside appearances? Did it hurt? Did it feel good?

  She studied her hand, imagining it as a seal’s flipper, dark brown and sleek, like a living wet suit. She visualized it that way until she saw the change begin, spreading from fingertip to wrist, from wrist to elbow, until it reached her shoulder, her torso…

  Nothing happened. No tingle. No change. No magic.

  The skin and bones remained her hand, pale pink and human. Suddenly, Dylan seemed very far away, and her blood cooled unpleasantly with a devastating sense of loss. He had been wrong. She was not seal-kin, or if she was, the blood had become too thin, the distance too great.

  That was the price that had been paid.

  She was landbound. He was…not. That was all there was to it.

  No. Her fingers clenched on the rail, and her jaw set stubbornly in a way her friends would recognize, a determined cast to her expression that would make Jake take a step back in concern, and Ben chortle with pleasure. No, and no. Anger bubbled beneath the surface, anger and a hint of desperation. She would not accept that. He had come so far to find her, had taken such risks to be with her, had been bra
ve enough to step back and give her time, when she knew that he would rather have gone all caveman—caveseal?—and not taken no, or even maybe, for an answer.

  She would not now, after all that, merely shrug and say oh, well. She would not tamely accept failure, quietly go back to a life of good-enough and calm enjoyments, not after she had tasted the wildness of passion, of love that could be shocking and fierce and real. She would rather die than go back to that sort of half life.

  There had to be a way to reach over the chasm between them, to teach her what to do. To discover what had brought her family here, to this spot, this place, this decision. To repay the price that had been paid, somehow.

  But how? There was nobody she could ask, and neither her grandfather nor great-grandfather had been the kind to keep diaries or journals she could look to. That seemed to have been part of the price as well, to leave no trace behind in history, either human or seal-kin.

  And yet… Beth stared out at the ocean, barely seeing it. She was remembering. Sharing a genetic memory, somehow. Like fixing a damaged photograph, the details were all there, just waiting to be recovered and revealed. What else did she know, that she had never known she knew?

  Standing in the house her family had built, her face to the limitless ocean vista, Beth closed her eyes and tried to remember….

  The sea raged, deep in its chasms, hidden by caverns of bedrock and chimneys emitting impossible steam. Ribbons of black swirled within the depths, and things with red eyes and pale flesh swam by, some fish-shaped, and some…not.

  There is a price. The words rose from the depths, and echoed with hollow thunder.

  You will allow us to be together? A man’s voice, more solid: deep and hopeful, but cautious nonetheless. Beth knew that voice, without ever having heard it before. Her great-grandfather as a young man.

  There is a price. That voice she also knew. It was cool and dark, neither masculine nor feminine but somehow both, and neither. Relentless. The endless movement of all water, the deepness and the stillness of the oceans, the restless fury of all storms, the deceptively cruel peace of dead calms. Potential, endless, recycling potential contained within it.