The Hunted

by Anna Leonard

  I will pay the price. The man again, determined, and a little desperate.

  The hollow voice filled as it rose from the depth, taking on pressure, deepening and become more powerful, a storm building power. All will pay the price, it warned.

  A vision came with the words, of generations cast up on dry shore, refused admittance to the waves, never knowing the embrace of the water or the joy of the surf. Of generation after generation down the endless line, locked within a single, human skin.

  The hollow thunder became the terrifying howl of a typhoon. There will be no return. No remission. No change for the rest of time, so long as your line continues. What was, will no longer be. For love, you must pay in love. All must pay.

  The selkie staggered under the blow. To cast off his own self, to give up forever the feel of his seal-self, to never teach his children how to change, how to swim with flipper and tail, to ride the surf and sport with their kin…?

  To spend the rest of his life asleep by his beloved’s side. To see his children grow, every day, and watch them take mates and create laughing, green-eyed children in turn…

  It was no price, what Tethys asked him to pay.

  We agree. He spoke for them all, and for all of them it was done.

  Beth opened her eyes, her lashes thick with salt from her tears.

  “I did not agree!” she cried out into the wind. “I did not agree, Tethys!”

  It was agreed. The voice was the same as in her great-grandfather’s memory: cool, implacable, not unkind, but without mercy. The bargain had been struck, and could not be undone. The sea might claim her, might share her knowledge, but she was not allowed to return.

  She could not change, the way Dylan did. Trying to let go of her human self, she had only felt the limitations of her body, not the promise of a greater one. She did not sense the movement of tides in her blood, only the pulse of her heart, its echoing beat moving with her, present, but too far apart.

  “Call,” Dylan had told her.

  She couldn’t. Not like this, her human body limited, her seal-kinship unfelt.

  Better to be apart forever, still loving, than torn apart by this.

  “And that is possibly the stupidest thing you’ve ever thought.” Her own voice shocked her, and she gripped the railing under her fingers so tight her nail beds went white. “You’re going to just give up, without a fight? Let some stupid bargain you weren’t a part of determine your fate now? Is that what you survived all these years for? To give up now?”

  Call.

  So long as your line continues…

  “My line has ended, Tethys.” She didn’t bother to shout this time, trusting that the sea-goddess would hear her, that her blood would carry, no matter her exile, no matter her skin-locked state. “There are no more, after me. There will be no more, not without Dylan.” She knew that for truth. Without her mate, she would have no desire to create new life, no wish for children of her own.

  All gone. The sea-voice sounded…surprised? Wistful. Her family might have been exiled, but they were still kin. Still Tethys’s children. You never stopped loving your children.

  You never truly abandoned them.

  For the first time since her parents’ funeral, Beth felt a pressure in her chest ease, and her vision blurred briefly with tears.

  The realization emboldened her, and Beth pushed her advantage. “All gone,” she echoed in agreement. “Lost, buried forever in dry land. But they never left, Tethys. Even exiled, we never went far. We never forgot the wave and the wind.”

  They never went back to sea. But never left it entirely, either. Island born and island bred, surrounded forever by their lost inheritance.

  The bargain was struck. Your line was cast out.

  “Then why did he come to me? How did he know to find me, to love me? How did I know him, trust him, love him, and only him, of all the humans I had met in my life?”

  This time, there was no answer from the goddess.

  Beth lifted her tear-streaked face to the sky, where storm clouds roiled, and a lone gull circled, screaming its hunger into the wind.

  Call.

  Not him. Her. She understood, now.

  “Tethys! Grandmother!”

  The call spiraled down, not so much sinking as returning, deep into the cold waves, down beyond human endurance, well beyond selkie or seal’s reach, into the beyond-depths of the ocean floor. Into the cold waters science could only guess at.

  A wave rose up in the wake of that call, tsunami-huge, green and blue and black in the depths. It rose, though fast, too fast to register on any radar, and came to the surface, seeking the source of that call. Seeking her.

  A terrible face formed within that rising wave, a hundred feet high and medusa-terrible, with a squid’s beak set under soulless black eyes, and the mouth opened to show the jagged teeth of an ancient shark. A thousand iridescent eels writhed for hair, and gills fluttered along the barnacle-encrusted neck. No fair mermaid, this, but a fearsome beast, a kraken, a monster of the deep. It should have been terrifying, but Beth only felt a wild exhilaration rush through her.

  Tethys. Grandmother. Summoned, in truth, as can only be done by a true daughter of the sea. Beth staggered back under the vision, but did not falter. There was everything to fear…and everything to gain.

  There is always a price, that terrible voice said, surrounding her, breaking around her like a storm breaking. Even I cannot change that law. There is a price, and a price to repay the price that was paid.

  Beth spread her arms wide to the wave, and offered everything she had.

  Epilogue

  In the aftermath of the freak storm that rocked the Nantucket coastline, local newscasters and marine scientists scrambled for explanations and causes, while older folk and experienced sailors merely lit their candles and patted the sides of their boats, and remembered that their mistress was her own creature, neither tamed nor always explicable.

  Meanwhile, the residents of Seastone picked through the debris, sorting through their belongings and taking stock of their losses. Like a sweep of God’s hand, seven houses on one block were destroyed; dozens of trees on that same street downed or damaged, and three cars tossed onto their sides like abandoned toys.

  Only one life was lost.

  “Oh. Jesus.” Jake stood at the edge of the road and stared at what had once been a lovely old home. “I knew it was bad, but…” Words failed him.

  “It’s like…like the house had a bull’s-eye painted on it.” Gena came up next to him, her hand slipping into his almost without either one of them noticing it.

  “Do you think she felt anything?” He was looking for reassurance but not really listening, bending down to pick up a chunk of broken pottery.

  “We don’t know she was even home.” But her voice wavered, and she didn’t convince herself, much less him. Joyce had picked Beth up at the ferry the night of the storm, had driven her home. The battered old Toyota was one of the cars that had been damaged, and her bicycle was still chained to a splintered porch post. Unless she had walked away…

  Nobody had seen her since the storm began, almost forty-eight hours ago.

  “She was home. She never left. She never wanted to leave.” Jake dropped the pottery and wiped his hands on his jeans. “This place was everything to her. It was…it was all she had.”

  He stood up and turned to look out over the road in the other direction, toward the ocean. “She loved this view.” His face twisted, and he took a step forward, and then stopped. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You live, boy. You go on. We all go on, boy. We go on.” Neither of them had noticed Glory sitting on the remains of the front steps until she spoke. “Storms come and storms go, and we mortals weather them as best we can. Neither of you were born here, it’s not in your bones. Not yet. But eventually you’ll understand. Or you’ll go back to the mainland.”

  Jake turned on the old woman, glad for a target and finding comfort in his rage. “That’s
all you can say? Oh, well, she’s dead, let’s have a cuppa?”

  Glory shrugged, squinting up into the bright blue sky. Her face had aged in the days since the storm hit, but there was a calmness to her that was at odds with the wrinkles. “Have a cuppa if that’s what you want. Yell if you’ve got to. Can’t hurt. Might help.”

  The ragged, extended yell that erupted from Jake’s throat surprised them all, Jake most of all. Gena flinched, but Glory rode it out, waiting until the last raw sounds faded away, and he was left panting, his expression drained and weary.

  “Feel better?” she asked him, not without compassion.

  “No.” But he did, somehow. The realization saddened him, rather than bringing relief, as though he had betrayed her, somehow.

  Glory laughed, a harsh coughing noise. “Go home, boy. Get drunk. Remember her however you remember her. That’s how we do things. Leave an old woman alone.”

  Jake would have argued more, just to fill the emptiness, but Gena—understanding more than she expected to—took his hand again, tugging him away down the road, speaking quietly to him.

  Alone for the moment, Glory kept squinting up into the sky.

  “I was thinking we’d put a monument here,” she said. “For all of them, poor family. Something simple. A stone, maybe. A thing that would weather well. A thing that would remain.”

  “A stone would be nice,” Ben agreed. Like his wife, he seemed to appear out of nowhere. “Granite. Not marble.”

  “No, not marble. Marble’s too cold. Do you think she’s happy?”

  Ben sat down next to his wife on the steps, and looked up into the same patch of sky. He took her hand, holding it between both of his.

  “I can’t remember the last time our Beth was truly happy,” he said. “Not since before the accident. But…yes. I think she’s happy now. Or she will be.”

  Glory rested her graying head on Ben’s shoulder. “Good. That’s good.”

  Her free hand rested in her lap. The fingers unclenched, revealing a small, perfectly formed square-rigger made of mahogany, picked out of the debris. One of the masts was broken, splintered beyond repair.

  Her fingers closed back around it, gently, protecting it from further harm.

  Home. Her home is gone. She can feel the land at her back, a steady presence filled with people, danger, warm food and cable television. But it is at her back, now.

  The past hours are blank to her. She remembers everything before then, all that she was, all that she had not been. Then Grandmother came, the wave engulfed her, and…

  A small boat floats in the water next to the rock outcrop she is perched on, the rope from its bow lying untied on the rock next to her. A small motor rested in the back of the boat, and oars were shipped along the side, allowing her to come up on her destination without alerting anyone to her presence.

  She had not called the boat to her, and yet it had appeared, rising on a wave in front of her, steady as a well-trained pony as she climbed on board, dripping wet and ungainly. She had known where to point the bow of the little craft, had known when the engine died that she had enough strength to row the rest of the way to wherever it was she was going.

  Here.

  A hundred yards ahead of her, an unnamed island rose out of the ocean. It appeared on maps, and yet very few people ever felt the urge to visit. Those who did were greeted by the sight in front of her eyes: a narrow dock, sized for half a dozen fishing boats. One was tied up there now, with a number of figures busily doing repairs. There was no beach as such, but a handful of children played off rocks too jagged to be safe. They raced up and down the sides without fear, occasionally disappearing with a happy scream and a splash, then crawling out of the water soaking wet and laughing.

  Birds soared overhead, black-tipped wings catching the morning sunlight, while other, unidentified birds patrolled the wet sands and rode close to the shallow waves. Fish slipped below the mirror-dark surface, while below them, an entire world went about its business.

  She understood how it was done now. You didn’t have to give up one skin when you put on the other; it was just there waiting, on the other side of the magic.

  Not spell-magic. Heart-magic. Soul-magic. Desire-magic. What you wanted, most of all.

  And with that, she slipped into the water and felt the change take place, sinew and flesh moving to accommodate her desires, until she found her seal-kin form. Not outside her, not separate, but within. Muscular and powerful, filled with joy and hunger. This…this satisfied the restlessness in her blood. But there was one more thing she needed…

  Dylan, she called, knowing, instinctively, how to do so, even as she swam forward. Dylan.

  It had been too long. What was taking so long? His restlessness had passed, leaving behind a dreary, patient weight. The others looked at him pityingly, but said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  He had been sitting with his eldest aunt, telling her—once again—about Beth, about her strength and her courage, when he heard the whisper.

  He didn’t remember getting up, didn’t know if he had made his excuses, but found himself outside, racing down from his mother’s cottage, the hope he had been hoarding, a slow, steady wavelet timed to the beating of his heart, stirred again inside him.

  Dylan. She called again, and the hope surged into a typhoon.

  The older men doing repairs down on the beach laughed as he moved past them, but he didn’t care, splashing into the water with an extraordinary lack of grace that was never part of the seal-kin’s inheritance. She surged up on a rising wave, her sleek gray form changing back to mortal without hesitation, even as he caught her in his arms, bringing his tear-wet lips down on her sea-wet ones.

  It was only his imagination that, even as his clean-shaven face touched hers, he felt the brush of long, textured whiskers brushing against his cheek, but his own unshaped whiskers twitched at that phantom touch.

  “You called,” he said, awe blending with a purely masculine satisfaction, even as the waves buffeted them, and the warmth of his body molded her flesh against his. “You called. You came.”

  “You were waiting,” she said simply, as though there could be no other answer, and raised her face for another kiss. He touched the side of her face, as though to reassure himself that she was really there.

  “What took you so long?” he asked, and then shook his head. It didn’t matter. She was here. He had trusted, and she had come.

  He took her up into his arms, a rough, possessive move that announced to anyone watching that she was his. His mate. His.

  “Dylan.” She laughed, shaking her head at his action, but she wasn’t protesting, not really, and she let him carry her, both of them dripping wet, to the shore, to where his family—her family—was waiting.

  She had come home.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-5235-0

  THE HUNTED

  Copyright © 2010 by Laura Anne Gilman

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