by Amy Hoff
Over the months that passed, he and Hazel became close, but she never seemed to respond to any of his advances. He kept his love secret. He had never felt this way, and in the past his conquests were simple, because they had only been conquests.
He had never wanted anything more than he wanted Hazel Worthington.
He was confused. He thought the selk could only fall in love if the tears were wept into the sea, and Hazel was not an unhappy woman. Quite the contrary, in fact.
One night, she attended a party at Magnus's flat. Everyone was there, other models, starlets, celebrities. His friend Sebastian, a rather nerdy type who worked at the Institute, had also attended, but he never did well at parties. Magnus was Sebastian's best friend, although they rarely saw each other. They had met years before, when Magnus needed help on a case. Those employed by Caledonia Interpol couldn’t talk about it freely among humans, of course, so everyone had a cover story. Magnus modelled part-time; he loved the money, the jet-set crowd, and of course the compliment to his vanity, but he would always be a police officer first.
“Who's this, Magnus?” Hazel had asked him, when she noticed Sebastian sitting uncomfortably on the sofa.
“Oh, you haven't met?” said Magnus. “Hazel Worthington, this is Sebastian Bloodworth.” Sebastian stood up, flustered, and shook her hand.
“Sebastian Bloodworth!” said Hazel. “What a name! Like something out of James Bond.
Sexy.”
Sebastian blushed to the roots of his hair.
“Oh, well, I wouldn't say that,” he stammered.
“Can I get either of you a drink?” asked Magnus.
“Please,” she said. “I'd love a glass of champagne. Thank you, Magnus.”
When he left, it had never occurred to him that she might find Sebastian attractive. He was the British librarian type, all stutters, v-neck jumpers, and emotional repression. He was the most unfashionable man imaginable, a holdover from the fifties: black and white, not Technicolor. In an era like the sixties, such a man was generally invisible to all women.
He returned with two glasses of champagne in his hand, only to find his friend deep in conversation with Hazel. To his surprise, and growing horror, she seemed to be responding to Sebastian in a way she never had with him. Eventually it became obvious that Magnus was an unwelcome third party and he excused himself. He had gone off the celebration, and went to brood alone, on his balcony overlooking the city.
He was not surprised, after a few weeks had passed, to discover that Sebastian and Hazel had become an item. Hazel told him herself, since he was her best friend.
Magnus was filled with consternation. He looked at his beautiful face in the mirror, his perfect hair, his admirable body. He was a poet, he could speak countless languages, he was eternal, and he was magic. How could Hazel prefer a man like Sebastian over a man like him?
His desperation increased, as he tried to tell her what he was, by telling her every story of the seal-people he could think of, every glamour of Faerie, every possible thing to charm her away from Sebastian. He even took her to Paris, and showed her his favourite haunts, the secret restaurants and wine cellars of the city. His fortune was boundless, he could grant her every wish.
One night while they were in Paris, he found her on the balcony, looking across the city. He approached her, wishing with every fibre of his being to touch her, to put his arms around her, to claim her as his own. By this point, Magnus had been driven mad by his longing, and by her silent refusal.
“What is it?” asked Magnus.
She turned to look at him, smiled, and sighed.
“Oh, Magnus,” she said. “You've always been so wonderful to me. You've been my best friend for a long time, and I can't express how amazing it is to be here in Paris with you. It was such a surprise. You know I've wanted to come here for years.”
“But...?” he asked.
Hazel smiled.
“But...people change. Dreams change. Here I am, in the city of lights,” she said, “and all I can think about is going home. I look out across this city, and I think of the sea that separates me from him. I feel it, that distance, like a physical pain.”
She laughed then, a musical sound.
“Oh, listen to me!” she said. “I sound like a silly girl. You do understand, though, don't you? You were always so keen on romance.”
Magnus' teeth ground together, as he tried to keep his expression placid and gentle.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I understand too well.”
She left Paris in the morning, and Magnus returned the following week.
They never spoke of the trip again.
In six months, Hazel and Sebastian were married.
Sebastian asked Magnus to be his best man as he was the best friend of both the bride and groom. He attended the wedding in the finery of the seal-folk, a coat of woven gold. He was the most splendid person there, but everyone saw only Hazel, and the radiance of her happiness. When she said I do, he nearly passed out. When they kissed, he looked away. Afterwards, she embraced Magnus, while Sebastian looked on, smiling happily.
Magnus envied him, the happiest man in the world. Sebastian was so innocent and naïve, he couldn't have suspected the evil coursing through the veins of his best friend, driven to madness by these new sensations of love and rejection.
Over the course of Magnus’s friendship with Hazel, whenever she had broken up with someone, she would spend the night at his flat. They would share a bottle of wine, and she would weep. He would comfort her. As he held her and wiped away her tears, he would carefully collect them and count seven into a vial, in secret.
Since she met Sebastian, Hazel hadn't wept. Magnus did not use the tears because he still hoped she would one day see the light, and come to him. But an unconscious practicality made him keep them nearby, just in case.
As their blissful marriage passed from weeks into months, hatred poisoned his yearning. He could no longer stand it. He put the pendant around his neck and spoke the cantrip meant only for the salvation of those who needed it. A secret spell meant to charm the abused from their abusers, the most guarded of all the selkie powers.
It was a matter of weeks before Hazel left Sebastian. She had called Magnus and told him that she could not stop thinking of him day or night, and that she was unable to sleep. She had confessed her sudden love for Magnus to Sebastian in tears, and he had accepted it in silence –while rejection was unfamiliar to Magnus, to Sebastian it was like an old friend. He watched her pack her things, and only said he felt blessed to have been able to share her life and joys with her for as long as he had. Blinking back tears, he said that her memory would always be looked upon with fondness.
Magnus was thrilled. He brazenly met Hazel at the door of Sebastian’s flat, and without a word or even a look to his friend, accompanied her to their new life together. Sebastian, wordless and broken, had watched her walk away. Not only had she left him, his best friend had betrayed him. Still, Sebastian loved them both, and he wanted them to be happy. He was a quiet, unassuming man, and believed only the best of people.
Over the moon, Magnus showered Hazel with gifts, took her out to the best restaurants, wined and dined her as only a selkie knew how. Things were not all that they seemed, unfortunately. During the night, she would say Sebastian's name again and again in her sleep, and wake, confused, to find herself with Magnus. Those nights, she wouldn't go anywhere near him. Day after day, she seemed happy – only to suddenly seem puzzled, as if she were half-waking from a dream. Sebastian's name was never far from her lips, and the faraway look in her eyes drove Magnus to despair. It seemed that she would never truly be his.
One morning, he awoke to find a note on the bedside table. With trembling hands, he lifted it, and read:
Dear Magnus, you have always been my best friend, and I love you dearly. However, I can’t love you as I love Sebastian. I feel that I have made a terrible mistake, and I am going to correct it, if I can. I am so sorry, and I hop
e you will forgive me. I wish you all the best, and perhaps when things have settled, we can speak again. For now, I ask that you respect me, and to honour your love for me, by keeping your distance. Love, Hazel.
Magnus's breath started to come in short gasps, and he crushed the note in his hand as if he could overcome what she had said with the sheer power of the ancient race that had bore him.
She had been able to break the bond and walk away.
Magnus looked around himself, at his enormous flat with its built-in bar, his hi-fi system, the loft, and the balcony overlooking the city. He had everything, and it was all hollow and silent.
It did not take him long to find himself at the door to Hazel and Sebastian’s flat.
His eyes were mad, and wild...and blazing ice blue, with centuries of storm and sea. Hazel had no time to run or cry out. He stabbed her again and again, his hand tight around a silver knife slick with blood, and he wept, sobbing incoherently as the bottle she was holding smashed across the floor and mixed red wine with thick blood that pooled onto the white tiles. Hazel collapsed, and upon falling, saw the sunlight through the window glint off of the glass tear pendant that swung from Magnus's chest. With weak hands she snatched at it, snapping the chain.
Magnus looked down one last time at her shattered frame, and then stared at his hands, at the blood, the life taken by them. They were soft and supple, meant to be offered as a gentleman's prayer, to help, to protect, to lend succour, to be trusted. These hands, only meant to be offered in support, had destroyed the only human he had ever loved.
He lost his nerve then, and fled. He vaulted over the wall and ran as far and fast as he could go. No one saw him. In the darkness, he buried the knife and his clothing deep in a field near an overpass where he himself would never again be able to find them. Sobbing, desperate, he disappeared into the night.
Chapter Sixteen
“So, if you couldn’t have her, no one could,” Leah said, as Magnus finished, hating herself for knowing exactly what that kind of anger felt like.
Magnus didn't respond.
“You killed the others, didn't you?” she asked. “You were the first Fae serial killer and so you killed the humans that belonged to the other selk? You wanted to draw suspicion away from yourself...and only humans are serial killers. The selk just don't do that kind of thing.”
“Magnus?!” Dorian cried.
“She's right, Dorian,” said Magnus coldly. “I don't understand how she knows, but she's right.”
Dorian looked absolutely miserable.
“We will tell the selk,” said Leah.
This was the first time Magnus's serene countenance was shaken.
“You cannot tell them!” he said. “The selk won’t hunt me, they will turn their backs. I would be exiled!”
“It is already done,” said Dorian, “Such is the way of our people.”
“There are worse things in this world than them knowing,” said Leah.
***
The mood at Caledonia was one of muted sadness. They had lost two of their own, traitors in their midst. It did not reflect well on the force, or on the Fae in general.
What happens when monsters try to change? To live an honest life? Some things are beyond even their power or comprehension.
Magnus hadn't spoken since his arrest. Leah had put him into one of the cells, magic holding him in place. He had gone quietly, accepting his fate. Chief Ben had informed her that he would need to be transported to the Fae Council to await his trial. Soon, he would be put in the maximum security cells, located in the Deeps of Caledonia Interpol.
The door to the cell block opened. Magnus lifted his head.
Dorian entered, walking down the rows of cells, until he reached Magnus’ and saw, to his surprise, that his brother had been weeping. In all his long life, he did not remember his brother often shedding tears.
Dorian recognised that Magnus had a selkie heart, like his own. For decades he had wondered if Magnus was even a member of the same species, but now he realised that Magnus felt love more keenly than he had expected and it had driven him insane. Dorian hid his own heart with a stiff upper lip, and Magnus with abandon and vulgarity.
Now, for different reasons, they both were questioning the wisdom of leaving the ocean so long ago.
Dorian sat down, and leaned back against the wall outside Magnus's cell. His brother moved towards him, leaning against the other side, so they were bookends, one golden and angelic, the other dark and pale.
“Do you remember,” Dorian said softly, “when we were young, and diving the shoals? The silver flashes of fish, the green darkness that wrapped around us and held us safe from this human world?”
Magnus's head was bowed. He looked down at his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
Dorian spread his white hands wide. He looked at his long slender fingers, perfectly shaped and delicate.
“We came here, to the land, you and I, together,” he said. “We left the sea, our home, and cold-bellied, in the darkness, worked our way onto the sand. In the moonlight, the sealskin fell away from our human forms, large eyes and dark lashes all that was left of our former lives, and we glistened in the silver light like the white of waves on the shore.”
He looked down at his clothes, at the form of his perfect legs, and turned to see his dull reflection in the glass of the cell, the sweep of his impossibly white cheekbone to long lashes and animal eyes.
Magnus turned to look at him.
“What a strange life we found it, did we not?” Dorian asked. “These long limbs, these legs for running swiftly, feeling wind that for the first time was not from a storm-tossed sea. Rain streaming through our hair, across our human bodies.
“We were beautiful, Magnus. We are beautiful.”
“And we are pain. We are the truth woven through this world. Help me to understand, brother, because I do not think I can. And if I cannot understand, I cannot forgive you.”
Magnus looked at his own body, so much more powerful than his brother's delicate frame and sharp features. His facial features were soft, almost feline, but his arms were strong, his hands masculine and lovely. His long curls were the dream of artists from Rembrandt to Botticelli. His fine muscles worked beneath his clothing, and he was then aware of all that made him human.
“Better to have kept to the sea,” he laughed quietly. “Better to never have felt it, Dorian. You mention pain. I could not suffer it. When she was not with me, I was tortured, aflame. When she left me, when she chose him instead, it was as if some phantom force had torn my insides out through my mouth. The times you speak of, the simple joys as a seal, sporting in the waves, they were times of happiness. The delicious feeling of humanity, over the centuries, the battles where we could not die, the women and wine, before she came into my life...oh, Dorian, had I known what it was to suffer the pangs of unrequited love, I should never have left that moonlit shore.”
Dorian eyed him strangely.
“You are a selkie,” he said. “Suffering is our purpose. We care for humankind. We are their servants, and their saviours.”
“Humankind!” cried Magnus. “Thankless, and wounding! She saw my pain and she would not comfort it. She held the cure in her own hands and she let me suffer anyway. We save them every day and they do not know. If they knew, they would not care.”
His fists were clenched against the cool stone floor of the cell. Dorian stared at his brother, his eyes cold.
“She owed you nothing, Magnus,” he said. “She trusted you. She even loved you, in her way. She owed you nothing.”
“I thought...I thought, when she died, the pain would leave me,” Magnus said. “I was wild, and I wanted to save others from suffering. We are all selk, and I hadn't known of the horrible pain before...I did not know how deeply it hurt. I wanted to save us all. I killed them, Dorian, I killed her, to save us this pain...but the pain is still here.”
Furiously, he tore at his chest.
&nbs
p; “The pain is still here!” he shouted. “I curse this selkie heart! How can the pain still live in me? Why won't it leave me alone?”
Sobbing, he collapsed onto the floor of his cell. Dorian's jaw tightened until his teeth ground together. He turned and inflicted a cold steel gaze upon his brother's crumpled form.
“Would you...would you have killed Dahlia?” he whispered. “Would you have killed the human I belonged to, Magnus?”
Gasping, and coughing through his sobs, Magnus turned bright black eyes on his brother. He crept to the window that separated them and put his palm flat against it, his long curls falling forward. He stared into Dorian’s eyes; two creatures of ethereal, impossible beauty gazing at each other through the glass.
“Oh, Dorian,” Magnus said. “You are my brother, and I love you so much. I would have killed her first.”
Slowly, Dorian stood up and turned away. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, wild sea waves pounding against an unrelenting shore. Wordless, he left his brother staring after him from the hard, cold floor of the cell.
***
“Leah,” Chief Ben said. “I've just received word. It's time.”
Leah nodded, and went down into the cell block. She opened the door of Magnus’s cell and put the handcuffs on him. He did not protest, staring off into the distance. It seemed that he was in his own world, far away, perhaps in the days of his youth when he and Dorian had no other worry than the salt of the sea and basking on the shoreline. For a moment, he paused. He looked at her, but said nothing. She pushed him gently into the corridor and he went calmly enough.
As he was led past the darkened cells, a figure emerged in one of them. Brilliant blue eyes stared out with hatred as Sebastian struck the glass.
“Did you feel her dying, you bastard?!” he cried, slamming his hands in futile fury against the cell window. “Did you hear her call my name?!”