Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  An awkward silence fell, broken only by the whisper of waves on the rocks, the stones tinkling and tumbling like wind chimes. Strains of music drifted from the tent, too faint for Regina to distinguish words or melody. She opened her mouth to say something, anything. That was fun. Let’s never do it again.

  “You knew Maggie?” she asked. “Before she got married?”

  “Yes.”

  Regina sucked in her breath. Not her problem, she reminded herself. None of her business.

  But Margred was her employee. Regina had hired her to help out at the restaurant after Caleb found her on the beach, naked and bleeding from a blow to her head. Margred claimed not to remember anything of her life before she came to the island. Regina always suspected the other woman was fleeing an abusive relationship.

  But if Dylan knew her . . .

  Regina scowled. “How?”

  His brows rose. “I suggest you ask her.”

  “I will.”

  As soon as she gets back from her honeymoon with your brother.

  Maybe not.

  “Or you could tell me now,” Regina said.

  “No.”

  She folded her arms, her underwear still wadded in her hand. “Are you always this chatty after sex? Or is it me?”

  “Maybe I don’t like gossip.”

  “Or maybe you’re protecting somebody.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Her?” Regina guessed. “Or yourself?”

  * * *

  Human women.

  Always wanting something.

  Dylan regarded this one with frustrated resignation. He had liked the look of her, the straight, cropped hair, the angular body, the contrast of those soft, sensitive lips in that sharp-featured face. Her differences drew him, all that tension and energy confined in a tight, feminine little body. He had enjoyed unwrapping her and watching her fly apart.

  But the big dark eyes had sharpened to points, and her chin was at a militant angle. Now that he’d had her, she thought that he owed her— attention, answers, some damn thing.

  Not so different, after all. He supposed her attitude was only human.

  Too bad for her he wasn’t.

  “Let me take you back,” he said. “You must have work to do.”

  The chin rose a notch. “You don’t need to take me anywhere. I can get where I’m going by myself.”

  Almost amused, he stepped back to let her pass. She marched to the edge of the water and stopped.

  Of course. She would not be able to see in the dark. Dylan remembered how it had been before his first Change. These rocks would slice her narrow human feet to pieces.

  She edged forward.

  He frowned. He wasn’t going to waste the breath or effort to argue with her. But neither could he stand by while she cut herself stumbling around in the surf.

  Jeering at himself for caring, he picked her up.

  Regina yelped. Jerked. The top of her head connected with his chin, snapping his mouth shut. Pain shot through his jaw.

  He unclenched his teeth and growled. “Hold still.”

  She glared, her nose inches from his. Her hair was soft against his cheek and smelled like fruit, strawberries or—

  “You surprised me,” she accused.

  “I surprise myself,” he murmured.

  “What’s the matter? Never swept a girl off her feet before?”

  “Not usually.” Apricots, he decided. She smelled like apricots, tart and ripe. She was heavier than he expected, muscle wrapped around a tensile steel frame. The skin behind her knees was soft and smooth. To distancehimself, to bait her, he said, “Mostly they just lie down.”

  Her smile sliced knife-sharp through the twilight. “That explains why your technique needs work.”

  He laughed softly. “And you?”

  Water splashed around his ankles.

  Her grip tightened on his neck. “What about me?”

  “Do you often get, ah, carried away?”

  “Are you asking if I sleep around?”

  He did not know what he was asking. Or why. “Your sexual history is no concern of mine.”

  She snorted. “Obviously. Or you would have used a condom.”

  In truth, she was no more likely to get him sick than he was to get her pregnant. But Dylan could not be bothered to explain that to her. She would not believe him if he did.

  He walked out of the water and set her on the beach, keeping his hands on her forearms while she found her balance.

  She sighed. “Look, you don’t need to worry. You’re the first in— oh, a long time.”

  He felt a tinge of satisfaction, a twinge of guilt, and scowled. He should not feel anything. His kind did not. They sought the sensations and the physical release of sex. They did not blind themselves with emotion or bind their partners with expectations.

  “Your shoes.” He jerked his head toward them.

  They lay on their sides just out of reach of the water, the flirty heels and skinny straps totally unsuited to this stretch of rock and sand.

  “Right.” She scooped them up. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” He met her gaze, warm and wary, and felt heat curl in his belly. He wanted her again. But that flash of feeling had alarmed him.

  He should have learned by now not to fuck with humans.

  He was too close to being one of them.

  This one hadn’t even been that good, he told himself, ignoring the intensity of her response, his satisfaction at making her come. Oh, she was acceptable by human standards. But he was accustomed to partners who knew what pleased them and how to please him. He was fourteen and grieving for his mother when he had his first lover, a lush selkie female who had honed her skills and her lust over a millennium of practice. Nerienne had been nothing at all like this uptight, argumentative human.

  Her words pounded in his temples. “You’re the first in— oh, a long time.”

  His chest tightened.

  The air was too warm. Warm and close. It dragged on him like a fisherman’s net, constraining his lungs, cutting off his air. He could not breathe. He was wild to go, to run, to return to the freedom of the sea.

  He stood immobile at the cliffs while the woman— Regina— fumbled with her sandals.

  “Well.” She straightened and pinned him with a bright smile. “Have a nice stay on the island.”

  “I am leaving tonight.”

  Her smile faltered; set. “Oh. Then I guess I won’t see you again.”

  Her casual pat on his flank, that tender, careless touch on his thigh, burned like a brand. The mer did not touch. Only to fight, or to mate.

  His hands curled into fists at his sides.

  “No,” he said.

  She turned away without another word.

  He stood without moving as she wobbled up the beach, toward the lights and the music, leaving him alone.

  3

  THE TOWER OF CAER SUBAI WAS VERY OLD, mortared with mists and magic. The prince was older still, weary with the weight of years and responsibilities. But as long as he stayed within this tower on the selkie isle of Sanctuary, he did not age. He would not die.

  Conn ap Llyr, prince of the mer, lord of the sea, gazed west out his windows, listening to the sea song rise from the rocks below and the north wind pry through the stones like a knife. He could feel the demon’s presence from half a world away, swirling like an oil slick, dark and corrosive, lapping at the island the humans called World’s End.

  Conn did not give a damn if the humans were overrun with demons and their island sank into the sea. For millennia, the children of the sea had maintained an uneasy peace with demonkind, a peace struck from pride and self-interest, cobbled together with compromises and broken promises, defended through centuries of violationsand encroachments. A peace he believed would hold.

  Until six weeks ago, when a demon had murdered one of Conn’s people on World’s End.

  He gripped the edge of his desk, a massive slab of iron and carved wal
nut salvaged from a Spanish galleon wrecked off the Cornish coast. Everything that dwelled in and under the sea, everything that fell below its surface, was his to claim or dispose of. Nine tenths of the earth was in his realm. But the demon eluded him.

  He reached outward, his thoughts eddying, circling the darkness, seeking its source, its threat. He might as well have tried to sieve a drop from a current. The demon slipped his grasp, lost in a moving tide of humanity.

  Conn bowed his head, failure bitter in his mouth. The hound sleeping at his feet twitched and whined. Beyond his tower windows, the bright sea rolled, wild, wide, and deep, beyond his reach, taunting his control.

  There was a time— the whales sang of it— when the sea lords’ power ran high and full, when the mer were attuned to every creature in and over the sea, when they could summon glaciers or transport themselves in a shower of rain. Even Conn’s own father, Llyr, before he abandoned human form and all responsibility—

  But Conn could not think of the absentee king without anger, and anger was something else he had learned to deny himself. Deliberately, he uncurled his hands, splaying them against the map on his desk.

  In recent centuries, the sea kings’ gifts had dwindled as their people’s numbers declined. All that was left for the sea king’s heir was to safeguard what remained with whatever tools he could find.

  Footsteps sounded from the tower stairs.

  Conn glanced up as Dylan emerged, the top of his head nearly brushing the arch of rough cut stone.

  Here was a tool. A weapon, rather. Dylan was ambitious and resourceful, a son of the sea witch Atargatis and her human husband. After her death, Conn had taken the boy under his own protection. Dylan had yet to demonstrate any power beyond what every selkie possessed, sexual glamour and a little weather magic. But he had proven his courage and his loyalty; and in the current situation, Conn must use what lay at hand.

  “You sent for me, lord?” Dylan asked.

  “Yes.” Frustration had made him abrupt. He leashed his tone. “I have something to show you.”

  Dylan surveyed the chart covering the surface of the desk. “Since when do we depend on human maps?”

  “It suits my purpose,” Conn said.

  “Which is?”

  Instead of replying, Conn spread his hands over the desk. He concentrated his gift, adding his little findings to the information already imbued in the map. Gradually the image came alive, colors winking into being like stars in the night sky, forming streams and clusters of light.

  Dylan’s brows flicked up. “Impressive. What is it?”

  Conn closed his fists, ignoring the faint, residual headache that exercising his magic always gave him. The map pulsed and swirled with color. “The gray”— great swathes of it—“indicates human habitation. The blue represents our people.”

  A few, too few, thousand scattered points of light, almost lost in the vastness of the oceans.

  “The children of earth are here.” Conn’s finger followed the trail of green along the mountain ranges, tapped the sacred places of the sidhe. “Demons here.” A sweep of his hand indicated the children of fire, spattered like blood across fault lines and land forms.

  Dylan stepped closer to the desk, narrowing his eyes in concentration. “I do not see the children of air on your map.”

  “Because they are not there. Angelic intervention is less common than most humans believe. Or would welcome,” Conn said dryly. “Besides, it is the demons’ activity that concerns me.”

  “Because of Gwyneth.”

  Conn’s rage welled, deep and slow as ice. Six weeks ago, the selkie Gwyneth of Hiort had been lured to land, stripped of her pelt, tortured, and killed by a demon in human form.

  “Because they murdered one of us,” Conn agreed, “and because they attempted to cast blame on the humans. I will not be tricked into taking sides in the demons’ war on heaven and humankind.”

  Dylan frowned at the map. The darkness Conn had sensed earlier was a red blot off the coast of Maine. “You may not have a choice. If the demons upset the balance—”

  “Margred restored the balance when she bound Gwyneth’s murderer in the sea.”

  Dylan raised one eyebrow. “A life for a life?”

  “After a fashion.” Elementals were immortal. The selkie would be reborn in the sea; the demon was trapped for eternity. A fair enough exchange, in Conn’s view. “But Margred’s action carries its own consequences.”

  “You think she is in danger?” Dylan asked sharply.

  “I think she could be.”

  “Revenge?”

  Conn considered. The demons understood justice; they were not ruled by it. Revenge would certainly play a part in their response. But they were driven by more practical considerations. “Say, rather, that Margred’s demonstration of power may have put her at risk.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “She married your brother.”

  Dylan’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “Unfortunately. She is human now. Which means her choices and her fate are really none of my business.”

  Or yours. The implication hung in the air, unspoken.

  “Unless she carries your brother’s child,” Conn said evenly.

  Dylan’s pale face turned white. There were feelings there, Conn thought. Feelings he would not hesitate to use for his own purposes.

  “What difference would that make?” Dylan asked.

  “Your mother’s blood was strong. Her gift was powerful. There are songs—” Prophecy or history? Conn wondered. Impossible to tell from the whales’ song. The great mammals had even less concept of time than selkies. “There are stories that a daughter of Atargatis’s lineage could forever change the balance of power and the destiny of her people.”

  “A daughter.” Dylan’s eyes were black. “Not a son?”

  Conn sympathized with his disappointment. Better for them both if Atargatis’s power had devolved to a son. To Dylan.

  “The songs say a daughter.”

  “Then . . .” Dylan scowled, still regarding the red-tinged map of Maine. “My sister?”

  Conn shook his head. “Both your brother and your sister are human. So far the demons have considered them unworthy of notice. But if your brother were to have a child—”

  “Or if I did.”

  “Yes. I had hoped—” Conn broke off. He did not indulge in hope any more than anger. “The combination of your mother’s blood and Margred’s gift might be regarded as an advantage for our people. Or as a threat by the demons.”

  “So what do you want me to do? Tell my brother he shouldn’t fuck his wife?”

  Conn thought about it. “Would he listen to you?”

  “No.”

  Conn shrugged. “Just as well. Our numbers are declining. We need children. We need this child.”

  Dylan sneered. “Assuming he can get Margred pregnant.”

  “Assuming their child is selkie. And female. Yes.”

  “You assume a great deal.”

  Conn’s mouth twitched in a rare smile. “True.” And few of his court dared to speak the truth to him. “Yet something draws the demons to World’s End. I need you to find out what.”

  * * *

  Dylan stared at his prince, his heart thundering in his ears. For a moment he wondered if he’d heard Conn correctly. “That’s a warden’s job.”

  The prince’s gaze was clear and light as frost, deep and measureless as the sea. “Do you refuse me?”

  “I— No, my lord.” He was startled, not stupid. “But why not send one of them?”

  The wardens were Conn’s confidants, his elite. Chosen for their loyalty and the strength of their gift, they kept the prince’s peace, defending his realm from the depredations of human and demon kind.

  Since he was fourteen years old, Dylan had burned to be counted as one of them, to wear the wardens’ mark around his neck.

  It had been a bitter realization to accept he was too nearly human to have either their pow
er or the prince’s trust.

  “They do not have your knowledge of the island,” Conn said. “Or your connection to it.”

  For some reason, Dylan’s brain presented him with a picture of the woman, the prickly one with the ward on her wrist and the tight body humming with energy.