Sea Fever

by Virginia Kantra

  Regina would be doing her job, writing specials on the board, say, or bringing plates to the pass-through, and she’d look up to find him staring at her with dark-eyed intensity, like the brooding hero of some romance novel. Regina shivered. It was perversely arousing. Annoying. People were beginning to talk.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” she demanded, keeping her voice low.

  By the door, a middle-aged couple hung with cameras and water bottles perused the menu. Nick was under one of the tables, playing with the cat.

  Dylan studied her a moment. A corner of his mouth quirked. “No.”

  “Someplace to go? A job?”

  “I have a job to do here.”

  “You’re not a lobsterman.” The lobster fishermen, the good ones, were all on the water by five o’clock. It was after ten now.

  “No,” he acknowledged.

  She set her hands on her hips and waited.

  “Salvage,” he offered finally.

  Her brows drew together. “You mean, shipwrecks? Like, Titanic stuff?”

  “What lies in the sea belongs to the sea.”

  “I heard it belongs to the government.”

  He shrugged. “Most exploration is done by private divers.”

  “Grave robbers.”

  The edge of his teeth showed in a smile. “Treasure seekers.”

  Nick poked his head from under the table. “Did you ever find treasure?”

  He was stuck indoors, grounded, until Regina’s shift ended at three. Antonia told Regina she was overreacting, but she didn’t care. She had enough problems without worrying about Nick’s whereabouts ten times a day.

  Dylan reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. Regina caught the gleam as he flipped it to her son.

  “Wow.” Nick’s eyes widened as he turned the coin over in his hand. “Is it real?”

  Dylan nodded. “Morgan Liberty Head silver dollar.”

  “Cool.”

  “Keep it.”

  “No,” Regina said.

  “It’s only a dollar,” Nick said.

  “And not in mint condition,” Dylan added.

  “I don’t care what kind of condition it’s in. He doesn’t take gifts from strangers.”

  Nick thrust out his lower lip. “But—”

  She pinned him with her I-mean-it-Nicky-now look. She didn’t want her son romanticizing this guy. Even if Dylan did look a little like a pirate, with that long dark hair and sexy stubble . . .

  She pulled herself up. She wasn’t going to romanticizehim either. He was just an island boy who’d gone away, no different and certainly no better than any of the men she had considered and rejected over the years.

  Men she hadn’t had sex with.

  Shit.

  “Sorry, kid,” Dylan said.

  “Yeah.” Nick dropped the coin into Dylan’s palm. “Me, too.”

  Regina sighed as her son stomped into the kitchen.

  Dylan turned toward the door, stretching his legs into the room. Long legs, Regina noticed. No socks.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  Regina jerked her attention from his corded legs and followed his gaze to the front window, where Jericho waited on the sidewalk. “Jericho Jones.”

  She gave him the islanders’ wave, lifted fingers, an almost-nod. The vet shouldered his pack and disappeared around the corner of the building.

  “What does he want?”

  “Nothing. A sandwich.”

  He came by once a day, or every other day. She slipped him food through the back door when Antonia wasn’t watching.

  “I meant here, on the island.”

  Regina shrugged. “Maybe he can’t afford the ferry back to the mainland.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “I didn’t ask. It’s your brother’s job to question people. I just feed them.”

  Dylan’s gaze narrowed on her face. “You are kind,” he said, almost accusingly.

  “Not really. The way our country treats its returning soldiers sucks. He shouldn’t be living on the streets, he—”

  “— could be trouble.”

  “Look, he doesn’t bother the customers, and he’s not a registered sex offender. That’s all I need to know.”

  “And how do you know that much?”

  She flushed. “Your brother told me.”

  “Where does he sleep?”

  “Jericho? I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Around. I don’t know where you sleep either.”

  “Would you like to see?” he asked softly.

  Her pulse jumped. “N-no.” She cleared her throat. “No. It’s just . . . The inn’s full up, and most places were rented months ago. Unless you’re staying with your family?”

  Dylan’s brows rose. “With the newlyweds? I think not.”

  She wiped her hands on her apron. “What about your dad’s place?”

  His face closed like a poker player’s. “My father and I do not speak.”

  “But your sister—”

  “Lucy was a baby when I . . . left.”

  He had Margred’s habit of pausing before certain words, as if English was his second language or something. Regina wondered again where he’d lived and how they’d met. “All the more reason to get to know her now,” she pointed out.

  “You’re suddenly very interested in my personal life.”

  “I—” Oh, shit. “I’m thinking about Lucy. She was Nicky’s teacher for two years, you know. First and second grade.”

  “I did not know.” He caught her eye and for a second looked almost embarrassed, like the boy he must have been before his mother took him away. “We do not have much sense of family.”

  But that wasn’t true. Bart Hunter had been devastated by his wife’s desertion. Lucy had turned down a post in Cumberland County to teach on the island and keep house for her father. Caleb was a thoughtful and devoted brother. Since his return from Iraq, he had even begun a painful reconciliation with his dad.

  “You mean, you don’t have much sense of family,” she accused.

  He shrugged. “If you like.”

  She didn’t like it at all.

  * * *

  The next morning, Regina sat on the toilet, counting the days in her mental calendar, controlling panic.

  Her period wasn’t even due yet, not for another— she counted again— two days, she wasn’t late, she couldn’t possibly be pregnant.

  Her throat closed.

  Well, technically, she could.

  She could take a pregnancy test. Regina thought about walking into Wiley’s Grocery and requesting a pregnancy kit from the Wileys’ teenage daughter and shuddered. That would certainly liven up the discussion in the checkout line.

  Regina swallowed. Okay, no test. Not yet. Not until she could get to the mainland, Rockland or someplace, to buy one. In the meanwhile, she would count the days and pray and stay as far away as possible from Dylan “No Family Ties” Hunter.

  5

  LIVING IN HUMAN FORM AMONG HUMANS was like being dragged naked over rocks.

  Dylan stood motionless on the wharf outside the lobster cooperative, itching for the coverage of his pelt, craving the rush and freedom of the sea.

  His hands flexed and fisted. He had dallied in human form before, sometimes for sex, most often alone on the island his mother had bequeathed to him. But never for so long. Never surrounded by other beings who claimed a share of his space, a portion of his attention. He felt assaulted, abraded, by the constant human contact.

  No wonder the old king, Llyr, had gone “beneath the wave,” the polite selkie term for those who had withdrawn so deeply into themselves and the sea that they lost the desire and ability to assume human shape.

  The smell of diesel and oil, the tang of coffee, sweat, and cigarettes, rose from the saturated planks, overlaying the rich brine of the ocean. Fishermen came into the low wooden building to sell their catch, to buy bait and fuel and rubber bands, to share complaints or gossip. Dylan felt
their glances light like flies against his skin, but no one questioned his presence. He was accepted— not one of them, but still of the island.

  He listened to their conversations, trying to fathom from their talk of weather, traps, and prices what the demons could possibly want from World’s End.

  “He’s got no right to set traps on that ledge,” one man told another. “So I cut his line and retied it with a big knot up by the buoy.”

  His companion nodded. “That’ll teach him.”

  “It better.” The rumble of an incoming boat underscored the threat. “Or next time I’ll cut his line for good.”

  Dylan smiled to himself. Apparently humans could be as territorial as selkies.

  The engine behind him throttled down. Another fisherman, Dylan thought. He turned. And froze, his casual greeting stuck in his throat.

  The boat was the Pretty Saro. He recognized her lines even before he registered the name painted on her side. And the fisherman was Bart Hunter.

  His father.

  He was old. Dylan had seen his father before, of course, at the wedding. But out of a suit, out in the sunlight, the realization struck with fresh force.

  Bart Hunter had always been a big man. Dylan had his height; Caleb, his shoulders and large, square, workingman’s hands. But the years or the drinking had whittled the flesh from his bones, weathered his face, bleached his hair, until he stood like an old spar, stark and gray. Human. Old.

  How had Dylan ever been afraid of him?

  They stared at each other across the narrowing strip of water.

  They had barely spoken at the wedding. Dylan had nothing to say to the man who had held his mother captive for fourteen years.

  But before he could clear out, Bart tossed him a rope.

  Dylan caught it automatically. Old habits died hard. He was eight or nine when he started sterning for his father, hard, wet, dirty work in oversized boots and rubber gloves.

  Dylan tied the line, cursing the memories that dragged at him as hard as any rope.

  And then he turned and walked away without a word. “Don’t judge me, boy,” Bart called after him. The words thumped like stones between his shoulder blades. “You can’t judge me.”

  Dylan did not look back.

  He climbed the road away from the wharf, the need to escape swelling inside him, coiling in his gut, clawing under his skin.

  He sucked in the cool ocean air in a vain attempt to placate the beast in his belly. He burned with need, for a woman, for the sea, the two hungers twining and combining, eating him up inside. He fought the urge to run back and plunge off the pier, to merge with the dance beneath the waves, the life lurking, darting, swaying, streaming, in the flowing moss, in the forests of kelp, in the cold, deep dark. To blot out thought with sensation. To wash the taint of humanity from his soul.

  How did Conn stand it?

  Within the confines of Sanctuary, the prince had held to his human form longer than any selkie living. But he would not leave the magic of the island. He could not risk aging.

  Dylan gulped another mouthful of air. He was young by selkie standards— not yet forty. He could spend weeks, years, on land and still not approach his chronological age. At least he would not die from this experience. Unless the frustration killed him.

  He raised his gaze from the asphalt. At the top of the winding road, the restaurant’s red awning gleamed like a sail in the sunset.

  The slippery knot in his gut eased. There was one hunger he could satisfy.

  He went to see her only because it suited his purpose, Dylan told himself as he passed the ferry road. His very public pursuit of Regina provided him with an excuse to keep an eye on the humans’ comings and goings, to listen to their gossip. If a demon did possess an islander, chances were good that his neighbors would be discussing his strange behavior over coffee at Antonia’s the next day.

  And yet . . .

  He wanted to see her. Looked forward to the wary light that came into her eyes when he walked through the door, the challenge in her chin, the annoyance in her voice. Liked watching her through the pass-through into the kitchen, her quick, neat movements, her small, strong hands, the impatient press of her lips. He smiled, picturing her. Always busy, always in motion, like a bird at the edge of the tide.

  He pushed open the restaurant door, making the bell jangle. The restaurant cat raised its head from its window perch, regarding him with sleepy golden eyes.

  Margred paused in the act of untying her apron. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Dylan raised an eyebrow, nettled by her obvious disappointment. Selkie or human, married or not, Margred had power, a purely female magic that would always draw men’s eyes. But this time the sight of her did nothing to blunt the edge in him.

  His restless gaze moved past her to the kitchen. “Where is she?”

  “Regina? She went to the dock to meet the ferry. I am waiting for her to come back.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can go home.”

  He bared his teeth. “Who is she meeting at the ferry?”

  “No one. They’re off-loading supplies for the restaurant. Dylan . . .” Margred’s eyes were troubled. Seeking. “What are you doing here?”

  She had faced a demon before, Dylan reminded himself. They had faced a demon together. He did not need to pretend with her. And Conn had not instructed him to lie.

  “Conn sent me.”

  “Why?”

  “He believes the fire spawn are seeking something on World’s End.”

  Margred went very still. “Seeking what?”

  Your child. Yours and my brother’s. But Dylan could not say that. He did not know it to be true.

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “Vengeance?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Then why did you not come to me?” She crumpled her apron between her hands. “Why did you not warn me?”

  “Because we do not know.”

  “And because I am human now,” she guessed.

  Possibly. Probably. Guilt made him stiff. “By your own choice.”

  “Yes. My choice. Being human pleases me.” She added deliberately, “Caleb pleases me.”

  “Till death do you part,” Dylan sneered.

  She tossed her head. “Better a lifetime with him than eternity without him.”

  “And when you both are old, will he still please you then?”

  “Yes,” she said with absolute certainty.

  “How do you know?”

  “Why do you care?” she shot back.

  The back door slammed.

  “Idiot supplier sent me iceberg,” Regina said. “Four crates of— Well.” She stopped, her gaze flicking from Dylan to Margred and back again. She set a big cardboard box on the stainless steel counter; crossed her arms. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “You’re not interrupting,” Margred said. “I am leaving.”

  The bell over the door jangled in her wake.

  “Shit,” Regina said wearily. She ran her fingers through her straight, cropped hair. “I was going to ask her to give me another twenty minutes.”

  “Why?” Dylan asked.

  “Ma’s doing mayor stuff— waste committee meeting,” Regina explained. “I’m covering the dinner shift by myself. Which isn’t a problem normally, but there wasn’t room for the truck on the morning ferry, and now I’ve got to unload the delivery myself.”

  She was already moving as she spoke, sliding the carton, wedging open the back door. There was no rest in her, no peace, only this slightly nervous, crackling energy. And yet for the first time all day, Dylan felt his shoulders relax.

  He walked into the kitchen as she returned from the alley carrying another big box. Through the open door he could see an old white van, its rear doors open to reveal stacked crates and cartons.

  “You are alone?”

  “I just said so, didn’t I?” She sidestepped to avoid him.

  He followed. “Where is Nic
k?”

  “At Danny Trujillo’s, playing Ultimate Alliance. Get out of my way.”