Immortal Sea (5 page)

Liz pulled herself together. “Stay back. You’ll cut your feet.”

Zack scowled. “You’ll cut your hands.”

“You’re
bleeding
,” Emily squeaked in distress.

Liz glanced down. Sure enough, a thin red line welled on her finger. She pressed on it hastily, offering her daughter a shaky smile. “It’s okay. I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt.”

Emily frowned, unconvinced. “But . . .”

“You heard her, she’s fine.” Zack poked his sister’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get out of here so she can clean up.”

Em tipped up her face. “Will you take me to the beach?”

“No, but I’ll buy you ice cream.” Zack’s gaze, deep black rimmed with gold, met Liz’s. Were his pupils a little too dilated? But he’d just woken up, she reminded herself.

“You want a broom?” he asked.

This was the boy she remembered, thoughtful, responsible, compassionate. Like Ben.

She swallowed, cradling the broken doves in her lap. “No, you go. I’ll get it.”

He nodded once, his shaggy dark hair flopping over his forehead. With his face free from powder and fresh from sleep, he could have been any average teenage boy stumbling out of bed.

Assuming the average teenage boy would be caught dead wearing black nail polish.

“There’s money in my purse,” Liz said. “For the ice cream.”

Zack’s mouth flattened. Did he remember the last bitter fight they’d had before leaving North Carolina, when she’d accused him of taking money from her purse to buy drugs?

Of course he did. Zack—sensitive, observant, intelligent—remembered everything.

A fresh start, she reminded herself. For all of them.

She held his gaze.

“Sweet,” he said at last. “Thanks.”

Liz expelled a shaky breath.

They would be all right, she thought as she listened to the front door click shut behind them. The sound of their footsteps thumped down the steps and faded away. Everything was going to be all right.

In time.

She regarded the fractured crystal in her hands, the furled and frozen wings, the fault line running through its pedestal like a bolt of buried lightning, and a storm of grief shook her heart.

She closed her eyes. A tear oozed beneath her shut lids and rolled unchecked down her cheek.

Zack shot a glance at the girl behind the cash register. His age, maybe a year older. With girls sometimes it was hard to tell. She was pretty, with purple eye shadow and a silver lip ring at the corner of her mouth. She was reading some thick book, but as he approached, she closed the black-and-white cover and shoved it beside the register.

Zack put his purchases on the counter without making eye contact. The Invisible Man.

The girl picked up the box of hair color with one hand. “This yours?”

Zack gave her his walled-off look. The store—WILEY’S GROCERY, announced the painted sign out front in big, old-fashioned letters—was practically empty. Who did she think he was buying it for?

“Because the other brand is better,” she said, as if he’d asked. “Not as harsh. And it comes with this little conditioning tube—”

“This is fine,” he interrupted. “And an ice cream bar, please.”

“Self-serve,” she told him. “In the freezer.”

“I know.” He dug in his front jeans pocket for his wallet. “It’s for my sister.”

The cashier glanced toward the front of the store where a freezer case sat next to a bunch of store displays. Sunscreen. Bug spray. Charcoal briquettes. Emily propped the door open, shivering in the fog that rolled off the bags of ice.

The girl behind the cash register arched her eyebrows. “That’s her? That’s your sister?”

His mom was always going on about people in small towns, how everybody knew everybody and looked out for each other. He couldn’t explain he didn’t want people to know him without going into the reasons why, so he just nodded.

Emily selected an ice cream bar, letting the freezer door thump shut. Zack watched her peel back the paper.

“She doesn’t look like you,” observed the cashier.

No, she didn’t. Emily took after their father, Ben: warm brown eyes, warm brown skin, warm, wide smile.

“I’m adopted.”

“You’re kidding.”

Zack lifted one shoulder in a shrug. He didn’t care if she believed him or not.

She blinked her purple-lidded eyes. “Seriously? Because some days I wish I was adopted. I used to pretend that my parents, my
real
parents, my fabulously wealthy real parents who lived in, like, the Bahamas or New York City or someplace . . . Anyway, I used to imagine that one day they’d show up and take me away and give me everything I ever wanted. A pony. A canopy bed. A scholarship to Harvard.”

He bet nobody in this crappy town on this godforsaken rock in the middle of the ocean ever went to Harvard.

“You want a pony,” he repeated.

“I want to get off World’s End,” she said frankly. “I want
choices
in my life.”

Her gaze met his and something sparked. Attraction. Recognition.

He didn’t have any choices either.

“It’s fine if you’re a guy,” the girl added. She nodded toward the snack aisle, where a couple of dudes in flannel shirts loaded up on corn chips and meat byproducts. “Guys work stern for their fathers until they make enough dough to go out on their own. But if you’re a girl, there’s nothing to do here but raise babies or clean houses.”

“You could still work for your father,” Zack said. His mom was big on equal opportunity shit.

“I do. I’m Stephanie Wiley.” In response to his blank look, she added, “Wiley’s Grocery? George Wiley is my dad.”

“Zack Rodriguez.”

“I know. Your mom’s the new doctor, right? You’re a . . . senior?”

“Sophomore.”

“I’m a junior.” She studied him a moment, making him conscious of his big nose and his awkward height and his lack of a driver’s license. She smiled. “Close enough.”

He stared back, his heart pounding. Close enough for what?

An elbow jabbed him hard in the back. “Whatever you’re selling, Stephanie, faggot boy isn’t buying.”

Shit.

Just . . . Shit.

Zack turned to face the two guys from the snack aisle, crowding behind him.

The girl sighed. “Jesus, Todd. Could you be a bigger prick?”

“Why don’t you look and find out?” he invited.

His companion snickered.

Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Ignore these morons. They have limited intelligence and even smaller . . . vocabularies.”

They didn’t need a big vocabulary to get their message across. Zack read it in their hostile looks, their fat, freckled faces, clear as a posted warning:
No Trespassing. Keep Out.

Fine by him. He wasn’t here to make friends.

He dropped a ten on the counter.

“Summer people,” sneered the shorter of the two guys. “Throwing your money around.”

“Shut up, Doug,” the girl said. “He’s one of us.”

But he wasn’t. He couldn’t ever be one of them. That was his problem.

The familiar bubble of panic swelled in his chest, squeezing his lungs until he couldn’t breathe.

He pocketed his change and left.

Morgan of the finfolk leaned against a pillar at the back of the small dark church, chafing against his human form and the need that drove him here. He was still stretched thin from the long sea crossing, his blood cold, his bones fluid, his very essence draining away through the stones at his feet, dissipating with each exhalation.

He filled his lungs painfully. He belonged on Sanctuary supervising the work of reconstruction. He should not have to abandon his duty and his people to chase their errant lord across the ocean.

But the sea lord, Conn ap Llyr, had bowed to his consort’s desire to attend the birth of her niece on the humans’ island of World’s End.

Morgan had been forced to follow.

Which was how he found himself in this human house of God, an unwilling witness to a baptism.

He stirred restively, stifled by the stink of humanity and the atmosphere inside the church.

The air was thick with angels. He could not breathe. The children of air pressed close around him like the brush of wings against his face, like a weight on his chest, like a blade at his throat.

He drew another painful breath as the priest fumbled with his book. “What name do you give this child?”

“Grace Anne,” her parents answered together.

Morgan’s eyes narrowed. He knew the infant’s father, the selkie Dylan Hunter, newly created warden of this island. The dark-haired woman beside him with the cross around her neck must be the child’s mother.

“And what do you ask of God’s church for Grace Anne?”

“Baptism.”

Morgan curled his lip. The children of the sea did not require the sacraments of men. They were one with the First Creation, elemental, immortal.

Or they had been immortal.

They were dying now. His sister, dead. His people, dying while the sea lord dallied on shore.

Morgan’s hand clenched on the cold stone pillar. A silent howl tore through his chest, strong as anger, bleak as the winter wind through caves of ice. Yet his face remained calm, his gaze fixed on the font. He had not let himself feel anything, even despair, in a very long time.

His gaze flickered over the family in the front pew; narrowed in recognition on the selkie Margred, standing beside her human mate, a big man with a strong jaw and a short haircut. Margred had chosen to live as a human. Age as a human. Die as a human.

Yet she appeared content and even more beautiful than Morgan remembered, secure within the circle of her mate’s arm, her belly swollen with his whelp.

Morgan wondered if their child would be born human or shifter. There was simply no way of knowing until it reached the age of puberty, the time of Change.

“
Hope for the future,
” Conn called these half-blood offspring.

Perhaps. Morgan shifted his weight, uncomfortable in his own skin, as restive in his own body as a cat tied in a sack, as a shark confined to a tank.

At the dawn of creation, the children of the sea had lived in balance with their fellow elementals, the children of earth, air, and fire. In recent centuries, however, the seas had sickened and the merfolk had declined. As their numbers and their power dwindled, every birth, every loss, assumed deeper significance. When three of their youngest had disappeared last year, even Morgan had winced at the loss.

Perhaps Conn was right. Maybe a closer alliance with humankind would ensure their survival.

His lips tightened as the infant at the front of the church was signed with water and the cross.

And perhaps it would destroy them.

He turned and stalked from the church.

At least outside he could breathe. The shadowed porch was cool and dim. He staggered like a sailor who had been too long at sea. The smell of grass and decay rose from the church yard, carried on a fresh breeze from the sea. To steady himself, he focused on the things of earth, leaning headstones, blowing grass, a tree.

A pair of children, an older boy and a little girl, turned off the main street, ambling along the crumbling asphalt at the side of the road. Something about the boy, the shape of his head or the set of his shoulders, snagged Morgan’s attention. He narrowed his gaze.

Really, the boy seemed almost familiar, tall and wiry, a mop of hair above a lean, watchful face. Morgan had not known many children. Only the whelps on Sanctuary. Perhaps boys, like puppies, were all the same. This one had yet to fill out, to grow into his hands or his wrists, his feet or his nose. But he looked like . . .

Morgan’s pulse quickened.

Almost exactly like . . .

“
Iestyn?
” Morgan whispered.

But as soon as the name escaped his lips, he damned himself for a fool. This was no missing selkie youth. This boy was bony where Iestyn was lean, black-haired while Iestyn was fair.