Sea Lord (6 page)

They sat, listening to the sound of her retreating footsteps.

The pregnant woman crossed her arms over her stomach and shot Caleb an accusing look. “Smooth,

Cal. Very smooth.”

Caleb rubbed the back of his neck.

“She couldn’t stay,” Margred said.

“Not after that,” the woman—
Regina, that was her name
—said.

“Not at all,” said Dylan. “She’s not involved. She doesn’t even know what’s going on.”

Conn was struck by a sudden vision of Lucy’s face burning in the water of the tide pool.

She was involved. Somehow.

He had to find the reason, a pattern, a clue.

He clasped his hands behind him and directed a look at Dylan. “Neither do I. Yet. No doubt you are

about to enlighten me.”

3

CONN WAS NOT HIS FATHER. HE DID NOT EXPEND energy in needless emotion. But listening

to Dylan’s report, Conn was aware of a hard, cold lump beneath his breastbone, a warning pulse in his

blood, that felt disconcertingly like anger.

Buggering hell.

He tightened his hands behind his back. “They tried to kill your child,” he said. “A selkie child. A

daughter of Atargatis.”

It was the threat he feared.

And the answer he had come looking for.

Regina spread her hands over her stomach. “We don’t know yet if the baby’s selkie. Or even if it’s a girl.

The ultrasound won’t be accurate for another couple of weeks. But that woman—the devil

woman—was definitely trying to end the pregnancy. I was just . . . What do you call it?”

“Collateral damage,” Caleb said in a grim voice.

Conn ignored them both. “And you did nothing,” he said to Dylan.

Dylan flushed the way he used to when he first came to live at Sanctuary, a thin, sulky adolescent with

more attitude than sense. “I warded the island.”

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“You knew I was waiting to hear from you.”

“I sent the
whaleyn
.”

The humpbacks’ song was rich and nuanced. But it lacked the clarity of human communication.

“You should have come yourself,” Conn said.

He had wasted weeks in the expectation that Dylan would return to Sanctuary to make his report—a

mere eyeblink in the centuries of a selkie’s existence. However, in the current contest with the children of

fire, even time was Conn’s enemy.

Dylan gave him a level look, reminding Conn he was not a boy any longer. “I couldn’t leave them,” he

said.

Them.
His woman. His child.
The daughter of the prophecy?
Conn wondered. The
targair inghean
.

“You could have brought them with you,” he said. Though what in all the seven seas he was to do with

them . . .

Dylan shook his head. “Regina shouldn’t travel.”

“I wouldn’t leave anyway,” she said. “I’ve got family here. A kid. A life.”

Conn raised his eyebrows. “And if you lose your life? What becomes of your child then?”

She pressed her lips together.

The big man with the quiet eyes—Caleb, Dylan’s brother—stirred by the door. “She fought. We all

fought the battle that came to us. Where the fuck were you?”

In his tower on Sanctuary, trying to hold a castle of sand against the encroaching tide.

“You see a battle,” Conn said coldly. “I see the war.”

Caleb stuck his thumbs in his pockets. “So we’re just more collateral damage?”

“Not if you come to Sanctuary,” Conn said.

They all gaped at him.

Not the reaction he was hoping for.

“In attacking you, the children of fire have exposed their weakness. They fear you. Or at least,” he added

carefully, “they fear the children to come after you. The daughters of Atargatis are a threat to them.”

And an advantage to me, Conn thought but did not say. A tool. A weapon to be grasped.

Lucy’s face—watchful eyes between curtains of thick, fair hair—flashed briefly in his brain.

But it was her brothers who concerned him now.

“Come to Sanctuary,” he repeated. “Where I can protect you.”

“Protect?” Margred asked. “Or control?”

“You will be safe there,” Conn insisted.

“We’re safe here,” said Dylan’s woman. “Dylan warded the whole island.”

“Dylan is but one,” Conn said. The youngest and least of his wardens. “There are a dozen guardians on

Sanctuary.”

Or there could be.

He would call them back, he decided. The ranks of the wardens had thinned as their people dwindled, as

their magic declined. There were fewer than a hundred now. Too many of the seaborn had been lost as

Conn’s father was lost to the bliss of the land beneath the wave. Atargatis had been among the last of the

old ones to still take human form. Which made preserving her bloodline even more important.

“Well, I’m the only cop on World’s End,” Caleb said. “I can’t just pack up and leave. I have a

responsibility to the people here.”

Conn looked pointedly at Margred. “Greater than your responsibility to her? To the children you might

have together?”

Margred sucked in her breath.

“There aren’t going to be any children,” Caleb said flatly.

“There could be,” Margred said.

Her husband’s face set like stone. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“So you keep saying. Or we would have a baby by now.”

Conn, sensing weakness, pressed his argument home like a sword. “Have your baby on Sanctuary.

Where you both will be safe.”

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Margred’s mouth opened. Closed.

“Want a piece of candy, little girl?” Regina muttered.

Dylan shot her a warning look.

“What? We already talked this over,” she said. “I won’t leave Ma. And I’m not ripping Nick away from

the only life he’s ever known to hang with the lost boys in Never-land.”

“All right,” Dylan said. “If—”

“You need time to consider,” Conn said before they could refuse.

The lump under his ribs had coalesced into a hard, cold knot. More was at stake here than their human

ties or loyalties, than their practical considerations or their pride. More was at risk than their safety.

The demons were circling World’s End, drawn to the promise of power like sharks to the scent of blood.

If Conn could preserve Atargatis’s bloodline . . .

He regarded them a moment: two humans, a selkie who had lost her pelt, and a warden just coming into

his power. The heirs of Atargatis. The key to the prophecy.

The knot in his chest tightened.

“I’ll leave you to talk,” he said.

Caleb gave a short nod.

But at the entrance to the hall, Conn paused. “You should ask your sister what she wants.”

“Lucy?” asked Regina.

“She’s not selkie,” Dylan said.

“She carries the bloodline,” Conn said. “She has a right to choose.”

“Lucy would never leave the island,” Caleb said. “She almost didn’t go away to college. She’s happy

here.”

Conn raised his brows. “Is she?”

“Isn’t she?” Margred asked.

“Ask her,” Conn said again.

He gripped the door handle when something—a noise, a scent, a sense like a breath at the back of his

neck—dragged his gaze upward.

Lucy stood almost hidden in the crook of the narrow stairs, a hand pressed to her mouth. In the

shadows, her eyes blazed.

His heart leaped.

Their gazes locked.

She blinked, and it was as if the brightness had never been.

Conn swallowed a snarl of disappointment. “A message at the inn will find me,” he said tightly to no one

in particular. “When you are ready to talk.”

Opening the door, he stalked into the night.

Lucy stabbed her spade into the soil.
Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms

. . .

Which was stupid. She knew her family loved her. She loved them. But the silly jingle played over and

over in her head like a bad song on the radio, complete with a slide show of scenes from last night.

The Hunter family had never been big on Sharing Their Feelings. Every child growing up in an alcoholic

household learned to protect its secrets. Lucy had spent most of her life avoiding questions from friends,

teachers, and well-meaning neighbors.
Where is your mother? How is your father? Why did you

move back?

But now the things her family would not say were threatening to split them apart. And the people with the

answers, the people Lucy loved, weren’t talking.

At least not to her.

She ripped a potato from the garden. The fat root exploded from the ground in a shower of dirt that did

nothing to relieve her hurt or frustration.

Use words
, she told her students when they were overwhelmed by the need to scream and kick and

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bite. Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she? After Conn had left, she’d gone into the living room to talk to her

family. But all her questions, all her overtures, had died a slow and miserable death in the face of their

determined noncommunication, killed by Dylan’s stubborn silence and Caleb’s dismissive reassurances.

She rubbed the potato against her jeans, leaving a long smear of dirt.

Caleb’s reaction hurt the most. Her brother had raised her from the time she was in diapers until he left

on a ROTC scholarship the year she turned nine. All through middle and high school, Cal had still been

there for her, making trips home for holidays and school assemblies, sending checks on her birthday. She

trusted him with . . . almost everything.

He didn’t trust her. His lack of faith stung.

Well, if Cal couldn’t treat her like a grown-up, she knew someone who would.

She glanced toward the edge of the field. Assuming he came.

She thought—she hoped—he would come. Otherwise, why bother making that cryptic announcement at

the door? “
A message at the inn will find me when you are ready to talk.
”

She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, smearing them even more. Ready to talk? Maybe. Ready to

listen anyway. Anything was better than being cut off from her family by this awful not-knowing.

She watched him emerge from the shadow of the woods like a surfer sliding from beneath a wave. He

wasn’t a stranger anymore.

That didn’t stop the drop in her stomach, the scrambling of her pulse.

“You came,” she said foolishly as Conn approached over the sun-streaked furrows.

No jacket today. No tie. The collar of his dress shirt—Dylan’s dress shirt—was unbuttoned, the sleeves

rolled up. Fine, dark hair dusted his arms. Otherwise, he looked the same, same slightly hooked nose,

same unsmiling mouth, same cool eyes.

The color of rain, Lucy thought again and shivered with apprehension and desire.

She wished suddenly, passionately, that she could turn the clock back, roll the world back to the way it

had been twenty-four hours ago when he had first walked across the fields and into her life. Before she

knew her brothers were lying to her. Before she was forced to a decision.

His brows arched. “You asked me to come.”

“
You can talk to me,
” he’d said.

“Yeah.” She swallowed. She must have been out of her mind. “You said . . . Last night you said I had the

right to choose.”

Silence. A long, assessing, how-much-should-I-tell-her kind of silence, while her heart beat faster and

her blood drummed in her ears.

“I was mistaken,” he said at last.

Disappointment flattened her mouth. She took a step closer. “I want to know what’s going on.”

His cool, light eyes considered her face. “What did your brothers tell you?”

“Dylan didn’t say anything. And Caleb . . .” Lucy bit her lip, a small pain to counter the ache at her heart.

“Cal said what I don’t know can’t hurt me.”

But it hurt already.

“They treat you like the girl they left behind,” Conn said.

She met his gaze, grateful for his understanding. “Pretty much.”

“You are very young,” he observed.

“Twenty-three.”

“Almost a quarter century,” he said, gently mocking.

She narrowed her eyes. She was tired of being shut out, frustrated at being dismissed, sick of being good

and quiet and alone. “Old enough,” she said.

His gaze met hers. The air charged between them. She felt a tingle like static electricity all along her skin,

the shock of wetness between her thighs.

“Are you indeed?” he murmured.

She swallowed. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t want . . .”