Beth snaked her arms around his neck and gave in to the impulse she had been fighting all day—to touch her lips to his.

The moment she did that, he let out a moan deep in his throat, his fingers fumbling, and a touch wasn’t enough. Her mouth claimed his, tongue dipping inside to discover that he did, as expected, taste of warm salt and sea-spray, and something else that she couldn’t identify, but immediately wanted more of. This was her dream, all of her dreams recently, only even better.

About the Author

ANNA LEONARD is the nom d’paranormal for fantasy/horror writer Laura Anne Gilman, who grew up wondering why none of the characters in her favorite Gothic novels ever seemed to know a damn thing about ghosts, vampires, or how to run in high heels. She is delighted that the newest generation of heroines has a much better grasp on things. “Anna” lives in New York City, where either nothing or everything is paranormal.

Both can be reached via: www.sff.net/people/lauraanne. gilman or http://cosanostradamus.blogspot.com.

THE HUNTED

ANNA LEONARD

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

My family spent many summer vacations along the Massachusetts coast, and the sound and smell of the ocean is one of my strongest memories even now. When the idea of a selkie hero came to me, the decision to set the story on the Cape was a no-brainer. Of course, that also meant that both my hero and heroine are of the staunch Yankee breed—occasionally (often) too stubborn for their own good, but fierce when the ones they love are threatened.

Any passing resemblance to family members may not be entirely coincidental …

Laura Anne Gilman

For Amy and Larry

Prologue

Miles away, in another world, a young male in his prime leaned back, and thought about a woman.

He didn’t know her name. Or what she looked like. Or the sound of her voice or her favorite foods. He didn’t know anything about her, not even that she, specifically, existed. But he woke one morning to the sound of rain on the water, and couldn’t stop thinking about her.

The obsession was hard on him, shadowing his every move, every hour of the day, filling his thoughts, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

He rolled over on his side and stared out over the ever-moving surface of the sea. No, that wasn’t the truth. He knew exactly what to do about it. He just didn’t want to.

Life was good, right now. The outcropping of rock was warm underneath him, his sleek, powerful muscles slack and relaxed after a day of hard swimming, and the ocean spray tingled on his bare skin, milky-pale despite the hours spent exposed to the elements. He could stay here all day, sleep out under the cool wind and bright stars. Or he could swim back home to the little village where his family lived, the comfortable cottage where there would be fresh-caught fish on the table, and a squabble of nieces and nephews to wrestle with, and the pleasure of a new season of warmth and life to celebrate on this first full week of spring.

Life was good. On any other day, any other time of his life, he would be content with the gifts he had been given, to be alive and healthy and surrounded by everything he could possibly want.

But now something tingled in his blood, making him restless and moody. Not just this day: all week, ever since the equinox. Life might be good, but he wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t satisfied with the way anything tasted, wasn’t taking pleasure in anything that he normally enjoyed. Even his temper, normally even and calm, was frayed and ragged.

His blood-kin abandoned him first, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at his growls and twitches, telling him without words that they wouldn’t put up with his behavior. His seal-kin lasted longer, their patient eyes and soft plush fur giving comfort until his increasing discomfort drove them away as well, searching out other places to bask in the spring sunshine and leaving him alone on the rock.

He knew what was wrong. Or rather, what was right. Even if he hadn’t observed it in others, instinct would drive him. The temper, the frustration, the desire to pick a fight with his nearest and dearest … He needed to mate.

No, that wasn’t accurate. He’d been through lust before, and this was … more. He needed to find the female who would stay with him, not for a night or even a season, but forever.

Somewhere out there, this woman existed. The simple fact of her being was firing his blood, making him dream of her skin, her hair, the feel of her wrapped around him, of him fitting inside her so perfectly, body and soul …

All he had to do was find her, woo her, win her.

It was a simple enough thing, in theory. Not every seal-kin partnered for life—his own mother had several mates, one of them his father, and was on good terms with them all—but it happened often enough. Always the same way: an impossible pull, tugging the male to bend to its will until the female was found and won, wooed and well mated. But the others males always seemed able to find what—who—they needed among the blood-kin, the eight Families that made up this colony. If a mate was not there, they sometimes traveled north or south, to meet up with other colonies. Places that were known, were filled with familiar names and shared histories.

He didn’t feel a pull that way. He felt pulled westward. West, across the sea, toward the setting sun.

He covered his face with his arm, trying to block out the need. There were no colonies to the west that anyone knew of. Nobody had gone west in generations. He would not find what he needed.

That knowledge did not stop the pull, inexorable as the tides.

It felt wrong, to go against what was traditional. And he resented this pull his body had on him, when it wasn’t what he had been planning. He hadn’t even thought to take a breeding-mate for another few seasons, much less life-mating.

But his people trusted their instincts. Instinct was what kept them alive and free, even when other colonies were wiped out by Hunters, by pollution, by the slow eroding of their territories. Instinct, and not being too stubborn, too stupid to acknowledge simple truths.

So when the itch became too much, the need overwhelming, and the warmth of the rock no longer soothed, he slipped shoulder-first into the cold waters of the Atlantic, ignoring the storm clouds forming in the distant east, and, without a word of farewell to anyone, swam toward the pull.

Chapter 1

Beth Havelock was restless. She moved back and forth in her workroom, touching projects but not actually doing anything with them. The paper cutter was cleared off, the trash emptied, the work counter scrubbed, pens capped and sorted, to-file box filed down to the last proof sheet and invoice. Chemicals were sorted, the older ones pulled to the front of the darkroom’s cabinet, the newer ones pushed to the back. She even changed the batteries in all the smoke detectors in the house a week early, and then, still needing something to do, went back into her workroom on the first floor and rinsed out all of the extra developing trays, setting them to dry upside down on the counter. Still, she felt the need to be moving, doing.

Her bare feet scrunched against the cold tile floor, her toes flexing and releasing as though picking up the motion her hands were forbidden, the tension thrumming through her entire body, nose to toes.

“Good lord, what is it with you, woman?” Her voice echoed in the tile-and-chrome workroom, startling her even though she was the one who had spoken.

She was well ahead of her deadlines—waking early and restless did wonderful things to her to-do list, even if it was making her antsy beyond belief. Business was good right now, but not good enough to keep up with her sudden surge of energy, as though she had been mainlining energy drinks and chocolate rather than her usual healthy diet. Maybe she should switch to chocolate bars and soda for a week, see what that did for her.

“All that will do is give you zits like you were fourteen again,” she said, horrified by the thought. “It’s spring fever like usual, that’s all.” It wasn’t anything unusual for her, for all that it seemed more severe. She got like this every year, when the weather finally began to soften, and the days started getting longer. This winter had been a particularly rough one along the New England coast, and when they weren’t getting hit with surprisingly heavy snowfall, they were being battered by seemingly nonstop nor’easters. Waves and wind were nothing new to hardy Nantucketers like the Havelocks, but after several months of overcast white skies and the never-ending howl of the wind, that first day of spring, when the skies were blue and the air mild, could rouse even the most phlegmatic of New Englander into flights of relative fancy. And while Beth Havelock was many things from practical to responsible, she wasn’t phlegmatic.

She also wasn’t focusing at all. That really wasn’t like her. Normally, once she settled in to work she could shut out any distraction, not noticing anything except what she was doing. Today, even the sound of a bird singing outside was enough to break her concentration.

She sighed, moving away from the window and staring at the far wall. It was painted a darker white than the other walls, intentionally, to better showcase the photos mounted there. Her own work ran the gamut, from a traditionally posed wedding photo of a bride and groom, to three dolphins leaping in the surf, to a single lonely form standing on the rocks at night, like a human watchtower. She was a good photographer, although not good enough to make a living at it. Her technical skills were better than her artistic ones. But sometimes she caught just the right moment, like the photograph at the end that, no matter how many times she saw it, always caught her attention: a single harp seal, pulled up onto a shelf of rock, gazing up at her with sad eyes … and one flipper raised in what, in a human, would have been a rude gesture.

Even on bad days when everything was going to crap, that photo could always make her laugh. Today, instead, it filled her with a strange sense of wistfulness.

Giving in to her mood, she locked up the darkroom, put away her materials and, still barefoot, left the work space on the second floor of her Victorian-era home. That was the advantage to working for herself, rather than reporting to an office. Worse pay, longer hours, but moderately better perks, including the ability to work at 4:00 a.m.—or take off at 4:00 p.m. Rather than heading downstairs to the rambling porch and the enticements of the still-sleeping garden, however, Beth went up to the third floor, to the room at the end of the hall.

The room had been her mother’s workroom when Beth was growing up. The drafting table was still pushed up against the wall, but it was bare and empty. The pencils, papers and watercolors that used to clutter the space were long gone, as was her mother. The memories were there, but tucked away, out of daily reach. Now the room was simply something Beth walked through to get to the great wooden door set in the far wall.

That door led out to a narrow walkway running along the roof-edge of her home.

A widow’s walk, it was called. A platform, with waist-high rails all around, that circled the house’s two chimneys, and gave Beth an almost unobstructed view of the ocean beyond the boundaries of the small town of Seastone, Massachusetts.

She leaned against the railing, feeling the wind tangle in her sleek black hair and tie it into elf knots. When she was a little girl, her father would sneak her and her cousin up here. Her mother, working at her sketches, would pretend not to see or hear them as they crept, giggling, past her. They would watch the sailboats in the harbor, and the great fishing boats and tankers passing by much farther out in the green-capped waves.

Beth was older now, her family long gone, and her hair was cut short, above her shoulders, but the wind still tangled it in exactly the same way, as though a giant hand were tousling it.

And she still leaned against the railing of the widow’s walk and watched the boats slip by. Only now, rather than feeling a sense of history and contentment when she watched them, Beth felt her restlessness increase until it was an almost physical ache in her legs and arms.

Did everyone feel it, in the quiet pockets of the day when nothing else occupied their minds and bodies? Or was it just her, this strange echoing, like there was something scooped out and hollow inside, when the seasons shifted and the winds changed? She had almost asked friends and total strangers, time and again, when she was away at college in Boston, and after, when she came home, when this whimsical mood attached itself to her. Each time, something had held her back from actually saying something. Fear of an answer, perhaps. Of discovering that yes, it was only her. That only she felt it, and nobody else would ever understand.

Not that it mattered. Each time winter or summer came, the restlessness passed, and she found purpose and focus again.

“More of the same. Always more of the same.” And yet, even as she said it, trying to reassure herself, something deep inside told her that there was more to it this time than simple spring fever. Something that surged inside her like a tidal pool, swirling and wearing at her, matching the physical ache with a pool of longing for.

For what?

Beth didn’t know. This spring, for some reason, it was different. Stronger. More painful. Usually standing up here and watching the waves move on the surface of the ocean took the harsh edges off, and a bit of physical activity—a bike ride, a hike along the dunes—dealt with the rest, got her through until it went away.

She wasn’t so sure it would be enough, this spring.

Once, her father would somehow sense her mood and swing her by the arms, tossing her into the pile of leaves they had raked up on the sloping backyard, or a pile of new-mown grass. Her cousin Tal, nobody ever called him Talbot, would leap after her, and they would wrestle. her father would laugh so hard he had to sit on the ground to recover, and they would leap on him, and the restlessness would disappear, chased out and forgotten.

Had her father known the same restlessness? If he were still here, would he be able to explain it away, give her the way to deal with it, the words to explain it?

It didn’t matter. He wasn’t here. All gone: father, mother and Tal, her entire family gone in one split second on a rainy highway nearly fifteen years ago. She was the only one left. The one left behind. Would she feel this way, if they had been spared? Would the feeling of separation, of restlessness be soothed by their presence? Or would it have been worse, knowing for certain that there was no one out there who could understand?

A trill at her hip interrupted her morbid thoughts, and she flipped open her cell phone to answer it. “Jake, hi.” Jacob Brown—Jake to his friends, which some days seemed to include every person living in Seastone and the surrounding towns. Open-faced and blueeyed, with a row of freckles better suited to a ten-year-old and the physique of a high school quarterback.

Five years they had been dating, since the summer they both turned twenty-four and got drunk together while sitting on the seawall at midnight. It wasn’t a great love, but it was comfortable, and they knew what to expect from each other. Five years, and neither seemingly eager to move forward, or move away from where they were. Every month for the past year Beth had resolved to end it, and every month Jake agreed with her, and yet they still found themselves having dinner and sex on a regular basis.

There was a lot to be said for stability. For knowing what you would be doing each day, and each night, and with whom, and what was expected of you, and what you could expect of them. Sudden changes had never been good things, for her.

“We still on for dinner?” she asked him, giving in once again to habit.

“Maybe not tonight. Storm’s coming up, according to the screens. Looks like it might be a doozy.”

A storm might explain her mood. Storms did that to her, when they came in off the ocean. “You afraid of a little rain?” she teased, glad for distraction from her own distraction.

“More likely a lot of wind, which means we’re probably going to lose power on half the island.” Jake was a Realtor, and the property manager for a number of nearby summer homes. If anything happened, he was the guy who had to deal with it, while the owners were safe and dry on the mainland. “Anyway, you remember what happened the last time we went out in a bad spring storm, at, I might add, your instigation?”

She did. Unlike Jake, she still thought it was funny, smiling now at the memory. How many people could say that they got chased across a beach by an irate and very lost bull seal? It wouldn’t actually have hurt them—seals were peaceable creatures, as a rule, unless you got near them during breeding or whelping seasons—but Jake’s ego had apparently been bruised something fierce by the experience.

Beth’s smile widened. “Point taken, forgive me. All right, no rain-swept walks on the beach. So we’ll eat somewhere in town?”

“Look … can we make a rain check? Literally?” He sounded distracted now, and she could hear the clicking of computer keys in the background. He must be checking on his clients, probably scanning the weather networks, too. Multitasking always made him cranky.

Beth looked up at the sky, watching newly arrived clouds scud past, wispy white against the pale blue. It looked innocent enough, but she had grown up watching these skies, learning the warning signs. Storms could come up fast, even when it looked clear, especially in the spring. She should know that by now. “Sure,” she said, sighing. It wasn’t like it mattered, anyway. Dinner with Jake wasn’t going to do anything about her feeling of restlessness. It never did. That was part of the problem.

She listened to his agreement, then ended the call.

She didn’t want to reschedule. She didn’t want to have dinner with Jake at all, truth be told. She didn’t want a casual, comfortable dinner where they talked about things they had talked about for years, until the edges were all worn off and it was soft and easy and no surprises, followed by sex that was … Well, it was nice. Enjoyable. But not surprising. Not … passionate.

She wanted passion tonight. She wanted to have a nice rough tumble in the sheets. Something dirty and sweet, sweaty and ache-inducing. Complete with biting and bruising, thrown clothing, tangled sheets, and no regrets, come the morning.

“Yeah, and that’s gonna happen,” she said, shaking her head. Jake was a sweet, tender lover. Careful and considerate, always whispering endearments. He was a good man.

He just wasn’t The One. Whatever that meant.

Disgusted with herself, Beth rubbed the smooth surface of the teak railing, as though to wipe those treasonous thoughts out of her head, but they wouldn’t go.

She was very fond of Jake. He was a great guy. But they were never going to go anywhere except in circles. And after five years … that wasn’t enough. They both knew it. And suddenly, right now, the lack made her want to scream.

“Spring fever. That’s all. You get it every year.” But even as she went inside, closing the door behind her as though to block out the disturbing influences of the salt-and pollenladen air, Beth knew that there was more to it than that. Something was rising in her, like the storm surge and just as impossible to control.

A glance out the window showed her Jake had been right—the storm was coming in, and coming hard. Even in the half hour since she had left the roof, things had picked up speed. The sea was agitated, churning back and forth, and the sky seemed lower than normal, visibility poor and getting worse. Pity the sailor caught out in this, if they didn’t make it home in time. At best they would lose their lunch over the side. At worst …

Worst in a storm could get pretty bad.

Her head was muzzy and stuffed, and her skin felt too tight. Maybe she was coming down with something.

She changed into an old pair of jeans and a thick fleece sweatshirt and went down to the kitchen to make her usual virus-fighting dinner of fresh pasta and vegetables, steamed and tossed with fresh-grated cheese, garlic and cracked pepper, and a beer that she didn’t finish. The taste was off, flat and metallic.

“Yeah, probably coming down with a cold. Joy.” She poured the beer down the drain, left the dishes in the sink and went back into the office, determined to get something accomplished today other than fretting and woolgathering. A client had sent her a number of old family photos, browned, yellowed and cracked, to be scanned and digitally repaired. Her professional shingle might say Elizabeth Havelock, Photography, but it was this restoration work that kept the mortgage paid and the groceries coming in.

Ten minutes of prep calmed her enough to start working, and another ten minutes into the project, and finally the panacea of work did its job, at least enough for her to forget her fuzzy-headed twitchiness. The whir of the scanner and the clicking of the mouse were soothing as she studied the image on the oversize flat-screen monitor that was her pride and joy, and made minute corrections to the photo, bringing the damaged photograph back to life. There was a crack across the woman’s face that slowly mended, half-inch by half-inch. Her world narrowed to the mouse and the screen and the pixels healing like magic under her application. It wasn’t art, wasn’t groundbreaking, news-making work, but it was satisfying in its own way.

The storm finally broke around 7:00 p.m., with the sudden hard patter of rain on the roof, followed almost immediately by a heavy crack of lightning overhead, and the low, rumbling echo of thunder rolling in from the ocean. The sense of sudden, almost painful relief flooding her body took her by surprise, and her shoulders, which Beth hadn’t even realized were hunched while she worked, relaxed immediately. She looked out the single window in the studio. Branches bowed and waved in the wind, and water splattered against the window, echoing from every pane in the house.

Storms sounded different out here than they did on the mainland. Hell, storms were different. When it rained in Boston, when she was in college, it never felt this … soothing.

Thunder crashed again, and she shook her head. “And that puts an end to that for the evening,” she said, shutting down her computer once everything was backed up. You didn’t take chances with the electronics in an old house during a spring storm, especially when those electronics represented your livelihood.

No sooner had she thought that than the overhead lights flickered, came back on and then went out. The familiar steady hum she barely heard anymore died as well, leaving the house in an almost supernatural stillness broken only by the rain.

“Jinx,” she muttered. Well, she was officially off the clock now. Mother Nature insisted.

In the drawer of her desk there was a flashlight, and she used it to find her way to the store of candles, the sound of thick, heavy raindrops on the roof and windows following her as she went through the house. The linen closet on the second floor was the repository of all blackout supplies—extra gallons of water, a box of protein bars, dry shampoo and soap, and an entire shelf filled with thick pillar candles.

Beth’s practical streak failed her when it came to candles. These were handmade by a local craftswoman, lilac in color and scented with clean, crisp lavender and sea grass. Picking three of the candles off the shelf, along with a book of matches, she closed the closet door and went back downstairs to the main parlor. It had always been her favorite room, aside from the corner bedroom that had been hers all her life, and if the storm was going to go all night, then that was where she would wait it out.

One pillar went on the walnut coffee table, one on the plaster mantel over the fireplace and the third she positioned on the table next to the old cracked leather sofa. Using only one match to light them all, the room was soon bathed in a warm, comforting light. There was something about the flickering of candle flame that she adored; it didn’t fill the room the way artificial light did, but it seemed to illuminate better, somehow. The antiques in the room looked better in firelight: her great-grandfather’s spyglass; the rough but gorgeous little carvings of ivory that dated back to when whaling was the industry on this island; the handmade wooden ships her father had collected, three-and two-masters, all perfect down to the last detail, including the narrow boats lashed to their sides. Neither she nor Tal had ever felt the desire to play with them when they were children. They would watch them for hours, but never once had she taken one down other than to dust or display it for someone else. It was as though it was forbidden to look too closely, to ask too much, although her parents had never forbidden her or Tal anything of the sort.

Now, in the candlelight, she watched the shadows their masts and riggings made on the cream-painted walls, and felt some of her restlessness subside. Those boats were her inheritance, as much as this house; they told the story of her great-grandfather helping to build the fleets that used to ply these waters, her grandfather’s specialization in the carpentry of higher-end boats that put her dad through college, and her own dad’s fascination with boats that never seemed to translate into anything larger than those models. An entire family, tied to the shoreline without ever actually going out to sea. Beth suddenly wondered why she felt no particular draw toward boats, why Tal had actually gotten seasick the one time he went out on a fishing boat when they were in grade school. Maybe it was something genetic, and the further from their shipbuilding great-grandfather you got, the less you cared?

“Maybe it was just the storm,” she said. “Maybe I need a vacation. Get off the island for a little bit. Maybe go inland, see a forest or a mountain.” She had never gone more than a day’s travel inland; there were entire stretches of the country she had never seen except as the backdrop for movies on the television. Maybe she could get a passport, leave the country. See England, or Paris, or …

Her imagination failed her. She didn’t have a passport. She’d never been on a plane. She didn’t even watch the Travel Channel, for God’s sake. “Maybe it’s time to change all of that,” she said. “Do something different.”

A crack of thunder and a flash of lightning directly overhead sounded as though in answer.

“Fine, but is that a yes or a no?” she asked the ceiling, half expecting a reply. But the lights stayed off, the rain came down and no further electrical energy exploded overhead.

“Thanks for nothing,” she said, curling up on the sofa, her arms around her knees. Her attention was drawn, not to the shadows now, or even the fireplace, laid with wood already in case she wanted one last fire before warmer weather came in, but into the next room, where a plate-glass window looked out over the small front yard, over the tops of smaller Cape-style houses, down the road that led to the shoreline.

There were lights flickering outside, on the road heading toward the beach. Most of them were white headlights, but—she squinted—at least one or two were red. Cops. Or an ambulance.

There wasn’t anything she could do, if there had been an accident, either some idiot in a car, or a greater idiot in a boat. She had the basics of CPR, courtesy of a town-wide push last summer, but she wasn’t a paramedic or anything useful. There was nothing she could do at the scene other than clutter it up and get herself soaked. There was no reason she was extinguishing the candles, grabbing the flashlight, an oiled baseball cap and her raincoat, and grabbing the keys to her Toyota.

No reason at all. Except a sudden need to be there, to see what the storm had brought in.

The rain almost knocked her little car to the side of the road a time or two, but she got to the beach without disaster. The rain and clouds made it seem much later in the evening, closer to midnight than 8:00 p.m., and added to the unreality of the entire scene, to Beth. There were dark forms on the sand, over the dunes: people gathered, and a single vehicle with the red lights on top that marked it as belonging to the rescue squad.

Not an accident, then. Not a car, anyway. And no sign of wreckage that you’d expect, if someone were stupid enough to take a boat out with a storm coming in …

She parked and got out, startled by how noisy the rain was, once she was in it. Cold and hard, and even through her rain slicker she was quickly drenched. The cap kept the water off her face, but nothing more than that, and her hair stuck to her scalp unpleasantly.

“Get the stretcher over here!” a man’s voice yelled. “And you people, back off! You’d think you’d never seen a moron before.”

“Never one out of uniform” the retort came back from one of the bystanders, a woman. Beth slowed her steps a little. Obviously, whoever it was was still alive, and not in critical danger, if they were mouthing off over his body. Nobody here was quite hardened enough to crack jokes over a dead body. Something prickled on the back of her neck, like a spider walking there, or the unexpected touch of a warm hand. She flinched, and then looked around, feeling embarrassed, but there wasn’t anything but the crowd gathered, seven or eight people, including herself. And yet, somehow, the feeling remained, like some phantom hand rested just above her collar.

It wasn’t like her to spook at anything, much less nothing. After one last look around, she shrugged off the feeling and turned to the much more real scene in front of her.

“Evening, Beth.” The nearest dark form in rain hat and slicker turned out to be Mrs. Daley, who had taught seventh-grade math to Beth and her cousin, with variable success. She was in her sixties now, but still held students in thrall with a voice of steel and a heart of marshmallow.

“What happened?” Beth asked her.

“No idea. The call went out from the lighthouse about an hour ago—they spotted something in the water. So we came out to search.”

“We” in this case was the self-titled border patrol, a group of locals who came out when a whale or dolphin beached itself, or a ship got into trouble, or any other crisis requiring a pair of hands and a strong back. Mrs. Daley was a charter member.

“And found …”

“One body, male.” Mrs. Daley leaned in, laughter in her voice even if Beth couldn’t see her face clearly in the dusk and rain. “Nude.”

“Mrs. Daley!” Beth had to laugh, and immediately felt bad about it. “He’s all right, though?”

The older woman nodded. “Out cold, but doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. In any sense of the word. Spoilsport Josiah had to go and throw a blanket over him, though. Poor boy. I hope there wasn’t anyone else out there with him.”

Beth assumed that she meant the stranger, not Josiah. “A boat wreck, then?”

“Well, what else could it be, wash him up here, a night like tonight? No debris, that anyone’s seen, but you think he was just out for a casual swim? In that water?”

The Atlantic Ocean was not a gentle body of water, even in summer. It was only spring now, which meant that the water was still too cold for anyone but the most fervent polar bear or long-distance swimmer to be out in it. Although you never knew what someone from Away, a non-Islander, might do; people came here and did stupid things, all the time. Usually in tourist season, though.

Beth felt that prickle again, this time all down her spine, and she shivered. Not a warm hand this time; more like the sleek dark shadow of something swimming in the deep waters below her.

The crowd parted, and she could see that the paramedics were loading him onto the stretcher now. Drawn by the same urgency that got her down there, Beth moved forward, needing for some reason to see the face of this stranger.

“Miss, stay back, please.” She didn’t know the paramedic; he must have been new. Not that she knew everyone in town—it was small but not that small—but almost everyone was on nodding basis with everyone else.

That thought put the words in her mouth. “I … want to make sure I don’t know him.”

It wasn’t totally a lie. She did want to make sure of that. She didn’t think there was a chance in hell she did know him, but it worked; the paramedic moved aside just enough for her to see the guy’s face in the light of the emergency vehicle’s headlights.

Pale skin, even allowing for shock and being washed out under those flashing red lights. Clean-shaven, with broad, strong cheekbones. Masculine, without being heavy or brutish. The light flickered, highlighting reddish glints in thick black hair so much like hers—there was a moment of shock, and Beth felt her knees almost give out under her.

“Ma’am?” The paramedic was right there at her elbow. “Do you know him?”

That moment of concern allowed her to get close enough to touch the stranger, the flesh of one arm outside the blanket, wet from seawater and rain, cold but not dead-cold, just wet-cold.

“No.” Her breath came back in a rush, and her heart started beating again. No, it wasn’t Tal. It wasn’t her cousin, dead and buried and not haunting her because he would never have been cruel enough to do that. Just some guy with hair the same color and texture his had been, like hers, that was all. Coincidence.

And the look of this guy said he was closer to her age, maybe in his early thirties at most, than Tal’s fifteen when he died. Beth swallowed and forced herself to look again. The features were different, too, now that she could see him more clearly. Tal had been blessed with the family nose, a sort of turned-up snub, and his skin had been darker, his coloring inherited from his Italian father, not the pale-as-flounder Havelock line. This stranger was pale like that, like she was, and his nose was longer, narrower, his mouth wider, the chin more stubborn, and without the five-o’clock shadow that Tal got, even as a teenager.

She touched the stranger’s arm again, driven by an urge that she didn’t understand, and something sparked under her fingers, making her shiver again from something other than the cold.

Something clicked. Something changed, here and now. Chemicals collided in her bloodstream, stars aligned, a wave crested and fell, and she was never going to be the same again.

Beth shook her head, refusing the sense of portent overwhelming her. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing—she was tired, that was all. Tired enough to swear that the guy was shimmering in the rain, that his skin was overlaid with something, some kind of.

A second layer, almost. The kind that she used when she was retouching photographs, to blank out details she didn’t want to use in the final product or distract the eye from things that couldn’t be repaired.

Beth blinked, then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Humans couldn’t be retouched. She was probably running a fever to go with her cold; that would explain it. She needed to get the hell out of the rain, get her overtired imagination under control.

“No,” she said again, backing away before she could touch the body again. “I don’t know him.”

They bundled the stretcher into the ambulance and pulled away slowly over the sand, lights flashing but the siren off. The crowd started to drift away, and Beth drifted with it, back to the house. She shed her raincoat and sneakers just inside the door, then peeled off her sodden jeans and sweater as well, and walked through the house in damp panties and socks. The main bathroom upstairs was old-fashioned enough to still have the original claw-foot tub, and she started the water running hot while she stripped off her socks and underwear and added scented bath salts to the water. Hair piled on top of her head, she sank gratefully into the steaming, sweet-smelling water up to her shoulders and felt her body finally let go of the rain’s chill. She reached up with her toes and managed to shut the tap off before the water reached a dangerously overfull level. Her muscles softened, her eyes closed, and only some remnant of awareness kept her from falling asleep in the tub. When the water cooled enough to rouse her, she hauled her body out of the tub, dried off and put on warm flannel pajamas and slid into bed. The moment her damp head hit the pillow, she was asleep, dreaming of deep green waves, briny air and the slide of warm, warm hands along the inside of her legs and up across her stomach, lingering in places that made her smile in her sleep, as she turned to embrace her pillow as though it were a lover.

Chapter 2

He woke slowly, surfacing with a sense of panic blunted by something soft and sticky.

There was dark and a sudden shock of pain, and … nothing. He opened his eyes, his lashes gummy and stuck together, and discovered that he was in a bed. He knew it was a bed, although he hadn’t slept in one since he was a child, preferring a hammock that mimicked the motion of the waves.

A bed. In a place he didn’t recognize, filled with smells he didn’t recognize.

There were no windows wherever he was, only a single narrow doorway. White surrounded him, white sheets and walls, and shiny metals and plastics and that overwhelming smell of something that made his nostrils flare in distrust and disgust.

Cleansers, part of his brain reminded him. To clean up the shit and the blood. You’re in a hospital.

He had been in one of those, long ago. His sister had torn open her leg on a rusty nail half-submerged off a dock, and she’d had to go to the mainland and have it stitched up. As her favorite sibling, her only brother, closest in age, he had gone with her and their mother, to keep her calm while the doctors did their thing. There had been the same smells, and shots, and the adults had all been annoyed but not really worried.

That was good. Annoyed but not worried meant this was an inconvenience, not a threat. Hospitals were where they helped you. What was this hospital helping him for? What had he done to himself? Nothing hurt, nothing felt wrong … It annoyed him that he couldn’t remember.

“Good morning.”

He turned his head and looked up at a man who was pushing back the curtains and moving to stand beside the bed. An older man, maybe even Elder. Gray hair and beard; the latter was cut into a sharp point on his chin, like a shark’s fin. But the eyes were pale blue and kind.

“Morning,” he responded, his voice raspy, like he’d been yelling. Maybe he had. He couldn’t remember even that much.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me your name?”

He could. He could remember that. But it wouldn’t mean much to this man, his name and colony-connection, identifying him as seal-kin. Nothing this human male could understand. An instant of panic flooded his brain, and then another name came to him from memories of long ago, names and connections to the land …

“Dylan.” He coughed, spoke again more firmly, confidence coming back to him with the memories. “My name’s Dylan. Dylan … Meridith.”

“Excellent.” The man took a thin instrument out of his white coat’s pocket and flicked it on, a narrow beam of light coming from one end. Dylan obediently let him flick the light into one eye and then the other, relieved when the man—a doctor?—grunted in satisfaction and turned the light off. “Look this way, please? And that way. Excellent. No headache? Very good. Lie back now, and relax. You gave us all quite a scare, Mr. Meridith, washing up like that. Usually by the time the Atlantic gets done with bodies, they go to the morgue, not the emergency room.”

He had been swimming, that was right. Heading for shore. Looking …

Looking for his mate. Yes.

Dylan lay back on the pillow, the memories returning now. Bypassing the other colonies to come here, to where humans lived, this arm of land jutting out from the mainland. Swimming, endlessly swimming: so focused that he ignored the warning signs of the storm, when he should have known better. The storm came. Waves knocking him over, being bumped by something, losing consciousness.

And waking up here.

“I. You found me on the sand.” It wasn’t a question; he remembered that, vaguely. Voices and lights, things being done to his body, bringing his temperature back up. He owed those people his life. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Although I had the easy part, just waiting for you to wake up.” He smiled, and the kind blue eyes sparkled with life and humor. “I’m Dr. Alden, by the way, and I’m the one who says when you get to go home. But first, we need to know where home is, exactly.”

Dylan froze. The name he’d given the doctor had been placed in his memory years ago, just in case, but he hadn’t thought of what to say about his home. He hadn’t even thought to think about it.

He trusted this Dr. Alden, instinctively. Despite that, his voice caught before any words escaped. You never told where the colony was. You never betrayed the kin living there. That was the first training seal-kin got, when they first went out among the human-kin. It was too dangerous.

Sometimes, following instinct was good. Sometimes, it was not so good. What was he supposed to do?

Another flash of memory: someone talking over him, something about debris, looking for debris, of … a boat?

“Daughter of the Sea,” he said, buying time with whatever came to mind. “My boat. Is it okay?”

Since there wasn’t any such boat, he wasn’t horribly crushed when Dr. Alden sadly told him that there was no sign of his boat anywhere, not even debris. But it gave him enough time to come up with a story that would get him out of this hospital.

Because he remembered something else from the night before, after the feel of sand under his face and being wrapped in blankets and bundled into a vehicle. He remembered a warm voice, and a cool hand on his skin, and the reaction he’d had, even mostly unconscious, to her presence.

A woman. The woman he had come to find.

She was here.

He had come to the right place, after all. The sea had not betrayed him.

Dr. Alden excused himself and disappeared beyond the curtains, leaving Dylan to sink into the hard comfort of his bed. She was here.

And with that thought, the urgency returned, a wave that would have knocked him over were he not already lying down. Instead, it sent him bolt upright.

He had to find her. Now.

“Where do you think you’re going, young man?”

The doctor appeared next to him, a firm hand on his arm. Dylan would have protested except that he feared, if the human let go, he would fall on his face like a weanling denied milk.

“You said I was fine.”

“I said you hadn’t suffered any permanent damage. That’s not fine. You were badly dehydrated, battered, and unless I miss my guess, your muscles aren’t responding very well to commands even now.”

“I’ll be fine. I …” This doctor had eyes like Dylan’s grandfather: wide-set, sky-blue and gentle, but still able to see through any lie you might even think about telling. “I mean no disrespect, sir. I know that you mean well. But I don’t like being indoors, especially in a medical facility. I’d do better if I could find a place with …with windows, at least.”

“Humph.” The doctor’s gruff voice didn’t match the understanding in those eyes, and Dylan felt himself relax, even as the older man ushered him back onto the bed.

“I’ll tell you what. You let me run a few tests, make me feel better about turning you out into the street, and I’ll sign off on your discharge papers today. Deal?”

Dylan nodded. “Deal.”

Part of the test involved giving up quantities of his blood, and breathing into a strange device of three tubes with small balls inside. Dylan amused himself by making all three balls rise and fall in unison, until Doctor Alden admitted that his lungs were in excellent shape and took the device away. Then, he had to walk the length of the clinic—ten beds and two exam rooms—without faltering.

A glimpse out the one window in the hallway, a single clear pane of glass, reassured him that he was not far from the sea—set on a rise of land, the clinic looked over rooftops toward the wide expanse of water. Dr. Alden left him there, staring out at the horizon, while he went off to do whatever it was that doctors did. Soon enough the nurse came by and shooed him back to his bed, where a pair of dark blue pants, a white shirt and cheap white sneakers waited. “Your clothing didn’t survive your wreck,” she said apologetically. “We had to guess at your size and the color choices were, well, limited.”

“Thank you.” He had left home so quickly, without thinking anything through, he hadn’t even thought about clothing. Or money. Oh, hell.

He dropped the simple robe and reached for the jeans. The nurse let out a noise that was a cross between a giggle and a squeak, and left him to get dressed.

“So.” Dr. Alden appeared without fanfare as he was lacing up the shoes. “No dizziness? No last-minute headache to crash your escape plans?”

“I’m good?” Dylan waited with bated breath for the answer.

“You’re annoyingly good. If all of my patients healed up as quickly as you did, I’d be out of business and have to find honest work.”

The nurse walking by snickered quietly, then ducked her head when the doctor mock-glared at her. “You can see that I get no respect at all, already.”

Dylan wisely stayed out of the argument. At home, females outnumbered males 3:2 and bossed the younger males around mercilessly, giving way only when males reached what his mother called “the interesting age.” That snicker had sounded reassuringly familiar to a man who grew up surrounded by sisters.

“All right. Yes, you get your walking papers, and consider yourself a lucky son of a bitch. Try to keep on top of the water, not under it, from now on?”

Dylan merely smiled and took the papers the doctor handed him, scrawling something on the line for his own signature. His people spent almost half their lives riding underneath the waves. But he appreciated the concern.

Dr. Alden put his own signature on the papers that made his release official and tucked them into his clipboard. “There you go. I want you to check in with your own doctor when you get home, though, just to be on the safe side. All right?”

“I had actually planned on staying in town for a little while,” Dylan admitted. “It seems like a nice place. From the little I saw of it last night.”

Dr. Alden laughed. “Watery and dark, you mean. It is a nice enough place, yes. We avoid the worst of the tourist invasion, and I certainly like it here, but I can’t imagine there’d be much to keep you occupied, unless you’re here for the beach or the views. Still, if you’re going to stay, welcome to you. And feel free to stop by if anything at all feels odd or uneasy.”

“I will. Ah.” Dylan suddenly felt awkward again. Free. Nothing in the human world was free, and he had no money. Nothing at all, except. The weight on his ankle was a sudden, reassuring shock—the anklet, a gift from his sister years before, was so familiar he had forgotten it was there. He could sell that, maybe. Sell it, and settle his debt.

“Don’t worry about it, young Dylan.” Dr. Alden’s eyes were kind again. “Men who show up stark naked on our beach, and don’t immediately ask for a phone to call their family? We don’t expect you’re going to pull out a platinum card. Fortunately, you weren’t exactly a financial burden, not needing much more than a bed and treatment for mild dehydration and exhaustion.”

“Still, I …”

“Someday, when you can, you’ll make a donation. Yes?”

“Yes.” He would. Even if he had to swim all the way back from the colony with the funds clenched between his teeth, he would.

“Do you have somewhere to stay? Tourist town, Nantucket’s become. No decent place cheap anymore. But you go to the Blue Anchor. I’ll call ahead, and Brandt will take care of you for a few days, until you figure things out.”

Seals were communal, and so by default were their kin. But they tended to care only for their own, and strangers were not welcomed. Humans, it seemed, were different. That pleased Dylan, even as it confused him slightly. If they knew how very much a stranger he was, would they still welcome him? Or would they drive him out?

Instinct warned him to stay silent, to try to fit in as quickly and quietly as possible. There was so much he didn’t know, so many ways he could do the wrong thing. He wasn’t used to being uncertain. It pissed him off, both the sensation and the hesitation.

Leaving the clinic, the sharp scent of sea and salt slid into his pores and made his muscles relax after the antiseptic feel of the clinic. The sun was warm overhead, white clouds scudding against a clear blue sky, and the sound of gulls soaring and screaming overhead was like laughter in his ears.

A full day waited in front of him. A full day, and his mate waiting for him, somewhere nearby. The thought that she might be within earshot, even, her silken skin waiting for his touch.

The rush of blood to his groin wasn’t unexpected. The strange tightness in his chest was more of a surprise. He tried to breathe normally, remembering how easy it had been to breathe into the medical apparatus, but the tightness remained. It wasn’t his lungs that weren’t working, but the muscles in his chest, constricting around his heart with a pang that felt a little like hunger, and a little like sadness.

When he claimed his mate, all those emotions would go away. The knowledge came to him the same way awareness of her had, appearing like something he’d always known only never consciously realized until now. He had to find her. Everything would be all right once he found her.

But first, he needed to find a place that would buy his anklet. A jewelry store, or a crafts stall. Or a pawnshop. Something like that, any town of decent size would have to have those, yes? Then, he would go to this bed-and-breakfast. It burned him to take charity, but maybe, if he got enough for the anklet, he wouldn’t have to. Money was the first priority, though. He might be willing to sleep on the beach without fuss, but if he was going to look among humans, he needed to stay among them, too.

Glancing down at the sheet of paper Dr. Alden had given him, with a rough-drawn map and a name on it, he stepped onto the sidewalk, and started moving toward his goal.

Chapter 3

Beth had woken early that morning, listening to the birds doing their welcome-the-dawn thing outside her window, and cautiously probed her emotional status the way a bomb technician might inspect a suspicious package. Yes, still twitchy, even though the storm had blown through, and the skies were now clear and bright. In fact, she thought that it might even be worse now, and she couldn’t blame it on the weather.

Or the dream she’d had, all sea-green and salty, the pressure on her lungs as though she were holding her breath too long, like being held underwater but without any of the fear or agitation you might think would come from a dream about drowning.

She knew how to swim, of course. You didn’t grow up on an island and not know how to swim. But her family was odd among the Nantucket old-timers; nobody in her family went to sea for their career. Not back when there was an actual sailing-and-whaling industry based on the island, not to the navy, marines, or Coasties—although there were stories of a distant cousin in the air force, during WWII—and not now. Hell, they didn’t even own a boat, relying on the ferry to get them the short distance between the island and mainland. They stayed put on land, and did landy things—without ever getting too far from the ocean itself. She tried to remember a single close relative who had moved to a landlocked state, and failed. She had gone away for college, but come home as soon as she could, and her father had never even gotten that far away, and every cousin within two generations had been the same.

So why was she now dreaming of the sea like it was something she had been missing all her life? How could you yearn for something you always had, and never particularly wanted?

It had been an erotic dream, too, she remembered now, stretching and blushing slightly at the memory. Waves like hands stroking her skin, the water blood-warm, even as her blood warmed more. Her own hand slid down her belly, tangling briefly in the curls between her legs, curls that were still damp from the intensity of that dream.

Beth let out a deep sigh and scrubbed at her face with both hands, trying to erase all images, erotic or otherwise, from her head. “That storm just messed with you, is all. The storm, and that naked man on the beach.

“Oh, yeah. Time to get out of the house, away from the darkroom and the computer and all the stress, and put some fresh air on your face,” she told herself, throwing off the covers and making her way, shivering, to the wardrobe. Never mind that it hadn’t worked all that well yesterday; today was a new day. Anything was possible, right?

Underwear, a pair of sweats and a jog bra, and a windbreaker over that, two pairs of socks, and her sneakers, and she was ready to go. Ten minutes later, she had pulled her bike out of storage and was pedaling down the road, already feeling her mood improve even as the memory of the dream faded. The road was slick with morning dew, and the air was crisp and salty on her skin, just the way it should be. Instead of heading to the beach road as usual, though, she went upland, above town, and away from the water. It was more of a workout that way, she justified to herself, feeling her muscles protest as she headed up a steep incline. If she worked hard this morning, she could eat an éclair from Peggie’s Bakery after dinner without guilt.

Maybe even two, if she only had a salad for dinner itself.

An hour later, sweating and grinning, éclairs earned and her mood on a definite upswing, she locked the bike up outside the local diner and went inside.

“Morning, Miss Elizabeth,” the man behind the counter called out. “Coffee ‘n’ eggroll?”

“Please, yes, thank you, Ben.” The eggroll had been a joke since she was ten—it was exactly that, a hard roll with scrambled eggs inside. No bacon, no ham, nothing except egg, to which Beth would add a dose of hot sauce just before she ate it. The first time she had gone to a Chinese restaurant, the notion that there might be another kind of egg roll had completely floored her.

She sat at the counter, since there wasn’t anyone else in the diner except a trucker at one of the tables, staring into his coffee like it held the answer to everything. After dumping her bike helmet on the seat next to her, she propped her elbows up on the Formica counter and waited for the coffee and inevitable.

“Didja heah about the guy washed up on the beach?”

Glory not only made the best eggroll in the world, she also knew everything that happened in town, often before the people it was happening to knew. She should have been a reporter for the Times, not a short-order cook.

Beth looked at the square-shouldered woman, her gray curls pulled into a ponytail that should have looked ridiculous on a woman her age, but somehow worked. She and her husband, Ben, had owned the diner since before Beth was born, and she suspected they’d be here long after she had died. They were just so … solid. Like granite underfoot, only not so heavy, since neither Glory nor Ben were very large individuals. In fact, Ben was shorter than Beth was, and couldn’t weigh much more than she did, soaking wet, for all that he gave off a reassuring impression of solidity. When her parents had died, and there hadn’t been anyone else to take the teenage Elizabeth in, those two had stepped forward, fostering her until she could be on her own, so that she didn’t have to leave her home. She owed them a debt they refused to even acknowledge. The least she could do was indulge Glory’s love of gossip.

“I was there,” she told Glory. “On the beach last night when they found him.”

“Yes, but did you heah?”

Beth sighed. Obviously, there was more to the story, and Glory wasn’t going to be satisfied until she had the telling of it. “I need coffee before anything else,” she told the older woman, pretending that something inside her hadn’t done a weird flip at the mention of the stranger.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure that she wanted more coffee after all. That flip feeling wasn’t good. Nothing that made her feel like her world was being turned upside down and roundabout like that could be any good.

Glory, unaware of Beth’s sudden mood change, was already pouring the black liquid into a thick white mug and pushing it across the counter into the younger woman’s unresisting hands.

“All right.” Beth sighed, her fingers curling around the mug despite herself. There wasn’t any graceful way to escape. “Spill all.”

“His name’s Dylan, he’s been checked out of the clinic already and Doc, as usual, refused to take any money for it. That man is going to run himself into the ground, he doesn’t watch it.”

The rant about Doc Alden was familiar territory, and Glory skipped over it to the new and interesting material. “The boy, Dylan, he was sailing, a boat called the Daughter of the Sea, all by himself although nobody seems to know out of what port. Boat’s gone now, obviously, not even flinders to be found.”

“Lucky guy,” Ben muttered, coming behind Glory with a menu for someone who had just come in, and Beth nodded in agreement. A boat that thoroughly destroyed, the captain didn’t usually survive.

“He’s taken a room at the Blue Anchor for don’t know how long. Paid in cash, too. Sold a nice piece of jewelry over at Rosen Jewelers to pay for it. Hasn’t called anyone since he’s been here, poor boy. Must not have any family. Can you imagine that—” Glory stopped, suddenly aware that Beth would be all too able to imagine that.

“And I’m a thoughtless idiot, but you knew that already. I’m sorry, baby. Here, have some more coffee and I’ll go make your eggroll.”

Beth couldn’t take offense, not from Glory. Despite the efforts of her friends, she had been alone for so long, sometimes she forgot what it was like to be part of even a small larger group. Sometimes. Most of the time it didn’t bother her.

Mostly.

“She forgot to tell you that he was single,” Ben said, sliding up to the counter and taking right over where his wife left off. “Or at least, no ring and not talking about a wife and kidlets.” He had a mug of coffee in his own hands, except that, unlike Beth, this was probably his sixth or seventh mug since the diner had opened at five that morning. Even when he was outside the diner, there was always a to-go cup of coffee somewhere near Ben.

“Probably because I’m not interested?” Beth offered, smiling despite herself.

Ben had known her since she was in the womb, and had been speaking his mind about her personal life since then. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you and Jake made the bed shake?”

“None of your damn business, you pervert,” she shot back, refusing to blush or blink.

“I rest my case.” Ben looked too damn pleased with himself for a guy who had just pointed out that her social life sucked. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Ben was the only person she knew who could make her revert back to being a ten-year-old just by poking her.

“Here you go.” Glory returned with a platter of eggroll and a side of hash browns. “Benjamin, you leave the girl alone. You know better than to meddle.”

“He does?” That was news to Beth.

Glory knocked her husband affectionately on the shoulder. “You’ll come to your senses on your own schedule, or not at all. Nothing we can do to rush it along without making things worse. Now eat. If I know you, you haven’t eaten a thing since, oh, lunch yesterday?”

She had, actually, but in the aftermath of the storm and her dreams, she wasn’t sure if she could remember what, and Beth suspected Glory would say a meal you didn’t remember didn’t count.

She ate, and Ben and Glory both left her alone, disappearing back into the chrome-and-white depths of the diner’s kitchen.

Her own schedule? Schedule for what? On any other day the comment would have washed right over her, but today it stuck at her restlessness like a burr, and itched in a place she couldn’t quite reach. She and Jake might not have been setting the world on fire, but what did that have to do with a schedule?

And if Glory or Ben made one single comment about biological clocks ticking, she was going to clean their clocks. Of all the things she ever wanted in her life, gotten or not gotten, kids were not on the list. She wasn’t even much for pets, although her mother had fed stray cats in the neighborhood. They had all slipped away in the year after the accident; she had forgotten that, too. So much, she had made herself forget.

The eggroll satisfied her stomach, but the contentment she had earned slipped away, leaving her feeling irritable and restless all over again. What was here for her, really? Okay, the family house, and people who had known her since her mother went into the hospital to give birth, but … so what? Things that normally made her feel supported and secure now added to her irritation.

Maybe it was time, finally, to do something different. Maybe that was what this restlessness was about. Maybe. maybe she would paint the house pink. Or black. Black, with hot-pink trim.

The thought of what her proper New Englander neighbors would say made her feel slightly better, even as she knew she would do no such thing. It wasn’t a Havelock thing to do, to draw attention to herself, or her house. Not that there was any rule against it, or that she had ever been scolded for making a fuss, it just … wasn’t Done. The family had lived generations on this island and managed to stay out of every single history book or pamphlet, after all. Her dad used to pretend to be annoyed by that, but she got a sense of satisfaction from him, too. Like he had managed to pull off some secret trick nobody knew about … It was another thing they had never talked about. She had been too young, too full of herself then, to think her father might have anything she needed to know.

Not for the first time, she wondered what she might have learned, if they’d lived long enough for her to listen.

“Be a love, will you?” Ben was back, Glory glaring at him over the transom where the orders were placed. He handed her a brown-wrapped package. “Drop this off for me in town?”

“Town” was a two-block walk away from the diner. Ben walked the two miles from their cottage to the diner every morning, no matter the weather, to start the kitchen before dawn. He was hardly in need of assistance.

Beth narrowed her hazel-green eyes at him, but he maintained a look of perfect innocence.

She studied the address on the package’s label. It was addressed to someone in Rockport, Maine, and was already stamped and ready to go. Ben could have just left it out on the counter for the postman to pick up during his rounds.

“What game are you playing, Benjamin?” she wondered, and got only a low chuckle from behind the counter. Beth slid the package to the side, away from her coffee, and went to work on her breakfast. If she was going to be choregirl, she was going to be fed, first. Post office was barely open yet, anyway. And it was off-season—not like there would be a line.

The bedroom Dylan had been shown to on the third floor of the three-story house was large, by his standards, with a bed, a pedestal sink and a bookcase filled with old books. Normally, as a single male, he didn’t stay under a roof unless the weather was particularly bad, and the peaked, plastered ceiling meeting his gaze was not as pretty as the flat, wood-beamed one he and his father had rebuilt after a nor’easter almost destroyed the seal-kin village, but it seemed to suit the building. Wooden flooring was covered by a rug made out of brightly colored bits of cloth. His mother had a rug like that in her own cottage, and for a moment Dylan felt his throat close up with an unfamiliar sensation.

Loneliness, he identified it, without too much surprise. Well, he was without colony or cousins in this place, it made sense. Not pleasant, but understandable.

But the knowledge that his mate waited for him somewhere in this village made the sensation pass. Once he found her, they could return home, and all would be right again.

And surely seal-kin came up on these shores. Maybe he wouldn’t be entirely alone here, during his search?

With that thought, he pushed open the single window, enjoying the feel of the crisp morning air on his skin, looking out into a beautiful blue sky he’d been too focused before then to notice. No clouds, only the slightest hint of any moisture at all in the air, a fine day for swimming …

Or finding a mate.

Single-minded, aren’t you? He could hear his mother’s voice, laughing at him. He really should have said something to her, at least, before he left. But nothing to be done for it now. She would at least know—or suspect—where he had gone, and why. He had always been given to acting on impulse.

Dylan took off the sneakers and shucked the clothing the nurse had given him, dropping them on the bed and luxuriating in the feel of the air through the open window on his skin.

The pull was getting stronger, minute by minute, until it was becoming almost painful. Worse than pain, worse than hunger or lust, even though there was something of both to it. He thought about relieving himself of the lust, at least, but something stopped his hand on the first stroke. There was no shame in pleasure, but … he didn’t want to take it alone. Not when he was so close to finding Her.

Dylan was struck with an intense urge to take a shower, to wash the last stink of the hospital off his skin. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the dry texture of it with displeasure. They had washed it for him at the clinic, while he was unconscious, but used some sort of soap that took the natural oils out, so the strands felt brittle. Worse, his skin felt almost as dry; he wasn’t used to spending this much time out of the water. Not that he couldn’t—one of his sisters used to routinely go off for months at a time when she went to college, and his oldest brother worked on an oil rig, where shedding your human form to go diving into the ocean at a moment’s whim was not exactly a good idea. But Dylan was used to spending most of his time with his cousins, in his other skin. Being caught in human form endlessly was … itchy.

He looked out the window again, judging how far this building was from the shoreline, then shrugged and went in search of the shared bathroom down the hall he had been shown the night before. A good soak in a tub wouldn’t be the same, but it would get him clean, anyway.

A low scream made him jump back into his room, slamming the door shut behind him. His heart pounding, Dylan tried to determine where the threat was coming from. Then he looked down, and a red flush stained his pale skin.

He had forgotten for a moment that he wasn’t home, and had gone outside without any clothing.

“Sorry,” he called out to the unsuspecting fellow guest in the hallway, reaching out to grab the drawstring blue pants and drag them back up his legs. “Wasn’t quite awake yet.”

By the time he made it downstairs, his skin comfortably soaked and his black hair slicked back away from his face, the woman he had startled and two other guests were in quiet conversation—about him, clearly, from the laughter that broke out when he appeared. Dylan felt himself blush again, and a wave of irritation followed. It had been an easy enough mistake to make; he wasn’t exactly used to wearing clothing, after all. At home, people were more comfortable with skin, theirs and others', in any form.

“Glad you could join us,” Mr. Brandt—Mike—said, only a trace of teasing in his voice, although he was clearly hard-pressed to keep from smiling. “I held over some food from breakfast, as Doc Alden said you’d probably be hungry. Breads and whatnot are on the buffet, and everything else is family-style on the table.”

“Everything else” included a platter of salmon piled high and red, and what looked like smoked chub, and Dylan felt his mouth start to water. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. The rest of the foods—scrambled eggs, bacon and fresh fruits—were added to his plate more cautiously. They were treats to his people, not everyday meals, and he was almost afraid to take too much, for fear of doing something wrong, or rude.

“How are you feeling?” Mike asked, reaching over to drop another two slices of the crisp pork onto his plate with a wink. “Doc says you were pretty beat up when they brought you in, but you look fine now.”

“More exhausted than anything else. They warned me I may be sleeping a lot for a while, to recover.”

“So what are your plans today?” Mike asked as Dylan sat down at the table with his plate. “Other than clothes shopping?”

That started everyone laughing again, and even Dylan, despite his blush, acknowledged now that it was amusing.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Get my bearings, figure out what I’m going to do.”

“Have they found any trace of your boat?”

It took Dylan a moment to remember what boat the woman was talking about, then remembered his lie to the doctor. Another thing humans had in common with seal-kin, then; gossip spread faster than illness.

“Not that I have heard,” he said truthfully. “I suspect they won’t. I was an idiot, pushing through the storm like that.” Also true.

“You lived to learn from it, so that’s the important thing,” the woman said. “I’m Gert, and this is Sarah.” The look she cast Sarah made it clear that there was an implied lesson for more than Dylan in that fact. He wondered what the two women were to each other; not mother and daughter, no, nor sisters. He didn’t know enough about human society to understand, and for the first time, doubt struck. Being brought here … that implied that the female he had come to find was human. Everything he knew, everything he understood about females … would it apply to a human woman?

“There’s no job waiting for you? No family?” the other man, Jonah, asked.

“No job,” Dylan answered truthfully. “My family are fishermen, and they know I’ll be back when I’m back.”

Mike laughed. “Had enough of hauling nets and soaking in brine, did you? I spent a few summers working at a packing plant, and I swore the smell of fish would never get out of my pores. Money was good, though.”

Money. He was going to need money. He should have thought of that before he let his hormones take over his brains, should have brought more to barter with than just his sister’s anklet. Idiot. “I thought I might go into town and see if anyone needs a handyman. I’m pretty good with building and fixing.”

“It’s spring,” Mike said thoughtfully. “Tourists’ll be coming soon in hordes—sorry, folk,” he said to the others, who merely laughed, not taking offense, “and everything needs to look pretty. You should be able to find some work pretty easily around here, if you’re handy with a hammer.” He eyed Dylan, as though judging how much of his sleek build was actually muscle. Dylan resisted the urge to stand up and try to present a larger silhouette, like a fur-cousin spoiling for a fight. At five-ten, he wasn’t terribly impressive, until you looked more closely at his build. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone looking that closely at him.

“I haven’t lost a thumb yet” was all he said.

“And if you’ve been a fisherman you’re not afraid of hard work. Then you’ll do.” Mike nodded, coming to a decision. “I’ll give you a list of folk you should talk to. Can’t have a long-term boarder out of work now, can I?”

Everything was falling into place: the storm sending him here, of all the villages he might have come to, to the very beach where his mate waited. This man, giving him shelter and a reason to linger, to find her again.

Yes. He felt his impatience and restlessness stir again under his skin, and whispered to it the way he might a seal-pup, counseling patience. There would be time to swim in the great waters soon enough. Patience, for now.

And like a pup, his restlessness did not want to listen. Now, it insisted. Find her now. He could practically feel her in the air. She was close, close … all he had to do was find her.

After finishing her breakfast and coffee, Beth ran her assigned errand, strolling to the post office and standing on the line that had, wonders of wonders, actually formed. All of three people were in front of her, but in this town, before tourist season started, that was a notable wait.

Beth gave Ben’s package over and asked for her own boxed mail, as well, when it was her turn.

While he went to fetch it, she leaned against the counter of the post office, her head turned just enough that she could watch people passing on the sidewalk beyond the plate-glass window of the storefront. She saw two friends walking past on the other side of the street going into the café, and realized that she hadn’t seen either of them in weeks.

A dark-haired man walked past, on this side of the street, right in front of the post office, and Beth felt herself come to attention, somehow. A stranger with thick black hair down to his collar and a slender-hipped and yet sturdy build that caught her eye.

“No.” It wasn’t the stranger from the beach. It couldn’t be. Or it could but even if it was, so what? Beth licked her lips, suddenly tasting salt and sea-musk on her skin, as though she had been out swimming, or washed her face with seawater. It reminded her of her dream, and her internal temperature rose several notches. The flush she felt inside was more annoying; what was she, sixteen again, to get so flustered at the sight of a good-looking stranger, dressed and ambulatory, or otherwise? And what the hell was she doing, walking out of the post office just to get a better look at him? Hello? Earth to Elizabeth?

Her feet weren’t listening to her head, but she moved too slowly. By the time she went out the door, the bell jingling overhead, he was gone.

Beth stared down the street, wondering at herself, and the aching disappointment she felt. Was she that hard up, that a good-looking stranger got her juices running? Pitiful. But there was something about the figure, even glimpsed out of the corner of her eye … She had to fight the urge to run after him, ask him his name, anything to get him to notice her. She’d never felt any pull that hard, like the lure of fine chocolate at three in the morning, multiplied by ten.

“Oh, he was pretty, wasn’t he?”

Beth flushed, and laughed at being caught—and by Sarah, of all people.

“Is the town starting a new beautification project?” she asked her old schoolmate and current Beautification Board member, who had also stopped on the sidewalk, apparently to watch the stranger walk by. Humor was better than admitting she had been caught in the act of goggling. “Because if so,” she continued, “I gotta say, I approve.”

“I wish,” Sarah said. “But we’d have to raise taxes too much to afford that kind of pretty. You know who he is?”

“No ….” Honesty forced her to add, “I think he’s our newest resident, the guy who washed up on shore.”

“Really? Is he single?”

“You’re not,” Beth pointed out, fighting a surge of bitterness in her gut that surprised her. Was the eggroll suddenly disagreeing with her stomach?

“Oh. Right. Darn. And I was supposed to meet the hubby and the brats ten minutes ago. Don’t be such a stranger!”

Beth promised, and then the postmaster waved from the counter, a large brown envelope in his hand. She went back in to pick up her packages, but her mind remained on the stranger in the street. Who was he? Why had such a quick glimpse of a stranger gotten her so worked up?

Maybe she had been running a fever, some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. That would explain everything, the weird twitches, the visual fluctuations, even the acid churning in her stomach. Maybe.

She walked out of the post office, her mail in hand, and looked across the street at the café where her friends had grabbed a table. She could see them inside, gesturing and laughing over their coffee. It was still early. Her bike was still locked up outside the diner. She should retrieve it and her safety helmet, go back to the house and get some work done. But even as she thought that, clutching her mail in one hand, Beth found herself torn between responsibility and a renewed restlessness.

Should, should … Suddenly, she didn’t care so much about “should.”

She tucked the packages into her bag and stepped off the curb, walking across the street to the café. She would take some time off, have a nice pot of tea with friends, instead of her usual solitary coffee. All in the name of taking care of her health, of course …

And absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that their window seat would be the perfect place to spot the stranger, if he walked by again.

* * *

Inland, across the bridge that connected the island to the mainland, in a small storefront office, a landline connected, and an old man picked up on the second ring. “Yes?” He didn’t identify himself. Anyone who had this number was calling for only one reason, and names weren’t required.

What they did wasn’t illegal, technically. But only technically.

“You’re certain?” he asked, pulling out a notepad and writing down the details. There was a plastic sheet under the page, preventing an impression being made on the sheet underneath. The technicality they worked under was best never tested in court.

The voice on the other end of the line was quite certain. The circumstances suggested, blood work confirmed, and he would like his bonus now, please.

“No sighting bonus until our team confirms,” the man on the receiving end snapped, exasperated. Freelancers, bah. Every stray surfer, they tried to claim. “You have your stipend to tide you over, same as always. If you’re as certain as you claim, then the bonus will be cut soon enough. We will be in touch.”

He hung up the phone, and then picked it up again and dialed a single digit. There hadn’t been a verified sighting here in almost two decades. But before then, this had been a major harvesting area. You didn’t take chances, not with so much money involved.

“This is Station 22. I need to schedule a Hunt.”

Chapter 4

The storm passed, but the restlessness remained. This morning, Beth didn’t even pretend to be exercising, but instead found a large rock overlooking the ocean and climbed out onto it, letting her legs dangle off the edge exactly the way they warned teenagers about doing. A carafe of coffee beside her, and the remains of a cinnamon Danish on her lap, Beth stared out at the morning waves and tried to capture some of her usual serenity.

Now, that serenity felt more like death, and the camera on the opposite side of her, the object that usually gave her context for her moods, remained capped and unused.

She had dreamed again last night. Not an erotic dream this time, but a sad one. A dream of loss, and longing, and lose-lose scenarios. On waking, the details had fled. But as she stared into the gray-blue of the Atlantic, the memory stirred.

His daughter was crying ….

In the dream, it was a lovely summer’s morning, the sun barely breaking over the rooftops of the village. A man stood in the surf, the cold blue-green Atlantic waters washing about his ankles, the gritty wet sand moving below his bare feet, a fish braver or more foolish than the rest of its school nibbling curiously at the rough fabric of his trousers. The rest of his clothing he had left, clean and neatly folded, on the bed in the cottage. When his son, his Isaac, grew to a man’s height, he could wear them.

Or they could be passed on, still fashionable, if Sarah took another husband.

The thought should not be a hook in his gut, so surprisingly sharp and painful. Was he then so easily replaced? He had never meant to linger so long, never meant to make a life here, never meant to create children … Isaac and baby Ruth. His children, his and Sarah’s.

Bright-eyed Sarah. Fearless Sarah, who faced down storms and sickness with such calm courage and practical sure-handedness. Who had found him wracked up in the rocks after a bad storm four years before and taken him in, nursed him to health, and asked no questions when he slipped out of her bed and down to the sea—and asked no questions when he came back, wrapping sea-damp arms around her, kissing away her tears with salt-streaked lips. Who ignored the tsking of the village women to bear his children, sell his daily catch of fish in the market: who had every reason to believe that she would grow old with him at her side.

The thought pained him, that he would disappoint her so. And yet …

Come home, the sea whispered to him, as it had for a week or more, now, until he could no longer resist. It is time to come home.

He had loved Sarah, their family, as well as he could, as much and as long as a mortal could be loved by one such as he. Sarah knew that. They had their season, and more. It was time, past time for him to go. That was how all stories such as theirs ended.

Come home.

He missed his colony, the sounds of his kin. And yet …

“I can’t.” He didn’t know who he was speaking to, what he was denying. His feet moved him deeper into the water, even as his heart tied him to the land.

His brave Sarah, crying.

His daughter was crying.

Come home.

The water always takes back its own.

He took another step, and stopped.

“Not this time. Tethys, forgive me, not this time.”

A stillness in the waves, the water chilling against his skin, urging him in.

“I … cannot. My home is here now.”

The stillness broke, the sea’s voice replaced by another. There is a price for what you ask ….

“Anything. For them … for them anything I will pay.”

The voice went on as though it had not heard him. There is a price … that all must pay. Forever.

The dream, the memory faded and disappeared, yet forever echoed in Beth’s ears, a sense of inexplicable loss settling in her soul, and a single salty tear escaped, unnoticed, from the corner of her eye as she stared out into the hypnotic flow of the ocean.

Dylan wanted to swear. Four days. Four days since he had given in to the itch, left the safety of his home and swum into human lands, the totally human world. This small village was close enough to his own home that he could adapt, but the bits and pieces he caught, in the ads and conversations around him, were overwhelming.

Still, the basics were always the same. Food, shelter and clothing came first. Dylan pushed his selections across the counter, and watched as the clerk totaled the cost of each into a sum. He had enough to cover it, but the fold of bills in his pocket was not as thick as it had been only a few days before. Still, he needed the new underwear and socks, as well as the two long-sleeved pullover shirts, and a pair of cotton pants the same faded green as the knapsack he had picked out to hold it all.

Army surplus, the clerk had said when he picked it up, and that triggered another set of memories in Dylan’s head. Men, and things exploding into the water. Men swimming, being pulled to land. Some of them going away, after, and some of them staying. His great-grandfather had been one of those men pulled to safety by his great-grandmother, according to family stories, Dylan remembered now. A human sailor: one of the ones who stayed. That was the source of the memories, then.

He welcomed the memories, and the information they brought; his people were seal-kin, after all, not seals. This confusing land was as much his legacy as the ocean and wind, for all that he had never explored it much before now.

He paid the final charge and shoved everything into the knapsack, adjusting the straps to fit comfortably over his shoulder. “Thanks,” he said to the clerk, who paused in shutting the register’s drawer to smile in return. “No problem. Have a good day, mister.”

Leaving the store, Dylan paused in front of another storefront window, drawn by something in the display. Bright sticks of color, each the size of one of his fingers, wrapped in paper and just begging to be picked up and drawn across a surface. Like the chalks he used at home, but softer, creamier. It was only a hobby, his drawing, but he missed it.

He mentally counted how much cash he had left from the anklet, after buying clothing and paying for the room, then looked at the chalks again. Not enough. Not if he didn’t find work soon. Dylan didn’t want to rely on Dr. Alden’s charity, but he didn’t know, anymore, how long finding Her would take, and … And he could almost feel the chalks under his fingers, could almost see the swaths of color they would leave behind.

It was stupid. He was here to find his mate, and then go home. That was what drove him. The sense of urgency moved within him, reminding him that he didn’t have forever. He had enough paints and brushes at home, and he would be back with them soon enough, once his mission was done.

And yet, suddenly he found himself inside the store, buying the sticks, and a pad of thick white paper, and a fat brush with soft bristles, to smooth the colors together in ways he could already envision in his mind. The thought made him smile.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.