Burning Up

her fingertips.
    The memory of Jack’s dark, weary eyes, his hard, strained face, jabbed at her heart.
    She had offered her help, and he had dismissed her.
    She could not blame him. She had spurned him, after all. And he had no idea what she could do. What she was.
    Once her kind had been revered, feared and worshipped. But as their numbers dwindled and they withdrew deeper into the wild places of earth, their encounters with humankind became less frequent. Reverence had faded to superstition and fear to unbelief. Now even the legends were fading from human memory.
    Better that way, her brother insisted. Safer that way. There were so many of them . . .
    And Jack was one of them, one with them, the men with their wet clothes and weathered faces, the girl with the red-rimmed eyes.
    She lengthened her stride, unhampered by the pelting rain and gusts of wind. She was not jealous . What she wanted, she would have. She was an immortal child of the sea, part of the First Creation.
    And yet . . .
    Standing alone outside the circle of the fire, she had been achingly aware of something outside and separate from herself, the web of human experience. All those others in the taproom had come together in the face of the storm, bound together by some human need, united by a shared understanding of death and love and loss.
    Humans died.
    She would not die.
    But she could do something they could not do.
    She walked the long stone jetty that protected the harbor. Waves crested and crashed around her, pouring their might onto the rocks, sending up shoots and plumes of spray, drenching her hair and her skirt. The sea pounded through the soles of her feet and within her chest.
    Dimly, she heard shouting behind her. She would not have chosen to reveal herself. She did not want to prompt questions she was not prepared to answer. Not yet.
    But she would not let human considerations, human fears, distract her from her magic. She closed her mind to consequences and embraced the water’s power. She breathed it in, licking it from her lips, absorbing it through her skin. She was drunk on the smell of brine, blinded and deafened by the beauty of the tempest.
    Lifting her arms to the wind, she raised her face to the rain and sang in the storm.
    Her notes pierced the heavy sky, soared like drops of vapor into the clouds swirling and combining high above the earth. Bright shards of music ripped from her throat and flashed like lightning among the currents of air. The energy of the storm pulsed inside her, welled inside her, spilled from her eyes and her heart like song. Like blood.
    She felt the clouds shift and break, felt the sea surge and respond, and trembled in the marrow of her bones.
    It was not enough.
    Voices fretted her, plucking at her peace, stirring her to the depths like the wind moving over the waters.
    She lost her man.
    He will not be found until this storm is past.
    There is nothing you can do.
    Resolve stiffened her spine. She anchored her feet on the slippery wet stone and sang in the seals from the sea.
    She summoned them by name and by magic, and they came, streaking dark and brindled out of the deeps, racing in response to her song. Leaping, diving, seeking, finding . . .
    There. A young man drifting in a fisherman’s smock and boots, his dark hair flowing like weeds. A heartbeat, thin and thready beneath the surface of the water. Her own pulse fluttered in response.
    Rain spattered and sank on the surface of the ocean. She felt his breath rising like a chain of silver bubbles, barely linking him to life. Her lungs emptied. Was she too late?
    In a burst of notes and panic, she sent the seals scything through the water to bring him up, to bring him in. They curled around him like cats, bumping him with their whiskered heads, prodding him with their flippers, rolling him on to his back like an otter. They turned his white face to the clearing sky and bore him up, making a raft of their broad, sleek bodies to carry him toward shore. She smoothed the waves in their path to a grumble, a ripple, a flourish of foam.
    Her power was running out like water from a cup, leaving her emptied, her throat raw, her legs as heavy as wet sand.
    She heard cries, raucous and indistinct as the kittiwakes on the cliff. The human inhabitants of Farness straggled along the seawall, watching the seals come in on the tide.
    Jack . . .
    Even from a distance she recognized him, his broad shoulders, his straight soldier’s posture, and everything