Burning Up

bleary eyes slid over her.
    “Do you hear me?” She shook him. “Hold on. Hold on to me.”
    “No,” he slurred. “Drag you . . . down.”
    “You won’t.”
    Not if she Changed. Now. Quickly.
    “You must hold on,” she said fiercely.
    His gaze found hers. “Love . . . you. Save . . . yourself.”
    He sagged.
    Sank.
    With a little cry, she seized his hand and pressed it to her shoulder. Please. His fingers fumbled. Squeezed. Her relief rose like a sob.
    She had never attempted to Change like this, with clothes plastered to her body and shoes on her feet. With urgency beating in her blood and panic squeezing her heart. No plunge, no dive, no wild surge of spirit becoming one with the sea. She gritted her teeth, wrenching power from her uncooperative flesh, forcing magic along constricted veins and sinews.
    It hurt.
    Pain lanced through her, unexpected, shocking. She spasmed, writhing like a fish out of water. Jack drifted beside her—breathing?—his touch a brand, an anchor on her flesh. Quickly. Now.
    Her blood drummed in her ears as she Changed, as her muscles rippled and popped and her bones erupted and dissolved. Seams popped. Fabric tore.
    Jack.
    She nudged against him, glided under him, felt his hands slide and grip, felt his weight shift and roll.
    Hold on , she said or thought or sang and carried him safely to shore.
     
    H e could not breathe. He was drowning. Dreaming. Delirious.
    His head was on fire and his chest burned and his limbs were cold, at once heavy and weightless. His blood rushed in his ears.
    Hold on , someone said, as they’d said in the surgeons’ tent when they’d placed the pad between his teeth and probed his wounds for bits of bone and shrapnel. The world whirled as it had then, and the pain shot through his head.
    They were taking him somewhere, carrying him swiftly, away from the battlefield.
    Hold on.
    So he did, clinging grimly to life. There was something he had to do, someone he had to see, some . . .
    Morwenna.
    The sea gushed and bubbled around him. The world fractured in a blaze of light, a blast of sound, a burst of agony. Air knifed his lungs. He gasped and choked. On blood? Or brine?
    He felt a nudge, a shove, as he lay like a felled log in the surf, cold, hard sand under his cheek, water running through his fingers.
    Morwenna. He turned his head to find her, struggled to push to his knees.
    She was there—and not there—in the shallow water.
    He closed his eyes. Opened them again. There was a dolphin. He saw it, the sleek barrel shape, the distinctive fin.
    And there was Morwenna, shining like the mist, insubstantial as the foam, her wet hair around her shoulders . . .
    A wave rattled in and drained away, taking the last vestige of the dolphin with it.
    But the double image, Morwenna’s face superimposed on the fin, the tail, seared the back of his eyes.
    Better if he had not seen her at all.
    She rose from the water and ran to him, her dress clinging to her in rags.
    His heart pounded. She was safe. He was relieved. He was . . . He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged.
    He tried again. “I didn’t see you out there. In the water. I thought you were dead.”
    “Are you all right?”
    “Hallucinating,” he explained.
    She kneeled beside him, her face inhuman in its perfection, beautiful in its concern.
    He could not breathe. He could not think. His brain was on fire. “Are you . . .”
    “I am fine.”
    “Morwenna?”
    “Yes. Let me help you to the cart.” She reached for him and he saw—he saw —the faint iridescent webbing between her fingers. Even as he watched, it faded, it melted away.
    Turning his head, he threw up onto the sand.
    He lay there a long time, his face pressed to the ground, listening to nothing but the rasp of his breathing and the water running over the rocks.
    He raised his head, bile bitter in his mouth. “What are you?” he asked hoarsely.
     
    M orwenna flinched. He was afraid. Disgusted. Disbelieving.
    Or perhaps he had simply swallowed too much seawater after a bump on the head.
    But the wary, searching look in his eyes, the memory of Morgan’s words, quickly disabused her of that hope. Humans fear what they do not understand. And what they fear, they hate.
    She sat back on her heels and folded her hands, no longer trying to touch him. “What do you think I am?”
    He shook his head. Winced as the movement jarred his wound. “You don’t want to know.”
    His rejection jabbed like a sea urchin’s barb. He was