Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

One
     
    IF SHE DIDN’T HAVE SEX WITH SOMETHING SOON, she would burst out of her skin.
     
    She plunged through the blue-shot water, driven by a whisper on the wind, a pulse in her blood that carried her along like a warm current. The lavender sky was brindled pink and daubed with indigo clouds. On the beach, fire leaped from the rocks, glowing with the heat of the dying sun.
     
    Her mate was dead. Dead so long ago that the tearing pain, the fresh, bright welling of fury and grief, had ebbed and healed, leaving only a scar on her heart. She barely missed him anymore. She did not allow herself to miss him.
     
    But she missed sex.
     
    Her craving flayed her, hollowed her from the inside out. Lately she’d felt as if she were being slowly scraped to a pelt, a shell, lifeless and empty. She wanted to be touched. She yearned to be filled again, to feel someone move inside her, deep inside her, hard and urgent inside her.
     
    The memory quickened her blood.
     
    She rode the waves to shore, drawn by the warmth of the flames and the heat of the young bodies clustered there. Healthy human bodies, male and female.
     
    Mostly male.
     

     
    Some damn fool had built a fire on the point. Police Chief Caleb Hunter spotted the glow from the road.
     
    Mainers welcomed most visitors to their shore. But Bruce Whittaker had made it clear when he called that the islanders’ tolerance didn’t extend to bonfires on the beach.
     
    3
     
    Caleb had no particular objection to beach fires, as long as whoever set the fire used the designated picnic areas or obtained a permit. At the point, the wind was likely to carry sparks to the trees. The volunteers at the fire department, fishermen mostly, didn’t like to be pulled out of bed to deal with somebody else’s carelessness.
     
    Caleb pulled his marked Jeep behind the litter of vehicles parked on the shoulder of the road: a tricked-out Wrangler, a ticket-me-red Firebird, and a late-model Lexus with New York plates. Two weeks shy of Memorial Day, and already the island population was swelling with folks from Away. Caleb didn’t mind. The annual influx of summer people paid his salary. Besides, compared to Mosul or Sadr City or even Portland down the coast, World’s End was a walk on the beach. Even at the height of the season.
     
    Caleb could have gone back to the Portland PD. Hell, after his medical discharge from the National Guard, he could have gone anywhere. Since 9/11, with the call-up of the reserves and the demands of homeland security, most big-city police departments were understaffed and overwhelmed. A decorated combat veteran—even one with his left leg cobbled together with enough screws, plates, and assorted hardware to set off the metal detector every time he walked through the police station doors—was a sure hire.
     
    The minute Caleb heard old Roy Miller was retiring, he had put in for the chief’s job on World’s End, struggling upright in his hospital bed to update his résumé. He didn’t want to make busts or headlines anymore.
    He just wanted to keep the peace, to find some peace, to walk patrol without getting shot at. To feel the wind on his face again and smell the salt in the air.
     
    To drive along a road without the world blowing up around him.
     
    He eased from the vehicle, maneuvering his stiff knee around the steering wheel. He left his lights on. Going without backup into an isolated area after dark, he felt a familiar prickle between his shoulder blades. Sweat slid down his spine.
     
    Get over it . You’re on World’s End . Nothing ever happens here .
     
    Which was about all he could handle now.
     
    4
    Nothing .
     
    He crossed the strip of trees, thankful this particular stretch of beach wasn’t all slippery rock, and stepped silently onto sand.
     

     
    She came ashore downwind behind an outcrop of rock that reared from the surrounding beach like the standing stones of Orkney.
     
    Water lapped on sand and shale. An evening breeze caressed her damp skin, teasing every nerve to quivering life. Her senses strained for the whiff of smoke, the rumble of male laughter drifting on the wind. Her nipples hardened.
     
    She shivered.
     
    Not with cold. With anticipation.
     
    She combed her wet hair with her fingers and arranged it over her bare shoulders. First things first. She needed clothes.
     
    Even in this body, her blood kept her warm. But she knew from past encounters that her nakedness would be . . . unexpected. She did not