Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

compliments. She needed to make him understand.
     
    “I am not selkie. I do not have my powers any longer.” Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “But you bound Tan.”
     
    She blinked. “I . . . Yes.”
     
    “And you called the dolphins.”
     
    She smiled, remembering. “I did, didn’t I?”
     
    “Being selkie—it isn’t about your skin. It’s something deeper.
    Something inside you. You’re different, Maggie. Amazing. Magic.” His gaze, his hands, were warm and steady on hers. “You’re . . . you.”
     
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    Margred stared at her hands, linked with his. Her human hands that had learned to wash dishes and set a table and soothe her lover’s hurts.
    Her selkie hands that had summoned the rain and bound a demon.
     
    Was Caleb right?
     
    She was not what she once was.
     
    Maybe she was more.
     
    “Maybe I am not changed,” she acknowledged. “But I have grown.”
     
    Like a child learning to stand on its own two sturdy legs, like a bride leaving her mother’s house, she was ready to leave the cradle and bosom of the sea and walk on solid ground.
     
    “I don’t want to visit you to take my pleasure,” she continued. “I want a real life with you, to sleep with you and talk with you. To grow old with you. To have children with you.”
     
    And she would never leave them, she vowed. She would never leave him . She could live on land and still be of the sea.
     
    “How about dying with me?” Caleb challenged her.
     
    She nodded. “I told you. I would not want to live without you.”
     
    “Maggie . . .” His eyes were gray and troubled as the northern sea.
    “I’m not a religious guy. But . . . only humans have souls, you said. Is one life with me enough for you? Is it worth giving up eternity?”
    Only humans asked so many questions.
     
    Only humans had such doubts.
     
    And such faith.
     
    Margred smiled. “I love you,” she said. “I believe you love me. I do not believe the God of love would let such a thing happen if our love was meant to die with these bodies. ”
     
    “God help us both, then,” Caleb said. “Because I’d go to Hell to get you back.”
     
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    They stood on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the sweep of horizon sharp and curved as a line drawn by pencil. Below, the boundary between land and sea blurred with every wave that rushed and retreated over the rocks.
     
    Margred shook out her hair, the taste of brine on her lips, her bare feet planted on the sun-warmed soil among the buttercups and blowing grass. In the distance, strings of lobster pots crossed the water like lines of bright embroidery stitches, but no boats, no swimmers, no kayakers broke the far, wide, wrinkled surface of the ocean.
     
    “Maggie.” She loved the way he spoke her name. Caleb stood behind her, upright and strong as a lighthouse on the headland. “Are you sure?”
     
    She had never been more certain of anything. “I lived in the ocean for seven hundred years. The sea is in my blood, always. But you are my heart.”
     
    She held the sealskin in her arms, the coarse, rippling fur, the warm, sleek weight of it. And when the surf rushed in again, she dropped it into the sea.
     
    A harbor seal popped its bullet-shaped head from the water to watch as the waves plucked and dragged at the bundled pelt, carrying it, rolling and unfolding, out to sea.
     
    Margred sighed. Smiled.
    And turned to find Caleb waiting for her, a look in his eyes that made her heart turn over.
     
    “Let Gwyneth have eternity.” She gazed into his dear, battered face, more precious to her than the land beneath the wave. “I have you.”
     
    He kissed her among the rioting wildflowers while the ocean foamed on the rocks below.
     
    Hand in hand, they descended the sunlit hill.
     
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