Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

beauty.
     
    Dylan .
     
    The younger selkie had claimed a territory adjoining hers a score of years ago. She tolerated him because of his youth and bitter humor. Well, and because he was very good to look at, in a fierce and fine-honed way.
    Once she had even considered . . .
     
    She half smiled and shook her head. He took himself too seriously to suit her.
     
    39
    He had spoken in English, so she answered in the same tongue. “As you see.”
     
    Dylan crossed the tower room, leaning his elbows on the window ledge beside her. Posing, she thought.
     
    The wind ruffled his dark hair. “Perhaps you are alone too much,” he said.
     
    She shot him an amused look. “Do you speak for yourself? Or the prince?”
     
    “Conn is concerned for you, of course.”
     
    “I don’t see why.”
     
    “He wants you to be happy here.”
     
    “He wants me to whelp selkie babies, you mean.”
     
    “The prince is disturbed by the decline in our numbers,” Dylan said in a careful tone. “At last count there were fewer than two thousand of our people left.”
     
    Margred arched her eyebrows. “At last count? Does Conn really believe the king and the others living beneath the wave”—the polite term for those selkies who rarely or never took human form—“would present themselves for his census?”
     
    “You can’t deny there are fewer of us born each year.”
     
    She did not deny anything. Her inability to bear her mate a child had been a source of real, if secret, grief to her four or five decades past.
     
    She shrugged, feigning indifference. “A low birth rate is the price our people pay for immortality. The seas would be overrun with us else.”
     
    “Instead of which, our numbers are dropping. Our population may have been in balance once, but now too many of us are dying.”
     
    “And are reborn again in the sea,” Margred said. “As we always have been.”
     
    40
    As she had been herself, seven centuries ago.
     
    “ Not always. Selkies who die without their sealskins are not reborn.
    They cease to exist.”
     
    Memory welled like fresh blood from an old scar. “My mate was killed by poachers. I do not need you to explain to me what happens to a selkie who dies without his pelt.”
     
    Dylan watched her closely. “I have offended you.”
     
    But she would not give him even that much. “It is what it is. Mayhap his fate is one he would have chosen. Endless existence has its own . . .
    burdens.”
     
    “You are dissatisfied?”
     
    Dissatisfied , restless , empty , alone . . .
     
    She lifted her chin. “I am bored.”
     
    His gaze sharpened on her face. “I hear you’ve been amusing yourself ashore.”
     
    “And this interests you because . . . ?”
     
    “Perhaps you would be better served if you redirected your energy toward your own kind.”
     
    She tilted her head. “Pimping for the prince, Dylan?”
     
    “Merely delivering a friendly warning. There are dangers to becoming involved with humans.”
     
    “You are half human, are you not?”
     
    His mouth compressed. “It’s impossible to be half anything. You are selkie, or you are not. You live in the sea, or you die on land. I am selkie, like my mother.”
     
    So she had touched a nerve. She poked at it again, the way children on shore thrust sticks at jellyfish to watch them twitch. “But your father was human.”
     
    41
     
    “I do not speak of my father.”
     
    “Tell me about your mother, then.”
     
    “She drowned. In a fisherman’s net.” The cry of the gulls carried upward on the wind. Dylan turned his head and held Margred’s gaze.
    “Because she ventured too close to shore.”
     
    “Another warning?” Margred asked softly. “Have a care, Dylan. I do not take cautions well. Or instruction either.”
     
    “Something is happening,” Dylan argued. “Something affecting the balance of power. Conn fears it. We all feel it. There’s a disturbance in the demon realm.”
     
    Margred shivered. She did not want to think there was more to her recent restlessness than frustrated lust. An actual attachment to a human would be bad. An upset in the balance that existed between elementals, between the children of the sea and the children of the fire, would be much worse.
     
    “Demons are always disturbed,” she said. “What does that have to do with us? With me? The sea folk are neutral in Hell’s war on humankind. We always have been.”
     
    “Hardly neutral,” Dylan said, “if you’re