Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

speak the truth to him. “Yet something draws the demons to World’s End. I need you to find out what.”
     
    *
     
    Dylan stared at his prince, his heart thundering in his ears. For a moment he wondered if he’d heard Conn correctly. “That’s a warden’s job.”
     
    30
     
    The prince’s gaze was clear and light as frost, deep and measureless as the sea. “Do you refuse me?”
     
    “I— No, my lord.” He was startled, not stupid. “But why not send one of them?”
     
    The wardens were Conn’s confidants, his elite. Chosen for their loyalty and the strength of their gift, they kept the prince’s peace, defending his realm from the depredations of human and demon kind.
     
    Since he was fourteen years old, Dylan had burned to be counted as one of them, to wear the wardens’ mark around his neck.
     
    It had been a bitter realization to accept he was too nearly human to have either their power or the prince’s trust.
     
    “They do not have your knowledge of the island,” Conn said. “Or your connection to it.”
     
    For some reason, Dylan’s brain presented him with a picture of the woman, the prickly one with the ward on her wrist and the tight body humming with energy.
     
    They were not connected, he thought. He had merely had sex with her. He had sex with many women.
     
    And banished the memory of her voice saying, “You’re the first in—oh, a long time.”
     
    Conn must have taken his silence as dissent, for he said, “You grew up there.”
     
    Dylan dragged his mind back to the tower and the present discussion. “Many years ago.”
     
    “Your family lives there.”
     
    A touchy point. “They are not my family any longer. I am selkie now.”
     
    The prince regarded him with cool, light eyes. “And yet you keep a human habitation not three miles east of them.”
     
    31
     
    Dylan flushed. How much did Conn know? And how much did he hold against him? “The island was my mother’s.”
     
    “Your father built and furnished the house.”
     
    He had not known. He told himself it did not matter. “It’s a convenient stopping place, that’s all,” Dylan said.
     
    “Certainly it will be,” Conn agreed. “You may need to live among them for a time.”
     
    Dylan’s stomach sank. “After more than twenty years, the islanders are likely to question my sudden reappearance.”
     
    “Not so sudden,” Conn pointed out. “You were at your brother’s wedding.”
     
    Something Dylan regretted now. “That’s hardly the same. I didn’t have to talk to them.”
     
    Or his father. Or his sister.
     
    Sweat broke out on his lip and under his arms.
     
    “They will want to know why I am there.”
     
    “The humans have a story, do they not? Of the prodigal son?”
     
    “I do not think my brother”—the older brother, the good son, the one who stayed with his father—“will buy that explanation for my return.”
     
    “Then you will have to offer him another one,” Conn said coolly.
    “You can think of some excuse that will satisfy him.”
     
    Unbidden, the woman appeared again in his mind’s eye, her chin raised in the moonlight, her panties balled in her fist.
     
    “Yes,” Dylan said slowly. “I can.”
     
    *
     
    32
    Regina counted the twenties under the tray of the cash register drawer. Forty, sixty, eighty . . .
     
    The lunchtime rush was over, the tourists gone to catch the two thirty ferry to the mainland. The afternoon sun slanted through the restaurant’s faded red awning, warming the vinyl booths and scratched wood floor. Beyondthe plate glass window, the harbor sparkled blue and bright, boats at anchor in the quiet water.
     
    Margred loaded glasses from an empty table into a dish pan, her movements languid and graceful as the resident cat’s. She and Caleb had returned from their two nights in Portland yesterday.
     
    “So.” Regina snapped a rubber band around the pile of bills. “How was the honeymoon?”
     
    Margred showed her teeth in a slow, satisfied smile. “Too short.”
     
    Regina laughed, ignoring her own wistfulness. “That’s what you get for marrying the only cop on the island in the middle of the tourist season. If you’d waited until September, he could have taken you on a real honeymoon. Hawaii, maybe. Or Paris.”
     
    “I do not want Paris.” Margred’s smile spread. “And Caleb did not want to wait.”
     
    Regina fought a pinch of envy. Had she ever been that happy? That desired? That . . .