Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

am I supposed to do? Besides go crazy?”
     
    “Make me a list. Anybody she talked to, girlfriends maybe, anybody who might have called her up in the middle of the night—”
     
    “Regina wouldn’t leave Nicky.”
     
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    That’s what Caleb figured, too. “Can you think of anything else that might explain her disappearing for a couple hours? Drugs, alcohol, anything like that?”
     
    Antonia made a visible effort to pull herself together. “She drank in high school. Same as you and everybody else. I don’t know what she did in Boston. But if she got up to anything now, I’d have heard.”
     
    Caleb nodded. On the island, you started working young and drinking young. But if you had a problem, your neighbors talked about it.
    Caleb knew. He’d grown up the son of a drunk.
     
    “What about men? Boyfriends?”
     
    “She won’t have anything to do with the island boys.”
     
    “That could cause hard feelings. She complain about anybody hanging around, giving her a hard time?”
     
    Antonia crossed her arms. “You mean, besides your brother? Why don’t you ask him where she is?”
     
    Their gazes locked.
     
    “I’ll talk to him,” Caleb said grimly.
     
    If he could find him.
     
    Caleb didn’t think his brother would hurt a woman. Not physically, at least. But the fate of one human female wasn’t likely to concern him too much either.
     
    Margred claimed Dylan was really here on some kind of fact-finding mission for the selkie prince.
     
    Fine. If there were demons on World’s End, Caleb hoped the merfolk were prepared to deal with them. Because in any selkie-demon skirmish, humans were bound to lose.
     
    Caleb couldn’t ignore the possibility that Dylan’s presence and Regina’s disappearance were connected somehow. But neither could he let speculation drive his investigation. People did shitty things to each
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    other all the time. They might blame the devil, but it was mostly human nature.
     
    Caleb was damned if he knew why a demon would target a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant cook.
     
    Dylan could tell him.
     
    Too bad his brother was never around when Caleb needed him.
     
    *
     
    Dylan plunged into the wet, salty womb of the sea, felt the water stroke his thick fur pelt and surround him like a lover. Here he was alive in every strand and cell.
     
    Here he was free.
     
    He swam through the great green darkness, the cold salt tang.
    Through streamers of light and pennants of kelp, past colonies of steely black mussels and milky moon jellies. The beat of the surge was his pulse, the rush of the waves better than breath. He spiraled down, drifted up. No gravity. No responsibility.
     
    Regina’s words hooked him like a barb, ripping at his peace. “You try being responsible for somebody besides yourself sometime, and we’ll talk.”
     
    He dove deeper. He was responsible, damn it. He was here, wasn’t he? Doing his job, obeying his prince.
     
    Dylan exhaled in a cloud of silver bubbles. Not that he could tell Regina that.
     
    Not that she would understand or believe him if he did. Hard-headed, sharp-tongued Regina, with her quick laugh and hair-trigger temper, was completely human.
     
    And he was . . .
     
    He had been human once. The thought was another barb. Had believed himself human. Had imagined himself part of a family.
     
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    A memory pulled at him, strong as any current: his mother, posing them for a picture, ten-year-old Caleb with Lucy smiling on his lap, and Dylan, already standing a little apart. He had known even then that he was different, that things were about to change.
     
    He hadn’t guessed how much.
     
    He never thought he would be the one responsible for tearing their family apart.
     
    He raced through water dense with light and life; broke the surface into the sharp, bright air of morning. The sea was his refuge, the place where he could feel and move and breathe and be. But today he could not outpace his thoughts. Could not escape Regina’s image, the smooth skin of her arms and chest, the gold cross glinting below her collarbone, her scowl. “I can’t give Nick a mother who’s around all the time. The least I can do is spare him some guy who won’t stick.”
     
    Dylan blew out a noisy gust of air. He would not stick. His kind never did. If he cared for her . . . His thoughts tangled like seaweed. He did not care for anyone. It was only fair for him to leave her now, before— how had she put it?— she became attached to