Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

cold flat water. Trapped. She flattened her palms against the rock face, reading the passage like a blind woman learning Braille. The tunnel dropped. The ceiling touched the water. She was trapped.
     
    She went a little crazy then, beating the walls and the water with her hands, croaking and crying out. She wanted out. Oh, God, she needed to get out of here.
     
    103
    Breathing hard, she stood shuddering, chest deep in the freezing water. Her face was wet, her hair was wet, her clothes glued to her body.
    She bit her lip, tasting blood and salt and defeat.
     
    Tasting salt.
     
    She brought her trembling hand to her lips, sucked on her fingers.
    The salt taste was definitely stronger. Or was she simply thirstier? She held herself still, listening to the echoes bounce and fade, and felt the surge moving between her legs. Her heart pounded. In or out? She could not tell. When the tide dropped, would the passage open? Had she found a way out?
     
    Shaking with cold and a desperate hope, Regina fumbled her way back to the black chamber in the rock to wait for the tide to turn.
     
    *
     
    Dylan waited outside the yellow tape stretched along the sidewalk in front of Antonia’s, his hands in his pockets and every muscle tensed.
    Through the plate glass window he could see busy humans with brushes, bags, and bits of tape moving systematically through the dining room.
    They were wasting their time. They had no idea what they were looking for. What they were up against. Fingerprints and carpet fibers would not get Regina back.
     
    Caleb had mobilized volunteers to search the ten square miles of island in a carefully coordinated grid, concentrating first on the areas around the restaurant and the homeless encampment. Dylan wanted to plunge after them, to run around screaming her name. Futile human activity, he told himself. Useless human emotion.
     
    But at least they were doing something.
     
    His hands clenched into fists. Conn had directed him to observe, not to act.
     
    His inactivity was killing him. Regina was gone. Missing. And Dylan was desperately aware that his inactivity could be killing her, too.
     
    He wanted to take his fists to Jericho, to beat him bloody until the man confessed what he had done with her. Jericho, however, was under
    104
    guard at the clinic, awaiting medevac to a hospital on the mainland to have his burn treated. Even if the unconscious man were here and in his right mind, he could not tell Dylan anything the selkie didn’t already know.
     
    Regina was gone. Dylan had to find her.
     
    She was only human, and yet he felt . . . connected to her. They had a sexual bond. If his power were stronger, if their connection were stronger, he might have used it to trace her.
     
    But their attachment was too tenuous for him to follow. The memory of her wide brown eyes, her wry smile, haunted him. “Maybe I can’t risk me getting attached either.”
     
    He felt the bite of frustration and, worse, a lick of guilt. He could have changed her mind. He could have told her, promised her . . . What?
    She was human. He was selkie.
     
    She was gone.
     
    He had to find her.
     
    “Nonna says you know where my mother is.”
     
    Startled, Dylan looked down. Nick Barone scowled from beside the yellow tape, his chin cocked at a kiss-my-ass angle and his eyes full of raw misery.
     
    Dylan’s stomach lurched. “Is that what she told you?” he asked carefully.
     
    “I heard her talking to Chief Hunter. Do you?” Nick persisted.
    “Know where my mom is?”
     
    “No.” Such a flat, bald word. “But I will find her.”
     
    The promises he had not made to Regina were somehow easier to make to the child. Her son.
     
    Nick looked skeptical. “How?”
     
    “I don’t know yet,” Dylan admitted.
     
    105
     
    Nick’s face closed into a smooth, polite child’s mask. “Yeah. Okay.
    Thanks.”
     
    The boy did not believe him. Why should he? Nick did not need some stranger to tell him everything would be all right. He needed his mother.
     
    Dylan’s gaze went past him to the quiet street. The yellow tape had drawn as many people as it kept away. As hours passed without a break in the case or the gossip, however, most of the islanders who weren’t assisting in the search had gone on with their grocery shopping or their work or their lives.
     
    “You shouldn’t be alone,” Dylan said, sounding, even to his own ears, like a well-meaning and clueless adult. He tried again. “Where is your