Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

can go in now,” the doctor said.
     
    Finally. Dylan stood.
     
    He hadn’t known when he carried Regina into the clinic that he would be barred from her bedside. But he had known she needed more help than he could give. Medical help. Human help.
     
    He’d stripped off Regina’s wet clothes and wrapped her in his shirt before carrying her to the nearest house. One look at her, unconscious in his arms, and the woman living there had called 9-1-1.
     
    Caleb came, lights flashing, to drive them to the clinic and stayed past the clinic’s offical closing at five to hear the doctor’s report. Out of concern? Or to question Regina when she regained consciousness?
     
    Antonia Barone came to smoke and pace on the sidewalk just outside the front doors.
     
    Nick came with his grandmother. He hunched over some kind of video game, his thumbs busy, his face fixed and white, his attention completely focused on the glowing screen. As if the future of the world
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    depended on his ability to punch and kick the tiny bad guys into oblivion.
    He had barely looked up the entire time they waited.
     
    At the doctor’s announcement, however, he lurched to his feet, the game system sliding unnoticed onto the chair.
     
    Dylan followed the boy forward.
     
    The doctor— female, sixtyish, with a round, brown face and salt-and-pepper hair— frowned over her clipboard. “Family only.”
     
    “But he saved her,” Nick protested.
     
    Dylan looked down in surprise.
     
    “I’m sure your mom will thank him,” the doctor said. “Later. Right now she just wants to see you.”
     
    Antonia took Nick through the door to the exam room.
     
    Caleb stopped the doctor as she turned to follow them. “How is she?”
     
    “Better. Tired,” the doctor said. “The warmed IV brought her body temperature back up. I’m keeping an eye on her toes.”
     
    “What about the baby?” Dylan asked.
     
    “What baby?” Caleb’s tone was sharp.
     
    Dylan’s shoulders tensed. “There’s a possibility she is pregnant,” he said stiffly to the doctor.
     
    The doctor glanced down at her clipboard and then up at him. “And you are . . . ?”
     
    Dylan set his jaw. “The father.”
     
    “I’ll talk to the patient,” the doctor said and disappeared through the door.
     
    “You son of a bitch,” Caleb said.
     
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    Dylan winced. Emotions seethed and bubbled inside him: worry, responsibility, guilt. He covered them, as he had learned to cover all emotion at the selkie court, with a sneer. “Why? Because you weren’t the only one to enjoy himself on your wedding night?”
     
    Caleb’s punch snapped back his head and rocked him on his heels.
     
    Dylan ran his tongue around his teeth and tasted blood. “One,” he snarled. “I’ll give you one.” He deserved it. “But hit me again and I’ll take you down.”
     
    “You can try,” Caleb said.
     
    “If you were really eager to defend Regina, you would ask me why she was taken.”
     
    Caleb hooked his thumbs into his pockets. “I’m listening.”
     
    It was one thing to confide his mission to Margred; quite another, Dylan discovered, to discuss family matters with his brother. The Hunters had never been big on communication.
     
    “There are . . . stories about our family. About our mother.”
     
    “Yeah, I heard most of them. After she took a hike.”
     
    Dylan shook his head. “Not gossip. Legends. Prophecies, if you will.
    The stories say that a daughter born of the lineage of Atargatis will one day change the balance of power among the elementals.”
     
    “Atargatis.”
     
    “Alice Hunter. Our mother.”
     
    Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “So?”
     
    Dylan spoke carefully, in the even tones he’d learned at the prince’s court. “If Regina is with child, a female child, that offspring could fulfill the prophecy. It would be regarded by Hell as a danger to the present order.”
     
    “Regina’s child,” Caleb repeated.
     
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    “Hers. And mine.” He felt a lurch of something— possessiveness?
    pride?— as he said the words.
     
    “You think the demons decided to take her out?”
     
    “To eliminate the threat of the child. Yes.”
     
    His brother eyed him grimly. “So, before you knocked her up, did you tell her she was going to be a demon magnet?”
     
    Dylan’s lips thinned. “I did not know she was a target.”
     
    “You didn’t know she was pregnant?”
     
    It chafed him to admit it. “No.”
     
    “You still had no