Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

not say.
     
    “Oh, please. You were thirteen. Your mother was, what, like, forty?”
     
    His mouth was dry. “Older than that.”
     
    Regina looked at him questioningly.
     
    “Selkies are immortal. We do not age as humans do.”
     
    “Oh.” Another silence, while she absorbed this fresh bit of information and he wished he were somewhere far away in the cool, dark depths of the ocean. “But she died. Didn’t you say she died?”
     
    “She was killed. Drowned in a fisherman’s net within a year of her freedom.” He blamed himself for that, too.
     
    Regina winced. “Well, but that doesn’t change my point. Your mother was the grown-up. She could have split with you anytime. Or made sure you stayed.”
     
    “She could not leave. Before.”
     
    “Why not?”
     
    138
    Black resentment boiled in him. He swallowed it. “We cannot change form, we cannot return to the sea, without our sealskins. My mother used to come ashore to . . . visit my father. Before we were born.
    Before they married. I think they married.” Dylan chose his words with care, but it was impossible to disguise the bitterness in his face. “One night, while she lay sleeping, he took her pelt and hid it.”
     
    “She used to visit him,” Regina repeated.
     
    He should have known she would focus on the wrong thing. She was human and female. Incapable of understanding the needs that drove his kind.
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “So she must have been at least attracted to him at some point.”
     
    “That did not give him the right to try to contain her,” Dylan said tautly. “To control her.”
     
    “She still stayed with him for thirteen— fourteen?— years.”
     
    He glared. “She had no choice.”
     
    “They had three kids.”
     
    Dylan could not answer. He was the one who had found his mother’s pelt. He had brought it to her. He had destroyed his family.
     
    He met her gaze, speechless, appalled by the emotions that raged and wept inside him. As if he were thirteen again, mortified and distracted by the changes in his own body, torn between his childhood loyalties and affections and his deep, desperate desire for the sea.
     
    He steadied his breathing. He was not that child, he reminded himself. He was not the victim of emotion or anything else. He was selkie, impervious, immortal.
     
    “Does Caleb know?” Regina asked, plunging him back into the torrent of human feeling and connection again. “That you and your mother are some kind of . . .”
     
    He narrowed his eyes. “Freaks?” he asked softly.
     
    139
     
    She crossed her arms over her stomach. “I was going to say mermaid, but you can call yourself whatever you want. Does he know?”
     
    “He does now. He’s had some recent experience with . . .
    mermaids.”
     
    Her mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “Maggie?”
     
    Margred was her friend, Dylan thought, an odd pressure in his chest.
    Surely Regina, with her fierce loyalties and her kind heart, would not turn from Margred, who had been selkie. And if she did not turn from Margred, then . . . But he would not let himself complete that thought.
     
    He nodded.
     
    “Wow. That’s . . . wow.” Regina reached for her water. She took a sip, her hand tight on the frosted glass, watching him over the rim. “What about Lucy?”
     
    “Lucy is human. I told you.”
     
    “Yeah, but does she know?”
     
    “There is no reason for her to know. She was only a year old when we . . . left.”
     
    “Nick was only three months old when we moved from Boston, but he still knows who his father is.” Regina gulped more water. “What his father is.”
     
    “The situation is not the same,” Dylan said stiffly.
     
    “No?” She set down her glass, her hand trembling. “Then why are you telling me?”
     
    To keep her safe.
     
    Whether the child in her womb was the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy or merely a pawn in the elementals’ border wars, the demons would not back off when their first attack failed. The child was still threatened. Regina was still in danger. Dylan’s gut knotted.
     
    140
    “You deserve to know,” he said coolly.
     
    She hunched in her chair, her eyes bright and challenging in her white face. “So you’ve told me. Now what? Are you going to visit me, like your mom visited your dad?”
     
    He recognized the strain under her flippant tone, the tension hiding behind her casual posture. Hadn’t he learned to mask his own fears and uncertainties the