Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

same way?
     
    Dylan scowled. It was one thing for him to deny or disguise his feelings. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t female and pregnant. He hadn’t been half strangled and thrown down a hole by a demon intent on his destruction. Her strength of mind, her practicality of purpose, as her world turned upside down awed and annoyed him. Couldn’t she let her guard down this once and let him take care of things?
     
    Of course not.
     
    In her eyes, he was one of the things she was guarding against, a threat to the life she had built with her son. She was probably dying to get rid of him. Circle the wagons. Repel the alien invader. “Nicky and I will be fine on our own,” she’d said.
     
    But she wouldn’t. They wouldn’t. They needed him, whether Regina admitted it or not. Whether she liked it or not. Now he just had to figure out how to tell her.
     
    “You should get some rest,” he said.
     
    She gave him a disbelieving look. “You think that’s going to solve anything?”
     
    “I think,” he said carefully, “you need to sleep. We can decide what to do in the morning.”
     
    “We don’t decide,” Regina said. “I decide.”
     
    “Not tonight,” Dylan said.
     
    He knew she prided herself on her independence. This situation, however, was outside her experience and beyond her control. Eventually, she would have to accept that. Accept his protection.
     
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    At least she would be safe tonight. He was here. She was warded. In the morning, he would find some way to confer with Conn, to make arrangements to bring her to the selkie island until her baby could be born. In the meantime . . .
     
    He reached into his pocket. “I have something of yours.”
     
    Her eyes rounded as he withdrew the bright gold cross on the broken chain. “Oh.” Her hand went to her neck in a habitual gesture. “I thought I lost it. Where . . .”
     
    “In the kitchen.” He poured the fine chain into her cupped palm, keeping his hand carefully apart from hers. “The clasp is snapped. You need another.”
     
    He should have gotten her another, he realized belatedly. But there hadn’t been time.
     
    “Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him, her eyes glowing as if he’d brought her diamonds instead of a broken necklace that already belonged to her.
     
    His heart constricted. “You’re welcome. You should wear it. For protection.”
     
    Her smile turned rueful. “It hasn’t done a very good job of protecting me so far.”
     
    “More than you know.” Unable any longer to resist the temptation of her touch, he closed her hand around the cross. Her fingers were light and cool. He let go before she could notice his own hand trembling.
     
    “It is a ward,” he explained. “Like the mark on your wrist.”
     
    She looked at the triskelion tattooed on her skin; at the gold cross in her hand. “A ward against what? Vampires?”
     
    He had intended to put this conversation off until morning. He owed her his honesty. That didn’t mean he had to batter her with the truth when she was exhausted and he was on edge.
     
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    But she wouldn’t let it go, he thought in irritation. She kept pushing and pushing at him with her wide eyes and her soft heart and her big mouth.
     
    “Not vampires,” he said. “Demons.”
     
    *
     
    Regina’s jaw dropped. She inhaled. She exhaled. Demons. Well.
     
    “I was kidding,” she said weakly.
     
    Dylan didn’t say anything. Oh, God. Obviously, he was not.
     
    Regina had been baptized a Catholic, but her knowledge of demons was pretty much limited to Halloween and a few episodes of Buffy.
     
    She swallowed. “Are we talking horns and pitchforks here? Or The Exorcist?”
     
    A muscle bunched in Dylan’s jaw. “This is not a movie.”
     
    “No, it’s my life.” Her previously dull and ordinary life. She wanted it back.
     
    “This is crap,” she said. “I was attacked by somebody I know. A man. A human. Jericho Jones.”
     
    “He was possessed,” Dylan said. “Unlike the other elements, fire has no matter of its own. The children of the fire must take over a host to act on the corporal plane.”
     
    She struggled to make sense of his words, to hear him through the rushing in her ears, the pounding of her heart. “Possessed or not, Jericho’s in jail. The demon—” Even the word stopped her. She wasn’t Buffy. She didn’t do demons. She was a twenty-nine-year-old line cook with an eight-year-old son. She forced herself to go on.