Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

aisles had been a nightmare. Too many labels. Too many choices. What if he guessed wrong? He glared at the girl standing between him and freedom and snarled, “Take the damn money.”
     
    Her painted eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. “Dad!” she hollered.
     
    Dylan ground his teeth together. So much for his ability to charm.
     
    A man with a build like a barrel and a receding hairline rolled over from the meat counter. “Problem here?”
     
    “He—” The girl thrust her lip ring in Dylan’s direction. “Wants to pay with that.” She sneered at the fortune in silver plunked on the counter.
     
    “They’re dollars,” Dylan said tightly.
     
    American dollars. It wasn’t like he’d offered her Caesars or doubloons.
     
    Usually when he needed cash to buy propane or supplies, he sold a few coins to a dealer in Rockland. But the past few weeks on World’s End had depleted his currency.
     
    “So I . . .” The creases deepened at the corners of the man’s eyes.
    “Dylan? I heard you were back.”
     
    Dylan regarded him blankly.
     
    “George,” the man said.
     
    191
    Dylan had gone to school with a boy named George. They’d shared a classroom from kindergarten through eighth grade, shared gum and homework answers and copies of Penthouse that George had smuggled from behind the counter of his father’s store. Wiley’s Grocery. George Wiley. George.
     
    Dylan managed to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
    “Good to see you again.”
     
    “Yeah, you, too. Boy, you look just the same.” George shook his head. “Just the same.”
     
    Because he’d aged only half the time, Dylan thought, with an odd lurch in his stomach.
     
    George beamed at the girl with the purple eye shadow. “That’s my daughter, Stephanie, who won’t take your money.”
     
    She rolled her eyes. “Dad-deee.”
     
    His friend George was a father, Dylan thought dazedly. An overweight store owner with an adolescent daughter. Nothing human endured . . .
     
    “So, you want us to run a tab for you?” George asked.
     
    Dylan scowled. “What?”
     
    His old friend nodded at the pile of coins on the counter. “What you got there is probably worth half my inventory. I don’t know exactly how much, and I sure as hell can’t make change. So we’ll open you an account, and you settle up when you can.”
     
    Maybe some things endured, Dylan realized. Like a boy’s casually offered friendship, long after the boy had grown.
     
    He swallowed past a constriction in his throat. “That would be . . .
    good. Thanks.”
     
    “What are friends for?” George made an entry in a ledger; glanced at the prenatal vitamins as he bagged them. “How’s Regina?”
     
    “Fine.”
     
    192
     
    Pregnant.
     
    “Good.” George’s grin widened. “Women and the island, they get to us all, buddy. You give her my best.”
     
    Dylan walked out, purchase in hand and George’s good wishes in his ears.
     
    This, then, was what Regina wanted for Nick. The net Dylan felt closing so tightly around him could also be a web of support. Maybe the gossip and aggravation, the friction and demands, were a tolerable trade-off for this sense of community. Of acceptance. Of belonging.
     
    Or they would be, Dylan thought, if he were human.
     
    *
     
    When you lived for millennia in the sea, a few days to send a message was nothing. But this once, the human technology that had fouled the waves and roiled the ocean bottom would have come in handy.
     
    Dylan tread water a mile offshore, his long, pale legs dangling like so much shark bait, his balls pulled tight with cold. His human form was another inconvenience that had to be endured. Details tended to dissipate over distance in the water. Dylan needed his human brain to frame and sharpen the images he sent to Conn.
     
    Especially since the messengers he called would filter whatever information he gave them the same way they strained the ocean for food, keeping only what they could digest.
     
    They came, their long, sleek backs and uneven dorsals occasionally breaking the water’s bright surface: huge, slow acrobats of the sea with mild, deep eyes and flukes as individual as snowflakes. Two males, a female, and a calf, drawn by Dylan’s call. Not near, not too near. Their weight could swamp him, their draft could drown him, the barnacles on their sides could scrape him raw. Even the baby weighed a ton.
     
    One of the males struck the water in greeting, and the wash broke over