Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

almost gently.
    “Save your son. Save yourself.”
     
    Regina could barely think anymore. Loss of blood, lack of sleep, and worry over Nick had drained her. Her head was full of white noise like the TV when the cable went out.
     
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    “I need . . .” Time. “Water,” she choked out.
     
    “Of course.” Donna filled a cup at the tap, held it out solicitously.
    “This will make everything easier,” she said. “You’ll see.”
     
    *
     
    The fortress waited above him in the dark like a sleeping dragon.
    Baleful. Breathing.
     
    Dylan twisted water from his shorts before he put them on.
    Anticipating ambush, he had slipped ashore in seal form, his black dive knife in his teeth. He retrieved the blade— salvaged years before from the wreck of a Navy boat— and hung it from the waistband of his shorts.
    Firearms were not reliable weapons against the children of fire.
     
    Besides, Dylan couldn’t swim with a gun in his mouth.
     
    He bundled his sealskin under a rock at the water’s edge, trusting night and the fog to hide it. He straightened from the surf, wrapping a glamour around him like a cloak to shield himself from demon eyes. A breeze whistled over the rocks, a sharp and sneaky little wind that tugged at his disguise and raised the hair on the back of his neck.
     
    He froze, expecting something to spring at him out of the dark. A guard. A jailer. A demon.
     
    But there was only the breeze, carrying the cold notes of mold and wet ash, drowned fires and small, dead things.
     
    Releasing his breath, Dylan climbed the rocks.
     
    And walked into a wall of fire.
     
    Pain. Heat.
     
    It seared the tissues of his mouth and throat, sucked the moisture from his eyeballs and the oxygen from his lungs.
     
    But he was selkie. The power of the sea coursed through his blood, and a human purpose deep and wide as the ocean drove him. He would not fail Regina. He would not fail. His own power rose to the flood. The
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    making of the warden’s mark on the restaurant wall had changed him, as if his gift had burst its banks and found new channels, new rivers within him.
     
    The fire was not real fire, he realized dimly. It was a flash of power, a wall of illusion, intended to repel. Squaring his shoulders, he walked through the flames without burning, and they died in his wake.
     
    He drew a shaky breath. Only the faintest demon taint stained the air.
    Maybe they were . . . gone? In hiding. Or maybe their magic fire had fried his sinuses.
     
    He studied the fortress squatting less than fifty yards above the waterline, its roof topped with grass like a hill. It stank of death and disuse.
     
    And something else.
     
    His heart pounded.
     
    Nick.
     
    He felt the boy trapped within those rough dark walls like a grain of sand in an oyster. So close.
     
    Dylan pulled his knife. Crouching, he crept over the rocks, trying not to crash through bushes like a bear, awkward as a seal out of water. He should have worn shoes. When he reached the fortress, he stopped and sniffed the air again. Nothing.
     
    It shouldn’t be this easy.
     
    It must be a trap.
     
    He drew a deep breath and eased along the wall, searching for an entrance.
     
    He found one tucked under the shadow of the hill and a white swirl of graffiti, the sign of human vandals, not of demons. He waited, listened, and slipped inside.
     
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    The windows piercing the thick walls had been designed for cannon, not for light. The feeble moon lay in faint, square puddles on the broken floor. The damp walls gleamed.
     
    Dylan did not need the moonlight. His eyes were made for darkness.
    But the need for caution hampered him like a blindfold. Small sounds echoed in the enclosed space. The rasp of his breath. The scuff of his feet.
     
    No other footsteps.
     
    Where was Nick?
     
    He heard a scrape from the lower level and a stifled whimper.
     
    He looked down through the rotted floor that must once have covered a store room and saw Nick, his face as pale as a rag and his eyes closed, huddled and bound at the bottom of the staircase like a goat tethered to trap a tiger.
     
    Dylan’s heart squeezed. Ah, shit. Be alive, he thought. Please be alive.
     
    “Don’t move,” he called down the stairs. “I’m coming to get you.”
     
    And then he realized maybe those weren’t the most reassuring words to hear from a man with a knife at the top of the stairs if you were a little boy tied up in the dark.
     
    Assuming Nick could hear.
     
    “It’s