Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

pattern, a clue.
    He clasped his hands behind him and directed a look at Dylan. “Neither do I. Yet. No doubt you are about to enlighten me.”

3
    CONN WAS NOT HIS FATHER. HE DID NOT EXPEND energy in needless emotion. But listening to Dylan’s report, Conn was aware of a hard, cold lump beneath his breastbone, a warning pulse in his blood, that felt disconcertingly like anger.
    Buggering hell.
    He tightened his hands behind his back. “They tried to kill your child,” he said. “A selkie child. A daughter of Atargatis.”
    It was the threat he feared.
    And the answer he had come looking for.
    Regina spread her hands over her stomach. “We don’t know yet if the baby’s selkie. Or even if it’s a girl.
    The ultrasound won’t be accurate for another couple of weeks. But that woman—the devil woman—was definitely trying to end the pregnancy. I was just . . . What do you call it?”
    “Collateral damage,” Caleb said in a grim voice.
    Conn ignored them both. “And you did nothing,” he said to Dylan.
    Dylan flushed the way he used to when he first came to live at Sanctuary, a thin, sulky adolescent with more attitude than sense. “I warded the island.”

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    “You knew I was waiting to hear from you.”
    “I sent the whaleyn .”
    The humpbacks’ song was rich and nuanced. But it lacked the clarity of human communication.
    “You should have come yourself,” Conn said.
    He had wasted weeks in the expectation that Dylan would return to Sanctuary to make his report—a mere eyeblink in the centuries of a selkie’s existence. However, in the current contest with the children of fire, even time was Conn’s enemy.
    Dylan gave him a level look, reminding Conn he was not a boy any longer. “I couldn’t leave them,” he said.
    Them. His woman. His child. The daughter of the prophecy? Conn wondered. The targair inghean .
    “You could have brought them with you,” he said. Though what in all the seven seas he was to do with them . . .
    Dylan shook his head. “Regina shouldn’t travel.”
    “I wouldn’t leave anyway,” she said. “I’ve got family here. A kid. A life.”
    Conn raised his eyebrows. “And if you lose your life? What becomes of your child then?”
    She pressed her lips together.
    The big man with the quiet eyes—Caleb, Dylan’s brother—stirred by the door. “She fought. We all fought the battle that came to us. Where the fuck were you?”
    In his tower on Sanctuary, trying to hold a castle of sand against the encroaching tide.
    “You see a battle,” Conn said coldly. “I see the war.”
    Caleb stuck his thumbs in his pockets. “So we’re just more collateral damage?”
    “Not if you come to Sanctuary,” Conn said.
    They all gaped at him.
    Not the reaction he was hoping for.
    “In attacking you, the children of fire have exposed their weakness. They fear you. Or at least,” he added carefully, “they fear the children to come after you. The daughters of Atargatis are a threat to them.”
    And an advantage to me, Conn thought but did not say. A tool. A weapon to be grasped.
    Lucy’s face—watchful eyes between curtains of thick, fair hair—flashed briefly in his brain.
    But it was her brothers who concerned him now.
    “Come to Sanctuary,” he repeated. “Where I can protect you.”
    “Protect?” Margred asked. “Or control?”
    “You will be safe there,” Conn insisted.
    “We’re safe here,” said Dylan’s woman. “Dylan warded the whole island.”
    “Dylan is but one,” Conn said. The youngest and least of his wardens. “There are a dozen guardians on Sanctuary.”
    Or there could be.
    He would call them back, he decided. The ranks of the wardens had thinned as their people dwindled, as their magic declined. There were fewer than a hundred now. Too many of the seaborn had been lost as Conn’s father was lost to the bliss of the land beneath the wave. Atargatis had been among the last of the old ones to still take human form. Which made preserving her bloodline even more important.
    “Well, I’m the only cop on World’s End,” Caleb said. “I can’t just pack up and leave. I have a responsibility to the people here.”
    Conn looked pointedly at Margred. “Greater than your responsibility to her? To the children you might have together?”
    Margred sucked in her breath.
    “There aren’t going to be any children,” Caleb said flatly.
    “There could be,”