Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

underwater. As if she couldn’t breathe. The ceiling pressed down like the lid of a coffin.
    The mattress tilted. Water slapped the wall beside her bed. The lurching of her stomach made sudden, horrible sense.
    She was on a boat.
    Fear writhed inside her like a big, fat snake. A boat . Moving at the whim of the wind and the water. At the mercy of her fears.
    Her heart raced. Her teeth chattered.
    Creak. Creak. From overhead.
    She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. She hated the water. She was going to be sick. She struggled to hold it in, to hold herself together, to force everything back into its proper place, but her body wasn’t hers to control anymore. As if the orgasm that had ripped through her—how long ago? hours?
    days?—had torn something vital from her.
    Scrape scrape. From the direction of the hatch.
    Panic swelled her chest, robbing her of air. A whimper escaped her. Oh, God.
    A shadow loomed at the base of the stairs, broad and black against the dimness of the room. Coming closer. Coming for her.
    The tangle inside her rippled and coiled like a snake about to strike. She bolted upright.
    No.
    Power erupted from her gut, tore from her throat like a scream as the thing inside her launched at the approaching threat. Her control snapped like a thread. Force exploded from her mouth, slammed through the cabin like a shock wave.
    Objects hurtled, clattered. Crashed.
    Things shattered. Glass. Her mind.
    She couldn’t see. She couldn’t stop. Roaring filled her head.
    Like freaking Carrie, drenched in blood and wreaking destruction at the prom.

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    Stop. Freak.
    “Enough.” One word, dropped into the raging dark like a pebble into a flood.
    She almost sobbed in relief. The wind, if it was a wind, died. Things settled or slid to the floor. The cabin righted. Her panic shriveled.
    That voice.
    She knew that voice.
    Lucy curled into a ball, gasping, sweating, deafened by the sudden silence.
    A light bloomed, soft and round like a marsh light, illuminating a strong jaw, a long nose, a sardonic mouth.
    Conn.
    He had a cut along one cheekbone, black in the blue light. He didn’t wipe the blood away. For some reason, the absence of that simple human gesture chilled her heart.
    She trembled, waiting for him to take her in his arms, to say something, do something, to restore her world and her faith.
    He glanced at Lucy and then around the cabin. His eyebrows arched. “It would appear,” he said, “you are your mother’s daughter, after all.”

5
    LUCY PULLED HER KNEES TO HER CHEST AND hugged them tight, struggling not to lose it.
    Again. She had survived bad dates before. But this . . .
    Conn’s face was inscrutable, his eyes shadowed in the odd, pale light.
    She’d had sex with him. Unprotected sex with a stranger. Like some stupid freshman who passed out at a kegger and woke up in an unfamiliar bed with no notion of how she got there.
    Lucy cringed. She couldn’t believe what she’d done. She couldn’t believe . . .
    Objects hurtling, crashing, shattering in the dark.
    She must have lost her mind.
    Things like this didn’t happen to her. Things like this didn’t happen.
    The room rocked with the rhythm of the water.
    “What . . . Where are we?” she asked. Dim memories clung of being carried, lifted . . . fed? “Was I sick?”
    But no one ever fed her when she was sick.
    Conn stooped—she managed not to flinch—and fished something from the floor. She caught the gleam of a broken lantern as he set it on the table.
    “You will feel better soon,” he said, which wasn’t an answer. “The sleep took you harder than I expected. But now that you are awake, the effects will wear off quickly.”
    Not sick, then, she thought. Maybe not crazy either.
    She remembered—or had she dreamed?—his arm strong and warm around her shoulders, a cup at her lips.
    “You gave me soup.”
    Had he drugged her? Maybe she was hallucinating. That would explain the things flying around the cabin, the sense of something writhing inside her, waiting to burst out of her chest like the space monster in Alien .
    She shuddered.
    He nodded. “You needed food. Liquids.”
    The room still rocked. Her stomach churned. Nerves? Or motion sickness?
    “How long was I out?”
    Conn did not answer.
    “How long?” she insisted. Hours? Days?

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    What had he done