Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

of the water, feeling the sun on her face, trying hard not to think of anything at all.
    “ You belong here, ” Conn had said to her last night. “ In time you will come to accept that. ”
    Was he right?
    She wondered how Dylan had adapted, coming here for the first time when he was thirteen, leaving behind his family and friends, the only life, the only world he’d ever known. But Dylan was selkie, and he’d had their mother with him.
    She wondered how Griff’s wife, Emma, had adjusted, the only human, the only mortal on Sanctuary.
    Conn said she had been happy here. Fulfilled. But Emma’s husband had been devoted to her until the day she died.
    Lucy pleated the red wool in her lap and wondered how it would feel to be loved. How she would feel if Conn loved her.
    She remembered the look on his face as he gazed out to sea, his body carved out of moonlight and marble, and her heart ached in her breast.
    Madadh growled and rose to a crouch.

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    Startled, she glanced down. The dog’s small ears laid back along its narrow skull. Its yellow eyes blazed.
    She followed its line of sight to the empty arch and beyond to the cobblestoned keep. Her chest tightened in apprehension.
    “It’s okay,” she soothed, without any idea whether everything was okay or not.
    Madadh took a slinking step forward.
    She reached— no collar —and put her hand on the dog’s shoulders, feeling its muscles bunch beneath the fur. “Let’s not be silly.”
    Something was going on in the outer courtyard. The tall iron-bound door swung silently open. No footsteps. No voices. She still had time to retreat to her room. Assuming she could find it in this pile of stones.
    She stood. “Come on,” she urged Madadh, sounding unconvincingly cheery. “Let’s—”
    The dog bolted from under her hand and tore across the courtyard.
    “ Crap. ” She took off after him.
    At the arch, she stopped, catching herself against the cold, finished stone, her heart hammering against her ribs.
    A phantom company of—people?—poured like smoke through the open door. Not people. Ghosts.
    Ancient soldiers, senators, centurions, like extras from an old Bible movie, like visions from a nightmare.
    Something about the shape of their skulls, the set of their shoulders or eye sockets, wasn’t quite . . . right.
    Their robes and bodies flowed and faded in the sun. Through their booted feet, their sandaled legs, she could see the stones of the courtyard standing out like bones.
    Her blood chilled.
    Madadh launched like a rock from a catapult through the shifting, shimmering crowd. The air swirled and sparkled in the dog’s wake.
    “Madadh, no!” Lucy shouted as one figure—tall, robed, with leaves of some sort circling its dark head—turned and raised one hand.
    The hound dropped like a stone.
    Lucy pressed her hands to her mouth.
    The man, if it was a man, looked from the dog whimpering at its feet to Lucy cowering against the wall.
    Its eyes glowed like the embers of a dying fire. They scorched her soul.
    She felt the brute thrust of its invasion like an ice pick in her skull, like a broom handle between her legs.
    Jabbing. Burning. Tearing. Wrong.
    Instinctively, she recoiled into the shadow of the arch, her heart thumping in her chest and the taste of ashes in her mouth.

11
    BART HUNTER CAME HOME TO THE SOUND OF the TV and the smell of burning food. He
    dropped his boots by the front door. “Lucy?”
    No answer.
    Where the hell was she?
    He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be home. Usually at this hour he was at the inn. A man deserved a drink after putting in a day on the water. He shouldn’t have to chase after his grown-up daughter. She was too old, he was too old, to put up with this shit.
    But while he was in line to sell his catch—young lobsters, shedders, to stock the co-op’s pond over the winter—that jackass Henry Tibbetts had joked, “Where’d you bury the body, Bart?”
    Like his daughter was dead instead of just taking a couple days off sick.
    Like she’d run off.
    Like her mother.
    “Lu!” he bellowed.

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    It wasn’t like her to skip work. Even when she was a little girl, she’d never missed more than a day of school. Never gave any trouble, he thought with pride and regret.
    The TV chattered—some woman with big lips and small tits leaning