Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

over a stove. Bart snapped off the set and heard noises from the kitchen. Running water. Scraping sounds.
    He found Lucy in the kitchen, standing in front of the sink, chipping away with a spatula at some godawful black mess in a frying pan. Cupboards and drawers stood open. Dirty cups, bowls, and spoons littered the counters among splotches of flour, grease, and tomato. Under the smoke and char floated a sharper, fresher scent, like a mowed lawn.
    Lucy’s head jerked around as he entered the kitchen, her shock of blond hair flying. Something—tomato sauce? chocolate?—smeared her cheek. Her eyes were wild.
    Bart halted. He didn’t ask her what was wrong. They never asked. There were too many possible answers he didn’t want to hear. “What the hell are you doing?”
    She lifted the pan half out of the sink, slopping water to the floor. “I wanted to make dinner.”
    His gaze went from the wet floor to the hard, blackened remains of . . . whatever it was, stinking in the sink.
    He frowned, bothered. Bewildered. “Why didn’t you just throw something in the Crock-Pot?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “I don’t know anything.”
    Her eyes welled with tears.
    Bart recoiled. But under his worry and aggravation, a memory stirred: Alice, right after she’d come to live with him, struggling in the kitchen. “ But I want to cook for you, ” she’d protested when he came home to another ruined dinner. “ Like a regular wife. ”
    “ I didn’t want a regular wife, ” he would tease her. “ I married a mermaid. ” Maybe he’d fry up some eggs, then, or boil lobsters. Sometimes they’d skip dinner altogether and go upstairs to make love.
    In the old days. In the good days. In the days when she still loved him enough to please him, and he’d loved her enough to trust her.
    The old, familiar pain ripped at him.
    He looked at Alice’s daughter, her flushed face, her tear-filled eyes, and shifted his weight uneasily.
    He’d never been a good father to her. Hadn’t needed to be. Caleb had raised her since she was in diapers. By the time the boy left home, she was pretty much taking care of herself. And him, too. Doing the laundry, doing her home-work, opening cans of soup for dinner. A good girl. No trouble, he thought again.
    But she was in some kind of trouble now. Henry said she hadn’t been into work all week.
    “Maybe we should go out,” he said. “To eat. Give you a break.”
    Her green eyes—green as grass, greener than he remembered—widened. “Why?”
    “You’ve been sick,” he said gruffly. “Not yourself.”
    “Not myself,” she repeated.
    He wouldn’t take her to the bar at the inn, he decided. They’d go to Antonia’s. “Get a good meal inside you, you might feel better.”
    Her tears dried up as if by magic. “I will feel better.”
    He was unaccountably pleased with himself and her. “And tomorrow you get yourself back to school.”
    She stared at him, her face a blank.
    His mouth dried in panic. Had something happened to her at the school? Something she couldn’t tell him?
    She was fired, maybe, or . . . His mind skittered away from all the things that could happen to a girl, all the dangers he’d never been able to protect her from.
    “School,” she said suddenly and smiled. “To learn.”
    He jammed his hands in his pockets. “To teach.”
    “To teach and learn.”
    “Right.” Well, why not? “Better than brooding around the house like your old man.”
    She smiled, a hint of mischief in her face. “Get a good meal inside you, you might feel better.”
    He chuckled, already feeling better than he had in a long time.

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    Conn’s gaze swept from Madadh’s body, limp on the cobblestones, to Lucy’s white, stricken face. For one second his heart simply stopped, frozen in terror.
    Across the courtyard, Gau smiled, taunting him. Playing him.
    Fury slammed through Conn like a storm surge, sweeping everything in its path.
    His lips pulled back in a snarl. “Hold him.”
    Gau’s form flickered. Perhaps it was an effect of the sunlight, but the demon lord appeared almost shaken. “I am an emissary. You do not have the authority to hold me.”
    “My realm,” Conn said. “My rules.”
    A sigh rippled through Gau’s cohort. The stench of demonkind lay over the keep like smoke. In that shifting, shimmering crowd, any one of them could have slipped away.