Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

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    Should not . . .
    Buggering hell. He slammed through the postern door.
    She must not go alone into the sea. Not the first time. Without guidance, she could become dazzled, disoriented, lost beneath the waves.
    Lost.
    As his father was lost.
    Conn stumbled and burst onto the beach, more bull than human, blind with fear, uncoordinated with worry. Madadh guarded a slim pile at the water’s edge. Lucy’s cloak. Lucy’s clothes.
    Lucy was gone.
    His heart turned to ice in his chest. She had left him.
    He wanted to scream her name and plunge into the sea after her.
    He fought the impulse. He had no way of knowing where in all the vast ocean she was. Or what she was.
    If she was Changed or lost or drowned.
    His hands fisted at his sides.
    He stood listening, casting his heart and all his senses out to sea to find her. But all that came back to him was the low roll of the breakers and the high seabirds’ cries.
    Madadh rose, ears drooping, skinny tail pressed between his legs, as if his dim, doggy brain accepted responsibility for Lucy’s leaving.
    “Not you,” Conn said hoarsely. “Me.”
    He reached for her cloak, as if the touch of the fabric which had touched her skin could provide a hint of comfort, a clue to her presence or her fate. Something fell from the cloak’s folds, flashing as it tumbled to the sand.
    Conn picked it up, his hand trembling.
    The aquamarine drop glinted in his palm, pale as a diamond in the twilight.
    His heart clenched. His hand closed.
    Dropping to his knees on the hard sand, he bowed his head.
    Lucy.
    Lucy. A finger touch on her soul.
    She was Lucy.
    Her name was a chain around her neck, tightening her throat. She dived to escape, but the sound followed her into the depths like the ringing of a buoy’s bell.
    She scythed through the water, pursued by her name, by the memory of his voice.
    She had left him, the one who called her. The one she loved. She wept tears into the sea from large, moist, round eyes that saw in the dark.
    But she did not turn back. The siren song of the sea rushed in her ears, drummed in her head, as she plunged in the wake of the sun, driven by a need deeper than hunger, more compelling than exhaustion, goaded on by visions of blood and tears that stained the water.
    Wave upon wave.
    Day after day.
    She slept in snatches, bobbing in the waves, breathing brine. Woke and swam. Slept and swam again.
    Until her strength was nearly depleted, until her mind was almost gone, until she existed only as a purpose and a shadow gliding in the shadows of the water.
    Following the sun.
    Going home.
    She carried the one she loved with her, a fish hook caught in her heart, and every mile she swam from Page 111

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    him ripped her chest and made her bleed.
    The wardens gathered around the ancient map imbued with magic on Conn’s desk. The tall windows barred the tower room with rose light and with shadow.
    As if, Conn thought, the castle already burned. He clasped his hands behind his back, refusing to entertain the fantasy or the fear.
    “There are no signs of life anywhere near the fissure,” Morgan said. He had just returned from the vent.
    “No squid, no shrimp, not even worms.”
    “Killed by the heat,” Griff suggested.
    Morgan shook his white-blond head. “Life thrives in the heat around the vents.”
    Ronat frowned. “So if there is no life . . .”
    “Then the vent opened only recently. After Gau’s visit,” Conn said grimly.
    The issue was not the cause, but their response.
    On the map, the demons’ activity was revealed as a throbbing red threat off the west coast of Sanctuary.
    Never admit emotion. Never reveal weakness.
    “How large is the seep?” he asked calmly.
    Morgan shrugged. “The magma has not built up. But the cracks are deep. I could see the sulfur plume before I was down a hundred feet.”
    Brychan whistled, obviously dismayed. “We cannot seal such a gap.”
    “No.” Morgan turned his unblinking golden stare on Conn. “I should say . . . not without help.”
    Not without Lucy to boost and bind their powers together.
    They all looked at Conn, as if expecting him to produce the targair inghean from thin air and save them all.
    Conn quelled the impulse to shout at them. She was gone. She had left him. He could not save them.
    “Even if we seal this fissure, there will be more,” Conn said.
    “There are always vents,” Morgan said. “Thousands of them