Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

her turn the flood there.
    Love or duty?
    Life or Lucy?
    The past or the future?
    Her magic sprang from love, he remembered thinking. Could his do less?
    He licked his lips, bitter with brine and defeat. “You must Change,” he ordered his wardens. “Save yourselves.”
    “But my lord,” Griff objected.
    “He goes to her,” Morgan snarled. “Fool!”
    Enya’s mouth dropped open in shock.
    “Change, damn you!” Conn cried before his heart was plucked from his chest.
    For a moment, he hovered, his spirit winging like a bird above the tower. As he wheeled, he saw his body drop abandoned on the wall, and Morgan grab the chain about his neck.
    And then his spirit was drawn away, sucked across the sea.
    The wave reared taller than the towers and fell like a hammer on Caer Subai.

20
    LUCY HELD TIGHT TO MARGRED’S AND DYLAN’S hands as if they were drowning.
    Or she was.
    The flood roared down on them like a train in a tunnel. The earth shook. The wind rushed in her ears.
    She felt Dylan’s spirit draining and Margred’s spirit ebb, and the wall she had built to protect them, the dike to dam the demon flood, began to crumble and crack under the strain. Her knees trembled. Her soul cried out.
    Never to return to Sanctuary.

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    Never to see Conn again.
    “ We need you. I need you. ” An echo of his words.
    I love you. A cry wrenched from her soul.
    And as if her love were a bridge, a channel, he was suddenly there, with her, in her, his strength propping up her faltering strength, his power thundering through her veins.
    She felt the demons’ surprise, heard their howls of pain and protest as she turned the ocean back on them, as the sea wall she had constructed burst to become one with this new surge of power, boulders tossed in the flood, missiles hurtled against an enemy.
    Conn’s spirit flowed into her spirit. Her magic rose like the sea, shining, vengeful, smooth and towering as the wave.
    “ Gau! ” she shouted. “ I bury you! ”
    The wave crashed down, turning the flood back out to sea, where it was swallowed by the deeps.
    But even as her magic crested and crashed down, even as she clung to her family’s hands, she saw another wall, another wave, across the sea.
    Like a bird high in the sky, she saw the castle wall on Sanctuary, topped with tiny figures, human and seal, and a wave rearing over them like the hammer of Hell.
    She saw Conn, unconscious, helpless, lying on the wall; and she watched in horror as the hammer fell.
    The next morning Lucy crept toward the stairs, aching and stiff in every muscle and sinew, sore and sick at heart. In the hallway outside her old room, she paused, caught by the sound of her father’s voice, reading aloud to the figure on the bed.
    “ ‘Goodnight to the cow jumping over the moon ...’ ”
    Lucy’s breath hitched.
    Bart looked up and saw her. His spare, worn face flushed. “That new doctor told me it might help to read to her. He saw us—saw her—saw Cora at the community center last night.” He cleared his throat.
    “I’m calling her Cora. Too confusing to have two Lucys in the house.”
    Tears sprang to Lucy’s eyes. She blinked, leaning against the door jamb. “That’s . . . great, Dad. Pretty name,” she offered, because what else was there to say?
    “I found this with your teaching stuff.” Bart held up the orange-and-green-striped cover of Goodnight Moon . “You don’t mind, do you?”
    “No,” she said truthfully. “I don’t mind at all.”
    Bart frowned at the figure lying on the bed, so still, so pale, her chest rising and falling softly with her breath. “She doesn’t look anything like you,” he said. “I don’t know why anybody . . . I don’t know why I thought she looked like you.”
    Lucy’s laugh sounded more like a sob. Walking into the room, she bent and kissed the top of his head. “I don’t know either, Dad.”
    Her father reached up and patted her hand awkwardly where it rested on his shoulder. “Caleb and the rest of them’s downstairs,” he said. “You should go down. Get some breakfast.”
    “Yes.” She swallowed hard. “I will.”
    They were gathered in the living room: Caleb in his uniform, and Margred tired and beautiful, Regina with eight-year-old Nick on the couch, and Dylan with his back to the room, staring out the window at the snow.
    Caleb and Regina were speaking in hushed voices, like schoolchildren