Adrift (5 page)

My heart tugged within me.  I missed Coal, looking at that fuzzy little body, with the neat, sharp little ears and heavy mane framing the Shetland face.  A wave of home-sickness filled me.  I felt as if I might drown.

Devin disappeared into a shed and came out with four flat buckets of grain.

“Watch this,” he said, sliding through the rails of the fence.  He let out a low whistle and all three horses, who had been staring at us, with wide, expectant eyes, immediately trotted up.  “Dance,” Devin commanded.

To my delighted surprise, all four horses starting jigging in place, tossing their heads and arching their necks, and lifting their knees high.  Devin set the buckets down well away from each other.

“That was impressive,” I told him.  “Have you taught them any other tricks?”

“A few.”  He shrugged off the accomplishment.

We watched quietly as the horses finished their grain and went back to grazing the lush, green grass.  There was something comforting about the familiar grinding of their teeth, the lazy swish of their tails as they brushed off the occasional fly.

“I’m concerned about what brings you to Trinity,” Devin said, suddenly, his face, if possible, even sterner than usual.

“I told you,” I said, confused.  “I just got in the car and started driving.”

He shook his head.  “There’s just too much coincidence here.  I don’t think you even know why you’re here.”  He leaned his chin against the top rail of the fence, his eyes on the horses instead of on me.

“What?” I demanded. “You think I came here on purpose? I’ve never even heard of Trinity before, in my entire life!”

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” he said, brushing his reddish-blond hair out of his eyes.

“I already almost do,” I told him. 

Something about him was starting to make me nervous.  Had I been wrong to accept his and Maura’s hospitality?  After all, they could be some sort of insane murderers, for all I knew.  They might have some sort of plan to bury me in the garden I had just helped weed. I shivered at the thought of rhubarb growing up through my ribs. Some fertilizer, I thought morbidly.

I shook my head. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to believe anything evil of Maura.

Devin, on the other hand, confused me.  He was so closed, so hidden. Even now he stared at me with an unreadable expression. For all I knew he was a psychopath, luring me unwittingly to my doom.

Instinctively I edge away from him, using the horses as an excuse for the movement.

“That cottage,” Devin said, reading the swiftly-changing emotions on my face.  He started again.  “That cottage… it’s… not exactly haunted, but sometimes the Old Ones can be seen there.”

“Haunted? The Old Ones?” I asked, stupidly, suddenly thinking about UFOs and alien ghosts.

“The Fae,” Devin elaborated.  “Those of Faerie.  Meg, you have an… aura around you.  You’re one of them, in part anyway.”

“I’m what?” I asked, growing more and more confused.

Devin rubbed a hand over his face.  “Ugh, this is impossible. Meg, what do you know about your mother?”

“She drowned when I was a baby,” I said, trying to make some kind of connection in all he was saying.

“Meg, for the last few centuries, my father and forefathers have lived here, guarding… The fabric between Faerie and the mortal realm is very thin here.  We’ve been in charge of making sure that nothing… crosses.  Some things, though, are harder to control.  That cottage, it has been here as long as we have… Longer, really.  Before Trinity even existed, it belonged to a family.” Devin spoke as if all of this information were being dragged from him, reluctantly. He scowled, his homely face looking almost dangerous to me, completely at odds with his talk of fairyland.

“A family?” I repeated, wondering what, exactly, I was listening too.  How could his family have been here for centuries?  Was he saying they had come over with the Vikings?

“A family of selkies,” Devin answered. He stared at me, daring me with his eyes to laugh at him.

Somehow, I couldn’t laugh, ridiculous as his words were. He was too cold, too serious not to believe what he was saying.

I gulped.

“Um,” I licked my lips.  “I don’t really understand what you’re saying.  What, exactly, is a selkie?”

“A selkie is a Fae-being that takes the form of a seal,” Devin explained, with the air of someone explaining the obvious.  “They’re seal-folk.  Some believe that they are behind all the legends of mer-folk.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding my hands up.  “You’re saying that the cottage belongs to a mermaid?” I had to fight hard not to roll my eyes. There had been no fish-tails there in that cottage, that was for sure.

It was growing more and more clear to me that Devin was off his rocker. I casually took grip of a shovel, leaning against the fence, in case I ended up needing to defend myself.

Devin made a frustrated sound.  “No.  That’s not what I’m saying at all.  What I’m saying is… Meg, I think your mother is a selkie.  I think you were drawn to Trinity because this is where she is, where she can cross between our world and Faerie.  I don’t think she drowned.  I think she, like all selkie folk eventually do, couldn’t escape the call of the sea any longer.  You can feel it too, can’t you?” His voice became suddenly urgent.  “The sea, I can see that it calls to you, that it hypnotizes you.  That’s the selkie blood in you.”

“But you’re expecting me to believe in fairytales,” I protested. “It’s completely ridiculous.”

“Not fairytales,” Devin insisted.  “Faerie.  It exists.  Once, the Fae folk interacted with this world, but it has been gated away.  For any of the Fae folk to cross is very rare these days.  Your mother probably would have been the only one in the last three hundred years at least.  I can even guess the timing… but that’s not important.”

“I can’t even begin to believe this,” I said.  “It’s not possible.  It’s insane. You are bonkers, stark raving mad!”

“But it’s true,” Devin said, steadily, suddenly turning to me with the full determination of his face.  “It’s true, and, because it’s true, you’re in danger—and the gate is in danger.  You already have some of the glamorie about you… did you have strange dreams last night?”

I gasped, a shiver climbing up my spine, thinking of the girl I had seen in my dreams, feeling my face flush as I thought of the impossibly beautiful man, whose face still haunted me, hours after waking.

“They cannot cross, but you are Fae enough yourself that they can touch your mind when your guard is let down.”

“My dreams are real?” My voice stuttered, but for the first time I found myself prepared to begin to believe him.  My dreams had been so real, so vivid.  “That… the girl that I saw in the cottage?”

“I believe she is your mother,” Devin said, seriously.  “Yes.”

I swallowed, feeling suddenly light headed.  I thought of her impossibly young face, and that heavy, dark, hair tumbling down her back.  There was something there, in the shape of her eyes, in the curve of her mouth.  There was something in her that I could claim.

“I think I need to sit down.”  I whispered.
 

Chapter Four

Devin was expecting me to believe in fairytales, in bedtime stories.

What frightened me is that I almost believed him.

Almost, but not quite.

Was he dragging me down into his delusions? Was I beginning a spiraling descent into madness? I could not deny his intensity, his desperation. Whatever the truth was, he honestly believed that I was this selkie creature, and he honestly believed that I was in some kind of danger.

There was part of me that liked the simplicity-- that wanted to believe what he was saying.  After all, that meant that my mother was still out there, somewhere.  I wasn’t an orphan.  I wasn’t really alone.  And, if what he said was true, then she hadn’t really meant to leave me, she had to—had been compelled by the sea—to leave.

I rubbed my throbbing head.  My thoughts were tangled together and jumbled, skittering off in all directions. I had to sort things out.

What if it were true?  After all, weren’t fairy-stories only created to explain what we couldn’t understand?

However… It was
impossible
.

To accept the madness that Devin was presenting as reality was to accept the existence of things I had never held any stock in—was I to believe in Santa Claus again, in unicorns seeking out virgins, in dragons blasting through the air with fiery breath and silvery wings?

Preposterous.

But, I wanted to believe.

And it terrified me how badly I wanted it to be true.

I never even noticed when Devin left me alone.  I sat down, just inside the pasture, with the horses, my mind racing like a wild thing.

Devin’s old pony waffled up to me and settled lazily to the ground, dropping his head in my lap, spraying hay-breath all over my lap.  I stroked his mane, watching his long pony eyelashes flutter in the sunlight, savoring the real, familiar warmth of his presence.  Somehow, like Coal, he had really seemed to know that I needed that comfort.

I snorted.  Next thing I knew Devin would probably be telling me that I could talk to animals.  Not that that wouldn’t be nice, but I knew that, at least, was fiction. Animals were so much easier to understand than people. They would never ask me to believe in impossible things.

A remembered quote about believing impossible things before breakfast flitted through my head.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland.  Nothing made sense.  The world was suddenly a strange and surreal place.

I had so many questions… and I did not want to ask them. 

I didn’t want to open myself up to all of that, though I wasn’t sure why.  Maybe it was because the whole idea triggered my concept of the absurd. Perhaps it was just too cruel to have hope that my family was still out there somewhere—that my mother had, despite having mystical mer-powers, sought me out in my time of need—that she had called me to Trinity so that I could be with her.

It felt horribly disloyal to my father, the man who had raised me alone, to want to meet my mother so badly.

It was late afternoon before I headed back to the house.  Maura and Devin sat at the table, as if they had been waiting for me to return.  I thought they might actually have been waiting, knowing, I’m sure, that I’d been upset by Devin’s words.

I stood, awkwardly, not wanting to look at them, shifting my weight from side to side. I twisted my hands together, nerves making a mess of my stomach.

Kip thumped his tail under the table, tongue lolling in a doggy grin, then rolled back to his side with a canine-groan of contentment and started to snore.  The sound made me jump, nervously. I glanced up at Maura and Devin, half expecting them to uncloak themselves as some kind of super villains.

Or, perhaps, something even more strange.  Anything was possible in a household that believed in the strange ideas that Devin had shared with me. Were they part of some sort of cult?  Was I being readied to be some kind of virgin sacrifice?

There were three mugs on the table, and the scent in the air was that of chamomile with a hint of lavender and honey.

Bracing myself, I pulled out a chair, and silently allowed Maura to pour a steaming stream into my cup.

I sighed, knowing I would have to be the first to speak.

“I guess,” I said tentatively, “I really need to hear more before I can… believe in what you told me.  I’m trying to understand, but it’s so… impossible…”

I shook my head, feeling that my usual lack of eloquence was even more crippling than usual.

To my surprise, it was Maura, not Devin, who spoke.

“There are stories,” she said, in a soft voice, her hands wrapped around her mug and her eyes in the distance, “from long ago that talk about the selkie folk.  They were the Fae who most often had dealing with humans, in the old days, being part mortal themselves.  They were creatures of the sea, and could be blessings and curses alike to the seafaring folk…leading them to safety and fish, or into peril… and so, it would happen, from time to time, that a man would see a beautiful woman on the rocks where the seals sunned themselves and, either by a terrible need, or by finding her seal-skin, he would bind himself to her…and her in return.

“And there were those women who had husbands that visited them often, and kept them with child… but returned ever to the sea…

“And the selkie blood and the mortal blood mixed in those old days… some children turning to the sea with the selkie, others staying on land with the mortals—though these children grew to men and women whom the sea would call, too, and they could gather more fish than others, yet the sea was terribly hazardous for them, for it would call to them until they, too, would seek the portals of the sea.”

“But these are stories,” I protested. “Surely you can’t believe that they are true!”

Maura sighed and took a sip of her tea, stirring the contents around with a silver spoon and staring into the depths.  I wondered if she was reading the tea-leaves.