Lord of the Deep (5 page)

“You make it sound as if I planned it all on purpose,” Simeon said. “She summoned me, and I responded.”

“In true selkie fashion.”

“I am what I am, just as you are, Gideon.”

“Do not bring me into it,” the dark lord said. “I do not play the games of the Lord of the Deep.”

Simeon heaved a sigh. “Midsummer’s Eve is soon upon us. If she can dupe the shamans into believing she still possesses her maiden skin, she will be taken into the fold as a priestess of the Isle of Mists. Better that than consort of the Lord of the Deep. She would be safe—protected. If I were to take her below the waves with me, the others would kill her. Why, coming here, I left a rumpus in my bed. The jealous consorts pulling hair and tweaking tits, and the gods alone know what I’ll find when I return.”

“You had best be about it then,” Gideon said, flexing his wings. “It is your coil to unwind, none of mine. My way is clear. You have been warned.”

He turned away then, his magnificent wings drawn in, though they had not diminished. When he held them thus, their tips touched the ground. The interview was over. There was no more to be said. The deliverer of justice of the Principality of Arcus—usually a man of few words—had spoken more in this interview than he had in eons. Simeon offered a silent heel-clicking bow to the dark lord’s winged back and melted into the shadows.

Outside, the wind had risen, ruffling his hair and billowing his cloak about him. The wind was always strong on the Dark Isle. The surf would be up, just as Elicorn liked it, but the magnificent animal would soon grow bored with no mortals to tempt, and Simeon quickened his pace. He could hear the roar of the breakers as he picked his way through the murky swamp among the dark waste of petrified trees that served as a forest. Sprinting down the dunes, he squinted toward the shore in search of the waterhorse. Dark clouds scudding across the moon only showed him the strand in brief glimpses, and he cupped is hands around his mouth and whistled as he approached the water’s edge. Simeon strained his ears for Elicorn’s familiar whinny, but only the thudding sound of the surf crashing on the beach met his ears.

Simeon’s heart began to quicken. It constricted in his chest. Just for a moment, the veil of clouds parted and the moon showed him his worst fear. There, in the dark volcanic sand, Elicorn’s hoof prints showed clearly, leading straight into the white-caped bay.

M
eg strolled along the strand in fractured moonlight. It was just as well dark clouds had robbed all but the eerie phosphorescence coming from the water. She was hiding, even from the moon.

So much for seven tears shed in the sea summoning a selkie lover. There was no question that she’d been abandoned now. She had never felt more cast off than she did strolling alone along the strand in the soft semidarkness with a rainstorm looming.

The seals hadn’t come tonight, either, and the waterfowl had long since sought shelter inland for the night. Once, she thought she saw something sail through the sky—something dark, like the giant eagles that lived in the mountains on the mainland. But it was only a fleeting glimpse before it soared off and disappeared in deep darkness. It brought to mind the strange winged creature she’d seen circling the little skiff that morning. But she’d convinced herself that creature was surely her imagination playing tricks on her. It had to have been. If it wasn’t, that would mean whatever entity it was had seen her exposing herself to the salt-laced wind and hot sun, touching herself in broad, sultry daylight. Hot blood rushed to her temples as she imagined it.

Whatever creature it was she’d glimpsed soaring and gliding above, it was gone now, and her gaze returned to the strand and the tall combers rolling up the coastline, spilling froth on the hard-packed sand and spinning yards of gossamer spindrift carried on the wind. Though she was nowhere near the water’s edge, her fine kirtle of mulberry homespun gauze was damp, clinging to her naked skin beneath, and her long, tousled hair was fanned out about her, combed by the gusts into spiral curls that teased her buttocks and framed her face with wild tendrils.

She was just about to turn back to the cottage before the rain came to further dampen her spirits, when she heard a familiar sound. Stopping in her tracks, she pricked up her ears and listened. It came again. She knew it now, the high-pitched whinny of the waterhorse riding the wind. Her eyes flashed toward the waves thudding on the sand, and her breath caught at the sight of the great white creature prancing through the surf, its high-flying forefeet pummeling the waves as it galloped toward the shore.

Meg’s heart sank when she realized the animal was riderless, but she ran to it nonetheless. Could Simeon have sent it to fetch her? The waterhorse pranced to a high-stepping halt before her, puffing fine spray out of flared nostrils. It reminded her of the way the selkie seals spouted water from theirs. Tears misted her eyes, and she threw her arms about the stallion’s neck.

“Have you come to take me to him?” she crooned to the horse. “Have my seven tears worked their magic, or are you naught but deep-sea glamour come to seduce me to a watery grave?”

The waterhorse snorted. It waggled its head noncommittally, Meg thought. She plucked some of the seaweed from its long wet mane. “I wish I had more knowledge of these mystical things,” she said.

The horse’s silvery eyes gleamed as it stretched its right leg out and knelt upon the other. Its message was clear. The animal wanted her to mount. Right or wrong, it took her only a moment to decide to climb up on the animal’s back and less time for the horse to surge to its full height and bolt toward the water.

Hoping until the last that she hadn’t made the wrong decision, Meg didn’t panic until the waterhorse beneath her disappeared under the swells and brine threatened her mouth. It flooded her nostrils, and she knew. Simeon hadn’t sent the waterhorse. It was acting in its own fiendish stead. It meant to drown her!

Saltwater rushed up her nostrils as the animal plunged deeper into the churning bay. Opening her mouth to scream did nothing but flood her throat with water. Frantically, Meg tugged on the horse’s mane in a desperate attempt to coax it back above the waves, but the animal only sank deeper. She tried to climb higher—tried to stand on its back, tried to jump clear—but she couldn’t. Her legs wouldn’t move. Then, in that horrible terrible instant, she knew the secret of the waterhorse: once upon its back, its victims were powerless to save themselves. As though paralyzed, Meg was helpless to prevent the inevitable. A heart-stopping orgasm riveted her. She was going to die!

Simeon streaked through the water, his heart pounding so violently he feared it would burst from his chest. It was a good stretch between the Dark Isle, and the Isle of Mists—too far for a man to swim unaided. But Simeon was not an ordinary man; he was a selkie.

He had stripped off his eel skin garment and cloak and left them behind on the volcanic sand of the Dark Isle. He could swim faster naked. He knew where Elicorn had gone. If he knew nothing else, he knew the only thing that mattered was reaching Megaleen in time, for she would indeed die beneath the waves without his breath in her nostrils if the waterhorse were to take her under. Why hadn’t he answered the dark lord’s summons in his sealskin? He could have made much better time sheathed in the magical skin. How could he have thought he could walk away from the gorgeous, passionate creature who had stolen his heart, no matter how noble his intentions?

The Isle of Mists came into view at last, and not a minute too soon. Rain had begun to pelt down, slowing Simeon’s progress. Through the horizontal splinters pockmarking the breast of the swells, he saw Elicorn plunge into the bay. Slipping beneath the waves, he parted them like an arrow until he came abreast of the waterhorse, within touching distance of Megaleen who was fused helplessly to the enchanted animal’s back.

Simeon drew back his fist with the intent to pummel Elicorn to within an inch of his life. A hair’s breadth from the animal’s proud head, the selkie lord froze, his fist suspended in the water, as Gideon’s words ghosted across his memory:
You cannot be faulted for these things, for it is in the blood, but that does not exempt you from reprisal
. The waterhorse was doing what his kind had done since time out of mind, just as he had done what his kind had been doing since the dawn of time when he seduced Meg. It was, indeed, in the blood.

But Elicorn was under his command, and he seized the animal’s mane in both his white-knuckled fists and shouted: “Enough! Release her!”

The waterhorse obeyed, slipping away, and Simeon seized Meg about the waist and broke the surface of the water. The shower had passed, though more threatened, and the full moon showed its face through scudding clouds just long enough for Simeon to glimpse a winged figure silhouetted against it.

Gideon.

A spate of expletives parted Simeon’s lips. Had the dark lord been there all the while, watching him struggle to reach Meg in time? Evidently. Cradling her against him, he raised his fist to the sky, and in a blink, the Lord of the Dark was gone. There was some depraved consolation in knowing that Gideon would never have let her drown, but not much. This was Simeon’s reprisal. So be it! He would take that up with Gideon at a later date. Right now, Meg was clinging to him, her heart beating against his naked chest, the soft thatch of her pubic curls cushioning his hard cock through the flimsy billowed kirtle. Their eyes met for one brief instant before he breathed into her nostrils and spiraled with her down beneath the surface of the water.

His bedchamber in the palace was vacant when they reached it. There was no sign of the melee that had taken place there earlier. The rumpled bed had been restored—thanks, he had no doubt, to Vega—and the consorts were nowhere in sight. Laying Meg down on the bed, he climbed in beside her and took her in his arms.

“Why did you take me back?” she murmured. “Why did you leave me?”

Simeon crushed her closer, avoiding her accusing eyes. They were blue, a deep, shimmering blue. “I cannot keep you here, Megaleen,” he murmured against her hair. It smelled of honeysuckle and of her own sweet musk. He inhaled deeply. “It isn’t safe,” he went on. How silky her skin was. As if they had a will of their own, his fingers could not resist touching, fondling the golden hairs that lightly furred her arms and overspread the V between her thighs. It held a great fascination for him, because the selkie females were hairless except for their long, flowing manes.

“I could not bring myself to keep you,” he said. “I still cannot justify it, though I want you beyond bearing. You cannot exist beneath the waves for long periods. You are a daughter of Eve. That you do so here now is only temporary, and I cannot exist long upon the land.”

“Why not?” Meg said. “Others do.”

“Not voluntarily, my love,” he lamented. “Not unless they are tricked. It is the nature of the selkie to live in the sea, just as it is the nature of mortals to live upon land. We are what we are, Megaleen. As a priestess of the Isle, you will be safe—protected….”

“You know what it entails, my becoming a priestess,” she said. “You pointed it out to me, if you remember.”

He could not prevent his hands from palming her breasts, his fingers from touching the tips of her nipples, bringing them erect. He was helpless to prevent his tongue from flicking the tawny buds and circling their pebbled areola.

“On Midsummer’s Eve, I am to mate with the shaman priest who must take my virtue as part of the initiation,” she murmured, writhing beneath his tongue. “There is more that you do not know, but it is not likely I shall ever see it. Once it is discovered that I am no virgin, instead of a priestess, I will become a blood sacrifice to appease the gods. That is how ‘safe’ I will be, Lord of the Deep. I thought you had saved me from a life that would whither my body and my spirit. Instead, you have condemned me to death. You should have let the waterhorse drown me. Such a death would at least have been kinder.”

Simeon would hear no more. Bending, he took her lips with a hungry mouth, his tongue entwined with hers. His cock was bursting, aching for her fingertips to stroke it, throbbing in anticipation of those velvet lips wrapped around its veined shaft. She moaned into his mouth, and the sound resonated though his body as she undulated against him.

She was his for the taking. What was it about the sweet flesh of this mortal female that bewitched him so? He needed to delve more deeply into that.
Was
she the sorceress she’d been accused? He could think of no other explanation. Many mortals had aroused him. Many had become obsessed with him, but he had never been enchanted by a mortal before. It was not a comfortable thing.

He cursed Gideon, Lord of the Dark, under his breath. If only Gideon hadn’t meddled. Simeon knew he’d made the right decision in returning Meg to the Isle of Mists. If the dark lord hadn’t interfered, she would be preparing for her initiation into the sisterhood of priestesses now, and in time, she would have forgotten her brief interlude with the Lord of the Deep. Could she exist in his watery netherworld? She existed in it now only because the palace was part of one of the many subterranean air pockets that existed magically beneath the waves. It was only a pleasant fiction to believe it could continue indefinitely…Wasn’t it? He was beginning to wrack his brain for a way to make that dream a reality.

His cock was so engorged he feared it would burst, and the pressure called him back to the situation at hand. Meg’s exquisite body was arched against him, begging him to fill her. It was no use. Driving her hand down to his groin, he crimped her fingers around the thick, hard bulk of his sex. It leapt at her touch, the hot mushroom tip leaking fine pearly dew drops of pre-come. She had brought him to climax like no other the first time. He wanted to feel that again. He wanted to know again the riveting firestorm of drenching heat that rendered him all but senseless, that constricted his balls and gripped him like a seizure until his body begged for release. Not just any release. The blessed release of total surrender to a passion he had never known until now…Until the exquisite mortal beauty underneath him had opened the floodgates of ecstasy and drowned him in the depths of her innocent desire.

He parted the fascinating curls that hid her nub and began to fondle it. Meg writhed in his arms, moving against his strokes, showing him her need. Her moans filled his mouth as he tasted her deeply, savoring the flavor of her, like warm honey laced with the salt of the sea. How he thirsted for that sweet honey.

His fingers slipped inside her, feeling for the special spot that would bring her to rapture, the mysterious mound that when touched drove a woman mad. She bucked in his arms when he found it, her sex seizing his fingers, which he quickly replaced with his bursting cock, driving it into her to the root. She was his so totally then that he failed to hear the hushed murmur echoing along the corridor or to feel the cool influx of currents stirring the air that should have flagged danger until they were upon him, a swarm of female sea lions attacking from all sides.

Simeon withdrew himself unclimaxed in a valiant attempt to shield Meg from the onslaught of great hulking seal bodies slamming into them. She screamed and began to gasp and choke as one butted her in the belly with its head, another crashed into her from behind, and still another collided with her knees until they buckled—not to mention those attacking Simeon with intent to do bodily harm in that quarter. There were too many jealous female selkies to fend off without casualties, and Simeon was hard put to accomplish it.

In a mad rush to drive her out, the selkies rushed Meg along the corridor into the water tunnel. Her lips turned blue. She was losing consciousness. There was no question that they meant to drown her. They were driving her beneath the waves. There wasn’t a moment to lose. Simeon would deal with the consorts later. So much for his pleasant fantasies of Meg existing with him in his world beneath the waves. Plowing through the hulking press of seal bodies, he loosed a bestial roar that reverberated through the water. It cowed the seals, turning them away as effectually as if he’d struck them a blow, though some still lingered on the fringes, milling about with the curious fish that had assembled there to observe the ruckus.

Seizing Meg about the waist, he raised her above the surface of the waves. Sputtering and coughing, she fought to breathe. The breath he’d blown into her nostrils earlier to allow her to exist under water had failed. Terror had broken the spell. Swooping down, he sucked the water from her nostrils and from her throat, then blew his breath into her again and plunged below the waves.