Sea Lord (29 page)

his body above survived.

As long as his will held out.

He lay and burned.

Lucy seized Conn’s arm, as stiff, as cold, as unresponsive as his face. Terror closed her throat.

“Help me!” she shouted.

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But everyone who could help was already here, blind and voiceless as mannequins in a department store

window.

She grabbed Griff on her other side. Energy sparked and snapped through her body. Her pulse jumped.

Her nerves sizzled. Like jamming a fork in a toaster. As if her touch had completed a connection.

Griff groaned and took a shuddering breath.

Fear and urgency overrode her relief. She tightened her grip on his arm. “Conn?”

Griff blinked bleary eyes at her. “Too deep,” he murmured. “I could not—”

She had no time for explanations. No patience. Love sharpened her brain. Fear pressed like a knife at

her throat. She shook him. “
Help
me,” she said fiercely.

“Lass ...”

“Like this.” She would not release her hold on Conn, so still, so cold beside her. With her free hand, she

reached past Griff, fumbling for the woman on his other side. “Hold her. Her arm. We need to . . .”

What?

“Make a circle,” she decided. “All of us.”

Griff shot her a confused look but obeyed.

The woman beside him gasped and stirred.

Lucy danced from foot to foot in an agony of impatience as the wardens woke and grumbled, as Griff

prodded them into a circle, linking hands like reluctant fifth graders forced to square dance.

The silver-haired man, Morgan, took the arm of the man beside him. He looked at Lucy, his mouth

compressed. “Why?”

She bit her lip. She had no answer. She only knew, with a teacher’s instincts, what to do in an

emergency.
Hold hands. Stay in line. Stay together. So no one is lost.

The pressure swelled in her chest. Her breath escaped on a sob.

Oh, Conn.

He wept without tears. Screamed without sound, without throat or mouth. Throat and mouth were

burned away; being and memory, gone. Only his will remained, a spider thread stretched across the door

of Hell.

Oh, Conn.

A name raked from the ashes.

His name, in a voice . . .
Her
voice. His beloved’s. She was saying his name and crying.

Her tears were sweet balm and precious rain to him. He roused, trying to summon strength to answer, to

thank her for her tears, but there was not enough of him left to respond.

He closed his lidless eyes and burned.

But her voice would not let him go.

Her words dripped into his arid soul, trickling along his veins, seeping into the marrow of his bones. Her

golden tears opened channels for other streams to follow, springs of strength, rivulets of power. Griff’s.

Morgan’s. Enya’s. The streams joined and mingled. The gush became a spring, the spring a torrent that

thundered through Conn like a flood. He was battered, blinded, deafened, grateful.

The golden flood rushed along the passage and scorched through his soul, drowning out the roar of the

fire, inundating the threshold of Hell. He was taken up, taken over, by a great wave of power that flung

him up and cast him on the shore.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the caves under the castle, and Lucy was holding him as if she

would never let go.

She smiled at him with tears in her eyes. “Welcome back.”

“Walk with me?” Conn invited in his cool, uninflected voice.

At the word “walk,” Madadh lurched from the hearth, panting at the prospect of escape.

Lucy knew exactly how the dog felt. “Outside the castle walls?”

Conn nodded.

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She eyed the sword at his hip. “Is that safe?”

“The portal is closed,” he reminded her. “Thanks to you.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”

“You united us. You enhanced our power.”

“Did I? I just . . . I had to do
something
, you know?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t need to say more. More than anyone else, this son of Llyr understood that you did what you

could with what you had in the face of overwhelming odds.

He looked . . . not his age, exactly. But he looked tired tonight. Human. The strain of the day had etched

deeper lines at the corners of his mouth and drawn the skin taut across his cheekbones. Concern

tightened her throat.

“I’ll get my cloak,” she said.

He smiled at her, the rare, brilliant smile that transformed his austere face. But the shadows lingered in his

eyes.

Warrior’s eyes, she thought with another quick squeeze of concern. She could drag him back from the

brink of Hell, but she could not ease the memories of what he’d suffered there any more than she’d been

able to help Caleb when her brother returned from Iraq.

As she pulled her cloak from the wardrobe, a memory flashed across her brain: Conn, carved of marble

and moonlight, gazing out to sea, so weary, so proud, so alone.

Well, he wasn’t alone anymore.

Dragging the sealskin off their bed, she turned to face him. Her heart hammered in her chest. “Ready,”

she said.

He froze.

She stumbled to explain. “I thought . . . After the day you had . . . Here.” She thrust the pelt at him.

He made no move to take it. “You are releasing me.”

Did she imagine the question mark at the end?

“I guess.” He was a child of the sea. The sea could heal him. She had not attached any larger significance

to her gesture than that. But . . . “I mean, yes. I don’t want you to feel like my prisoner.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You humans have a saying: If you save a life, it belongs to you. You saved

more than my life today.”

“You saved mine yesterday.”

“After bringing you here against your will,” he pointed out. “I merely restored the balance between us.”

She swallowed. She was no good at putting feelings into words. Her family didn’t. And selkies

supposedly had no feelings to speak of. But a combination of hurt and fairness drove her to blurt out,

“The hell with the balance. I’m not fucking keeping score, okay? I’m here because I want to be here. I

choose to be here. Now. With you.”

His silver eyes gleamed. “And you think to offer me the same choice.”

“I . . .” She drew a sharp, bitter breath. “Yes.”

He crossed the room in two strides. He took her hands. The sealskin fell between them. He raised her

hands to his lips, one after the other, kissing the backs and then the palms. His lips were warm. So were

his eyes.

“Then I choose you,” he said. “Only you. Now and forever.”

Later, much later, they climbed down the narrow rutted path to the beach. The sea had the texture of

beaten silver; the sky was molten gold.

Lucy felt weak-kneed, warm, and satisfied. Every time Conn made love to her, she felt closer to him.

More free to be herself.

Yet after only two weeks, how well did they really know each other? He had never said he loved her.

She had never seen him Change.

She eyed the black sealskin slung over his shoulder and fought a little shiver. “You go ahead,” she said.

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“I’ll watch.”

He tugged his loose shirt over his head. He had a beautiful body. “Come with me.”

She jolted, the impositions and restrictions of a lifetime clenching her stomach. “Oh, I . . .”

Couldn’t.

Can’t.

Won’t.

“You have been in the water before,” he reminded her.

Her heart tripped in panic. “Not when it was this cold.”

He stooped to unbuckle the knife from around his knee; divested himself of his pants. His long, arched

feet were already bare. His toes . . . For the first time, she noticed his toes were webbed.

She jerked her gaze back to his face.

“You braved Hell for me,” he said softly, holding her gaze. “Will you not come with me into the ocean?”

Put that way, how could she refuse?

She gritted her teeth and stood while he unfastened the buttons of her cloak, untied the skirt at her waist,

and slid her blouse over her head. The clothes she wore on Sanctuary offered more coverage and fewer

challenges to a man than her jeans back home. All the while he undressed her, his hands were busy,

touching, brushing, stroking, cupping. By the time he had her naked, she was shivering with cold and fear

and desire.

Her nipples peaked. She crossed her arms over her breasts, pressing her thighs together.

“You know, on World’s End, when the ice breaks, we have this thing called the Polar Bear Plunge,” she

babbled nervously as he herded her toward the line of foam, his muscled arm around her waist. “But

nobody actually goes into the water naked.”

Conn smiled at her, his eyes very bright. “Trust me,” he murmured. “Trust yourself.”

“Easy for you to . . .
Shit
, that’s cold.” She hopped from foot to foot.

Conn steadied her against his broad, naked side as the water ran over her knees. “It will be all right.

Hold on to me now.”

She clutched him, grateful for his warmth. His support. “What about your, um.” With her free hand, she

gestured toward the shore, where his sealskin lay in a lump.

“Not this first time. Not your first time. You will need me with you.” His face was serious, intent, like the

first time they’d made love.

With another internal quiver, Lucy realized he didn’t expect this to be easy. What had Iestyn said? “
The

first time, you must generate your own skin from the inside. It hurts. Like your guts being torn

out.
”

Crap.

She sucked in her breath and waded into the icy water. Cold speared her feet, gripped her legs, swirled

toward the juncture of her thighs. She clenched; inched into the ripple of the surf.

“Brave girl,” Conn said.

She nodded weakly and slid another foot forward.

Pain shot through her belly, white-hot, nauseating. Her body locked. Spasmed. She felt like a poker was

being driven into her stomach. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t yell.

Conn’s arm was an iron band around her waist. He held her upright in the freezing water as the agony

battered her in waves. Like the worst kind of cramps, like what she vaguely imagined childbirth might be,

like death . . .

Sweat broke out on her face. Panting, she leaned her head against his shoulder and prayed for the pain to

end.

Surely it must end.