Sea Lord (37 page)

“Anything.”

Dylan shook his head, his eyes black with regret. And she remembered that he, too, had loved Conn,

had known the selkie prince since he was a sulky thirteen-year-old boy.

Regina nudged Nick, who jumped off the couch. “We don’t have school today,” he announced.

“Because of the snow and, like, the evacuation and stuff. So Danny and me are going sledding.” He

cocked his head. “Are you sick again?”

Lucy opened her mouth, but to her horror no words came out.

“She’s just tired,” Regina said, ruffling her son’s hair. “Come on. Let’s make Miss Lucy some tea.”

He trotted after her down the hall, and Lucy walked across the room and into her brother Dylan’s arms.

United in grief, they embraced for the first time. His body was hard and lean and spare, like their father’s.

“I’m sorry.” Dylan’s voice was hoarse.

She shook her head wordlessly. He patted her back awkwardly, briefly, before releasing her to follow

his wife and son into the kitchen.

Lucy stood bereft in the middle of the living room. Margred watched her, her dark eyes deep and

sympathetic.

“You did good,” Caleb said quietly.

“I feel so empty,” Lucy whispered.

He enveloped her in a hug. He smelled of uniform starch and spruce and snow. Caleb smells. World’s

End smells.

“It always feels like that after a battle,” he said. “Even when you win.”

But they hadn’t won, she thought numbly, resting her head against his shoulder.

Her family was safe, for now. World’s End was safe. Gau was defeated, buried under sea and stone.

But Lucy had lost.

She’d lost Conn.

The week wore on, measured by the deepening ruts in the snow and the thickening ice layer around

Lucy’s heart.

Island life resumed, marked by the rotating flyers in the window of Wiley’s Grocery and the changing

daily specials at Antonia’s restaurant. Ferry and cable service were restored.

Lucy’s classroom filled with squirming bodies and the smell of wet coats and boots. Regina and Margred

went shopping on the mainland for maternity clothes. Caleb rescued cars from ditches and checked on

the elderly in the cold. Dylan walked the frozen beaches, casting for signs of Sanctuary.

Cora opened her eyes and smiled at their father.

Everything went back to normal.

Lucy’s life went back to normal.

A life without Conn in it.

She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. Her days were haunted by thoughts of Conn, her dreams by the

falling towers of Caer Subai.

Grief, Regina told her, dropping by the house with a pot of Antonia’s minestrone.

Shock, Caleb said, when he came by after school.

Stress, Dylan concluded, his mouth compressed in sympathy.

Their well-meaning concern battered at the ice encasing her poor, bruised heart and scraped her nerves

raw.

She fled to her garden for solitude and solace.

But the ground was hard and barren, as frozen as her heart. Frost lay on the pumpkins and the broken

stalks of corn.

She turned from the untidy rows, desolation blooming in her chest.

Someone was watching from the edge of the field. Her heart thumped. A man, taller than Dylan, broader

than Caleb, watching her with an intensity that charged the air like a storm.

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Something stirred in Lucy like the trickle of ice, like the melting of her heart. Her throat tightened. The

blood drummed in her ears like the sea.

He strode across the field, his boots crunching the frozen furrows, a lean gray shadow trotting at his

heels. Madadh.

Madadh and Conn.

The ice shattered, and Lucy burst into tears.

She stumbled forward, meeting him halfway. He caught her close, his breath warm, his arms strong. He

was real and warm and solid and alive.

She clung to him, sobbing. “I thought you were dead.”

Conn kissed her hair, her cheek, her mouth. She tasted her tears on his lips like the salt of the sea.

“Almost,” he said. “Morgan saved me. He dragged me out of the sea by the chain around my neck, and

he and Griff kept watch over my body until I could return to it.”

“I love Griff,” she said in a choked voice.

“You love me,” Conn said, a hint of arrogance in his tone.

She didn’t mind. She loved his arrogance. He was the lord of the sea. The master of her heart.

She smiled. “Yes. Always.”

Emotion swirled in his gray eyes. “Do you forgive me?”

She blinked. “What for?”

“For not coming with you when you asked.”

“You came to me when it mattered the most.” A splinter of pain pierced her happiness, a tiny icicle of

doubt. “Can you forgive me?”

He raised his dark eyebrows. “For what?”

It had to be said. Had to be faced. “I left you.”

“Yes.” A single word like a stone between them.

She swallowed hard. “I destroyed Sanctuary.”

“The demons destroyed Sanctuary.”

“But I could have stopped them.”

“You made the better choice. The only choice for either of us. Sanctuary is the past. You are my present

and the future of our people.”

She wanted so desperately to believe him. “But the prophecy . . .”

“Is fulfilled.” His voice was strong with hope and purpose. “The balance of power is changed. The

children of fire have suffered a defeat they cannot quickly forget or recover from. And my people, our

people, have remembered the magic of the sea.”

“But the castle . . . everyone on Sanctuary . . .”

“Caer Subai can be rebuilt.”

She eyed him doubtfully. “Just like that.”

He looked down his long, elegant nose at her. “I did not say the effort would be easy. It will take

cooperation. And time.”

She nodded. She could help with the rebuilding, she thought. She was the
targair inghean
. But under

her resolve, worry stirred. “How much time?”

Conn raised his eyebrows. “You are impatient?”

“No. Yes. Conn . . .” Her gaze searched his face. “Where will you live? You cannot stay in human form

forever. Without Sanctuary, you will age. You could die. All of the children of the sea will age and die.”

He shrugged. “Some may choose to live beneath the wave. Until Sanctuary is restored.”

“But—”

“Lucy. Each of us must use the gifts that we have, in the time that we have, in the place that we are. You

taught me that. No more is required of us. And no less.”

She touched his face. “I don’t want to lose you.”

He turned his lips into her palm. “You told me you trusted me to come back to you. And so I have.”

Her heart swelled. “And the others?” she asked anxiously. “Griff? Iestyn?”

“Griff is well.” Conn slanted a look at her. “He sends his love.”

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Conn still had not said he loved her. But that small worry was swallowed by a bigger one.

“And Iestyn?” Lucy persisted.

Conn hesitated. “I sent them away,” he said, grief roughening his voice. “Iestyn, Roth, and Kera. I sent

them on a boat with Madadh, before the wave struck. We found pieces of the craft drifting in the sea.”

Lucy’s heart contracted. She glanced down at the dog, its tongue lolling at their feet. “But Madadh

survived.”

Conn’s mouth curved. “Yes.”

“So there’s a chance that Iestyn and the others survived, too.”

Conn met her eyes gravely. “That is,” he said, “my second greatest wish.”

Her gaze locked with his. Her breath caught in her chest.

“What . . .” Her mouth was dry. “What is your first wish?” she whispered.

Conn took her hands again, her cold, frozen hands, and folded them in his. He raised their clasped hands

to his lips and kissed her fingers. “That you will come back with me to Sanctuary to rebuild,” he said. “To

raise the castle and make the roses grow. To walk with me and rule with me. To bear our children. To be

my love.”

He dropped on his knees in the snow. Her hands trembled in his. “I did not know I could love,” Conn

said in his deep voice. He looked up, and his eyes were the color of the sea at dawn, reflecting her joy as

the dancing waves reflect the sun. “But I love you. Be with me now and forever. Fill my life with magic

and my heart with love.”

Lucy’s heart welled with emotion. Her eyes brimmed with happy tears. Tugging him to his feet, she threw

herself into his arms. “
Yes
.”

“You will never leave me?”

“Never,” she promised.

“I love you.”

At last, they kissed, rediscovering each other with lips and hands and hearts, and for that moment the air

around them was as warm as spring and the garden bloomed like summer.

Because love is the greatest magic of all.

TURN THE PAGE FOR A SPECIAL PREVIEW

OF THE FIRST BOOK IN THE FITZ

CLARE CHRONICLES

Kissing

Midnight

BY EMMA HOLLY

COMING JUNE 2009 FROM

BERKLEY SENSATION!

Paddington Station, 1933

GRAHAM FITZ CLARE WAS A SECRET AGENT.

He had to repeat that to himself sometimes, because the situation seemed too ludicrous otherwise. He

was ordinary, he thought, no one more so, but he fit a profile apparently. Eton. Oxford. No nascent

Bolshevik tendencies. MI5 had recruited him two years ago, soon after he’d accepted a job as personal

assistant to an American manufacturer. Arnold Anderson traveled the world on business, and

Graham—who had a knack for languages—served as his translator and dogsbody.

He supposed it was the built-in cover that shined him up for spywork, though he couldn’t see as he’d

done anything important yet. He hadn’t pilfered any secret papers; hadn’t seduced an enemy

agent—which wasn’t to suggest he thought he could! For the most part, he’d simply reported back on

factories he and his employer had visited, along with writing up impressions of their associated owners

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and officials.

Tonight, in fact, was the most spylike experience he’d had to date.

His instructions had been tucked into the copy of
The Times
he’d bought at the newsagent down the

street from his home.

“Paddington Station,” the note had said in curt, telegraphic style. “At 11:45 tonight. Come by

Underground and carry this paper under your left arm.”

Graham stood at the station now, carrying the paper and feeling vaguely foolish. The platform was empty

and far darker than during the day. The cast-iron arches of the roof curved gloomily above his head, the

musty smell of soot stinging his nose. A single train, unlit and silent except for the occasional sigh of

escaping steam, sat on the track to the right of him. One bored porter had eyed him when he arrived,

shaken his head, and then retired to presumably cozier environs.

Possibly the porter had been bribed to disappear. All Graham knew for sure was that he’d been waiting

here fifteen minutes while his feet froze to the concrete floor, without the slightest sign of whoever he was

supposed to meet. Doubly vexed to hear a church clock striking midnight, he tried not to shiver in the icy

November damp. His overcoat was new, at least—a present from the professor on Graham’s

twenty-fifth birthday.

That memory made him smile despite his discomfort. His guardian was notoriously shy about giving gifts.

They were always generous, always exactly what the person wanted—as if Edmund had plucked the

wish from their minds. He always acted as if he’d presumed by wanting to give whatever it was to them.

The habit, and so many others, endeared him to his adopted brood more than any parent by blood could

have. The professor seemed to think it a privilege to have been allowed to care for them.

All of them, even flighty little Sally, knew the privilege was theirs.

Though Graham was old enough to occasionally be embarrassed by the fact, there really was no mystery

as to why Edmund’s charges remained at home. Graham’s lips pressed together at the thought of causing

Edmund concern. If tonight’s business kept him waiting long enough to have to lie to the professor about

where he’d been, he was not going to be amused.

Metal creaked, drawing his eyes to the darkened train. Evidently, it wasn’t empty. One of the doors had

opened, and a dainty Oriental woman was stepping down the stairs of the central car. Her skintight

emerald dress looked straight out of wardrobe for a Charlie Chan picture. Actually, she looked straight