Burning Up

“Washed ashore.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.

She smiled at him. “Like that lucky young man saved by the tide.”

An old fisherman spoke from his place at the bar. “It wasn’t the tide that saved him. It was the selkie.”

Morwenna’s heart beat faster. The seals she had called to her were ordinary harbor seals. But the old man’s guess was uncomfortably close to the truth. The selkie were water elementals like the finfolk, all children of the sea.

Jack’s brows drew together. “The what?”

“The seal folk. They live in the ocean as seals, see, and when they come ashore they put off their sealskins and walk around no different from you and me.”

“Except better looking,” put in another. “And naked.”

“Superstitious nonsense,” Sloat said.

The fisherman stuck out his jaw. “I’ve seen them out there in the waves. Guided me home once in the fog.”

The young man, Colin, lifted his head from the girl’s brown hair and looked at Morwenna.

“My grandda said if you find a selkie’s pelt and hide it, the selkie must bide with you as man or wife,” the second fisherman said.

Sloat sneered. “Your grandda was at sea too long. I knew you Scots had sex with sheep. But seals?”

Jack silenced him with a look. “It’s a pleasant story.”

Morwenna released a relieved breath. Story. He did not believe a word of it.

Colin left his corner and stood before Morwenna, fumbling beneath the open neck of his shirt. He wore a leather thong around his throat and the silver sign of the mortals’ murdered Christ. He pulled the thong over his head and offered her the cross in his broad palm. “Thank you,” he said simply.

The ache in her throat grew to a lump. She swallowed hard. “You owe me nothing.”

Stubbornly, he held out his hand. “I know what I know.”

She shook her head, aware of Jack watching them. But she could not spurn the young fisherman’s earnest thanks. Nor could she take his offering and send him away empty-handed.

She curled her hand around the cross and traced a spiral in his palm, the sign of the sea. “I will treasure your gift and remember,” she said. “Go in peace over the waters and return in safety to the land.”

His smile almost blinded her with its brilliance.

“Now go back to your sweetheart,” Morwenna told him. “Thank her, if you must thank someone, and hold her tight for the time that has been given to you both.”

He ducked his head in shy acknowledgment and retreated.

“An interesting blessing,” Jack observed quietly.

She shrugged, not daring to look at him for fear he would find the truth in her eyes. “It did not hurt me to say and may do him good to hear. Their lives will be short and hard enough. They should love each other while they can.”

“Excellent advice,” he said.

Finally she met his gaze. What she saw in his eyes made her pulse pound. Not distrust, not suspicion, but warmth and acceptance and desire.

“Oh,” she said with a foolish lurch of heart, “do you think so?”

“Yes.” He stopped and took her hands in his. Warm, steady hands. Strong, human hands. “Marry me, Morwenna.”

Her heart turned over completely and her whole world shifted again. She felt grit in her eyes like sand in an oyster and blinked. A single pearl rolled down her cheek.

She smiled tremulously. “Perhaps we could start with dinner,” she suggested. “You did say you would court me.”

FIVE

“This charade has gone on long enough,” Morgan said.

Her brother stalked the confines of Morwenna’s neat little cottage like a shark trapped by the tide, all sleek power and frustrated energy. “How long has it been now? Four weeks?”

“Three,” Morwenna said defensively.

Three weeks of this odd human process known as courtship. Dinner at Jack’s house, with her hair piled up and a bewildering array of cutlery on the table. Sex at hers, sweaty, sweet, and satisfying. He took her for a ride in his carriage. She took him for walks along the beach. They even sat side by side in the church one Sunday morning while the preacher droned like a drowsy bee and the sun cast colored patterns on the stone floor.

Only three weeks.

Not that the actual number of days mattered except as a measure of her brother’s concern. If Morgan was counting time by human standards, in weeks rather than seasons and centuries, he was worried indeed.

She watched him pace to the cupboard and turn. The once-empty shelves behind him were littered with items she had received since the storm, left at her doorstep or pressed shyly upon her when she walked into town: a pitcher of flowers, a package of candles, a loaf of bread, a shawl. She accepted the villagers’ offerings as she accepted the gifts of the tide and gave them fair weather and good fishing in return.

Yet somehow the trade had become more meaningful than a simple transaction.

She tried to explain. “I have a place here.”

Morgan threw her an impatient look. “Your place is on Sanctuary. Among your own kind. Not with . . . with . . .”

She raised her chin. “His name is Jack.”

“Does he know who you are? What you are?”

She hesitated. She was venturing further and further from who she had been. Once she told Jack the truth, there was no going back. One way or another, their idyll would end. “He does not need to know. He accepts what he sees.”

“Then he is blind. Or stupid.”

“He is not stupid.” She remembered the warm perception in Jack’s serious gaze, the strength of his steady hands. “He loves me.”

Her brother looked down his long, bold nose. “Humans fear what they do not understand. And what they fear, they hate. He is not capable of loving you.”

His words touched her deepest fears. Her brother knew her too well. And yet . . .

“You do not know him,” she said.

Morgan stared at her, baffled, and shook his head. “Say that he loves you. It cannot last. He is mortal. He will die eventually. That is his fate, his nature. And you will go on. That is ours.”

“Unless . . .” She drew a shaky breath, daring at last to speak the possibility burning like a coal in her breast. Knowing her words would hurt and anger Morgan. “He has asked me to marry him.”

If they married, if she lived on land with Jack as a human, she would love as a human. Age as a human. Die as a human.

“Wenna.” Morgan’s voice was shaken. Her throat tightened at his use of her old childhood name. He was her brother, her twin. In their carefree existence, in their careless way, they had always cared for each other. “You would give up immortality? You would give up the sea?”

Yes.

No.

“I do not know.” She bit her lip. “I might.”

“For what? For him?”

Could she give up the sea for Jack?

She admired him: his quiet strength, his bone-deep sense of responsibility, his constant heart. She liked him.

But more, she liked the person she became when she was with him. Someone softer, more open, more