T-shirt and get his hands on what was under it. He wanted her on him and him inside her for whatever was left of the night. For however long they were together.
He looked into her eyes, shining with trust, and knew he couldn’t do it. She might say sex wasn’t that big a deal, but women often said that. In his experience, most of them felt differently in the morning.
He wasn’t taking advantage of her. He owed her too much, liked her too much, for that.
“Sleep would be good,” he said.
She nodded and scooted down on her pil ow, making the mattress and everything under the T-shirt shift. He closed his eyes briefly. He must be out of his mind. He settled next to her, tucking her alongside him, her head under his chin, her arm across his chest, her smooth legs against his thigh.
Torture.
Her hair smel ed fresh like rain and clean like soap. It was also, he discovered quickly, stil damp.
Sleep was hopeless. He lay staring at the ceiling, trying not to disturb her, forcing himself to breathe slowly and steadily in and out. He could feel the faint vibration of their connection, the beat of her heart, the whisper of her breath.
In and out . . .
He dreamed again. Dreamed and remembered.
*
*
*
Three of them boarded the ship in the gray dawn light. Four, if you counted the dog. Iestyn, his arms ful of ninety pounds of wet, excited deerhound, definitely counted the dog. If not for the prince’s hound Madagh, they might al have Changed into seal form instead of leaving Sanctuary by boat.
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Or maybe not. Iestyn boosted the shivering dog onto the swim platform at the back of the boat before hauling himself, dripping, from the cold sea.
How did you outswim the end of the world?
The dog’s claws scrabbled on the smooth deck. Roth set down the sea chest and turned to help.
At the ship’s rail, Kera stood, her gaze fixed on the rocky shore where the sea lord Conn stood with Griff, the castle warden, to see them off.
Kera’s face set in lines of mutinous distress. “I should stay.”
“The prince commanded us to leave,” Roth said.
Kera raised her chin. “I could help in Sanctuary’s defense.
I am Gifted.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
Iestyn ignored their squabble. The three of them had been raised together since before the age of Change. The magic of the island that kept their elders from aging prevented the young selkies from reaching maturity for a very long time.
Once there had been enough of them to fil a classroom.
But he and Roth and Kera were the youngest.
The last.
Seabirds clamored around the southern cliff face, disturbed by the fretting wind or the tension in the air. Smal waves slapped the rocks below the towers of Caer Subai.
Iestyn eyed them anxiously.
Miles away, outside the wards that protected the island, demons labored under the crust of earth to turn the sea itself against the children of the sea. When the ocean floor erupted, the quake would create a tidal wave, a roaring wal of displaced water that would crest and fal on Sanctuary.
Unless the sea lord stopped it. Somehow.
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A white bird, its wings sharply angled as a kite, circled the mast like a portent.
Madagh caught sight of Conn on shore and whined, pressing against Iestyn’s thigh. Iestyn rubbed the dog’s bearded muzzle. He knew exactly how the dog felt.
Lucy might have stopped the destruction of Sanctuary.
In the brief time she had lived on the island, Lucy Hunter had channeled the flood of the wardens’ power and tapped a wel of feeling in the cold, proud sea lord as deep as it was unexpected.
But Lucy was gone now.
When the demons threatened, she had turned her back on the prince and her selkie heritage to protect her human family in Maine, half a world away.
No one dared speak of her desertion to the prince. But among themselves, Iestyn and his friends could talk of little else.
“Traitor,” Kera denounced her.
But in the weeks Lucy had been on Sanctuary, she had been Iestyn’s friend. She stood with him back to back against the demons. She had healed his wounded arm.
