Faery Tales & Nightmares

She nodded, but he could feel her tears falling on his hands.

Alana thought about it and decided that trusting Vic completely was foolish. He was right: she needed to let Murrin go before he resented her for keeping him from the sea. Murrin wasn’t thinking clearly. Whatever enchantment made him need to stay close to her was keeping him from admitting that he longed for the sea. If he went back … there were selchies he could meet. None of that meant that she wanted to risk being tied to Vic—so she opted to try a plan she’d come up with before, but had rejected as too dangerous.

And unnecessary because love took over.

He was sleeping when she left the apartment. She thought about kissing him good-bye, but knew that would wake him.

She let the door close behind her; then she went silently to the street and popped the trunk of the car. It was in there, his pelt. It was a part of him as surely as the seemingly human skin she’d caressed when he sat beside her late at night watching old movies with the sound down low. Gently, she gathered the pelt to her, trying not to wonder at how warm it was, and then she ran.

There weren’t tears in her eyes. Yet. She’d have time enough for that later. First she had to focus on getting to the beach before he realized what she was doing. She ran through the streets in the not-yet-light day. The sunrise wasn’t too far off, but it was early enough that the surfers hadn’t started arriving yet.

She knew he’d come soon. He had to follow the pull of his pelt when it was in her hands, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to hurry. She felt an urgency to get done with it before he arrived, but she felt a simultaneous despair.

It’s for the best.

She waded into the surf. Waves tugged at her, like strange creatures butting at her knees to pull her under the surface; kelp slid over her bare skin, slithering lengths that made her pulse race too fast.

It’s the right thing for both of us.

He was there then. She heard Murrin calling her name. “Alana! Stop!”

In the end, we’ll both be miserable if I don’t.

The pelt was heavy in her arms; her fingers clutched at it.

He was beside her. “Don’t—”

She didn’t hear the rest. She let the waves take her legs out from under her. She closed her eyes and waited. The instinct to survive outweighed any enchantment, and her arms released the pelt so she could swim.

Beside her, she felt him, his silk-soft fur brushing against her as his selchie pelt transformed his human body into a sleek-skinned seal. She slid her hand over his skin, and then she swam away from him, away from the wide open sea where he was headed.

Good-bye.

She wasn’t sure if it was the sea or her tears, but she could taste salt on her lips as she surfaced.

When she stood on the beach again, she could see him in the distance, too far away to hear her voice if she gave in and asked him to come back. She wouldn’t. A relationship based on enchantment was ill-fated from the beginning. It wasn’t what she wanted for either of them. She knew that, was certain of it, but it didn’t ease the ache she felt at his absence.

I don’t really love him. It’s just leftover magic.

She saw Vic watching her from the shore. He said something she couldn’t hear over the waves, and then he was gone too. They were both gone, and she was left reminding herself that it was better this way, that what she’d felt hadn’t been real.

So why does it hurt so bad?

For several weeks, Murrin watched her, his Alana, his mate-no-more, on the shore that was his home-no- more. He didn’t know what to do. She’d rejected him, cast him back to the sea, but she seemed to mourn it.

If she didn’t love me, why does she weep?

Then one day, he saw that she was holding the pearls he’d given her. She sat on the sand, running the strand through her fingers, carefully, lovingly. All the while, she wept.

He came to shore there at the reef where he’d first chosen her, where he’d watched her habits to try to find the best way to woo her. It was more difficult this time, knowing that she knew so many of his secrets and found him lacking. At the edge of the reef, he slid out of his Other-Skin and tucked it in a hollow under an edge of the reef where it would be hidden from sight. Giant sea stars clung to the underside of the reef ledge, and he wondered if she’d seen them. His first thoughts were too often still of her, her interests, her laughter, her soft skin.

She didn’t hear his approach. He walked up to stand beside her and asked the question that had been plaguing him. “Why are you sad?”

“Murrin?” She stuffed the necklace into her pocket and backed away, careful to look where she stepped, no doubt looking for his Other-Skin, then glancing back at him after each step. “I set you free. Go away. Go on.”

“No.” He had dreamed of being this close to her ever since he’d been forced away from her. He couldn’t help it; he smiled.

“Where is it?” she asked, her gaze still darting frantically around the exposed tide pools.

“Do you want me to show—”

“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “I don’t want to do that again.”

“It’s hidden. You won’t touch it unless you let me lead you to it.” He walked closer then, and she didn’t back away this time—nor did she approach him as he’d hoped.

“You’re, um, naked.” She blushed and turned away. She picked up her backpack and pulled out one of the warm hoodies and jeans she’d found at the thrift store when they were shopping that first week. She shoved them at him. “Here.”

Immeasurably pleased that she carried his clothes with her—surely that meant she hoped he’d return—he got dressed. “Walk with me?”

She nodded.

They walked for a few steps, and she said, “You have no reason to be here. I broke the spell or whatever. You don’t need—”

“What spell?”

“The one that made you have to stay with me. Vic explained it to me. You can go get with a seal girl now…. It’s what’s best.”

“Vic explained it?” he repeated. Veikko had convinced Alana to risk her life to get rid of Murrin. It made his pulse thud as it did when he rode the waves during a storm. “And you believed him why?”

Her cheeks reddened again.

“What did he tell you?”

“That you’d resent me because you lost the sea, and that you couldn’t tell me, and that what I felt was just pheromones … like the hundreds of other girls you…” She blushed brighter still. “And I saw you at night, Murrin. You looked so sad.”

“Now I am sad in the waves watching you.” He pulled her closer, folding her into his arms, kissing her as they’d kissed only a few times before.

“I don’t understand.” She touched her lips with her fingertips, as if there were something odd about his kissing her. “Why?”

Even the thriving reefs weren’t as breathtakingly beautiful as she was as she stood there with kiss-swollen lips and a wide-eyed gaze. He kept her in his arms, where she belonged, where he wanted her always to be, and told her, “Because I love you. That’s how we express—”

“No. I mean, you don’t have to love me now. I freed you.” Her voice was soft, a whisper under the wind from the water.

“I never had to love you. I just had to stay with you unless I reclaimed my skin. If I wanted to leave, I’d have found it in time.”

Alana watched him with a familiar wariness, but this time there was a new feeling—hope.

“Vic lied because I’d helped his mate leave him: she was sick. He was out with mortal girls constantly … and she was trapped and miserable.” Murrin glanced away, looking embarrassed. “Our family doesn’t know. Well, they