He turned, and swam slowly out into gray light, and drifted down the crosscurrent that ebbed below the cliffs. Trickles of fresh water joined the salt, runoff here and there from the rain carrying soil and spruce resin and traces of char from burned house and garage, seepage from springs, faint hints of lawn chemicals and manure.
No. Not manure. Human waste, sewage.
He lifted his head out of the water and scanned, making sure he still floated beneath Pratt cliffs, tasted runoff from Pratt lands. A weathered gray gazebo crowned the point directly over him. Distinctive style. Pratt land, indeed.
Older houses in Stonefort, the Morgan house, the Pratt house, they'd been built before indoor plumbing. Not as old as the Haskell house, damn sure the Morgans hadn't been willing to put up with that much inconvenience. But plumbing had been an afterthought, hand pumps and cisterns and pipes, and then deep bored wells when electricity came through. And more pipes to take the water away again when you were done with it. But most of the places right on the shore just used the ocean as a cesspool.
People still lived in the Pratt tunnels. He smelled their waste.
Salt water splashed high to Daniel's left, and startled reflex threw him into a dive. Sharp thumps echoed off the bay floor and squeezed him from whiskers to flippers. Not orcas, not sharks . . .
He surfaced and gazed around, his seal mind curious and looking for play. The stone headlands still rose above him to the Pratts' gazebo. He still tasted char on the water, and runoff from last night's rain, and the odd flavors that might lead him to secret entrances and answers.
Echoes bounced above water as well, sharp rapid cracks like splitting stone or a tree snapped in the wind. Water spouted again, closer, to his right, and he dove again and the thumps squeezed him again and human thoughts rose up from beneath the seal's focus on current and taste and the tantalizing vibrations of a nearby school of herring.
Shots. Someone is shooting at me. He squirmed deeper, twisting away from the shore, and shunned the dark glittering spots of metal sinking from their shrouds of bubbles.
Someone was shooting at him. Daniel forced himself back into control, human over seal-mind, and swam. He finally surfaced, hundreds of yards offshore, and turned. The cliffs blurred in the distance, seal eyes again, but he couldn't pick out any movement. The Morgan tunnels had entrances and arrow-slits hidden in crevices of the rock, turned into gun ports with the advance of civilization. He had to assume the Pratts came similarly equipped.
Time to swap bliss for brains, become human again. Daniel turned and dove and surprised a lobster on open bottom and crunched it. Delicious. They never tasted quite as sweet once they'd been cooked. Then he felt for the warmth of the Dragon in his head and aimed for it. Like the ocean's call to his selkie body, he always felt his bond to that glowing red orb of whatever hiding in the dark stone passages under Morgan's Point, to its Tear he'd left behind when he changed. He could find them in the dark, in a full Nor'easter on the bay in February.
He followed that warmth home and dove and felt his way into the scent of fresh water welling up into the salt along the bottom of the bay. Into that taste, and through tight twisting passages of black rock, and up into the yellow artificial light of the tide pool inside the Morgan tunnels. He surfaced and wriggled his body onto a sloping granite ledge.
He closed his eyes. He hated doing this. So easy to just stay a seal, turn, dive, swim back down and out and away . . . fire seared through his bones, spreading into muscles and nerves and blazing across his skin, and he clamped his changing jaw against a scream.
And then he lay naked on coarse pink granite, panting, sweat mingling with the salt water draining down his skin and back to the sea. He rolled to his hands and knees, groggy as always with the change. Stood up, swaying and leaning on the stone wall cold and rough under his hand. He groped for a towel, and dried himself.
And dressed. He stood, staring at the slow pulse of the dark tide pool, the sea's memory of the swells outside. Once you change, remember to change back. It didn't get any easier with practice.
He stirred his aching bones and rubbed the towel through his hair again, before hanging the Tear around his neck. At least that gave him reason to come back.
He could take it with him, arrange a bungee collar that would hold it against a changing body. Instead, he left it as a hostage. Guarantee of his return.
Back to the question that had nagged him, all the way home. Someone had shot at him. No way anyone in Stonefort would shoot at a seal, much less kill one. Morgans had sorted that question out centuries ago. Legends left none of the normal Maine ambivalence toward the seal, watermen viewing seals as vicious competitors for fish and lobster, fair targets anytime the Marine Resources or Coast Guard fishcops were out of sight, while landsmen saw the animals as cute and huggable.
Stonefort watermen lived a different myth, seals as guardians and rescuers and guides, almost human, like porpoises in the Mediterranean. And they added an unspoken taboo — avoid the seal, leave it alone unless it sought you out. Seals had Powers, were uncanny creatures, spirit creatures. That came from the Naskeags and their legends of shape-changer shamans, of a People that hunted dark waters, apparently passed down from before the coming of the Welsh and selkies. At least Alice had said her ancestors hadn't been surprised.
But the bottom line was, no Stonefort man would
