Lord of the Deep (19 page)

What she needed was an opportunity to slip away, and he hadn’t left her side. Making matters worse, the mere sight of him aroused her. Despite her resolve, the bond between them was already too strong to sever casually, and yet it had to be done. Meanwhile, she dared not give him reason to suspect what she was planning, and above it all, she begged the Arcan gods to give her just one more hour in his arms. She was going mad—she had to be. There was no other explanation for the riot of emotions roiling in her then.

“We can go another day,” she said. She longed to reach out and touch him as he stomped past, but she dared not. He was very perceptive. He might know. It was torture. Instead, she stood helpless, taking his measure, drinking in the tall, muscular length of him: the sturdy, well-turned thighs and broad shoulders defined beneath the skin-tight eel skin suit that left nothing to the imagination. He may as well have been naked. She couldn’t see his eyes, they were so deeply sunken in shadows, but she didn’t need to see them to recall their soulful, almond-shaped beauty—the only feature that remained the same whether he was in his human form or that of the great, graceful seal. He was magnificent.

Just when she feared she could bear no more, a strange echo vibrated through the master apartments catching Simeon’s attention. He stopped in his tracks.

“What is it?” Meg asked.

“Pio!” Simeon said. “Now we shall have some answers. I shan’t be long.”

He streaked off toward the tunnel in the direction of the sound, and Meg waited until she heard the splash as his body enter the water before slipping off in the opposite direction toward the subterranean pool, where he had bathed her and made love to her. She remembered the ebb and flow of the tide as it rose and subsided there. It was fed by the water in the bay. It would be easy enough to find the opening.

On her way past the bed they’d just slept in together, the nightstand beside it caught her eye. On it, she spied the flask containing the tincture that would allow her to breathe for longer periods under water. She hesitated, her hand hovering over it. Should she take it with her? She’d already been dosed. If it hadn’t worked, it wouldn’t matter, and once she’d gotten away, she would have no more need of it. She would not be coming back beneath the waves again.

There was no more time. Retracting her hand, she cast one last glance about the chamber and fled.

“W
e may have to postpone our visit to the Pavilion,” Simeon said to an empty chamber as he entered the master suite. “Pio has found Seth on the Isle of Mists, and some selkie justice is in order to”—he pulled up short—“see that he never does anything like…Megaleen…?
Megaleen!
”

Streaking through the other chambers, he called her name at the top of his voice, bringing a troop of otherwise invisible retainers, mostly older male selkies, who swarmed into the master suite nonplussed at the ruckus. But there was no sign of Meg, and he dismissed them with orders to search every recess.

Raking his hair back with both his hands as if he meant to keep his brain from bursting, Simeon began to pace. First Vega and now Meg had gone missing. He’d sensed something under the surface in Meg, especially the last time they’d made love. It was almost a desperate coupling, as if it were their last. He’d shrugged it off as the heat of passion, but now those fears came crawling back to haunt him. But why would she go and where? She loved him, he knew it. Did she fear the differences between them that Vega was so quick to point out? Didn’t she know how much he loved her? Didn’t she know he would move the moon and the stars to have her, to keep, and to love her?

His travels pacing the sumptuous carpet brought him close to the nightstand and the tincture bottle standing on it just as he’d left it. The blood drained from his face as if a shade had descended over him, shutting out the light she had lit inside him, and he groaned. She wasn’t in the palace. The servants wouldn’t find her there. She was gone, and she did not mean to return.

He rummaged through the wardrobe like a man possessed. She had taken nothing from the vast collection of rich costumes and accessories that had been collected over the ages, the boon of shipwrecks, like everything else in the palace. He was certain the exquisite costumes were meant by the fates for Meg alone, and she had taken nothing—not a bauble, not a jewel—only the frock on her back. He couldn’t even recall its color or style. Her beauty by far outshone any silk or lace or cloth of gold in the palace, and he had been blinded by it. He had to have her back. Life meant nothing without her—immortality meant nothing. It would be a life of torture. The world and everything in it had no meaning without his Megaleen.

Stomping out of the palace, Simeon plunged into the water surrounding it and swam for the Waterwitch’s cave, meanwhile humming the mantra to bring Pio, but the summoner didn’t come. Pio, too? What was happening? In all the eons of his life, Simeon had never felt as helpless as he did then, surging through the water alone on the brink of madness.

He surfaced at the Waterwitch’s subterranean cave, scrambled up onto the threshold, and burst into her sitting room. As always, it was empty, and he charged through the aquatic vine curtain and entered her sanctum. That, too, was vacant, and he loosed a cry of utter frustration, pounding the chair on the dais with clenched fists. How, in but a blink in time’s eye, had everyone abandoned him?

Rage moved him now, and he ground out the mantra that always brought the witch, but it came out more like the roar of a lion. Taking deep breaths, he tried again, and again…and again. Nothing. Not a ripple in the water in her pool. Not a sound save the slow, maddening splats of water dripping from chinks in the coral into more water.

How long he stood there, he did not know, only that it was long enough for him to grow hoarse from calling the witch to no avail. Finally, he staggered through the vine curtain into the vacant parlor and dove back into the water. There would be no help for him this time. If he was to have his Megaleen back, he was on his own.

Vega reached the Isle of Mists too soon. He dared not risk climbing out of the bay in broad daylight. He’d swum and swum until he feared his heart would burst through his chest, but it hadn’t eased the mortal pain the Waterwitch’s words had inflicted upon him or the ferocity of his selkie desire. It was not a comfortable thing.

Through all the centuries of his existence, he’d thought he knew who, and why, he was. Now he knew nothing. In the space of a blink, the Waterwitch had wiped everything he knew and thought and hoped he was away, like the wind carrying off a thistle seed. It would take root elsewhere, but he could not. He was doomed to an existence as foreign to him as his separate races, the curse of a half-breed; not enough of either to be whole.

There were many magical underwater air pockets in the archipelago, where a selkie, or a mortal for that matter, might take shelter beneath the waves. Vega found one close to the Isle of Mists. It was a small, secluded one rising from a little pool filled with graceful sea anemones attached to the coral, where he could rest and think…and relieve himself, for despite it all, he was still tight against the seam. Crawling up on a broad flat ledge lined with sea kelp, he stretched out on his back with one knee raised, and opened the crotch of his eel skin suit. Lifting the bulk of his cock out, he groaned as he soothed it—more for relief than release at first, for it pained him so long jammed against the skin-tight crotch of the suit.

He thought of Risa, the beautiful young selkie consort he’d bedded once before Simeon banished all the consorts. That seemed an eon ago. It might have worked between them given half a chance, for Risa was willing, and they had mated well, but that was hopeless now. Still, when he shut his eyes, it was Risa he saw stroking his cock, bringing it to life. It wasn’t his roughened palm that gripped it. It was Risa’s soft, skilled fingers riding up and down its shaft, her soft quim gripping him, her dewy lips sucking him dry.

His slow, soothing ministrations quickly became rapid and urgent, but he wasn’t alone. Vibrations in the kelp bed beneath him brought his eyes open to the sight of a young female selkie, who thrashed up on the ledge alongside him and began shedding her sealskin. Was he dreaming? Vega inched back to give her more room, his hooded eyes following her every move as she peeled the skin away, with painfully slow undulations that revealed her perfect body beneath.

It wasn’t the Risa of his daydream, though there was something familiar about her. One of the younger consorts perhaps or one of those hopefuls slated to become a consort that he’d seen loitering about the palace hoping for a glimpse of Simeon. It didn’t matter. His selkie side was out of control, just as it always seemed to be when he was overtired.

Her gaze, hooded and sultry, was ravishing him. She’s inched the skin down to expose her breasts, teasing him with her hardened nipples, giving him only brief glimpses of their tawny peaks. Just when he thought he could bear no more, she wriggled out of the rest of the skin and knelt before him naked. She was without blemish, her skin like alabaster, her hair gleaming in the defused light with the blue-black shimmer of a raven’s wing. Phosphorescence from the water and light filtering down from above gave her an ethereal look, Otherworldly and mysterious. It captivated him. Above all, her large, lipid eyes, a feature inherent in both incarnations, were reverencing him in a way that made his hot blood sizzle. This was where his selkie self and his mortal self parted company. This was where one always gave way to the other. His selkie self had done that the minute she undulated out of the sealskin. He was pure sex, as malleable as molten lava in her hands—or any hands that laid themselves upon him in his selkie incarnation.

Sidling closer, the female fed him one if her nipples, while she played with the other. Vega saw her through a veil of red that always obscured his vision when aroused. He had often wondered if it was the same with other selkies—with Simeon—or if it was a phenomenon peculiar to half-breeds. He’d never mustered the courage to ask him. It didn’t matter now. Rational thought was far away. Nothing seemed real, nothing but the tug his cock felt as he sucked her tit; nothing but the cool touch of her hand stroking the hot flesh of his thick, hard shaft.

It had been too long since his last mating, and he could hold back no longer. His release would be strong. It had already started to pulse when she leaned back from him, her hideous laughter ringing in his ears. Vega’s eyes snapped open to Elna, the Waterwitch, her gap-tooth grin and wiry white hair looming over him where the beautiful selkie’s countenance had been.

“Shortchange me, will you, half-breed?” she triumphed. She gestured toward his rigid cock. Why wouldn’t it go soft? How could it betray him like this? It should shrivel into limp flaccidity, but there it was, as hard as ever a cock could be! “It can wither and fall clean off you before I’ll finish what I’ve started there,” she shrilled.

“I would prefer that to relieving it in the likes of you!” Vega thundered.

“Good!” she snarled, “then this should please you, young lordling!” Seizing the foot of a green sea anemone from where it was attached to the edge of the pool, she flew at him and jammed the creature’s head—tentacles and all—over his erection. “Cock a leg over that!” she chortled, her head thrust back in riotous laughter.

The minute the dozens of stinging tentacles seized his member, Vega came into the flowerlike creature’s mouth, the hot rush of his seed riding back up his shaft, coating it—protecting it from the stinging cells the anemone used to paralyze its prey. It would not harm him. They were creatures of the deep—kindred. The Waterwitch hadn’t taken into consideration the symbiotic relationship that existed between such creatures and the selkie, and Vega laughed as he took back his cock and returned the anemone to its coral ledge.

“Better than my palm by half, old hag,” he said. “And you’ve nourished the creature to boot! You’ve done us both a favor.”

The Waterwitch’s laughter turned to rage. She pounded her thighs with white-knuckled fists and spewed a spate of curses at him. She reached for her sealskin, but Vega was too quick for her. Snatching it up from the kelp strewn ledge, he slung it over his shoulder.

“Oh, no!” he said, “’Tis mine now by forfeit!”

“You give that back!” she demanded, her shrieks deafening.

“So you can tempt another with it?” Vega said. “Never! Where did you get it in the first place? You are no selkie. What poor unsuspecting creature did you steal it from?” His breath caught. “Wait a moment,” he said, discovery in his voice. “Is this how you buy your immortality? Is this how you cheat the gods…by stealing selkie skins and holding them until the poor creature dies his mortal death? What then…you steal another and another, when his days are done?
It is!
And in the meanwhile, you transform into your most seductive incarnation, like you did just now, don the skin, and fornicate among the unsuspecting selkies? I
knew
there was something. I warned Simeon about you eons ago. The Scroll of Arcan Rite in your hands is sacrilege!”

“That is none of your affair.”

“No?” Vega seethed, brandishing the sealskin. “I’ve just made it my affair.”

She shrugged. “Keep the skin! I shall only get another.”

Vega plunged into the pool. “Well, you shan’t have this one! Unless, of course, you want to fish it out of the volcano on Lord Vane’s Isle of Fire, because that is where it’s going, ‘venerable’ one, and I would not attempt it if I were you. Once I tell this tale to the Lord of the Flames, you will not be welcome there!” He brandished the sealskin. “This here will become a burnt offering to insure its former owner rite of passage to the gods. See how they welcome you when your time comes, old hag!”

She said more, her hoarse voice crackling over the breast of the water, her fists carving mad circles in the air. Then all at once there came a hitch in her demeanor, as though some fiendish inspiration had struck, and one thing came loud and clear above the rest: “I
will
get another, and you will rue the day you ever touched that sealskin, bastard of the sea! You mark my words!”

Having had enough, Vega plunged beneath the surface of the pool, swam out into the bay, then on to the ocean and the Isle of Fire to keep his word. He didn’t linger there. Soon it would be midnight. Whoever’s sealskin it was that he’d confiscated from the Waterwitch had been cast into Lord Vane’s volcano and was no more. Shrugging off her cryptic augur at the last, he swam for the Isle of Mists and reached it just before the midnight hour. He wasn’t prepared for the devastation that met his eyes. The strand was foreshortened by yards. The dune where Simeon had buried his sealskin was gone, so was the little cottage on the rise above it; Meg’s cottage. Nothing remained near the beach, and the seas were still running high.

Selkie storms were notorious for their intensity. Much of the archipelago was formed because of them at the dawn of time. It was a miracle that anything remained, considering, Vega thought, since Shamans’ Mount adjoining had been leveled to a mere spit of rock and sand. He took that to be an act of the gods’ justice.

The night mist had risen over the Isle and cloaked his movements, though stealth was inherent in him. Picking his way to the north side of the Isle as the Waterwitch had instructed, he passed much devastation. What appeared to be a bait shack close to the destroyed cottage had also been leveled. Horsefeet were everywhere, righting themselves with their long sharp tails, clawing their way toward the shore in a mass exodus to return to their home in the sea. Even the babies raised on shore seemed to know this was where they belonged. Vega stopped to help turn several over whose hard, helmetlike shells were too heavy for their tails to flip. All creatures of the sea were kin to the selkie—half-breeds included.

The mists were thick in pockets on the north shore. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Glancing about to be certain he wasn’t being watched, Vega slipped the Waterwitch’s crystal from inside his eel skin suit and turned it to and fro in his hand.
Universal,
she’d said of the charm. How it would be accepted while she was not was a mystery, but then so was the nunnery. He had no choice but to chance it. Murmuring a prayer over it to the Arcan gods of the deep just in case, he cast it into the misty hollow.

For a moment, he felt like a fool, but only for a moment. All at once the mist parted, showing him what looked like an ancient abbey. The Waterwitch had been truthful about that much at least. As he stepped into the illusion, it swallowed him up. Spinning around, he saw no exit. Groping the mist gained him nothing. Searching the ground, he foraged for the Waterwitch’s crystal charm and found it. Tucking it away inside his eel skin again, just in case, he turned back to the strange chalk structure before him, which was the color of the mist itself.