The Selkie Sorceress (Seal Island Trilogy, Book 3) (29 page)

One of the younger nuns—Sister Catherine—hurried into the kitchen, gathering up the loaves of bread. Sister Evelyn laid a hand on her arm. “Sister, I need you to ring the bells.”

“It’s not time,” Sister Catherine protested, shaking her head. “We’re not supposed to ring the bells until the start of mass.”

“I need you to ring them
now
.”

Sister Catherine set down the loaves and scurried out of the house. Sister Evelyn watched her run across the lawn and dart inside the chapel. As soon as the bells started to ring, she picked up her phone, dialing the office at St. Brigid’s Cathedral.

“Sister Margaret,” she said when a nun whose voice she recognized answered. “I need you to ring the bells in the cathedral.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“I’ve had a call from the Bishop,” Sister Evelyn said. “It’s an emergency.”

“The Bishop?” There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “What happened? Why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

“You will,” Sister Evelyn said grimly. But her hands shook as she hung up the phone and started to dial another number. She would get in trouble for this. How much, she didn’t know. But right now, all she cared about was finding Brigid.

“Ring the bells in the church,” she breathed into the phone when Sister Helen in Tullamore answered. “All of them.”

SAM STEPPED ON
the gas, passing a car full of tourists. “What color was the truck?”

“Blue,” Glenna answered, snagging his laptop case from the back seat. “Will your internet work in the car?”

Sam nodded as she booted it up, searching for information on
Clifden Construction
. She handed him his phone back and he frowned at the screen. “Seven missed calls from Tara. Do you know what this is about?”

She shook her head. “The company’s owned by a man named Neil Leary. They’re working on a big housing project on the south side of the bay. I think I know where it is, and it shouldn’t be that hard to find.”

“Good.” Sam dialed the pub, and Tara answered on the first ring.

“Tara, it’s Sam.”

“Sam!” Relief flooded into her voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

“Why?” Sam asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Haven’t you gotten my messages?”

“I just saw that you called,” he said. “I haven’t listened to them yet.”

Tara took a deep breath. “This is going to sound crazy, but I think I know where Brigid is. I had a dream last night about a community of nuns in Kildare…”

Sam shook his head as she related both the details of her dream and Kelsey’s connection to Brigid as the princess living in a convent in
The Little Mermaid
. “You’re not crazy,” Sam said when she’d finished. “We’re leaving Kildare now.”

There was a long moment of silence on the other end. “Is Brigid with you?”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

Sam gazed through the windshield at the sheep farms and rolling green hills of central Ireland. “We think she’s headed to Clifden. Things have gotten,” he paused, glancing at Glenna, “complicated. But we’re going to find her and catch the last ferry back to Seal Island tonight.”

“That’s going to be a bit of a problem.”

“Why?” Sam asked, putting Tara on speakerphone so Glenna could hear, too.

“We don’t have a ferry anymore.”

Sam exchanged a look with Glenna. “What happened to it?”

“It caught fire.”

Glenna shook her head, dismayed. “My mother did this.”

“We think so, too” Tara said. “But that’s not the worst of it. She set the fire to get Caitlin and Liam out of their home so she could steal Owen’s pelt.”

Glenna closed the laptop slowly. “Did she find it?”

“Yes.”

Sam gripped the wheel. He accelerated as the lanes widened, passing several cars at once. “How’s Owen doing now?”

Through the phone, Sam heard the kitchen door squeak as Tara ducked into the back to hide their conversation from whoever was in the dining room. “He hasn’t said a word since last night,” Tara murmured.

“I don’t blame him,” Sam said.

“It gets worse,” Tara said softly.

“How could it possibly get worse?” Sam asked.

“He’s been sneaking off to see Nuala all winter.”

Glenna lifted her eyes to Sam’s. “What?”

“We found Nuala injured on the beach last night,” Tara explained. “She’d gotten into some kind of fight with Moira. I tried to get her to stay, but she went back into the water. Owen says he doesn’t know where she went, but that she’s on our side and is trying to help us.”

“Can we trust her?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Tara admitted. “But she still loves Owen and wants to protect him. As long as he’s one of us, then I think she’s on our side.”

Sam downshifted as the tractor trailer in front of him lumbered up the hill. “Has Liam come up with anything connecting the mermaids to the white selkie legend?”

“Yes,” Tara said slowly, “but it’s only a theory.”

“Give us whatever you’ve got,” Sam said.

“Brennan told Owen a story a few days ago,” Tara began, “about a powerful siren who almost started a war between the mermaids and selkies.”

Glenna tensed, and Sam glanced over at her. He didn’t like the look on her face. He didn’t like it at all. “Go on,” he said slowly.

“The siren was the child of a selkie and a merman,” Tara explained. “Because she had both selkie
and
mermaid blood in her, she was very rare and unusually powerful. Men fell helplessly in love with her the moment they saw her.”

Sam thought of Glenna, of how he had felt the first time he’d laid eyes on her—the powerful force of attraction that had whipped through him and had left him dizzy with need.

“The siren enjoyed exploiting her powers over men,” Tara continued. “She spent her days off the shores of the busy dockyards along the coast, luring men into the sea and watching them drown. After a while, other men realized what was happening and they fought back. They couldn’t capture her because she would put a spell on them, so they rounded up dozens of innocent seals and slaughtered them instead. They captured entire families of mermaids in their trolling nets and murdered them.”

Sam gazed out at the rolling hills and trees blurring into a patchwork of green. “I read every one of Brennan’s books after what happened to you last summer. I don’t remember this story.”

“Not all myths and legends are written down,” Tara said. “When the mermaids finally got word of what was happening, they demanded the siren be handed over to them. The selkies refused, and almost started a war between the two species. As punishment, the mermaids corralled the selkies into the waters around Seal Island and set up boundaries. They took away their freedom to roam the seas, and they said if a child was ever born of a selkie/merman union again, they would destroy it.”

Sam looked slowly back at Glenna. He felt a tightening in his chest as he remembered the conversation they’d had while hiking to the stone circle in Connemara.

“…what you feel for me isn’t anything other than lust. You can’t resist
me because of what I am.”

“I know you have selkie blood in you. Maybe that’s what first drew me to you when I saw you on the island. But it’s so much more than that now, Glenna. Besides, Tara has selkie blood in her. You don’t question Dominic’s feelings for her.”

“It’s not the same.”

“How?”

“I’m different from Tara.”

“This siren…” Sam said slowly, looking back at the road. “She was half mermaid and half selkie?”

“Yes,” Tara’s voice crackled through the phone. “That’s why they separated the selkies from the mermaids. They couldn’t risk another union between their two kinds because the child would be too powerful.”

Sam swallowed. His throat felt dry, like he’d been running for days. “How does this all connect to the white selkie legend?”

“Liam thinks it’s possible that the first white selkie could have been born at the same time the mermaids forced the selkies into these waters,” Tara explained. “That her very existence is a way for the mermaids to maintain control so that no ruling family stays in power for too long.”

Sam glanced back at Glenna. He thought of the man Moira murdered—the man from the vision inside the stone circle, the man who’d been in love with Brigid. Glenna had said her father had been planning to run away with a selkie that night, but he’d been expecting someone else.

Sam had assumed, when Glenna had said her father wasn’t a selkie, that he was a human man. But a human man wouldn’t have had to run away with a selkie. He could have simply claimed her pelt and she would have belonged to him. A
merman
, on the other hand, would have had to run away from his people to be with a selkie.

“Tara.” Sam picked up the phone and took her off the speaker. “I want you to put Kelsey on the phone.”

“Why?” Tara asked, surprised.

“I want to ask her a few questions.”

A few moments later, Kelsey’s small voice came on the line. “Sam?”

“Kelsey, your mother mentioned that you made a connection between Brigid and the princess living in a convent in
The Little Mermaid
.”

“That’s right.”

“Have you made any other connections?”

“Well,” Kelsey said slowly, “we know where the princess was hiding. But where is her prince?”

Sam stared out the windshield, at the white lines blurring in the road. “Go on…”

“In the story,” Kelsey said, “there was
one
prince and
two
princesses. We know Brigid is the first princess, but who is the other one? And what did she have to trade with the sea witch for a chance to be with her prince?”

M
oira paced the rocky shores of Clifden Bay. Her sister should be here by now. She’d felt her twin’s presence the moment Brigid had left the sacred grounds of Kildare that morning. She’d seen a vision of her climbing into a blue truck with a
Clifden Construction
logo on the side. It was only a matter of time before Brigid arrived and came down to the ocean.

Her sister would not be able to resist its call.

Moira smiled as she watched the ripples form in the water, the long graceful arc of a merman’s tail pushing back and forth under the quiet sea toward the shore. The warrior’s bare chest gleamed as he surfaced. Seawater rushed down the rippling muscles of his chest, and his powerful tail flicked effortlessly, suspending him in the deeper waters.

His face was stony, not betraying a hint of emotion as he gazed at Moira with piercing green eyes. “Where is Brigid?”

“We will be at Seal Island by nightfall.”

The tip of his sharp silver spear glinted in the sunlight. “Our people are ready.”