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have chosen. Endless existence has its own . . .
    burdens.”

    “You are dissatisfied?”

    Dissatisfied , restless , empty , alone . . .

    She lifted her chin. “I am bored.”

    His gaze sharpened on her face. “I hear you’ve been amusing
    yourself ashore.”

    “And this interests you because . . . ?”

    “Perhaps you would be better served if you redirected your energy
    toward your own kind.”

    She tilted her head. “Pimping for the prince, Dylan?”

    “Merely delivering a friendly warning. There are dangers to
    becoming involved with humans.”

    “You are half human, are you not?”

    His mouth compressed. “It’s impossible to be half anything. You are
    selkie, or you are not. You live in the sea, or you die on land. I am selkie,
    like my mother.”

    So she had touched a nerve. She poked at it again, the way children
    on shore thrust sticks at jellyfish to watch them twitch. “But your father
    was human.”

    41

    “I do not speak of my father.”

    “Tell me about your mother, then.”

    “She drowned. In a fisherman’s net.” The cry of the gulls carried
    upward on the wind. Dylan turned his head and held Margred’s gaze.
    “Because she ventured too close to shore.”

    “Another warning?” Margred asked softly. “Have a care, Dylan. I do
    not take cautions well. Or instruction either.”

    “Something is happening,” Dylan argued. “Something affecting the
    balance of power. Conn fears it. We all feel it. There’s a disturbance in
    the demon realm.”

    Margred shivered. She did not want to think there was more to her
    recent restlessness than frustrated lust. An actual attachment to a human
    would be bad. An upset in the balance that existed between elementals,
    between the children of the sea and the children of the fire, would be
    much worse.

    “Demons are always disturbed,” she said. “What does that have to
    do with us? With me? The sea folk are neutral in Hell’s war on
    humankind. We always have been.”

    “Hardly neutral,” Dylan said, “if you’re fucking one.”

    The barb shot home. She flinched and then aimed her smile like a
    knife.

    “The way your mother did?”

    “My mother married my father.”

    Margred blinked, diverted. “Really? Why?”

    Dylan’s lips peeled back. “Why do you think? He took her pelt.”

    Ah. Selkies could not return to the sea without their sealskins. A
    mortal man could keep a selkie wife . . . as long as he kept her sealskin
    hidden. Because the children of such unions were rare—and usually
    human—the marriages even worked out. Sometimes.

    42

    “After I hit the Change, I found her sealskin,” Dylan explained. “She
    took me back to sea with her.”

    Margred tried and failed to imagine entering the land beneath the
    wave for the first time at— How old must he have been? Twelve?
    Thirteen? Almost grown, floundering in an unfamiliar body and an utterly
    new world.

    “That must have been . . . upsetting,” she ventured.

    Dylan inclined his head. “Awkward, at least. Stick to your own
    kind,” he advised. “Easier that way on everybody. ”

    He was right.

    Of course he was right.

    She sympathized with his story. And yet . . . She glanced at his
    throat. He did not wear the triskelion, the wardens’ mark, the sign of the
    prince’s elite. But Dylan was still the prince’s protégé, as much the
    prince’s creature as Conn’s hound. Had he issued his warning out of
    genuine concern? Or to further some agenda of his own?

    She left him, making her way down the tower steps to the sea caves
    under the castle. Chinks of light pierced the thick stone walls. Margred’s
    eyes adjusted to the gloom. The smell of the ocean rose from below like
    the smoke from a human fire.

    As she circled down the stairs, another selkie climbed up: Gwyneth
    of Hiort. Her bare feet left damp splotches on the stone. A red robe
    trimmed with sable wrapped her naked shoulders. The black fur
    contrasted pleasingly with her milky skin