“She killed me under the full moon,” Eliana said.
“Yes.” He wrapped Nicole’s heart in his shirt. “You were born again with blood and moonlight.”
“Why?”
“Some animals are territorial, Eliana.” He looked at her then, and it was like stepping into her own memories. That was the same look he’d given her when she’d first gone with him, when she’d been alive and bored: it was a look that said she mattered, that she was the most important thing in his world.
And I am now.
He was looking at her the way Nikki had watched him. He brushed her hair away from her face. “We are territorial, so when we touch another, our partners respond poorly.”
“Why were you with me then? You knew that…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“She’d kill you?” He shrugged again, but he didn’t step away to give her more room. “Yes, when she found you, when I was ready.”
“You meant for her to kill me?” Eliana put both hands on his chest as she stared up at him.
“It was preferable that she do it,” he said. “I planned very carefully. I picked you.”
“You picked me,” she echoed. “You picked me to be murdered.”
“To be changed.” Sebastian cupped her chin in his hand and tilted her head up to meet his gaze. “I needed you, Eliana. Mortals aren’t strong enough to kill us, and we can’t strike the one whose blood made us. The one whose blood runs inside us is safe from our anger. You can’t strike me. I couldn’t strike her.”
“You wanted her to find me and kill me, so I would kill her for you?” Eliana clarified. She felt like she was going to be sick. She’d been used. She had killed for him, been killed for him.
“I was tired of Nicole, but it was more than that.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and held tight as she tried to pull away. “We still need the same nutrients that we needed as humans, but our bodies can no longer extract them from solid food. So we take the blood from those who can extract the nutrients.”
“Humans.”
He nodded once. “We don’t need that much, and the shock and pain makes most people forget us. It hurts, you know, having holes ripped in your skin.”
She dropped a hand to her leg in suddenly remembered pain. It did hurt. Her entire thigh had been bruised afterward. And her chest. At the time, she couldn’t remember what the bruises were from. And the bend of her arm.
He kissed her throat, softly, the way she’d fantasized about afterward when she’d believed it was just a dream, when headaches kept her from remembering more.
“Why?” she asked again. “You needed a meal and a murderer. That didn’t mean you needed to screw me.”
“Oh, but I did. I needed you.” His breath wasn’t warm on her throat; it was a damp breeze that shouldn’t be appealing. “The living are so warm … and you were perfect. There were others, but I didn’t keep them. I was careful with you.”
She remembered him looking at her and asking permission.
“Sometimes I can’t help but want to be inside humans, but I won’t keep them. We’re together now.” He kissed her throat, not at her pulse, but where her neck met her shoulder. “I chose you.”
Eliana didn’t move away.
“Nikki found out, though.” He sighed the words.
“So she killed me.” Eliana stepped backward, out of his embrace.
Sebastian had an unreadable expression as he caught and held her gaze. “Of course. Would you do any differently?”
“I…”
“If I left you tonight and sank into some girl—or guy—would you forgive me?” He reached out and entwined his fingers with hers. “Would you mind if I kissed someone else the way I kiss you? If I knelt at their feet and asked permission to—”
“Yes.” She squeezed his hand until she saw him wince. “Yes.”
He nodded. “As I said, territorial.”
Eliana shook her head. “So that’s it? We kill, but not under full or new moon. We drink blood, but really not so much. If we do kill, it’s some sort of territorial bullshit.”
“An area can support only so many predators. I have you, and you have me.”
“So I killed Nikki, and now you’re my mate?” She wasn’t sure whether she was excited or disgusted.
Or both.
Sebastian whispered, “Until one of us makes someone alert enough and strong enough to kill the other, yes.”
She pulled her hand out of his. “Yeah? So how do I do that?”
Sebastian had her pinned against the crypt wall before she could blink.
“I’m not telling you that, Eliana. That’s part of the game.” He rested his forehead against hers in a mockery of tenderness.
She looked at the floor of the crypt, where Nikki’s heart had fallen. The bloodied shirt lay in the thin layer of soil that covered the cracked cement floor. Moss decorated the sides where the dampness had seeped into the small building.
Transition. Eliana felt an echo of herself crying out, but the person she’d been was dead.
She looked at Sebastian and smiled. A game? She might not be able to kill him yet, but she’d figure it out. She’d find someone to help her—and unlike Sebastian, she wouldn’t be arrogant enough to leave the vampire she made alive to plot her death.
Until then…
With a warm smile, she wrapped her arms around him. “I’m hungry again. Take me out to dinner? Or”—she tilted her head to look up at him—“let’s find somewhere less depressing to live? Or both?”
“With pleasure.” He looked at her with the same desperation Eliana had seen in Nikki’s gaze when she watched Sebastian.
Which is useful…
Eliana pulled him down for a kiss—and almost wished she didn’t need to kill him.
Almost.
LOVE STRUCK
DESPITE IT BEING AT THE BEACH, THE party was lame. A few people were trying to turn noise into music: if Alana had been high or drunk, it might’ve been tolerable. But she was sober—and tense. Usually, the beach was where she found peace and pleasure; it was one of the only places where she felt like the world wasn’t impossibly out of order. But tonight, she felt anxious.
A guy sat down beside her; he held out a cup. “You look thirsty.”
“I’m not thirsty”—she glanced at him and tore her gaze away as quickly as she could—“or interested.” Eye candy. She didn’t date eye candy. She’d been watching her mother do that for years. It was so not the path Alana was taking. Ever. Instead, she stared at the singer. He was normal, not-tempting, not-exciting. He was cute and sweet, but not irresistible. That was the sort of guy Alana chose when she dated—safe, temporary, and easy to leave.
She smiled at the singer. The bad rendition of a Beatles song shifted into a worse attempt at poetry … or maybe a cover of something new and emo. It didn’t really matter what it was: Alana was going to listen to it and not pay attention to the hot dreadlocked guy who was sitting too close beside her.
Dreadlocks, however, wasn’t taking the hint.
“Are you cold? Here.” He tossed a long brown leather coat onto the sand in front of her. It looked completely out of place for the crowd at the party.
“No, thanks.” Alana scooted a bit away from him, closer to the fire. Burnt embers swirled and lifted like fireflies rising with the smoke.
“You’ll get cold walking home and—”
“Go away. Please.” Alana still didn’t look back at him. Polite wasn’t working. “I’m not interested, easy, or going to get drunk enough to be either of those. Seriously.”
He laughed, seeming not insulted but genuinely amused. “Are you sure?”
“Leave.”
“It’d be easier this way….”
He moved closer, putting himself between her and the fire, directly in her line of view.
And she had to look, not a quick glance, but a real look. Illuminated by the combined glow of firelight and moonlight, he was even more stunning than she’d feared:
blond hair clumped in thick dreadlocks that stretched to his waist; a few of those thick strands were kelp-green; his tattered T-shirt had holes that allowed glimpses of the most defined abs she’d ever seen.
He was crouched down, balancing on his feet. “Even if it wouldn’t upset Murrin, it’d be tempting to take you.”
Dreadlocks reached out as if he was going to cup her face in his hand.
Alana crab-walked backward, scuttling over the sand until she was just out of his reach. She scrambled to her feet and slipped a hand into the depths of her bag, past her shoes and her jumble of keys. She gripped her pepper spray and flicked the safety switch off, but didn’t pull it out of her bag yet. Logic said she was overreacting: there were other people around; she was safe here. But something about him felt wrong.
“Back off,” she said.
He didn’t move. “Are you sure? Really, it’d be easier for you this way….”
She pulled out the pepper spray.
“It’s your choice, precious. It’ll be worse once he finds you.” Dreadlocks paused as if she’d say something or change her mind.
She’d couldn’t reply to comments that made no sense, though—and she surely wasn’t going to change her mind about getting closer to him.
He sighed. “I’ll be back after he breaks you.”
Then he walked away, heading toward the mostly empty parking lot.
She watched until she was sure he was gone. Grappling with drunk or high or whatever-he-was guys wasn’t on her to-do list. She’d taken self-defense and street-defense classes, heard countless lectures on safety, and kept her pepper spray handy—her mother was very good about that part of parenting. None of that meant she wanted to have to use those lessons.
She looked around the beach. There were some strangers at the party, but mostly the people there were ones she’d seen around at school or out walking the reef. Right now, none of them was paying any attention to her. No one even looked her way. Some had watched when she was backing away from Dreadlocks, but they’d stopped watching when he left.
Alana couldn’t decide if he was just messing with her or if someone there really posed a threat … or if he was saying that to spook her into leaving the party so she’d be alone and vulnerable. Usually, when she walked home, she went in the same direction he’d gone, but just in case he was lurking in the parking lot, she decided to go farther down the beach and cut across Coast Highway. It was a couple blocks out of the way, but he’d creeped her out. A lot. He’d made her feel trapped, like prey.
When she’d walked far enough away that the bonfire was a glow in the distance and the roll of waves was all she could hear, the knot of tension in her neck loosened. She had gone the opposite direction of danger, and she stood in one of the spots where she felt safest, most at peace—the exposed reef. The ground under her feet shifted from sandy beach to rocky shelf. Tide pools were spread open to the moon. It was perfect, just her and the sea. She needed that, the peace she found there. She went toward a ledge of the reef where waves crashed and sprayed upward. Mussel shells jutted up like blunt black teeth. Slick sea lettuce and sea grasses hid crabs and unstable ground. She was barefoot, balancing on the edges of the reef, feeling that rush as the waves came ever closer, feeling herself fill up with the peace Dreadlocks had stolen.
Then she saw him standing in the surf in front of her, staring at her, oblivious to the waves that broke around him. “How did he get here first?”
She shivered, but then realized that it wasn’t him. The guy was as defined as Dreadlocks, but he had long, loose, dark hair. Just a surfer. Or Dreadlocks’s friend. The surfer wasn’t wearing a wet suit. He looked like he might be … naked. It was difficult to tell with the waves crashing around him; at the very least, he was topless in the frigid water.
He lifted his hand to beckon her closer, and she thought she heard him say, “I’m safe enough. Come talk to me.”
It was her imagination, though. It had to be. She was just freaked out by Dreadlocks. There was no way this guy could’ve heard her over the breaking of waves, no way she could’ve heard him.
But that didn’t change her suspicion that somehow they had just spoken.
Primal fear uncoiled in her belly, and for the second time that night, she backed away without looking. Her heel sliced open on the edge of a mussel shell. The sting of salt water made her wince as she walked farther away, unable to ignore the panic, the urge to run. She glanced back and saw that he hadn’t moved, hadn’t stopped watching her with that unwavering gaze. And her fear turned to fury.
Then she saw the long black leather coat slung carelessly on the sand; it looked like a darker version of the coat Dreadlocks had offered her. She stepped on it and ground her blood-and-sand-caked foot on it. It wasn’t smooth like leather should be. Instead, the material under her foot was silk-soft fur, an animal’s pelt, a seal’s skin.
It was a pelt.
She pulled her gaze away from that dark pelt and stared at him. He still stood in the surf. Waves curled around him like the sea had formed arms of itself, hiding him, holding him.
He smiled again and told her, “Take it. It’s yours now.”
And she knew she had heard his voice that time; she’d felt the words on her skin like the wind that stirred the water. She didn’t want to reach down, didn’t want to lift that pelt into her arms, but she had no choice. Her bleeding foot had broken his glamour, ended his manipulation of her senses, and she knew him for what he truly was: a selchie. He was a fey creature, a seal person, and he wasn’t supposed to exist.
Maybe it was fun to believe in them when she was a little girl sharing her storybooks with Nonny, but Alana knew that her grandmother’s insistence that selchies were real was just another type of make-believe. Seals didn’t walk on land among humans; they didn’t slip out of their Other-Skins. They were just beautiful myths. She knew that—except she was looking at a selchie who was telling her to take his Other-Skin.
Just like the one at the bonfire.
She stood motionless as she tried to process the enormity of what had happened, what was happening right now.
Two selchies. I met two freaking selchies … who both tried to trap me.
And in that instant, she understood: the fairy tales were all wrong. It wasn’t the mortals’ fault. Alana didn’t want to stay there looking at him, but she was no longer acting of her own volition.
I am trapped.
The fishermen in the old stories who’d taken the selchies’ pelts hadn’t been entrapping innocent fey creatures: they’d been entrapped by selchie women. Perhaps it was too hard for the fishermen to admit that they were the ones who got trapped, but Alana suddenly knew the truth that none of the stories had shared. A mortal could no more resist the pull of that pelt than the sea could refuse to obey the pull of the moon. Once she took the pelt, lifted it into her mortal arms, she was bound to him. She knew what he was, knew the trap was sprung, but she was no different from the mortals in the stories she’d grown up hearing. She could not resist. She took the pelt and ran, hoping she could foist it off on someone else before he found her, before Murrin followed her home—because he had to be Murrin, the one Dreadlocks was talking about, the one that the creepy selchie had told her was worse.
Murrin watched her run, felt the irresistible need to follow her. She carried his skin with her: he had no choice but to follow. It would have been better if she hadn’t run.
With murmured epithets over her flight, he stepped out of the surf and made his way to the tiny caves the water had carved into the sandstone. Inside, he had his shore clothes: woven sandals, well-worn jeans, a few shirts, and a timepiece. When his brother, Veikko, had gone ashore earlier, he’d borrowed the soft shirt Murrin had liked so. Instead, Murrin had to wear one that required fastening many small buttons. He hated buttons. Most of his family didn’t go shore walking often enough that they needed many clothes, but Murrin had been on land often enough that the lack of a decent shirt was displeasing. He bare
ly fastened the shirt, slipping a couple of the tiny disks into the equally tiny holes, and went to find her—the girl he’d chosen over the sea.
He hadn’t meant for her to find his Other-Skin like this, not yet, not now. He’d intended to talk to her, but as he was coming out of the water, he’d seen her—here and not at the party. He watched her, trying to figure how to walk out of the surf without startling her, but then he felt it: the touch of her skin on his pelt. His pelt wasn’t to be there. It wasn’t to happen like this. He’d had a plan.
A selchie couldn’t have both a mate and the water, so Murrin had waited until he found a girl intriguing enough to hold his attention. After living with the moods of the sea, it wasn’t an easy task to find a person worth losing the waves for.
But I have.
So he’d intended to ease her fears, to try to woo her instead of trapping her, but when she stepped on his Other-Skin, all of those choices had vanished. This was it: they were bound. Now, he was left doing the same thing his father had once done, trying to convince a mortal to trust him after he’d trapped her. The fact that he hadn’t put his pelt where she’d find it didn’t change anything. He was left trying to wait out her fears, to find a way to convince her to trust him, to hope for a way to persuade her to forgive him: all of the very same things he’d wanted to avoid.
Mortals weren’t strong enough of will to refuse the enchantment that bound him to her. It wouldn’t make her love him, but selchies grew up knowing that love wasn’t often theirs to have. Tradition mattered more. Finding a mate, making a family, those mattered more.
And Murrin’s plan to buck tradition by getting to know his intended first had gone horribly off course.
Thanks to Veikko.
At the dirty bathrooms along the beach parking lot, Alana saw a girl clad only in a thin top and ragged shorts. The girl was shivering, not that it was cold, but from something she’d shot up—or hadn’t been able to shoot. Usually, the junkies and vagrants clustered in small groups, but this one was alone.
The pelt tingled and resumed looking again like a beautiful leather jacket as soon as Alana saw the girl. Perfect. Alana walked up and tried to hand it to the girl. “Here. You can use it to warm—”