Forgotten Sea (17 page)

Lara twisted in her seat, pushing her hair from her eyes.

The sky was crossed with phone and utility lines, but between them she could see black specks like flies in a spider’s web.

Misgiving snaked down her spine. “They’re following us.”

“Not for long.”

“I meant the birds.”

He flashed her a look. “So did I.”

The Jeep tore up the old coast road, changing lanes, weaving in and out of traffic. Motels, restaurants, outlet stores streaked by. The wind whipped Lara’s face and rattled the bags in back. She bit her lip, one eye on the quivering needle of the speedometer. The last thing they needed was to be picked up for speeding in a stolen Jeep.

The buildings thinned.

“Hang on,” Iestyn said.

He veered hard onto a wooded side road past split rail fences and straggling stone walls, rutted driveways and rusting mailboxes.

Another sharp turn. Lara clutched the roll bar as Iestyn drove the Jeep over a ditch and under the trees, crashing, bumping, bouncing through the brush, light and shadow dancing crazily overhead. Her knuckles turned white.

The Jeep lurched and jolted to a stop deep under the cover of a broad, black pine. He turned off the engine. In the sudden silence she could hear the rasp of his breathing and the beating of her own heart.

The scent of spruce wrapped around them.

Iestyn turned his head. In the tree’s shadow, his eyes gleamed like the eyes of an animal, unreadable and intent.

“Come here.”

Tension thickened the air like the smell of broken bracken.

Lara licked her lips. His gaze dropped to her mouth.

“What about the birds?”

“They’ll follow the road.”

“And the demons?”

“What about them?”

She blinked. “They could be . . .”
Here?
A trace like burning leaves at the back of her palate. A hint of something decaying on the forest floor.

“Miles away,” he finished for her.

The sun slanted through the branches of the pine, sculpting his body in sunlight and deep blue shadow. He stretched one arm along the back of his seat, sinewy, graceful.

Denim pulled taut over his hard thighs and his hard . . .

Well.

Her cheeks flushed. Her heart pounded.

The bruises on his face, the hint of beard roughening his jaw, made him look disreputable. Dangerous. But it wasn’t terror that scrambled her pulse.

Cupping the back of her head, he pulled her slowly toward him. His breath seared her lips. His mouth hovered, just out of reach. She made a small, impatient sound deep in her throat, and he kissed her. Not roughly, with none of the suppressed violence that had quivered in him since the parking lot. But slowly, thoroughly, taking possession of her mouth, using his tongue and his teeth. Blinded, she closed her eyes.

His left hand covered her breast. “Your heart is racing,” he whispered against her lips.

He filled her head like a day at the beach, hot, salty, golden.

“Adrenaline,” she managed to say.

He twined his fingers in her hair. “Fight? Or flight?”

The tug on her scalp, the pull on her senses, rippled along her nerves. She didn’t want to fight him. “Are you giving me a choice?” she asked, half-seriously.

“You always have the choice.”

She attempted a smile. “Not if you’re holding my hair.”

He twined it around his fist. “Maybe I’m afraid you’ll run away.”

Was he kidding? She’d just dismissed her last, best chance to go home. Every mile, every decision, separated her more irrevocably from everything and everyone she knew at Rockhaven.

“I’m not the one who’s leaving,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

Let it go
, she told herself.

But of course she didn’t. “You’re the one on your way to World’s End.”

“That was your idea.”

“Because you need to find your people.”

“I’m not like you. I don’t need others of my kind to survive.”

“It’s more than a matter of survival.” She struggled to explain the precepts she had lived with for the past thirteen years. The nephilim spent their entire earthly existence aspiring to the perfection that had been theirs before the Fall. “Only your own kind can see you as you really are. Without their vision, how can you become your best self? The self the Creator intends you to be.”

His golden eyes were unreadable. “And you think your masters at Rockhaven see you as your best self.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. “At least they know me there.”

“Well, they don’t know me on World’s End.”

She realized with a shock of sympathy that she wasn’t the only one venturing into the unknown on this journey. She had admired Iestyn’s confidence, envied his ability to go with the flow. But really, he was as cut-off, as alone in this, as she. More so, because of the seven years he had lived without sight or memory of his own kind.

“Someone there will know you,” she reassured him. “This Lucy Hunter. You must have friends who survived. Family.”

“I have no family.”

She knew nothing of the merfolk’s social structure. But he was an elemental, one of the First Creation. “You were born on the foam?” she asked.

“No, I am blood born. My mother is—was—selkie.”

Her heart squeezed. “Did she . . . die in the attack?”

Iestyn shrugged. “I do not know.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I should have said, I do not know her. She did not want me. I was conceived in human form, so all the time she carried me she could not go to sea. She gave me to my father as soon as a nurse could be found. I do not remember her, and I doubt that she remembers me.”

Lara bristled on his behalf. How could a mother not love her child?

But of course it happened. She herself had Fallen trying to save one of those unloved, unwanted children.

 “At least you knew your father wanted you,” she said.

“My mother paid him to take me. And Prince Conn paid him to give me up. Most children of the sea are fostered in human households until they near the age of Change,” he explained. “My father was sorry to lose me just as I grew big enough to help around the farm, but the prince gave him enough gold to hire many men.”

As he spoke of his childhood, his speech thickened and slowed. He had a faint burr. Scottish? Welsh?

“Your father was human,” Lara said slowly, testing the idea.

Iestyn nodded. “Prince Conn told me my father had finfolk blood, but that could have been because of my eyes. The color,” he explained. “I have finfolk eyes.”

“You have beautiful eyes,” she said.

He smiled faintly. “Fish eyes.”

“Who told you that?”

He shrugged.

She frowned. “Is that why your mother didn’t want you? Because your father wasn’t selkie?”

“I doubt she gave my sire a thought once he rolled off her.” He met her shocked gaze and smiled faintly. “The children of the sea don’t do commitment.”

A chill brushed her. “They don’t marry? Ever?”

“We take mates,” he offered. “But even among humans, how many couples are together after five years? Or fifty? What kind of relationship could last five hundred?”

No stabilizing influence in his life, she realized with a trickle of cold. No lasting relationships. This was what Simon had warned her about. Iestyn was a child of the sea, restless, rootless, his loyalties and affections as transient as the tides.

She swallowed. “So you went from your father’s farm to . . .”

 “Sanctuary. Conn collected us, all the fosterlings, and sheltered us until we could take our proper place and form in the sea.”

She had a flash, a vision, of round towers and green hills and cliffs rising above the sea, of a great empty hall and a smoldering red fire. “Like Rockhaven. A school.”

“A castle.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Very romantic.”

“It was bloody cold,” Iestyn said. “We slept with the dogs. And ran as wild.”

She frowned. “But who took care of you?”

“Everyone. No one. It wasn’t a . . . tame childhood.”

For some reason, she remembered the tawny raptor on Moon’s arm, watching her with wicked, golden eyes.

Lara suppressed a shiver, asking lightly, “The Lost Boys in Neverland?”

“More like
Lord of the Flies
.” Iestyn met her surprised look and grinned. “I do read. Plenty of time for that at sea.”

“So you must have had a teacher.”

“Eventually. Miss March.” He smiled as if the memory was a pleasant one.

“Maybe you’ll see her again,” Lara offered. “The flyers said there were merfolk on World’s End. Maybe she survived.”

“No. She was human. She died almost sixty years ago.”

Lara jolted. “I forget that you’re immortal.”

“
Was
immortal,” he corrected her deliberately. “Before I lost my sealskin. I’m demon bait now.”

Their eyes met.

Her lungs emptied. “Because of me.”

Iestyn shook his head. “I’m alive because of you. But we could die tonight. Tomorrow, we might never see each other again. I can’t promise you a future. I can’t promise you anything.”

We could die
. . .

Her heart thumped. “Then give me now.”

He watched her with slitted golden eyes. “Is that enough for you?”

Yes.

No.

“If that’s all I can have.”

“Lara.” His tone was unusually serious. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You will .” She steeled herself to accept it. “You can’t help yourself.”

Frustration darkened his face. “What do you want me to say? Tell me what you want.”

Tenderness and impatience tangled within her.

This wasn’t about her. Not only about her, not anymore.

This journey they were on together was taking her farther and farther from the person she had been. But she would not beg. And she would not take the next step alone.

She turned his question back on him. “What do
you
want?”

“You,” he answered simply. “I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting for you.”

Her eyes blurred. As easily as that, he restored her confidence and destroyed her defenses.

She smiled at him through the mist. “Then take me.”

Iestyn’s blood drummed in his ears like a roaring wind, like the crashing sea.

Lara should have left him when she had the chance. Instead, she was putting herself in his hands. Literally. What the hell was she thinking?

“Take me
.
”

Heat surged in his veins. A cold sweat trickled down his spine.

For seven years, he’d drifted, a nobody answerable to no one, responsible for no one but himself. Because of Lara, he knew who he was. What he had been. Her choices had gotten them this far.

But they had left her world behind. With every mile, they traveled closer to his. Where they went from here was up to him. She was his responsibility now. Her safety, her satisfaction, depended on him.

He looked into her misty gray eyes and his vision contracted suddenly as if he were sighting the stars through a sextant, plotting his course by her light. All he could see was Lara.

He was no angel. Maybe he would never be what she needed. But in one area, at least, he could give her what she wanted. Sex was part of his world. He could take responsibility for sex without any problem at all.

“Not here,” he said.

Her shining eyes dimmed slightly—
with disappointment
? —before she nodded, once more in control of herself and the situation.

“You want to wait,” she said, which was a reasonable assumption. The only reasonable course of action.

But maybe she’d had enough of being reasonable at that school of hers. Maybe she was tired of playing it safe, playing by the rules. Maybe she was sick of being in control.

Last night he’d let her make the choice, make her move, set the pace, take the lead.

Today they’d try sex his way.

“No,” he said.

“We
need
to wait,” she amended.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear, does it make a sound?”

She frowned. “Is that a joke?”

He grinned, tickled by her prim tone. “Nobody’s around to see us. Nobody can hear. We can do whatever we want.”

“Not without attracting attention. The energy released when we make love—”

“How long did it take the demons to track us the last time?” he interrupted.

Her gaze met his. “Hours.”

 “So we’ll be miles away by then.” He jumped from his seat and walked around the hood of the Jeep, stripping off his shirt on the way. She watched him, her eyes huge. With doubt . . . or arousal? Smiling, he held out his hand.

Her throat rippled as she swallowed.

“Do you trust me?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation.

He waited, hand extended.

She bit her lip. Lacing her fingers with his, she let him help her from the car.

His lower belly tightened.
Progress.

He used their clasped hands to tug her closer. The branches of the spruce formed a scented tent over and around them, the needles a dense carpet underfoot.

Cupping her jaw, he laid his mouth on hers, kissing her with slow, moist deliberation until her lips parted and clung, until she slipped her tongue into his mouth and made him dizzy, kissing him back, tilting her hips in silent urging.

For a second—okay, a couple of seconds—he considered giving her what she thought she wanted, pictured her with her legs around his waist and his hands on her ass and his cock buried deep inside her.

But he could do more than she could imagine. She deserved better. He wanted to show her something else, take her someplace she wouldn’t go on her own.

He stroked her lightly up and down, his hands just brushing the outside curve of her breasts. Her heart thudded against the shell of his palm.

“I want you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Naked.”

“Um . . .”

He slid her T-shirt up her narrow ribcage.

She crossed her arms. “We’re outside.”

“Under cover.” He eased the hem up. “Anyway, I took off my shirt.”

“It’s not the same.” But she lifted her arms to help him.

“That’s what makes it fun.” He tugged the shirt over her head.

Her breath caught. So did his. He stopped with her arms still trapped in her shirt so he could stare. With her arms pulled back, her breasts thrust forward like a ripe, warm offering, small and firm with pale, pink crests. They beaded under his gaze.

“I don’t have these.” He touched one with his finger, making the pink tip contract.

One dark, winged brow rose. “Nipples?”

“Breasts. Beautiful breasts. Beautiful Lara.”

Her skin was the color of cream. He lapped her like a cat, curling his tongue around her pretty peaks, sucking her into his mouth.

A flush spread over her chest. Her fingers winnowed through his hair, scratched lightly at his scalp, as his mouth tugged at her breasts.

“You taste so good,” he murmured. He flicked open the top button of her jeans. The muscles of her warm, smooth stomach jumped. He thrust his hand into her waistband. “I want to lick you all over.”

She trembled as he found what he was searching for, rough curls, hot, slick flesh. He withdrew his hand. Holding her gaze, he tasted his fingertips.

“Sweet Heaven.” She shuddered and shut her eyes.

“Ssh.” He soothed her, pulling her close, letting her feel how she affected him, assuring her without words that she wasn’t in this alone. “Do you trust me?”

 “I guess. Yes.”

He spread his T-shirt onto the hood of the Jeep. Retrieved the condom from his jeans pocket. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”

He pulled her back into his arms, her back to his chest, the hard ridge of his erection nestled against her sweet rump, her arms still trapped between them. She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her soft exhalation stabbed his heart. He pressed a kiss to her temple before stripping her shirt from her arms so she wouldn’t feel constrained in any way. With his arms around her, he slid down her zipper, the sound loud in the stillness. She sucked in her breath. But she didn’t object as he worked pants and panties over the curve of her butt and down her long, smooth thighs. Keeping one hand on her hip for reassurance, he dealt with the condom. His belt buckle rattled as he shoved down his jeans. And then he bent her over the warm metal hood of the Jeep and covered her from behind.

Lara jerked like a startled pony. “Iestyn.”

God, she felt good, warm and good against him. His heart thundered. He kissed her ear. “Do you trust me?”

“Ye-es. But . . .”

“Let me show you.” He nuzzled her shoulder. Her skin was like velvet. “Let me take you where you want to go.”

Her breathing quickened. He concentrated on that, on the subtle signals of her body as he fit himself over her, as he slid a hand under her, holding her steady for his intrusion.

He nudged between her thighs and she rose on tiptoe, angling her hips to receive him.
Oh, baby.
He almost lost his breath. His mind. She was already wet, ripe, ready.

Fisting his cock, he stroked her slowly up and down, working himself into her, just a little. Just enough.

Never enough.

“Is this what you want?”

She writhed and pushed back against him, telling him
yes
over and over,
yes
, in the arch of her back,
yes
, in her wet welcome,
yes
, in the tight, hot clasp of her body.

Yes, I want you.

Yes, I trust you.

Take me.

* * *

The world fell away. There was only this, only Iestyn, his hot, urgent voice in her ear, his hard, insistent body at her back, his knowing hands . . .

He covered her, animal, intimate, and intent, filling her. Stretching her.

Lara tightened in wicked anticipation, on edge with excitement. She had never felt like this before, never been like this, wanting, needy, naked, raw. His clever hands pressed with devastating accuracy right where she needed him most, and she made a choked sound in her throat and hitched against him, pushing back, the heat and the need coiling inside her.

Another stroke of his broad head against her sensitive flesh. “Is this what you want, Lara?”

Oh, God, she was melting, she was dying, she was burning up. She closed her eyes, unable to bear the sweet agony. “You know it is.”

He made a low sound, approval or triumph. “Then take it,” he said, and slammed his full length into her.

Dark suns exploded behind her closed lids. She cried out, her hands curled, her body clenched in pleasure. He eased from her, a slow, wet caress, and drove in again, jolting her against the hood of the Jeep.

Blindly, she tried to reach back, to touch him. Her fingers curled into his flanks. Bent forward, she was powerless to hurry or control him. She could only accept him, all of him, as he surged into her, his breathing ragged, imprinting her with his scent, his body, making her feel him in every muscle and nerve.

She absorbed the heavy, driving thrusts, taking him again and again. She wanted,
needed
. . . Surely it was impossible to want this much and survive. Her back arched.

Her muscles constricted around him. His fingers bit into her as he plunged hard and deep, and she ground her teeth on his shirt and came and came, exploding under and around him, helpless to do anything but feel.

His hands clamped on her hips. She felt the deep, hard spasm of his body, the hot release of his breath against her nape as he shuddered and was still.

Quiet, except for the rasp of his breathing, the thud of her heart.

Slowly, she became aware of small, inconsequential things. The rustle of leaves. A crick in her back. The wetness between her thighs.

She sighed and opened her eyes. Sunlight slanted through the trees, illuminating the floating motes above the forest floor. She’d just had car sex, she thought wonderingly. Naked outdoor car sex with a selkie. Bria would have been proud.

Iestyn withdrew from her body, the dragging friction setting off aftershocks in her sensitive flesh. She shivered.

He dragged her up, tucking her head under his jaw, cradling her against his body. His chest was warm and damp.

She turned her face into his neck and closed her eyes. Should she say something? What could she say? Usually she was better with words than with feelings, but his assault on her senses, her own carnal craving, had left her speechless, sore, and unsettled. And oddly free of regrets.

Iestyn raised his head and framed her face with his hands. “I was rough with you.”

Sudden moisture sprang to her eyes. She could handle rough. His tenderness threatened to destroy her. “Are you apologizing?”

He watched her carefully. “Do I need to?”

“No, I liked it. It was nice.” She winced at the woefully inadequate word. “Different.”

The laughter sprang back into his eyes. “Different good or different bad?”

“Different for me,” she clarified. “I’m not usually so . . .”
Shameless? Fearless?
“Physical.”

“Different for me, too.” He stroked her hair back from her face, tucking a strand behind her ear. His golden eyes were warm, searching. “You’re different.”

More than anything, she wanted to believe him. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only you. Two lost souls,” he murmured.

She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat. “We’re not lost. Maybe we don’t know exactly where we’re going, but we’re here now. Together. For the first time in my life, maybe that’s enough.”

* * *

Zayin’s vision fractured. Splintered. The world below him broke like a shattered kaleidoscope, escaping its ordered patterns, the mosaic of field and forest, rock and road, fragmenting. Falling apart, as his spirit was falling apart, bright, broken slivers of his soul.

“Zayin.”

His heart pounded,
a dozen hearts
. His wings flailed,
an
explosion of wings
. He—
they
—tumbled down, down, in a bright avalanche of shards, piercing, blinding . . .

“Jude.”

Pain burst in his skull, rocked his head, jerked him back into his heavy, human body. The ground spun and solidified under him.

He gasped, dragging air into his inefficient lungs, and felt the cold, hard floor beneath his shoulders, the weight of his bones. He opened his eyes.

Mews mistress Moon knelt over him, scowling, her long hippie hair hanging down around her face.

Jude blinked as shadow returned to his sight, obscuring his bright bird vision. “I lost them.”

“I thought I was going to lose you.” Moon rolled to her feet and went to the sink of the small keeper’s room, leaving him lying on the cold linoleum floor. “Next time you decide to have an out-of-body experience, do it with your lady doctor in attendance.”

He flexed his fingers, restoring flexibility to his hands and wrists. “You know I can’t.”

Miriam’s unquestioning loyalty to Simon made it impossible for him to trust her completely. He was rarely vulnerable, even in sex. But spirit casting left him open. Weakened.

“You’ll end up in the infirmary anyway,” Moon said darkly. “Twelve crows, was it, this time? The spirit isn’t meant to divide into that many pieces. You left me with hardly anything to call you back.”

“You should be grateful for the excuse to hit me.” He rubbed his jaw where the imprint of her hand still burned. “Anyway, I had a wide area to cover.”

She turned, a glass of water in her hands. “Here.”

He raised one eyebrow. “No cookies and orange juice?”

 “Fuck off.” But she supported him up with one arm behind his back, guiding the glass to his lips as he drank. 

“What did you see?”

“Flyers.” He swallowed. “They thought I was spying on them.”

“There’s a shocker. What about our runaways?”

“Still headed north.” He sifted through his scattered memories, picking through images and snatches of conversation from the parking lot, reconciling his human knowledge with the crows’ perceptions. Dizzied, he closed his eyes. “World’s End.”

“Where’s that?”

He opened his eyes. “Maine, I imagine.”

Cautiously, he sat up. His spine popped and stretched. Birds’ vertebrae were fused for flight. The return to his human body left him feeling heavy and unsupported.