The Hunted

Chapter 3

Beth had woken early that morning, listening to the birds doing their welcome-the-dawn thing outside her window, and cautiously probed her emotional status the way a bomb technician might inspect a suspicious package. Yes, still twitchy, even though the storm had blown through, and the skies were now clear and bright. In fact, she thought that it might even be worse now, and she couldn’t blame it on the weather.

Or the dream she’d had, all sea-green and salty, the pressure on her lungs as though she were holding her breath too long, like being held underwater but without any of the fear or agitation you might think would come from a dream about drowning.

She knew how to swim, of course. You didn’t grow up on an island and not know how to swim. But her family was odd among the Nantucket old-timers; nobody in her family went to sea for their career. Not back when there was an actual sailing-and-whaling industry based on the island, not to the navy, marines, or Coasties—although there were stories of a distant cousin in the air force, during WWII—and not now. Hell, they didn’t even own a boat, relying on the ferry to get them the short distance between the island and mainland. They stayed put on land, and did landy things—without ever getting too far from the ocean itself. She tried to remember a single close relative who had moved to a landlocked state, and failed. She had gone away for college, but come home as soon as she could, and her father had never even gotten that far away, and every cousin within two generations had been the same.

So why was she now dreaming of the sea like it was something she had been missing all her life? How could you yearn for something you always had, and never particularly wanted?

It had been an erotic dream, too, she remembered now, stretching and blushing slightly at the memory. Waves like hands stroking her skin, the water blood-warm, even as her blood warmed more. Her own hand slid down her belly, tangling briefly in the curls between her legs, curls that were still damp from the intensity of that dream.

Beth let out a deep sigh and scrubbed at her face with both hands, trying to erase all images, erotic or otherwise, from her head. “That storm just messed with you, is all. The storm, and that naked man on the beach.

“Oh, yeah. Time to get out of the house, away from the darkroom and the computer and all the stress, and put some fresh air on your face,” she told herself, throwing off the covers and making her way, shivering, to the wardrobe. Never mind that it hadn’t worked all that well yesterday; today was a new day. Anything was possible, right?

Underwear, a pair of sweats and a jog bra, and a windbreaker over that, two pairs of socks, and her sneakers, and she was ready to go. Ten minutes later, she had pulled her bike out of storage and was pedaling down the road, already feeling her mood improve even as the memory of the dream faded. The road was slick with morning dew, and the air was crisp and salty on her skin, just the way it should be. Instead of heading to the beach road as usual, though, she went upland, above town, and away from the water. It was more of a workout that way, she justified to herself, feeling her muscles protest as she headed up a steep incline. If she worked hard this morning, she could eat an éclair from Peggie’s Bakery after dinner without guilt.

Maybe even two, if she only had a salad for dinner itself.

An hour later, sweating and grinning, éclairs earned and her mood on a definite upswing, she locked the bike up outside the local diner and went inside.

“Morning, Miss Elizabeth,” the man behind the counter called out. “Coffee ‘n’ eggroll?”

“Please, yes, thank you, Ben.” The eggroll had been a joke since she was ten—it was exactly that, a hard roll with scrambled eggs inside. No bacon, no ham, nothing except egg, to which Beth would add a dose of hot sauce just before she ate it. The first time she had gone to a Chinese restaurant, the notion that there might be another kind of egg roll had completely floored her.

She sat at the counter, since there wasn’t anyone else in the diner except a trucker at one of the tables, staring into his coffee like it held the answer to everything. After dumping her bike helmet on the seat next to her, she propped her elbows up on the Formica counter and waited for the coffee and inevitable.

“Didja heah about the guy washed up on the beach?”

Glory not only made the best eggroll in the world, she also knew everything that happened in town, often before the people it was happening to knew. She should have been a reporter for the Times, not a short-order cook.

Beth looked at the square-shouldered woman, her gray curls pulled into a ponytail that should have looked ridiculous on a woman her age, but somehow worked. She and her husband, Ben, had owned the diner since before Beth was born, and she suspected they’d be here long after she had died. They were just so … solid. Like granite underfoot, only not so heavy, since neither Glory nor Ben were very large individuals. In fact, Ben was shorter than Beth was, and couldn’t weigh much more than she did, soaking wet, for all that he gave off a reassuring impression of solidity. When her parents had died, and there hadn’t been anyone else to take the teenage Elizabeth in, those two had stepped forward, fostering her until she could be on her own, so that she didn’t have to leave her home. She owed them a debt they refused to even acknowledge. The least she could do was indulge Glory’s love of gossip.

“I was there,” she told Glory. “On the beach last night when they found him.”

“Yes, but did you heah?”

Beth sighed. Obviously, there was more to the story, and Glory wasn’t going to be satisfied until she had the telling of it. “I need coffee before anything else,” she told the older woman, pretending that something inside her hadn’t done a weird flip at the mention of the stranger.

Suddenly, she wasn’t sure that she wanted more coffee after all. That flip feeling wasn’t good. Nothing that made her feel like her world was being turned upside down and roundabout like that could be any good.

Glory, unaware of Beth’s sudden mood change, was already pouring the black liquid into a thick white mug and pushing it across the counter into the younger woman’s unresisting hands.

“All right.” Beth sighed, her fingers curling around the mug despite herself. There wasn’t any graceful way to escape. “Spill all.”

“His name’s Dylan, he’s been checked out of the clinic already and Doc, as usual, refused to take any money for it. That man is going to run himself into the ground, he doesn’t watch it.”

The rant about Doc Alden was familiar territory, and Glory skipped over it to the new and interesting material. “The boy, Dylan, he was sailing, a boat called the Daughter of the Sea, all by himself although nobody seems to know out of what port. Boat’s gone now, obviously, not even flinders to be found.”

“Lucky guy,” Ben muttered, coming behind Glory with a menu for someone who had just come in, and Beth nodded in agreement. A boat that thoroughly destroyed, the captain didn’t usually survive.

“He’s taken a room at the Blue Anchor for don’t know how long. Paid in cash, too. Sold a nice piece of jewelry over at Rosen Jewelers to pay for it. Hasn’t called anyone since he’s been here, poor boy. Must not have any family. Can you imagine that—” Glory stopped, suddenly aware that Beth would be all too able to imagine that.

“And I’m a thoughtless idiot, but you knew that already. I’m sorry, baby. Here, have some more coffee and I’ll go make your eggroll.”

Beth couldn’t take offense, not from Glory. Despite the efforts of her friends, she had been alone for so long, sometimes she forgot what it was like to be part of even a small larger group. Sometimes. Most of the time it didn’t bother her.

Mostly.

“She forgot to tell you that he was single,” Ben said, sliding up to the counter and taking right over where his wife left off. “Or at least, no ring and not talking about a wife and kidlets.” He had a mug of coffee in his own hands, except that, unlike Beth, this was probably his sixth or seventh mug since the diner had opened at five that morning. Even when he was outside the diner, there was always a to-go cup of coffee somewhere near Ben.

“Probably because I’m not interested?” Beth offered, smiling despite herself.

Ben had known her since she was in the womb, and had been speaking his mind about her personal life since then. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you and Jake made the bed shake?”

“None of your damn business, you pervert,” she shot back, refusing to blush or blink.

“I rest my case.” Ben looked too damn pleased with himself for a guy who had just pointed out that her social life sucked. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Ben was the only person she knew who could make her revert back to being a ten-year-old just by poking her.

“Here you go.” Glory returned with a platter of eggroll and a side of hash browns. “Benjamin, you leave the girl alone. You know better than to meddle.”

“He does?” That was news to Beth.

Glory knocked her husband affectionately on the shoulder. “You’ll come to your senses on your own schedule, or not at all. Nothing we can do to rush it along without making things worse. Now eat. If I know you, you haven’t eaten a thing since, oh, lunch yesterday?”

She had, actually, but in the aftermath of the storm and her dreams, she wasn’t sure if she could remember what, and Beth suspected Glory would say a meal you didn’t remember didn’t count.

She ate, and Ben and Glory both left her alone, disappearing back into the chrome-and-white depths of the diner’s kitchen.

Her own schedule? Schedule for what? On any other day the comment would have washed right over her, but today it stuck at her restlessness like a burr, and itched in a place she couldn’t quite reach. She and Jake might not have been setting the world on fire, but what did that have to do with a schedule?

And if Glory or Ben made one single comment about biological clocks ticking, she was going to clean their clocks. Of all the things she ever wanted in her life, gotten or not gotten, kids were not on the list. She wasn’t even much for pets, although her mother had fed stray cats in the neighborhood. They had all slipped away in the year after the accident; she had forgotten that, too. So much, she had made herself forget.

The eggroll satisfied her stomach, but the contentment she had earned slipped away, leaving her feeling irritable and restless all over again. What was here for her, really? Okay, the family house, and people who had known her since her mother went into the hospital to give birth, but … so what? Things that normally made her feel supported and secure now added to her irritation.

Maybe it was time, finally, to do something different. Maybe that was what this restlessness was about. Maybe. maybe she would paint the house pink. Or black. Black, with hot-pink trim.

The thought of what her proper New Englander neighbors would say made her feel slightly better, even as she knew she would do no such thing. It wasn’t a Havelock thing to do, to draw attention to herself, or her house. Not that there was any rule against it, or that she had ever been scolded for making a fuss, it just … wasn’t Done. The family had lived generations on this island and managed to stay out of every single history book or pamphlet, after all. Her dad used to pretend to be annoyed by that, but she got a sense of satisfaction from him, too. Like he had managed to pull off some secret trick nobody knew about … It was another thing they had never talked about. She had been too young, too full of herself then, to think her father might have anything she needed to know.

Not for the first time, she wondered what she might have learned, if they’d lived long enough for her to listen.

“Be a love, will you?” Ben was back, Glory glaring at him over the transom where the orders were placed. He handed her a brown-wrapped package. “Drop this off for me in town?”

“Town” was a two-block walk away from the diner. Ben walked the two miles from their cottage to the diner every morning, no matter the weather, to start the kitchen before dawn. He was hardly in need of assistance.

Beth narrowed her hazel-green eyes at him, but he maintained a look of perfect innocence.

She studied the address on the package’s label. It was addressed to someone in Rockport, Maine, and was already stamped and ready to go. Ben could have just left it out on the counter for the postman to pick up during his rounds.

“What game are you playing, Benjamin?” she wondered, and got only a low chuckle from behind the counter. Beth slid the package to the side, away from her coffee, and went to work on her breakfast. If she was going to be choregirl, she was going to be fed, first. Post office was barely open yet, anyway. And it was off-season—not like there would be a line.

The bedroom Dylan had been shown to on the third floor of the three-story house was large, by his standards, with a bed, a pedestal sink and a bookcase filled with old books. Normally, as a single male, he didn’t stay under a roof unless the weather was particularly bad, and the peaked, plastered ceiling meeting his gaze was not as pretty as the flat, wood-beamed one he and his father had rebuilt after a nor’easter almost destroyed the seal-kin village, but it seemed to suit the building. Wooden flooring was covered by a rug made out of brightly colored bits of cloth. His mother had a rug like that in her own cottage, and for a moment Dylan felt his throat close up with an unfamiliar sensation.

Loneliness, he identified it, without too much surprise. Well, he was without colony or cousins in this place, it made sense. Not pleasant, but understandable.

But the knowledge that his mate waited for him somewhere in this village made the sensation pass. Once he found her, they could return home, and all would be right again.

And surely seal-kin came up on these shores. Maybe he wouldn’t be entirely alone here, during his search?

With that thought, he pushed open the single window, enjoying the feel of the crisp morning air on his skin, looking out into a beautiful blue sky he’d been too focused before then to notice. No clouds, only the slightest hint of any moisture at all in the air, a fine day for swimming …

Or finding a mate.

Single-minded, aren’t you? He could hear his mother’s voice, laughing at him. He really should have said something to her, at least, before he left. But nothing to be done for it now. She would at least know—or suspect—where he had gone, and why. He had always been given to acting on impulse.

Dylan took off the sneakers and shucked the clothing the nurse had given him, dropping them on the bed and luxuriating in the feel of the air through the open window on his skin.

The pull was getting stronger, minute by minute, until it was becoming almost painful. Worse than pain, worse than hunger or lust, even though there was something of both to it. He thought about relieving himself of the lust, at least, but something stopped his hand on the first stroke. There was no shame in pleasure, but … he didn’t want to take it alone. Not when he was so close to finding Her.

Dylan was struck with an intense urge to take a shower, to wash the last stink of the hospital off his skin. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the dry texture of it with displeasure. They had washed it for him at the clinic, while he was unconscious, but used some sort of soap that took the natural oils out, so the strands felt brittle. Worse, his skin felt almost as dry; he wasn’t used to spending this much time out of the water. Not that he couldn’t—one of his sisters used to routinely go off for months at a time when she went to college, and his oldest brother worked on an oil rig, where shedding your human form to go diving into the ocean at a moment’s whim was not exactly a good idea. But Dylan was used to spending most of his time with his cousins, in his other skin. Being caught in human form endlessly was … itchy.

He looked out the window again, judging how far this building was from the shoreline, then shrugged and went in search of the shared bathroom down the hall he had been shown the night before. A good soak in a tub wouldn’t be the same, but it would get him clean, anyway.

A low scream made him jump back into his room, slamming the door shut behind him. His heart pounding, Dylan tried to determine where the threat was coming from. Then he looked down, and a red flush stained his pale skin.

He had forgotten for a moment that he wasn’t home, and had gone outside without any clothing.

“Sorry,” he called out to the unsuspecting fellow guest in the hallway, reaching out to grab the drawstring blue pants and drag them back up his legs. “Wasn’t quite awake yet.”

By the time he made it downstairs, his skin comfortably soaked and his black hair slicked back away from his face, the woman he had startled and two other guests were in quiet conversation—about him, clearly, from the laughter that broke out when he appeared. Dylan felt himself blush again, and a wave of irritation followed. It had been an easy enough mistake to make; he wasn’t exactly used to wearing clothing, after all. At home, people were more comfortable with skin, theirs and others', in any form.

“Glad you could join us,” Mr. Brandt—Mike—said, only a trace of teasing in his voice, although he was clearly hard-pressed to keep from smiling. “I held over some food from breakfast, as Doc Alden said you’d probably be hungry. Breads and whatnot are on the buffet, and everything else is family-style on the table.”

“Everything else” included a platter of salmon piled high and red, and what looked like smoked chub, and Dylan felt his mouth start to water. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. The rest of the foods—scrambled eggs, bacon and fresh fruits—were added to his plate more cautiously. They were treats to his people, not everyday meals, and he was almost afraid to take too much, for fear of doing something wrong, or rude.

“How are you feeling?” Mike asked, reaching over to drop another two slices of the crisp pork onto his plate with a wink. “Doc says you were pretty beat up when they brought you in, but you look fine now.”

“More exhausted than anything else. They warned me I may be sleeping a lot for a while, to recover.”

“So what are your plans today?” Mike asked as Dylan sat down at the table with his plate. “Other than clothes shopping?”

That started everyone laughing again, and even Dylan, despite his blush, acknowledged now that it was amusing.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Get my bearings, figure out what I’m going to do.”

“Have they found any trace of your boat?”

It took Dylan a moment to remember what boat the woman was talking about, then remembered his lie to the doctor. Another thing humans had in common with seal-kin, then; gossip spread faster than illness.

“Not that I have heard,” he said truthfully. “I suspect they won’t. I was an idiot, pushing through the storm like that.” Also true.

“You lived to learn from it, so that’s the important thing,” the woman said. “I’m Gert, and this is Sarah.” The look she cast Sarah made it clear that there was an implied lesson for more than Dylan in that fact. He wondered what the two women were to each other; not mother and daughter, no, nor sisters. He didn’t know enough about human society to understand, and for the first time, doubt struck. Being brought here … that implied that the female he had come to find was human. Everything he knew, everything he understood about females … would it apply to a human woman?

“There’s no job waiting for you? No family?” the other man, Jonah, asked.

“No job,” Dylan answered truthfully. “My family are fishermen, and they know I’ll be back when I’m back.”

Mike laughed. “Had enough of hauling nets and soaking in brine, did you? I spent a few summers working at a packing plant, and I swore the smell of fish would never get out of my pores. Money was good, though.”

Money. He was going to need money. He should have thought of that before he let his hormones take over his brains, should have brought more to barter with than just his sister’s anklet. Idiot. “I thought I might go into town and see if anyone needs a handyman. I’m pretty good with building and fixing.”

“It’s spring,” Mike said thoughtfully. “Tourists’ll be coming soon in hordes—sorry, folk,” he said to the others, who merely laughed, not taking offense, “and everything needs to look pretty. You should be able to find some work pretty easily around here, if you’re handy with a hammer.” He eyed Dylan, as though judging how much of his sleek build was actually muscle. Dylan resisted the urge to stand up and try to present a larger silhouette, like a fur-cousin spoiling for a fight. At five-ten, he wasn’t terribly impressive, until you looked more closely at his build. He wasn’t sure he wanted anyone looking that closely at him.

“I haven’t lost a thumb yet” was all he said.

“And if you’ve been a fisherman you’re not afraid of hard work. Then you’ll do.” Mike nodded, coming to a decision. “I’ll give you a list of folk you should talk to. Can’t have a long-term boarder out of work now, can I?”

Everything was falling into place: the storm sending him here, of all the villages he might have come to, to the very beach where his mate waited. This man, giving him shelter and a reason to linger, to find her again.

Yes. He felt his impatience and restlessness stir again under his skin, and whispered to it the way he might a seal-pup, counseling patience. There would be time to swim in the great waters soon enough. Patience, for now.

And like a pup, his restlessness did not want to listen. Now, it insisted. Find her now. He could practically feel her in the air. She was close, close … all he had to do was find her.

After finishing her breakfast and coffee, Beth ran her assigned errand, strolling to the post office and standing on the line that had, wonders of wonders, actually formed. All of three people were in front of her, but in this town, before tourist season started, that was a notable wait.

Beth gave Ben’s package over and asked for her own boxed mail, as well, when it was her turn.

While he went to fetch it, she leaned against the counter of the post office, her head turned just enough that she could watch people passing on the sidewalk beyond the plate-glass window of the storefront. She saw two friends walking past on the other side of the street going into the café, and realized that she hadn’t seen either of them in weeks.

A dark-haired man walked past, on this side of the street, right in front of the post office, and Beth felt herself come to attention, somehow. A stranger with thick black hair down to his collar and a slender-hipped and yet sturdy build that caught her eye.

“No.” It wasn’t the stranger from the beach. It couldn’t be. Or it could but even if it was, so what? Beth licked her lips, suddenly tasting salt and sea-musk on her skin, as though she had been out swimming, or washed her face with seawater. It reminded her of her dream, and her internal temperature rose several notches. The flush she felt inside was more annoying; what was she, sixteen again, to get so flustered at the sight of a good-looking stranger, dressed and ambulatory, or otherwise? And what the hell was she doing, walking out of the post office just to get a better look at him? Hello? Earth to Elizabeth?

Her feet weren’t listening to her head, but she moved too slowly. By the time she went out the door, the bell jingling overhead, he was gone.

Beth stared down the street, wondering at herself, and the aching disappointment she felt. Was she that hard up, that a good-looking stranger got her juices running? Pitiful. But there was something about the figure, even glimpsed out of the corner of her eye … She had to fight the urge to run after him, ask him his name, anything to get him to notice her. She’d never felt any pull that hard, like the lure of fine chocolate at three in the morning, multiplied by ten.

“Oh, he was pretty, wasn’t he?”

Beth flushed, and laughed at being caught—and by Sarah, of all people.

“Is the town starting a new beautification project?” she asked her old schoolmate and current Beautification Board member, who had also stopped on the sidewalk, apparently to watch the stranger walk by. Humor was better than admitting she had been caught in the act of goggling. “Because if so,” she continued, “I gotta say, I approve.”

“I wish,” Sarah said. “But we’d have to raise taxes too much to afford that kind of pretty. You know who he is?”

“No ….” Honesty forced her to add, “I think he’s our newest resident, the guy who washed up on shore.”

“Really? Is he single?”

“You’re not,” Beth pointed out, fighting a surge of bitterness in her gut that surprised her. Was the eggroll suddenly disagreeing with her stomach?

“Oh. Right. Darn. And I was supposed to meet the hubby and the brats ten minutes ago. Don’t be such a stranger!”

Beth promised, and then the postmaster waved from the counter, a large brown envelope in his hand. She went back in to pick up her packages, but her mind remained on the stranger in the street. Who was he? Why had such a quick glimpse of a stranger gotten her so worked up?

Maybe she had been running a fever, some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. That would explain everything, the weird twitches, the visual fluctuations, even the acid churning in her stomach. Maybe.

She walked out of the post office, her mail in hand, and looked across the street at the café where her friends had grabbed a table. She could see them inside, gesturing and laughing over their coffee. It was still early. Her bike was still locked up outside the diner. She should retrieve it and her safety helmet, go back to the house and get some work done. But even as she thought that, clutching her mail in one hand, Beth found herself torn between responsibility and a renewed restlessness.

Should, should … Suddenly, she didn’t care so much about “should.”

She tucked the packages into her bag and stepped off the curb, walking across the street to the café. She would take some time off, have a nice pot of tea with friends, instead of her usual solitary coffee. All in the name of taking care of her health, of course …

And absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that their window seat would be the perfect place to spot the stranger, if he walked by again.

* * *

Inland, across the bridge that connected the island to the mainland, in a small storefront office, a landline connected, and an old man picked up on the second ring. “Yes?” He didn’t identify himself. Anyone who had this number was calling for only one reason, and names weren’t required.