The Hunted

There wasn’t anything she could do, if there had been an accident, either some idiot in a car, or a greater idiot in a boat. She had the basics of CPR, courtesy of a town-wide push last summer, but she wasn’t a paramedic or anything useful. There was nothing she could do at the scene other than clutter it up and get herself soaked. There was no reason she was extinguishing the candles, grabbing the flashlight, an oiled baseball cap and her raincoat, and grabbing the keys to her Toyota.

No reason at all. Except a sudden need to be there, to see what the storm had brought in.

The rain almost knocked her little car to the side of the road a time or two, but she got to the beach without disaster. The rain and clouds made it seem much later in the evening, closer to midnight than 8:00 p.m., and added to the unreality of the entire scene, to Beth. There were dark forms on the sand, over the dunes: people gathered, and a single vehicle with the red lights on top that marked it as belonging to the rescue squad.

Not an accident, then. Not a car, anyway. And no sign of wreckage that you’d expect, if someone were stupid enough to take a boat out with a storm coming in …

She parked and got out, startled by how noisy the rain was, once she was in it. Cold and hard, and even through her rain slicker she was quickly drenched. The cap kept the water off her face, but nothing more than that, and her hair stuck to her scalp unpleasantly.

“Get the stretcher over here!” a man’s voice yelled. “And you people, back off! You’d think you’d never seen a moron before.”

“Never one out of uniform” the retort came back from one of the bystanders, a woman. Beth slowed her steps a little. Obviously, whoever it was was still alive, and not in critical danger, if they were mouthing off over his body. Nobody here was quite hardened enough to crack jokes over a dead body. Something prickled on the back of her neck, like a spider walking there, or the unexpected touch of a warm hand. She flinched, and then looked around, feeling embarrassed, but there wasn’t anything but the crowd gathered, seven or eight people, including herself. And yet, somehow, the feeling remained, like some phantom hand rested just above her collar.

It wasn’t like her to spook at anything, much less nothing. After one last look around, she shrugged off the feeling and turned to the much more real scene in front of her.

“Evening, Beth.” The nearest dark form in rain hat and slicker turned out to be Mrs. Daley, who had taught seventh-grade math to Beth and her cousin, with variable success. She was in her sixties now, but still held students in thrall with a voice of steel and a heart of marshmallow.

“What happened?” Beth asked her.

“No idea. The call went out from the lighthouse about an hour ago—they spotted something in the water. So we came out to search.”

“We” in this case was the self-titled border patrol, a group of locals who came out when a whale or dolphin beached itself, or a ship got into trouble, or any other crisis requiring a pair of hands and a strong back. Mrs. Daley was a charter member.

“And found …”

“One body, male.” Mrs. Daley leaned in, laughter in her voice even if Beth couldn’t see her face clearly in the dusk and rain. “Nude.”

“Mrs. Daley!” Beth had to laugh, and immediately felt bad about it. “He’s all right, though?”

The older woman nodded. “Out cold, but doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. In any sense of the word. Spoilsport Josiah had to go and throw a blanket over him, though. Poor boy. I hope there wasn’t anyone else out there with him.”

Beth assumed that she meant the stranger, not Josiah. “A boat wreck, then?”

“Well, what else could it be, wash him up here, a night like tonight? No debris, that anyone’s seen, but you think he was just out for a casual swim? In that water?”

The Atlantic Ocean was not a gentle body of water, even in summer. It was only spring now, which meant that the water was still too cold for anyone but the most fervent polar bear or long-distance swimmer to be out in it. Although you never knew what someone from Away, a non-Islander, might do; people came here and did stupid things, all the time. Usually in tourist season, though.

Beth felt that prickle again, this time all down her spine, and she shivered. Not a warm hand this time; more like the sleek dark shadow of something swimming in the deep waters below her.

The crowd parted, and she could see that the paramedics were loading him onto the stretcher now. Drawn by the same urgency that got her down there, Beth moved forward, needing for some reason to see the face of this stranger.

“Miss, stay back, please.” She didn’t know the paramedic; he must have been new. Not that she knew everyone in town—it was small but not that small—but almost everyone was on nodding basis with everyone else.

That thought put the words in her mouth. “I … want to make sure I don’t know him.”

It wasn’t totally a lie. She did want to make sure of that. She didn’t think there was a chance in hell she did know him, but it worked; the paramedic moved aside just enough for her to see the guy’s face in the light of the emergency vehicle’s headlights.

Pale skin, even allowing for shock and being washed out under those flashing red lights. Clean-shaven, with broad, strong cheekbones. Masculine, without being heavy or brutish. The light flickered, highlighting reddish glints in thick black hair so much like hers—there was a moment of shock, and Beth felt her knees almost give out under her.

“Ma’am?” The paramedic was right there at her elbow. “Do you know him?”

That moment of concern allowed her to get close enough to touch the stranger, the flesh of one arm outside the blanket, wet from seawater and rain, cold but not dead-cold, just wet-cold.

“No.” Her breath came back in a rush, and her heart started beating again. No, it wasn’t Tal. It wasn’t her cousin, dead and buried and not haunting her because he would never have been cruel enough to do that. Just some guy with hair the same color and texture his had been, like hers, that was all. Coincidence.

And the look of this guy said he was closer to her age, maybe in his early thirties at most, than Tal’s fifteen when he died. Beth swallowed and forced herself to look again. The features were different, too, now that she could see him more clearly. Tal had been blessed with the family nose, a sort of turned-up snub, and his skin had been darker, his coloring inherited from his Italian father, not the pale-as-flounder Havelock line. This stranger was pale like that, like she was, and his nose was longer, narrower, his mouth wider, the chin more stubborn, and without the five-o’clock shadow that Tal got, even as a teenager.

She touched the stranger’s arm again, driven by an urge that she didn’t understand, and something sparked under her fingers, making her shiver again from something other than the cold.

Something clicked. Something changed, here and now. Chemicals collided in her bloodstream, stars aligned, a wave crested and fell, and she was never going to be the same again.

Beth shook her head, refusing the sense of portent overwhelming her. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing—she was tired, that was all. Tired enough to swear that the guy was shimmering in the rain, that his skin was overlaid with something, some kind of.

A second layer, almost. The kind that she used when she was retouching photographs, to blank out details she didn’t want to use in the final product or distract the eye from things that couldn’t be repaired.

Beth blinked, then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Humans couldn’t be retouched. She was probably running a fever to go with her cold; that would explain it. She needed to get the hell out of the rain, get her overtired imagination under control.

“No,” she said again, backing away before she could touch the body again. “I don’t know him.”

They bundled the stretcher into the ambulance and pulled away slowly over the sand, lights flashing but the siren off. The crowd started to drift away, and Beth drifted with it, back to the house. She shed her raincoat and sneakers just inside the door, then peeled off her sodden jeans and sweater as well, and walked through the house in damp panties and socks. The main bathroom upstairs was old-fashioned enough to still have the original claw-foot tub, and she started the water running hot while she stripped off her socks and underwear and added scented bath salts to the water. Hair piled on top of her head, she sank gratefully into the steaming, sweet-smelling water up to her shoulders and felt her body finally let go of the rain’s chill. She reached up with her toes and managed to shut the tap off before the water reached a dangerously overfull level. Her muscles softened, her eyes closed, and only some remnant of awareness kept her from falling asleep in the tub. When the water cooled enough to rouse her, she hauled her body out of the tub, dried off and put on warm flannel pajamas and slid into bed. The moment her damp head hit the pillow, she was asleep, dreaming of deep green waves, briny air and the slide of warm, warm hands along the inside of her legs and up across her stomach, lingering in places that made her smile in her sleep, as she turned to embrace her pillow as though it were a lover.

Chapter 2

He woke slowly, surfacing with a sense of panic blunted by something soft and sticky.

There was dark and a sudden shock of pain, and … nothing. He opened his eyes, his lashes gummy and stuck together, and discovered that he was in a bed. He knew it was a bed, although he hadn’t slept in one since he was a child, preferring a hammock that mimicked the motion of the waves.

A bed. In a place he didn’t recognize, filled with smells he didn’t recognize.

There were no windows wherever he was, only a single narrow doorway. White surrounded him, white sheets and walls, and shiny metals and plastics and that overwhelming smell of something that made his nostrils flare in distrust and disgust.

Cleansers, part of his brain reminded him. To clean up the shit and the blood. You’re in a hospital.

He had been in one of those, long ago. His sister had torn open her leg on a rusty nail half-submerged off a dock, and she’d had to go to the mainland and have it stitched up. As her favorite sibling, her only brother, closest in age, he had gone with her and their mother, to keep her calm while the doctors did their thing. There had been the same smells, and shots, and the adults had all been annoyed but not really worried.

That was good. Annoyed but not worried meant this was an inconvenience, not a threat. Hospitals were where they helped you. What was this hospital helping him for? What had he done to himself? Nothing hurt, nothing felt wrong … It annoyed him that he couldn’t remember.

“Good morning.”

He turned his head and looked up at a man who was pushing back the curtains and moving to stand beside the bed. An older man, maybe even Elder. Gray hair and beard; the latter was cut into a sharp point on his chin, like a shark’s fin. But the eyes were pale blue and kind.

“Morning,” he responded, his voice raspy, like he’d been yelling. Maybe he had. He couldn’t remember even that much.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me your name?”

He could. He could remember that. But it wouldn’t mean much to this man, his name and colony-connection, identifying him as seal-kin. Nothing this human male could understand. An instant of panic flooded his brain, and then another name came to him from memories of long ago, names and connections to the land …

“Dylan.” He coughed, spoke again more firmly, confidence coming back to him with the memories. “My name’s Dylan. Dylan … Meridith.”