Page 3 of Odder Still
No, no I don’t.
But before I can stop myself, I’m tackling the seal, snatching its brooch away. With the gleaming jewelry in my hands, the odd emotions fade. My arms shake and my stomach turns. Did I just—didthe parasitejust—
The seal releases a startled bark, and ripples of color shoot along the brooch like an electric shock, mirrored by a similar storm that rolls over the animal. Fur swirls off it, skin sinking inward and legs spilling out, until there’s a chubby human in its place. Or, perhaps more accurately, the sealisa human. A stunned human staring vaguely toward me with cloud-grey eyes that don’t quite focus. Freckles coat his face, and his red hair flares back from his forehead in waves that curl up around his ears.
“Well.” I swallow. “That wasn’t what I expected.”
CHAPTER TWO
No-Man’s Lander
Multitudes within us, multitudes at war.
Questions battling for answers
with consequences we can scarcely afford.
Bloody compromises beneath torn banners.
Only ever ourselves to settle the score.
NOTHING IN THIS DAMNED North makes sense.
The once-seal yelps, a human sound this time, and shuffles away from me, all bare skin over plump curves. The freckles smothering his neck and shoulders end there, leaving him a glowing white in all but the two small scars beneath his nipples. He jerks his legs up, blocking his chest from view.
“Who goes there? Speak up!” A tenacious sort of delicacy radiates from him, as though he will force the world to accommodate his fragility and not the other way around, a glass sharpened to a perfect point. He stares somewhere past my shoulder, his gaze so distant that his eyesight must be terribly poor. “My family is of the big seven! If you wish to retain your life, you’d best give me that coat back.”
I grimace at the way he says it, as though I ought to have known that already and be kneeling at his feet. No person or household should have the power and wealth to wield their very existence like a weapon. Particularly when a simplepleasewould have done the trick.
I flick his brooch back and forth as the stories of the North snap into place. “You’re a selkie,” I say. “I always thought they were a kind of mer.”
“Do I look like a mer to you?” His blind stare goes straight through me, and his fine voice is a knife’s edge compared to the whiskey tune of my own.
I do look at him, my attention catching on his defined, auburn eyebrows and soft lips and the curve of his heavyset shoulders. I hastily redirect my focus to other parts of the present moment, where a parasite slowly leaches deeper into my body. Where Lilias surely still hunts me down. Where the only thing I want is to return to my pets and my no-man’s land and my heritage of none.
My fingers lift instinctively to the side of my neck. I slam them back down before they can graze the parasite.
“Sorry,” I say. “As I just poorly demonstrated, I don’t have much knowledge of this region. I have a few questions, actually, if you don’t mind.”
“And I have priorities, ones which include, in a very particular order, my coat, my clothes, and an important meeting with an equally important corporation head, and onlythenpotentially answering the questions of random foreigners,” he replies. “So, if you’d be so kind as to hand me back my coat now—the brooch, if you ken.”
“It’s how you shape-shift?” I look at the device a bit more warily as I transfer it between my fingers, the silver, in its almost liquid-like crown pattern, glowing against my dark skin. It taunts me with the option to leave my human life behind. To escape myself, and the repetitive, leeching emptiness that tries to steal away my time and energy. Or to realize that no matter how I change, that this cycle of depression will follow me.
“Transform, not shape-shift. Like certain small groups of near-humans, selkies possess a secondary set of genetics that the energy emitted by the brooch can activate. Which is why I’ll be needing it back.”
“Maybe I don’t want to hand it over until my questions have been answered.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“A warning.”
“Why, don’t tease, you’ll get my hopes up.” The selkie’s lips quirk. “Fine, then. But my clothes are in the watertight chest beneath the boardwalk stairs. I won’t be answering anything withoutthem.” He tucks a stray lock of his red curls behind an ear before extending his arm to me.
The motion draws my attention along the line of his neck, my gaze landing on the dip between his collarbones. I have to swallow suddenly. As I help him stand, I avert my eyes to the endless grey sky, as though whatever deities living in its northern vastness might realize this is the worst possible time to dump a very handsome, very naked aristocrat into my lap. I should pray they provide me protection. Or course correction, perhaps.
The selkie holds on to me as we cross the beach, though the self-assured way he moves makes me think he could manage on his own despite his blindness. A small trunk of clothing sits out of view, beneath the stairs, a thin, silver cane resting atop it. While he changes, I stand on the beach, tossing his brooch and catching is again.
He reemerges in a short cape of steel grey over a deep-blue suit jacket, fluid as a waterfall and so fine the silver embroidery shimmers as he moves. His polished, black boots are pulled over his dark pants, and the top of his curls hide beneath a small, perched hat of blue-and-black plaid that matches the trim of his cape perfectly. Somehow, he looks even better with clothes on. Fuck me.
