Bunny nodded, but I wouldn’t blame her if she thought I was a flaming nutcase. I definitely sounded like one.
Bunny, however, still had more questions.
“You’re wearing a wedding band,” she said, gesturing toward the circle of Welsh gold I wore on my middle finger. “Are you and my son married?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a family ring.”
“So why aren’t you and my son married?”
Luke had asked me to marry him so many times that I had lost count before the end of my first trimester, but I said nothing to Bunny. It seemed the safest option.
And, to be honest, she scared me!
Bunny, however, was undeterred. “I raised my son to take responsibility for his actions.”
“And he has,” I shot back. So much for the safest option. “He’s every bit as excited about the baby as I am.” In some ways, maybe even more excited since he knew how precious a child’s life was. “I definitely think you should talk to him about this.”
“You bet I will,” Bunny said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what you have to say. After all, you’re the one carrying my granddaughter.”
The baby answered with a powerful kick. I reached for Bunny’s hand and placed it back against the spot. “I think she wants to offer an opinion,” I said as another kick made us both laugh out loud. Strange how natural it felt to share this moment with her.
“A true MacKenzie woman,” Bunny said, her eyes tearing up again. “Opinionated and strong.”
“Same thing can be said of a Hobbs woman.”
“I have no doubt.” She patted my belly then leaned back against the sofa cushions. “So do you love my son?”
She said it the same way a knitter would say, “Do you love cashmere?” Clearly there was only one right answer.
“I love him very much.”
“Does he love you?”
“Yes.” I doubted many things about humans and their world but Luke’s love wasn’t one of them.
“So what’s the problem?”
“There is no problem. Right now we’re concentrating on the baby.”
“A baby who deserves two parents.”
“She has two parents.”
“I mean a real family.”
“We
are
a real family.”
“Not in the eyes of God or Vermont.”
She didn’t add “or the MacKenzies,” but I heard the words loud and clear.
“I disagree, Bunny.”
She gave me a long, measuring look that had me praying the protective charm around Sugar Maple could keep me safe from wannabe mothers-in-law. “In our family we marry first and have children second.”
“We didn’t plan it this way, Bunny. The pregnancy was a happy surprise for both of us.”
“So you do plan to marry later on.”
“I didn’t say that.” In fact, I wished I hadn’t said anything at all. “You really should talk to Luke about this.”
“You’re right,” she said with a nod of her carefully coiffed head. “I need to talk to Luke.”
She whipped out her iPhone and pressed the Prodigal Son speed-dial button while I prayed for an attack of Braxton-Hicks contractions.
Poor Luke. He wouldn’t know what hit him.
LUKE—SHADOW BEACH, SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE
The next time a six-foot, six-inch, two-hundred-twenty-pound selkie asked me to drive him to the ocean so he could start his winter retreat I’d say no.
Chloe tried to tell me I might be in over my pay grade, but I liked Lorcan Meany, and after all that his wife Janice had done for us in Salem, I figured I owed them one. So when the guy asked me for a lift I figured how tough could it be.
Like a lot of things in life, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
I’d stand there on the shore and watch as Lorcan walked into the waves then disappeared beneath the swells. Then I’d gather up his clothes, his wallet, his iPod, and his battered copy of
On the Road
and be home with Chloe in time for Thanksgiving leftovers.
The first clue that I was in for a wild ride came when I swung by the Meany house to pick him up. He was waiting in the driveway with a body bag and three giant coolers at his feet.
“Should I be worried?” I asked. “I’m your friend but don’t forget I’m also the chief of police.”
I’d worked homicide in Boston before moving up to Sugar Maple. Body bags and coolers weren’t usually a good sign.
He shot me the kind of look I usually got when I told a New Yorker I was a Pats fan. “It’s my pelt.”
“Your pelt?” I sounded like English was my third language.
“Sealskin,” he said. “What did you think, I grew a new one every year?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That actually is what I thought.”
“Without the pelt, I couldn’t go back to the sea.”
“And that’s a big deal?”
“If I didn’t go back, I’d be dead by Christmas.” Normally he took his annual retreat at Snow Lake, submerging himself beneath the ice for two long, safe winter months. But every five years he needed to return to the ocean or face extinction.
I stared at him. “You’re shitting me.”
“Chloe didn’t fill you in?”
“She tried, but I told her I had a handle on it.”
I was wrong. So the body bag held a dark, gleaming sealskin that he would wear into the sea. My imagination conjured up some kind of zip-up-the-front coat that he could slip on and off at will, but I wasn’t even close to reality.
And that was just the beginning.
“Holy crap,” I said when he flipped open the cooler a half hour later. “Smells like dead fish.”
Some people bring Cheez Doodles and doughnuts to snack on. Lorcan Meany brought trout. I knew the guy liked fish—nobody grilled fresh trout the way Lorcan did—but there wasn’t a grill in sight. The guy was downing the frozen trout ice chunks and all, tearing the heads off then swallowing the damn things tail end first.
“Fish-loading,” he said between mouthfuls. “Sometimes I go a week before finding food when I first go back. Gotta be prepared.”
By the time he started on the third cooler he was making weird snuffling noises and snorting fish bones onto the dashboard.
“C’mon, man!” I protested as fish guts flew past my nose. “Gimme a break.” I’d spent quality time with corpses that smelled better. I buzzed down the window and stuck my head out in an attempt to keep from puking up my breakfast.
The closer we got to the ocean, the weirder it got inside the Jeep. Lorcan polished off the last of the trout, then seemed to drop into something close to a food coma. The capacity for human speech seemed to have been supplanted with random squeaks and periodic gasps for air.
When he poured two sport bottles of Poland Spring over his head, I considered tossing him the keys and hitchhiking back to Vermont, but he’d probably drive my Jeep into the ocean.
My cell rang and I let it flip over to voice mail. No way was I taking a call from my mother with seal boy next to me, barking his ass off. Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what she was calling about. This was the third year I’d been AWOL at the Thanksgiving table. That alone was enough to merit at least two calls.
Chloe had been pushing me to tell the extended MacKenzie clan about the baby, but so far I’d resisted her best arguments. They’d swarm all over us like picnic ants, darting into every nook and cranny of our lives. Chloe’s magick had been haywire lately. All we needed was for her to literally nail Great-Aunt Brigid’s butt to the wall and all hell would break loose.
Besides, what if the baby wasn’t exactly human? I’d spent a few sleepless, whiskey-fueled nights mulling over that question. I mean, I was sitting next to a guy who was about to spend the winter in a seal suit. Nothing seemed impossible to me anymore. Waiting until the baby was here in this world to introduce her to the human side of her family seemed the wise way to go.
The phone rang again. I ignored it again. Whoever came up with the idea of personalized ringtones must’ve had a mother like mine.
The ringing stopped, but that didn’t mean my mother had given up. For all I knew she was on the phone with Chloe right now, detailing chapter and verse of my failings as a son. So far Chloe had gone along with my decision to keep her pregnancy our secret, but with the holiday season under way and her third-trimester emotions running high, there was the very real possibility she might blurt out the news the second my mother said, “How are you?”
But I’d deal with that later. Right now I had a selkie to deliver.
The last five miles were tough going. Lorcan ran out of trout and stared at me with big, sad brown eyes until I stopped at a Long John Silver’s for a bucket of fish and chips. He’d given me a detailed map before we started and I followed it off-road until we reached the secluded beach that was our ultimate destination.
“Okay, bud,” I said as I climbed out of the truck. “Let’s get this thing rolling.”
The agitation that had marked the trip down here vanished as a sense of peace seemed to encircle Lorcan. Even I could see he was changing right before my eyes. I unlatched the back of my truck, then he reached in and unzipped the body bag.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a couple of bad moments when I got a good look at his pelt. I’d grown up on Disney’s fairy tales and this made the murder of Bambi’s mother a walk in the park. The pelt wasn’t exactly coat-ready. It was big, hot, moist, almost breathing with life. It stank from fish and brine and something else. Something my blood recognized but my brain refused to process. The head was sleek, the nose long and whiskered. The teeth were marbled brown and yellow, the incisors sharp and angled for business.
This was Lorcan Meany, same as the human form I’d come to call friend.
He donned the pelt, letting it settle over his form like exactly what it was: a second skin. So far it was a lot like old adventure movies where the hunter shielded his human essence from his prey by donning a bear skin and slipping through the woods unnoticed.
And then it got really weird.
He dropped to his knees a few feet from the water’s edge and toppled over on his right side just as Chloe’s ringtone erupted from my jacket pocket.
No way was I letting that call roll over to voice mail.
I pressed ON as I ran toward Lorcan’s rigid form.
“You okay?” I barked into the phone.
“Fine, but—”
“Contractions?”
“No, but, Luke—”
Lorcan was white, pasty, sweating profusely beneath the heavy skin. “He’s flopping around on the sand. Is that normal?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never—”
“Shit, he’s having trouble breathing. Do selkies need air or water? CPR? I need help here.”
“Luke, listen to me. Your—”
“I’ll call you back.”
The guy was going down for the count. Or at least I thought he was. Nothing in my training had prepared me for this. It occurred to me that maybe he needed oxygen, the kind you found in water. I bent down to roll him toward the surf, but he was five hundred pounds of pure muscle and I couldn’t budge him even an inch. The lines between human and seal were blurring, Lorcan’s features melting into the lines of the pelt. Was this the way it was supposed to go down or did he need help?
Chloe’s ringtone sounded again. “You’re gonna have to hold, Chloe. I’ve got a situation here.”
“That makes two of us, Luke William Aloysius MacKenzie,” a familiar voice stated, “because you’ve got yourself a situation here, too.”
What the hell had I done to piss off the gods?
“Ma, I’ve got to go.” A dozen sea lions bounded onto shore, barking loudly as they thumped their way toward Lorcan. One of the sea lions was the size of a pickup truck. His muzzle was dark gray, his whiskers white. He stood back from the others as they circled Lorcan’s prone form and watched me with huge brown eyes that seemed to take my measure.
“Where are you?” my mother demanded. “What’s all that barking?”
“This isn’t a good time, Ma.” I was being herded toward the water by two sea lions who seemed to think I was a long-lost cousin. “I’ll call you back.”
“I find out you’re about to be a father again and you’re going to hang up on me? I don’t think—”
“Ma, seriously, this isn’t a good time. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”
“I’ve heard that story before, mister. You owe your father and me an explanation and I want—”
“You’re breaking up, Ma. Can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday. Your sister Meghan pulls that nonsense, so don’t you start. You’re just lucky I have to drive Fran back home or I’d take Chloe up on her offer and spend the night.”
Elspeth our bossy houseguest and my mother under the same roof. What the hell was Chloe thinking?