A - Immortal Sea

crook of her elbow, she yanked, tugged, rattled the door in the frame.

It didn‟t budge.

The cat‟s cries pierced her eardrums. Coughing, she abandoned the door and stumbled toward the dining room. Her eyes

stung with smoke. A chair loomed in her path. Pain cracked across her shins. She shoved it aside, lurched forward on her

knees, still cradling the protesting Tigger against her stomach.

A curtain of fire sprang up like a wall, blocking her escape. Heat blasted her, nearly singeing her hair. She cried out in

terror. Which way? Forward or back? The door? Stuck. Or the fire?

The back door burst open. The fire howled and flung itself at the draft.

A cold, wet blast of air struck back.

Morgan.

Relief swept over her. He filled the doorway, black as a thundercloud, bringing the storm in with him. Rain drove into the

room, slashing, silver. The air trembled with fog and fury as energies collided.

Trembling, she stared as power flashed around him.

“Gau!” he shouted. “I cast you out!”

The fire roared, curled, retreated. In the door to the dining room, the curtain of flame tore like a veil, disappeared in a

shower of diamond drops.

A gust scattered the choking fumes.

The fire on the stove muttered, spat, and died.

Tigger cowered, mute, in her arms.

Morgan stood in the dissipating smoke like a soldier on a battlefield. Liz could feel the energy pumping through his blood

and pouring off his skin. His gold-rimmed eyes blazed.

Striding across the kitchen floor, he hauled her to her feet and yanked her against his iron body. “Are you all right?”

“I . . .” Her lungs weren‟t working properly. Neither was her brain. “Fine,” she managed before his mouth crushed hers.

His kiss was fierce and needy. Hot. His mouth claimed and conquered hers. She clung to him with one arm, her short nails

digging into his muscled shoulder, battered by a storm of sensation, a tempest of relief and desire and need. She couldn‟t get

her breath or her balance. He swept away her control.

She gave herself up to his kiss, grateful simply to touch, taste, be.

The kitten squirmed and clawed between them.

“Ouch.”

With one hand, he plucked the kitten from between them and dropped it on the ground. He gripped her hips to pull her

more firmly against him and then stopped, his mouth compressing in apparent displeasure.

Her heartbeat thundered. Her head hazed with lust. “What?”

He took her arm and turned it over, exposing the long, thin lines of red cat scratches against her pale skin, her bleeding

palm. “You are hurt.”

“It‟s nothing. Thank God you showed up.” She pulled her arm back. “Why did you show up?”

“You needed me,” he said, so simply her heart stuttered.

He didn‟t mean it the way it sounded, she told herself.

“I did,” she said. “I‟ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life, but . . .”

The kitten edged closer to the door, quivering. Morgan snapped a word Liz didn‟t recognize and Tigger ran back under the

table.

Liz regarded the open door, her mind working now, turning, churning. “How did you get in?”

He raised his brows. “In the usual way.”

“The door was locked. Not locked,” she corrected herself. “Jammed.”

“No. Gau used your fears to hold you captive.”

“Excuse me?”

“It was an illusion,” Morgan explained. “Like the fire at the other door. Demons are masters of such deception.”

Fire. Demons. In her house.

She drew an unsteady breath. “I think,” she said carefully, “I need to sit down.”

Before her knees gave out.

He righted the overturned chair with one hand. She sat, the cat scratches throbbing on her arm. The broken tea mug rolled

at her feet. Piles of chemical foam dripped from the stove. Rain puddled on the floor. The kitchen curtains were limp, damp,

and dirty, and wet paper napkins had been blown around the room. The storm had been no illusion. But there were remarkably

few signs of fire: a blackened towel, a scorched kettle, a smudge of soot on the wall. A breeze blew through the open door,

clean and smelling of salt.

She shivered. “You‟re saying this wasn‟t a regular fire.”

“It was a fire,” Morgan said. “Fire is the demons‟ element.”

“I was making tea. It‟s an old house. Maybe a gas leak . . .” He met her eyes, and her voice died. Okay, she didn‟t believe

the gas leak theory either.

She picked up Tigger, stroking his vibrating little body for comfort.

“The flames provided the medium,” Morgan said. “But Gau should not have been able to manifest so completely.”

She felt ignorant. Helpless. “Who is Gau?”

His eyes, black and gold and guarded, met hers. “An old acquaintance.”

“A demon.”

“Yes.”

“An enemy?”

“He has made himself so.”

Fear sharpened her voice. “You know, you could stop with the ominous, cryptic statements. We‟re talking about my life

here. My children‟s safety. I need to know what‟s going on.”

He inclined his head. “You are right. I am not used to confiding in another.” His smile showed the edge of his teeth. “I hunt

alone.”

She looked at his teeth and his eyes and was suddenly reminded of something she would prefer to forget. He was not

human.

Inside her something quivered and froze like a rabbit spying a hawk, a flutter of purely animal panic. For a moment the

impossibility of what he was overcame even the improbability of what he was saying.

She bit down on her lip— This was Morgan , she told herself firmly—and the fear passed. “Well, you‟re not alone now.

You‟ve got Zack to think about.” And me, she thought. And Em. “If we‟re in danger, I need to know.”

Morgan hesitated. Debating what to tell her? Or deciding what to leave out? “I am the leader of the finfolk. If I ally with

Hell, if my people side with the children of fire against the selkie and humankind, Gau has offered me rulership over the sea.”

“So he‟s angry because you said no.”

He went still, that quality beyond stillness that reminded her again he was something more or other than human. “You

sound very certain of my answer.”

“No one who knows you could think you are a traitor.”

His gaze rested on her, dark and unreadable. “Not everyone shares your confidence in my loyalties.”

“You gave my daughter a kitten. You told me about our son.” You made love to me as if I mattered to you. “You saved my

house and probably my life. That earns you a certain amount of trust.”

“You give me too much credit. You were in danger because of me. I could hardly do otherwise.”

He would see it that way, she thought. Whatever Morgan was, whatever he had done, he had his own spare, warrior‟s code.

She frowned. “I still don‟t understand why Gau attacked me. Does he want revenge?”

“He wants my support.”

“Killing me won‟t accomplish that.”

“Threatening you might. He sees you as a weakness to be exploited.”

She held her breath. “And how do you see us?”

“I have no weaknesses.”

She struggled to hide her disappointment. “Then we have no value as hostages.”

“Elizabeth.”

She looked up and met his gaze. The look in his eyes was as warm, as fierce, as intimate as a kiss. Her blood began to

pound.