Free Love Struck by Melissa Marr Page B

he wasn’t supposed to exist.
    Maybe it was fun to believe in them when she was a little girl sharing her storybooks with Nonny, but Alana knew that her grandmother’s insistence that selchies were real was just another type of make-believe. Seals didn’t walk on land among humans; they didn’t slip out of their Other-Skins. They were just beautiful myths. She knew that—except she was looking at a selchie who was telling her to take his Other-Skin.
    Just like the one at the bonfire.
    She stood motionless as she tried to process the enormity of what had happened, what was happening right now.
    Two selchies. I met two freaking selchies. . .who tried to trap me.
    And in that instant, she understood: the fairy tales were all wrong. It wasn’t the mortals’ fault. Alana didn’t want to stay there looking at him, but she was no longer acting of her own volition.
    I am trapped.
    The fishermen in the old stories who’d taken the selchies’ pelts hadn’t been entrapping innocent fey creatures: they’d been entrapped by selchie women. Perhaps it was too hard for the fishermen to admit that they were the ones who got trapped, but Alana suddenly knew the truth that none of the stories had shared. A mortal could no more resist the pull of that pelt than the sea could refuse to obey the pull of the moon. Once she took the pelt, lifted it into her mortal arms, she was bound to him. She knew what he was, knew the trap was sprung, but she was no different from the mortals in the stories she’d grown up hearing. She could not resist. She took the pelt and ran, hoping she could foist it off on someone else before he found her, before Murrin followed her home—because he had to be Murrin, the one Dreadlocks was talking about, the one that the creepy selchie had told her was worse .
     
    Murrin watched her run, felt the irresistible need to follow her. She carried his skin with her: he had no choice but follow. It would have been better if she hadn’t run.
    With murmured epithets over her flight, he stepped out of the surf and made his way to the tiny caves the water had carved into the sandstone. Inside, he had his shore-clothes: woven sandals, well-worn jeans, a few shirts, and a timepiece. When his brother, Veikko, had gone ashore earlier, he’d borrowed the soft shirt Murrin had liked so. Instead, Murrin had to wear one that required fastening many small buttons. He hated buttons. Most of his family didn’t go shore-walking often enough that they needed many clothes, but Murrin had been on land often enough that the lack of a decent shirt was displeasing. He barely fastened the shirt, slipping a couple of the tiny disks into the equally tiny holes, and went to find her—the girl he’d chosen over the sea.
    He hadn’t meant for her to find his Other-Skin like this, not yet, not now. He’d intended to talk to her, but as he was coming out of the water, he’d seen her—here and not at the party. He watched her, trying to figure how to walk out of the surf without startling her, but then he felt it: the touch of her skin on his pelt. His pelt wasn’t to be there. It wasn’t to happen like this. He’d had a plan.
    A selchie couldn’t have both a mate and the water, so Murrin had waited until he found a girl intriguing enough to hold his attention. After living with the moods of the sea, it wasn’t an easy task to find a person worth losing the waves for.
    But I have.
    So he’d intended to ease her fears, to try to woo her instead of trapping her, but when she stepped on his Other-Skin, all of those choices had vanished. This was it: they were bound. Now, he was left doing the same thing his father had once done, trying to convince a mortal to trust him after he’d trapped her. The fact that he hadn’t put his pelt where she’d find it didn’t change anything. He was left trying to wait out her fears, to find a way to convince her to trust him, to hope for a way to persuade her to forgive him: all of the very same