“No!” she cried. “You listen to me! You hurt him, and I won’t let you do it again!”
She saw her father’s finger tighten on the gun. Whatever it was he was doing to Linc, he wasn’t going to stop. The gun fired with a dull shot. She screamed, and Linc jerked, but not because he’d been hurt. Floating on top of the water was a dart, its yellow-feathered end sinking into the marsh. She heard the sound again, felt a hot, lancing pain in her side and cried out. The water seemed to get closer and closer, but the ocean was far-off, the crashing waves muted. She heard another sound, a scream and a gurgle, like someone clearing their throat, and then she was submerged. It was quiet beneath the water. She heard nothing but her heartbeat.
Edie!
Suddenly, she was shaken and slapped. Everything was loud. The entire world exploded. She felt herself lifted and a blanket being wrapped around her shoulders.
“Linc?” Her voice was hoarse, and she couldn’t speak above a whisper.
“You’re okay, Edythe. Everything’s going to be okay.”
She felt heat on her face. She heard sirens and rushing water. It was no longer night, or was it? There were the stars, but… She covered her face. Her home was engulfed in flames. She heard a crash and watched the ceiling fall, the structure collapsing like a house of cards. “My mom,” she whispered.
“We’re taking you to the hospital, Edythe. It’ll be okay.”
Linc? She asked the question in her mind, but the space where he was, where he would answer and nudge her, was empty.
She was lifted and loaded onto an ambulance. Someone closed the bay doors, but she could still see the orange flames through the windows. “My dad?”
The EMT looked at her with sad eyes before fixing a mask over her face.
Edythe searched inside her head one more time. Linc? He was gone.
Chapter Two
Present Day
In Linc’s world, when an Aegean was separated from his mate, they went mad. It began slowly, insidiously. It crept into their brain and tainted their thoughts so gradually the male didn’t realize he was crazed until he found his teeth buried in the neck of a human, dragging him beneath the water.
But Linc knew. He knew every day he was away from Edythe left him a little bit more unhinged, a bit more unstable. He’d lasted longer than any of them, fifteen years without his mate. It was the reason males were kept away from females for so long. Should they find each other before they were mature, the results were disastrous. It was also the reason why they kept away from humans. Rarely had an Aegean found their mate in the human world. Those pairings were the stuff of legends, but Linc always thought it was too much work. Living between worlds, struggling to understand their human mate...
Then he’d met Edythe, and he hadn’t cared. He was horrified at first. Not only was she human, but he’d found her when she was so young.
In the next moment, it hadn’t mattered.
If this was the person gifted to him by the gods, then he was blessed. He hadn’t been very old himself, just out of adolescence, but full of his own self-importance. He believed himself smarter and stronger than humans, and so he had no qualms approaching her. He walked out of the ocean, scales disappearing into his skin. She squatted next to a tide pool, her hands gripping her knees as she stared intently into the water.
She’d looked up in annoyance when the water dripped down his face and plunked into the pool, rippling the water and obscuring what was beneath the surface.
“Do you mind?” she asked with all the disdain of a young girl.
And Linc was lost. His heart had filled up with love and annoyance and disbelief. This little human, with the narrowed eyes and sunburned nose, was his. When he didn’t say anything, she rolled her eyes and went back to examining the pool.
She ignored him, entirely focused on the creatures. He sat next to her, trying to see what captured her attention so completely.
“It’s a sea anemone,” she informed him, and he started. He thought the question, and she heard him.
“Of course I hear you, weirdo. You’re talking in my ear.”
Any doubt he had of their connection disappeared.
“Edythe!”
The sound of a human male shouting at her made Linc cover himself in his scales, readying for a fight.
“It’s just my dad.”
He absorbed the scales quickly, and it wasn’t until later when he was captured that he realized it had been too late. Edythe’s father had seen them, and while another human may have discounted what he saw as a trick of the sun or heatstroke, Edythe’s father, a marine biologist, wanted to examine. He wanted proof of what he saw, he wanted evidence to show the world.