Read Chapter 32: The Sea Mother's Apparition

The dream began in the sea. Not the grey Hebridean water Isla knew, but something warmer, greener, shot through with shafts of pale light that swayed like music made visible. She floated, heavy-limbed and slow, her hair fanning out around her face like kelp.

A figure swam toward her. Selkie—she knew it before she saw the sealskin trailing from one hand, or the dark eyes that held Tam’s exact shape but older, sadder, worn thin by decades of grief. The woman stopped an arm’s length away, treading water with effortless grace, and looked at Isla’s belly with an expression that made Isla’s blood go cold.

“You carry him,” the woman said. Her voice came through the water clear as a bell, though her lips barely moved. “My son’s child.”

“Tam’s,” Isla agreed. The word came out in a stream of bubbles.

The selkie woman shook her head slowly. “Not if you make him human.”

Isla’s heart lurched. The water around them seemed to thicken, pressing in on her ribs. “The pendant—it rewrites the selkie genes. It should—”

“It will kill what grows inside you.” The woman’s hand moved to Isla’s belly, hovering a finger’s width from the skin. “The spell that binds our blood is older than their machines. It cannot be rewritten. It can only be cut away or fed. If Tam becomes human, the child will be born still. The tide-chain will take it instead of him.”

Isla’s lungs seized. She tried to speak, but water rushed in, cold and brutal, filling her throat.

The selkie woman caught her chin with cold fingertips. “There is another way. If Tam stays what he is—embraces it fully—he can return to the sea and change the child within you. Carry it through the deep water, let the old magic wash it clean. The child will be born human. Free. No deadline. No tide-chain. No hunger for the sea that will tear it apart from the inside.”

The grip on her chin tightened. The green light around them began to fade, dimming like the last glow of a dying fire.

“But he must go before the storm breaks the tide,” the woman said. “Before the lowest water, or it will be too late for both of them.”

Isla woke gasping, salt on her lips. The bed beside her was empty, the sheets cold. Rain hammered the window in sheets, and beyond it, the sea roared like a living thing trying to break in.

She found Tam in the kitchen, bare-chested, staring at the storm through the glass. Mrs. Kincaid sat at the table with a cup of tea she hadn’t touched. Both turned when Isla entered.

“You dreamed,” Mrs. Kincaid said. Not a question.

Isla’s throat was raw, as if she’d actually swallowed seawater. She wrapped her arms around her middle. “Your mother. She came to me.”

Tam’s face went pale beneath his tan. “What did she say?”

Isla told them. The words came out flat, clinical—her researcher’s voice, the one she used when delivering bad news about pup mortality rates or failing colonies. It was the only way she could get through it without breaking. When she finished, the kitchen was silent except for the rain.

Mrs. Kincaid set down her cup with a soft click. “She’s telling the truth.”

“How do you know?” Isla demanded. Her voice cracked. “You’ve never even met her.”

“I’ve read enough,” Mrs. Kincaid said. “The diaries your father left behind. The letters I found in Cleary’s briefcase. The selkie line demands a sacrifice—it always has. That’s the secret no one wants to speak aloud.” She looked at Tam, and her eyes were wet. “Every seventh year, the tide takes one of them. Your father went looking for your mother and the sea kept them both. Now it wants you, or it will take what you’ve made.”

Isla’s hands flew to her stomach. “No. There has to be another way. The pendant was designed by my father—he wouldn’t have left us a tool that kills babies.”

“Your father didn’t know you were pregnant,” Tam said quietly. His voice was rough, scraped clean of all its usual warmth. “He built the pendant to save a man from drowning. Not to save a child from being born wrong.”

The word hung in the air between them. Wrong. Isla’s vision blurred.

Mrs. Kincaid rose and moved to the window, her silhouette sharp against the lightning that flickered beyond the glass. “The tide will be lowest in three hours. If we go now, we can still make the cave before the water turns.”

“I’m not going to the cave,” Tam said. “Not to find her. Not if the answer is what Isla just said.”

“You’re going to the cave to become what you are,” Mrs. Kincaid countered, turning to face him. “Not to be human. Not to hide. To be the thing the sea made you, and to carry your child through the dark and make it right. That’s the only way.”

Tam stared at his mother—his other mother, the one who had raised him and lied to him and loved him badly but truly. Something in his face shifted. Isla saw the moment he accepted it, and her chest split open.

“No,” she said. She crossed the kitchen and grabbed his arm. “Tam, don’t. We don’t know that dream was real. It could be stress, hormones, guilt—I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in prophetic dreams.”

“You’re a scientist who’s been carrying a selkie’s child for two months,” Tam said gently. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest, where his heart beat strong and fast beneath her palm. “You felt the second pulse. You knew something was different. And now you know what it is.”

Isla shook her head. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “If you go into the sea, you won’t come back. You’ll be like your father. Gone.”

Tam’s smile was small and sad. “I’ll be with my mother. And my child will be human—truly human. No deadline. No tide-chain. No curse.”

“I don’t want a human child,” Isla choked out. “I want you. I want our life. The cottage, the seals, the pub on Friday nights. I want you to grow old and grey and argue with me about the washing-up.”

Tam pulled her close. His chin rested on the top of her head as the rain lashed the windows. “And I want you to live,” he said. “Both of you. If that means I have to go, then I go.”

Mrs. Kincaid was crying silently. She turned away, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth.

Isla breathed in the smell of him—salt and earth and the faint wildness that had drawn her in from the first moment she’d pulled him from the surf. She knew, with a bone-deep certainty that had nothing to do with science, that the dream was real. And she knew what Tam was going to do.

But that didn’t make it easier to let go.