“What was he or she?” Angela asked, and it was the question that cut to the root of the conversation.

“Mohserran was a selkie,” Lilou said. “I haven’t seen him for over a hundred years, maybe more, and he hasn’t been seen since the valley was flooded. Yes, he probably died there along with two other Kin, one of whom might even have been from the Time, but no one knows for sure. And I need to go, because there aren’t so many of us left that we can ignore three who are missing and might not be dead.”

* * *

Sammi left her aunt and Lilou talking outside the cabin and went for a walk into the woods. She liked going up to the waterfalls, and she loved pretending that she was the only human who had ever seen them. There was nothing to indicate that was not true. They were wild and untamed, and when she was there she felt in control of herself. Lately, it was one of the few places she did.

At the cabin with Angela and Lilou—and often when it was just her and Angela—she had to work harder and harder to control the pressures building inside. She smiled and joked, joined in the conversations, provided a light response to Angela’s worried, dark tone, and all the while her mind pulsed with constrained possibilities, and her senses thrummed with things she should not see, sense, smell.

She knew that Angela perceived these changes in her, and that the fairy’s interest in her had been the first warning sign. She also knew that her aunt respected her enough to let her discover her own self. That, or maybe she wished to deny her niece’s growing strangeness.

When her mom was alive, Sammi had been a normal little girl. When it was just her and her father, surviving together had taken most of her strength, distracting her from the unusual feelings she had, the strange thoughts that affected her dreams and sometimes followed into her waking hours.

Now that she was an orphan, Sammi felt the full gravity of that secret she kept inside drawing her in. Being struck by the fairy’s lightning had awoken it. Being touched by Grace, looking into her eyes and seeing a reflection of her own, had allowed it release.

Sometimes the pressure needed venting. That was why she liked walking in the woods on her own, and at the waterfalls she felt secluded enough to let herself go.

Today the pressures were greater than ever. Lilou’s presence often brought them on, because she knew more about Sammi than Angela. The nymph had never been overt about it, but on those few occasions she had visited them in the cabin Sammi had caught Lilou glancing at her with a strange look in her eyes. It might have been curiosity, and sometimes it might have been fear.