by BlueJean
Author’s Note: This new story is a sequel to both The Beekeeper’s Daughters and Selkie Days. If you haven’t already, I’d advise you to read those first, as this new installment won’t make much sense without the context of those earlier works. They are both stand-alone stories, with some connective tissue, and can be read in either order. That said, this prologue picks up a few months after the end of Selkie Days and is a direct continuation of that story, so reading The Beekeeper’s Daughters first, then Selkie Days, would probably be a good way to go.
~Dramatis Personae~
In the Anglo-Welsh border village of Derwold:
Georgia Newton ~ Mother of Millie and Freya. Lover of Sadie Laine. Moved to the village of Derwold after her husband died. Very grounded, and distrustful of magic. She is the eponymous beekeeper of the title.
Freya Newton ~ Oldest daughter of Georgia. A natural cynic who struggles with insecurities. She likes to spend time in the greenhouse with her herbs.
Millie Newton ~ Youngest daughter of Georgia and witch’s apprentice. Harbours magical powers. Loves to go on adventures. Just on the right side of precocious.
Sadie Laine ~ Schoolteacher and Georgia’s lover, secretly a witch. Came to Derwold to send her restless, troublesome ancestor Isabel on to the afterlife and ended up staying. Bubbly, kooky, but has grit where it counts.
Elsa Hart ~ Lady of the Manor and Simon’s Derwold’s wife. A refined woman of impeccable taste.
Simon Derwold ~ Ancestral heir to the Derwold estate. His family has a troubled past.
Astris ~ An ancient forest nymph known as a dryad. Has served as Derwold’s protector for many centuries. She speaks of Neanderthals, the Picts, and the Roman invasion of Britain as if she has witnessed these things firsthand.
Sally Jeffries ~ Runs the local post office. Wicked sense of humour. Strange and unusual things happen when she’s had a few drinks.
Bernard the Druid ~ Bumbling, pompous druid. Has made Derwold his temporary home.
Roy Sutton ~ Georgia and Sadie’s camp friend. Loves knitting.
Vivaan Dinesh ~ Derwold’s resident doctor. One of the few people who know of Sadie’s dual life.
Billy Buckham ~ A grumpy black cat and Sadie’s animal familiar. Does not suffer fools gladly.
Bee ~ Newton family dog. Has a very waggy tail.
Mr. Dalliard (deceased) ~ An elderly gentleman and friend to Sadie and the Newtons. Millie was particularly fond of him. As a young boy he was seduced by Isabel and nearly killed. Astris healed him, inadvertently extending his lifespan in the process. Last seen possessing the body of a majestic stag in order to protect Georgia and her girls. His spirit has since moved on.
Isabel (deceased) ~ Sadie’s ancestor. She was accused of witchcraft and killed by hanging. Astris reached out to comfort her during her last moments, allowing Isabel to anchor her spirit to the great oak and leech off the dryad’s power. Hundreds of years later, Sadie managed to send her back to the great cycle.
In the Cornish coastal town of Morcant-On-Sea:
Hailey Ellis ~ A young journalist and budding writer. Has come back to Morcant to live with her uncle.
Derek ~ Fisherman and Hailey’s uncle. Loud, brash, enjoys the simple things in life.
Rita ~ Hailey’s aunt, and for a time, her lover. Also happens to be a selkie. Derek stole her sealskin and bound her to the land but she has since found her way back to the ocean.
Jack ~ One of Derek’s former crew and Hailey’s occasional lover. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but means well.
Madeline ~ Morcant’s glamorous doctor. Lost her husband to the sea many years before. An unrepentant sexual deviant.
Isla ~ Madeline’s teenage daughter. All adolescent hormones.
Mike ~ Hailey’s boss at the local newspaper.
Karnu ~ Reluctant leader of the Selkie.
Sully (deceased) ~ Lifelong fisherman and Derek’s former first mate. His smoking habit finally caught up with him.
***
Prologue
Amidst water lily fields, white and green
Grows a tree
And from the tree hang apples
Not for you to eat
Beneath the heaving sea
Where statues and pillars and stone altars
Rest for all these aching bones
To guide us far from energy
Mirth, birth, reverie
Nico “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)”
1
Morcant-On-Sea was dying a slow death.
The isolated peninsula was fast becoming a ghost town, most of the houses now serving as summer holiday homes for mainlanders wealthy enough to afford such luxuries. In the autumn and winter months they stood cold and empty.
The pub down on the harbour, The Mal De Mer, had closed its doors for the last time a year ago. Its windows were now boarded up, the slow crawl of decay creeping up its salt-encrusted walls.
The post office suffered a similar fate, but that at least had found new life as a convenience store, a much needed necessity for the few remaining locals rather than a sound business opportunity – there wasn’t much in the way of custom these days.
The bookshop had gone too – the little gothic bookshop that everyone swore blind never existed. It was a launderette, some claimed. No, it was one of those cobbler and key shops, others insisted. Most were adamant there had never been anything there in the first place, that there had only ever been three shops on that street, never four.
But Hailey still had the book, that old battered paperback with the title The Selkie. The book was hers. It had always been hers. The lady in the bookshop had said as much, and Hailey understood the immovable truth of the mysterious old woman’s words in a way she couldn’t quite explain.
If the harbour town was in the last throes of death, then its small fishing industry had already breathed its last. Hailey’s Uncle Derek had held on for as long as he could, suffering the indignity of watching his crew dwindle to nothing. Sully was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away; Odette returned to her native France, and then it was just Derek and Jack left. Then Jack threw in the towel to try his hand at painting and decorating. Now her uncle’s fishing trawler was the only vessel tied up in the harbour, its hold bare and dry.
To add insult to injury, the coastal town was collapsing under foot, the folly of building a settlement on what was effectively a cliff side now starkly apparent. Coastal erosion had plagued the length and breadth of Britain, but none more so than Morcant-On-Sea. When the houses higher up began to topple, the ones below would stand no chance.
When this became clear to residents savvy enough to go digging for the information, they quickly sold their properties at below-market rates before the insurance companies could get wind of it. Once the severity of the situation was blown wide open, the rest of the populace either abandoned their homes or took their chances in the harbour town.
2
Hailey returned to Morcant thinking everything would be as it always was, that somehow the small fishing town of her childhood would be frozen in time, ready to resume once she made her way back. Foolish nostalgia, she told herself. Nothing ever stays the same, no matter how much you want it to.
Except Jack. Jack hadn’t changed. A little older, yes, but certainly none the wiser. The brash, cocky boy of her childhood had given way to a kind, easy-going young man, one of those rare breed of human who seemed content to swim with the current, never questioning whatever life throws at them. He was safe, uncomplicated. And sometimes Hailey needed safe and uncomplicated.
He leaned across the bed and claimed her with an arm, his eyes still tight shut. She could smell the musk of his clean sweat, and the faint scent of day-old aftershave.
“Get up,” Hailey told him softly, stroking his thick blonde hair. “We both need to go to work.”
“Uh… what day is it?” Jack mumbled, still mostly asleep. “Thought it was Sunday.”
Hailey smiled at him. “Idiot.”
He was an idiot, and she liked him for it. It was both endearing and unthreatening – her very own handsome fool. But it wasn’t quite love. He was twenty-six; she’d be nineteen soon. The two of them offered each other as much as they had to give. Maybe that was good enough in a dying town.
But her heart lay elsewhere.
3
When Rita called to Hailey, she was compelled to answer, though there were times when she resisted the insistent tug. When she did go down to meet her aunt (Rita had been Hailey’s human aunt for so much of her life it was impossible to think of her any other way), it was hard to tell if it was of her own volition or Rita’s glamour at work. She considered telling her aunt to stop summoning her that way, but that would’ve been like telling someone to stop breathing. Rita didn’t do it by choice – it was just something she projected naturally, potent pheromones unique to the Selkie. It left Hailey wondering if it was truly love she felt, or something more akin to thralldom.
Regardless, it wasn’t the selkie she’d fallen in love with. It was her Aunt Rita. And Aunt Rita was lost.
Hailey made her way down to the beach and along the wide band of pale sand that traced the peninsula. She came to the ring of fossilised trees that had so fascinated her as a child. The prehistoric monument had been built by ancient hands, human and selkie alike. Rita told her it had been a gateway once, like other ancient monuments that dotted the country. Hailey didn’t know exactly what that meant, and Rita never seemed much inclined to elaborate on her musings.
She headed over to the rocks where a naked flame-haired figure sat gazing out at the ocean. Rita hadn’t aged a day since Hailey’s childhood – she suspected the passage of time hadn’t touched her aunt for many decades – but she had changed in other ways. A smattering of red-brown mottle adorned the selkie’s body, sprinkled across her temples and down the nape of her neck. Her ribs and thighs were similarly marked. Her skin was oily and sweet smelling.
The only reminder of who this creature had once been was the sea serpent tattooed down the length of her spine, a gift from her ‘friend’ Madeline.
Rita turned to Hailey and fixed her with emerald eyes – eyes that had once been brown. “Why do you fight it?” she asked, the strange lilt of her native tongue thick and alluring, its mellifluous timbre vaguely Icelandic. It’d been strange for Hailey to come back to Morcant and hear her aunt talking like that, her rough English accent all but vanished in the intervening years.
Hailey took a place next to her aunt. “I can make up my own mind whether I want to come or not.”
“You didn’t need to think about it when you were a child. You just followed your heart.”
“I’m not eleven anymore,” Hailey told her without much rancour. “And back then I didn’t realise what you were doing.”
Rita turned her attention back to the ocean with a faint smile. Hailey hated that smile. It didn’t belong to her aunt, the woman she’d loved with such intensity. “Something’s coming, Hailey. Something big. I think I will return to the cycle soon.”
More vague nonsense. It seemed her aunt was intent on speaking in riddles these days.
Hailey kissed her aunt on the mouth, then whispered the words that she wanted to scream. “Come back to me. Please.”
Rita wiped away her niece’s tears and smiled that imposter’s smile. “I’m here. Don’t you see me?”
Hailey wondered if this was how the friends and family of Alzheimer’s sufferers felt as they watched their beloved husband or wife or parent fading away, helpless to stop it happening. Those people were forced to accept the horrible truth of their situations – that their loved ones would never get better; never return to them. But like the people racked by that terrible disease, the old Rita still surfaced from time to time, and in some ways that made it worse. Hailey held fast to a thin hope that her Aunt Rita could be drawn fully out, that somehow she could still be set free. Sometimes hope can be a terrible limbo.
And there was another uncomfortable truth – that this flame-haired imposter was the real Rita. This was who she’d been before Derek had stolen her sealskin and bound her to the land. Hailey even had a vague memory when she was very small, of a quiet, almost confused woman her uncle had introduced as his wife. Had the loud, brash Aunt Rita she’d known and loved merely been a persona, a corrupted version of the selkie she had once been? Was she mourning someone who had never truly existed?
Rita’s sealskin lay behind her, draped across the rocks. It shimmered in the sun, seeming to pulsate with a life of its own. It shared a symbiotic relationship with its host. All those years ago Hailey had found the sealskin buried in a sea cave along the shore, hidden there for years. Separated from her aunt for so long, it had shrivelled and died, but Hailey had watched it miraculously regenerate in front of her eyes when selkie and skin were reunited.
What would happen if she stole her aunt’s sealskin, just as her uncle had done all those years ago? Would Aunt Rita return to her? Was that the only way to bring her back? It wasn’t the first time Hailey had considered doing such a terrible thing, and it shamed her. She pushed the thought away.
4
The office was quiet when Hailey wandered in later that morning. There were only three of them working on the local rag now, and Leonie was over on the mainland covering some football match. That left Hailey and head honcho Mike manning the fort, not that it was in much danger of being overrun any time soon.
Hailey was finishing up her article on local marine conservation efforts when Mike called her into his office. She sat down in the chair opposite his desk. She knew what was coming.
“Listen, Hailey, there’s no easy way to say this—”
“You’re firing me.”
Mike stared at her blank-eyed for a moment, then managed to compose himself. “Not firing, no – laying off.”
Hailey was pretty sure they were the same thing, but didn’t bother pointing it out.
After an awkward pause, Mike added, “The thing is, it’s last to join, first to go, and Leonie’s been here longer than you. I know it’s not fair, but… well, the money’s running out. I just can’t afford to keep you on much longer.”
“It’s okay.”
Mike pulled his glasses away to pinch the bridge of his nose. “It’s not okay. None of this is okay. It won’t be long before we have to shut down the whole paper.”
“Nothing much to report in a ghost town, I suppose.”
“Yeah. But listen, this was only ever a stop gap for you, right? Morcant’s been a good place to cut your teeth, learn the tricks of the trade, but the big bucks are out there on the mainland. You would’ve left eventually.”
Hailey didn’t know if that was true or not. She’d seen this place as a new life, or perhaps the reclaiming of an old one. Maybe not as a journalist – Mike was right about that. Even with a healthy populace, The Morcant Echo had never exactly been The Daily Mail. But as a published novelist writing her magnum opus from her beloved Cornish fishing town? She’d fallen in love with the idea, even if it was jumping the gun somewhat on the novel front. Now, though? She wasn’t sure. Morcant-On-Sea was not the hub of hustle bustle it’d once been. The town reeked of decay.
“Well,” Mike continued, “you don’t need to decide what you want to do right away. I can keep you on for a few more months. I just wanted to be upfront with you. I owe you that, at least.”
“I appreciate it.”
“How’s that novel coming along?”
Her first book was finished. She’d been pushing it around various publishing houses, but hadn’t had any takers yet. In the meantime, she’d begun work on a second, and told Mike as much.
“It’ll get picked up sooner or later, I’m sure of it,” he said, and Hailey wondered if he was just telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.
She had no idea if the book was good or not. Sometimes it seemed like literary genius to her; on other days, the scribblings of a child. Either way, she wasn’t hugely concerned. The consensus seemed to be that no writer should be trying to get published before they had an ample sum of years and life experiences under their belt. She was only eighteen. An exceptionally mature eighteen, with an intellect beyond her years, but eighteen nonetheless.
“Then I can tell everyone the famous novelist Hailey Ellis used to work for me,” Mike was saying.
Hailey found herself laughing at the notion. “Wouldn’t that be a splendid thing?”
“Absolutely.”
5
She found Uncle Derek down by the harbour. The tide had slowly inched away, exposing a flat expanse of muddy sand. He was harvesting cockles under the tangerine sky of early evening, inspecting each excavated crustacean before dropping them into a plastic carrier bag, occasionally casting one aside. There was something mundanely tragic about the scene, and Hailey’s heart broke every time she saw him out here. He’d been a proud fisherman once, with his own trawler and crew. Now he was reduced to this.
But Hailey knew the real reason he came out here.
Rita wouldn’t show herself to him. She was wary, Hailey guessed. And who could blame her after what he’d done? Stolen her sealskin and hidden it away for years, leaving her unable to return to the ocean. She had loved him, for sure – that was her nature – but doesn’t a domestic abuse victim still love their abuser to some extent, enough to keep forgiving them? It was an ugly parallel, and one that was hard to attribute to her uncle, but Hailey kept coming back to it all the same.
But now Rita was free of her captivity, and as far as she was concerned, it was once bitten, twice shy. Hailey told her uncle to let it go, but he wouldn’t. Or couldn’t.
“Found any good ones?” she shouted across to him from the harbour wall. Not that she knew what constituted a good cockle.
“They’re scrawny little fuckers,” her uncle hollered back. “Seem to get smaller every year. They was the size of dinner plates when I was a lad.”
“Don’t exaggerate!”
“I ain’t, girl!” Derek protested, but his grin said otherwise.
“Are they really worth the trouble? Not exactly a living, is it?”
“It ain’t about the money,” Derek said after some consideration. “It’s about the mud between yer toes, and the salt air in yer lungs. And watchin’ the sun sink into the sea.”
“Uh-huh.”
Hailey didn’t doubt the sincerity of his words, even if there was an ulterior motive behind them. They were spoken with too much earthy conviction to ever question their honesty.
“Come on,” Derek said. “Roll up them strides and give yer old uncle a hand.”
Hailey slipped her shoes off, rolled up her jeans, then waded out to where Uncle Derek waited with a spare plastic bag and a hearty smile. His beard was as full and lush as ever, but filaments of grey streaked through it now, and the lines on his face were beginning to mark the harsh passage of time.
They talked as they plucked cockles from the sand, and the conversation turned inevitably to a certain selkie.
“How is she?” Derek asked. He sounded good-natured enough, but Hailey couldn’t help notice the way he turned away from her when he spoke, as if his eyes might reveal the truth of it.
“She’s okay,” Hailey told him. “Not quite the Rita we knew, but… she’s happy, I think.”
“I’m glad.” He hooked his hands into the small of his back and arched into a stretch, a wince creasing his craggy face. “I can’t keep bein’ sorry, Hailey. It’s a dead end, you know? It don’t solve nothin’. I had to start puttin’ one foot in front of the other again.” He plucked another crustacean from the wet sand and turned it in his hands, regarding it sadly. “I just wish I could’ve explained things to her.”
“She’s not angry anymore,” Hailey offered. “I don’t think her kind dwell on things. She lives in the moment. Like an animal would, I suppose.”
“Aye. Best way to be, I reckon.”
“She asks after you.”
Derek scratched the back of his head awkwardly. “Bridge night up at the library tonight,” he said. “Female attendance has gone through the roof since I joined.”
Hailey rolled her eyes. “You’re so full of crap.”
He threw his head back and laughed that wonderful booming laugh. She didn’t hear it nearly often enough these days.
They plucked more cockles from the sand and watched the autumn sun disappear into the sea.
6
When Hailey entered the convenience store a short while later, she noticed Isla loitering in the shop’s meagre beauty department – a sparse two metres of shelf space devoted to deodorant, hair products and various other toiletries. The fourteen-year-old had her rucksack on her back, and was dressed in her school uniform. Hailey guessed she’d just gotten off the ferry from the mainland where she attended secondary school.
Hailey stood just out of sight and watched. Isla ran her hands through her shaved-at-the-sides pink bouffant, then cupped her chin in mock-concentration. Hmm… what to buy… what to buy… seemed to be what she was trying to convey, but from the way her eyes flickered furtively to left and right, Hailey strongly suspected that no money would be changing hands during this particular transaction.
And there it was – a jar of hair clay dropped into her open rucksack, closely followed by a can of antiperspirant.
Hailey approached from behind and tapped the teenager on her shoulder. “What’re you doing?”
Isla spun to face her, and Hailey saw the fight in her eyes. The fourteen-year-old deflated a little when she saw who was behind her. “Fuck! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“Put those things back before you get caught,” Hailey told her quietly.
“What’re you, my mum?”
“Put them back, Isla!”
“No!”
Sighing, Hailey held her basket up. “Drop them in there. And hurry up before someone sees us!”
Isla stared at her for a moment, then fished the stolen goods from her rucksack and dropped them into the basket. Hailey paid for both of their items – an old fashioned concept, she explained, but one that’s stood the test of time.
Outside the shop, Hailey handed over Isla’s ill-gotten goods. The teenager tilted her head to one side, squeezed her eyes to slits, then gave Hailey the sweetest of smiles. “Fank Yoo!”
“Save the cute act, devil spawn,” Hailey told her dryly. “I’m immune.”
Isla took Hailey’s hand, her eyes flashing suggestively. “Come home with me and I’ll prove you’re not.”
When Isla began leading her towards the beachfront property she shared with her mother, Hailey made no effort to stop her.
“What would your mum say if she found out you’d been shoplifting?”
Isla did an approximation of her mother, voice deepened to somewhere between Greta Garbo and Darth Vader, which, as it turns out, was a perfect description of Madeline.
“She’d say, ‘Isla, I’m veeery disappointed in you. I have a reputation to maintain, you know. And never mind that I used to make you stick your hand up my twat when you were a little girl. That doesn’t make me a fucking hypocrite at all, unruly child!”
Hailey tried hard not to laugh. “Okay, okay, point taken.”
“Why do you care what my dear mother thinks, anyway? You don’t even like her.”
“It’s not that I don’t like her, Isla.”
“You don’t, though.”
“All right, I don’t much. But I like you. I don’t want to see you flush your life down the toilet.”
Isla hooked her arm into Hailey’s. “Aww! So sweet!”
Madeline wasn’t home when Isla turned the key and ushered Hailey inside – she played bridge with Derek down at the library on Mondays and Thursdays. It still tickled Hailey to think of the two of them playing cards with the other, mostly elderly, residents of Morcant. They were also known to collaborate on the occasional jigsaw puzzle.
She had it on good authority (a certain pink-haired teenage informant) that Doctor Madeline had been in therapy since ‘The Selkie Incident’, but Hailey suspected her activities with Derek must have been a kind of therapy too, perhaps for both of them.
But no, Hailey didn’t like her. She couldn’t forgive the woman for what she’d done to Aunt Rita. If her uncle had been Rita’s jailor, then Madeline had been her tormentor, and that, to Hailey’s mind, was worse. Derek was family, and despite it all, loved Rita desperately, so Hailey found it easy to forgive him, but Doctor Madeline wasn’t getting off so easily.
Hailey didn’t think the doctor ever truly believed the story about Rita’s sealskin, not until the day Hailey retrieved it (mistakenly offering the skin to Madeline in the belief that she was the real selkie). Nevertheless, she had been forced to accept that the strange woman she was nursing back to health was not quite human – the x-rays and blood tests proved that, and Derek had all but confirmed it with his half-muddled sailor’s tales of Selkie, Merrow and Finfolk.
Aunt Rita pleaded with the doctor for help in the early days of her emancipation. Madeline could have opened the cage if she’d wanted to. Instead, she chose to poke and prod the creature inside, taking some perverse pleasure in corrupting the overwhelmed selkie, seducing her with sex and alcohol, and all the other trappings of humanity. That a woman would inflict such cruelty on another woman, regardless of species, somehow made it worse.
Isla corralled Hailey upstairs and into her room. The walls were plastered with posters of bands Hailey had never heard of. The fourteen-year-old switched on her stereo, and Amyl and the Sniffers blasted out of the speakers. Hailey winced and turned the volume down.
Isla undid her white school blouse button by button, taunting Hailey with her shrewd blue eyes. When the last button popped free she pulled the two halves open, then brought her hands up to cup a pair of small bare breasts, fingers scissoring back and forth across her perky nipples.
The grey plaid skirt was next, unclasped and pushed over her slim hips. She kicked it away, then fell back onto the bed with a breathless giggle. Lying there in white panties and socks, blouse slung open, her nose and ear studs glimmering like precious metal embedded in alabaster, the fourteen-year-old was the very embodiment of teen sex appeal.
Isla knew it too. “So what do you think, Hailey?” she said in a voice that sounded a little too much like her mother. “Are you still immune?”
Hailey paused a moment to take in the sight of the pink-haired nymph lolling on the bed. Slowly sinking to her knees, she tattooed kisses on each of Isla’s ankles in turn, then peppered her way up the girl’s smooth, honed calves.
When she reached the inner thighs, Isla propped herself up on her elbows and peered down at Hailey with a devilish smile. “Where do you think you’re going with that mouth?”
“Exactly where you want me to go,” Hailey told her.
“Not yet,” Isla said, then flipped herself round onto her hands and knees. “Pull my knickers down and slap my bum first.”
Hailey rolled her eyes. “Always with the spanking. Kinky little thing, aren’t you?”
She remembered spanking Isla for fun when the two of them were younger. As she recalled, Madeline had also been partial to warming her daughter’s bottom on occasion. Was it any surprise the teenager had developed such tendencies?
Hooking her fingers into the elastic of Isla’s knickers, Hailey drew them down until they reached the fourteen-year-old’s socks, then left them stretched around her ankles. Somehow that made the view even sexier.
Isla spread her knees as far as she was able, her pussy glistening with a musky dew. “I haven’t had a shower yet,” she said, peering back at Hailey with a grin. “Do I smell?”
“You smell gorgeous,” Hailey told her, breathing in the thick, tantalising scent.
“I got detention after school. The teacher was looking at her phone and not paying attention, so I spent nearly the whole hour masturbating. I’m always so fucking randy!”
“Nice to know you’re making good use of your time. Want me to eat you out now?”
Isla gave her head a hard shake. “Spank me first… or no pussy for you, Hailey Wailey!”
Drawing back a hand, Hailey whacked the teenager half-heartedly on the arse.
“Harder,” Isla demanded, so Hailey slapped her again, using more force this time. “Harder, I said!”
“I am.”
“You’re not! Make it hurt or fuck off!”
She should’ve given the teenager an earful for speaking to her like that, maybe walked out altogether. Instead, Hailey got to her feet and gave the little shit what she wanted, swinging her arm back and whacking her almost full force across one bum cheek, then the other. The loud crack echoed off the walls.
“That’s it, hit me!“ Isla cried. “You know you like it as much as I do!”
The schoolgirl pushed her bum back, inviting further punishment. Her arse was turning a cherry red, intensifying in colour as Hailey continued her relentless assault.
“You nasty lady!” Isla squealed in the bizarre high-pitched anime voice she was convinced everyone found endearing. “I’m telling Mooommmyyyyy!”
“Is this what you want, bad girl?” Hailey snarled. Then more words, each one accompanied by a slap. “Don’t. Ever. Let. Me. Catch. You. Stealing. Again!”
She found herself enjoying administering the beating more than she’d admit. Sometimes harsh truths reveal themselves in the bedroom.
“S-spank my pussy, too!” Isla blurted.
Hailey’s hand froze mid-swing. “Uh… what?”
“I’m gonna come soon! Spank my pussy! Hurry!”
Hailey slapped the teenager’s exposed mound. It landed with a dull thwack.
“Harder, Hailey! Make it sting!”
Hailey whipped her hand against Isla’s pussy, this time making contact with the tips of her fingers instead of the palm. When she caught it at just the right angle, a satisfying snap rang out. It’s just like skimming stones across a pond, she mused. It takes a while to get a good one, but when you do, oh how it flies!
Snap!
“Yes!” Isla screeched.
Hailey smacked her again and again, the teenager’s wetness only increasing the friction of skin on skin.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
Isla broke out into a series of violent shudders, her back arching spasmodically. She collapsed onto the bed and writhed against the sheets, her moans muffled by a pillow. The stereo oozed out Iggy Pop’s “Funtime.”
Finally, Isla rolled onto her back and blew the fluffy pink fringe from her eyes. She slipped the half-removed panties all the way off, and when she opened her legs, her sex was red, swollen, and very wet. “Maybe you should come kiss it better now,” she cooed in butter-wouldn’t-melt tones.
Once more, Hailey folded to her knees. A hand upon each of Isla’s smooth inner thighs, she bent to lap at the tart confection before her. Was there anything more exquisitely erotic than the taste of a young adolescent girl, the taste of a girl who’s spent most of the day edging herself under a desk when she should’ve been studying? Hailey flicked her tongue across the twitching teenager’s clit, coaxing several more smaller climaxes from her.
“Why do you still have your clothes on?“ a breathless Isla wondered.
Hailey made short work in remedying that. Now both naked and sprawled across the bed, Isla climbed over her friend until the two of them were mouth to pussy. When Hailey closed her lips around Isla’s clit, the teenager jerked away with a gasp.
“Too sensitive! Lick my bumhole instead, okay?”
Hailey dragged another pillow beneath her head, then spread Isla’s still-chafed bum cheeks apart. She teased the musky rosebud with feather-light flicks before wriggling her tongue inside. Isla grazed Hailey’s cunt with her teeth, a finger finding its way into her older friend’s arse.
Hailey came quickly, letting the waves wash over her, tongue still firmly planted inside Isla’s arsehole.
Isla flipped herself around and settled her body back atop Hailey’s, the two of them now face to face. “Why doesn’t the mermaid come visit me anymore?” she asked with a smirk, rubbing herself back and forth against Hailey’s pussy.
“She has a name,” Hailey told her defensively, “and she’s not a bloody mermaid.“
From the way Isla’s eyes sparkled so gleefully, it was just the sort of response she sought to provoke. She could be such a little brat sometimes.
“Reee-taa!” Isla mocked in a liquid growl. “Reee-taa the mermaid!”
“Stop pretending to be your mother, you childish little bitch.”
“Fuck you!”
“So do it! Fuck me!”
She never made it easy, did Isla. Sex was always like a war of attrition with her, the polar opposite of Jack’s gentler ways. But just as she was drawn to Jack’s tender, attentive love, there were times when Hailey needed this, too – this dark thing that smouldered between her and Isla, as much vengeance as it was desire.
7
Hailey awakened with a start in the small hours of the morning, a lingering cold sweat making her pyjamas cling to her body. Her sleep had been plagued by images of earthquakes, dead rising from the sea, terrible winged monsters.
But it hadn’t been the nightmares that’d roused her from an uneasy slumber. Rita was calling to her again. The summons had an urgent edge to it, and seemed to be coming from somewhere much closer than the beach this time. She hadn’t seen her aunt for several weeks, but that wasn’t so unusual – Rita came and went, as was her nature.
Hailey climbed out of bed – her own bed, in the attic of the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage. It was the first time she’d slept in it for days. It occurred to her that she might be spreading herself a little too thin of late. Jack, Rita, Isla – they all took their share. Was there any part left to call her own anymore? It didn’t seem to speak well of a supposedly independent young woman.
She slipped on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, then crept out of the cottage, as she’d often done as a young girl. Habit took her across the empty yard where Rita had once tinkered with Morcant’s cars, then toward the gated entrance that led down to the harbour. She paused, her attention drawn towards the lighthouse keeping vigil some yards away, its bright beacon constant and somehow reassuring. The door had been left ajar. Hailey hastened towards it, then began the long climb to the top.
Upon reaching the light chamber, she found a naked Rita hunched on the floor behind the central daise, knees hugged tightly against her chest. The sealskin lay beside her, its red hue now flecked with bits of white. Hailey clapped a hand to her mouth in horror and rushed towards her aunt.
“Aunt Rita! What happened to you?”
Her aunt’s hair was grey and lifeless, her pallid, sickly skin exuding a milky, oily substance, the rich ocean smell of it assaulting Hailey’s senses. Rita’s lips were dry and cracked, scabbed over with the same stuff that crusted her eyelids. Her whole body seemed to be draped in some kind of cobweb-like material.
Rita reached out and placed a cold, damp hand on Hailey’s cheek. “Who am I, Hailey? Who am I?” she croaked. “I am Reeta of the Selkie, ambassador to my people. ‘Witch-friend’ they called me – first to tease, then later out of respect. I am Rita the mechanic. Fishwife. Aunt. Yes, those too! Long years have I lived. I do not want to forget them!”
“You’re not well,” Hailey sobbed, brushing her aunt’s colourless hair back from her face. “I’ll fetch Madeline. She’ll help you.”
Rita clamped a hand around Hailey’s arm. “This is not sickness, Hailey. It is change. Nothing can stop it. Long ago we held rituals to usher in the metamorphosis, but the old ways have been forgotten. There are so few of us left now. So few…”
“I don’t understand. How are you changing? There must be something we can do!”
Rita’s hand tightened on Hailey’s arm. “Listen to me. The child… the child is coming.”
“The child? What child?”
“The Beekeeper’s child. She’s coming. And something terrible pursues her. Echoes of what’s to come… even now, they ripple through the water.”
It seemed like more cryptic nonsense to Hailey. But Rita was on the Path of the Siren. In the days of the Tuatha Dé Danann, those blessed, or perhaps cursed, with such a rare rebirth were revered, the change considered sacrosanct. For those on the path could tap into days yet to come, their perception of time coiling and dilating in strange configurations to offer glimpses of what might be. Even the mighty Dryad could not command such farsight, fleeting though it was.
But all Hailey wanted was to get Rita back, the way she had been. Her elusive aunt haunted the selkie, here one moment, gone the next, impossible to pin down. That was heartbreak enough. Now this. Whatever the hell this was.
Hailey gently cradled her aunt’s face. “Come back to me, Aunt Rita. Please.”
And she did. Just briefly. The Aunt Rita she remembered from childhood. Hailey peered into her eyes, and there she was.
Rita gave her niece a weary smile. “Oh, we are so fucked, kid…”
On to Chapter One!
It was my little sister Amy who saw the rider first. I was in the barn looking for eggs from our last three laying hens. We’d lost just about almost everything, like the rest of the ranchers and homesteaders who lived around us.