“A selkie?”
“That’s what Giles says.” Buffy paused, whirled, and staked a stocky male vampire who had just come running at them, and shook her head. “Is it just me, or are the vamps in this town starting to show a serious lack of anything resembling style? I mean, my mom could have taken him out.”
She brushed herself off, frowning at the mess on her black long-sleeved top. “Got to remember to wear something that doesn’t show the dust so much.”
“So we’ve got selkies in town now?” Angel prodded her as they resumed walking through the moonlit graveyard. The night after the full moon, so Xander was on wolf-watch duty while Willow and Giles waded through the research, trying to find something that would help them deal with Giles’s little house-guest.
“Oh. Yeah. Selkie, of the singular. Is that the singular? Or is it like sheep?”
“Selkie for both, I think.” He shrugged, moving around a slightly tilting headstone and stepping carefully over a gaping hole in the turf where a grave used to be. “I was never much on that particular legend, though. It always seemed a children’s story, a way for some families to claim something special about themselves, and not very interesting.” He looked sideways at her. “Buffy, what’s wrong?”
She shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Angel repeated flatly. “You’ve been tense all night. And don’t tell me it’s work-related. Town’s been quiet all week, but not so quiet you should be jumpy. And it can’t be the selkie. You’re more than capable of handling one little, perfectly normal addition to the town’s population.” He caught himself. “Well, normal for Sunnydale, anyhow.”
Buffy cracked just the slightest smile at that. “Job gets to me sometimes, that’s all.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not really, no. Besides, we’ve got company.”
Buffy caught a female vamp by the arm, swung her at Angel for him to dispatch, then kicked a male vamp in the knee. As he crumpled, she ducked up under the grasping arms of a third vamp, said, “Nighty-night,” and staked him. The vamp she’d knee-hauled rushed her from behind, but Buffy ducked and sent him flying over her head. He twisted as he landed, tried leaping back up at her—and ran right onto the stake.
“Buh-bye!” Buffy said in her best flight attendant voice.
“Feel better?” Angel asked.
“Actually . . . yes.” She perked up, flashing him an unforced grin. “Sometimes it’s good to be me.”
“So what is it that’s bothering you?”
“Angel . . .” Buffy stopped, her good mood fleeing as quickly as it had arrived. But she could tell from the look in his eyes that he wasn’t going to be put off. Never fails. When it comes to our un-relationship, he dances around the facts like Fred Astaire, she thought. But when it comes to stuff that doesn’t deal with Us, he’s like . . . like something really irritating.
Angel waited, patient. She would tell him. She always did.
“Nothing. I’m of the calm. Completely. It’s just . . . what do you know about selkies?”
Angel frowned slightly, clearly casting his memory back to his distant childhood, remembering what he could. “Basic Celtic legend, popular along the coastal towns. Fishermen told the stories, mostly. They’re seals in the sea, human-looking on the land, need magical sealskins to shapeshift—but I take it you already know that.”
“Difficult to miss,” Buffy said dryly. “What with the selkie currently minus a working skin and shacking up at Giles’s place, and all.”
“Almost all the legends I can recall deal with adults, a few male selkies trying to attract human women, but mostly females who’re captured by human males and taken as wives. Sometimes happily, more often not. Like I said, lots of families try to use the legend to pump up their own history. There are supposed to be some of their selkie/human great-great-grandchildren running around today, webbed fingers and toes all that’s left of their selkie blood.”
Buffy glanced automatically at her hands, caught Angel watching her, and said quickly, “So there’s no way they can be evil, right?”
The vampire frowned, thinking it over. “Well . . . no. Not evil. Cruel, sometimes, by human standards, I suppose. But Giles would know more about that sort of thing than I would.”
At that moment, a vamp leaped out from behind a stone monument, hesitating when it saw who was there.
“Mr. Lawrence. I was wondering when you’d come back to make my life miserable again.” Buffy sighed and went forward to meet her former Driver’s Ed instructor, stake in hand.
* * *
“Actually,” Giles admitted somewhat reluctantly, glancing up from the latest in the growing pile of books on his desk, “I don’t know very much about selkies at all. As they’re generally considered, well, rather benign, there wasn’t much reason to learn about them.”
“Or to do any real research about them, apparently,” Willow said in disgust, closing another book and adding it to her pile of discards by the sofa. They had moved their base of operations to Giles’s apartment for the duration, in order to keep Ariel as out of sight as possible. The addition of the books from the library to the books Giles already had made his apartment look like an explosion in a binding factory. But neither human nor the selkie appeared to notice, stepping over the piles and shifting tomes as needed, without conscious thought.
“How can so many books be so completely useless? And the websites—” Willow snorted in disdain. “A lot of fluff and fairy tales that don’t even match up with what’s in the older legends, like people just made it all up.”
“They probably did,” Giles reminded her. “If you don’t believe something is real, what’s to stop you from adding your own interpretation? It’s the curse of the serious folklorist or, for that matter, occultist.”
Ariel, still wearing Willow’s castoffs, was curled at the other end of the sofa, watching the two humans. She still held onto the sealskin, but her eyes were less wary, her body language a little more relaxed. Getting her into Giles’s car had taken some doing—prompting Xander to comment that even selkies knew the vehicle was a deathtrap—but once inside the dark, cool air of the apartment, the selkie had settled down to the point where even sudden loud noises like the phone ringing didn’t startle her too badly.
“Yes . . .” Giles continued, flipping open another text and scanning it quickly before setting it aside. Looking up at Willow, he continued, “The more romantic legends do seem to appeal to a certain element of the population. And, as I said, selkies tend not to be the sort of creature with whom past Watchers have concerned themselves.”
He leaned back in the chair, reaching for his cup of tea and taking a sip. “As a race, they tend to be stand-offish, except of course in those rare cases when one comes to shore to take a human mate. Although,” he added, “very few of those cases have ever been substantiated by anything other than family legend. It’s really rather inconvenient.”
Willow snorted again, a distinctly indelicate sound. “I’ll say! For everything that’s been written in all these books, it’s all the same information over and over again. And half of it contradicts the other, and, and . . .”
“Welcome to the wonderful world of secondary source research. Now you know why I prefer to use primary sources.” Giles frowned suddenly. “Of course, why didn’t I—” Pushing away from his desk, he tapped his hand against the pile of books, thinking, then snapped his fingers and headed for the stairs that led to the upper level of the apartment.
“Giles?” Willow called after him.
Ariel looked up, her brown gaze tracking between Willow and the stairs as though asking where the big male had gone.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Willow soothed. “ ’S’okay.”
Reassured, the selkie settled back into the blanket, making a soft moaning noise that the best website on harbor seals Willow had found had described as indicating satisfaction. Well, for seals, anyway. It might mean something really different for selkies. Or not. She wasn’t sure how much of that stuff applied to selkies. Some stuff about wolves carried over to werewolves, though; they knew that for a fact. So it was a place to start, anyway.
Following the advice the website had given, Willow extended her hand, palm down, and rested it on the sofa cushion an unthreatening distance from her companion. The more she did it, the faster Ariel would come to accept it as comforting. Supposedly.
“If we’re going to help you,” she said conversationally, “we’re really going to have to take a closer look at that skin. And you. Which means you’re going to have to trust us. ’Cause otherwise, you’re kinda stuck here. And here’s really not a good place for you to be, if you know what I mean.” Willow rolled her eyes at her own words. “Which you don’t. On account of the not speaking English thing. That’s a problem we haven’t had before.”
The thought struck her. “Wow. That’s right. All the demons speak English. Is it, like, the official language of Hell, or do they have some kind of demonic universal translator? A spell like that could be really useful for French class—Hey, Giles! Find anything?”
He came down the stairs, pausing on the bottom step, to glance at the book in his hand. “As a matter of fact, yes, I believe I have. Honigsberg and O’Hogan’s Treoir Praiticuil Muiri.”
Ariel straightened with a startled little whine rising from deep in her throat. Giles, still looking only at the book, continued, “That’s Irish Gaelic; the English would be Practical Marine Guide. I picked it up at a small bookstore a few years ago, along with several other titles; never had a chance to do more than browse through it—”
“Giles, no, wait! You said the title, in Gaelic, I mean, and she—Ariel, do you speak Gaelic? I don’t, but—Giles?”
Giles looked from Willow to the selkie, noting the look of interest in the creature’s large brown eyes. “Actually, I don’t speak it very well myself . . . um . . . Caintigh Gaelige?”
Ariel made a noise that, coming from a normal human kid, would have been a giggle. “Se’fo’d’ach.”
“Hey!” Willow cried. “She spoke!”
Giles blinked. “I think she just called me . . . silly.” His expression said that he wasn’t sure if he should be insulted or not. “Her accent certainly isn’t any better than mine, and I admit that my command of the syntax is rusty, but . . .”
He tried a few more phrases, stumbling over the grammar. But Ariel, though she listened with great interest, didn’t volunteer anything else.
Giles finally gave up with a sigh. “At a guess, her people know Gaelic only as a second language, some remnant perhaps from a time when they were more closely affiliated with fishermen and such along the coastline of their home islands. But the differences between the words and pronunciation I know, and what she seems to speak, do not give one much hope for communication.”
He brandished the Treoir Praiticuil Muiri. “But at least, we know we are on the correct track.”
The book didn’t look very impressive, Willow thought. Unlike a lot of Giles’s other books, it was bound in ordinary paper and cardboard, like something one would see in any run-of-the-mill bookstore. She held out her hand, and he gave it to her readily—okay, so it was written in a language she couldn’t read. That was a point in its favor. Very little of the really interesting stuff was written in modern English.
“Anything else useful there?” she asked, handing it back to Giles.
“Perhaps . . . See, here . . . wait . . . something about ‘by the wave’s side, by the wave’s side, um . . . go brach . . . ’ ”
“Go brach,” Ariel echoed eagerly, as though prompting him. “Go deo!” Her voice was soft, but deeper than a human girl’s of that age would be.
“Forever!” Giles finished in triumph. “ ‘By the wave’s side forever’—it’s a charm for a changeling, perhaps a descendant of a selkie and a human who wished to go to sea.”
“But that isn’t going to get the skin clean.”
“Er, no.” Giles leafed busily through the book. “I really do need to brush up on my Gaelic.”
“Maybe I could find something on the Internet, with alternate pronunciations?” Willow suggested hopefully.
Giles shrugged. “It is certainly worth a look. Although I can’t imagine anyone putting together such an arcane bit of information.”
Willow made a face at him. “Believe me, if it’s weird, or a waste of time, it’s on the Internet.”
“Which rather proves my point about the whole thing, doesn’t it?” It was a long-running argument, and one they both knew wasn’t going to be resolved any time soon.
“There do seem to be some rather intriguing paragraphs about the original selkies’ homes and their migratory patterns,” Giles began, returning to the original topic of conversation—
“Rachaidh me ann go!” Ariel burst out, and looked hopefully at them both.
“ ‘I will go back again,’ ” Giles translated after a hesitant moment. “I think.”
“She wants to go home,” Willow echoed. “Poor thing.”
“Quite the change from our usual brand of crisis,” Giles agreed, settling himself down to study the book further. “A welcome change, indeed.”
* * *
The late-day sun cast long shadows on the now-deserted beach. The truck and rescue workers were long gone for the day, and the quiet sea was empty of containment ships. An occasional splotch of black scum still coated the sand and rocks, and come morning, more volunteers would come to take samples of the water and sand, but for the most part, the cleanup— both that of humans and Mother Nature—was finished here. The work had all moved indoors, to the facility in San Diego, where lab techs, doctors, and volunteers were working on the animals which had been brought in from all along the coastline. In a few days, the surviving rescued animals, healthy again, would be returned to their native habitat.
The only living thing to be seen on this stretch of beach was a man, hands in the pockets of his dark brown windbreaker. He stood on the shoulder of the road, his rental car parked a few feet behind him.
Too late. Again.
He stepped over the low cement wall and walked down the sand to the water’s edge. Standing there, the sun slanting directly into his grim, sharply-angled face and glinting off his straight, graying black hair, he stared out over the waves, searching for something just below the surface.
“Where are you?” he asked the emptiness. “Where are you?” The words were soft, but the voice was angry.
There was no reply, except the single caw of a gull that whirled overhead once before winging farther out to sea and disappearing into the sunset.
The man looked up at the bird, identifying and dismissing it with a single quick thought before returning to his study of the water. Then with a shrug he walked down the beach, his gaze now focused on the sand, smoothed by the tide from the turmoil of that morning. Now and again, something would catch his attention, and he would bend to examine it. Or he would move into the occasional grouping of rocks, running his hands over the cool surfaces of the outcroppings.
His entire posture was that of a man on a mission. Of a man determined to find something . . . whether it was there or not.
Then a shrill brrring cut into the silence, and he straightened, pulling out a small cell phone.
“Dr. Lee here,” he barked into it. “What have you got for me?”
The answer clearly didn’t please him.
“Idiots! If you had gotten word to me sooner—” He reined in his temper with an effort, listening to the hasty excuses of his staff. “Fine. I want the names of all the rescue workers, everyone who had anything to do with the cleanup.”
He took a look around again, frowning. It had become too dark to continue his search.
“No. The report from Los Angeles was quite clear on that. At least one of them was caught in the spill, which means it will be helpless until it can rejoin its herd. I don’t intend for it to get away.
“Not this time.”
He closed the phone and put it away, then stared off into the horizon, where the blue-gray of the water met the gray-blue of the sky and merged.
“Not again.”