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“Where is she? I can’t go to her. She should be here.”
The Keeper heard the anguish in Tobias’ words. He watched his brooding clansman, who watched the empty cove beneath the darkening sky.
Hunter was uneasy. More than uneasy. The water today was turbulent, but Elise hadn’t come. The summer was long and hot. There hadn’t been many stormy days for Elise to venture out, under cover of the waves that hid them from the shore, and even fewer days that she brought her child. The child who made them present, the only reason they needed the waves for cover.
Something was changing with Elise. Did Tobias sense it? Did she not want to see them? Or did she fear for Skye?
Skye, with the inexplicable ability to give them presence just with her own. A child now of six or seven. Did she remember the Nemaro each time she left the water’s edge? And when Elise left the hidden Cove and returned to the village, were the Nemaro forgotten? After all, they were cursed to be.
How did Tobias bear this? What must it cost him to leave her untouched, un-mesmerised, free to leave? Free to forget. Free...to a certain extent. She would always return to the water’s edge, bound by his conditional love. Was that love?
He had not believed Tobias’ sacrifice would last, but perhaps he’d been wrong? His heart swelled with ...what was this feeling? Hope: could they be more than a void of hungry need? Hop that some remnant of their ancient humanity remained intact.
No. Tobias was Nemaro. Taking, not giving. Like all their kind.
They had lingered too long here. He had seen signs of envy in his clan. The idea of what Tobias had with Elise was raising ideas of the impossible. There had been trouble in the Bay; people going...missing. He couldn’t be everywhere. This wouldn’t end well.
It was time. They must leave. And he must lead. If he went, his people would have to follow him.
Decided, Hunter sped from the Bay, out into the wide ocean, almost the distance his clan could bear to be from him. They would have to follow.
Then abruptly he stopped, like a stone dropped into still water. Even from this distance, he felt it. The power of the call. The end of Tobias’ sacrifice.
Sorrow struck him; for the limitations of his kind, and the loss that his clan’s grasping of human lives inflicted on the innocent. No. Not this time, not again.
Gathering his strength, he forged on, moving further away, forcing Tobias to follow. He felt Tobias’ resistance, he strained, trying to pull Tobias from the Bay like a knife lodged in sinew to its hilt.
Scarcely able to believe it, he felt the life-giving connection that bound Tobias to him already stretched to its limit, tearing. He felt his friend destroying himself as he resisted, desperate to stay. Stay to do what? Hunter slowed, stopped. What should he do?
The only thing he could.
Turning with barely a ripple on the ocean’s surface, he sped back towards Bannimor, moving faster than he ever had, racing for Ciarlan Cove.
