The Siren and the Deep Blue Sea - Kerrelyn Sparks Page 0,14

Seer coughed. “She will find you.”

“How?”

“Saw her last week. She . . .” The Seer paused for a moment, breathing hard. “She thought I was too sick to live alone. She’s sending a ship here to take me to her castle.”

“She has a castle? Where? And if she was so worried about you, why did she leave you here?”

“She didn’t come . . . in a boat.”

“What? Then how—” Brody stiffened when, suddenly, the Seer gripped his hand with a surprising burst of strength.

“You must take my place,” the Seer ordered. “Pretend to be me and go to her castle.”

“But . . . what about you?”

The Seer let go of Brody’s hand and his eyes grew unfocused once again. “I will not be here.”

Brody blinked away tears. He wanted to object, but he could see that the Seer was telling the truth. His death was coming soon. “I don’t want to impersonate you. We always agreed that it was morally wrong for me to pretend to be another person.”

“You must.” The Seer’s eyes closed. “You must.”

Brody suppressed a groan. Only once in his life had he ever tried to shift into another person’s image. At the age of eleven, he’d thought it would be funny to impersonate the Seer, but his jest had not gone well. The Seer had scolded him, explaining how harmful it was to steal a person’s identity. Brody had accepted the Seer’s words, but it wasn’t until much later, when he saw the damage the Chameleon was causing, that he understood how evil it truly was. He didn’t even want to try it. Wouldn’t that make him just as bad as the Chameleon?

“Seer,” he began, but realized the old man had lost consciousness. He leaned over and could barely hear the dying man’s shallow breaths. With a sigh, he straightened. There was nothing he could do but wait.

He stood and paced around the cottage. Then he remembered he needed to find the journal. For the next hour, he alternated among three things: checking on the Seer, stirring the soup, and searching for the journal. He looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it. Finally, he helped himself to some soup and gave the cat a bowl of chicken meat and broth.

The Seer kept breathing, and Brody realized it would be a long night. If the Seer needed any assistance, Brody would have to be in human form to help him. With less than an hour left of his allotted time to be human, he needed to be careful how he spent it. So he shifted into a dog.

With a screech, the cat jumped straight into the air.

“But I’m a friendly dog,” Brody growled at him.

The cat hissed and hunched his back, his fur bristling.

Brody sighed. It was going to be a long night. He curled up on his bed and kept watch.

Sometime, just before midnight, the Seer’s breathing stopped. Brody sat up, listening carefully. He shifted into human form and sat on the Seer’s bed.

“Seer?” Brody’s eyes filled with tears. The man who had been a father to him was dead.

* * *

Onboard the Eberoni ship, Maeve turned over in the narrow bed as a tingling feeling started in her head and crept down her spine. Ignoring it, she fell back asleep.

She was floating in the air, surrounded by mist. As she moved slowly forward, a patch of wispy clouds parted before her and she saw a green island surrounded by a narrow belt of turquoise sea. White sandy beaches. Bluffs of long green grass rustling in the breeze. As the sun rose in the east, horizontal rays shot through the mist, and when the light hit the grass, the morning dew sparkled like a sea of stars.

Just as she was thinking what a lovely island this was, a film of mist drifted in front of her and obscured her vision. Still, she floated toward the island, aware somehow in her dream that time was passing. Then the mist parted, revealing a man alone on a bluff. He had a shovel and was moving a pile of earth back into a hole. A grave.

It started to rain, but still the man worked. His shirt and breeches grew wet and stuck to his skin. He was tall, lean, and muscular. His black shaggy hair swooped forward, hiding his face. He tamped down the last of the dirt, then began to pile stones on the grave. With the last stone in place, he collapsed onto his knees. When he lifted