Chapter 1

San Diego,

September 2011

Selkies.

Thirty-five miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean, and I’m dodging freakin’

selkies in my fishing boat. It’s like they’re seagulls, and I’m dropping French

fries at the beach. Man do they screw up the fishing. Worse, when they appear,

bad things tend to follow. And it’s just my luck. Of all fae to show up

randomly, it had to be these shapeshifters—the kind that could transform into

seals and even into sea lions, which scare the crap out of the fish. Every pile

of floating kelp we’d fished around so far had one of these fairies under it.

Every kelp except the paddy right in front of the boat.

“Captain Dore,

look! Another seal,” the woman said, reaching for her camera.

And that selkie

made it a perfect five for five.

I couldn’t help

but hang my head. My clients—a simple Midwestern family of Mom, Dad, and

Teenage Son—considered it endearing to see a seal poke its head up from inside

the kelp, but I could see their true bulbous heads, seaweed-like hair, and

pudgy gray-green humanoid forms. Their giant, shiny-black eyes fixed on me as

if they knew exactly who I was.

The creepy

shapeshifters were part of the Unseelie Court—fairies that are decidedly

unfriendly to humans—and the fact that we kept encountering them was starting

to unnerve me. Encountering one in the Pacific was rare. In fact, I couldn’t

recall one off Southern California since an entire tribe of them showed up

around Catalina Island in the 1980s. That appearance had led to a spate of

unidentified submerged object and alien sightings, not to mention a few

mysterious plane crashes around the island and a heap of sunken boats.

“Hey what’s that

big fin?” the father asked, pointing at the rapidly approaching triangular

object sticking out of the water and heading straight at the paddy from the

opposite side.

“Shark,” I said

with a sudden smile. “Damn big one, too. Great white, from the looks of it.

Rare for us down here in San Diego.”

“Oh, swim, seal!

Swim!” the mom said as all hell broke loose around the paddy.

“Wow, really,”

the kid said. “It’s like a real National Geographic moment.” He whipped out his

phone to video the event.

I was the only

one on the boat rooting for the shark. If they’d known what that shark was

really chasing, they probably would have thought it was more like a National

Enquirer moment.

Knowing the

selkie-shark conflict would ruin the fishing within a mile of that paddy, I

pushed farther out, always on the lookout for signs of life other than selkies.

As long as we could avoid them, we found lots of small football-sized yellowfin

tuna while we trolled, and I’d even managed to convince the anglers to release

the little guys, in hopes of finding bigger ones. The small fish kept me

blissfully busy until we made it back to the dock at around four in the

afternoon—so busy, in fact, that I forgot about how screwy the presence of

selkies was until I realized my buddy Ned was storming down the dock toward my

boat as I pulled in.

As usual, Ned

was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with colors usually reserved for Las Vegas

neon. The fact that he resembled a derelict version of Santa Claus usually drew

people’s attention. It was either that or the fact that he always smelled like

beer-soaked seaweed washed up on a beach. It could be worse given that Ned was

in fact the Titan God of the Sea, Nereus, in self-imposed exile.

As I secured the

boat to the dock, my cellphone, stashed inside my captain’s bag within the

console, chirped the unique ring my buddy Geek had helped me assign to Sarah

Wright. I felt guilty for avoiding her over the past two weeks. Despite

scrambling to reach the annoying device before the call went to voice mail, I

wasn’t quick enough. I tossed the phone on the console, thoroughly disgusted

with my wishy-washy-ness regarding our relationship—or whatever we had. I was

pretty sure we both wanted to take things to the next level, but I was

conflicted about what that would mean for both of us since my situation wasn’t

exactly normal.

I’ll call her

back as soon as I can. I sighed, watching my three clients stumble off the

boat, trying to adjust to sea legs on land after a full day on the water. They

chatted excitedly about sharks and sea lions as they went. Ned stood down the

dock, waiting, staring intently at me with his hands on his hips and one

flip-flop-clad foot tapping away. The trio barely managed to get past him

before he charged the boat.

“Diomedes, dude,

glad to see you made it back okay.” Ned’s shoulders dropped a bit as he exhaled

heavily. “Now get yer ass off the damn boat and back onto land.” He dipped his

head slightly and glared over his sunglasses at me, his brow deeply furrowed.

I stopped taking

rods out of the rod racks under the gunwales and stared back at him. Something

had him on edge, and that was saying something. Normally, he made people on

Prozac appear edgy. In over a thousand years, I’d never seen him like this

before.

“Now, dude.

Now!” he said, raising his voice and gesticulating wildly.

The myriad of

seagulls and pelicans gathered around the boat awaiting leftover bait and fish

carcasses took off in a sudden deafening and chaotic commotion.

“Whoa. Relax,

Ned. What’s got your panties in a bunch?” I said, getting back to my after-charter

chores. “Sheesh. Besides, I think the dad left a few beers if you want them.”

Normally, Ned’s

first question to me would have involved the possible presence of abandoned

beer. Instead, he fixed me with a withering stare. His hands were back on his

hips, and his foot again tapped on the dock. When we’d first met a few thousand

years before, he’d naturally emanated an aura of power. Though he’d since

willingly given up most of his other-dimensional essence, the preternatural

blue glow was now visible.

“Dude, which

part of ‘now’ ain’t you understandin’?” He spoke through a clenched jaw and

pointed at the dock forcefully, like a parent demanding a child’s immediate

presence. Over his sunglasses, his eyes darted everywhere, keeping watch around

us.

“Okay, okay,” I

said, eyeing my fish-slimed gear and all the sardine scales and scuff marks

marring the deck. “Who’s gonna clean all this up? You know if I let it sit,

it’ll be even harder to clean later.”

“I’ll take care

of it,” Ned replied. “Just get yer ass off the water. Right. Now.”

“Fine.” I kicked

at my rods like a petulant child. “Let me get my damn gear bag, and I’ll

leave.”

I grabbed my

captain’s bag and stormed down the dock in a huff, glaring at Ned. I didn’t

even bother to take off my grungy gray rubber fishing bibs. He avoided making

eye contact as I passed him, which only pissed me off more. Instead, his eyes

continued to dart around the marina. Whatever.

I got to my

truck, threw my gear bag in the bed, then stripped off the rubber bibs. While

hopping around on one leg like an idiot, trying to get the bibs off over my

deck boots, I worked myself up from a huff to a tizzy. Who the hell did he

think he was ordering me around like that? Athena? Throwing my bibs into the

bed with the rest, I glanced over my shoulder, toward the dock.

Just as I was

about to get into my truck, a more pressing question hit me: Why? Ned actually

yelled at me. In over two millennia, I had never even witnessed him raise his

voice. What’d I do to him?

I instantly felt

like I owed him an apology, without even knowing what I’d done. I headed back

down to the dock.

As I approached

the top of the gangway, Ned was in a heated discussion with something in the

water on the other side of the dock from my boat. I couldn’t get a clear view

of who or what Ned was talking with, or hear what was being said. The only

things evident were the loud and freakish sea lion-like barks and Ned’s wild

and very uncharacteristic gesticulations. Instinctively, I searched for

something to use as a weapon—a boat hook was leaning against the fence next to

the gate down to the dock.

Then a

putty-colored round female head covered in thick yellow-green hair popped up

just above the dock and peered directly at me. Ned noticed me, as well, and all

at once, the creature disappeared below the water’s surface creating a wake

that tossed the floating dock and rocked the boats tied up nearby. She was

definitely one of the selkies I had encountered earlier offshore.

I stopped dead

in my tracks. Ned shook his head and stomped toward me, which couldn’t have

been easy in flip-flops. His eyes were ablaze—literally. His awakened aura

pulsed from white to blue like a lightning storm.

I shrugged and

raised my eyebrows as his gaze fell on me. The temperature began to drop, and

the water around the dock changed from a drab green to black and turned rough,

as if it were about to boil. The disturbance bounced the moored boats against

their bumpers and the dock, and the rigging on the sailboats began to clang.

Even the remaining birds evacuated—only noiselessly.

“Boy, who did

you piss off this time?” he said at me more than to me in a voice that

reverberated through my skull. It wasn’t loud, but it was insistent in its

tone.

“I… um… I, ah…

what?” I asked, vapor trailing from my mouth in the cool air.

I couldn’t

recall having done anything to anybody since chasing down that witch, Medea, a

few months back, and as far as I knew, everyone I could have pissed off doing

that was dead.

Ned continued up

the ramp from the dock toward me, somehow appearing larger than normal. His

face, especially his eyes, darkened. “Don’t play games with me. You got selkies

chasin’ yer ass all over the Pacific, and they had to travel around the world

to get here to do it. Nytrocyon herself is here to find you.” He pointed back

down toward my boat. “She says Mab wants you. Says you killed Lord Indronivay.”

“Nytrocyon,

ruler of the selkies? Seriously?” My teeth started to chatter, and my jaw

muscles clenched in the frigid air. “Wait… she said I killed who? Lord

Indronivay, Mab’s warmaster? Are you kidding me? Why the hell would I have

killed that uptight belligerent asshole?”

I’d never even

met him, but his reputation as a jerk was legendary. Even as a Guardian and

protector of humanity, I knew him only through stories that suggested he was a

giant at nearly eight feet tall and was about as friendly as a shark with a

toothache. All I really knew about him was that he personally ran every major

war and military campaign Queen Mab of the Unseelie Court had waged for tens of

thousands of years. Hell, the guy might have charged into battle against Queen

Titania of the Seelie Court on the back of a triceratops.

“You’re sayin’

Nytrocyon is lying?” Ned’s voice boomed through my head, shaking me back to

attention.

I shrugged

again. “Now why the hell would I do something like that? Honestly?”

Ned’s shoulders

dropped slightly, and his pulsing aura faded. Though his face brightened and

his bushy beard and mustache split, revealing his white teeth in a broad smile,

the rest of him remained rigid. “Good. I didn’t think you were dumb enough to

attack a member of one of the fairy royal courts. That’d be grounds for war.

Only problem is then, dude”—he slowly slipped back into his normal relaxed and

carefree persona—“you gotta ask yerself one question: why does she think you

did?”