She wasn’t sure if it was true. But she was done being the person who needed saving.
“Where’s Dante?” Malachar asked. “The chaos witch? I assume they’re around here somewhere, waiting to ambush me.”
“They’re on their way.”
“They won’t make it in time.” His smile sharpened. “Your pelt is inside that lighthouse. I’ve been unraveling its ancestral wards for days. Another few hours and the destruction ritual willbe complete. By tomorrow’s full moon, there won’t be enough left to fill a thimble.”
Marina forced herself to stand straight. To meet his eyes. The urgency clawed at her (hours, not days) but she kept her voice level.
“You won’t finish it,” she said. “You can’t afford to.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“Because you need me.” The pieces clicked together in her mind. “The curse-breaking recipe requires selkie song. You’ve known about it for two hundred years. That’s why you killed my grandmother before she could use it. That’s why you’ve been watching my family all this time.”
Malachar’s expression shifted.
“You can’t break the curse yourself,” Marina continued, gaining confidence. “And you can’t let anyone else break it either. You need the curse to continue. But you also need to make sure no selkie ever sings the right song at the right time.”
“Clever girl. What’s your point?”
“My point is that killing me solves your immediate problem but creates new ones. There are other selkies. Other recipe books. Other dragons who might figure out what you’ve been doing.” Marina took a step forward: toward him, toward her pelt, toward her own power. “You’ve spent two centuries maintaining a careful balance. Killing me disrupts that balance.”
“Not if I kill you quietly.”
“Like you killed my grandmother?”
Neither moved. For a moment, recognition dawned in Malachar’s ancient eyes. He remembered.
“That was different,” Malachar said. “She was old. Alone. Easy to make it look natural.” His voice carried a hint of respect. “She fought, your grandmother. Sang right to the end. I had to be very careful.”
Marina closed her eyes. She’d always imagined her grandmother’s death as peaceful: a slip, a fall, a quiet ending. Now she knew the truth. Grandma Pearl had died fighting. Had died protecting the knowledge that might one day break the curse.
“And I’m bonded to a dragon who’s about thirty seconds from burning this entire clifftop to ash.”
On cue, Alessandro’s roar split the sky.
Marina looked up to see him, not fully shifted, but close. Wings spreading from his back, scales rippling across his skin, fire building in his chest. He dove toward them from the town, faster than anything that size should be able to move.
Malachar cursed and raised his hands.
Marina ran for the lighthouse.
She didn’t look back. Didn’t wait to see if the demon followed. Just ran, throwing herself through the door, scrambling up the spiral stairs, reaching for the presence she could feel calling to her from above.
Her pelt.
It was there, draped over a beam in the lighthouse’s upper room, silver-grey and shimmering faintly in the storm-light. Around it, she could see the faint residue of Malachar’s unraveling ritual: dark sigils chalked onto the floor in a widening spiral, half-burned candles that smelled of sulfur and rot. He’d been close. Another day, maybe less, and the ancestral wards would have fallen.
Even from across the room, she could feel it calling to her, singing in the old selkie tongue that only her blood could understand.
Marina’s fingers closed around the pelt, and the world fell away.
Heat flooded her palms first, not fire-heat but something deeper, the warmth of blood returning to a limb that had beennumb for too long. It spread up her arms and across her chest, and she gasped as the selkie magic poured back into the hollow places Malachar’s theft had carved. Her skin prickled, every nerve alive, and for one dizzying moment she felt the pull of transformation—not the full shift, but the promise of it, her body remembering what it meant to be seal and sea and salt wind. The edges of her blurred. Her bones ached with wanting.
And beneath the power, threaded through every fiber of the pelt like a song woven into silk, she felt her grandmother. Not a ghost, not a memory—a presence. Grandma Pearl’s hands braiding Marina’s wet hair after a swim. Her voice singing the old lullabies. Her fierce, salt-worn love, preserved in the ancestral magic that had kept this pelt safe for generations.I’m here, the pelt seemed to whisper.I’ve always been here.
Marina pressed it against her face and breathed in: sea spray and lavender and the faintest trace of her grandmother’s kitchen. Tears slid down her cheeks. Then she pulled the pelt around her shoulders, and it settled against her skin like it had never been gone.
