Page 5 of Saved By the Selkie

“Yeah,” he agrees, glancing me up and down, “I can’t decide if you’d be good to eat or not.”

Whoa, okay, definitely morehellhere! I scuttle away as quick as I can, tossing sand at him like it might deter him if he actually decided to kill me. He’s … uh, pretty big, actually, now that I’m looking at him. Likely taller than me if we were to stand up. Broad shoulders. Broad generally, actually.

He makes a face. “Don’t worry. I think you’d be stringy,” he says. “And you’re not very big either—are you a bedlamer?”

“A what?”

“A bedlamer. Y’know, next step up from a pup.” He turns a bit, so his one shoulder is digging deeper into the sand, and he half-rolls onto his back, curling his arms in. “But how come you’re like this? Did you lose your pelt?”

I blink at him. “My what?”

He sits up abruptly. “You know. Your pelt—your fur.” I stare at him blankly, and he scoffs, tossing his head.“C’mon—you have to know! Your pelt—you use it for shifting.”

“I … have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say. This is too much. I can’t keep up.

He rolls his eyes, then practically flops his way across the beach to one of the rocky outcroppings. He drags something out from behind the stones.

Come to think of it, he seems almost like a—

“Yourpelt,” he says, wriggling the gray thing in front of my face, then pulling it back to himself and shimmying into it. It seems to bind to his legs, transforming his feet into flippers and—

“Oh shit,” I say, “you’re a selkie.”

He pauses, the sealskin—the magical pelt selkies use to shapeshift—halfway up his body. “Of course,” he agrees. He gives me a weird look. “What are you?”

I shake my head. “A human.”

“Human,” he repeats, tilting his head. He loses interest in putting his pelt back on, instead dropping back to the sand and dragging a finger around in the dirt. “What’s a human?”

“Um,” I say, glancing around. It’s not something I’ve ever had to explain to anyone. “Uh. Well. We … look like you.”

He quirks a brow at me.

“And, uh, we live on land! We don’t have pelts, and we can’t shapeshift.”

“Hm,” he says, frowning deeply at me. “What were you doing in the ocean then?”

I grimace. “My crew abandoned me.”

“Crew,” he repeats. Then his eyes light up. “Does that have anything to do with the big glidy thing I saw?” He waves his arm a bit, like he’s mimicking the ocean. “It came out of the mist and it sailed by.” He squints at me. “There were more little creatures, like you.”

“Uh, yeah! That would have been my ship.”

“Ship. Why’d they leave you out here, if your kind isn’t much good at swimming?”

I rub at the back of my head. “Uh. Well. They’re … kinda mad at me.”

The selkie gives me a funny look. I grimace again. “We were trying to find the Isle of Mythos, and they took it into their heads that I was leading them on a wild goose chase—”

“Goose chase?”

I wave a hand, dismissing the question. “They gave me the ol’ heave-ho and sailed off with my ship, because they didn’t believe that Mythos is a real place.”

The selkie tilts his head. “Why wouldn’t they think Mythos is a real place?”

“Uh … ’cause no one has ever been there.”

The selkie blinks a couple of times. “You’re here. I’m here. We’re standing here, on Mythos, right now.”