The Selkie Bride by Melanie Jackson Page A

eye. I looked down at my feet and there was a second of these creatures, armed with a pair of shears, which it was using to cut away my shadow at my bare toes so the first poppet could carry it away. This one I could see quite clearly. It had whiskers growing from its cheeks, chin and forehead. It was small, no more than two feet tall, and I might have thought it cute if not for it being busy chopping away at my shadow.
    I screamed once in protest and kicked out with the foot farther from the shears, but my limb barely moved and my shadow not at all. The sensation was similar to the one that had overcome me in the cave, though pronounced to an extreme degree. The creature hissed back but did not shy away until Herman landed on it with claws outstretched. Then it gave an angry shriek and fell back, dropping its shears. The blood that ran from its wound was white, not red, and this stuck to the groundin mucuslike clots that steamed unattractively. This was the same milky substance that surrounded the finman’s still beating heart.
    Herman turned on me then, howling and swiping at my leg, perhaps attempting to break the spell that held me in place, though maybe only maddened with fear and lashing out at whoever was nearby. At the last moment, he leapt for my eyes. This worked. I came awake in bed with the cat on my chest, crying loudly into my face.
    “Good kitty,” I croaked, pushing him aside, and then I reached under the covers for my stinging leg. The warm wetness told me I was bleeding. Then my hand encountered something that chilled me all the way to my soul.
    I pulled out the cold metal thing and laid it on the covers. My hands shook as I fumbled for the lamp I kept at the side of the bed. It took a moment for me to light it and then to turn the flame up high, and when I turned back to the bed—with the utmost reluctance, I might add—the shears were gone. But they had been there, of that I was certain, because they had left a bloody print outlined clearly on the white coverlet.
    I thought then of the story in the village about how Fergus Culbin often went about without his shadow. Were these nightmare creatures somehow tied to him, perhaps some kind of familiars?
    “Lachlan,” I whispered, reaching out in a kind of prayer. “If you can hear me, please come back.”
    Morning found me on my bike heading to the village, though it was cold and the damp mist that sometimesturns into the light rain the locals call smirr seemed disinclined to surrender its hold on the shore. My body hurt, especially my leg, where I was scratched in four places, but I forced myself to keep moving. I was frayed at the edges of my nerves, unraveled by nightmares and worry, but as the saying goes: Sometimes the only way out is through. Hiding at home would not help me.
    My attention was divided the whole way between the slick, uneven ground and the dim light of a paraffin bicycle lamp glowing eerily in the waves of fog that rolled by irregularly. I had trouble imagining a wicked wizard riding a bicycle with a generous-sized basket about town, but the bike had been in Fergus’s storeroom, so I assume that he used it, withered arm and all.
    It had not escaped my notice that I was without a charm to ward my door when I left and it was possible for the finman to enter in my absence, should he be able to force the lock, but so far he had preferred skulking about at night and I stubbornly clung to the belief that he had already searched my cottage and found nothing. He must have done so—if not on the night he killed Fergus, then sometime in the weeks that followed, while the cottage was tenantless. There was no reason for him to come back.
    I would, of course, be very careful on my return, regardless of this reasonable rationalization.
    Though I admit it only reluctantly, I must confess that I thought some of Lachlan as well on my ride, what he was and that he had been married. To a human woman. And unlike my own union, his had apparentlybeen