Ink and Ice, Erin McRae [primary phonics .txt] 📗

the sheet between his fingers. “There’s something else I want to tell you. If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course,” Zack said, without hesitation, and Aaron loved him for it.

“So, something peculiar happened while I was in St. Petersburg...”

He told Zack the story of his surprise placement and the excitement and his subsequent walk around the city to work through his energy. Of the barking he’d heard in the water, of the dark eyes that had watched him. The soft, warm muzzle against his fingers. The man he’d met on the promenade after, not knowing if what had just happened had been real or a dream: They came for you.

Aaron knew it was a lot. Especially coming on the heels of his story about the origins of Whisker Island’s inhabitants—his ancestors. But he’d invited Zack here because he’d wanted to bring his two worlds together, and for that to happen, he needed Zack to understand all of him. Even the parts he didn’t entirely understand himself. And Zack didn’t recoil, didn’t even frown, didn’t dismiss anything Aaron told him.

Which, somehow, made Aaron feel more secure in his own skin. Like maybe stories could be true without having to be hidden, like maybe they could be true without destroying him.

Zack dragged a hand up and down Aaron’s back while he talked, the sensation soothing. When he’d finally finished, worn out by the day and the sex and the stories, he closed his eyes, intending only to rest.

He fell asleep before he knew it, Zack’s heart pounding beneath his ear like the surf on the shore.

Chapter 28

A WINTER STORM

Whisker Island

ZACK CRAWLED SLOWLY back to consciousness to the sound of footsteps and voices from overhead. Aaron was curled up against him, a warm lump of unconscious boy, and for a moment the world seemed normal again. He worried about what his parents might think if they came down here and how awkward breakfast might be. But those were small, halfway familiar concerns, and unimportant in the face of this place.

He couldn’t keep what Aaron had told him last night out of his head. The local legend about the origin of the island’s inhabitants, Zack might have been able to rationalize or dismiss. There was no reason to take it any more or less seriously than any other bit of folklore he’d ever heard on his travels. Aaron’s encounter with the seals in Saint Petersburg. That would have been easy to dismiss if it had happened to anyone not from this place. As it stood, having happened to Aaron that was much harder to push aside.

Certainly Aaron hadn’t just made up the story; it was simply too strange. And if he really had encountered seals in a river in the middle of Russia, seals who had apparently been looking for him...were the Lake Erie seals real too—and was Aaron really related to them?

Get a grip, Zack told himself. Aaron had just had an incredibly exciting and emotional day. It had been dark, in a city he didn’t know. Zack had been in enough high-stress situations to know that the night and adrenaline often combined to make people think they’d seen, heard and done things they wouldn’t possibly have. A seal wasn’t even the strangest thing he’d known someone to imagine. Surely, that’s all it had been, the Saint Petersburg seals and the island’s selkie inhabitants both: A product of the imagination.

But his train of thought was interrupted by a chorus of barking seals, and he jumped, every hair standing on end.

In his arms, Aaron grumbled sleepily and reached for his phone on the nightstand.

That goddamn phone, Zack thought, thoroughly unnerved.

Aaron cracked open an eye to look over the notifications, and a frown creased his forehead.

“What is it?” Zack asked. In his current frame of mind, he thoroughly expected the answer to be calamitous.

“A front is moving through,” Aaron said, scrolling. His hair was tousled from their activities the previous night, the curls falling into his eyes.

Zack gave into the urge to push Aaron’s hair back off his forehead. “Is that bad news?”

“It might be. All weather here is risky. And we need to be able to fly to get out of here.” His frown deepened. “There’s not a lot of wiggle room in my training schedule right now. I really need to get back on time.”

“What do we do, then?” Zack asked.

Aaron set the phone back on the nightstand with one last worried look. “Watch and wait.”

LATER THAT MORNING a storm blew in. Zack watched the clouds pile up on the horizon. With nothing in between but miles of water, there wasn’t anything to slow the storm down. The world seemed to shrink as it approached, the far-distant line of the horizon fading as a wall of grey swept across the lake. Aaron watched it and kept checking the weather radar.

Zack felt his unease rise. He could—and did—tell himself that the seals were just a story. But as the world outside disappeared, he couldn’t help but wonder if the island, or the seals out beyond the ice, were trying to keep Aaron there. Where they thought he belonged.

Any outside pursuits were out of the question for the day. Everyone else sat down to play cards. Aaron invited Zack to join, but he demurred. Aaron should have some time with just his family, and he needed some time to himself.

He settled himself by the fireplace, in the same overstuffed armchair he’d dozed off in his first night here, and pulled out his laptop. He wanted to check in with the outside world, especially if they were about to get stuck here, or if the internet was about to go out, He needed a reminder that people and places outside this island even existed.

A check of his email provided exactly that. It was ostensibly the Christmas holiday, so his inbox was relatively empty, but there was a message from Sammy. His article, about Aaron and TCI, had come back to him for one