Forgotten Sea by Virginia Kantra

bright with pity or derision. “Or so used to being locked up and hand fed they can’t adjust to life outside.”
    Lara’s heart thumped. The tawny raptor on Moon’s arm watched her with wicked, golden eyes.
    “What about him?” she asked. “What will happen to him?”
    “Tuari?” The keeper stroked the bird’s bronze plumage.
    He opened his beak softly against her fingers. “He won’t have an easy time of it. He doesn’t belong here. He’s not like the others.”
    “He’s not one of us,”   Zayin had said last night about Justin.
    Not human. Not nephilim either.
    “What difference does it make?” Lara asked fiercely. “If he needs care.”
    “Oh, we can care for him. But he doesn’t have a place here. Or out there. The others are all native species, hawks and owls. Tuari’s a golden eagle. God knows what brought him to us, but he’s totally out of his range, poor boy.” The keeper’s eyes clouded again. “Even if I set him free, he’d be lost.”
    * * *
    Moon’s words hung in the air like the smell of newts, pungent and impossible to ignore. They haunted Lara as she raked flight pens and scrubbed birdcages, breaking her nails and her heart.
    “He doesn’t have a place here. Or out there.”
    She rubbed her forehead, but the words kept circling, picking, attacking. They kept her company at dinner when no one else would. They whispered in the carrels during evening study and followed her up the stairs after lights out.
    She held on to the banister as she climbed. The darkness of the stairwell suited her mood. After her so-called period of reflection, she was dirty and exhausted and more confused than ever. What she needed was a hot shower and an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Everything would look better in the morning.
    Including Justin?
    She stopped, a tight, fluttery feeling in her chest, trying to remember what Miriam had said. Forty-eight hours to recover from the concussion. And then what?
    “Even if I set him free, he’d be lost . ”
    She dragged herself the rest of the way to her room. She closed and locked the door. Stripping her filthy T-shirt over her head, she dropped it with a sigh to the floor.
    As a proctor, she had her own closet-sized bathroom. She turned the shower as hot as she could stand, letting the pulse pound her tight muscles, the water sluice over her head, desperate to rinse away the stink of the mews and her lingering sense of guilt. Steam billowed in the air, slicked the tiles, condensed on the mirror. She breathed in the moist, shampoo-scented air. Released it, expelling tension on a sigh.
    Wrapped in a towel, she opened the door to her room.
    The window was open. Night whispered against her bare skin. Her body hummed with awareness.
    A sound, a breath, a disturbance in the air . . .
    Her mind blanked in terror. It was her nightmare, a man in her room, in the dark.
    She sucked in her breath.
    “Don’t scream,” Justin said from the direction of her bed.

7
    He could see in the dark. “Cat’s eyes,” Captain Rick had said the first time he’d watched Justin climb the rigging at night.
    He could see her now, Lara, silhouetted against the slanting light from the bathroom, the quick rise of her breasts above the knotted towel, her small hands curled into fists at her sides.
    He could smell her, soap and fear, and under that her skin, her scent, female, sweet. Arousing.
    “Don’t be scared,” he said hoarsely, which was a crock—she should be scared, she barely knew him. And what she could probably make out was hardly reassuring.
    His head hurt. His throat burned. For seven years, his past had been a blank to him. Now his brain seethed with unfamiliar images. With questions. Something had changed within him, and the one person he trusted for answers was braced in front of him, watching him with wide, wary gray eyes as if he were about to jump her.
    “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
    Her body remained tensed, slim taut lines and the gleam of her