Regardless of what Connor had said, as I made and ate a late dinner, I wracked my brain for ways in which I could help with the hunt for Saorise. There had to be something I could do. Besides, based on what Patch had said, she could have gone anywhere to talk to anyone. I remembered our journey back to the apartment the first day, when she made friends with everyone on the bus.

Perhaps she had been too trusting.

But then again, when she had come to me, there was no question in my mind, she had been running from something.

She had stayed with me to hide. And although we’d gone out together as a pair, she’d stayed indoors when I wasn’t with her. In someone as gregarious and inquisitive as Saorise, that suggested a caution born of fear.

So why would she have chosen to leave the apartment alone today when she knew she might be still in danger?

The thought niggled at me and I wondered if that was something worth pursuing. What if what I’d suggested to her brother was right? What if she hadn't left the apartment and someone had come to my door looking for her, and she had let them in for some reason? My door had no peephole so she might have unknowingly let in the wrong person - someone pretending to be me or a friend of mine, or even one of her brothers.

It was enough of a possibility to follow up. Annoyingly, my building had no security system to regulate people coming in and out, but tomorrow morning I would ask my neighbors if they had seen anyone.

The fact that I had a plan made me feel marginally better and, with a glance to the bed clothes that still sat folded up on the couch, waiting hopefully for Saorise's return, I picked up Jessie and went to bed.

I tossed and turned for what felt like hours before I finally drifted off. My dreams were riddled with strange and curious images. Not scary, exactly, but somehow ominous just the same.

I tried to grab hold of them, keep them from slipping away but they were like spun sugar, melting at my touch, until an icy cold washed over me.

The bars in front of me were hazy, as if I was looking at them through water. Then I realized that I was, and that the bars were on a window beyond the limits of the tank in which I hung. I floated upwards to grab a breath of air from the narrow space between the surface of the water and the thick wire grill over the top of the tank. Turning about, I saw, through the water and glass, a dark world of strange faces and stranger creatures.

Nothing was clear but it looked like a zoo re-imagined by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Salvador Dali after a night of tequila and meth. More normal-looking people - the keepers, I supposed - were moving amongst the cages. I twisted away from them, a shock of fear running through me at their approach. As I turned, I caught sight of my hand - but it wasn't a hand, it was a flipper.

Help me.

I shot upright in bed, gasping for breath, shaking from head to foot and bathed in cold sweat. It was the most vivid dream I had ever had and I immediately connected it to Saorise. I wasn't sure why but it... the dream had felt like her. In the same way that I had been sure that Connor, Patch and Declan were her brothers, so I was sure this dream was more than just a dream, it was Saorise trying to tell me something.

I stopped for a moment, calming my breathing and trying to focus on something normal - Jessie in the bed beside me. The softness of the blankets around me.

A dream…sent to me by my missing friend.

What was I thinking? I didn't believe in crap like this. Dreams were the brain's way of dumping all the nonsense that accumulated during the day. They did not contain hidden messages and they damn sure couldn't be used as a way of communicating with other people. It wasn't possible.

And yet, while my logical brain knew this to be the case, I knew that this had been a message from Saorise as sure as I knew the sky was blue. It didn't matter that it didn't make sense, it was a fact.

My friend had sent me a message.

My heart pounded with the truth of that realization and I tried to fight my rising panic. The how of it all did not matter. What mattered was the content. And while it had been confusing and scattered and strange, she had known what she was doing. Because, as I ran through the dream in my mind, I realized with a start that, despite the strange creatures and surreal nature of most of the images in my brain, one thing had been clear. It floated to the forefront of my consciousness like a beacon.

The image of a barred window, through which I could make out a garish neon sign flashing the words Cash For Gold in wince-inducing electric green.

A sign that hung above the storefront in a row of buildings that I passed everyday on my way to work.

If this really was a sign from Saorise, and not a sign that I was going crazy? Then I knew where she was.

“And if not, it’s a white coat and padded walls for me,” I muttered under my breath.

As soon as daylight broke, I headed for the bay and Battery Park. I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to find her brothers or what I was going to tell them when I found them, but I knew I had to try.

Truth be told, I was still trying to justify it to myself, and the best I'd been able to do so far was that I didn't know how my phone worked either…or television…or radios or computers or space travel. But it did.

It sounded flimsy at best but actually helped; I didn't know how Saorise had done this, but I knew she had. And that was enough for me.

Battery Park was close to empty as I entered in search of the men I’d met the night before. Part of me didn't expect to find them given the vagueness of their directions, but as I approached the river in the early morning chill, sure enough, I saw three figures sitting on the rail above the water.

From this distance, it looked as if they weren't wearing anything, but perhaps that was my overly active imagination. They hadn't seen me yet and, as I got closer, I saw Connor suddenly push himself forwards off the rail towards the river below him. I broke into a run, almost crying out in shock, but the other two just watched as if this was quite normal. I reached the rail in time to see Declan follow his eldest brother, throwing himself forward in an elegant dive. I noticed that he seemed to be carrying something, possibly a coat of some kind, and as he dived he spiraled like an Olympic diver, wrapping himself in the coat and...

This time I screamed, because I didn't know how else to respond to what I had just seen.

As Declan spun into what I had taken to be a coat, it seemed to curl about his body like a living thing, melding itself to him, and suddenly I was not watching a man dive into the water of the East River, but a seal. He entered the water smoothly, leaving barely a ripple, then re-surfaced moments later, joining another seal that was already bobbing there - Connor, I could only assume.

My cry had, of course, alerted them to my presence, and Patch, still seated on the rail, naked and holding what I now saw to be a seal skin in his hand, looked over at me.

"Ah," he said. "Good morning, Sienna. You probably have some questions."

Ten minutes and a violent dizzy spell later, I was blinking wide-eyed at Patch as he spoke in soothing tones.

"There are pockets of magic in the world - leftover from when the earth was young and wild. That's usually something people struggle to believe in, but I get the sense that you've seen enough that I can probably breeze past it. Magical creatures - what you might term 'supernatural' - evolved alongside others, but found it necessary to keep their existence secret with the rise of organized religions, which have always taken a dim view - witch burnings and the like.”

Connor slid in smoothly. “We are Selkie, a predominantly - though not exclusively - Irish species. We live part of our life in the water as seals, and the other on land, indistinguishable from humans from outward appearance. The one thing a Selkie cannot change is their skin, so we have to take it with us when we become human. The most important thing to a Selkie is their skin."

"Saorise said something about her skin," I interrupted through numb lips as I floundered to make sense of all this. "On that first night when she arrived. I didn't mention it because I just thought she was rambling."

"What did she say?" asked Connor, leaning forward.

The four of us were seated on the benches on the bank, and my companions had put on clothes, which was a mixed blessing from my perspective.

"It sounded like…” I hesitated and swallowed hard, “'took my skin'?" I offered.

A grim look passed between the brothers and I saw Connor grit his teeth.

"The other reason a Selkie keeps hold of their skin..." Patch began to explain.

"Patch!" Connor snapped.

"We’ve trusted her this far. Saorise did, as well, and that's good enough for me."

"Saorise was too trusting by half,” Connor muttered.

"We don’t have much of a choice right now, brother. I truly think she’s a good person." Declan was looking directly at me, his green eyes disarmingly like his sister's.

Connor stared from brother to brother then shook his head.

"Can’t do it." He looked at me. "Please don't think I'm ungrateful, but our race has a bad history with yours. Look at what's happened to our sister. She’s gone missing, and if you heard right, someone – likely, your kind - took her seal skin. There are some things about us you cannot know. At least, not yet."

I nodded, my throat tight with emotion. There was a lot of anger in Connor, but why shouldn't there be? I had faith that it all came from a place of love for Saorise. He had no reason to trust me and I wouldn't blame him for not, but I did wonder how he would react when I told them about my dream - would they believe me?

It was do or die. If he thought I was crazy, or worse, lying, he’d never trust me, and the others wouldn’t be far behind. But I had to risk it. There was too much at stake not to.

"I think I might know where she is."

They all looked up at me, hope and shock and confusion mingled in their expressive features.

"Why didn't you tell us yesterday?" asked Connor, his firm lips going tight.

"I didn't know then. I guess you could say I don't really know now, either.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and let out a groan of frustration. “Except I do. I do know and you can either accept it or not, because I know it's unbelievable – although, no more unbelievable than anything you've told me so - I don't know - maybe you will believe me."

"Maybe you should just tell us," suggested Patch, kindly.

I sucked in a steadying breath and spilled my guts. This time, I was careful to leave out no detail, no matter how insignificant it seemed to me - it was evident that some things, which seemed meaningless to me, had significance to them.

"And you know where this is?" Patch's response immediately suggested that he believed me but his older brother did not look so convinced.

"How do we know she's telling the truth?"

"Lighten up, Conn," said Declan. "Why would she make something like that up?"

"Because," said Connor, his hard gaze never leaving me, "someone or something out there is hunting Selkie. It has taken our sister and it might plausibly want us, too. What better way to get us than to use Saorise as bait?"

"So you think I'm luring you into a trap?" My patience with Connor's attitude was wearing a little thin.

It was one thing to be cautious, but another to outright accuse me of something awful when I’d done nothing but try to help.

"Maybe not deliberately, then," Connor said, raking a hand through his hair. "There are telepathic species out there which could put a fake dream in your head to trick you into tricking us."

"Why would they target her and not us?" asked Declan.

"Because we would know if it was really Saorise," pointed out Connor. "We could not be fooled."

"I know it was Saorise," I insisted. I was a lot more confident about it now than I had been when I arrived, but there's nothing that bolstered confidence so much as having your word questioned.

"You've gotten a lot of experience of telepathy, have you?"

"No. But I still know," I shot back, lifting my chin and glaring at him.

"Also," Connor went on, "as long as we're asking why anyone would target her instead of us - why would Saorise contact her instead of us?"

"Does she know you're here?" I asked. “Maybe she thought you were in Ireland and she couldn’t…reach that far.”

"That's not how telepathy works," Connor muttered.

"We haven't seen her for weeks," Declan pointed out. "Her connection with Sienna is much stronger. Fresher. If she were struggling to get through at all, then, of course, she would go with the stronger connection. And more to the point, she would also know that we might not have been able to piece together her location. If we didn’t know she was in New York, what would a neon sign have told us? Nothing."

"True enough. But she's human," insisted Connor, crossing his muscular arms over his chest. "Saorise would hardly rely on getting through to a human. Most of them can't receive at all, let alone interpret a message."

"But she did. So perhaps Sienna isn't like most humans. And perhaps Saorise was well aware of that. Whatever the case," Patch said conclusively, "we can't ignore the dream."

Connor nodded. "Agreed. But we also can't run too many risks. It still might be a trap - whether Sienna knows it or not."

"Please don't talk about me like I'm not here." That I was able to talk so defiantly to Connor even after I had seen him transform from a seal, I thought was pretty impressive. Trying to help Saorise made me more assertive.

"What are you suggesting?" asked Patch.

Connor turned to me. "You can show me this place?"

I nodded.

"Then you can take me there. Patch and Declan - you guys stay here. That way, if something happens to me, you'll still be free to help Saorise."

I had to admit to being quietly impressed by Connor, and not just by his appearance or physique. He didn't trust me, it was evident in everything he said and it was written all over his handsome face. And yet, he was willing to go with me, into whatever danger I might be leading him into, to help his sister.

How could you not be impressed by someone like that?

Patch and Declan nodded their reluctant agreement. They, I think, did trust me, but were still wary about letting their brother go off alone with a stranger to seek the danger that had already taken their sister. They might argue a lot but they were clearly a close and loving family, which reminded me a little of my own.

Connor turned to me. "Alright then, I'm in your hands."

I stood up from the bench in front of him, my eyes coming about level with his broad chest. "I won't let you down."

He looked down at me, his green eyes distrustful but full of meaning.

"Don't let her down."

He didn’t have to finish that thought for his meaning to be clear because I’d heard the two words he’d left off, loud and clear.

Or else.