Connor didn't talk much as we walked away from the park.

He also didn't talk much when we got on the bus or when we changed buses or when we got off a bit earlier than necessary so that we could casually walk past, assessing the area.

I had gotten the impression from the brothers' conversation that Selkie mostly communicated with each other through whatever telepathic skill they had, not with other species and certainly not with a human like me. I wasn't sure if this 'speciesist' attitude was the sole reason for Connor's antipathy toward me, or if I had done something else to upset him, but I was determined not to just accept it. This was Saorise's brother and I would rather we were friends.

"Can I ask a question?" The normal way of getting to know a person through small talk was obviously not going to work with the taciturn Connor, so I tried some business talk.

Connor shrugged. "You can ask, but I can't guarantee that I'll answer."

"We're making the assumption that Saorise is, for some reason that you won't explain to me - and that's okay; your call - unable to properly use her telepathy to get in touch with you. Do you mind me asking why you can't get in touch with her?"

It was hard to say if he minded or not as he continued to walk, staring straight ahead as he had through most of our journey. Possibly, he was considering whether or not to answer because, eventually, he did speak. "Only female Selkie are fully telepathic. Males like me are receptive to messages, but we can't send them ourselves."

"Like an office phone that only takes incoming calls?" I suggested.

His eyes went flat as he turned away. "Not really."

His sharp retort stung and the words rushed to my lips before I could stop them.

"Why don't you like me?"

Well, that was direct. Maybe for the best. Sometimes it was easiest to confront these things head on. In the normal course of things, it wasn't something that I would do as I was a relatively mild-mannered person. But having Saorise back in my life, and the current situation, had brought out the more forthright side of me that usually lay dormant.

"Who says I don't?"

"Everything about you says it,” I chirped back frankly.

"I don't trust you. There's a difference. If it helps; you seem perfectly nice. Is that the sort of validation you had in mind?" he asked, one brow hiked high on his forehead.

Part of me wanted to say that it was hard to believe that someone so unfriendly could be related to Saorise. But that would have been intensely cruel in the circumstances, and would have just highlighted that it was quite possibly her own open friendliness that had landed her in this situation.

Also, it would not have been completely true. Though he lacked, or was for the moment suppressing the ease Saorise had with people, there was much about Connor that immediately reflected his sister. His devoted loyalty and his love for his siblings might be expressed differently to hers but those were traits they surely shared. His courage was something I had always seen in his sister.

Physically, he was the least similar to her of the three brothers, his hair was dark brown and his tall muscular build was a million miles away from the petite Saorise. But there was a deeper similarity. Saorise had a wildness about her, both when she was young and now. It would have been easy to have written Connor off as straight and buttoned down, but he carried with him a sense of wildness beneath the skin. He was here searching for his lost sister and so would focus on that, but there was a fire that danced in his eyes and an energy in the way he moved that I dearly wanted to see released from its constraints.

It was probably not where my mind should have been right at that moment, but I was increasingly aware of how attractive I found him. I used the word 'attractive' in its most literal sense. It was not simply that he was handsome with a great body. He attracted me. I felt drawn to him with a tug that was almost physical, as if that wildness in his soul had reached out from his chest, coiled its tendrils about me and fastened me to Connor.

"Where now?"

Connor's voice brought me out of the fanciful daydream into which I had self-indulgently allowed myself to slip. I pointed.

"Down here. The building I could see through the window in my dream is just on the right."

"And try not to be too suspicious while we're doing it."

It had not occurred to me that people might be watching. I recalled how Saorise had looked over her shoulder nervously when we were at Newtown Creek.

Did whoever had taken her have lots of henchmen? Perhaps that would make the place easier to spot.

"The window looked to be at ground level," I went on, struggling to remember every detail of the dream, which was now our only link to Saorise. "A basement window."

Connor nodded but added, "Just keep your voice down a little. There may be people listening and some of them may have hearing better than you would think possible."

"How good?"

"Some of them can probably hear what you're thinking."

I wasn't sure if he was joking or not - it was hard to distinguish possible from impossible these past couple of days - so I tried hard not to think anything suspicious.

It now occurred to me that we might be a more obvious target than I had considered when I suggested this. Although Connor looked perfectly human to me, there were presumably people who could spot a Selkie in human form without any difficulty. For the first time, I realized that I might actually be in danger here. I had known that there was danger involved, but I had never really thought of it as something that applied to me. Even now, though I was more aware of it, part of me still insisted that nothing bad would happen to me because I was me - bad things only happened to other people. It's that attitude that gets most jaywalkers killed.

We walked down the right-hand side of the road, both of us innocently scanning the opposite side for a window on sidewalk level. But there was nothing. I looked around for other roads that might give a similar view of the building and the store’s sign but, likewise, came up with nothing.

"I don't understand."

"It's okay," said Connor, gruffly. "You've been thinking about Saorise a lot, it came out through a dream. It's understandable. I rather wish it hadn't led to you finding out things about us that are generally kept on a need to know basis but," he shrugged, "I'd sooner that you made a mistake than you turned out to be on the other side."

It was nice that he now seemed to trust me, but his reason for doing so would seem to be that I was just some naive idiot.

"No..." I stuttered. "It was real. It was her."

"Then where's the window?" He didn't say it cruelly, but somehow the kindness of his voice was worse. He was humoring the poor human who wouldn't know a telepathic message if it smacked her in the face.

For a moment there, I doubted it, too. I had been consumed with thoughts of Saorise, it was perfectly natural to be thinking of her, and with all the odd circumstances surrounding her reappearance in my life and disappearance from my apartment, my brain might well have concocted some outlandish vision.

But I had seen the flipper.

In my dream, Saorise's hand had been a flipper. Not a fish's one but a seal's flipper. I had not known she was a Selkie until I saw her brothers, hours later. I had not even known what a Selkie was. How could that have been in my dream when I did not have that information?

It would have been an incredible thing to guess.

Was it possible that I had learned this twenty years ago and my brain had suppressed the information till now? It seemed like the sort of thing I would remember. And I had dreamed about Saorise regularly throughout my life without ever seeing even a hint of her turning into a seal until last night - again, that was the sort of thing that I would have remembered. It was too much of a coincidence.

"In my dream she was a seal," I said, turning to Connor defiantly. "How would I have known that? How could I have just dreamed it?"

His face had narrowed to a frown before I had even finished speaking. "She was a seal in your dream? You're sure?"

"It's not exactly a grey area."

Connor's eyes flashed from side to side as if he was trying to keep up with a fast-moving train of thought that was passing before his eyes.

"This store; did you ever point it out to Saorise?"

I nodded. "Yeah, we passed it on our way to get pizza the first day we went out. There was a cool-looking guitar in the window."

"And that doesn't strike you as fortunate?"

Now he said it; yes, it did. Saorise was imprisoned with a view of a building on the block she could positively identify. That was very fortunate. Though I wasn't sure what that had to do with her being a seal or how it helped us find her.

Connor began to walk back quickly the way we had come, talking as he went. For the first time since I had met him, I got some sense of the man behind the serious, concerned brother, as his enthusiasm made him careless of being overheard.

"Saorise isn't a seal. Not right now."

"How do you know?"

"Because they took her skin and, believe me, they will only give it back to her if they have to."

"Why?"

"Doesn't matter."

I had a feeling it did, but it was one of the things he was not willing to share with me. "The point is, you were seeing something that wasn't real."

"So it was a dream?" I was increasingly confused.

"No," Connor went on. "Like you said; there's no way you could have known about her being a Selkie. You weren't seeing through Saorise's eyes..."

"That's how it felt."

"I know. But you were seeing what she wanted you to see. She wanted to show you where she was and what she was. Telepathy isn't like a text message or a voice in your head. It's like getting someone else's thoughts in pictures. It never occurred to me that Saorise might be sending you a message - truth be told, I had enough trouble accepting that she was sending you an image of any sort. I've never encountered a human who could receive a message from a Selkie. I would have bet it wasn't possible. But I think it's the only explanation. In which case..."

"What I saw through the window might not be literally what she can see through her window."

I was getting the idea, and hope fluttered again in my chest.

"More than that," said Connor. We were now in front of the building from my dream and he had stopped to tie a shoelace, using this as an excuse to look around, before moving on. "There might not even be a window. In fact, it makes much more sense that there isn’t, because whoever has her wouldn’t want her to be seen from the outside. Which means, she's likely not saying, 'this is what I can see'…"

"She's saying 'this is where I am',” I finished with a gasp.

To our left as we walked by, I saw a narrow alley that burrowed between two buildings. A large man, who might as well have had 'security' tattooed across his forehead, stood in front of a flight of steps leading down.

Once we had gotten a safe distance away, Connor stopped and turned to me. "That's where she is. I'm sure of it."

The lethal expression on his face left no room for doubt, so I nodded.

"What now?"

"What do you want?" The large man who stood at the top of the staircase down the alley peered at me as I approached from beneath a low forehead that looked like a slab of granite.

"Can you help me?" I said as I walked closer, trying to look blasé and unconcerned. "You obviously work around here so you know where stuff is. I'm looking for a vet - I can't remember the name; something to do with cats. I know it's around here somewhere. Can you help?" I gave him my best 'poor, pretty girl lost in the big city' smile and saw the rocky features of the guard soften.

"Sure. You take a right out of here..."

"A right," I repeated, pointing left.

The guard smiled, presumably delighted to find someone dumber than him. "Other right, sweetie. Then you hang left at the end of the block."

"Which block? Sorry, you're losing me. Any chance you could show me?"

The guard took me by the arm. "Sure thing, honey."

He guided me to the end of the alley and out onto the street. "Right here. Then..."

As the guard gave some pretty accurate directions to the place where I worked, I flicked a glance back to see Connor stealing down the alleyway behind us.

"You got that?" asked the guard.

"Could you tell me again?"

He went through the instructions again but was clearly getting impatient with my interruptions as I tried to give Connor more time - there was still no sign of him. I tried for a third explanation but the guard had had enough.

"Sorry, babe, I got a job to do." He turned back to the alleyway. "Hey!"

He took off down the alley at top speed, and Connor, who had just been coming up the steps, ran the other way, heading for a high wall at the far end. As he reached the wall, he sprang up, agile as a cat, grabbing a drainpipe and hoisting himself up. But I could see the guard talking into a walkie-talkie - he was calling for backup.

Fortunately, I knew the area well and now took to my heels to meet Connor on the far side of the wall.

"How did you do that?"

"Never mind. There's more people coming."

The words were barely out of my mouth when we saw three more men, all of them built along similar lines to the guard barreling our way.

"Follow me."

I grabbed Connor's hand and pulled. We raced through the back streets, ducking onto the main avenues when we had to, describing the most unlikely and weaving route possible to where I worked. It was closed today, owing to sickness, and I fumbled for my keys as Connor checked to see if they were still behind us. We ducked in and slammed the door.

"This way."

At the back of the vet clinic at which I worked was a bedroom where Dr. Collins or one of the nurses could stay when an animal needed round the clock care. As we got through the door, a trio of shadows charged past the frosted glass window. Connor put a finger to his lips and we stood in tense silence, listening. The shadows passed back the other way.

They were gone.

Connor and I sank onto the bed to catch our breath. It was only then that I saw the look on his face.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" I asked, tentatively.

"I didn’t see her, but I know where she is," he said, his voice thick with emotion. "It's not good news."

I felt my stomach tightening. His expression told me how bad the news was and exactly how real was the danger that Saorise was facing.

"I'm so sorry for how I treated you," he murmured, his voice raspy with emotion.

I shook my head and had to resist the urge to reach out for him in comfort. "You were worried about your sister."

"And I wouldn't have found her without your help."

"I bet you would have. I imagine when you set your mind to something it gets done."

"You still need to know how sorry I am," said Connor. His green eyes met mine and seemed to look beyond them into my soul, seeing my darkest secrets. "And I'm grateful. You're an amazing woman."

Suddenly, the little room seemed very hot, or, at least, I was.

"Should we go back? Try to help her?" I tried to stay focused on what mattered.

He shook his head slowly. "We can’t. They'll be on the alert now. We'll have to wait. Damn it, I shouldn’t have tried it without my brothers with me in the first place. We’ve got to stay out of sight to give things time to cool off now. They’re surely scouring the streets for us. I have every reason to believe she’ll be safe for the short term, at least.” His lean throat worked as he barked out a harsh laugh. “Safe, if you consider being imprisoned like an animal safe.”

I opened my mouth to ask what he meant but then closed it with a snap. He would relive what he’d seen when he was ready.

“And here we are, stuck waiting while she’s alone and afraid. Dammit!"

He punched the bed and I watched through tear-blurred eyes.

"You're doing everything you can. And it'll be okay. We are going to save her." I didn't know if it was true or not but I needed to believe it as much as he did. I put a hand on Connor's shoulder and pulled him round to face me.

"It's going to be okay."

His expression was tortured as he shook his head slowly. “We have to, Sienna. It’ll kill me if we don’t.”

On instinct, I leaned close and pulled him in for a hug. To my surprise, he closed his strong arms around me and held tight, blowing out a mighty sigh.

We stayed like that for a long time, drawing comfort from one another. As time ticked by, awareness of him seeped in. His warmth. His scent. His strength. I wanted to draw it inside me and let it heal my battered soul.

As if he could hear my thoughts, he pulled back and met my gaze.

A sharp thrill of excitement passed through me as I felt Connor's hold change, dragging me closer to him as he pressed his mouth to mine with a groan.