Authors: Virginia Kantra
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal, #Suspense, #General
One hour, twenty-seven minutes since Caleb had carried out the
trash, promising to return. Eleven—no, twelve— minutes now since her
shift had ended. She stank of smoke and sweat and crusted pots, and she
wanted to go—
Home
.
Her breath caught. Because in that instant she had not pictured the
cold stone grandeur of Caer Subai or the sweet, cool freedom of the
ocean.
She saw a house, tucked like a secret beneath the tall pines, and a
wide bed with a view of the sea shining beyond the wood-paned
windows. Caleb’s house. Caleb’s bed.
The vision rushed on her like a wave, stirring her to the depths,
flowing and filling the empty chambers of her heart. She pressed the heel
of her palm to her chest, almost dizzy with dismay and a lack of oxygen.
She was selkie. She flowed as the sea flowed, following her whims
and the currents. Ever changing. Eternal.
Caleb was hewed of New England rock, upstanding as the old stone
church at the head of the harbor, rooted as an oak. For all his selkie
heritage, he belonged to the earth. To the island.
Where did she belong?
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She did not know. Only that in him, her restless heart had found
harbor at last.
“Are you paying attention, girl?” Antonia demanded.
“No,” Margred admitted.
“Moony eyes,” Antonia repeated in disgust.
This time Margred did not bother to deny it.
One hour, thirty-two minutes. Every sixty-second tick lay heavy on
her heart.
What if Caleb had found the demon? Or the demon had found him?
Her throat felt tight. She moved her hand to her necklace, closing her
fingers around the shell. Caleb was more vulnerable than he believed.
And his danger made her vulnerable in ways she had never imagined.
The door to the dining room banged open.
Caleb
, Margred thought with relief.
Finally
.
But it was Regina who blew into the kitchen, her eyes stormy and
red warning flags flying in her cheeks. Margred bit back her
disappointment.
Antonia raised the wire basket from the hot oil. “What bug is up
your ass?”
“That—reporter,” Regina spat the word, “just asked me if the lobster
was fresh. Yes, I said. Local, he says. We’re on a freaking island off the
coast of Maine. What does he think, we ship it from Florida?”
“Did you take his order?” Antonia asked.
"I took his head off,” Regina said. “Asshole. I’ll give him local
lobster. ”
“You’ll give him what he asks for,” Antonia said. “Then he gives
you money. That’s how real restaurants work.”
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“I don’t need you to tell me about restaurants.”
Antonia crossed her arms. “Then why did you come back here?”
Regina ran a hand through her short hair. “Because if I stay out there
another minute, I’m gonna kill one of your precious paying customers.
Which is no big loss, but I don’t want to set a bad example for Nicky.”
“Fine.” Antonia whipped off her apron and thrust it at Regina.
“You’re on the grill. Don’t try anything fancy.”
“Yeah, God forbid I do something crazy, like use real herbs or make
my own mayonnaise,” Regina muttered. She wrapped the apron strings
around her narrow waist and shook salt over the clam strips, bumping
Margred out of the way. “What are you still doing here?”
Margred bristled defensively. “Waiting for Caleb.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet.”
She bared her teeth in a smile. “If you mock me, I will bite you.”
Sympathetic laughter lightened Regina’s angular face. “Yeah, yeah,
sorry. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“This. Men. Sex.” Regina arranged clams and fries in a basket,
somehow making a lettuce leaf and a few citrus wedges look like an
elegant presentation. “Ticket up,” she yelled through the window.
“I like sex,” Margred said.
“Me, too. If I can remember back that far.” Regina scowled at the
next ticket and dumped a load of precut frozen fries into the wire basket.
“But it makes you stupid. I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those
needy females who wasted her life waiting for some guy to acknowledge
her existence. Then I met Nick’s father and—bam!—I’m trembling in the
prep line, all breathless if he so much as smiles at me.”
Margred felt a shoot of curiosity, a tendril of concern, cautiously
unfurling within her. As if Regina was a friend. Her first human female
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friend. As if she, too, were developing roots in this place. “What
happened with Nick’s father? ”
Regina shrugged. “Turns out he had even more trouble
acknowledging Nick’s existence. I got tired of waiting for him to, and I
came home.”
Margred felt she should offer something, some admission, in return.
“I have never waited for a man before.”
“Then you haven’t dated in Boston. Those city guys all carry cell
phones just so they can call you with excuses about how they’re going to
be late.”
Margred could hardly explain they would not be late for a date with
her. No mortal man had ever resisted her allure.
So where was Caleb?
One hour, thirty-six minutes.
She pressed her lips together.
Regina sighed, apparently misunderstanding the reason for her
silence. “Listen, you could do worse than Caleb. He’s one of the good
guys. In fact, when I saw him again, I kind of hoped—”
The door swung open. Caleb loomed on the threshold, his big body
radiating heat and frustration, his gaze raking the kitchen.
“You can see him now,” Margred interrupted.
Regina flushed. “Oh. Well. Scratch that. Anyway, I—”
But Margred was no longer listening. The relief she felt at Caleb’s
return overwhelmed her. Annoyed her. She was not accustomed to caring
for anyone. How would she bear it?
How did he?
“You’re late,” she said.
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“Yeah.” He didn’t apologize. His face was hard and tired. “You’re
here.”
She raised her chin. “Obviously.”
His eyes, deep and turbulent as the sea, met hers, and she felt that
funny little flutter again in her chest.
Home
.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
She shrugged, disguising the pleasure that look gave her. Her need
was too new, too deep, too raw to expose.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Margred untied her apron.
Regina raised her eyebrows. “And hello to you, too.”
But they were gone.
Maggie leaned back against the padded seat in the cockpit of the
rental boat. Framed against the silver reflection of the water and the deep
blue sky, she was so beautiful Caleb’s throat tightened. His chest ached
like an old scar.
She had waited for him. This once, at least, she had waited. He
allowed himself a small satisfaction, a quiet hope, at that.
She caught him staring and lifted her eyebrows. “Do you know
where we are going?”
He busied himself casting off the two stern lines so she wouldn’t see
the hunger in his eyes. “You said an island three miles east of Seal Cove.
I figure we’ll know it when we see it.”
“If you see it,” Maggie said. “Your brother may have cast a
glamour.”
Caleb settled into the seat beside her, making the small craft rock.
Water, dark with shadows and sludge, slapped against the barnacle-crusted pilings. A compound of fuel, fish, salt, and decay wafted from
under the dock. “What’s that?”
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“A glamour.” She raised her voice over the low rumble of the
engine. “A spell, you would say, to make you look. Or make you look
away.”
He still had trouble reconciling the brother he remembered with talk
of mermaids and magic. “He can do that?”
She nodded. “To discourage visitors.”
The dock slid away to starboard as Caleb eased into the waters of the
harbor, giving wide berth to a school of sail-boats wobbling in the
shallows. “You said the island was some kind of way station, right? What
good is a rest stop if nobody can find it?”
“Selkies can find it. I can find it.”
“Fine. Then you can navigate,” Caleb said.
Maggie shook out her hair, lifting her face to the wind. “As long as
you do not expect me to drive.”
“Not a chance.”
She narrowed her eyes.
Caleb smiled blandly, rewarded an instant later when she chuckled
and relaxed against her cushioned seat.
“Perhaps you are right,” she conceded. “I would rather learn to sail
anyway.”
“I could teach you,” he offered steadily. “If you stay.” Their gazes
met and held, the unspoken plea trembling between them.
Stay
.
She looked away, a flush climbing her cheeks. In the distance, a
single kayaker struck out for open water, paddles glistening in the
sunlight. “Who taught you?”
Caleb recognized and accepted the change of subject. “To pilot a
boat? My father. I started going out with him— working stern—the
summer I turned ten.”
The year his mother left them.
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He steered to avoid the strings of buoys, orange and white, red and
yellow, that bobbed above a likely ledge. Fifteen years since Caleb
worked the lines, and he still recognized the individual markings of each
lobsterman’s traps, still heard his father’s voice name them, Tibbetts,
Dalton, Spratt . . .
He didn’t want to think about Bart. Not now. He didn’t want to
remember his father taking Lucy to the sitter’s so they could go out on the
boat together, just the two of them, and watch the sun rise over the sea
and feel, in the quiet before dawn, that maybe the day held promise after
all.
Caleb’s hands tightened on the wheel. He didn’t like the doubts that
stirred inside him like something ugly crawling on the ocean bottom.
And he hated the question he had to ask, the question that had
burned a hole in his gut since he’d stumbled on his father lurking in the
restaurant alley.
He asked anyway.
It was his job.
“My father—he resented my mother for leaving. Is it possible the
demon knew that? Used it. Used my father?”
“Possessed him, you mean?”
Caleb didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“No,” Maggie said certainly.
Caleb held himself very still, not daring yet to believe. “How can
you be sure?”
“Because I would know. Living in the same house, breathing the
same air . . . I would smell it. Sense it. Caleb . . .” She put her hand on his
arm until he met those great, brown, perceptive eyes. “I would know,”
she repeated quietly.
Some of the tension leached from his muscles. His hands eased their
death grip on the wheel. “Right. All right. Thanks.”
253
They rounded the rocky point, plowing the deep blue water, leaving
white-capped furrows in their wake. The Atlantic sparkled as far as the
horizon. The breeze snatched at the dark streamers of Maggie’s hair and
molded her clothes to her body. She looked like some exotic figurehead
sprung to life, full-breasted, bold, and gorgeous. The embodiment of
every sailor’s fantasy, every dream of home.
Caleb’s chest constricted. Would she stay? Or would she go, taking
his dreams and his heart with her?
He cleared his throat. “That’s Whittaker’s place.”
She turned her head, studying the expanse of glass and shingle
squatting on the headland. Turned back to smile at him, memory glinting
in her eyes. “I recognize the cliff.”
Oh, yeah. That cliff.
Where Caleb had found her swimming with the dolphins.
Where he’d backed her against the rocks and put his tongue in her
mouth, his hands up her skirt.
He licked salt from his lips. “I went there today. To his house.”
He watched, both glad and sorry, as the awareness in her eyes
shifted. Sharpened. “Why?”
“His place overlooks the beach where you were attacked, ” Caleb
said evenly. “He wasn’t at the school assembly that night. He doesn’t
have an alibi for last night either.”
She scowled at him. “And you went to his house? Alone?”
“I never got past the front door. He claimed he didn’t feel well
enough for company. Or questions either.”
Her frown turned thoughtful. “If a demon has him . . . he may not be
eating much. Or sleeping. The children of the fire are rarely considerate
of their hosts.”
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“That would explain why he looks like shit,” Caleb said grimly.
“Unfortunately, it’s not enough to convince a judge that Whittaker could
be a murderer.”
“But it convinced you.”
Caleb hesitated. “Not . . . entirely. Not by itself. Look, in this job