Sea Witch (34 page)

herself he was safe.

With trembling fingers, she brushed the hair back from his forehead,

stroked the swelling around his eyes and his poor, split lip.

They both winced.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He captured her fingers and brought her hand to his lips. The gesture

made moisture well again in her eyes. “I’m fine. You?”

“He shot you,” she said, her voice rising in indignation.

“Yeah.” Caleb eased his good arm around her waist. “Hurts like a

son of a bitch, too. But I’ve had worse.”

She buried her face against his shirt. His arm tightened. She rested

against his heart, absorbing his strength, the sheer comfort of his

presence. He pressed a kiss to her hair.

280

“What did you do?” Dylan demanded.

Caleb spoke over her head to his brother. “Crushed his windpipe.”

“He’s gone.”

Caleb nudged the body on the deck with the toe of his boot. “He

didn’t get far.”

“The demon,” Dylan said impatiently. “I can’t sense him. Where is

he?”

Alerted by the tone of Dylan’s voice, Margred raised her head from

Caleb’s chest, disturbed by the rhythm of his heart, alarmed by a vague

awareness of something . . . wrong. She tested the air.

“I do not smell demon,” she said.

Only a tickle at the back of her throat, a sly hint of sulfur on the

wind . . .

“That’s good.” Caleb stood solid as a monument, the blood sliding

down his arm to stain the deck. “Isn’t it?”

Margred exchanged looks with Dylan, worry worming in her chest.

“Demons are immortal,” Dylan said. “He wouldn’t choose to die

with his human host.”

Caleb frowned. “I thought you bound him.”

Margred flushed. “There wasn’t time.”

It sounded like an excuse, even to herself.

Caleb nodded, accepting her rationale.

Dylan was less forgiving. “He didn’t just disappear.”

The creases deepened on Caleb’s forehead. “Why not? Demons

don’t have matter, you said.”

281

“Not their own,” Margred answered. A creeping sense of
wrongness

burrowed to her heart. “They borrow the form and substance of others.”

She stepped from the comforting circle of his arm to cast her senses

wider, trying to track that disturbing trace of hell-fire clinging to the boat.

But it was stifled, banked, hidden from her somehow.

Dylan cocked an eyebrow.

She shook her head, frustrated.
Nothing
.

“Then I know where he went,” Caleb said steadily. “The demon.

Tan.”

Margred looked at him in surprise. He stood rigid above Whittaker’s

body, his face carved in stone. His right arm hung uselessly from his

shoulder. His left hand clenched at his side.

“Where?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dylan.

Caleb drew a short, sharp breath. “I feel something—I can feel

him—pushing at my brain.” He met Margred’s gaze, his eyes as stark as

death. “You can’t find him because the demon found another host. He’s

in me.”

Twenty-two

"I CANNOT DO IT. THE DEMON’S SPIRIT IS TIED— tangled—with yours.” Maggie’s face was white as bone. Her voice shook. “I

cannot separate out the threads to bind him.”

Well, shit
.

282

Caleb stood, absorbing the blow, accepting the truth of her words.

He could feel Tan working within him, spinning along his sinews,

knotting up his will, laying down lines of fire sticky as spider floss and

strong as steel cable.

Maggie’s gaze sought his. Fear swam in her eyes. “There are magic

handlers among our people. Wardens. We could send for one to help

you.”

Caleb swayed on his feet, ignoring the burn in his blood. His brain

felt thick as cotton. The demon inside him snickered and spun, sending

red-hot filaments twining along his nerves, choking out thought and

memory. Like that nasty dwarf thing in one of Lucy’s fairy tales. What

was its name?”

Caleb frowned, struggling to remember, wresting bits and pieces of

himself from the demon’s control.

Rumpelstiltskin
, that was it. The story his sister liked was

Rumpelstiltskin.

“I don’t think we can wait,” he said.

Maggie took his hand. Caleb appreciated her attempt at comfort.

Against the fever rioting inside him, her fingers felt cool and strong. But

how could she bear to touch him, knowing who—what—inhabited his

body?

“Perhaps the prince . . .” Maggie bit her lip. “Conn’s skills are

greater than mine.”

“And he is not so . . . intimately connected with the demon’s host,”

Dylan said.

Maggie growled low in her throat.

“But you could do it,” Caleb said to Maggie. “If this— thing weren’t

inside me.”

“I . . . If I could drive him out, yes. But I don’t have the power.”

“That’s okay,” Caleb said. “I do.”

283

“You?” Dylan’s voice dripped scorn. “You’re human.” Exactly. He

was human. And so he could do one thing Maggie and Dylan couldn’t do.

He could die.

Caleb looked down at his hands, sticking from his wrists at odd

angles like a department store mannequin’s, awkward, alien, not his. Not

wholly his any longer. Grasping the heavy slack of the anchor chain, he

raised it from the deck of the boat.
Don’t think about it. Do it. Do it

before he can stop you
.

Caleb wrapped the chain around his waist.

Comprehension blossomed in Maggie’s eyes. She caught her breath.

“No. Oh, no.”

“I saw you with the dolphins that day,” he said to her. “You have

power in the water.”

“What are you going to do? Drown yourself?” Dylan asked.

“Yes.”
While he still could
. Grimly, Caleb hauled on the chain.

Blood smeared the links. His shoulder was on fire. “He won’t stay to die

with a human host, you said.”

Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “So Margred traps the demon as he escapes?

It might work.”

“I can’t let you die!” The words burst from Maggie.

Her fierceness warmed Caleb. But it didn’t change anything. He was

a soldier, trained to weigh the cost of every action against its outcome. He

had served under a desert sun where the shadows and the choices sprang

in sharp black and white. If he hesitated now, if he failed, Maggie would

die at his hands, and all hell would break loose—literally.

Caleb hitched another loop of chain around his waist, his good hand

yielding reluctantly to his commands like an unfamiliar prosthesis. He

could feel the demon’s will eating through him like worms feasting on a

corpse. What would happen when they were seated in his brain? When

they reached his reached his heart?

284

“There are worse things,” he said evenly, “than death.” He tugged on

the chain, testing it. He wouldn’t escape that. Not underwater, with a

wounded arm. He couldn’t break it either, even with the demon’s

strength.

Caleb took another deep breath, looking around at the bright, flat

water, at his brother, silent on the dock, at Maggie’s pale face and dark,

expressive eyes. Even frightened and exhausted, she was the most

beautiful woman he had even seen. He would have liked to kiss her one

last time.

He didn’t want the demon inside him to touch her. To contaminate

her. He could feel its contagion raging like an infection in his blood,

taking him over, making him into something he hated and feared. He

thought of what Whittaker had done to the selkie Gwyneth and

shuddered.

There are worse things than death
.

Yes. His head throbbed. But he would have liked to live. He would

have wished to spend the rest of his life with her.

“Gwyneth’s pelt is in the sea chest at the foot of Dylan’s bed,” he

told her. “Take it, and be free.”

“Don’t worry,” Dylan said. “I’ll take care of her.”

Bastard
.

Maggie turned on him, eyes flashing. “Coward. Ass. Take care of

your brother.”

“I can’t,” Dylan protested. “He’s right. This is the best way—the

only way—to defeat the demon.”

“You cannot simply let him die.”

“I have no choice.”

At least his brother understood.

Or maybe—the thought bit Caleb like a fly—Dylan was just glad to

get rid of him.

285

Maggie stamped her foot. “When the demon leaves him, you must

bring him up, out of the water.”

“His body.”

“Him,” Maggie insisted. “Save him.”

Caleb shook his head. His vision flickered red at the edges. His skull

felt squeezed. “No. We can’t risk Tan—”

“I will deal with the demon,” Maggie said. “Let your brother do his

part.”

Caleb met his brother’s black, unfathomable gaze. “I need to die.”

“I know.”

“Don’t let him take me again.”

“I swear.”

Caleb nodded, satisfied. Gathering his strength, he shuffled the

length of the boat, dragging his heavy limbs like the chain behind him.

His skin felt close to bursting.

“Caleb!” Maggie’s cry was anguished.

He turned back to look at her. So beautiful. So achingly alive. The

sun beat warm on his head. The air on his lips was salty and cool. For

precious seconds, every sunlit detail— the blue sky, the silvery dock,

Maggie’s hair lifting in the breeze—cut sharp and clear as glass.

He didn’t shirk from what he was about to do any more than he

would shrink from throwing himself on a live grenade to protect his

squad. A man did what he had to do.

Out of instinct.

Out of duty.

Caleb held Maggie’s gaze for one long, last moment.
For love
.

286

But he had to act now, while he still could. Before his body wasn’t

his to command, before the demon took him over, before the sweetness of

Maggie’s love tempted him past the limits of his strength.

“I love you,” he said.

He stepped off the boat.

And the water closed over his head.

Margred knelt on the planks of the dock, staring down at the gray-green water, trying to distinguish the last release of Caleb’s breath from

the ocean foam. Her heart pounded in her chest, measuring time with

each frantic beat.

Two minutes. Three.
Agony
.

How long could he hold his breath underwater?

How long could he survive with his body wracked by a demon and

his heart pumping his oxygen-bearing blood into the sea?

She could not bear it. She jumped to her feet. “Now. Bring him up

now.”

“Steady,” Dylan murmured.

Her lips pulled back from her teeth. “This is not working. Bring him

up.”

Dylan raised one eyebrow. “And waste his sacrifice? No.”

She paced the rough boards, straining her senses, casting for a hint of

Caleb’s presence. She could feel the demon raging beneath the surface,

incandescent with hate, blazing with frustration. Beside that outpouring

of elemental energy, Caleb’s life force was a pale flicker, a tarnished

thread stretched almost to breaking point.

He was dying.

Alone.

287

While she hovered like a vulture above the surface, waiting for his

body to shut down so she could bind the demon’s escaping spirit.

She twisted her hands together. The reserves in Caleb’s lungs must

be almost exhausted. How long before they were gone completely and his

brain began to die? Another minute? Four?

“
If you love me, you’ve got to trust me. Trust us
.”

But she had never done anything like this before.

They had failed.
She
had failed, and Caleb and both their peoples

would pay the price.

Margred stared at the sun-glazed surface of the ocean, feeling

Caleb’s courage rise to her in tiny bubbles like breath. “
You can do it
.

You have power in the water
.”

She had power in the water . . .

Taking a deep breath, she jumped, fully clothed, into the sea.

The clothes, she realized almost instantly, were a mistake. Her full

skirt wrapped around her legs, impeding her movements as she kicked her

way to the bottom. Her human eyes were not designed to work in the

filtered light. That was all right. She did not need to see.

Like a fish at the end of a line, she swam through cool, murky water

teeming with life, drawn by the glinting thread she recognized as Caleb.

Her nostrils were sealed underwater. She could not smell demon. But she

felt the elemental’s presence like an ache in her sinuses, like ash in her

throat. His menace breathed like a beast in the darkness beneath her,

baleful, hungry, huge.

Margred shivered, flailing her thin, weak human legs, her long, pale