Page 10 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

But as the days turned into months and he still had not returned, Jory had no choice but to accept that he had died, either from his wounds or at the hands of the enemy, whoever they were. The loss of him had been devastating. The loss of her sealskin equally so. The loss of both at once had nearly broken her.

Jory stared into the gray eyes on the phone screen, eyes sheknew, once so full of warmth and good humor. They glinted coldly in his harsh face. But if Callum was alive, that meant he hadn’t been killed. And if he hadn’t been killed, it meant that he had…abandonedher.

But he’d taken the skin with him? Did he know? How could he have known?

It had been on the tip of her tongue to tell him for years. She had wanted to tell him what she was,whoshe was. He would never betray her, she swore to herself. But even still every time she tried, she remembered her mother’s warning:“You must never tell a mortal soul. They will take advantage of you. They willstealyou.”

He hadn’t stolen her, but he’d trapped her all the same.

Jory heard her father’s voice.“He will hurt you. He will keep you from us. He will bring about your misery.”Her body went cold.“Never,”she’d said to her father.“He would never hurt me.”

Jory took a deep, shuddering breath. She handed the phone back to Esther, her fingers lingering just a moment before she released it to her friend’s grasp. “I don’t know this man.”

It was true. Because the man she had loved, the man she thought she’d known, didn’t exist. He’d been an apparition. A falsehood. Whoever Callum MacLeod was now, whoever he’d been then, it didn’t matter. Because she’d loved a lie.

Jory stood and turned to leave the office, to return to the stacks of denim and wool that she had so carefully curated for her shop. Her treasures. Before she left, she looked at Esther over her shoulder and said, “But whoever he is, I won’t let him hurt you.”

She walked out into her shop and stood behind the counter, staring out at the bleak afternoon. She looked down and picked up the mother-of-pearl brooch she’d been polishing, gliding her thumb over the iridescent surface. She felt her grief, heavy and familiar in her chest, but in the silence, she could feel it shift and change.

For hundreds of years, she had mourned the loss of her great love. She had mourned her connection to home and her family as well, but it had been worth it. The great loss of her sealskin, her one ticket home, had been worth it because she’d gotten to taste the kind of love they wrote sagas about, the kind of love people only dreamed of. It hadn’t lasted, but she’d had it. She’dheldit, and so it had all been worth it.

But staring at the trinket in her hands, the grief suddenly felt far less like sadness and far more like rage. Because ithadn’tbeen worth it. It had been a lie. All of it. Their life, years together in that cottage by the sea. When he’d stroked his thumbs against her cheeks and told her that she was the beating heart that lived outside of his chest.

It seemed he’d been as talented at acting as he’d been with a sword.

Jory heard a crack and felt a quick snap of pain at the same moment. She looked down and saw the brooch in pieces, crushed in her hands, the jagged edges having sliced her palms and let loose ribbons of deep, red blood. Jory closed her eyes. The brooch had been beautiful, the mother-of-pearl laid over the shape of a gingko leaf. Her regret was sharp at having destroyed such a beautiful piece, forgetting for a moment an inhuman amount of strength that she had become quite adept at masking.

But amidst the pain in her hand and the pain in her chest, dull and ever present, Jory began to feel a spark of something that felt an awful lot like hope. Callum was coming, if he wasn’t already here. He would know where to find the sealskin, and she would make him tell her, no matter what it took. He owed her that.At the very least,he owed her that.

And she would take what she was owed.

4

Callum’s wickedly sharp knife slipped easily between the skin and flesh of the apple in his hands, making a softshrrrrsound. He peeled a thin, continuous ribbon. He sat at Hank Dove’s kitchen table, feeling his host’s loathing radiating toward him in waves. “Host” was, perhaps, generous seeing as how Callum and his men had broken into Hank’s home and were holding him abithostage until Esther MacLaren arrived.

Which she would. Any moment now. Callum would stake every dime he had on that fact. Because she loved Hank, and people did ridiculous, dangerous, ill-advised things for the people they loved.

“I thought vampires couldn’t eat food,” Hank growled.

Callum glanced up, surprised by the statement. Hank was a formidable man, as tall as Callum. He had a thick beard that was just on the kept side of ragged and dark hair that was pulled back into a little bun at the crown of his head. Callum looked back at the apple in his hands, at the juicy, white flesh contrasting starkly against the bright, waxy peel.

Callum chuckled. “You thought right. We cannae eat food. But I picked this habit up when I was a human a verra long time ago. It calms my nerves. Helps me think.”

“Calms your nerves,” Hank repeated, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair, his eyebrows drawn tightly, angrily, together.

Callum lifted a shoulder in an elegant half shrug. He remembered peeling apples for his Marjory. She would bake the apples into tarts and throw the peels to the sea birds. He remembered thinking how wasteful it was, but how he had also never seen a person so breathtakingly beautiful as Marjory when she was by the sea, the long, red ribbons of apple skin trailing from her fingers as she stood in the face of the wind. The last of the peel dropped from the perfectly smooth, perfectly bare apple. The ribbon Callum had made of it lay in a delicate tangle on the tabletop.

Callum held the apple out for Hank, who shook his head tightly. Callum sighed and tossed the apple into the air. Robbie reached out and caught it, and a sharp snap rent the air as he took a bite. The crunching of the apple between Robbie’s teeth was loud in the otherwise silent kitchen. For the first time in a long time, Callum missed food. He couldtastethat apple. He could taste the salty sea air. Salty skin… salty blood.

The door flew open, revealing the witch who had given him nothing but trouble for months. Robbie swept in quickly, grabbing her from behind and holding her against his chest, his hand muffling her scream.

“Easy now,” Robbie said, his mountain twang thick as molasses.

“Get your fucking hands off of her,” Hank barked, hurtling himself to his feet.

It must have felt like everything happened so fast to all of them. Hank had blinked, and there she was. But to Callum, it was like watching an underwater ballet. The moves slow, the next moves telegraphed. He’d heard the car pull onto the street. Smelled Esther getting out of it. Saw all of the tiny muscles in Hank’s face ripple with his anger when he saw her.

Hank took a half step towards Esther and Robbie, toward Callum, and said, “Let her go.”