Page 48 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

The parking lot at La Push was empty, the weather too cold and gray for tourists and the waves all wrong for surfing. Jory locked her car and made her way to the shore. She bent down to loosen her boots and stepped out of them onto the cold sand. She was a masochist, she knew. She could have moved any number of other places and been near the sea. Somewhere tropical and warm, wholly unlike the Orkney Islands. But there had been something about the cold water and the fact that it also rained half the year. She felt the cold sand shifting beneath her feet and sat on a large tree trunk that had been carried out to sea with a storm and then washed back onto shore.

She didn’t have to wait long. Moments later, the air went still and the sea birds went silent as her father emerged from the sea, striding easily through the shallows. She smiled. She saw him often now, making up for the five hundred years that she avoided him after Callum had di—left.

In that immediate aftermath, she’d been ashamed and embarrassed and devastated. Heartbroken. She had known that a single look from her father, one hint at him saying that he had warned her and that every warning had come to pass, would have broken her.

“Daughter,” he said with a smile that crinkled around his eyes.

“Adda,” she said, standing to hug him.

He held her close, resting his chin on the top of her head. “How we have missed you.”

“How is Ama?” Jory asked, feeling her throat get tight. It always did when she thought about the fact that she hadn’t seen her mother in almost a thousand years. It was nothing in the scheme of eternity, a long day, but until Callum came back, it had been a torturous eternity without any notion of ever seeing her again. But things were different now.

“She is well. And you? You look tired.”

“I am tired,” Jory said, swallowing against that tightness.

“You need to sleep more,” he chided, and she couldn’t help but smile.

“You’re right. I do.”

They were quiet, sitting together on the driftwood, watching the sea birds dive at the water. The silence was full of anticipation, but her father had always been patient. He clasped his hands in his lap and waited.

“He’s back.”

She didn’t need to say who. He made a single sound in his throat.

“He has my sealskin.”

At that, her father turned to her, an eyebrow arched high on his forehead. “And yet you sit here with me?”

Jory stared at her feet, curling and flexing her toes in the sand.

“Has he refused to return it to you?”

“No,” she answered quietly.

“I do not understand. Why do you not go and retrieve it? Or send this man to do so? No. Don’t send him. You must go, lest he disappear again. Faithless, feckless fool. He cannot?—”

“Adda,” she whispered, and he fell silent immediately.

He cleared his throat. “Will you retrieve it soon?”

“In a month.” She felt his gaze on the side of her face.

“A month,” he repeated.

“He wants to… see me.”

“He has forfeited the right to see you. He saw you, and heleftyou. He cannot possibly believe himself worthy of a single second of?—”

“Adda,” she hissed, and he was silent once more, though his silence was more mulish this time.

After a long handful of breaths, she said, “He is very different now. And yet he’s exactly the same.”

“Bah,” her father said, waving a hand.

She sucked in a shuddering breath. “I loved him, Adda. I loved him then, and I loved him ever after.”