Sea Witch (30 page)

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?”

251

“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.”

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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