Page 11 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

Callum nodded his head, and Robbie released Esther. She stumbled into Hank’s waiting arms. He crushed her against his chest and pressed his nose and mouth against the top of her head, inhaling deeply with a slack look of relief.

They whispered to one another, and it made Callum’s heart ache. He remembered laying on a mattress stuffed with heather, whispering with his Marjory in the darkest part of the night, brushing her dark curls away from her face with gentle fingertips.

Esther was touching Hank’s clenched jaw with a careful hand, whispering softly to him, though Callum heard every word. Callum set his jaw. The sooner he did what needed to be done, the sooner he could be gone from this place, from the painful reminder that true love did exist even if his was long gone from the world.

“You’ve been verra hard to get a hold of, Esther,” he said wearily.

“On purpose,” she replied through gritted teeth.

“I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to find you, to make sure you’re safe, lass.”

“You didn’t need to find me. I didn’t do anything wrong,” she snapped at him, and he arched an eyebrow.

“In your opinion, stealing an entire night’s worth of profits isnae wrong? Poisoning two dozen club patrons isnae wrong?”

“I didn’t poison them, and you know it,” she said.

The lion had a natural distrust of the hyena, the seal a distrust of the bear. And he had a similar but no less a hard-learned distrust of witches.

Esther blurted out, “If you really tracked me this far and this long for a few thousand dollars, I’ll pay you back. I’ll sell all my shit, and I’ll pay you back.”

Callum stood slowly from his seat, weary of the entire business. Esther took a step backwards and into Hank’s body. Callum closed that distance. Hank tried to push Esther behind him, but she resisted.

“Just take me, alright?” Esther shrieked. “Leave him alone, and I’ll go with you!”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Callum replied, a slow smile spreading like honey across his face. “I dinnae care for big scenes.”

No doubt she thought he meant to bite her, to kill her. But the truth was that Callum hadn’t killed a human in a very, very long time, and he had no desire to do so now. But he did need to glamour her. And for that, he needed to be close and have her eye contact. He loomed over Esther, and she trembled, staring into his eyes with the stunned terror of a deer about to be struck by a car.

He wondered what she saw in his eyes when the door flew open and a husky voice barked, “If you harm one hair on either of their heads, Callum MacLeod, I’ll gut you like a fish and then stake you to the floor.”

Callum froze.

It wasimpossible.She wasdead. He’d seen her. He’d held her lifeless body in his arms as the waves lapped at his feet, sliding away from them and taking her blood with them.

But as Callum whipped his head around, as he saw her slide out of Robbie’s reach as deftly as if she’d evaporated and reappeared, as he looked into her brilliant, jade-green eyes, he felt as if his heart couldalmoststart beating again, pounding in his chest for the first time in nearly a thousand years. Because inexplicably,impossibly, she washere.

“Marjory. Mo cridhe,” Callum whispered as he beheld a ghost. “Is it really you?”

“No thanks to you, you son of a bitch.”

5

ORKNEY, 1126

The full moon rose over the ocean, a gleaming mirror in an otherwise black night. Marjory sat on the beach. She should have waited back at the cottage. That’s what a normal person would do, whiling away the long hours in the flickering glow of a warm hearth.

But Marjory was not a normal person, which is why she found herself sitting in the damp, cold sand while the wind blew and the waves crashed like thunder over and over. He would be home soon. He’d been gone for more than a month, called away for his weapon of a body and his sword, and she would never,neverget used to that. She would never grow accustomed to the heavy feeling of worry that sat like a stone in her belly.

It was a fairly new emotion. In her life before him, her life in the sea, she hadn’t worried for much. Her father was a god. Her mother was immortal.Shewas immortal. What was there to worry about? Even the battles of men that boiled the sea above her head hadn’t truly worried her. Someone would win, more would lose, and sleep would close all of their eyes eventually regardless.

In her old life, worry had been more of a shifting sort of restlessness, something she felt when she couldn’t find something she had misplaced or wondered which of her sisters she had annoyed. At the time, it had felt like everything. But now, as she sat on the shore because she could not spend one more moment in that cottage waiting for him with a rigid back and a pounding heart, she realized that this—this—was worry.

Because Callum was not immortal. She had been working up the courage to tell him everything, to tell him what she was. But before she did that, she wanted to talk to her father and gain some promises. Her father had fallen in love with her mother, a human, and granted her eternity by his side. Surely he would not deny his favorite daughter the same.

As if she’d summoned him, he stepped from the sea.

She ran to him, leaping into his arms. “Adda,” she breathed into his neck as he held her close, as he’d always done, since she was small.