Page 4 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

1

Jory jerked awake in the darkness of her bedroom. She could smell the ocean. She reached over and turned off the sound machine on her nightstand, which played white noise because the ocean sounds were such a cheap imitation that it made her heart ache.

She reached for the large, stainless-steel water bottle she kept next to her bed and drained it. Less than ten minutes later, Jory was in her car. The sun lurked in the wings beyond the horizon, casting a dim glow over the world around her without offering any meaningful light. She drove down the empty streets, to the road that led to Cape Flattery on the Makah Reservation.

Before long, her feet were on the trail, the ground soft beneath her boots and the air thick around her. The boots were a special find from a yard sale in Maine a few years back. A woman had bought them to hike the Appalachian Trail with her husband, who passed away suddenly days before their scheduled departure. In her grief, she had kept them in her closet for a few years before purging everything to move to Canada. Jory had paid double what the woman had asked for them—something she never did—and assured her that she would wear them on adventures.

The boots had a story, like all of the treasures Jory collected, but today they felt heavy. Her coat felt like a straitjacket, and her other clothes too tight. They weren’t, but she had an itchy feeling that she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Knowing it was too early for tourists to be out on the trail, she took her clothes off, folding them carefully and placing them in a hollowed, fallen tree. She would return for them later. The chilly morning air raised goosebumps on her naked body. The forest floor was soft beneath her feet.

The ravens flew overhead, here at the end of the world to which they had flown. The Quileute called them Báyak. She was still teaching her mouth to say the Makah word for raven, which began with a juicy-feeling click on the inside of the cheek before the sounds shifted and rolled over the tongue and through the lips softly. Nearly a crooning sound.

Jory imagined the ravens enjoyed that crooning, soft name for themselves better than the corvo of Portuguese or kruk of Polish. They seemed their most at home here amongst the towering trees at the edge of a continent. Their glossy black wings flapped overhead as they cried out in the mist.

She came to the trail’s end. Cape Flattery was the northwesternmost point of the continental United States, and as she looked over the dizzying height, she saw sea lions on the rocks below and gray whales slipping in and out of the water like needles through a net.

Jory stood at the precipice, breathing in the salt of the air that blew her black hair behind her like a banner. She gripped the handrail with cold fingers, and the memory of her father came back to her.

“He will hurt you. He will keep you from us. He will bring about your misery.”

A sob escaped her lips as she listened to water crashing against the cliffs below. The sea lions barked, the whales blew their spray. The gulls cried, and she cried with them, desperately homesick and miserably lonely at the same time.

“Fate brought me to him,” she had said. Jory shook her head as she remembered, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

“Come back,” her father had said.

She would. For just a moment. Not home to her family, but home to the sea, to feel the cold surf against her skin, the thick, heavy water surrounding her. It would be cold in a way it never had been with her sealskin, but it was better than nothing.

Sixty years at most, she’d said while her father had looked at her sadly. A blink, she had said. He had wept.

Instead, it had been lifetimes. Lifetimes of struggling and fighting, of fleeing and never knowing how long she’d be able to stay in one place. Never putting down roots. A lifetime of never having a real home, never feeling safe. It had only been in the last fifty years that she’d been able to settle in any kind of comfort or safety.

She had been so sad. So damned sad for so damned long, to the point that sometimes her grief felt like a sealskin in its own right — heavy and thick and slick on her back. She carried her grief where she no longer carried her skin. Because it was gone.

And there was the biggest grief of all. She had lost everything for love. And shehadloved him. Desperately. Eternally. She had lost him, too. An eternity without him was painful, but to have lost her sealskin along with her love? Her family? To be trapped immortally in this human body, cut off from home and family? Fromsafety? It was unbearable.

Whoever had attacked them was long dead by now. Lifetimes dead. She’d never find them, but it was always possible that her sealskin, the ultimate treasure, would end up in an estate sale someday. Or in a thrift shop. With some family legend about an uncle who hunted seals once upon a time in the cold, northern seas. She never stopped searching for it. What did she have but time?

But sometimes—sometimes the grief was too much to carry. That was when she needed to submerge herself in all that she’d lost. She climbed over the railing, her toes gripping the rocks. The sounds of the forest waking grew louder and the rising light through the clouds made the gray skies look luminous.

Like Callum’s eyes.

With a deep breath, Jory closed her eyes, let go of the railing, and leaped into the air, her body angling downward like a blade, plunging toward her target with the sharpness and speed of a thrown dagger. And as she sliced through the shining surface of the water, as the muffled roar of the endless ocean filled her ears, she heard his voice.

“He has hurt you. He has kept you from us. Come back.”

She followed the light, her arms and legs kicking strongly and with all the knowledge and muscle memory of millennia. She broke through the surface and looked around, at the sea lions, at the whales, at the gulls.

And she answered her father. “Soon.”

2

Callum MacLeod sat behind the immaculate, polished wood desk in a dark office with deep, hunter-green walls and heavy drapery fabrics. He occupied a three-story Greek Revival building on Ellis Square and had paid the historical registry a small fortune to allow what he had paid architects and engineers even more money to execute.

Because Callum had not retained the ornate foyer or drawing room or formal dining room or sitting room or anything at all, really, other than the office where he was currently brooding. Instead, the heavy front door opened to reveal a huge, open space with a large, semi-circular bar flanking the grand staircase in the center, which led up to the open gallery VIP areas on the second floor. The structural engineers had told him he was asking too much. He’d told them that it was his job to tell them what he wanted and their job to figure out how to do it. Money was no object.

The third floor, however, remained sectioned off into rooms as it had been originally. One for his office. Two others merged for a large conference room. A small conference room. He’d imagined the third floor of Sanguine functioning as a safe place for people like him to do business. People who needed to have their meetings in the dark of night. In fact, one such meeting was happening at that very moment between two local vampire businesses hoping to expand their partnership.