Page 6 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

But she was most valuable for her elixirs.

Esther cooked up potions that went into signature drinks that existed off-menu. He told her they were like the Starbucks secret menu—official drinks sanctioned by the club, but if you didn’t know about them, you wouldn’t know about them. That had satisfied her, and she had made gallons each week for the club.

They made the drinker experience a deep, encompassing sense of euphoria, a lightness of being that made everything sound better, taste better, feel better. Dancing felt like sex. Drinking felt like ecstasy. And having a creature latched onto one’s neck for dear life, their blood pulsing thickly into that creature’s sucking, moaning, worshipful mouth to sustain life for another week of immortality? Transcendent.

The elixirs were so potent that they lived in the blood and gave the vampires that same sense of weightless, lightness of being. Which, after hundreds of years of monotonous existence, could not be priced.

But then Esther had happened upon the salon. She had wandered into the lower level and seen the feedings and gotten it all wrong.

Or perhaps she hadn’t gotten itallwrong, but she hadn’t gotten itrighteither. She had seen the facts—vampires feeding from the human patrons for whom she’d mixed drinks, human beings carried up the back stairs. But what she hadn’t seen was the finesse. The consent. The waivers. The waiting vans with professionals to care for the donors and bring them safely home. She didn’t see that those donors were in better, safer hands than if they had called a rideshare and ended up somewhere they didn’t intend to be.

This was fact. Because nobody on his payroll would dare to cross him. They wouldn’t dare to skim blood off the top or hurt his donors. But Esther couldn’t have known that. She only saw the limp, ecstatic poses of the donors, the ravenous growling of his vampire members. And she did exactly what he worried she’d do.

She ran.

What surprised him, however, was the revenge she took. Esther MacLaren made a dupe elixir. One that looked and tasted exactly the same to a human, but when consumed by a vampire would cause horrible sickness. Vomiting. Headache. Chills and aches. They hadn’t died—they couldn’t die, not like that anyway—but they had, every one, experienced the hell of a superhuman hangover for days.

And then, after rendering his vampire patrons catatonic, she had snuck the humans out the back, split her tips among them, and called them rideshares. She’d finished her shift, cleaned out the till, and run. He should’ve caught her that night, spoken truth to her and shown her the facts, the finesse, and then glamoured her into forgetting it entirely. But he’d had two dozen violently ill vampires on his hands and a PR nightmare looming. By the time he’d figured out what she’d done, she was gone.

Callum had spent the last six months chasing her across the country—sometimes personally, other times via associates he hired to track her. But she always slipped just out of his reach, sliding between his fingers like water. And now, staring out at the dark garden, at the murky shapes of magnolias and the glinting of fairy lights, he felt tired.

He was so goddamn tired of it all. Tired of chasing Esther MacLaren, a broke, thirty-five-year-old witch with an art degree who was nothing to him but a liability. He was tired of barely missing her. Tired of traveling. Tired of smelling magnolias and azaleas and wishing they were heather. Tired of sinking his teeth into throats that tasted like vanilla sugar body lotion and not the salt of the sea, the earthiness of sweat andher.

He was tired of old money and new money and old baggage and older grief. He was tired of missing someone who’d been dead almost as long as he’d been immortal. Tired of wanting her. Tired of trying to fill the gaping hole in his heart with people who might resemble her to an extent but who lacked the bright, watching eyes and almost carnivorous smile.

And he was still hungry, which made it all worse. Because he was going to be forced to taste that body lotion, with its cloying scents of sugar and flowers like azalea and lily and what someone in a lab thought smelled like lavender. Or “Ocean Crush,” which actually smelled far more like cough medicine than the actual sea. He would be forced to press his tongue against a throat and taste those cloying, artificial flavors alongside the tang of blood, sucking long and deep and hard to get it over with as fast as possible.

Because he didn’t want azaleas, and he never had. He wanted heather and bluebells and to drag his tongue up and down the long column of a throat that tasted like earth and sea.

He pushed the call button for his secretary, who had a desk in a nook just outside his office. “Penny.”

“How can I help you, Callum?” Penny asked brightly, her voice coming through the speaker as clearly as if she were sitting next to him.

“I’m hungry,” he said wearily.

“Of course. Do you have a preference? Anyone in particular I should call?”

“Nay,” he replied. “I dinnae care who it is. Just—Penny?”

“Yes?”

“Can you have them wash their neck before they come? I dinnae want them to put anything on.”

“Of course. I’ll have someone up in a jiffy.”

“Thank you, Penny,” he said, thinking about how he should give her a bonus.

She was chipper and helpful and eager to anticipate his needs. And she said things like “in a jiffy,” which were wholesome and made no sense to him at all but amused him anyway for reasons he couldn’t explain. The way the language was the same but the vernacular so different.

Twenty minutes later, Penny knocked on his office door.

“Callum?” she said, easing it open. “I have your donor here.”

“Send them in,” he replied, flipping on the lamp on his desk.

Penny stepped aside and made room for a rangy man of medium height to walk through the door. He was built like an MMA fighter, like someone who had honed their body by getting the shit kicked out of them and then jumped up to do it again. He wore low-slung black jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt with black combat boots only laced halfway. Every inch of visible skin from his jaw to his fingernails was covered in vibrant tattoos.

“Hello,” Callum said, standing to shake his hand. “I’m Callum MacLeod.”