Page 18 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

Jory didn’t even finish the email before she clicked over to her travel app and looked for flights. If she left within the hour, she could make the afternoon flight from Seattle to Albuquerque and then rent a car to drive the remaining hour to Santa Fe. She booked the ticket before clicking back to her texts.

I love you, Jory.

I’m here for you.

Whatever you need that to look like.

I love you too. I’m headed to New Mexico today for an estate sale.

Tell that big bear of yours to take care of you while I’m gone.

She tossed her phone onto the bed and walked to her bathroom. She turned on the shower and stepped into the hot spray, feeling it seeping into her hair, into her pores. She turned and opened her mouth, letting the water fall against her tongue. She swallowed it down as it beat against her face and chest.

She hated the desert. Nowhere on earth felt more foreign to her. But at the moment, the idea of a desert felt like heaven. No reminders of the sea that she had lost, the love that she had lost. She would be landlocked. Just like she was landlocked without her sealskin. She might as well make it literal.

Besides, she never dreamed in the desert. It was like her brain needed proximity to water to play. In the desert, her sleep was more like a coma. She welcomed that idea. She would buy treasures. She would drink gallons of water. She would sleep like the dead. And she would forget the memory of Callum MacLeod’s tormented face staring at her as if she’d mortally wounded him, as if staring at her alone would keep her with him.

It hadn’t then.

It wouldn’t now.

8

Callum’s eyes flew open and he leapt off the bed, landing beside it in a naked crouch in the pitch darkness. But just because there was no light didn’t mean he couldn’t see—a small reward for the price he had paid over and over and over for his immortality. It all came back to him quickly. The wrought-iron bed, the quilt, the desk and rolling chair. Magda’s cabin. He went to his jacket, which he’d carefully draped over the back of the chair, and saw on his phone that it was six o’clock in the evening. He had slept fourteen hours.

When had he last slept more than a handful of hours at a time? When had he last slept without computer monitors and tablets at the ready, checking on business and keeping track of responsibilities throughout the day when he was meant to be resting? He sat in the armchair. The faux leather squeaked under his naked weight, and he braced his elbows on his knees, hands clasped around his phone as he looked up sunset times.

According to the internet, the sun had set a half hour ago. His email notification showed one hundred and fifty unread. He had sixty-one text messages and eight missed calls. Ordinarily, those little red bolded numbers would have made his skin feel as if it was crawling. He would have felt a sudden burst of adrenaline—or whatever coursed through his veins now—and plunged headfirst into clearing them.

But he didn’t.

For the longest time, for as long as he could remember, his mission had been simple: grow the businesses. It had made him a wealthy man, but more importantly, it had kept countless creatures like him off of the necks of unsuspecting Timber dates or people wandering in dark alleys. His clubs, which had started in the Middle Ages, more like brothels than anything, became salons in the seventeenth century and then slowly morphed into speakeasies and then swanky nightclubs.

And the mission still existed. It mattered. But it was a hazy peripheral at this precise moment while his eyes were laser-focused on the vision of a tall ochre-skinned siren with wild black hair.

He opened his text messages and created a new thread for his assistant, Penny, and all of his club and business managers.

“I’m away on business. You know what to do. Send me a report at the end of the week, but in the meantime, I’ll only be taking calls from Penny. If you need me, reach out to her.”

There was a flurry of activity as three dots appeared on the screen. No doubt dozens of thumbs were moving in unison all over the country and a few internationally, but he clicked over to his email and set up an out-of-office reply that said mostly the same thing.

Then he thumbed back to his texts and sent one to Penny.

“I’m finally taking your advice. Sorry for the extra work you’ll be taking on. Hire an assistant. You’re getting a raise, effective immediately. I’ll send the number to Davis. And for God’s sake, finally listen to me and take that rust bucket of yours into Jacobsen’s and pick up the car I bought for you months ago. Don’t be an arse. Or at least be a safe arse.”

His lips twitched with the beginning of a smile.

“You’re a lifesaver, Penny.”

With that, Callum put his vibrating phone face down on the desk and reclined back in the chair, relishing the dark coolness of the room. He rested his laced fingers on his belly and stared at the ceiling. Penny had been gently nagging him to take a vacation for years now. He had always brushed her off. Too much to do. He made her take a vacation, though. Multiple, in fact. Last year, he’d sent her and her fiancée, Marisol, on an Alaskan cruise because Penny was fascinated by bears. One of the adventure packages had been a bear-watching excursion, and Penny had come back to work with three hundred pictures and a souvenir T-shirt for Callum, which he had never worn but had carefully folded in one of his drawers just the same.

Penny was the best assistant, and he’d never be able to replace her in a million years. He’d plucked her out of one of his other clubs a few years back. She’d applied for a job as a bar manager because she needed work that was at night, all night, so she could spend her days with her vampire fiancée who was a night shift nurse at the hospital. He’d watched her manage the bar for a solid week before offering her the job as his assistant, and she’d been giving him hell ever since.

His phone rang, and he lifted it to see Penny’s name on the screen. He answered, and before he could say hello, Penny was charging ahead.

“First of all, I said you couldrecommenda car. Not that you could buy us a $90,000 SUV. Second of all, I expect pictures.”

He smiled. “You said nothing of the sort. Take the car, Penny. Call it an early Christmas gift. You need it for that horse you call a dog.” The horse dog in question was a Great Dane named Beast who took his meals at the kitchen table and loved to try to knock Callum over.