Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

of the fire, releasing another gout of flame, another rush of heat. No way could anybody have survived a jump into or across that inferno.
     
    So he should see a body, right? Remains. The human body didn’t burn well. Too much water. Even cremation left large fragments of bone.
     
    There should have been . . . something.
     
    Instead, the fire burned clear and bright. He sniffed. Even the charred smell he’d noticed when he arrived was mostly gone.
     
    So what the hell had he seen? What the fuck had happened?
     
    The sand was disturbed in all directions.
     
    He didn’t have a prayer of processing the scene until morning.
     
    And he had a naked, bleeding woman on his hands in need of medical attention.
     
    He scanned the fire again, glanced toward the trees. If he was back in Portland, he’d have the combined resources of the city police, the fire department, and an EMS squad to call on. If he was back in Iraq, he’d have the support of his unit.
     
    Or he could be pinned under a smoking wreck with his femur sticking out of his thigh, trying to return enemy fire with an M9 while the nineteen-year-old kid next to him bled out into the dirt.
     
    56
    Sometimes you had to work with what you had.
     
    He reached again for his cell phone and felt Maggie’s presence like a breath on the back of his neck.
     
    stay put just because he’d told her to. (His last words to her three weeks ago— Hurry back —whispered in his head.)
    He turned.
     
    She stood on the beach behind him, her body shining like pearl through his open jacket, the blood on her forehead gleaming black, and her hair a wild glory in the moonlight. A wave of emotion—rage, desire, frustration—rushed him, cramping his gut.
     
    “Why don’t you tell me what happened,” he invited quietly, his eyes on her face.
     
    Her gaze flicked past him to the fire. “You said you would look,”
    she accused.
     
    Hostility was easier to handle than hysterics, but a part of him wished she would cry or cling to him or something— anything that would allow him to comfort her.
     
    “I looked,” he said. “I’ll look again in the morning.”
     
    “The morning will be too late.”
     
    “Maggie . . .” He was jealous, he realized. And appalled that his personal reactions were intruding on what was now police business. “It’s already too late for him.”
     
    Her lips drew back from her teeth. “Not him . You won’t find him. I need what he took from me.”
     
    Caleb rubbed his smarting forearm thoughtfully. She had bitten him.
    Like an animal. She must really want . . . whatever it was.
     
    “And what’s that?”
     
    “In the fire.”
     
    57
    “What did he take, Maggie?”
     
    She stared at him blankly.
     
    Shock, he thought. He’d seen it before, in victims huddled at the side of the road after a car accident, in soldiers on stretchers after an enemy attack: the rapid breathing, the dilated pupils, the insistent repetition. She was in shock.
     
    Or concussed.
     
    He felt a quick lurch of concern. He couldn’t rush her with questions like an overzealous rookie conducting his first interview. She needed time and medical attention before he could begin to make sense of what had happened.
     
    What had happened? He had seen—Caleb could have sworn he’d seen—a man jump into a bonfire without leaving a trace behind. How the hell did you make sense of that?
     
    He flipped open his phone.
     
    “What are you doing?” Maggie asked.
     
    “Calling Donna Tomah—our island doctor. You need somebody to check out that bump on your head.”
     
    And do a rape workup, he thought. Deadly anger coiled in his gut.
     
    She put her hand to her head and looked at her fingers as if she’d never seen blood before. Her eyes were dark and dazed.
     
    Caleb’s jaw set. When he found out what had happened, when he found the bastard who did this to her, he’d heave him into the fire himself.
     
    Her pelt was gone.
     
    Stolen.
     
    Burned.
     
    Destroyed .
     
    58
     
    Fear welled thick and cold inside her, smothering her chest. Margred forced herself to breathe. She had survived, she reminded herself. Things could be worse.
     
    She stared at her blood-smeared fingers. How could this be worse?
    Yes, she was alive now, but without her pelt she could never return to the sea. Never return to Sanctuary. Away from the enchantment of the island, she would age. She would live a span of human years and die, never to be reborn.
     
    The fear