Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

Dylan.
     
    Dylan vaulted from the boat.
     
    She stared at Caleb’s fingers gripping, pressing on the cords and vessels of the demon’s neck. Fighting—still—as the demon battered him with its fists, as his life blood oozed away. She did not feel any braver.
    But she could not let him fight alone. With a sob, she summoned her pathetic store of human courage, gathered up the remnants of her selkie magic.
     
    The demon’s punches slowed. It scratched at Caleb’s hands, trying to pry his fingers from around its throat. Whittaker’s eyes widened and bulged. His body jerked. Shuddered.
     
    Fire shot to the sky, rushing upward from the boat, a geyser of orange and red, a gush of smoke. The reflection flickered in Whittaker’s eyes, as if the fire were in his head, as if he burned from the inside out.
     
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    Margred flung her arms wide, casting her spirit like a net toward the flame. Power shimmered at her fingertips. For a moment, magic hung suspended in the air, sparkling like water droplets.
     
    Dylan raised the gun by its muzzle and wielded it like a club against the back of Whittaker’s head.
     
    As suddenly as that, it was over.
     
    The blaze died. The demon’s presence snuffed out, extinguished. A breeze wandered from the sea, sweet and salt, dispelling the mist of magic. Margred drew her breath on a sob and scrambled over the side, intent on one thing.
     
    Caleb .
     
    He staggered upright. Groaned. Whittaker’s body slumped at his feet.
     
    Relief and pain and tenderness flooded Margred’s chest. Her eyes swam with unfamiliar moisture. She blinked it away, stepping over the body on the deck to reach Caleb’s side. She had to touch him, to reassure herself he was safe.
     
    With trembling fingers, she brushed the hair back from his forehead, stroked the swelling around his eyes and his poor, split lip.
     
    They both winced.
     
    “Are you all right?” she asked.
     
    He captured her fingers and brought her hand to his lips. The gesture made moisture well again in her eyes. “I’m fine. You?”
     
    “He shot you,” she said, her voice rising in indignation.
     
    “Yeah.” Caleb eased his good arm around her waist. “Hurts like a son of a bitch, too. But I’ve had worse.”
     
    She buried her face against his shirt. His arm tightened. She rested against his heart, absorbing his strength, the sheer comfort of his presence. He pressed a kiss to her hair.
     
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    “What did you do?” Dylan demanded.
     
    Caleb spoke over her head to his brother. “Crushed his windpipe.”
     
    “He’s gone.”
     
    Caleb nudged the body on the deck with the toe of his boot. “He didn’t get far.”
     
    “The demon,” Dylan said impatiently. “I can’t sense him. Where is he?”
     
    Alerted by the tone of Dylan’s voice, Margred raised her head from Caleb’s chest, disturbed by the rhythm of his heart, alarmed by a vague awareness of something . . . wrong. She tested the air.
     
    “I do not smell demon,” she said.
     
    Only a tickle at the back of her throat, a sly hint of sulfur on the wind . . .
     
    “That’s good.” Caleb stood solid as a monument, the blood sliding down his arm to stain the deck. “Isn’t it?”
     
    Margred exchanged looks with Dylan, worry worming in her chest.
     
    “Demons are immortal,” Dylan said. “He wouldn’t choose to die with his human host.”
     
    Caleb frowned. “I thought you bound him.”
     
    Margred flushed. “There wasn’t time.”
     
    It sounded like an excuse, even to herself.
     
    Caleb nodded, accepting her rationale.
     
    Dylan was less forgiving. “He didn’t just disappear.”
     
    The creases deepened on Caleb’s forehead. “Why not? Demons don’t have matter, you said.”
     
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    “Not their own,” Margred answered. A creeping sense of wrongness burrowed to her heart. “They borrow the form and substance of others.”
     
    She stepped from the comforting circle of his arm to cast her senses wider, trying to track that disturbing trace of hell-fire clinging to the boat.
    But it was stifled, banked, hidden from her somehow.
     
    Dylan cocked an eyebrow.
     
    She shook her head, frustrated. Nothing .
     
    “Then I know where he went,” Caleb said steadily. “The demon.
    Tan.”
     
    Margred looked at him in surprise. He stood rigid above Whittaker’s body, his face carved in stone. His right arm hung uselessly from his shoulder. His left hand clenched at his side.
     
    “Where?”
     
    “What are you