Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

talking about?” asked Dylan.
     
    Caleb drew a short, sharp breath. “I feel something—I can feel him—pushing at my brain.” He met Margred’s gaze, his eyes as stark as death. “You can’t find him because the demon found another host. He’s in me.”
     
    Twenty-two
     
    "I CANNOT DO IT. THE DEMON’S SPIRIT IS TIED— tangled—with yours.” Maggie’s face was white as bone. Her voice shook. “I cannot separate out the threads to bind him.”
     
    Well, shit .
     
    282
    Caleb stood, absorbing the blow, accepting the truth of her words.
    He could feel Tan working within him, spinning along his sinews, knotting up his will, laying down lines of fire sticky as spider floss and strong as steel cable.
     
    Maggie’s gaze sought his. Fear swam in her eyes. “There are magic handlers among our people. Wardens. We could send for one to help you.”
     
    Caleb swayed on his feet, ignoring the burn in his blood. His brain felt thick as cotton. The demon inside him snickered and spun, sending red-hot filaments twining along his nerves, choking out thought and memory. Like that nasty dwarf thing in one of Lucy’s fairy tales. What was its name?”
     
    Caleb frowned, struggling to remember, wresting bits and pieces of himself from the demon’s control.
     
    Rumpelstiltskin , that was it. The story his sister liked was Rumpelstiltskin.
     
    “I don’t think we can wait,” he said.
     
    Maggie took his hand. Caleb appreciated her attempt at comfort.
    Against the fever rioting inside him, her fingers felt cool and strong. But how could she bear to touch him, knowing who—what—inhabited his body?
     
    “Perhaps the prince . . .” Maggie bit her lip. “Conn’s skills are greater than mine.”
     
    “And he is not so . . . intimately connected with the demon’s host,”
    Dylan said.
     
    Maggie growled low in her throat.
     
    “But you could do it,” Caleb said to Maggie. “If this— thing weren’t inside me.”
     
    “I . . . If I could drive him out, yes. But I don’t have the power.”
     
    “That’s okay,” Caleb said. “I do.”
     
    283
    “You?” Dylan’s voice dripped scorn. “You’re human.” Exactly. He was human. And so he could do one thing Maggie and Dylan couldn’t do.
     
    He could die.
     
    Caleb looked down at his hands, sticking from his wrists at odd angles like a department store mannequin’s, awkward, alien, not his. Not wholly his any longer. Grasping the heavy slack of the anchor chain, he raised it from the deck of the boat. Don’t think about it. Do it. Do it before he can stop you .
     
    Caleb wrapped the chain around his waist.
     
    Comprehension blossomed in Maggie’s eyes. She caught her breath.
    “No. Oh, no.”
     
    “I saw you with the dolphins that day,” he said to her. “You have power in the water.”
     
    “What are you going to do? Drown yourself?” Dylan asked.
     
    “Yes.” While he still could . Grimly, Caleb hauled on the chain.
    Blood smeared the links. His shoulder was on fire. “He won’t stay to die with a human host, you said.”
     
    Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “So Margred traps the demon as he escapes?
    It might work.”
     
    “I can’t let you die!” The words burst from Maggie.
     
    Her fierceness warmed Caleb. But it didn’t change anything. He was a soldier, trained to weigh the cost of every action against its outcome. He had served under a desert sun where the shadows and the choices sprang in sharp black and white. If he hesitated now, if he failed, Maggie would die at his hands, and all hell would break loose—literally.
     
    Caleb hitched another loop of chain around his waist, his good hand yielding reluctantly to his commands like an unfamiliar prosthesis. He could feel the demon’s will eating through him like worms feasting on a corpse. What would happen when they were seated in his brain? When they reached his reached his heart?
     
    284
    “There are worse things,” he said evenly, “than death.” He tugged on the chain, testing it. He wouldn’t escape that. Not underwater, with a wounded arm. He couldn’t break it either, even with the demon’s strength.
     
    Caleb took another deep breath, looking around at the bright, flat water, at his brother, silent on the dock, at Maggie’s pale face and dark, expressive eyes. Even frightened and exhausted, she was the most beautiful woman he had even seen. He would have liked to kiss her one last time.
     
    He didn’t want the demon inside him to touch