Immortal Sea (13 page)

Both, she thought desperately.

“Zack, of course.”

Well, it was half true, wasn’t it? She nudged Morgan out of the way with her hip and opened the freezer door. She needed to get a grip on the situation and herself. “The kids are waiting for their dessert. Why don’t you carry the ice cream out there while I make coffee?”

She thrust the carton at him.

His brows flickered upward. “You trust me alone with your children?”

Not really. But she trusted herself alone with him even less.

“I think you can deal with each other unsupervised for a few minutes,” she said, her tone as dry as his.

She spooned coffee into a paper filter, trying to ignore the pounding in her blood and the trembling of her hands. She was not the kind of woman who quaked with lust. Not usually. Not since Copenhagen.

Maybe stress and deprivation were finally getting to her.

Or maybe Morgan was.

He set the ice cream on the counter and came up behind her, moving silently and too close. “I am not finished. I want you.”

Her breath backed up in her throat.

“First lesson in parenting.” She flipped the switch on the coffeemaker and turned, leading with her elbow. He stepped back, avoiding a jab to his ribs. “What you want doesn’t come first anymore.”

It was a good exit line. She grabbed four bowls and a handful of spoons and beat a retreat toward the dining room and safety.

Emily leaned her head on her wrist, plowing tunnels through her rice and peas.

Zack’s place was empty. Of course. She should have known he’d escape from the table the minute her back was turned.

“Zack!” she called up the stairs. “Ice cream.”

No answer.

“Sulking,” Morgan observed.

“Regrouping,” Liz corrected. “It’s been quite a day.”

For all of them. And it wasn’t over yet.

“Em, would you go upstairs and tell Zack it’s time for dessert?”

Emily’s small face was tense, her gaze fixed on her plate. “He isn’t there.”

She pressed her lips together in annoyance. “Well, wherever he is, can you tell him—”

Emily looked up, her big eyes wide and clouded. “He went out.”

A feeling tickled the back of Liz’s neck like a spider crawling along her hair line. “Out where?”

Emily twisted, looking over her shoulder toward the front door.

“Beneath the wave,” Morgan said.

“What?”

His face was grim. “I will go after him.”

Liz quelled her unease. His urgency was infectious, but there was no point in overreacting. “That’s not necessary. He’s fifteen. It’s still light out. How much trouble can he . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Morgan met her gaze. “Precisely.”

Her heart hammered. “I’ll call his cell phone.”

“Do as you wish. I am going to find him.”

“You can’t. He left because of you.”

Because he was hurting, angry, and confused, questioned by the police and confronted with his biological father. And she’d told him to get a job. She winced.

“You give him too much credit,” Morgan said. “I doubt he is capable of rational thought. He is a young, rebellious male. He runs on instinct.”

“Runs where?” She knelt by her daughter’s chair. “Em, honey, did Zack say anything about where he was going? When he’s coming back?”

Emily’s lip trembled. She shook her head.

Liz strode to the living room and dug in her bag for her phone.

Morgan followed. “I need something that belongs to him. Something he sleeps with or wears next to his skin.”

She lowered the phone from her ear. “Why?”

“You are wasting time.” Morgan’s gaze was cool and implacable. “Get it, please.”

“I’m not going to . . . We don’t need search dogs. Or psychics.” With relief, she heard the connection to Zack’s cell phone go through. But the call switched over instantly to voice mail. Her stomach hollowed.

Emily’s sandals slapped as she ran upstairs. Upset, Liz thought.

She swallowed her worry and anger, struggled to keep her voice calm. “Zack, this is Mom.”

She left a message, flipped her phone shut. She needed to check on Em. But even as she headed for the hall, her daughter reappeared in the entrance to the living room, hugging a pillow to her waist.

“Your brother’s?” Morgan asked.

The little girl nodded.

His smile this time was no cool curve of lips but something warm and genuine. Liz’s heart stuttered in her chest.

“Good girl.” Morgan plucked the pillow from her small hands.

Emily gazed up at him the way she had in the police station, like he was all the Disney princes and Anakin Sky-walker rolled into one.

Liz watched him strip the case from Zack’s pillow, his movements swift and fluid, as if every second counted. “This is ridiculous. We’re on an island. He can’t go anywhere.”

Morgan ignored her, folding the pillowcase, shoving it in a pocket.

Liz set her jaw. “If anyone goes after him, it should be me.”

“Where he has gone, you cannot follow.”

“You know where he is?”

“I have some idea.”

Which was more than she had. At least in Chapel Hill, she’d known Zack’s few friends and his hangouts. Here, she was clueless. Doubts assailed her. She should never have moved them to Maine.

“Then I’ll drive you,” she said.

Zack was her son. Whatever mood had driven him from the house, whatever trouble he found, he was her responsibility.

Morgan stalked to the door. “You stay here.”

“But . . .”

He glanced over his shoulder. “In case he comes back.”

And before she could summon another argument, he was gone.

She kept staring even after the front door closed behind him. She wasn’t Emily’s age anymore. She wasn’t looking for a prince to ride to her rescue, and she’d lost her belief in fairytale endings when Ben died. But inside her flickered the hope that this one time everything would turn out all right. With Morgan’s help. For Zack’s sake.

Even if it meant Morgan was more firmly entrenched in their lives than she’d ever imagined or wanted him to be.

Zachary glanced at his cell phone display, ignoring the blinking message icon. Almost nine, barely past sunset. Man, he couldn’t get over how dark it was here. He could see in the dark since . . . His mind shied from the thought. Well, he could see. Enough to avoid tripping over his feet on the crumbling edge of the road. But the lack of street-lights, headlights, made him feel even more alone.

No city glow stained the horizon. Only red clouds marking where the sun went down and silver clouds veiling the moon. Nothing to do in this hick town but go to the beach—
“Amazing the things one finds underwater,” don’t go there, don’t go there, don’t
—or sit in his room jerking off.

His mouth hung open. He couldn’t get air in his lungs. His chest was hot and tight.

But he didn’t feel like a child. He felt . . . The pressure in his chest built and pushed at his throat like a sob, like a scream.

He walked faster along the broken road to escape it.

Occasional lights pierced the dusk and his solitude, the pale flicker of a TV through a window, the yellow glow of a lamp. Real families secure in their homes, with mothers who didn’t drag you off to Bumfuck, Maine, and tell you to get a job, with fathers who didn’t die or show up sneering out of nowhere.

A screen door creaked and slammed. Something thumped and was dragged rattling down a driveway.

He didn’t want to see anybody. He couldn’t talk to anybody, not with the weight sitting on his chest, cutting off his air. He stopped in the shadow of the trees a few yards away as somebody—a girl—lugged two garbage cans down to the road.

It was her. The girl—his mind fumbled for her name—Stephanie, from Wiley’s Grocery Store. Stephanie Wiley. Her dark red hair was almost black in the twilight, her arms smooth and pale. He could smell her, the salt of her skin, the freshness of her shampoo. Her gum. Inside him something quivered and went still like a cat stalking a bird on the lawn.

He didn’t speak, but maybe he made a sound because her head jerked up.

She whirled toward the road, eyes widened against the dusk. “Who’s . . . Oh.” Her shoulders visibly relaxed. “Zack? It is you, isn’t it? God, you scared me to death.”

He unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth and shuffled forward, no longer a stalker in the shadows, a sleek predator in the grass, but himself again, fifteen and awkward.

Her silver lip ring glinted as she smiled, flipping her hair back over her shoulders. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, just, you know.” He gestured largely. “Out. Walking.”

“You could have made a little noise,” she said. “Next time cough or say hi or something.”

Next time.
His heart swelled. Like she thought he would come by again, like she expected to see him.

Of course she’s going to see you, dickhead.
She couldn’t avoid him if she tried. The entire island population was probably smaller than his old high school.

He cleared his throat. “Hi.”

She cocked her hip, tilted her head. “So, where were you out walking to?”

“Nowhere.” He was going nowhere. In more ways than one.

The porch light flicked on, and the front door opened, revealing a woman’s backlit shape. “Steph, honey? Everything okay?”

“Fine, Ma,” she yelled without turning around.

“What are you doing out there?”

“Just talking to a friend.”

“Well, don’t be long.” The door closed.

“Parents.” Stephanie rolled her eyes. “They worry, you know?”

Guilt needled him as he thought of his unanswered phone, his mother’s strained face as she sat at the foot of his bed.

He swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yeah, I know.”

Brilliant. Girls everywhere threw themselves at his feet because of his deep insights and sparkling conversation.

“It was even worse last summer,” she confided. “Some lunatic was running around the island killing people.”

“Yeah?” he asked, distracted. She was so interesting to look at, her mobile mouth with that silver lip ring, her small, firm breasts.

“Well, one person. A woman from Away was murdered on the beach. Then Regina Barone at the restaurant got attacked by some homeless guy. And after that, somebody broke into the clinic and beat the shit out of her and the doctor.”

“Probably looking for drugs,” Zack said. There. Practically a complete sentence.

“Probably. Anyway, my parents were really freaked.” She stuck her hands into the hip pockets of her jeans, studying him in the dim light. “So . . . You want to sit for a while?”

His tongue felt too big for his mouth. “Sit?” he repeated stupidly.

“Out back.” Her smile flashed like a fish underwater, bright and quick. “We have a swing.”

“That would . . .” He cleared his throat. “That would be good. Great.”

Morgan glided down the stairs and melted into the long twilight of northern summer.

Sex or the sea?

The boy would seek one or the other. He was young, male, finfolk. At dinner he had quivered with too much tension, too much energy, all of it unsatisfied.

He needed relief. That moment of entry into a body of water or a woman, the plunge and rock to completion, the ebbing peace that followed release.

Morgan’s lips curled back from his teeth. It was not only the boy who was frustrated tonight. But his own needs must wait.

Elizabeth’s wry voice came back to him. “
First lesson in parenting. What you want doesn’t come first anymore.
”

He had to find the boy. Zachary.

At the fork in the road, Morgan raised his head, scenting the air. He could smell the fog rolling in from the water, heavy with brine, and the breeze rising through the trees, carrying the scent of spruce and decaying leaves.