Read Chapter 13: The Pull of the Tide

The sealskin coat hung in the air between them like a held breath, dark and slick, catching the thin grey light that bled through the cave mouth. Tam held it with both hands, fingers buried deep in the pelt, and Isla watched the change move through him—not a physical shift, not yet, but something in his posture, his stillness. The way a man stands when he has finally remembered his name.

"Tam." Her voice cracked on the syllable. "You don't have to do this."

He looked at her, and for a moment he was the man she had pulled from the surf—bewildered, afraid, entirely human. Then his gaze dropped to the coat in his hands, and something else surfaced. A longing so old and deep it had no face.

"I heard them," he said quietly. "Down there. In the water. Calling."

"There's nothing calling. It's the wind in the kelp, the—"

"It's my mother." He said it simply, without drama. "I remember her voice now. She sang to me when I was small. Before the net. Before the woman." His jaw tightened. "I've been away too long."

He turned toward the cave mouth, and the sea beyond it lay black and patient, waiting. Isla stepped in front of him, arms out, blocking the path.

"You're Ewan," she said. "Mrs. Kincaid's son. She's been searching for you for ten years. You can't just—"

"I don't know who Ewan is." His voice had taken on a strange timbre, rougher than before, like stones grinding underwater. "I know what I am. What I've always been. The sea is the only true thing I have left."

He moved past her, and the cave walls seemed to lean away from him as he walked. Isla scrambled after him, her boots slipping on wet rock, the roar of the Atlantic filling her ears as they emerged onto the strand.

The tide was coming in hard, fast, driven by the unnatural pull of the full moon that hung invisible behind the clouds. Water rushed over Tam's bare feet as he walked into the shallows, and Isla saw the coat in his hands begin to glisten, to writhe almost, as if it were waking from a long sleep.

"Tam—Ewan—please!" She splashed in after him, cold shock seizing her calves, her thighs. "You threw it away. You chose me. You said—"

"I didn't know what I was saying." He didn't turn. His shoulders were squared against her, toward the deep water. "I didn't know what I was giving up."

The water reached his waist now, and the coat lifted in his hands like a thing alive. Isla could see the transformation beginning at the edges of him—a shimmer along his arms, scales or something like them catching the faint light, and she realized with a sick lurch that he wasn't walking toward the sea.

He was walking *home.*

"Your father," she shouted, and the words came out mangled by the wind. "My father took your skin. He left you trapped, human, for a decade. That debt is mine to carry. You can't hold it against him—"

Tam stopped.

The sea moved around him, dark and muscular, and he turned his head just enough that she could see the profile of his face. The pain there was older than the sea itself.

"I don't hold it against him," he said. "I hold it against me. That I almost forgot what I am."

He raised the coat above his head, ready to pull it down over his body, and Isla screamed his name—both of them, Tam and Ewan, every name she had ever known him by—and hurled herself forward through the surging water.

She caught his arm.

The contact was electric, a shock that ran through her bones and lit up every nerve. Tam jerked as if burned, and the coat slipped from his grip. For a moment it hung in the air between them, impossibly suspended, and Isla saw her father's face, saw the cave, saw the woman in Tam's memory casting her spell with gentle hands and a cruel heart.

Then the sea took it.

The coat struck the water and began to move, sliding away from them like a living creature fleeing capture. Tam lunged after it, but Isla held on, her fingers locked around his wrist, her body straining against his pull.

"Let go," he snarled, but there was no venom in it—only desperation. "Let me go, Isla."

"No."

She put everything into that word. Every night she had sat with him while he woke screaming from dreams he couldn't remember. Every morning she had watched him search the horizon for something he couldn't name. Every silent admission that she had fallen for a man who might not be a man at all.

"You saved that boy," she said, the words tumbling out fast and fierce. "You dove into a storm to pull a stranger from the water. That wasn't a seal's instinct. That was a heart. A human heart."

Tam's hand trembled in hers. The coat had stopped moving now, floating a few yards away, dark against the dark water. Waiting.

"I can't leave her," he said, and she couldn't tell if he meant Mrs. Kincaid, or the woman in his memory, or the sea itself. Then he turned, and his eyes met hers, and she saw the spell break like a wave against rock. "I can't leave *you.*"

He threw the coat.

It arced through the air, heavy and slick, and landed at her feet in the shallows. The moment it left his hands, Tam seemed to collapse inward, the strange shimmer fading from his skin, the distance in his eyes closing until he was just a man again—wet, shivering, exhausted.

But behind him, the sea had turned.

Isla felt it before she saw it: a wrongness in the water, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. The surface, which had been churning with storm-driven waves, went suddenly flat. Perfectly, unnaturally flat, like oil.

Something moved beneath it.

Too large. Too old. A shape that blotted out the pale sand below, sliding past them in a slow, deliberate arc. Tam's face went white, and he grabbed Isla's arm, pulling her back toward the shore.

"It knows," he whispered. "I chose a human over the sea. Now it knows."

The water rippled once, twice, and then the shape was gone, leaving only a deep and terrible silence where the waves had been.

Tam looked at her, and the fear in his eyes was no longer the fear of a man drowning.

It was the fear of a man who had just awakened something that would not let them go.