Read Chapter 29: The Blood Secret

The fire in Mrs. Kincaid’s hearth was too hot. Isla sat on the edge of the threadbare armchair, watching Tam watch his mother. The woman’s hands, knobbed with age and years of scrubbing fish off her boat, trembled as she poured tea into three mismatched cups. She had not stopped looking at him since she’d opened her door, since she’d whispered the name *Ewan* against his salt-stiff hair.

“You have his hands,” Mrs. Kincaid said now, setting the pot down with a clatter. “Callum. Your—your father. The same long shape to the fingers.”

Tam lifted his own hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time. Isla had done the same thing once, after her own father had died—searched for him in the mirror, in the turn of her own wrist. It never worked. It only made the grief sit closer.

“Was he a good man?” Tam asked.

Mrs. Kincaid’s laugh was a sob. “He was a *fool*. A handsome, kind, wet-behind-the-ears fool who found a seal-woman on the beach and thought he could keep her.” She pressed her fingers to her lips. “He loved you. Before you were even born, he loved you. But he couldn’t love her the way she needed. He couldn’t go where she had to go.”

Tam’s jaw tightened. “Then she left us.”

“She left *him*. She took you inland.” Mrs. Kincaid shook her head slowly. “I never knew why. I thought… I thought she’d gone back to her own kind, and taken my grandchild with her. I hated her for that. I hated her for thirty years.”

“But she didn’t take me back to the sea,” Tam said. “She cut my pelt. She bound me to land.”

The words landed hard. Isla heard the old woman’s breath catch.

“That’s not what I was told,” Mrs. Kincaid said. “The only story we had was that she vanished, and you vanished with her. Callum searched for months. He died not knowing what happened to his son.”

“How did he die?” Isla asked quietly.

Mrs. Kincaid’s eyes went glassy. “The sea took him too. A squall off the north point, three years after she left. They found his boat overturned. They never found his body.”

Tam sat forward. “He drowned.”

“Aye.”

A long silence stretched, only the crack of the fire and the wind rattling the windowpanes. Isla watched Tam’s face and saw something shifting there—a calculation, a recognition. He had been a fisherman in this life. In the previous ones, who knew? The sea had always been his habitat and his enemy.

“And my mother,” Tam said. “What do you know of *her*? Of what she was?”

Mrs. Kincaid straightened her back, and for a moment Isla saw the formidable woman who had captained a boat single-handed through her husband’s wake. “I know the stories your father told me, drunk and terrified. He said she was beautiful and empty-eyed when she came ashore. He said she carried something with her—a little skin pouch she never let out of her sight. And he said that when she found herself pregnant, she changed.” Mrs. Kincaid paused. “He said she grew frightened. Not of him. Of what she’d made.”

Tam’s hand went to his chest, to the place beneath his shirt where the scar would lie. Isla knew it without having to see it—the raised white line where the knife had cut.

“She used the knife on the night I was born,” Tam said. “I’ve always known that much. It felt like a branding. Like a sentence.”

“Aye. But there’s more to the sentence.” Mrs. Kincaid’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Your father kept a journal. After she left, he wrote down everything she’d told him, trying to make sense of it. I found it in the bottom of his sea-chest, wrapped in oilskin, the year he died.” She looked at Isla. “I’ve never shown it to anyone. I thought it was the grief talking.”

“What did it say?” Isla asked.

Mrs. Kincaid rose, moving to the old dresser in the corner. She pulled open the bottom drawer, shifting papers and wool, and came back with a small leather-bound book, water-stained and cracked. She handed it to Tam, not to Isla. His fingers closed around it like it might dissolve.

“He wrote that she told him she was not the first of her line,” Mrs. Kincaid said. “And not a true seal-woman. She was a *bride of the tide*—a human woman who had been changed, long ago, by a spell her own mother’s mother made. Each generation, one daughter was chosen. The spell let her shift, let her breathe beneath the waves, but it came with a chain.”

Tam opened the journal. The pages were yellowed, the ink faded, but the handwriting was neat and steady. Callum had been a careful man, writing down his fears.

“A chain that binds to blood,” Tam read aloud, his voice rough. “Seven years on land, then the sea calls. And if you do not go, the body tears itself apart.”

Isla’s chest tightened. Seven years. She thought of Tam as she had first known him—open and gentle, a man with no memory and no past. But the past was never gone. It was only waiting.

“The convulsion,” Tam said, closing the book. “I’ve felt it coming. Like a storm building behind my ribs.”

“How long?” Isla asked, hating how her voice cracked.

He met her eyes. “Two months. Maybe less.”

Two months. Twelve weeks. She had known the deadline existed, had sensed its weight in every quiet moment between them, that he was on a clock no one could read. But this was the first time the clock had spoken, had named itself.

“Your mother didn’t cut you as a punishment,” Mrs. Kincaid said softly. “She cut you to save you from the spell. The cut is the release. It’s how a bride of the tide breaks the chain and stays land-bound.”

Tam looked up sharply. “But the cut—I can’t heal my pelt. I can’t return to seal form.”

“No,” Mrs. Kincaid agreed. “The cut severs the transformation. You’re trapped between. You’re human enough to survive on land, but the tide still runs in your blood. The spell is too old to be fully broken by one cut.” She paused. “She did it to make you human, son. To free you from the sea’s claim. But her spell was too strong, or her love was too clumsy. You got half a freedom.”

Isla stared at the old woman. “So the cut made it worse.”

“It made it *different*. He can’t become a seal anymore. But he still carries the sea’s mark, and the seventh year still comes.” Mrs. Kincaid’s eyes filled. “Callum died before he knew. And her—I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if she lives. I only know she gave up her place in the sea to make you. She must have loved him. She must have loved you, to pay that price.”

Tam’s voice was barely audible. “She abandoned me.”

“She *saved* you,” Mrs. Kincaid said. “In the only way she knew how. And it’s still not enough.”

Isla moved without thinking, crossing the rug to sit on the floor beside Tam’s chair, taking his hand. His skin was warm, but beneath it she felt the tremor, the same storm he had just described. In two months—

She cut the thought off before it could finish.

“The journal,” she said, looking at Mrs. Kincaid. “Did Callum write anything else? Any way to undo it. Any mention of a ritual, a place, an object.”

Mrs. Kincaid shook her head. “He died three weeks after writing the last entry. He was going to the north point to look for her.”

Tam went very still. “The north point.”

“Aye.”

His hand tightened on Isla’s. She felt it—a new current running through him. Not fear. Not grief. *Recognition.*

“I know the north point,” he said slowly. “I know it like I know my own breathing. I have dreams of it—a cave under the cliff where the water turns silver.” He looked at Isla. “I always thought it was a memory from this life. But it’s not, is it? It’s older.”

Isla understood. The cave was not in his memory. It was in his *blood*.