Page 20 of Bewitched By the Sea Monster
“Then I’ll leave ye be now.” The man swiped a hand over his chin. “Yer in good hands, eh?”
“Very. Thank you. So very much. And I’m sorry, I was super rude, I never even asked for your name.”
He tipped his head with a slow, gentle smile. “Caleb,” he said.
“Caleb.” I rolled it over on my tongue. “Thank you.For the magic peppermint oil.” I tapped my nose. “And the company.”
“My pleasure, lassie.” He turned and prowled along the deck, watching the gaggle of people hanging over the rail with a concentrated knit in his brow.
“Babe!” Jackson jogged the last few feet and plopped onto the bench beside me. “Looks like I wasted my time trying to find help, huh? Help found you, but…”He clapped a hand to my thigh—and his fingers werefrigid.Goodness. The cold stabbed through my jeans.
I chaffed at his knuckles, warming them.
“I saw the Loch Ness Monster! Or its shadow, anyway. I was in the perfectspot and watched it pass right under the ship. It washuge. E-nor-mous.” Jackson was almost breathless with excitement.
And I was breathless too. Withnotexcitement. “How big?”
“Easily bigger than this ship.”
I gulped.
“And some of the guys over there were talking, and—” Jackson stopped and scowled when the little boy, excreting clouds of disappointment over being unable to see over the railing and having his pleas to be picked up ignored by his parents, began howling. “What a fucking brat,” Jackson grumbled.
“He wants to see the monster too,” I said. “But his legs are too little, and his parents were shutting him out. It’s sad.”
“They’re not ignoring him now though, huh?”
As the little boy bunched his hands into fists and worked his gaping mouth around the torrent of emotion spewing out of him, his parents had finally turned to him. But rather than offering to lift him up so he could see, they scolded him, which only made him cry harder.
My heart thrashed against my chest, begging me to go to the boy and lift him over the railing so he could see. To dosomethingto assuage his distress. My hands fidgeted.
Jackson heaved a hearty breath and clasped his fingers over my knuckles, stilling them. “Should we move you somewhere quieter?”
“I’m fine, Jackson.” I shifted, tucking my feet up onto the bench and prying my hands loose so I could curl against his side.
“Are you stillnot feeling better?” Jackson asked.
No.
The nausea had passed, as had some of the panic. But the boy’s explosive unhappiness was fueling my own distress, and a strange, wriggling emotion had begun coiling in my gut. I was afraid to move, lest my uproarious stomach start heaving again.
So I pressed my face into Jackson’s neck, where it was warm and safe, and closed my eyes, mumbling. “I am better. Honest, Jackson. I’m just tired.”
He exhaled and leaned back, letting me snuggle into him.
But that odd feeling kept writhing and twisting around my heart in a wild, painful dance.
And I suddenly,desperately,wanted to go home.
“Welcome to Niverwick Isle!Where magic, monsters, and marvel await!”
That welcome spiel was spokenby a cat.
As I shuffled with the other tourists down a long, bedraggled dock, Isworethe bouts of repeated vomiting had done me in. Rendered me so dehydrated, so woozy, that I’d seen the bell-shaped cat shadow at the end of the dock and had a random blip of a thought (That is the cutest pudge cat I’ve ever seen. And it’swaitingfor us. Maybe that’s the guest services attendant Caleb said would meet us.)that my brain tried to turn into reality.
Cats didn’t talk. Not even on magic islands.Right?
Fog curled lazily around us, forming a thick, smoggy veil that was almost impossible to see through. The people at the front of our group, a mere six or so feet away, had turned into hazy smudge blobs, and there seemed to be nothing beyond the eroded surface of the dock—nothing but a wall of white, broken only by the little bell-shaped shadow.
