A Salt Bitter Sea (The Luck Mechanics) by Amy Lane

Author:Amy Lane [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641085748
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2023-08-07T18:30:00+00:00

Tom’s Bench

MILLER WAS only a little disappointed to find himself at the Tom’s bench clearing with a crowd. After breakfast—and Piers had made him eat a sausage muffin in addition to a donut, so he was feeling quite sustained at this point—Helen and Marcus had urged them to go to Tom’s bench in the lull before lunch. It was Monday, and Scout and Lucky usually took it off, but the holiday season was busy enough for both shop owners to need the extra help.

But an hour they could spare.

Otto and Ciaran came with them, and at Scout’s instruction, everybody paused on the sand before they took the path through the island vegetation to the carpet of crabgrass that formed the apron in front of Tom’s bench. The bench sat under a canopy of trees, but the grass faded into sand, so it looked out directly into the sea, facing Charleston, although the mainland wasn’t visible on the horizon. It was as though, Miller thought, the bench looked out into infinity, into all the possibilities, into the hope of forever.

A whimsical thought for a man not used to whimsy, but Miller could feel the clearing calling to him. It hummed, resonating in his stomach and up through his chest, the sort of hum that could push a man over when he was trying not to cry or that drove a person to watch a melancholy movie because there was something healing about the sadness. The sort of hum that was a favorite song, forever marred by a terrible memory.

In the back of his mind, Miller heard an old Killers’ tune, the one about being young and in love, playing on his phone while he and Clary watched their father walk into the gas station convenience store, and his eyes burned with the tears of a wasted moment, a wasted life, of inevitability.

“Miller!” Piers snapped, grabbing his hand. “Miller, breathe!”

Miller consciously sucked in a breath and then another and desperately tried to center himself.

“This place is cold,” he said, and his voice seemed to come from far, far away.

“Larissa, grab his other hand,” Piers ordered. “He’s freezing.”

In a moment, he was surrounded, Piers on one side, Larissa on the other, but the rest of the group—Scout, Lucky, Kayleigh, Otto, and Ciaran—surrounded him too.

Scout met his eyes grimly. “Okay, Miller. I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t come here alone, isn’t it?”

“Guess so,” he said weakly. Already assaulted on all sides with sadness—with grief—he couldn’t believe what he said next. “But I need to go in. God, you all are right. This place is important.”

“Okay, then,” Scout said. “We all join hands—I lead, Kayleigh takes the caboose. We link up into a circle when we all get in. Nobody take action. Nobody. We’re observers here only. We’ll compare notes when we come out. Understood?”

Miller nodded, reassured by Scout’s boot-camp approach. Scout and Kayleigh were some of the most powerful magic wielders in the world—they had to be. Scout beat his father in combat, and from what Marcus and Helen said, that was unheard of.

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