Taken With A Grain Of Salt (Salt Series Book 2)

by Aaron Galvin

  Garrett glanced at the soup in front of him. Am I supposed to eat that?

  “But enough of Nomads and savagery,” August continued. “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’ve asked you here to breakfast with my son and me this glorious morning.”

  “Yeah,” Garrett answered, happy for any excuse that might keep him from eating. He saw Oscar helping himself to bits of everything, with an appetite seemingly large as his father.

  “Excellent,” said August. “You might be unaware of this, but I thought it appalling when I learned my brave boy was bringing home an Orc. Meaning no offense, of course,” he said quickly. “But I saw only complications to my business when the Painted Guard inevitably becomes involved.”

  Garrett thought to cut in and say he still had no idea who or what the Painted Guard was, but August blathered on with little regard that his guest might be confused.

  “Last night, however,” August reached across the table and grabbed hold of Oscar’s shoulder. “My dear son opened my eyes to a new world of possibility. A world where Orc and Selkie might partner that our business might flourish.”

  Why do I get the vibe I don’t like where this is going? Garrett wondered as both father and son looked at him greedily.

  “To think I’d ever have an immortal guarding my cavern.” August dabbed at his eyes. “I admit even I had not thought to dream so large.”

  “Wait…” said Garrett. “What do you mean…immortal?”

  “Ah, yes,” said August. “Technically, you’re right. I suppose you’re not really immortal since you can be killed. Semantics.” August reached for another cake and popped it in his mouth.

  “No, hang on. You said I’m immortal?” Garrett asked.

  August swallowed. “Surely someone must have told you by now.”

  Garrett noted Oscar as surprised as his father.

  “Ooh, I do love this game.” August clapped. “Tell me, Garrett. How old do you think I am?”

  Garrett studied him.

  “Go on, go on,” said August. “Oh, and spare no regard for my feelings, please. Come on…out with it.”

  Garrett shrugged. “Fifty?”

  August squealed. “Quite wrong, of course, but I thank you for the compliment.”

  “Okay,” said Garrett. “So how old are you really then? Fifty-five?”

  August beamed. “Older.”

  “Sixty?”

  August shook his head. “Older,” he said gleefully.

  “No way,” said Garrett. “I know you guys think I’m dumb, but I’m not that dumb. You can’t be more than sixty.”

  “Quite a lot actually,” said August. “Call it five hundred sixty.”

  “Yeah right.”

  August chuckled. “I don’t blame you for not believing. The Ancients know I didn’t either when I was a boy.” He sighed. “In truth, it doesn’t seem that long ago when I discovered the secret of delaying death.”

  This is so stupid. Garrett sat back. “All right, I’ll bite. What’s the secret?”

  “Like you need it.” Oscar scowled at him.

  “Son, please,” said August. “It’s not often I get to tell this story, let alone to a Salt Child. You’ll ruin my breakfast if you give any more away.”

  “Sorry, Father.” Oscar returned to his soup.

  “Now,” said August. “Where were we?”

  Garrett slouched in his chair. “The secret to immortality.”

  “No,” August cautioned. “Not immortality. Beneath this suit, why, I’m only a man. Take it from me, and I should naturally age. Die, right from the start, actually, if the one stripping it from me weren’t a Salt Child. In that way, I suppose one might say all Selkies remain slaves to their suits.” August stroked the sheen of his coat. “Ah, but inside its threads, the only elixir mankind will ever find to truly ward off death.”

  Garrett sat up. “What do you mean?”

  August smiled. “Even as a boy, I was ambitious. My father was a rich man and powerful too. We lived happily for a time in our grand estate in southern England, all the niceties of the times within our reach. We had everything, or so I thought.”

  August frowned. “My father had not yet reached forty when the sickness found him. Some type of pox, I recall. He sent for the brightest physicians in our country and from others too. Each and every one of them brought the same news…nothing could save him.”

  Garrett watched August take another cake in his hands. This one he did not eat, however. Merely kept it in hand and looked at as if it were a mirror to his past.

  “Day after excruciating day, I watched my father wither and weaken whilst meaningless servants flaunted their health about him. For two years, I watched him die, bed-ridden and mad out of his mind. Only a boy, and yet I already feared death unlike my fellows who naively thought the invincibility of youth should last.”

  August plopped the cake into his mouth, hardly chewing before swallowing down the pastry.

  “With father gone, I spent his fortune examining any whisper of a chance to beat death, or at least stave it. So many stories.” August shook his head. “Vampires and werewolves, elves and fairies, all of it bollocks. I had resigned myself to death when a servant girl mentioned a man in her homeland, Ireland, of whom it was said never aged.”

  Garrett saw a dangerous glint in August’s eye and a smirk teasing the corners of his lips.

  “She took me to her village and I met with many of the locals. The elderly spoke in hushed whispers of how the man had been the same age when they were wee girls. I bid them take me to him and to leave us alone. To my surprise, I found him forthcoming with information. He was nearing the end of his time with the suit, you see.” August looked at Garrett for the first time since beginning his story. “But of course you know nothing about that either, do you?”

  “No,” said Garrett. “One of Nomads told me Selkie suits were made with Salt Child blood.”

  “Indeed,” said August. “The inventor implanted a bit of irony in this dark gift to humanity. At the time, I thought it quite silly. Only now do I understand the maker’s inspired genius.”

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  “The old man told me Salt Children never considered us their equals. What good is ruling if you have no one to rule over?” August chuckled. “And what good is a mortal slave to those who know nothing of death? Drybacks should be dead and gone in the blink of a Salt Child’s eye. Hardly any time for us to learn our place and be put to work.”

  Garrett watched August’s belly jiggle as he sighed.

  “No,” said August. “The maker knew better. By mixing a Salt Child’s blood with the skin of this mortal creature.” He tugged at his hood. “The maker extended our life, but did not give us an immortal life to match his own.”

  “Sooo you won’t live forever,” said Garrett.

  “The same question I asked the old man.” August smiled. “He warned the suit staved aging for only a hundred years. After that, the suit loses its power. It must be gifted to a new owner to work its dark enchantment anew.”

  “But why would someone give that up?” Garrett asked.

  “To wear the suit is to become its slave,” said August. “Most are happy to shed the yoke after a lifetime of servitude in the realm beneath the waves.”

  “Servitude?”

  “Aye. Who else to wait on Salt Children? Fetch their food and wine. Clean their homes and build their cities. All this and more the old man, Conroy,” August hesitated. “Funny that I still recall his name after all these years.” August shook off the memory. “He had been press-ganged by a pod of Orcinians to carry out the will of the royal families. After years of Salt slavery, he somehow managed to escape, though I never did tease the story of how out of him. Too busy staring at his coat.”

  Garrett watched August reach for another of the cakes. Unlike before, the owner of Crayfish Cavern didn’t plop the pastry into his mouth. This one he held in his hand, eyes widening as he stared on its rich frosting.


  “Conroy told me he had tired of the Salt life,” said August. “Had come ashore and started a new family. Still, he knew to remove the coat himself would surely kill him and so his Selkie suit continued its magic. It kept him alive while he watched his family pass on. He begged me then to kill him and burn his suit after.” August’s eyes narrowed. “Even as I told him I would, I knew he recognized it for a lie. He warned me immortality was a curse, but what did I care? I had witnessed the ones I loved suffer and die. I had no wish to follow that path.”

  Oscar slapped the table, surprising Garrett. “And so you killed him! Didn’t you, Father?”

  “Aye,” said August. “I granted that one request. His suit I kept. I donned it quickly and made for the water. Entered those frigid waters and changed for the first time. At first, there was only dark. The old man had tricked me, I thought. Then I heard.”

  Garrett heard a new energy in August’s voice and he thought back to the one in his own head, the Orca’s. How the oceans sang to him when first he changed.

  “I lost myself in the swimming. Soon I ventured further out and deeper.” August shook his head. “Foolish. I had forgotten all Conroy had said to me. Soon, I found myself enslaved by the same Salt Children he warned me against.”

  “You were a slave?” Garrett asked.

  “Aye, twice actually. The first time I escaped with several others.” August’s lip curled. “But there was a traitor in our midst. A group of catchers found him and teased our whereabouts from him before his death. They captured the rest of us easily, and back into slavery I went.”

  “But you escaped again,” said Oscar proudly.

  “Aye,” August continued. “And the second time I was not so naïve as those I ran with.”

  “Father killed them,” said Oscar.

  Garrett looked on August with new understanding.

  “Aye,” said August. “I did what was necessary. My time in Conroy’s suit wore thin and I knew I must procure a new one.”

  Oookay. Garrett squirmed. I’m sitting with a serial killer and his son.

  “And it was then, taking their suits from them, I learned the most important lesson of all.”

  “Wh-what?” Garrett hesitated to ask.

  “That I was capable of much and more,” said August. “Tell me something, Garrett. You wish to go home, yes?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “Would you kill to go home?”

  Garrett’s throat felt dry. August had asked the question so easily, as if asking Garrett if he wanted to go to the movies. “N-no. I wouldn’t kill for anything.”

  “Not yet,” said August. “But what if I told you that someday, perhaps soon, you would.”

  Garrett shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  August grinned as he stood and stepped to the edge of the veranda. “Come, Garrett. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Garrett felt a presence behind him, then noticed a host of guards had silently slipped onto the veranda to join them.

  “Come along,” said August. “I have other matters yet to attend this morning.”

  I don’t have a choice. Garrett thought as he stood from the table. He heard his chair screech as a hooded guardian pulled it away and escorted him to the edge.

  “Fenton,” August looked down toward the wooden stage. “As you will.”

  Garrett watched as Fenton led an older man, naked save for a loincloth, onto the stage. A hooded guardian tied off a rope as he joined them and Garrett suddenly knew in his heart what the driftwood beam above the stage would be used for. He choked at seeing a noose thrown over the beam and watched Fenton tease it down over the older man’s neck then tighten it.

  “Ansel,” Fenton’s voice boomed. “Your son, Racer, said the words. By the laws of New Pearlaya, should any slave not return…”

  “Let my loved ones pay the price,” said Ansel.

  Fenton nodded. “Have you any last words?”

  Garrett saw the older man glance up at him and those on the veranda. Their eyes connected for a moment before he looked away.

  Ansel straightened, his gaze fixed on August Collins. “Send me off to Fiddler’s Green. I want to see my boy again.”

  Garrett cried openly at the defiance in the condemned and he wondered how a man could stand so proudly while staring death in the eye.

  “No!” said Garrett as Fenton guided Ansel to the edge and placed a black hood over his head. “What are you doing? Stop!”

  Garrett closed his eyes when Fenton placed his hand to Ansel’s back. A moment later, he heard the sound of the rope snapping tight. Garrett fell to his knees, gasping at the constant creaking. Then he felt a tickle in his ear.

  “The Painted Guard will come to collect you soon,” August whispered. “But I think you want to stay in my cavern and protect me and my son. That’s what you’ll tell them anyway. Won’t you, Orc?”

  Garrett glared up. “N-never.”

  “Oscar…”

  “Aye, Father?”

  “Where did you say Garrett was from again?”

  “Some place called Indiana. Pretty far inland too. Can’t remember the town exactly, although I expect Lenny certainly would. That nipperkin never forgets a thing.”

  “We’ll have to ask him, then,” said August. “After all, I imagine you’ll want your loved ones brought here to join you, won’t you, Garrett?”

  “No…” Garrett thought of his mom. “You can’t…”

  “I can do anything I like,” said August. “Did you not listen to my story? I learned much that day I took my fellows’ coats…that I would do anything to survive and protect my family. That lesson’s served me well in my profession. You’re a bright Orc. Will you learn this lesson too? Or will you make me show you how serious I am?”

  “I…I…”

  “That worthless vermin you saw hanged…little more than krill, to my mind. He did nothing wrong. His boy ran. Desired freedom more than his father’s life.” August leaned closer still. “So what do you think I might do to someone who defied my wishes? Hmm?”

  “Please…”

  August leaned closer. “I will send a crew to bring me your family this very day should you not do as I ask.”

  Garrett threw up.

  “Getting the point, are you?” August asked. “Good. When the Painted Guard arrive to collect you, what are you going to say?”

  Garrett’s head swooned with thoughts of his mother. He broke down, sobbing.

  “What will you tell them?”

  “I-I…”

  “Say the words, Orc,” said August. “Convince me.”

  Garrett looked at August through blurry eyes. “I want to stay…”

  “Excellent.” August clapped Garrett on the shoulder. “See, Oscar? Don’t ever let it be said you can’t teach an Orc a new lesson. Right, then, we have an auction and games to attend. Guards! See this Orc locked away until the Painted Guard arrives. I want him cleaned and fed too. He’s looking a bit peakish.”

  Garrett’s legs felt like jelly as the guards helped him stand. He watched August and Oscar leaving.

  “Oh,” August turned back. “And you will eat, won’t you, Garrett? I noticed you didn’t touch your breakfast. After all, we don’t want the Painted Guard thinking you’ve not been taken care of. I’ll not have it said Crayfish Collins isn’t hospitable.”

  KELLEN

  Kellen languished in the pit. He remained certain if he could transform back into his normal self that he would find a way to unhook the net strung above him. For hours, he had pictured his human face, hands, and body.

  Nothing worked.

  Why can’t I change back? He snorted bubbles.

  His Sea Lion cellmates did little to help. The two he guessed as Edmund and Bryant huddled together at one corner. The smaller one Kellen figured as Marrero had swam near him once. Kellen had lost control of his seal mind and lunged at what he viewed as prey. Marrero hadn’t dared swim back over since.

  Kellen and the seal�
��s mind had fought much of the night for control over their shared body. Even so, he enjoyed allowing the seal mind take over from time to time, if nothing more than because it too hated. Hated that it had been outsmarted by man and couldn’t find a way to loosen the nets. Hated that Kellen kept fighting it back into submission. It lingered at the back of his mind even now.

  Kellen knew it would only be a matter of time before the Leper mind fought free again.

  He glanced up at the nets to focus both their minds on a common enemy. He had tried several times to leap from the pit. Snatch the net in his jaws and let his seal’s weight carry it down. Each attempt left him weaker and scarcely budged the net.

  Must’ve tied it down somehow.

  And so Kellen waited with only his hate and the seal mind to comfort him.

  When do we hunt? The seal endlessly wished to know. When do we eat?

  Soon, Kellen would remind it, picturing Tieran Chelly’s face, imagining what he would do if given half a chance.

  Kellen saw a flicker of light above the nets. Heard whistling.

  “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey. How many of my seadogs are still alive?”

  Tieran. Kellen heard a low rumble in his seal throat at the thought.

  Tieran appeared at the edge, along with a host of hooded guards, and he dipped his torch low toward the pits to light the dark waters. “Well, well. All still alive.” He sighed as he looked on Kellen. “And I half thought you’d take the rest of ‘em out. Might be you don’t have the fight in you after all.”

  Kellen opened his mouth and hissed.

  Tieran grinned. “That’s the spirit. Just in time for the games too. All righ’, lads,” Tieran motioned to the guards. “Auction’s starting soon. Might be a couple there wanna buy some fighters. String ‘em up.”

  Kellen shrunk as the nets fell. He dipped below the water to miss being struck on the head. His seal mind warned to dive deep and swim away. Kellen ignored it and surfaced, peeking his nostrils for a quick breath.

  Guards patrolled either side of the pit, harpoons in hand.

  What are they doing?

  Kellen heard movement in the water and ducked below again.

  Down, Kellen thought to his seal brain. His body responded and he tucked his nose and dove with a quick swish of his hind flippers. Kellen descended to the bottom, but the noise source eluded him. He searched for the three Sea Lions, but did not see or hear them anywhere.