Page 1 of Fated to the Fang

1

AVERY

Ipark the rental car at the overlook above the north beach of Crimson Harbor and step out with my binoculars already in hand, the engine still ticking behind me. The grant brochure promised wet rust cliffs, white clapboard, weathered shingles, and masts swaying in the working harbor below. It did not mention the haul-out rocks sitting empty at low tide.

I lower the binoculars, and raise them again. I've spent eight summers reading rocks like these. This kind means seals. Harbor seals haul out in late afternoon light to thermoregulate, dozens of them usually drape across the granite like spilled cargo. I count the flat shelves and sheltered lee side, and find nothing but cormorants and a single oystercatcher picking the wrack line. No seals. No fresh scat on the rocks. No smell of them on the wind, just salt and diesel and the iodine tang of drying kelp. I make a note in my field book, photograph the rocks with a timestamp, and drive into town.

Harbor House Bed and Breakfast sits two streets up from the docks, a blue Victorian with window boxes and a porch swing. A woman comes out before I've finished pulling my first case from the trunk—silver-blonde hair, a cardigan the color of marigolds, green eyes flicking my gear.

"You'll be Dr. Quinn." She says it warmly, already reaching for my smaller bag. "I'm Mabel Wren. I put you in the harbor-facing corner room. Figured a scientist would want to see the water."

"Avery's fine. And yes—thank you." I keep hold of the hard case myself; it has my sample kit, and I don't let anyone touch that. "I appreciate you taking a booking this close to festival week. It's only twelve weeks. My grant runs through the summer"

"Oh, we've got the room." She leads me up the porch steps. "Whale season's about to bring folks through. Give it a few days and this town won't have an empty room left. Folks call it the summer festival, but spring still keeps its teeth in the harbor until the fireworks start."

"The seasonal workers, you mean?" I shift the case to my other hand. "I read the cannery and the charter outfits staff up before summer officially starts. I was half worried I wouldn't find a room at all."

Mabel's hand pauses on the door. I catch the pause. "Some of them go home early," she says. "Some years more than others." Then her warmth returns. "You take whatever shelf in the kitchen you need for your samples. I've had researchers before. I know your lot live out of coolers."

I want to follow the thread—more than others—but she's already telling me about breakfast hours and the trick to the upstairs radiator, so I let it go for now. Daylight is the resource I can't replace. I drop my bags in a bright room that smells of lavender and old wood, leave the suitcase zipped, and catch myself in the mirror by the door. My chestnut braid has already frayed from the harbor damp, sun-browned skin wind-flushed from the drive, ocean-blue eyes too awake for how little sleep I got. Fine. I came here to look at water, not myself. I grab my kit and head back out.

The Harbor Café sits where the main street bends toward the docks. I go in for coffee and local talk. The woman behind the counter is maybe my age, freckled, with auburn curls escaping a knot at the back of her head.

"You're new," she says, delighted, like new is the best thing that's happened all week. "Tourist or trouble?"

"Marine biologist."

"Same thing, around here." She grins and sticks out a hand. "Nora Whitlock. What can I get the marine biologist?"

Nora tells me the muffins are yesterday's and the scones are real. I mention Oregon, the twelve-week survey, and academic per diems. She laughs, slides over an extra napkin, and says, "You'll need this town. It gets on everything."

"I was up at the north beach. The ledges are completely empty. Any idea where the harbor seals went?" I ask.

Two men at the window table stop talking, and an older woman lifts her head from a newspaper. Nora sets my cup down with a little more care than it needs.

"They've been thin this year," she says.

"Thin, or gone? Because I counted zero."

"Thin." One of the window men says it without turning around. "Better ask down at the—" He stops. The other man says something low, and the first one shrugs and returns to his coffee.

"Folks have noticed," Nora says, her voice careful now. "Nobody really knows. Could be the water warming, could be they moved down the coast." She wipes the counter. "You'd know better than us. You're the scientist."

I don't push. But every half-answer is its own kind of data, and I've collected three of them inside fifteen minutes.

I take my coffee and follow the road down to the south beach while there's still light. I find it twenty minutes later, below the tide line where the rocks give way to dark sand.

A young harbor seal lies past the high-water mark, its silver-gray coat still good. Nothing has fed on it. Gulls should have picked it apart. I pull a glove over the pale band where my ring used to sit, turn the head gently, and find the second wrong thing: two punctures at the throat, clean and paired, evenly spaced, deeper than they are wide. It can't be a propeller, or a shark, they would tear. Around the wounds the skin is filmed with a grayish residue, faintly iridescent.

I scrape the residue into a vial. It clings to the swab, beading instead of dissolving. A drop of seawater hits the sample, and the film darkens near black before I recap it. I have no explanation. I have numerous summers of necropsies and I have never seen a wound do this, and I write that down: no working hypothesis.

I glance up to see a figure on the cliff above the beach. A tall, dark figure, dressed in a peculiar way. I catch a glimpse of dark hair and the light highlights silver at the temples. His features and stance tell me it's a man. He isn't walking, he's perfectly still, watching—not the sunset, not the water. The seal. Me. I stare back and he doesn't look away. I bag my samples, turn from his stare, and start back up the path.

Mabel is on the porch when I return. I describe him without giving myself time to make it sound ordinary: the cliff, the stillness, the dark hair.

"That'll be Dorian Valek," she says, and the name comes out carefully, the same way the men in the café had stopped at a half-sentence. "He stays up there in the old house above the cliffs. He's not ‘summer crowd' my dear." She stops there and holds the door. "Have you eaten?"

"No, but I will soon."