Page 2 of Fated to the Fang

I head upstairs, and realize she never once offered an opinion about the man, but disregard it because the vial is the important thing I need to look at.

I place the vial on the windowsill and watch it darken further, and the rocks empty in the dusk below. Tomorrow, I start with the rocks. Then the seal. Then whatever this town is trying not to say.

2

DORIAN

The seal lies where she left it, but the beach has changed since dusk. No gulls. The woman noticed the absence. I know what caused it. Scavengers avoid older hunger when it has marked a place, and this shoreline has been marked.

I crouch beside the carcass. The woman would have ruled out shark, orca, propeller, and scavenger damage. I rule out every living predator this coast admits to having. The two punctures are feeding marks, clean enough to be intentional, careless enough to be a threat.

Gray residue clings along the fur, faintly iridescent in the dark. Part of it has already blackened where seawater touched it. She saw that much. What she could not see is the memory pressure caught beneath the stain, thin and ugly as oil under ice.

My hand hovers above it without touching the wound again. The pressure lifts in fragments: a boot sliding on wet stone, a human breath cut short, the sharp panic of seeing a predator where no predator should have been. The rogue left the echo raw. Untrained, then. Or arrogant. A careful hand would have buried the witness first, fed second, and cleaned the shoreline before the tide could carry proof into town. Carelessness like that always surfaces.

A small square has been cut from the hide near the wound, clean and deliberate. Beside it, the round bite of a vial cap marks the sand. Her work is steady. That's useful, and dangerous, because she will not scare away from the first answer that refuses to fit.

I rise and walk the line of the tide. Her trail leads toward the path she walked. Another does not. It comes down off the rocks to the north, light, almost weightless, the sand barely disturbed where weight should have pressed deep. No human moves like that. The rogue lingered above and dropped to the kill, and somewhere it made a mistake.

I search around revealing a mistake at the base of the cliff: a second set of human prints, heavier than hers, planted and still. Then they change. They scatter, turn, and lose intent. A witness stood here, saw the feeding, and walked away carrying a false calm laid over terror.

Not erased. We can't do that. The Silted Touch buries the moment under false calm and leaves the mind to mistake absence for peace. But buried things rise. Saltwater, harbor bells, whale song, blood on stone, fear at the wrong hour. Any one of them could return the memory whole, and the witness will break under a truth he was brainwashed to forget.

That is what sharpens my anger. The seal is a breach. The witness is a delayed disaster. A disciplined hunter leaves no public pattern, no damaged mind wandering town, no residue for the woman to bottle and label. This one fed in the open and trusted the Touch to clean up appetite. Carelessness like that always surfaces.

Stone shifts behind me. I do not turn.

"How many?" I ask.

"Four since the new moon that we've found." Celeste says. Her voice is low, controlled, carrying none of the disgust I know she feels. "Two seals here. A pair of cormorants in the north cove. There may be more we haven't."

"Spacing?"

"Closer each time. He's growing hungrier, or careless."

"Both." I straighten and watch the gray water. "Cover the bluffs, the coves, the fishing slips, the tourist paths. Quietly. No one moves on him until I say."

"And the woman? The one taking samples."

"She's not to be touched. Not frightened, not followed to her room, not parted from her notes, not handled in any way, shape, or form. If danger moves toward her, remove it. Not her choices. You do not approach her. None of you do."

A pause. "Understood."

"Go."

Celeste goes, silent over the rock, leaving me alone with the light coming up over the breakwater.

I should leave with Celeste, take the trail up through the pines, and put stone walls separating me and the stranger's questions. Instead I remain under the cliff, listening to town wake above me: a truck on the harbor road, rope ticking against a mast, one door closing too hard in the distance. Ordinary sounds. The kind I have spent centuries preserving.

The eastern sky begins to pale, as I watch the sun slowly rise. I hear her come down the path as the sun clears the headland. I draw myself back into the shadow of the cliff and freeze. She returns without hesitation, opens her case, and resumes the work I somehow knew she would not abandon. She does not see a monster's leavings. She sees data, and she means to follow it past every warning this town gives her.

The breeze changes direction, carrying her to me. Salt, and beneath it something warm and living. A recognition hits me, old enough to feel less like desire than warning. I hear her pulse from forty feet off, steady and human, and something in me answers despite every command I give it. I know what the records would call this. I refuse the word. Not attraction. Not curiosity. Something older, rarer, and far more dangerous.

It should be impossible. The bond is nearly extinct. What little survives of it sits in sealed records and old warnings, the kind elders remember only when they want a weapon. If the council learns it woke for a human before she knows, before she chooses, before I can protect her with the old law itself, they will not see wonder. They will see a legal impossibility that needs containing.

She tilts her head, frowns at the wound, and writes something down. She is not mine to steer. Whatever woke in me gives me no claim over her choices, her work, or the truth she is walking toward. So I give her the only protection I can offer without taking anything from her. Distance. I turn up the cliff toward the house, telling myself space and safety are the same.

I know I am wrong before I reach the top. With every step, the pull remains. Not command. Not comfort. A warning I will have to learn how to survive.