Page 20 of Fated to the Fang

"No, Sheriff. I was out there. I heard someone scream. I saw someone on the bow."

The dock changes around that sentence. Not visibly. Not enough for a report.

Dorian steps closer. "Avery."

"There you go," I say. " Saying my name in that voice. That usually means you're about to lie and say I imagined it."

"Not here."

"Then where? Because every place I find evidence becomes not here."

A crewman from the Saltline boat suddenly doubles over near the rail and vomits seawater onto the boards. Not bile. Not breakfast. Seawater. Too much of it. The teenage boy starts crying without sound. Dorian's face goes colder than I've ever seen it.

Greer moves putting himself before the crewman. "Go home, Dr. Quinn."

"No."

"Go home," Dorian says, and this time there is something under it I almost obey before anger saves me.

I look from him, to Greer, to the tourists. "You both know what happened."

Neither of them answers. My phone lights in my pocket. Caleb. I silence it without looking away from Dorian.

Owen touches my elbow. "Ave."

His voice is low, uneasy. When I glance at him, his face is pale behind his glasses.

"I got photos," he says. "Before the harbor mouth."

Dorian hears him. Something in his expression changes, and I realize too late that Owen has just become evidence with a pulse.

I tighten my grip on my field bag. "We're leaving."

I drive back to Harbor House with Owen silent beside me and the samples knocking softly in the cooler behind us. The Cradle Skerry tags are still in my pocket. The Saltline stencil is on O's camera. A boat full of tourists is already being folded into bullshit. I came here to count missing seals. Now I'm counting people lives.

14

DORIAN

The tourist boat gives us too much and not enough. I set Owen's copied frames on Celeste's table. Salt dries at the edges of the paper. The first image shows Cradle Skerry's landing rail, wiped clean in one long strip. The second catches the Saltline tour boat cutting hard toward the harbor mouth. The third is blurred by distance and spray, but the bow holds a shape where no passenger should stand.

Celeste studies it without touching the page. "Face?"

"No."

"Enough for a human?"

"Enough for Avery."

"That is becoming a familiar category."

She moves to the next image. Tourists in yellow waterproof jackets. One crewman down. Three passengers looking back toward the bow, mouths open. The last image is worse because it looks ordinary unless you know what fear does to bodies. Everyone on that deck is turned toward the same empty patch of air.

"They were touched?" Celeste asks.

"Badly."

"How many?"