Page 28 of Fated to the Fang

F-9 is stamped into the piling in flaking white paint. The dock number from O's photograph. The tide line is off here too, a dark skirt of wet algae six inches higher than the morning water should reach. Diesel sheens the surface, too new to have spread far. The security lamp hangs dead, its lens smashed inward. Fresh rope burns score the nearest cleat, bright through old salt, and one clean drag mark cuts through the gull mess toward the lower service float.

At the pier's end, I lift my phone and match the angle from O's eleventh frame. The Saltline boat would have passed for someone to step off if the water held still. Or if something made the boat stop.

That's when I hear a sound that doesn't belong: wet, rhythmic, almost tender.

On the lower service float, two figures: a man folded over a woman, face at her throat, one hand cradling the back of her skull. Her eyes—white-rimmed, fixed on nothing. She opens her mouth to scream and he lays two fingers to the inside of her wrist, light, nearly idle, and the scream dies. The panic drains from her face; terror smooths to a drugged calm. Her hand goes slack. She sighs.

I know that sigh. I heard it from a woman with blood at her hairline saying we struck the rocks in a story.

He lifts his head, something dark glossing his mouth, and he moves—the distance between where he was and where he is has no middle. He sets her against a piling with a care that turns my stomach. Two punctures at her throat, paired, already sealing. She blinks at the sky.

"Slipped," she says, to nobody. "On the boards. So stupid."

It's Tracy. Nora's Tracy, who carried my coffee and asked the wrong question at the harbormaster's window. Alive. Wrong, but alive. Her jacket is not the one she vanished in, and there are old bruises at both wrists, yellowing under the new blood.

I must make a sound. His head swings toward me, eyes throwing the lamplight back flat and bright as an animal's. His lips part. The teeth are not human. They're sharp. Long. I should run, but I'm frozen to the spot. It's not human, it's a monster.

He darts for me, but doesn't arrive. Dorian appears, and I never saw him. He has the monster by the neck, the air bending around the speed of it. The monster twists, fast, impossible. Something slams inside a body, and he hits the boards and stays.

"Elder." The word is wet. "I didn't know she was yours. I didn't know the harbor was⁠—"

"You knew." Dorian bellows. "You knew whose tide this is."

He lifts him by the throat, one hand, off his feet, and in the same moment as the monster kicks, I realize that Dorian is the same monster he's holding. The same teeth. The cold. The strength.

He doesn't kill him. Two fingers go to his temple, a word I can't hear, and its body locks as if every nerve has been cut from command. Dorian drops him to the boards. The thing twitches once, conscious, contained, and no longer hunting me.

It all flips over at once. The seal carcasses drained whole. The tourists chanting lies. The skin that never warms, the pulse too slow for any living thing. The headboard split in a fist. Not one lie—a collection of them, load-bearing, and me living inside.

"Avery." He's right before me without time to blink. "Let me get you off this pier. Then everything. I swear it."

"What—" My voice can't ask the question.

"You already know."

"Say it."

"I am a vampire." he says. "Older than most. Older than this town. I should have told you. I know that now⁠—"

Tracy sighs against her piling—a woman who'll wake convinced she tripped, while he'd have let me believe my own version forever. "I was never insane, was I? I touched you. We had sex. How did you reach into people every time I got near the truth? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Protection."

"No. You didn't protect me from monsters, Dorian. You shielded your secret from me."

"I know," he says.

"Don't follow me." I'm already on the gangway. "Get her somewhere safe. You're good at that."

"Avery—"

"I'm not afraid of you." I stop at the chain, and it's even true. "I'm afraid of how long I trusted you. Work out which of those you broke."

I stoop under the chain, eyes forward. If I turn I'll see him not coming after me, and I can't afford what that does.

Mabel meets me in the hall in her robe, and whatever's on my face roots her. She doesn't ask where I've been—just reads the salt and the dead-pier grime on me.

"You went out to the old fuel berth. You've got the look. People come back from that end of the harbor with it, or they don't come back at all. Sixty years I've been here. I can't tell you what's out there. But there is something there, and you've seen it now."