Page 3 of Fated to the Fang

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AVERY

Ireview the photographs first, because those won't lie or get nervous when I ask follow-up questions. The seal images load on my laptop. I crop in on the throat wounds, two punctures, paired, evenly spaced. The gray residue still on the sill has gone fully black overnight and stopped changing. I photograph it again for the record, label the time, and sit back. I have one carcass, one anomalous sample, and a residue I can't classify without a lab three hundred miles south. That's not a population study. That's a single dead animal and a list of things I can't explain. Biology has taken me as far as it can for today. The rest of what I need is from people, so I head downhill, near the docks.

I walk the floats with my field book and my friendliest face, which I'm aware needs work. A man coiling line on a gillnetter answers two questions and loses interest by the third. Seals? Thinned out. Why? Water's warmer than it used to be. He says it the way you recite a thing you've heard rather than seen.

I try a woman hosing down a deck, a kid sorting totes, two brothers patching a hull. The answers come back sanded smooth. Warm water. Rough tides this spring. Bad luck three seasons running. Seals moved down the coast, everybody knows that apparently. Tourists make more of it than there is. Each explanation is reasonable on its own. Stacked together, they start to sound rehearsed, like a town that decided on a story so it wouldn't have to keep telling different ones.

I keep it professional and write down what they give me. Until I notice the second pattern, the one underneath. When I ask about the coves, conversations find somewhere else to be. When I ask whether any of the early summer crew failed to show this year, a man checks his watch like it owes him money. Missing time, missing workers, certain stretches of water—those are the questions that bring me nothing.

"You won't get far that way."

The voice comes from an old man with a white beard mending a net. His face works into deep weather lines, eyes pale and amused. He doesn't stop his hands.

"Jasper Finch," he says, before I ask. "You're the seal woman. Whole dock knows by now. You ask straight, at least. Most come down here fishing for a postcard."

"Avery Quinn. I'm here on a grant—the seal decline." I crouch to his level, which fishermen seem to respect. "You've been on this water a while."

"Fifty-one years. Retired the boat, not the eyes." He pulls a knot tight. "Ask your real question. The dock's already lost interest in you, which is when the talking gets honest."

I like how direct he is, so I do. "What are people blaming on weather that isn't weather?"

Jasper works the net for a moment before he decides. "Boats come back wrong. Not wrecked per se. Not late from weather either. Just late, and the crew can't tell you why. Whole hours gone out of them. Fella swears he lugged gear at four, next thing he knows it's dark and he's two miles off where he ought to be, and the time in between is just—" he snaps his fingers, soft "—not there."

"Drunk," I offer, testing.

"That's what the young ones say." He fixes me with a look that has no patience in it. "I've fished beside drunks. Drunks remember being drunk. These men come in sober and frightened of their own heads. Not hurt. Not lying. A man lying makes a story. These ones got no story at all, and it scares them worse than a story would."

I'm writing fast now. Missing hours. No intoxication. No injury. Acute disorientation, possible displacement of the vessel. I'm already turning it into something I can test—fatigue, carbon monoxide pooling in a cabin, a fume leak, anything that scrambles time sense without leaving a mark.

"Night the Hadley boy didn't come back," Jasper goes on, quieter, "the bell buoy off the north point rang half the night. Clear night. Flat calm. No wind to move it." He finally looks up. "Bells don't ring themselves, miss. And boys don't walk off the face of the water for nothing. My grandmother had names for what takes from a coast like this. I won't say them in daylight—bad manners, and worse luck. Just know the old folks didn't fish those northern coves after dark, and they weren't fools."

I note the buoy. A bell with no wind has a mechanical answer—a swell I can't see, a passing wake, a loose clapper. I don't note the grandmother. Superstition is a costume people put on real observations, and my job is to undress and keep it. I thank him. He grunts and bends over his net.

I spend the next hour photographing the harbor's evidence instead of its opinions. Crab pots with their lines bitten. A pile of discarded gear nobody's claimed. I'm kneeling over a torn net, framing the bite radius against my pen for scale, when a shadow falls across the float and stays there.

"That net belongs to a man who'd rather you didn't catalog his bad season."

I turn my head, and the man from the cliff is hovering over me. Taller up close, striking steel-gray eyes, but dressed weirdly for a dock and somehow not caring. I notice two workers nearby drift back without seeming to decide to, leaving a clean circle of space around him that he didn't ask for and clearly expects.

"Dr. Quinn," I offer my hand. "Avery. The seals are part of a research grant."

"Dorian Valek." He glances at my hand, and then at my camera, book, and the bitten net. "And what has the research turned up that has the harbor whispering?"

"Dead animals with wounds I can't place. People who answer a different question than the one I ask. You'd be surprised what a town tells you by what it won't."

"I wouldn't, actually." Nothing moves in his face. "This coast looks managed and isn't. The northern coves drop off without warning, the currents reverse on the turn of the tide, and the ground above them is unstable. People have been hurt out there believing it was tamer than it is. For the town's sake and your own, stay south of the breakwater."

It's a good speech. Reasonable, even kind. It's also the third time today someone has steered me away from exactly one part of the map, and the only time the steering came with that much authority behind it.

"Noted," I say, which isn't agreement.

He studies me a moment longer, then inclines his head and goes, the dock rearranging itself out of his way.

I inspect my map and circle the cove nearest the bell buoy. Low tide is at six tomorrow morning. I'll be alone, I'll be quiet, and I'll be there before anyone's awake to tell me not to be.

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