Page 41 of Fated to the Fang

He sets down his pen. "Yeah," he says. "I know."

I don't reveal the whole truth. Vampires. Council. Chambers. "We need the archives. The blueprints of the tunnels. If you hand them over, they might come home. It needs to be kept quiet. Whoever this is will kill if it gets out."

He's quiet a beat too long, then pulls a laptop toward him. "Ok. What else do you need?"

"Everything you've got that the people who took them wouldn't think to hide. Harbor security feeds. Traffic cameras near Saltline. Last phone pings, if you can pull them. The old service road maps. And every abandoned property along the water you've ever chased kids out of."

He starts pulling files. I clear his desk and lay them out, and somewhere in the next half hour his office becomes mine. Dorian gives me the tunnel mouths the vampires know. Celeste marks the council territory. Greer overlays the human grid on top—roads, cameras, the places a van can and can't go—and the map starts to have two systems on it at once. Nobody knows where to look: Greer at the routes, Celeste at Greer, Dorian at me. Two worlds, one desk, none of them used to sharing space. I put a mug on the map corner to hold it flat. Greer shifts a stack of permit forms off the corner of the desk. The top one reads SUMMER FESTIVAL ROAD CLOSURES, approved for Friday. Four days away. The town is preparing for music, food trucks, tourists, and fireworks while we try to protect everyone around us.

"Stop guarding things," I say. "If Lucien wanted you divided, congratulations, you're doing his work for him."

Celeste's eyes cool. Greer is shocked. Dorian looks exposed.

Then Dorian sets his hand beside my notes, not over them. "She's right."

"Nora keeps a delivery log," I say. "The café. Every standing order, every drop-off, years of them. She logs it because she's exact. Pull it."

Greer frowns but calls it in. When the list prints, I run my finger down it twice before I find what's wrong.

"Here." I tap it. "Standing coffee order. Six o'clock, daily. Delivered to a berth at Saltline. That berth's been condemned for two years. There's nothing there. Nobody orders coffee to an empty pier."

Greer leans in. "Unless someone's working it who isn't supposed to be."

"Pull the harbor cam on that."

He does. The feed is grainy, half-dark, but it's enough: a panel van, no plates, backed up to the loading apron beside the old whale-processing storehouse—the long-dead building everyone forgets. Same window. Always near the turn of the tide. It went on for weeks and no one has noticed.

"We dismissed that whole stretch," Celeste says. "The storehouse sits over a collapsed tunnel. We assumed no access."

"You assumed no access for you," I say. "Coffee got in fine."

Dorian grinds his teeth. He looks at the map, at the obvious tunnel mouth Celeste marked first—the clean path any of them would take. "That's the door he wants us to use, but it's a trap" he says quietly. "He left it open."

"Of course it is." I'm already tracing the other line—a cannery drain under the storehouse, marked collapsed, marked useless, the kind of thing nobody protects because nobody remembers it. "This one still looks accessible. Humans built it. Humans forgot it. Which means Lucien may have forgotten it too."

"It floods at high water," Greer says. "You'd have a window—maybe ninety minutes around slack tide."

"That's when we go then."

"You don't go anywhere," Dorian starts.

I turn on him, and I'm not angry. "They were taken because of me. Because they want me. Because they want to get to you. I won't let anyone do this alone. I'm not staying ‘somewhere safe' because that could be a trap too. I'd rather be by your side and at least a little protected than be snatched while you're gone."

He holds my eyes a long time. He could try and stop me, but we both know he won't.

"Fine," he says. Not because he can't cage me. Because he won't.

Celeste looks at me differently now—the way you look at someone who turned out to be trustworthy.

We build the team fast. Dorian. Celeste. Two of his people she names without hesitation. Greer, who refuses to sit it out but stays above to run the human grid, and one deputy he'd trust with his life for the tunnel team. And me, with both maps folded in my jacket and my hands finally betraying a tremor, because I am afraid—I'd be a fool not to be.

But I don't show it. I just pick up the drain map, and I lead them out.

26

DORIAN

The plan is finished, and the next few hours may decide whether Crimson Harbor survives as a secret, a battlefield, or a grave. Avery stands beside the iron table with both hands still, hiding fear better than some immortals I have known. She does not know how completely the room has rearranged around her. Everything in me wants to take her somewhere Lucien cannot reach. I do not. She is right. She is safer at my side than hidden somewhere I cannot see.