Page 44 of Fated to the Fang

"The gate!" I shout. Above the rubble, half-buried, an old whale-house winch, its chain green with age. A sluice. "Aldric — the chain — pull it, now⁠—"

He hauls. The rusted gate screams up its track, and the surge, when it hits, finds the open mouth instead of us — slams sideways into the overflow and away, and the roar drops to a churn at our ankles instead of over our heads.

The rogues, caught wrong-footed by their own flood, break.

Dorian takes me over his shoulder. The others are taken by the group, and we all move at speed. The wind rushes past my face, stone flicking by, and we emerge through the drain hatch into open air. I'm soaked, shaking, behind us the tide is eating the tunnel we just left. Aldric stands dripping, glaring at me. Not warm. Just clear.

"She saw it before we did," he says to Dorian. Then he looks away, almost like he's ashamed to hold trust in me.

I'm still holding what O gave me with ink run at one corner. The small eye hasn't. The others are watching me now — the ones who doubted me, seen me as Dorian's weakness without admitting it. They glance to me, and before turning away they nod their heads. Showing me courtesy, showing me kindness. I now know I'm in this war with them. I'll never be against them because the one I'm connected to will always be one of them.

28

DORIAN

Itaste the salt air around us, copper and relief. Owen leans against the seawall with a blanket around his shoulders, alive. Nora won't let go of his arm. Tracy sits on the curb with her head between her knees while Greer crouches beside her, talking calmly. Shaken, all of them. But breathing.

Avery passes me something, and points for me to open it. It's a sheet of waxed paper, folded twice.

"It's not the tunnels," she says. "Look again."

I look. Celeste reads over my shoulder. Aldric comes close, and we bend over a square part of town we have all walked a thousand times. The markings around it, I recognize. It's the festival. The lines I took for corridors are road closures. The marked points are vendor staging zones, food-truck rows, the bandstand, the firework barge offshore. Service access doors circled in red. Power routes traced in a second color. Crowd flow drawn in long arrows that all funnel toward the square and then stop, because every exit out of it is marked closed.

"Friday," Celeste says quietly. "The festival opens Friday."

Aldric exhales through his teeth. "He's trying to expose us."

Our entire law has been one word. Conceal. Lucien is trying to do the opposite in one day. Tourists, music, fireworks, closed roads, blocked exits, cameras in every hand, enough noise to swallow a scream. He's choosing the festival for the same reason he chose a public event last time, he wants bigger exposure. He's choosing chaos.

"He wants chaos," I say.

Avery speaks up. "He wants people to see."

"Yes." I fold the paper along its old creases. "Feeding. Fighting. People will have their phones out recording. Social media will play a part. He's expecting humans to do his dirty work for him. Expose us to cause another war between us and humans."

"The rescue was bait," I say. "He didn't take them to kill them. He abducted them to pull us underground so his people could move supplies above it. We were searching while he was preparing."

Celeste is already reaching for her coat. "Then we must find out what he moved."

Avery stays with the humans while we do reconnaissance on the whale-processing storehouse. Circled in two different colors, it was the obvious place to start. It sits at the dead end of the north pier, condemned since before I came to this town. We go in through the loading bay, five of us, quiet as mice.

Inside, it's a standard warehouse where all the party decorations are being stored. Festival crates stacked to the rafters, stenciled with vendor logos and city permits, legitimate on paper. Celeste pries one open. Bunting and folding chairs on top. Underneath, packed in straw, blood stores in sealed medical coolers. The next crate hides restraints. The next, a row of carved memory charms that make Aldric step back without meaning to.

Pinned to a foreman's desk: an altered road-closure plan, the one the town will follow, with three exits quietly removed. A laminated list of timed incidents, hour by hour, Friday evening into night. And a roster. Names, some assigned to positions I recognize. Vendor staff. A stagehand. Someone listed simply as bell tower. Two of the names on that roster, I trusted once.

"Dorian."

The voice comes from the mezzanine. Sabine, who stood with me facing the council years ago and argued for restraint. She comes down the iron stairs, floating, no weapon drawn.

"You shouldn't have read that," she says.

"You shouldn't be on it."

She tilts her head. She doesn't look like a fanatic. She looks tired, and certain. "How many more decades do you want to spend underground, Dorian? Begging permission to exist. Erasing ourselves out of every photograph. Pretending the things we hunt are our equals. Lucien isn't offering slaughter. He's offering the end of the lie. A real future. Power."

"That's a disaster waiting to happen," I say. "ou remember what humans did when fear was involved, and what we became when we answered it. Lucien doesn't want freedom. He wants worship. That isn't a future, Sabine. It's the old slaughter dressed in prettier words."

Something flickers behind her certainty, and then she sprints toward me. The strike team meets her before she gets to me, and the storehouse erupts into violence. Metal screams. One of ours hits the rail hard enough to bend it. I catch Sabine by the wrist, twist, and feel bone give beneath my fingers before she tears free with a snarl. Behind me, Aldric grunts as Maddox drives a dock hook through his shoulder and pins him to a crate. Blood spatters the festival bunting. I turn to rip the attacker apart, but he's gone through a door in the floor, taken Sabine, and some evidence with them.