Page 45 of Fated to the Fang

They have left the roster behind. The only thing with a list of names that can help us identify who's sided with Lucien. Celeste says, low, "Someone from the council must have told them we were coming." She doesn't say more. Neither do I. I suspected it. I just can't prove it.

Avery is waiting on the seawall when we get back, the schedule spread across her knees, Greer beside her with a thermos. She jumps up when she sees me, reads my face, and keeps to herself whatever it is she wants to ask.

The town is starting to prepare for the festival. Workmen are stringing banners between lampposts. A flatbed unloads barricades. Someone tests the festival lights, and they flare multi-colored along the waterfront, one after another, all the way down to the water. Road-closure signs, stacked and waiting. People are decorating a battlefield that will either be the end of us or the death of them, and they have no idea.

Friday, Lucien turns this into a stage. If he gets what he wants, Crimson Harbor becomes the first open wound between our kind and them, and closing it again will take years. The war is just inches away from starting if we don't stop it now.

29

AVERY

By nine the square itself could be a picture on a postcard. Banners climb between the lampposts, blue and gold, and a girl on her father's shoulders points at each one like it's a kite. Two food trucks beep their way backward into the curb while a man in a reflective vest waves them in. A speaker on the bandstand shrieks, dies, comes back as a flat voice counting one, two, three. Near the chandlery, four volunteers crouch over a clipboard, fighting about whether booth nineteen goes before or after the funnel-cake stand. It should look like nothing. To me it looks like a map I can't stop seeing.

I have the other version folded in my jacket—Lucien's, in waxed paper. The town's cheerful chaos keeps matching it. The road-closure signs go up exactly where his red lines fall. The barricades stack along the routes he drew as walls. Every laughing vendor is setting a piece of his stage and calling it a festival.

I may be a marine biologist, but I can't stop reading the crowd the same way I read water. The lanes between booths are channels. The square is the basin everything drains into. And every exit will be blocked once he begins his war.

"Tell me what I'm fighting," Greer says, handing me a coffee. He looks like a man who hasn't slept.

I ignore what he's asking, and ask about the others. "Dorian's people?"

"Took the piers and the water side. He left the square to us. Said you'd see it faster than he would."

So we start dismantling what we can. The alley beside the chandlery is one of the exits, and someone's staged barricades so it pinches to single file. Greer plants himself directly ahead of the festival coordinator.

"Ambulance access. Eight feet minimum, fire marshal's orders."

"The permits are filed, the—" the coordinator is cut off.

"Eight feet." Greer doesn't move until the barricades do.

Booth nineteen is worse. The vendor rows are going up across the throat of the square, where the crowd wouldn't have an escape.

"Your propane has to clear ten feet from that cable run," I tell the funnel-cake man, "or the whole row fails inspection."

"That's the best corner on the waterfront. I paid for it. I've worked this festival since before you were born, missy."

"Then you know it floods if a hose pops." I don't blink. I move his row twenty feet north and open the throat back up, and I feel like a liar the whole time, because I am.

O trails me with his camera. "Ave." He points his lens at a temporary cable feeding the bandstand, straight across a service door Lucien timed for nine-forty. "That run's sitting in a puddle."

"Shock hazard." I flag it; they reroute it. Small. It doesn't fix the festival—his plan's still going ahead.

Mabel brings sandwiches none of us asked for. "Crimson Harbor's an odd place," she says, watching the banners go up. "People here survive things they don't get to understand. Boats that should've gone down. Folks who walk home who shouldn't have." She pats my hand. "Some of us stopped asking who pulls them back. We just got grateful."

Caleb appears at the curb just after noon, stepping out of a rented SUV with his search-and-rescue jacket over one arm. My clipboard slips. Greer catches it before it hits the pavement.

"Ave," Caleb says. "You stopped answering."

"You came here because I missed a few calls?"

"You missed twelve. After the fiancé, you ran to Oregon. After Oregon, you ran here. I'm not watching you disappear into another disaster because you're too proud to come home."

The word home doesn't feel the same anymore. Everything in me reaches for him and shoves him away at the same time.

"I'm not leaving."

His eyes harden. "Then I'm staying."