Page 5 of Fated to the Fang

"Usually fatal."

That gets her attention, but not her belief. "Something hit the rock. Hard."

"The water does strange things in here."

"No," she says. "People keep saying that to me. Weather. Tide. Bad season. Strange water. None of you seem to notice how often your explanations arrive already polished."

She writes it down. That is worse than an argument. She is not filing me under answer. She has a seal with wounds, a harbor missing its hours, and now a man who reached her faster than he should have. She will likely set them in a row. Distance was the only clean protection I had left, and it is spent. I climb out of the cove knowing I will be nearer tomorrow than today, because there isn't a version of this left in which I'm not.

5

AVERY

Ilay my photographs out on the kitchen table at Harbor House like a poker hand I'm not sure how to play. The cove shots first, then the seal images beside them, and the gray residue. I line them up as evidence. That doesn't get nervous, but everything and everyone else here does.

Marks on a seal, a man's blood on stone four days apart—my eye keeps pulling one toward the other. I open my field book and read Jasper's words back. Boats back wrong. Whole hours missing. The bell buoy. The Hadley boy.

I tear a clean page and rule three columns. Where. What's hurt. Who's gone. Where: the northern coves, the buoy point, the breakwater everyone tries to deter me from. Hurt: seals, a torn net, a man. Gone: the Hadley boy, and however many crewmen who lost hours they can't account for. It's not proof. It's every wound and every missing person stacked along the same half mile of coast nobody will discuss out loud.

Mabel comes in with a thermos before I manage to cover the table, glances at my work, then deliberately doesn't. "Records room's in the town hall basement," she says, "if that's where this is going. Open till four." She's gone before I can ask how she knew. That's its own data point.

The basement smells of damp paper and floor wax. I ask the clerk for incident reports and missing-person notices, last five years, coastal only. She's halfway to the cabinet when a man in a sheriff's uniform comes down the stairs like someone told him I'd be here. The brass nameplate over his pocket reads Greer, and the clerk straightens enough to fill in the rest before he says a word.

"Dr. Quinn." He doesn't offer the records. He doesn't stop the clerk either. "Mind if I ask what a marine biologist wants with our incident files?"

"Missing hours on returning boats. A worker who didn't come back. Animal wounds I can't classify—all inside the same stretch north of the breakwater." I keep it collegial. "I'm ruling things out. Carbon monoxide in the cabins. A predator I haven't identified. I'd take either."

He registers that and sets it aside. "Those coves are unstable ground. The shelf's undercut, the tides run odd past the point, and there are old storm tunnels under that headland—half caved, all sealed for a reason. I post the access closed. I'd rather not post names next."

"That's the official version. I've heard pieces of it from different people. Warm water. Bad seasons. Strange tides. It arrives polished, Sheriff, like everyone rehearsed off one sheet."

He sets both hands flat on the counter, careful. "Or it's a small town frightened of the same coast, saying so the same way. You found the cove. The Hadley scene."

"I photographed drag marks and blood on granite. Yes."

"Then you know it's an open case, and I'm asking you out of it. Not threatening. Asking. Whatever took that boy, I'd rather it didn't take another." He climbs the stairs. The clerk slides a thin folder across without being asked—and I notice he never told her not to.

My phone buzzes on the steps. Caleb. A voicemail, and a text stacked on top: Your last three updates read like hostage notes. "Fine, busy, bad signal." You're never fine and busy. Call me.

I call. "I'm okay. The grant's just bigger than I pitched. The decline's real and the data's messy."

"Messy how?" My brother skips small talk when he's worried.

"Sampling messy. Logistics messy. I'm being careful, Caleb. I promise. I'll send seal pictures to prove I'm doing science and not joining a cult."

"That's not the comfort you think it is." But he doesn't argue with my bye. I keep the worst and pocket the rest from him because I don't want him to do what older brothers do and insert himself.

I turn back toward the folder waiting downstairs, and Dorian is on the landing below, one hand resting on the rail as if the town keeps spare rooms available for him wherever he goes. His dark coat is buttoned against the draft, his silver-streaked hair untouched by the damp, and I hate that my first thought is not danger, but precision.

"You followed me to a basement?" Suspicion climbs inside me.

"I happened to be at the town hall."

"You happen to be wherever I am the moment something inconvenient surfaces." I come up the last step. "You crossed forty feet of wet rock before I finished turning. Something hit stone, hard. When I looked, you were between me and the dark with nothing behind you. Explain the timing."

"I was already on the shoreline."

"Doing what?"