Page 6 of Fated to the Fang

"Checking it, as I told you I do." He doesn't blink or fidget, and the stillness is its own tell. "People use those camps who shouldn't. I moved one off before he reached you. Disbelieve what you can't see; I'd think less of you otherwise."

"I disbelieve most of it." I shift the folder under my arm, and his eyes go to it.

"That's the public file. Five years, redacted, half the coast folded into 'exposure' or 'presumed drowning.' It won't show you what you're after."

"And you can."

"The harbor authority kept its own logs before the county took over. Tide charts, rescue reports, tourism incidents, shoreline surveys, the access records from when the tunnels were sealed. Not in that basement." A pause. "I can put them on a table this afternoon. Draw your own conclusions. I won't draw them for you."

That lands better than another warning. Worse, it's intelligent, which is harder to ignore. The smartest offer I've had since I arrived—which is exactly why it worries me. "Why help?"

"Because you'll keep going whether I do or not. I'd rather know what you know."

Honest, at least. "Fine. But I read everything myself."

We spread the logs across a table in a back room he has a key to and shouldn't. He knows where things are before he looks—hands me a rescue report without checking the spine. The idea comes fast once I have real pages. Disappearances and exposure deaths cluster in three coves, all in the north. Animal strandings log within a week of every missing-person date. Damaged gear recovered; owners "disoriented," several noting hours missing from memory.

The statements are what stop me. I read four, from different years.

"These are nearly word for word," I say. "'Lost time on the water. No memory of the interval. No injury found.' Same phrasing. Different people, different decades. Who edits a witness to match one from fifteen years back?"

"People reach for the same words when they have none of their own." Smooth. Too smooth.

Three reports end the same way, too—subject found near the sealed tunnels beneath the harbor district. One survey shows the tunnels running farther beneath the town than the closures admit, branching toward the coves where bodies never surface.

"These aren't all caved," I say.

"No." That, he doesn't dress up.

He reaches across to square two maps, and I notice he doesn't touch me—in the part of my brain with no business clocking in—and he reads salvage records the way I read tide charts, fluent in a thing he claims no stake in. He knows this coast like he's been correcting its mistakes for years.

I stack the maps and don't give them back. Here's where I've landed, and I don't love it: everyone in Crimson Harbor has steered me off this coast. Dorian's the only one who set its secrets on the table—which makes him the one person willing to help me, or the person hiding the deepest pocket of truth, handing me exactly what he expects me to find. I'm betting on both.

6

DORIAN

Ileave Avery with the evidence she would not surrender and take the long way to the water, because the council keeps its doors where no living foot will find them by accident. No human court has ever sat this far below Crimson Harbor. This is where vampires come when secrecy needs a law, a witness, or a sentence.

The entrance is beneath the old custom house, behind a coal hatch that has not seen coal in a hundred years. I go down with the cove still on me: rust gone to old blood, the rogue's mineral wrongness, the spent shell charm I recovered, cold now against my chest. I carry the logic of her work as well.

She built too much in one afternoon. It could cost us a decade of patient forgetting to bury what she sketched between a thermos and a folder. I sit with the problem she has become without intending to know that is worse, because the rogues read her the same and will reach a quicker verdict than the council ever could.

The mnemosigils begin at the third landing. They are not locks. They are memory set into the stone—every trial held down here, every sentence carried out, pressed into rock until they keep what we would rather not. Passing through is like wading a cold current of someone else's fear. A voice long out of any living mouth asks for mercy in a dead tongue. Saltwater that is non-existent there beads on the wall and runs. I don't move slow. You learn early that slowing is how the stone takes your measure.

Celeste Moreau is already in the chamber, black curls pinned away from dark brown skin, violet eyes moving over maps weighted at the corners with lead. She reads them upside down to herself—from the far side first, where the mistakes live. As always, she is impeccably dressed, as if politics, saltwater, and blood have all agreed not to touch her. A century and more of council rooms has made her economical. She trusts me as far as she trusts anyone, which is carefully, and that careful trust is the nearest thing to an ally I have below the waterline.

"You found a pattern," she says, before I set anything down.

"She found it." I lay the records out. "I only followed."

Helena Rook comes in on the last word, silver-white hair pinned with austere precision, piercing blue eyes taking the room before she spends a single word. She is the oldest mind on the council and the head of it, and she wears the office without effort—regal, settled, unremarkable to her, immovable to everyone else. She observes the maps, then faces me, and waits, because making others speak first is a habit older than the harbor.

I give them the cove. The drag line. The blood set into granite by a feeding done badly. The shell charm, burned from the inside, every name in the rogue scoured out before I could take it. "This was not hunger," I say. "Hunger does not carry a charm to erase itself. Someone equipped him and aimed him at this coast."

Celeste's eyes move down the clustered dates. "Strandings inside a week of each disappearance. Gear recovered, owners missing the same span of hours." She taps the survey. "And these run under the headland, past the closures. This is arranged. Not appetite—arrangement."

"It is worse than that." I set the witness statements beside the rest. "Decades apart. Different mouths. The same phrasing each time. A Touch done in a hurry leaves that residue—the seam where a memory was pressed flat instead of taken clean. The marine biologist read four in a row and asked who edits a witness to match one fifteen years dead."