Page 8 of Fated to the Fang

Dorian's voice, from the cove mouth, where he is wading in against water that should knock a man flat.

"I'm punctual. The tide's early." I don't move from my ledge. "How are you here?"

"I survey this coast. The closures off this headland have been failing for weeks." He's closer now, sure-footed where I'd be swept. "I came to check the gate. I found you instead."

"You have a talent for arriving at the worst possible second."

"Would you prefer I hadn't?"

I look at the dark water between us and decline to answer that honestly. "There's a route along the high fold. It dead-ends unless the next cove's shelf is clear."

"It's clear. For another few minutes." He reaches the base and puts up a hand, not to lift me, just to steady. "Stay on the fold. Don't fixate on the water. Match me."

The route is bad. There's one gap where the fold gives out and the only purchase is a seam I can't reach; he crosses first, braces somewhere I can't see, and gets me over it faster than the physics should allow. I keep that observation cold and quiet, then keep moving.

The next cove has a high dry shelf. We both make it, and then there's nothing to do but sit; the connecting passage is underwater and won't clear for an hour.

"So we wait," I say.

"We wait."

I wring out my sleeve. "You can stop watching me like I'll bolt into the surf. I came in with a planned route and timings. That prediction failed. That's a problem with the coast, not with me."

"I didn't say it was."

"People keep implying it." I let the quiet run a second. "That I missed something obvious. That if this goes badly, it will be because I didn't read the signs."

Dorian looks at me more carefully. "That sounds less like the coast."

"It is." I keep my eyes on my boots. "I was engaged. Before this. Venue booked, joint lease signed, future mapped to the quarter. My ex-fiancé had mapped a different one with someone in our department, and I found out opposite people I still had to work beside."

"And they blamed you?"

"Not directly. People are very polite when they decide you were foolish." I almost laugh. "They asked if I had noticed anything. If there had been signs. If maybe I had been too focused on work to see what was happening in my own life."

Dorian is quiet in the way that isn't absence. "So Crimson Harbor was supposed to be proof."

"Not proof. Work." I turn toward the water, dark and wrong below us. "Seals don't care who humiliated you. The tide doesn't ask whether you missed the obvious. I wanted one thing I could still read correctly."

"And you did," he says carefully. "The pattern is real."

"I know I'm right. That's never been my problem. Being right where someone can see it. That's the new one."

He shifts, and his hand starts toward my shoulder—to steady me, I think—then stops an inch off and draws back like the air there burned him. I have no idea what to make of a man who decides against a thing that small. I add it to the list of many other things.

"You should look at these," I say, to move us both off it, and turn the camera around.

He goes still. Not surprised-still. Recognizing-still. Whatever they are, he's seen them, and he isn't going to tell me, that's clear in his face.

"They're nothing," he says. "Old fishermen's marks."

"You looked at them like they owe you money."

He doesn't answer. I put the camera back into the dry bag, where it stays. Whatever's carved into that wall is the realest thing I've found, and now I know it matters, because the one man who keeps appearing wherever the coast turns dangerous just lied to me about a wall.

The water swooshes between us, dark and causing tension I can't name, is a foot too high. Neither of us pretends to trust the other while we sit waiting for it to go.

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