Page 9 of Fated to the Fang

DORIAN

Celeste reaches me on the bluff road before the harbor master's radio does. "A trawler off the north headland," she says. "Running dark. Not answering hails. She's drifting toward the closures you flagged."

I'm already moving. I've been edged since the caves—since knowing about the marks I've spent a long life pretending not to know. The pieces are no longer scattering. They're here.

The trawler sits a quarter mile out, no running lights, engine dead, rolling broadside to a swell. The sea around her hull sucks and lifts in a tight ring while the bay beyond lies flat. I come up under her stern and over the rail.

Blood first, thinned and spread across the deck boards, tracked toward the bow where the crew was driven and held. The nets are out and shredded. The winch still grinds against a load that isn't fish. The wheelhouse glass is gone.

Three rogues work the foredeck. They don't lunge. One holds the rail. One covers the companionway. One crouches over a fisherman pinned against the anchor locker, a hand spread across the man's jaw, thumb at his temple, mouth close to his ear. The fisherman's eyes are open and unseeing. He's being told a story.

I take the rail guard before any of them register me—hand to the skull, a turn, done. The body goes over. The covering rogue pivots, and that is the tell: he doesn't charge, he steps to keep the companionway in his line and holds it. Celeste comes over the port side and takes him from behind.

The third drops the fisherman and rises, and what's been pressed into the man comes off his hand and reaches me. Diesel. Cold water at the throat. A palm clamped over a mouth. The flat certainty of going under. A voice that isn't the fisherman's, repeating it was the rocks, you hit the rocks. I push it out, put the rogue down, and end it.

Two more break from the hold. They don't scatter. They fall back toward the bow in a line, covering each other's blind sides, and I understand I'm not clearing a feeding. I'm breaking up a working party.

That's when I see the second boat. A low hull stands off fifty yards, no lights, holding steady against the same wrong swell. A man stands at its bow. Even across the water he's a wall—massive through the shoulders, scarred down one side of his face and throat, still like only the deeply violent are still. He watches his rogues fall back and makes no move to help. They're coming to him because he has decided the work is finished.

He lifts one hand. Not at me—at them. The two on the bow break off Celeste's advance and go over the rail together, on the count of his fingers.

I go after him. I take the water hard and close half the gap before his engine turns over. He looks back once—Maddox Rusk, the Butcher to those old enough to remember what he has done—and doesn't speak. He isn't troubled that I've seen his face—a man who's done this many times, under orders from someone thinking beyond one boat, one night, one harbor. His boat pulls away faster than it should, and I let the gap open rather than be dragged from a wreck I still have to manage.

Celeste has the deck when I climb back aboard. Four crew alive, herded forward, eyes wrong. Two dead, and these I can't make into anything—one slumped at the winch, one half over the broken rail, wounds no propeller or reef explains to a coroner who looks twice. The oldest survivor sits against the locker, rocking, and says it without being asked.

"The tide gives them back." Level, and repeats himself.

Celeste goes still. "Where did you hear that?" she asks, not gently.

He doesn't answer. He isn't in a year that has us in it.

She straightens. "That's old," she tells me, low. "That's from people who lost a war. We don't say it on open water." She gives me nothing more, and I don't push.

The living ones have their stories already, set before we arrived. One says the engine caught fire. One says a wave took the men over. None of it agrees, and all of it is held with the same certainty as the voice that came off the rogue's hand.

Celeste raises the harbor master—failing gearbox, a man lost overboard in heavy water. Sheriff Greer's launch reaches us the deck has been arranged to hold a story.

Greer crouches by the body at the rail a long time. He stands.

"Gearbox," he says.

"That's what the survivors say."

"The survivors say four different things." He wipes his hands on his coat. "This one's got no business being dead from a gearbox, and you've got no business being first boat out here at three in the morning, Mr. Valek. Again. I'll write what the water lets me write. Doesn't mean I'll believe it."

I go to Avery before the report does. She opens the cottage door with a pen still in her hand and doesn't step back to let me in. "It's late."

"There was an incident offshore. I wanted to be sure you'd stayed out of the water."

"I've been at a desk since the tide ran me out." She takes in the wet hair, the lack of any reason for me to be at her door. "What kind of incident?"

"A fishing boat. Crew in trouble. Two men didn't make it."

She sets the pen down. "Where?"

"North of the headland."

"Where exactly?" She's already turning toward the maps on a table. "Inside the closures? Near my survey lines?"