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The great white shook him off and swam away quickly with Thane hot on its trail. Poet sank out of view. Penny went after him. She had no plan, but she knew she couldn’t leave him behind. The trail of his blood was easy to follow, and she found him on the ocean floor.
“Poet!” she cried as she moved closer.
She knew before she reached him that he was gone, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe it. He’d tried so hard to stay out of the water. He wanted nothing to do with the hunting and patrolling the waters the other males seemed to love so much. He only wanted to sit on the beach and write in his notebook. He wanted to be human. After feeling the pain of the shift herself, she understood, and she knew his transformation was a lot worse. To change into such a gigantic shark would take its toll on your body. Yet, he’d done it in a heartbeat to save her. He’d done it twice. And now he would never do it again.
She cried salt water tears as she swam in slow circles around him. He’d died saving her.
“Please wake up,” she begged. “This isn’t right. This is all so stupid. You died for what? For me? I’m supposed to die anyway!”
“He’s gone,” Thane’s voice popped into her head.
She sensed him behind her and knew he was approaching.
“He’s gone,” Thane assured her. “I can sense all my sharks and even though he’s not a tiger shark, I knew him well enough. And no shark can lie still like that.”
“Thane, he can’t be dead,” she argued. “Not for me. Not like this.”
“He’s gone, babe,” he replied. “It’s not your fault. It’s part of our life.”
“Did you kill that bastard?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “He got away. I wasn’t fast enough to catch him.”
“Evelyn did too,” Penny said. “But I hurt her bad. If she does come back around, she won’t be nearly as tough as she was before.”
“Come on,” Thane said. “We need to get you out of here in case they come back.”
“They’re not coming back,” Penny said. “Not today anyway.”
How she knew this, she wasn’t sure, but she knew it. They’d done what they came to do. They’d wreaked havoc on everyone around her. They were done for the day.
“Come on anyway,” Thane said. “Let’s go home.”
“And Poet?” she asked.
“I told you. He’s gone.”
“But we can’t leave him here like this.”
“Where do you think sharks go when they die?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t know.
“They go to the ocean floor…or they go into the stomach of whatever killed them,” he said. “It’s our way of life.”
“He would want to be buried on the island,” she said. “With his notebook.”
“He would be fine with this,” he assured her. “Besides, we have no way of getting him out of here. You’re like me now. If you touch the water, you shift. And as sharks we can’t move him out of here.”
She knew he was right. Reluctantly, she followed Thane back to the boat, and said goodbye to Poet forever.
Chapter 12
The water had become off limits to Thane and his group, at least for a while. Evelyn and her gang had spilled enough blood and had left behind enough witnesses to have every shark hunter on the planet searching the waters around Queensland. She’d done what she’d set out to do. She’d scared the tourists and caused Thane so much damn misery he could hardly think of anything else.
Part of that misery came from the fact that he had to send Penny away. She wouldn’t be safe with Evelyn around and now that there was a great white on the loose, he wanted her nowhere near the ocean. At night, while most of the hunters had retired for the evening, he and one of the other guys would carefully patrol the water searching for any hint that Evelyn was still around. He thought the great white might have been a random attack, urged on by the amount of blood splattered in the water and then brought to Penny on the red ribbon seeping from both hers and Evelyn’s wounds.
Evelyn hadn’t reared her ugly head since the attack. With Axel dead, Thane decided she might have actually taken his advice and had migrated someplace where she wouldn’t find so much opposition. She could attack humans off the coast of Hawaii or the Bahamas or any other place she wanted as long as she stayed the hell away from Australia.
