Hollow Oak's eastern dock came into view through the tree line, the small cluster of buildings beyond it showing lamplight through the thickening air. The dockside tavern sat closest to the water, warm and low-slung, smoke rising fromits chimney in a straight line that the wind hadn't touched yet. The harbourmaster's office was further up the bank. Rafe had radioed ahead two hours ago. He expected a dock hand waiting on the pier.
Nobody was there.
"That's unusual," Dex said, coming back up with Orick behind him, both of them loaded down with coiled storm line.
"Get those tied off. Port side first." Rafe eased back on the throttle and began working the Ashvane toward the approach, his eyes moving between the dock and the sky. The clouds had come faster than he'd tracked them. They were overhead now, the late-afternoon light gone strange under them, greenish and flat.
Then, the lake surface went glassy.
That was the thing about wind on water. It never fully stopped. Even on still days there was movement, a surface texture, the lake breathing. This was different. The water had gone smooth as hammered tin, and in that total stillness the reflection of the storm clouds above looked less like a reflection and more like a second sky opening beneath the first.
Rafe's grip tightened on the wheel.
The temperature dropped sharply. He could see his own breath.
"Orick." His voice came out flat and even. "Get below and check the cargo lashings."
Dex was quiet beside him, which Rafe appreciated. There was nothing useful to say and they both knew it. The approach to the dock was sixty yards, then forty, the Ashvane moving slow and deliberate through water that had gone so still the hull seemed to cut it like cloth. The only sound was the engine and the low, steady creak of the rigging.
They were almost there when the lightning hit.
Not from the clouds. From the water, a column of white-silver that erupted from the lake and drove straight upward, and for three full seconds it held there, rigid and burning, before it fractured along the surface in six lines spaced so evenly they could have been measured. The thunder came right behind it and rolled across the water and up through the hull into the soles of Rafe's boots.
Dex swore. Pell shouted something from the stern but Rafe didn't move.
He was already reading the lightning, the pattern of it, how it had originated from a single point and spread outward in a configuration no natural storm produced. Whoever was driving this weather, they were close. Whatever they were feeling, it was big.
The second column went up, same location, same duration. Suddenly, the wind whipped out ahead of the storm like a warning and Rafe caught the scent.
Cool. Clean. The particular sharpness of a mountain storm distilled down to something almost unbearably precise, wild rain stripped of everything ordinary until what remained was pure silver, and underneath that was something warm, alive, and unmistakably female.
Fae. Powerfully, undeniably fae.
His wolf went absolutely still.
Shit.
The storm hit, rain coming in sideways across the deck, and Rafe turned the wheel into it and held on.
2
ISLA
The wind had been talking all afternoon. Steadily, underneath everything else, a low note that never quite stopped.
Isla was in the side garden of her cottage pulling spent lavender when it shifted from talking to insisting. She straightened up and looked out at the lake. She was running out of time.
She washed her hands at the outdoor pump, dried them on the hem of her shirt, and went inside.
The cottage sat at the far western edge of Hollow Oak's outskirts, close enough to the lake that she could hear it at night and far enough from the nearest house that what happened in her yard stayed in her yard. A year ago she had chosen it for exactly those reasons. The landlord, a soft-spoken woman named Bette who kept chickens and minded her own business, had asked only one question during the whole arrangement.
"You need a lot of quiet?"
"Yes," Isla had said.
"Then you'll do fine out here."
She'd been right. Mostly.
