The Atlanticat night was a different universe. I’d been swimming for six hours because six hours of open ocean was the only thing that made the noise stop. Social media obligations and branding slides and old debts had swirled in my head until I couldn’t take it anymore, so I’d gone down to the beach and shifted for the first time in months.
RipTide would have paid for first class. Champagne, one of those little eye masks that made you look like an asshole but feel like a king. I’d told Derek—my agent—I needed the travel time, and he hadn’t asked questions.
I needed the water more than I needed the sleep.
My family called it following the old paths. The migration routes we had traced for generations before humans invented jet skis and cruise ships. My muscles moved in the rhythm encoded in my DNA, powerful tail strokes that could cover fifty miles without strain, and for six hours there was nothing but the current and the dark and not having to be the person everyone wanted me to be.
The water told me stories as I swam. Here, a pod of dolphins gossiping. There, the echo of a shipping lane I knew to avoid. The temperature dropped and rose in pockets that meant differentcurrents, different worlds. But they passed over me like…well, water.
I’d been seventeen the last time I’d swum this far north, when I’d still shifted regularly and hadn’t traded that in for surfboards and trophies. I’d still been young enough that the transformation felt like a gift instead of a complication. That trip, I’d been traveling to the family gathering in Nova Scotia that I’d never attended again. But I remembered this exact spot, where the continental shelf started its curve, where the water was charged—an energy I’d felt nowhere else.
Now, at twenty-five, I found that feeling again. Like I was being wrapped in a golden light, a soft power as ancient as the deep but warmer—welcoming.
And mixed with that was the one thing I couldn’t resist. One drop of blood, dissolved in the current and moving south with the tide.
It tasted like that same electricity, like a power that was sleeping in the deep, waiting to be awakened. My body made a unilateral decision before my brain had any say in the matter.
I angled toward shore.
My tiger shark instincts cataloged everything automatically. Water temperature: a perfect sixty-eight degrees. Current: mild southern pull. Prey fish: abundant and ridiculously easy to catch, though I wasn’t hungry. And underneath it all, a new sensation that made my electromagnetic sensors light up—magic, actual magic, woven into the water.
Crescent Cove.
The name surfaced in my human consciousness, along with the competition details I’d been trying not to think about. Three days of performing for cameras and winning another trophy that would end up in storage because I’d run out of shelf space years ago.
But first, I needed legs. And pants. And probably a shower.
I let my instincts guide me to a stretch of beach away from the main town.
The waves carried me into the shallows, and I felt the familiardiscomfort as my body recognized it was time to change. The shift was never painful—my father had been very clear that if it hurt, you were fighting it—but it was deeply unsettling. Like turning yourself inside out, except the inside was human, and the outside was apex predator.
I dragged myself onto the sand, my body reforming in segments. Tail splitting into legs. Rough skin smoothing into something that could pass for human if you didn’t look too closely. Teeth retracting from rows to a single set that could barely handle corn on the cob, let alone seal blubber. My stripes faded everywhere except my ribs, where I could pass them off as tattoos. My senses dulled instantly—the electromagnetic awareness vanishing, the ability to smell blood reduced—but not entirely gone.
“Fuck,” I gasped once my vocal cords reformed. The word came out rough, like I’d been gargling saltwater. Which, technically, I had been.
I spat out the corner of my board shorts I’d had hooked on my teeth the whole swim here. It was late, but the last thing I needed was a public indecency charge.
I pulled them on, still dripping, and tried to remember how to human.
Walk upright.
Check into your motel under the fake name you’d given for a little privacy before this whole circus began.
Bite nothing—unless it’s too pretty to resist.
I struggled up the beach, very ready to sleep for twelve hours, then figure out how to survive another competition without drowning my agent in the motel pool.
I made it exactly fifteen feet before I tripped and fell over something soft and definitely human.
“What the fuck?—”
“OW, Jesus Christo?—”
We both scrambled backward in the sand, my shark brain jumping into action—female, five-foot-eight, not a threat, smellslike coconut and electricity and, beneath that…iron. Just a trace. Enough.
My eyes found the source before I could stop them—a thin cut on her palm, already clotting. The blood that had pulled me off a straight line and reeled me in like a fucking tuna. A human wouldn’t have noticed it.
The shark noticed it but didn’t lunge. It went still instead, settled like it had been flipped onto its back. That was new, and I didn’t have time to wonder about it, because then I noticed the rest of her.
