Page 30 of Subduing the Shark

An hour passed. His phone buzzed. A text from one of Lady Leo's men. Two words:Dresden secured. Five minutes later:Lichen secured. No mention of Rashe.

Harold texted back:Rashe?

Nothing yet.

Harold's blood went cold. He called Lady Leo. "They don't have Rashe yet. He could be anywhere."

"He could be here." Lady Leo's voice was flat. "I've sent two men to Bethany's floor. Where are you?"

"Main floor."

"Stay there. Watch the entrances."

Harold watched. He stood in the dark club and breathed and let his nose do the work his eyes couldn't. He sorted through the ambient scents of the building. Lions, ferret, otter, the ghost of fifty shifter species that used the club every night. He filtered for shark. Not Jack's deep ocean water. The other one. Rashe's scent, which Harold had figured out weeks ago from the sharks he could smell on Jack. Rashe's scent was sharper than Jack's, with a metallic edge like blood in saltwater.

He found it at five fifteen AM.

Faint. Coming from the lobby above him. Harold hurried to the base of the stairs and inhaled and the metallic shark scentwas there, thin but unmistakable, filtering down through the stairwell. Rashe was in the building.

Harold took the stairs three at a time. He came out on the residential floor and heard the noise before he saw it. A crash. A scream that was pure fury and entirely female. Bethany.

He sprinted down the hall. Bethany's door was open and Rashe was in the doorway and Bethany was in the middle of her apartment with a broken lamp in her hands, swinging it at the shark's head with the full force of a lioness who'd grown up in her mother's den and didn't know how to be afraid. She connected. Rashe staggered. She hit him again and he went sideways into the doorframe.

Harold hit Rashe from behind. The shark was smaller than he expected, wiry and fast, and he twisted out of Harold's grip with the boneless agility of something that lived in water. He slammed an elbow into Harold's jaw and broke free and ran.

Down the hall. Down the stairs. Harold was two steps behind him and then three and then five because Rashe was faster than any shark Harold had chased before, lean and desperate, crashing through the lobby and out the front door into the predawn dark.

Harold stood on the sidewalk and watched the shark disappear around the corner and made a decision in the time it took to inhale.

He shifted.

His bloodhound took his place in under three seconds. Four legs, long ears, a body built for endurance rather than speed. The world exploded into scent. Every surface, every molecule, every trail left by every living thing that had passed through this stretch of sidewalk in the last twenty-four hours. Harold's human brain faded to background noise and the hound took over, and the hound had one instruction: find the shark.

Rashe's scent trail was fresh and bright, metallic blood-salt burning like a lit fuse on the pavement. Harold put his nose down and ran.

South. Through the warehouse district. Past the shuttered businesses and the empty lots and the chain-link fences. Rashe was fast but Harold was relentless. Bloodhounds didn't sprint. They sustained. Mile after mile, scent check after scent check, the trail unwinding in front of him like a thread he was following into a labyrinth.

The trail didn't go toward the shiver house. It went south and kept going. Past the edge of the district, past the residential blocks, out toward the open stretches of road that led away from the city. Harold ran for twenty minutes, thirty, his paws hitting asphalt, then gravel, and then the cracked pavement of an access road he recognized.

The dolphin pool facility. The painted warehouse wall. The parking lot where Harold had driven past a hundred times, slowing his truck, letting his window down.

The door was open.

Harold pushed through it with his shoulder. The lobby was empty. The dolphin at the counter wasn't in the normal spot. He followed the scent down the hallway toward the pools, Rashe's metallic trail overlaying something else, something deeper. Ocean water. Jack.

Both scents led to Pool B.

Chapter Seventeen

Jack got to the pool at quarter past four in the morning and the dolphins weren't there.

The lobby was dark. The counter was empty. A sign taped to the glass said the facility opened at six, which Jack had known but hadn't thought about because Lady Leo had said go somewhere safe and the pool was the only safe place Jack had. He stood in the dark lobby, looked at the sign, and then tried the inner door. It was unlocked because dolphin shifters were trusting people who didn't think about sharks breaking into their facility before dawn.

He went in. Tossed some money on the counter then went down the hallway, past the other pools, all of them dark and still. Pool B was at the back. His pool. The smallest one, the private one, the one where he'd sunk to the bottom every day for years and pretended the silence was peace.

He stripped at the edge and dove in and shifted before the water closed over his head.

The shark form took him and for one breath, one suspended second, the world narrowed to water, pressure, the hum of the filtration system, and nothing else. His body stretched into six feet of gray muscle. His pectoral fins spread wide. The weight of what he'd just done, the door, the house, the walk, the phone call, all of it fell away because sharks didn't carry guilt. Sharks didn't carry anything. They moved and they breathed and they existed in the water and the water asked nothing from him.