Page 19 of Fated to the Fang

One of them is screaming. The sound carries once, sharp, then stops. O's camera starts clicking.

"Tour boat," he says. "Saltline."

"I see it."

"No, not the boat. The bow." He adjusts the lens. "Someone's on the bow."

"There's crew on the bow."

"Not like that."

I take the binoculars from my bag and get the boat in the lenses. The image jumps with my breath: yellow jackets, white knuckles on railings, a crewman crawling on the deck like his balance has been stolen. Near the bow, I catch a figure standing too still against the spray. Then the boat pitches, and he is gone. My phone has no signal.

"Pack it," I say.

O doesn't argue. We load fast. Samples, collars, photographs, the cracked old route stencil on the shed. The engine coughs twice before it catches, and I hate every second it takes us to leave the island. The tour boat is already nearly at the harbor mouth by the time we cross. A second vessel meets it there. Not harbor patrol. Something lower, darker, cutting in from the north headland.

Dorian's boat. I know it before I have time to justify knowing it. We reach the marina, the Saltline tour has been tied off at the fuel dock along with a story I can't be sure is truthful.

"Rogue wave," someone says.

"Engine surge," someone else says.

"Woman hit her head."

"Kid slipped."

"Everybody's fine."

Nobody looks fine. A teenage boy sits with a blanket around his shoulders and no color in his face. A woman with blood at her hairline keeps saying, "It was the wake," in the flat voice of someone repeating a line in a language she doesn't speak. Beside her, a man stares at his own hands as if he has forgotten they belong to him.

Nora is there with a crate of bottled water. Greer is taking names. Dorian stands in a dark coat with seawater dripping from his sleeves. Of course he is. I step off the skiff with my field bag still over my shoulder.

"What happened?" I ask.

Greer turns first. "Tour boat took a bad wave."

"There wasn't weather."

"Bad wave," he repeats.

The woman with blood in her hair glances up at me. Her eyes catch, focus, then slip away. "We hit the rocks," she says.

"You were in open water."

"The rocks," she says. "We hit them."

O has gone quiet beside me. His camera hangs against his chest, lens still wet with spray. Dorian sees it.

"Who else has photographs?" he asks.

I stare at him. "That's your first question?"

"It's what matters."

"No. What matters is a tour boat full of people came in with half of them looking like they'd been drugged, and everyone started speaking in chorus."

Greer's jaw clenches. "Dr. Quinn."