Page 31 of Fated to the Fang

"I kept them alive." He plants both hands on the desk. "Here's the part you'll hate. Valek has prevented more of this than I can count. Boats that should have gone down didn't. People who ought to be names on a stone are pouring coffee this morning. I haven't worked out how yet, and I made a point of not knowing. That's the trade, Quinn. You can’t keep the people and the whole truth. I chose the people."

I mean to despise him for it. I can't, quite. None of the cowardice in this harbor is simple.

On the way back I cut through Nora's. A man at the corner table—one of the passengers from the boat that "ran aground" last month. He stirs coffee he isn't drinking, telling Nora in a pleasant voice that they caught a sandbar. When the bell strikes the hour his hand jerks, coffee slopping the rim, and his face does nothing. No fear. No memory to hang the fear on. A body flinching at a sound it isn't permitted to understand.

There's the whole argument at a café table. He's safe. He's also been robbed—of his own terror, of the right to decide what to do with it.

My phone buzzes. O.

enhanced frame 9. tell me i'm crazy.

The reflection on the wheelhouse glass: a man on the foredeck, and the rail behind him showing straight through where his chest should block it.

you're not crazy, I send back. don't enhance any more tonight. stay off the docks.

He sends a single ok. Scared, still working.

I walk back with the whole case rebuilt and one variable unsolved, and Dorian is the center of it.

I know what divides him. I've watched him choose victims into safety instead of silence—most of the time. That doesn't square the real thing though. Saving my life multiple times doesn't buy more lies.

But I can't keep judging a truth that I don't hold everything for.

I climb the stairs to wait. Forgiving him seems difficult right now. But I know I need the rest, because yesterday just wasn't enough. I need it all. If he expects me to live in this newfound world, he can begin by standing ahead of me and telling me everything, with nothing left unsaid.

20

DORIAN

She meets me outside the house as the sun rises, the folder under her arm like a shield she means to keep raised.

"Not here," she says. "Take me where it's kept."

"You're certain."

“No,” she says. “But I’m already past the line you were trying to keep me behind.”

She is right. The moment she saw my teeth, ignorance stopped being a shield. If I send her away with half-truths now, Lucien gets a frightened human. Helena gets a witness she can call unstable. The full truth is dangerous. The partial truth has become worse.

"I'm choosing. There's a difference, and you're going to start respecting it." She adds.

So I do. We go on foot, down past the seawall to where the cliff folds back on itself and the path turns to nothing a tourist would follow. The door is older than the harbor's name—iron gone black, set into the rock, sealed against asking. It opens for what I am and nothing else. Inside, the cold is dry and ancient, and the walls hold what the council calls the founding record: proof of how we did not die out. I light the sconces by hand, because she should see this the slow way, the human way.

"Sit if you want," I tell her. "This takes a while, and I won't shorten it to spare you."

She stays standing. I start where it actually starts. Not with me. With the killing.

"There was a stretch of years when humans learned what we were and did what any sane species would do. They hunted us. We answered the way frightened animals answer, and for a while both sides bled toward extinction. The laws came out of that. We stay hidden, we feed without killing, we leave no witness who could light a torch—and in exchange we go on existing. That's the council. That's Crimson Harbor. A town built to look empty so the thing under it can stay fed and quiet."

"Ethical feeding. You fed on Tracy's neighbors and called it ethical."

"We take little, and we don't take from the neck. We have blood delivered. The Silted Touch. It buries panic. It doesn't lie to the bone. It's only used if it's to hide us." I hold her eyes. "The rogues don't bother with the difference. The one at the pier drained for pleasure and left her almost empty. We are not the same. But from the outside, I know we look like one."

She doesn't look away. She writes nothing down. She's keeping the ledger in her head now.

"And human knowledge," she says. "Where do I land in the math?"

"A human who knows is a torch waiting to be lit. The law has one remedy for that, and it isn't gentle. Editing, if there's mercy in the room. Worse, if there isn't. Every hour you've known, you've been a problem the council want solving. That's why I kept building walls around. I let you believe I was managing you when I was hiding you."