Chapter Seven
Orvik
The fog clings to Saltford Bay like a jealous lover, wrapping its gray tendrils around masts and buoys in the predawn darkness. From the helm of my patrol boat, I can barely see thirty feet ahead, the world beyond existing only as vague shadows and muted sounds.
Normally, this is my favorite time of the day, when the harbor is silent and orderly, mine alone to patrol before the day's chaos begins.
But my mind isn't on the harbor safety this morning.
I glance down at my hand, where Captain Peck's beak punctured the webbing between my thumb and forefinger yesterday. The wound is already mostly healed, kraken biology being what it is. But the memory of Jackie's fingers on my skin lingers far more persistently than any injury.
Without warning, the patterns along my forearm pulse with a soft blue glow. I curse under my breath, tugging the fabric down to cover it.
This has been happening all night, random flares of bioluminescence whenever thoughts of her drift into my mind.
Which is embarrassingly often.
I adjust course slightly, steering around the row of fishing boats at their moorings.
Everything is in perfect order, exactly the way I would expect them to be. I should feel satisfied. Instead, all I can think about is the way Jackie's skin looked when my glow transferred to hers, those delicate blue patterns tracing her veins like luminous ink on parchment.
It's impossible her human body is responding to my mating pheromones, isn't it?
I focus on checking the mooring lines of old Thatcher's trawler, but even this routine task fails to quiet my mind. Instead, I see Jackie's face when she looked at her glowing hand, that mix of wonder and confusion, her lips parting slightly as if about to ask a question.
A question I'm unprepared to answer. Unprepared and unwilling.
My radio crackles, the guard's routine check-in providing a welcome distraction.
"Harbor Patrol One, this is Base. Check-in, over."
"Base, this is Harbor Patrol One. All clear in sectors one through three. Moving to sector four. Over."
"Copy that, Harbormaster. Fog's supposed to lift by oh-seven-hundred. Out."
Satisfied with my patrol officer's answer, I turn toward the eastern edge of the harbor where it meets open ocean and something catches my attention.
There's a silhouette in the fog and as I look at it, my entire body runs with a current of awareness.
My tentacle hair clings to my scalp as I stare at the shape of a vessel in the distance.
I slow the engine, squinting through the gray veil.
Most vessels would drop anchor in this soup, waiting for visibility to improve before attempting to enter the harbor.
Yet this one moves with fluid grace, unnaturally silent, barely making a dent in the ocean's oily perfection.
My tentacle hair tightens against my scalp so hard it hurts in an instinctual warning signal.
I know that silhouette. I know the shape of that boat, the organic curve of the prow, the absence of wake despite forward motion, the living hull material that absorbs rather than reflects sound. This is no human vessel.
It's kraken.
My gills flutter beneath my uniform shirt in an anxious response I can't control.
In the fifteen years I've settled in this small town, no kraken vessel ever came this close to shore.
The clues of the last few days come back to my mind with sudden clarity.
From the buoy to the shape in the water I chased the day I met Jackie in the lighthouse, everything lines up to paint an impossible picture.
One of my kraken brothers made their way to Saltford Bay and deep down in the pit of my stomach, I know who. I've known who since finding that buoy.
My hand goes to the half seashell, still tucked inside my shirt pocket, then I withdraw it.
The boy who carved it is long gone. Only one question remains.
Why did he come looking for me? And why now?
I alter course toward the unknown kraken ship, pushing my engine harder than usual. The vibrations travel through the hull, through my webbed hands on the wheel. Even in the fog, I can feel the approaching vessel disrupting the water pressure as it waits silently.
"Harbor Patrol to approaching vessel," I call through the radio, following protocol despite knowing they won't respond. "Identify yourself and state your business."
Silence. Expected, but irritating nonetheless.
As I draw closer, details emerge through the mist, the subtle phosphorescent glow marking the navigation points, the hull that seems to breathe with the ocean's rhythm.
My throat tightens as memories flood back of the Nautilus and its fleet of smaller craft.
The people living there. My family. All those I left behind.
I pull alongside and cut my engine. The familiar scent hits me, salt and deep-sea minerals. The kind that can only be harvested by hand in the secret depths of the ocean. It smells like home, and the unexpected nostalgia is like a hook to my gut.
"This is restricted waters requiring harbor clearance," I call out, maintaining my harbormaster persona despite my racing heart. "Permission to come aboard requested."
"Permission granted, Harbormaster," comes a voice that stops my heart.
A figure emerges from the cabin, lean and tall with skin tinged red around the edges like a warning display. His tentacle hair flows freely around his face, longer than I remember, with new patterns etched into the skin of his forearms.
He smiles at me, his tentacle beard lifting to expose a row of white teeth with a single golden tooth where his left canine should be. The smile creases around the scar that runs along his right cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his temple in a crisscross pattern.
The scar he wears because of me.
Kael Kelpwise. The friend who was a brother to me in a life best left forgotten.
"Little Orvy," he says, using the childhood nickname that now feels like a slur. "Look at you, all dressed up in your land-dweller costume."
I step onto his deck, feeling the living hull shift subtly beneath my boots. The vessel doesn't like the land-dwelling soles and I can feel it move underneath me, trying to reach up to my ankles. Seeking familiar flesh.
"State your business," I say, my voice flat and official. "All vessels must register with the harbormaster's office before—"
"By the Deep, listen to yourself!" Kael laughs, circling me with predatory grace, his bare feet making no noise on the living material.
His tentacle hair shifts and curls, expressing the mockery his face only hints at.
"Playing dress-up with the land dwellers, binding your crown like it's something to be ashamed of. "
He reaches toward my tentacle hair, neatly tied behind my neck, and I jerk back instinctively.
"Don't touch me." The words come out in the lower register krakens use for threats, vibrating more through water than air.
Kael's eyes widen fractionally, the only indication he's surprised by my reaction. Then his mocking smile returns.
"They've really domesticated you, haven't they?
Look at you!" His gaze travels from my boots to my neatly pressed uniform.
"You're trapped in leather and layers of fabric, sailing in this floating bucket instead of a proper kraken vessel.
" His tentacles darken with contempt. "Didn't think you'd go full surface-pet. "
My skin tightens, patterns darkening beneath my uniform. I fight the urge to shed the human trappings, to let my tentacles free, to remind him that I am still kraken, still a predator of the deep. But that would give him exactly what he wants.
"What are you doing here, Kael?" I ask again, keeping my voice level. "The Nautilus never comes this close to shore. You're a long way from home."
The fog begins to thin as dawn approaches, pale light catching the water's surface. Kael's demeanor shifts, his smile fading into something more businesslike. He reaches into the neck of his shirt and produces a small object on a cord, holding it up between two fingers.
My entire body goes still.
It's the other half of the midnight nautilus shell. Black as the abyss, streaked with pale violet, its curved surface carved with half of its figure missing. My carving. My half is in my breast pocket. It has been there since Callum pulled the buoy from the water.
"I've been looking for you for years," Kael says, his voice dropping the mockery for something that sounds almost like its original shape. Almost. "Since the Nautilus cast me out. Years, Orvik. Do you know how long that is, to search the coast alone?"
"I know exactly how long exile is," I say flatly. "I've had fifteen years of practice."
Something flickers across his face. Not guilt. I don't think Kael is capable of guilt anymore, but something adjacent to it. He closes his fist around the shell half and tucks it back against his chest.
"I scoured the coastline for you," he says. "Asking about a young kraken, washing up on shore with nothing to his name. Well, nothing to his name is a bit dramatic. I always knew you would keep your father's pearl. It seems I was right."
Kael's eyes go to my chest, where the pearl rests against my skin, barely visible through the unbuttoned top of the garment. Something shifts in his expression. Not greed, exactly. Something I can't read and don't care to.
"You still carry it," he says quietly.
"The pearl isn't your concern," I say.
"I know it isn't." His eyes fix on where my hand rests against my chest. "But the fact that you kept it tells me something. You haven't let go of the Nautilus entirely."
"I let go of the Nautilus the day it let go of me," I say. "Whatever you think you see, you're wrong."
He leans against the cabin wall, affecting casualness that doesn't reach his eyes. His tentacles curl nonchalantly, but I know better. I know him better than I've ever known anyone.
"Orvik." His voice loses its edge, and the change unsettles me more than the mockery did. "I came here because things have changed. Joren—"
"Don't." The word comes out in the lower register krakens use for threats. "You don't get to speak his name to me."
Kael's tentacle hair shifts, but he doesn't back down.
"If you'd just listen—"
"Listen to what? To you?" I stare at him. Kael is still the same. Still a liar at heart. Standing face-to-face with him after all these years feels like looking into a distorted mirror. This is what I might have become had circumstances been different.
Bitter. Exiled. Grasping at whatever he can reach.
"I lost everything for you." I push back, anger getting the best of me. "My family, my future, my entire life. And you dare come to me now and ask me to listen? Have you learned nothing?"
I know this man. I know what he's capable of. I shake my head, disgust running down my limbs like poison.
"My father cast me out," I say, the words burning my throat. "He looked me in the eye and told me I was no longer his son. All for a crime you committed. There’s nothing more to be said between us."
"It's not true."
"Everything out of your mouth is a lie." I step closer, my voice dropping to the kraken-threat register.
Around the kraken skiff, the water ripples at my tone.
"You lied to me. You lied to the council. You let me take your punishment. So no, Kael. I won’t listen to you now. I will never listen to you again."
Something flickers across Kael's face. Not anger. Not the mockery I expected. Something that looks, for just a moment, like grief. He masks it quickly, but not quickly enough.
"I didn't come here to fight you," he says.
"Then you wasted a very long trip."
Behind Kael, through the thinning fog, I can see the distant outline of the lighthouse, its beam still sweeping in the dawn light. Beyond it, the house where Jackie is probably already starting her day, rising in her soft bed.
The thought sends a pulse of light through my skin, faint but noticeable.
Kael's eyes narrow, his gaze fixing on the blue glow visible at my collar.
"Well, well," he says softly. "That's interesting. You've found a mate." His tentacles curl with something I read as malicious delight. "A surface dweller? That explains why you've stayed so long."
I keep my face impassive, though rage boils beneath my skin.
"Leave Saltford Bay, Kael. This is your only warning."
"I'll go, for now. But now I know where you live and where your mate lives."
The implications that he’s going to circle my town, my water, my Jackie, chills me more than the morning air.
"Stay away,” I say.
Without another word, I step back onto my own deck and Kael slips into his cabin.
The skiff's engine engages with barely a whisper, the vessel sliding away with unnatural speed and silence above the waveless water.
Within moments, it's swallowed by the remnants of fog, leaving only fading ripples to prove it was ever there.
I stand alone on my patrol boat as the fog lifts, the rising sun illuminating Saltford Bay in morning light. The familiar shoreline emerges: the rows of fishing boats, the harbor buildings, the lighthouse standing sentinel, and in the distance, the rescue center perched on its rocky peninsula.
My head pulses with deep, molten anger, betrayal, and something I refuse to examine. But watching him leave on a kraken vessel alone, exiled, same as me, I understand one thing clearly, at least.
Saltford Bay is my home. It's where my heart lies.
And my loyalties.
This time, I won't stand aside. This time, I'll protect what's mine.