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.
Jack sank to the bottom. The wet concrete was cool against his belly. He let himself drift.
He'd been in the pool for maybe an hour when he heard the door.
Not the pool room door. The outer door. The one in the lobby.
The sound traveled through the water muffled but unmistakable, the scrape of a handle and the thud of someone who wasn't trying to be quiet.
Jack's body went rigid. He hovered near the bottom of the pool and oriented toward the sound and every predator instinct he had came online at once.
Footsteps. Coming down the hallway. Moving fast, not running but close. A scent filtered through the water, faint at first, then stronger as the pool room door opened. Metallic. Sharp. Blood and salt and the aggressive musk of a shark who was not calm and not careful and not there to swim.
Rashe.
Jack didn't have time to think about how.
Rashe had found him the same way sharks always found each other, by scent, instinct, and the pull that connected members of a shiver even when the shiver was falling apart.
It didn't matter how. Rashe was standing at the edge of the pool, glaring down into the water.
Even through ten feet of water the fury on his face was evident.
"I know you did it," Rashe said. His voice was distorted through the water but the words carried. "Dresden and Lichen are gone. Cops came. Only way that happens is if someone told them." He crouched at the pool's edge. "Come out, Jack."
Jack stayed at the bottom. His shark brain was running thoughts that his human brain couldn't keep up with. Distance to the surface. Distance to the edge. Rashe's position relative to the water. Whether Rashe would shift or stay human. Whether it mattered.
Rashe shifted.
It was fast. He went from crouching at the edge to launching himself into the pool in one motion, his human form dissolving mid-air, and by the time he hit the water he was a shark.
Smaller than Jack but faster, leaner, built for the quick lateral strikes that made him dangerous in a challenge.
The pool erupted. The calm water became chaos, two sharks in a space designed for one, the walls too close and the bottom too shallow and neither of them with room to maneuver the way they would in open water.
Rashe hit him from the side. A raking pass, teeth grazing Jack's flank, tearing skin. The pain was bright and immediate and Jack's body responded before his mind caught up. He twisted, snapped, caught nothing. Rashe was already circling, coming around for a second pass.
In the shiver, that was the part where Jack would slow down.
Take the hit. Go still. Let the fight end the way fights always ended, with Jack on the bottom and the winner taking what came next.
His body knew the script. His muscles were already beginning the familiar softening, the surrender reflex, the trained response to losing.
That time though, he didn't go still.
He didn't go still because Rashe wasn't here to win a challenge and collect.
Rashe was here to kill him. Jack could see it in the way Rashe moved, the angle of attack, the speed.
There was no ritual in this. No rules. No fight-then-after cycle they'd both known for years.
Rashe wanted him dead for betraying the shiver, again, and the part of Jack's brain that had been going blank for years, the shutdown, the survival mode, the practiced emptiness, that part looked at what was coming and for the first time in Jack's life it said no.
Not stillness. Not blankness. The opposite. Everything came on at once.
Jack surged forward and hit Rashe head-on.
The impact shook through both of them, jaw to jaw, and the pool water turned cloudy with the force of it.
Rashe rolled sideways and came back fast, raking Jack's belly, and the pain lit up Jack's underside in a hot stripe that he felt from gills to tail.
Blood in the water. His blood. The pool was too small for that.
In open water, two sharks could circle and feint and test each other from a distance.
In the small pool, every pass was close-range.
The walls threw them back at each other.
Rashe came at his flank again and Jack spun to meet him and their bodies collided in the shallow end, the force of it sending a wave over the pool's edge and onto the concrete.
Jack snapped at Rashe's pectoral fin and caught it, tore, felt the cartilage give.
Rashe screamed. The sound was wrong underwater, distorted, a vibration that traveled through the water and into Jack's jaw.
Rashe wrenched free and left a piece of himself behind and the water bloomed pink around Jack's mouth.
He was deciding, for maybe the first time, to really fight like he meant it. His body knew how to do that. Underneath the years of pain, underneath the trained surrender, the shark knew what it was built for. Six feet of muscle and teeth and instinct that was older than any human rules.
Rashe hit the pool wall and rebounded and came at Jack's throat.
Jack dove under the strike and came up beneath him and drove his snout into Rashe's belly hard enough to lift the smaller shark halfway out of the water.
Rashe twisted, bit, caught Jack's dorsal fin and tore.
The pain was a white flash. Jack rolled, taking Rashe with him, and they tumbled through the water in a knot of gray bodies, blood, and thrashing tails, the pool's filtration system churning uselessly against the red.
Jack caught Rashe's tail on the next pass.
His jaws closed and the taste was blood, salt, and the familiar metallic edge of a shark he'd lived with for years.
Rashe thrashed. Jack held on. His body was doing things his mind couldn't track, moving on instinct that was older than the shiver, older than the challenges, older than the rules.
Predator instinct. Killer instinct. The thing that lived underneath the trained surrender and had been waiting, dormant, for the moment when surrender stopped being an option.
The blood frenzy came over him like a curtain dropping.
It wasn't like the blankness. The blankness was an absence, a going-away, a retreat into nothing.
It was the opposite. It was everything, all at once, turned up past what his brain could process.
The water was red. The taste of blood was so thick it was all he could sense.
His jaws were working and his body was moving and somewhere in the chaos Rashe stopped thrashing and Jack didn't stop.
He couldn't stop.
The frenzy had him and it was nothing like going still.
It was the raw thing underneath all the years of conditioning, the animal that the shiver had trained into compliance and that compliance had caged, and the cage was open now and the animal was out and it didn't know how to be out without being violent because violence was the only language it had ever been taught.
Jack came back to himself on the concrete.
He was human. Naked, wet, bleeding from cuts he couldn't count.
His ribcage burned, the healing rib rebroken or maybe a new one cracked, and when he pressed his hand against it his fingers came away red.
He was lying face down at the edge of the pool.
The concrete was cold and rough against his cheek and his chest and his stomach and every place where his skin met the ground.
The pool was behind him. He could hear the water, quiet, the filter still running. He didn't turn to look. He knew what was in the water. He'd put it there. He could smell the blood, his own and Rashe's, mixed with the water and the flat copper tang of death.
He'd killed Rashe.
The thought landed in his head and sat there.
Rashe was dead. Jack had killed a member of his own shiver.
No killing your own kind. That was the rule.
The deepest rule, the one that even the challenges didn't break, the line that separated what the shiver did from something worse.
Jack had crossed it. He'd crossed it in a blood frenzy that had taken him out of his own head and put something else in control, something feral and desperate and nothing like the blank compliance that had defined his life for years.
He'd fought back. For the first time, he'd fought back for real, and what fighting back looked like was a dead shark floating in a rented pool at five in the morning.
Jack pressed his face against the concrete and closed his eyes and breathed.
Every inhale hurt. The cuts on his arms were still bleeding, slow, the kind of bleed that would stop on its own if he didn't move.
He didn't move. He lay on the concrete and bled and listened to the quiet of the pool room and tried to find the blankness, the going-away place, the nothing spot.
It wasn't there. Just Jack, on the ground, with blood on his hands and a body in the water and the knowledge that the person he'd been twenty minutes ago, the one who went still when the fight was lost, was gone.
Replaced by someone who could kill. Who had killed.
Who'd discovered that the opposite of compliance wasn't freedom.
It was violence, and the violence felt as bad as the blankness, and Jack didn't know what was left if both of those things were taken away.
He heard the door. The inner door, the one to the pool hallway. The click of claws on tile. Fast, skittering, four legs moving at a pace that was frantic, focused, and nothing like a dolphin.
A wet nose pressed against Jack's cheek.
He opened his eyes. A bloodhound stood over him, long ears dragging on the wet concrete, brown eyes wide and frantic, panting from a run that must have covered miles.
The nose pressed against his face again, sniffing, checking, cataloging the damage with the same obsessive thoroughness that Harold brought to everything.
Then the hound shifted and there was Harold, naked and kneeling on the concrete beside him, and Harold's hands were on his face.
"Jack. I'm here."
Jack looked up at him. The lights were bright. Harold's face was blurred. Everything hurt.
"He came to the pool," Jack whispered. "He found me."
Harold's forehead pressed against his temple. Warm skin, warm breath, the smell of earth and rain cutting through the blood. Jack closed his eyes and let Harold hold him there on the wet concrete with the body of the man he'd killed floating in the water behind them.
The last thing he felt before the dark took him was Harold's hand on his jaw, steady and warm, not letting go.