21. Avery
AVERY
He finishes near the afternoon. A lot of information in one day leaving an echo through my mind. I set my folder on the cold slab between us and open it to the seal photographs, because evidence is what I can make sense of.
"Terms," I say. "You don't get my help for free, and you don't get it on faith."
"Name them."
"The truth stops being hidden from me even when it's ugly.
Especially then. No more deciding which parts I can handle.
If you can't tell me, you say that, and why.
And you stop with having people follow me.
I'm a person who works with you, or not at all.
I can walk away now, leave this town and never look back if that can't happen. "
"Agreed. Every last part."
"That was fast."
"I spent days learning what the alternative would be. I won't let a cage ruin what this between us could be. I already regret building that."
I wait for the catch, but there isn't one. I don't entirely forgive him yet. "What help do you need with Lucien? What can I do?"
"You should meet someone first who will know how dangerous this is." He points in the direction of the ocean. "You need to be aware of what you are getting yourself into."
A woman I've never seen before waits by the rocks. She chooses to look me up and down, and doesn't offer to shake my hand.
"So. The marine biologist. The woman who has been causing problems in the harbor. Do you understand the danger you are in? Everything you have right now could either get you killed, transitioned into a vampire, or your memory distorted?"
"Yes. He told me where I fit in this story."
"Did he?" She turns to Dorian. "You told her the law."
"The complete picture."
"Then you've made her twice as dangerous. When you saw what fed on those seals, what did you feel?"
"Nauseous. Then curious."
"In that order?"
"Overlapping."
Her attention sharpens—not warmth, just interest. "Curiosity gets people opened up. Fear keeps them breathing. Learn which one you are before you go deeper."
We walk toward a cliff, inside it opens into a chamber. Celeste, whose name I just heard from Dorian's mouth, spreads a stolen-looking version of council knowledge across the long table.
"We assumed the rogues hunt where it's easy," she says. "Tourists, dock workers, anyone the town can forget. The seals we wrote off as opportunistic."
I pull my folder from under my arm, and lay my pages next to hers.
"They're not opportunistic. Look at the recovery points."
She looks.
"Direct feeding leaves a clean carcass—drained, intact, the gray residue I flagged.
But half my dead seals aren't drained. Full blood volume, same residue.
Those didn't get fed on. They ate something that did, or swam where it happened.
" I trace the cluster. "It moves up the food chain.
Small fish, then seals, then whatever's next.
And it concentrates downstream of three tunnel outlets—here, here, and here.
Your rogues aren't hunting at random. They're working through planned attacks, and the water records which ones. "
"Three active outlets," Dorian says. "We had it at one."
"You had the one you watch. The seals found you the other two."
Celeste studies the three points for a long moment, then taps the nearest outlet. "If she's right, this one tells us fastest."
We gather everything and head for the cliff base.
"She slows us," the guard says. "And she remembers. You walked a human into our nest."
"I walked in the only person who found the other two outlets," Dorian says. "Move."
The dark inside is total, the cold heavy with salt and rot. I keep my headlamp low and my eyes on the floor, reading the rock like a tide line. Then a scream hits my ears. A woman, then a child, then a man begging in a language I can't make out. The guard stops. Even Dorian's shoulders lock.
"It's a trap," Celeste murmurs. "They seed fear into a place—stolen from the ones they fed on, pressed into the stone. It plays for whoever comes."
The voices climb. Then they change. The woman's scream thins into words. Not English. Not any language I know, but the guard reacts as if something has opened inside his chest. His head snaps toward the flooded channel, eyes gone wide and glass-bright.
"Sienna," the voice whispers. The guard stops breathing.
Celeste's hand closes around his sleeve. "That isn't here."
The voice comes again, closer now, wet and pleading. "Sienna. You left me."
The guard makes a sound too raw to be fear alone. Grief, panic, recognition. His body tilts toward the passage where the screaming peaks.
"What is that?" I ask.
"Echo debt," Dorian says, low. His face has gone stone-white in the beam of my lamp. "They seeded the walls with stolen fear. It doesn't just scare us. It looks inside us."
The guard jerks hard enough that Celeste slides half a step in the silt. "I heard her," he says. "Under the water."
"No," Celeste says, sharper now. "You heard what they buried here and connected your guilt."
The water seems to rise along the stones, black and fast, licking higher than my boots. My heartbeat thumps uncontrollably.
"It isn't rising," I say.
Dorian's eyes cut to me.
"The tide's going out. I read the table this morning. And the silt there hasn't moved. No ripples. No fresh wash line."
Celeste follows my lamp, then swears softly. "Collapsed run."
The guard lunges toward the screaming. Dorian catches him before he makes another step, one hand locked into the rear of his coat, and hauls him back with enough force to crack stone under both their boots. The guard fights him. Actually fights him.
"Let me go," he snarls. "She's there."
"She's not," Dorian says, close to his ear. "That voice is bait."
Celeste points where the screams are loudest. "They packed the sound around the dead passage. Anyone who runs toward it hits the collapse and goes under."
I swing my lamp to the low side passage. Foam gathers in a thin trembling line, moving steadily away from us.
"There," I say. "Water's still moving through that side. That's the opening."
Celeste looks once, then nods. "She's right. Follow the outflow."
Dorian does not release the guard until Celeste forces his eyes onto hers.
"Sienna is gone," she says. "This place is wearing her voice. Do not give it your body too."
The guard's face breaks, then shuts again. He nods once, ruined and furious.
Dorian turns to the low passage. "We follow Avery's waterline. No one listens to the dead."
The low passage opens into a chamber the rogues used and left in a hurry. Crates. A cot. Delivery bags gone brown. And on the far wall, scored fresh into the rock, a mark Dorian stares at.
"Lucien," he says.
I photograph everything. The guard watches, and says nothing.
Daylight is gray when we emerge from the tunnels, Celeste stares at me like a sample. Almost as though she's not decided how to label me.
"You were right. And you didn't run. That's two points I never expected to give. I don't trust you. But I'd rather have you in the room than divulging our secret."
"Warmest thing anyone's said to me all week."
The corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile, but close.
Dorian steps beside me, careful of the space between us. "There's a cost to today. The guard will report it. I can't keep you off the council's books for now. BUT they'll want to see you. Soon."
"Then we get ahead of it," I say. "Same terms. You prepare me for everything before I face them."
"Everything," he says.