I return to my makeshift lab, lock the door, and lean against it while my heart rate returns to normal.
The map coordinates are on my phone, ready to be verified against sample locations tomorrow. The cellular analysis needs to continue. The data requires systematic documentation. I have work to do, patterns to identify, a case to solve.
But when I finally pack up my equipment and walk back to Flynn's Inn as dawn colors the horizon, my thoughts keepcircling back to eyes that glow in darkness and a voice that promised the waters have teeth.
The coordinates will wait until I've slept. The samples, the analysis, the rational explanations I'm supposed to build—all of it can wait.
What can't wait is the need to check the door lock. Twice. Then the window latch. Then the door again, because Finn's warning about things that don't stay in the ocean keeps playing on a loop in my mind, and for the first time in my career, my scientific training has no answer for what I just experienced.
CHAPTER 4
FINN
My dragon refuses to let me sleep.
I've been awake since she walked out of my cave, pacing the stone floors that should feel like home but cut at me like a cage, diving to depths that should break me into unconsciousness, fighting the pull that drags me toward the village like a hooked fish bleeding in the current.
The mate-bond tightens with each hour. Go to her. Claim her. Mark her as mine before something else does.
I let the shift take me instead. Silver mist swirls around my body, cool against overheated skin, and the dragon rises through it like smoke given form. The change is seamless. Instant. One breath I'm standing on two legs, the next I'm coiled muscle and crimson scales that catch the dim cave light like fresh blood. Wings unfold from my spine with a whisper of leather, claws click against stone, and the relief that floods through me is almost sexual in its intensity.
The dragon doesn't fight the need. Doesn't rationalize or strategize. It simply is.
I dive, seeking the crushing pressure of the eastern trenches where thought becomes instinct and higher reasoning drowns.Down here, the cold should numb everything. The darkness should swallow the bond's pull.
It should... but once again it doesn't.
Even at depths where pressure could crush her, her presence burns on the island like a beacon I can't ignore. I can still smell jasmine and citrus and sense that sharp intelligence cutting through the black water.
Algae blooms coat the trench walls in patches that pulse with bioluminescence, exactly like the samples she's been collecting. I follow the concentrations deeper, tracking them to thermal vents along the ocean floor. The water tastes wrong here. I taste chemical traces that don't belong, synthetic compounds mixed with the organic bloom.
Then I see it.
Harvesting equipment lies scattered across the sea floor like discarded prey. Professional grade collection gear designed for extreme depths. Reinforced containers, sampling tools, industrial-strength scrapers for collecting algae from rock surfaces. The kind of equipment that requires hands to operate, but not the kind humans would need to survive down here.
Supernatural workers. The syndicate has been using them down here, creatures who can survive the crushing pressure without life support but need tools for the actual harvesting work.
I circle the wreckage, rage building in my chest. My dragon knows what I'm looking at. The collection containers still hold traces of concentrated algae at levels that would burn human tissue on contact, levels I've seen in the ritual deaths.
The syndicate isn't just trafficking supernaturals. They're enslaving them, forcing them to harvest the very toxins that will be used to murder humans in ritual sacrifices. Then discarding the workers when they're no longer useful.
I surface slowly, processing what I found. The pattern I've watched play out before slots into place. Concentrated toxins are delivered through contact. Ocean chemistry is introduced to the body without water present. The deaths look like drowning but follow different rules.
And now I know how they're getting the algae. Enslaved supernaturals harvesting at depths humans couldn't survive, collecting toxins that will be used in ritual murders—human sacrifices for Mikhail's blood magic.
Lila would understand the science. Her microscope and analysis could confirm what I'm guessing at based on lifetimes of watching blood magic kill.
The ritual symbols near the death sites tell me the rest. Someone is using their victims for a secondary purpose. I've noted the positioning, the lunar timing, the concentration of algae around specific contact points. These are blood magic patterns I haven't seen practiced openly since before the Clearances.
I haul myself onto the rocks and shift, needing hands for what comes next.
Phoenix ash coats the stone.
Heat hits me first, faint but unmistakable even in the ocean's cold. Phoenix fire never fully dies. It just waits for the flame to rise again. This ash is fresh, hours old at most, with warmth still clinging to the particles.
And the scent beneath tells me everything.
Mikhail.
