Page 60

“That’s not the scale I use.” The scratch of a pen. “How many creatures?”

“Three. Gone.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“Not currently. I’ll be functional tomorrow.”

The scratch of a pen on paper. Then: “How bad is what you found?”

Drayce watched the tide cover the entrance. The caves were closed until morning.

“Bad enough that we have a longer conversation when I’m not standing on wet rocks.” He looked at the GPS tag in the last photograph. “And bad enough that I’m telling Althea before the briefing.”

He wrote something. “Before the briefing.”

“Yes.”

Pike said nothing for a moment. This was the silence he used when he’d changed his mind and was letting it settle. “Understood,” he said at last. “I’ll have Tor pull the deep anchor records.”

He heard him set the pen down. “You’re going to her place.”

“In the morning.”

He could hear Pike writing — the scratch of pen on paper, signaling that Pike was documenting a decision he thought was wrong and had chosen not to argue about. “Morning,” Pike said, neutral in a way only Pike could, packing three separate meanings into one word.

“Good.”

He hung up. He stood on the rocks for a moment, the phone in his hand, the ocean coming in, the caves sealed behind the tide. He looked at the photograph one more time — the inscription in the unknown script, the transliteration beneath it, the seven characters he had read twice in an empty cave.

The Drowned King was patient. Whatever it was doing down there, it had been doing for a long time before anyone had noticed.

He had noticed now.

He started back along the cliff path toward town. The path was his, and the tide was coming in behind him.

He was going to the department. He was going to write the preliminary report, send the photographs to Tor, get four hours of sleep, and tell her in the morning, with the full context organized and the worst of the dread managed into a form he could hand her without it being unwieldy.

His wolf had a different opinion.

His wolf’s opinion arrived at the intersection of the coastal residential street and the road back to the department, and it was not subtle. She was sixty meters away, upstairs in the bookstore apartment with the light on. His wolf had been tracking this since the cliff base and had apparently been building a case.

He turned left instead of right.

The bookstore light was on.

She opened the door before he knocked. She took one look at him — the dark shirt, the set of his shoulders, held two degrees off his usual — and her face did that thing he’d come to recognize. The humor landed first, as it always did with her. The rest followed.

She stepped back from the door. “You went somewhere without telling me. And now you’re here instead of there. Either it went well, and you want company, or it went badly, and you want company.”

She held the door open. “Come in.”

He went in.

“Which one was it?”

“Both.”

“Helpful.”