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PROLOGUE

Everything here was wrong. Terrible. Unnatural.

That was the word. Unnatural. The creature had never been in such an unnatural place. Square walls. Bright lights. Barely enough room to turn or to stretch or to flick one’s tail becomingly.

The creature swished his tail anyway, baring his teeth at the sharp stab of pain the movement gave him. It hurt, his tail. Everything did. His gills, his eyes, even his skin. The salinity of the water was off, and it was kept too warm for comfort.

Another aspect of his torture, or a case of simple incompetence? The creature didn’t know, and he was tired of guessing. He was tired of everything, beaten down by this captivity. He was tired, and he was in pain, and he was bored. Their little aquarium held only him and the too-salty water. There was nothing shiny or pretty or scaly to admire or to chase. The only relief in monotony was when they came in, and nothing good ever followed.

They kept…prodding him. Cutting and scalding and peeling. Him and his poor, beautiful tail.

So no, the creature wouldn’t wish for them to come, even if it cut through the boredom.

Mostly the creature sang. He sang and sang, even though no one in his pod could hear him. He was cut off completely now. Not just pushed to the side this time, made unwelcome in obvious or subtle ways. No. He was abandoned and alone—whether deliberate or not, that was the outcome. He was set to drift in this dreary enclosure barely fit for a simple tuna.

The lights flickered.

The creature stopped his song mid-note. He peered up with interest from where he was slumped on the hard enclosure floor. That was new, the flickering. New and welcome. A brief relief from the perpetual harsher-than-daylight glow that surrounded him.

But more than that, humans needed power for their artificial light. The same power that maintained the electricity at the top of his enclosure. The dreaded electric fence that kept him from leaping out of this man-made receptacle.

The creature pumped his tail, ignoring the pain long enough to push closer to the surface. If the power went out…

Well, it wouldn’t do him any good, not in this form. And as for the other…

The other would require blood. Human blood.

How the creature would make it out of the facility, and out of the dense forest surrounding it and back to the ocean, injured and underfed, was another question. And what could he manage in open water, with a tail that barely functioned as it should?

It didn’t matter, did it? Not unless…

The door to the room surrounding his enclosure opened. A human entered, one of the big ones who carried a weapon, either to shoot darts or to give shocks. The human closed the door behind him and stood there, on guard, ears stuffed so as not to hear any hint of the creature’s song. Perhaps he was meant to keep the creature in line if anything went awry?

But no one followed the burly human through the door. Not yet. There was only the one.

How perfect. The creature bared his sharp teeth, pressing himself to the transparent wall of his enclosure, just below the ledge. He waited there, unblinking. The guard shivered behind his fabrics and his goggles, holding his weapon close.

The power went out.

It didn’t come back on.

1

LUKE

Luke woke to a shadowy form in his doorway. The room was too dark for him to get a grasp on its shape or its size, but something was definitely there. Silent. Ominous. Watching him as he slept.

He bolted upright in bed, heart racing as he let out a garbled yell. “What the⁠—?”

“Dada!”

Luke blinked into the darkness. Right. Colby. Of course the mysterious shadow was only Luke’s son, toddling toward him now, little arms held up in demand.

“Hey, bud,” Luke mumbled, pressing a hand to his chest to still his pounding heart. He pulled Colby up into the bed and grabbed for his phone. Five forty-five a.m. So it wasn’t the middle of the night, even if it felt like it was.

What he wouldn’t give for a little more sleep.

But it was too late for that, so Luke gave in to the inevitable early start to his morning and switched on his bedside lamp, then stared at the warm bundle of toddler in his arms. Of course the shadow had been Colby—there was no one else in the house—but how was Colby here? “Did you climb out of your crib, little man?”