Page 9 of A Gathering Storm
Maybe he's right. Maybe there's no staying neutral when one side trades in misery and the other's trying to protect what little wildness is left in the world. Or maybe I'm just tired of swimming alone in dark water, never knowing when the next Santos will come with silver bullets and a market price on tiger bones.
We work in silence after that, three killers hiding evidence with practiced efficiency. By the time the last body disappears into the tide pools, full dark has settled over Stormhaven. Clouds mass on the horizon, promising another storm by morning.
"There's a meeting," MacRae says as we climb back to the clifftop. "Tomorrow night, the old boathouse. The others will be there—Rafe, Jax, Finn."
CHAPTER 5
FINN
The ocean doesn't want to let me go.
Seawater streams from my skin as I rise from the churning depths, each drop a reluctant goodbye from the element that's sheltered me for seven years. The waves clutch at my ankles, my thighs, my waist—possessive as a lover, desperate as a mother losing her child. But the pull I've been fighting for weeks is stronger than the sea's embrace, dragging me back to land I swore I'd never walk again.
My feet find purchase on storm-slicked rocks, and the transformation begins its reversal. Scales shimmer along my spine before dissolving into pale flesh, iridescent patterns fading like watercolors in rain. The gills at my throat seal themselves with a sensation like drowning in reverse, forcing me to remember how lungs work, how to breathe air that tastes of lightning and old grief.
Kelp tangles in my hair—long, black, still carrying traces of the deep places where sunlight never reaches. Foam clings to my naked skin like the ocean's fingerprints, marking me as something that belongs fully to either world. Not anymore.
The first breath of Stormhaven air hits like a physical blow. Pine and peat, rain-soaked earth, the distant smoke of hearthfires. Underneath it all, the distinctive musk of wolf territory, bear-scent from the fishing boats, Rafe's panther-shadow lingering near the docks. The island's supernatural ecosystem mapped in scent, unchanged except for the new notes—fear-sweat, gunpowder, something chemical and wrong that makes my dragon-sense recoil.
My eyes adjust to moonlight after years of bioluminescent depths. The clifftop stretches before me, worn paths I once knew by heart now slightly altered by seven years of erosion and foot traffic. Below, Stormhaven sprawls in patterns of light and shadow. Windows glow warm where families gather, oblivious to what's crawled from their ocean. The harbor rocks with boats I don't recognize, though the old pier where I first kissed Saoirse remains, weathered but standing.
I don't think about Saoirse. About finding her body on these same rocks, throat torn out by wolves who thought a dragon's mate made good leverage. About the storm I called in my rage, how it nearly drowned the entire eastern shore before Declan and the others stopped me.
That's why I left. Not exile—escape. From what I'd become, from what I was capable of when grief stripped away five centuries of control.
But the pull that's been haunting my dreams won't be denied. Something stirs in the deep places, older than my bloodline, angrier than my grief. The whales sing warnings. The tide pools show visions of drowned things rising. And the ancient pacts—the ones my grandfather sealed with blood and starlight—tighten like chains around my bones, dragging me back to fulfill obligations I never chose.
Movement in the bracken. My senses, sharpened by years of hunting in pitch-black depths, catch the tremor of footsteps, the quick intake of breath. A fisherman, young enough that he wouldn't remember me clearly. His eyes go wide as he takes inmy naked form, the water still streaming from my hair, the faint shimmer of scales that haven't quite faded from my shoulders.
He runs.
Good. Let him run. Let him carry word to every pub and clan gathering that Finn Rowan walks the land again. The stories will grow in the telling—they always do. By morning, I'll be ten feet tall, breathing fire, with eyes that kill and storms at my command. Some of it might even be true.
I find clothes where I left them seven years ago, sealed in an old smuggler's cache behind a pile of rocks. The leather's stiff, the cotton musty, but they fit well enough. Black jacket, black jeans, boots that mold to feet that have known only water for too long. The clothes of a man I'm not sure exists anymore, worn by something caught between dragon and ghost.
By the time Declan finds me, I'm perched on the clifftop's edge where the drop is steepest, where Saoirse used to meet me when we thought love could bridge the gap between dragon and human. His approach is careful—an alpha recognizing another apex predator, unsure if I'm ally or threat.
"The tides are turning, MacRae." I don't look at him. Can't. His scent carries too many memories—the blood on his hands when he helped me carry Saoirse's body, the desperation in his voice when he begged me not to destroy the wolves responsible, knowing it would spark a war that would consume Stormhaven. "Sacrifices will be demanded before the moon turns dark."
He stops ten feet away. Close enough to speak, far enough to react if I shift. Smart man. "Speak plainly, Rowan. What threatens Stormhaven that requires your... intervention?"
The word carries weight. Intervention. As if I'm some outside force, not someone who once called this place home. But he's right—I am outside now, changed by years in places where pressure would crush lungs, where bioluminescence replacessunlight, where ancient things whisper secrets in languages that predate human speech.
My laugh scrapes out bitter as barnacles. "You think in terms of months and years. I feel the pull of ancient currents—something stirs that should have stayed buried."
"The human surveyors? The cartels?"
So narrow, his vision. Still thinking in terms of territory and drug routes when the real threat moves in deeper waters. "The humans are symptoms, not the disease. Their presence here, now, when the veils grow thin—someone's orchestrating this. Someone who knows what lies beneath Stormhaven's foundations."
His jaw works, processing. I can feel his wolf pressing against his skin, uncomfortable with my presence. Dragons and wolves have never mixed well. Too much fire and fang, too many old grievances written in scar tissue and scorched earth.
"The drownings," he says finally. "Three this month. The fishermen say...”
"The fishermen know nothing." I cut him off, finally turning to face him. His storm-grey eyes widen slightly—I've changed more than I thought. The deep does things to those who stay too long, leaves marks that can't fade. "But they feel it, don't they? The wrongness in the water. The way the fish flee to deeper channels. The seals that beach themselves rather than stay in corrupted tides."
"You're saying something's poisoning the water?"
"Not poison. Summoning." The word tastes like copper and salt. "Blood in specific patterns, deaths at calculated tides. Someone's trying to wake something that my grandfather put to sleep. And they're using Stormhaven's own people as the alarm clock."
