She hated the surf, she hated Cape North Light, she hated most of all the clanging bell buoy she could hear above the roar.

She sat in the open door of her car, put on one shoe, and found herself staring at the other, blankly. She took a long, shuddering sigh. She was too tired to put it on.

Then the tears came. So when the shark finally made her cry, at least she was alone.

She had not seen the great white's fin slicing through the surf.

***

The great white had tracked his target into water too shallow for him. Now he gave up and turned seaward again.

Before him, a half-mile sphere of water emptied of life, for he was not alone in his sensitivities: his own prey had receptors, psychic and physical, much like his.

A huge skate, gliding at ten fathoms, flapped away to sea. A giant squid on the bottom squirted like a rocket into Amity Sound: Something was above that it did not like.

A school of cod, acting with a single brain, panicked and headed for land.

The great white drifted lazily for a while. He was near waters in which he'd been conceived, sired by a male almost as big as he. His mother, enormous, gravid with young, had swept through Amity Sound like death itself, bearing him, three sisters and another brother in her right uterus, and three more young in her left. For two years he had lived in utero. He had eaten, with his remaining brother and sisters, thousands of his mother's unfertilized eggs and some thirty weaker siblings in the womb.

He had fought off his brother and sisters to survive the uterus, squirming, slashing, born to fight. Birthed live, like all sharks, at his mother's death off Cape North Light, he had been three feet long, a murderous twenty-two-pound replica of his sire.

From that day he had been at the very apex of the oceanic food triangle, as speedy as any fish in the ocean and living death to all.

He was a cold-water animal but pelagic: a wanderer. The myth that his kind was territorial was man-made: Unlike lesser sharks, he ranged for thousands of miles.

His slender, wrist-sized brain was subject to impulse, and forces that no man knew.

Weather could change his pattern of travel, or the currents of El Niño, or the migration of his prey.

Or other, stranger forces man could never understand....

On this hungry morning, impelled by a savage whim, he turned and headed south.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Ellen stepped from the Eastern Airline plane into blessed warmth and light. She trailed along with fellow passengers to the Nassau airline terminal.

It was a new world. The sea breeze carried a scent of flowers: Amity would not smell blossoms for three more months. Behind her were the hues of death: black and white, gray, wintry brown. Nassau was living color, in 3-D.

If only Sean could have seen this....