Ellison stared at Dorian, obviously waiting for him to ask what the FBI did believe. Dorian just gazed into the screen. How many lost lives did those hovering dots represent?

“And to answer your question, yes, that’s the west coast of Africa. Let’s look at a map of shipwrecks in Alaska now.” Ellison clicked a button. “Keep in mind that the Bering Sea is notoriously dangerous. Terrible storms. There’s a high incidence of wrecks there in any case.” A new map came up, and as Ellison had suggested red dots were loosely scattered across it. But in two places they were thicker. One was at the bottom of the image, well south of the Aleutians. There were definitely more dots down there but not really so many. But up near where Dorian was living, around Kuskokwim Bay and a bit farther north, red dots swarmed angrily: so many that whole patches of shore were blotted out. And one of those dots covered Emily’s body.

“Why don’t people just stay away, then?” Dorian could hear that his voice was getting harsher.

“They do now. There’s been an official warning to avoid that section of the coast since early July. The number of sinkings around there escalated so abruptly that people were simply caught off-guard at first.”

“But then . . .” Dorian stopped himself.

“But then it doesn’t matter? Is that what you were going to say?”

“No!”

“Dorian, I know I said we’d take it easy on questions today. But this person, or this entity, that might have saved you from drowning”

“That’s not even real—”

“This unreal entity, in that case.” Ellison paused. “Have you seen it again?”

7

The Queen

It served her right for trusting a human, even once. Even after the big deal he’d made about wanting to see her again, even after that bewilderingly tender good-night kiss, Dorian hadn’t shown up the next evening. Luce had swum back and forth for over an hour between the beach and the cliffs where he’d sung before she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to come.

A few hours after he’d given her his parka she’d even fought down her aversion to going near human towns, just to bring the rowboat back. She’d towed the boat as far as the village’s main dock—it had taken her a while to find both oars, but to her surprise the boat’s hull was undamaged—and tied it to a straggling rope. Incredible as it seemed to her now in the cold blue light of a new day, she’d actually been worried that Dorian might get in trouble for stealing it. He must have seen what she’d done for him, Luce thought, but even so he didn’t care enough to keep his word to her.