My brother walked into my dark house alone and blamed my daughter for a “teenage meltdown,” but he went pale when I told him I had heard every word he said before the boat rocked.

The windshield wipers of my four-wheel-drive truck beat an erratic, dragging rhythm across the glass: *screee-ch, thump. Screee-ch, thump.*

Ryan drove with both hands clamped to the ten-and-two positions of the wheel, his knuckles white as bleach. The Smith & Wesson sat in my lap, concealed beneath the heavy folds of my oilskin slicker, its snout aimed directly at his right femoral artery through the center console.

The logging road was little more than two parallel ruts of red clay and crushed oyster shell, carved through the dense rain forest that walled off Cape Falcon from the rest of the world. Rain had begun to fall—not the gentle, misty drizzle common to the coast, but heavy, driving spikes of water that rattled against the truck’s steel cab like handfuls of buckshot.

“Slow down around this bend,” I ordered.

“Claire, the tide’s coming up,” Ryan muttered, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and mounting adrenaline. “If I don’t keep the momentum, the rear differential will hang up in the mud.”

“You’ll slow down because the bridge at the slough washed out three winters ago,” I said. “Or did you forget that while you were running contraband for Harlan Crane?”

He bit his lower lip until blood welled, dark and thick, at the corner of his mouth. He tapped the brakes. The truck slewed sideways, its mud-tires clawing for traction against the greasy loam before settling into the tracks.

To our left, the black wall of timber dropped down into the marsh. To our right, through the thinning hemlocks, the Pacific roared. It wasn't the sound of waves breaking gently on sand. It was the sound of a siege. Massive, eight-foot rollers, pushed by an offshore storm system brewing near the Aleutians, were hammering against the volcanic ribs of the Cape. Each impact sent a low, seismic shudder through the floorboards of the cab.

*The Devil’s Teeth.*

They were a cluster of black, jagged basalt sea-stacks that jutted out of the surf four hundred yards offshore, surrounded by a labyrinth of submerged reefs and treacherous rip currents. In the 1920s, a salmon packing cannery had been erected on timber pilings in the lee of the rocks—a monstrous, sprawling wooden citadel connected to the mainland by a narrow trestle tramway. The tramway had collapsed fifty years ago. The cannery itself had burned to the waterline in 1974.

All that remained were the pilings.

Dozens of massive, creosote-soaked Douglas fir trunks, driven forty feet into the ocean floor, bound together by rusted iron cross-braces and hanging steel cables. At low tide, they looked like the rotting ribcage of a leviathan stranded in the surf. At high tide, they were completely submerged, swept by currents that could strip the flesh from a seal.

“There’s a turnout ahead,” Ryan whispered. His eyes were darting toward the rearview mirror every four seconds. “Where the trail leads down to the old winch house. But Claire... Crane’s boys keep a skiff moored in the channel behind the rocks. If they see headlights—”

“Turn them off,” I said.

“What?”

“Turn off the lights, Ryan. Now.”

He pulled the dashboard knob. The world went instantly, terrifyingly black.

Without the headlights, the fog became an impenetrable wall of gray smoke. The only illumination came from the faint, rhythmic pulse of the Cape Meares lighthouse five miles to the south, sweeping a pale, ghostly finger across the low-hanging belly of the clouds every thirty seconds.

In that sweeping beam, I saw it.

Parked in the turnout between two massive Sitka spruces was an unmarked, heavy-duty Dodge Ram with an idling diesel engine. A black headache rack. Two long-whip marine antennas quivering against the rain.

Crane’s lookouts.

“Keep rolling,” I whispered, cocking the hammer of the .38 under my coat. The *click* was tiny, but to Ryan, it must have sounded like a gunshot. “Don’t touch the gas. Let the truck coast past them on the grade.”

“Claire, they’ll hear the tires—”

“Let it coast.”

The truck drifted silently through the mud, the engine idling at its lowest RPM. We passed within fifteen feet of the black Ram. Through the rain-streaked side window, I could see two figures sitting in the cab, the green glow of a CB radio illuminating their stubbled jaws and hooded jackets. A thermos rested on the dash. A heavy-barreled shotgun leaned against the center console.

They were waiting for Ryan. They were waiting for *The Cormorant* to signal that the drop was secure.

For three agonizing seconds, we were level with them. One of the men turned his head, his brow furrowing as he caught the dark shape of my truck sliding through the shadows without lights. He reached for the handle of his spotlight.

“Punch it,” I hissed.

Ryan slammed his boot down on the accelerator.

The V8 engine roared to life with a savage, mechanical scream. The four tires hooked into the gravel, throwing two rooster-tails of mud and water high into the trees. The truck lunged forward, bottoming out against the frame with a violent crunch of metal on stone, then shot down the steep, overgrown switchback toward the beach.

Behind us, the spotlight flared—a brilliant, blinding beam of white light that slashed through the hemlocks, searching for our license plate. An air-horn blared once, twice—the signal that an unknown vehicle had breached the perimeter.

“They’re coming!” Ryan screamed, fighting the steering wheel as the truck slid sideways down the forty-degree grade. “They’re going to box us in at the beach!”

“They won’t follow us onto the sand!” I shouted over the engine’s roar. “Crane’s trucks weigh four tons! They’ll sink to their axles in the tidal wash! Keep your foot down, Ryan! Keep it down!”

The trees suddenly vanished.

The logging road terminated in a sheer drop of crushed stone, and the truck leaped off the bank, crashing down onto the wet, packed expanse of Cape Falcon’s south beach. Salt spray exploded across the windshield, blinding us completely for two terrifying seconds as the truck hydroplaned across four inches of foaming wash.

Ryan slammed on the brakes. The truck spun one hundred and eighty degrees, the tires throwing up curtains of black sand, before coming to a dead stop twenty feet from the roaring, froth-choked surf.

I kicked my door open against the howling gale.

The smell of the ocean hit me like a fist—pure, primordial salt, decaying bladderwrack, and freezing, ozone-heavy wind.

I hauled Ryan out by his collar, dragging him through the driver’s side door and slamming him face-first against the hot metal of the hood. The revolver never left the base of his skull.

“Look!” I screamed into his ear, pointing out into the boiling black cauldron of the bay with my free hand. “Look out there!”

The beam of the distant lighthouse swept across the water.

Four hundred yards out, surrounded by white, foaming breakers that leaped thirty feet into the dark sky, stood the pilings of the old cannery. The ocean was boiling through them, a nightmare of surging black hydraulics and iron spikes.

And there, halfway up the central piling, clinging with both arms wrapped around a rusted crossbeam as the freezing waves repeatedly smashed into her waist, was a tiny, yellow speck.