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.

On the beach, the world was coming apart.

The glass of my truck’s rear passenger window imploded in a shower of glittering, safety-glass pebbles.

*Crack!*

The sound of the high-powered hunting rifle came a split second later, flat and sharp against the thunder of the sea.

I dropped to my knees in the wet sand, using the truck’s massive rear left tire as a steel-and-rubber shield. Sand and freezing foam swirled around my shins. The tide was rising with terrifying speed; the front wheels of my truck were already submerged to the hubs in the backwash of the surf. If we stayed here another ten minutes, the ocean would float the vehicle, turn it sideways, and roll it down the coastal shelf into thirty feet of water.

Up on the edge of the dunes, sixty yards away, two figures were descending the trail on foot.

They weren't hiding anymore. They carried heavy tactical flashlights that cut through the rain in wide, aggressive cones. One of them had a scoped bolt-action rifle; the other carried a short-barreled pump shotgun.

Harlan Crane’s clean-up crew.

“Mercer!” one of them yelled—a coarse, gravelly shout that cut through the wind. “Step away from the rig! Leave the girl and walk up the bank with your hands empty, or we leave you both in the crab pots!”

They thought Ryan was still by the truck. In the dark, through the sheet-rain and the swirling fog, they hadn't seen him go into the water. They only saw the idling truck, the taut orange line running into the surf, and the figure crouched behind the wheels.

I reached into the cab, my fingers cold and clumsy, slipping on the slick leather of the front seat.

My hand found what I was looking for: the emergency road flare kit kept under the rear bench. A heavy, red plastic cylinder with a twist-off cap and a strike-igniter.

I didn't light it. Not yet. A flare on this beach would turn me into a brilliant, red-and-white silhouette for a sniper sixty yards away.

Instead, I looked back out toward the Teeth.

The orange line was trembling violently. The small, high-tensile winch on the front bumper was groaning, the steel mounting bolts straining against the frame as the tide pulled against whatever was anchored to the far end.

Through the rain, the sweep of the Cape Meares light illuminated the cannery timbers for four seconds.

They were together.

Lily had secured the harness. In the brief flash of white light, I saw the thick yellow strap running from her chest, locked into the primary carabiner of the rescue line.

She was off the iron pin. She was suspended in the air between two pilings, her legs dangling clear of the water, held by the line anchored to my truck.

Ryan was below her.

He hadn't unclipped himself. He didn't have the strength to work the steel gate with his shattered shoulder. He was hanging onto her ankles with his good hand, his head slumped backward, barely keeping his mouth above the crest of the incoming rollers. He was dragging her down. The combined weight of the two of them was five times what the small winch was designed to hold against an eight-knot current.

The winch drum began to slip.

*Screeech-clack-clack-clack.*

The steel pawl was jumping teeth on the gear. The cable was paying back out into the surf, foot by foot. If the gear stripped, the rope would go slack, and both of them would be pulled under the cannery foundation, tangled in the creosote cross-bracing until the tide drowned them.

I couldn't use the winch motor. The battery was drowning under the submerged front bumper.

There was only one way to pull them in.

I had to put the truck in reverse and drag them through the breakers with two tons of four-wheel-drive steel.

I raised the Smith & Wesson over the top of the rear tire, aimed at the center of the nearest flashlight beam descending the dune, and pulled the double-action trigger twice.

*BANG. BANG.*

The muzzle flashes were blinding orange flowers in the black rain.

Up on the dune trail, the man with the rifle cursed loudly as a slug ricocheted off a wet basalt boulder beside his boots, whining away into the pine trees. Both flashlights instantly dropped to the sand, their beams sweeping wildly as Crane’s men scrambled for cover behind the drift logs.

“She’s got iron!” someone screamed. “The bitch has a piece!”

That bought me twelve seconds.

I lunged into the driver’s seat of the truck.

The floorboards were already full of six inches of icy seawater. The cab smelled of shorting electrical wires and drowned carpet. I slammed my foot down on the heavy brake pedal, shoved the transfer case lever into *4-Low*, and hauled the transmission down into Reverse.

The four-wheel-drive engaged with a heavy, mechanical clunk that shook the entire chassis.

“Hold on, baby,” I whispered, tears of salt and exhaustion finally breaking from my eyes. “Hold on to each other.”