Page 7 of A Gathering Storm (Tides of Fate)

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 hearth fires.

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 in my 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 replaces sunlight, 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."

He goes still in that way alphas do when processing a threat to their territory. "Who?"

"If I knew that, would I be standing here talking philosophy with you?

" The anger surprises me—I thought seven years had drowned it.

But it rises now, hot and familiar. "I came back because the pacts demand it.

My bloodline sealed something here, and my bloodline must maintain the seal.

But I can't do it alone, not with the old alliances broken and my kin. .."

Dead. All dead except me. The last dragon in the North Atlantic, keeper of promises I never made, guardian of secrets I only half understand.

"The others need to know," Declan says, changing into his role as strategist, alpha, the one who holds Stormhaven's fractured pieces together. "Tomorrow night...”

"I know about your meeting. The old boathouse." His surprise flickers across his face, and I almost smile. "The gulls still speak to me, MacRae. And they see everything."

He turns to leave, then pauses. "Why now, Finn? Why return after seven years?"

The truth is too heavy for this moment—that I've felt each death like fishhooks in my scales, that the water itself screams warnings only dragon-blood can hear, that something my grandfather feared enough to bind with his own heart's blood is stirring in the deep places.

Instead, I give him part of it: "Because what's coming will make the grief that drove me away look like a gentle rain. And because, despite everything, I still remember when this place was home."

He leaves without another word, but I feel his presence fade slowly, reluctantly. He'll spread word—to Rafe in his shadow-kingdom, to Grayson guarding the harbor, to the wolves who gnash their teeth at my name. The sea dragon has returned, and with him, all the old fears.

Within an hour, I sense them gathering. Not approaching—none are that brave or foolish—but watching from safe distances.

Young wolves in the tree line, testing the air for my scent.

A crow that might be one of Rafe's informants perched on a dead pine.

Even the selkies surface briefly beyond the breakers, their seal-eyes reflecting moonlight as they verify the impossible: a dragon walks the land again.

They remember or think they do. Fire that turned sand to glass. Storms that lasted three days and sank half the fishing fleet. The way I held Saoirse's body and screamed until windows shattered in houses a mile away.

But they don't know the rest. The months I spent learning control from a grandfather who'd lived eight centuries.

The discipline required to keep dragon-fire from consuming everything in rage or passion.

The weight of being the last repository of knowledge about things that swim in trenches no human has mapped, about pacts written in constellations that no longer align, about why Stormhaven exists at all—a lock on a door that should never open.

Lightning forks across the horizon, and I taste ozone and possibility.

The storm will hit before dawn, washing away evidence of whatever happened on these cliffs tonight.

But storms can't wash away what's coming.

The drownings will continue. The summonings will grow stronger.

And somewhere, someone who knows too much about old magic and older grudges moves pieces on a board I can only partially see.

Wind tears at my jacket, carrying salt and sorrow and the faint copper tang of blood—not fresh, but remembered. This clifftop has seen too much death. Saoirse's. The ones before her. Maybe mine, eventually, when whatever my grandfather bound finally breaks free.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I stand between sea and sky, dragon and man, past and present.

The ocean calls me back to the silence of the deep, where grief can't follow and responsibility dissolves in pressure and darkness.

But the pull of the ancient pacts is stronger, a chain of starlight and blood-promise that binds me to this broken place and its fractured people.

Tomorrow, I'll face them in that boathouse.

Declan with his desperate need for unity.

Rafe with his shadow-games. The others with their fear and resentment and half-remembered stories of dragon-fire.

I'll endure their distrust, their anger at my abandonment, their terror of what I represent—power too vast for comfortable alliance, grief too deep for easy forgiveness.

But tonight, I mourn. For Saoirse, whose laughter once made even a dragon believe in gentleness. For my kin, scattered to ash and memory. For the simplicity of exile, where the only voices were whales and waves.

The storm builds, and I let it wash over me—rain like tears I can no longer cry, wind like the rage I've learned to contain. Somewhere beneath the waves, in trenches that know no light, something turns in its sleep. The seals are right to beach themselves. The fish are wise to flee.

Because when it wakes—and it will wake, the summoning is too far along to stop entirely—Stormhaven will need more than wolves and panthers and bears. It will need what dragons were made for: to stand between the mortal world and things that should never breach it.

Even if it costs everything. Again.

The isolation wraps around me like the ocean's embrace, familiar and suffocating in equal measure. This half-life of reluctant return, neither fully of land nor sea, neither dragon nor man. The exile was easier—you can't fail the dead, can't disappoint ghosts, can't break promises to echoes.

But the living demand more. They demand presence, participation, the pretense that I'm still capable of connection when everything I touch turns to salt and sorrow. They need the dragon's power but fear the dragon's nature, want the protection but not the price.