Kimo found her the next morning.

  She was on the lanai, meticulously applying a thick layer of zinc to her nose, the Pula house quiet behind her. The family had scattered after a tense, monosyllabic breakfast, each retreating into their own private sphere of worry.

  The air was thick with things unsaid.

  He came around the side of the house, board under his arm, his bare feet silent on the wooden decking. He moved with a liquid grace that was both beautiful and unsettling.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice a warm, easy drawl that cut through the morning’s tension. “Tide’s turning. That point break I told you about is gonna be firing. You coming?”

  His smile was bright, open, a perfect picture of island charm. He's just a guy.

  The thought was a quiet rebellion against the icy knot in her gut. A very cute guy. Her grandmother's stories were just that—stories. She was being paranoid.

  Predators always hide in plain sight. Dee Dee’s voice, a dry whisper in her mind.

  “I don’t know,” she said, stalling. She glanced back toward the house. Ted and Dee Dee had already left, muttering something about the local library and a “historical preservation project.” A flimsy excuse to dig for answers. Maybe she should be with them. In the safety of dusty books.

  “Come on,” Kimo pressed, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. “Can’t let the fear win, right? The ocean doesn’t care about our problems. It’s the one place we can forget.”

  He was right. And the thought of being out on the water, of feeling the surge of a real Hawaiian wave, was a pull she couldn't deny. It was a craving. A thirst. Besides, if he was the monster, wouldn’t it be better to monitor him? To watch him. To learn.

  It was a perfect excuse. She ignored the part of her that wanted to go with him.

  “Okay,” she said, the word coming out faster than she’d intended. “Let me grab my board.”

  The break was called Ke Iwi, the Bone. Kimo told her this as they paddled through a narrow channel in the reef, the water a brilliant, impossible turquoise.

  “The reef is shaped like a jawbone,” Kimo said, his voice a low murmur against the rhythmic splash of their paddling. “The old ones said it was the jaw of a fallen god. When the swell hits it just right, the wave grinds along the bone. It’s fast. Hollow.”

  Frankie looked down. Through the crystalline water, she could see the reef below, a terrifyingly beautiful landscape of coral spires and dark crevices. It was alive. And it was sharp. A wipeout here would not be forgiving.

  “You have to trust the wave,” Kimo said, as if reading her mind. “It knows the way. You just have to hold on.”

  He was already paddling for a dark blue line that was swelling on the horizon. He moved with an effortless power, his muscles coiling and releasing, his board seeming to skim across the surface. He was a part of this place. He belonged here.

  Frankie’s heart hammered. Fear. Exhilaration. Both. She followed him, her strokes suddenly clumsy. The wave rose, a sheer wall of blue. Bigger up close. Faster. So much faster.

  Kimo dropped in first, a fluid, perfect descent. He disappeared behind the curtain of the wave, and for a heart-stopping second, Frankie thought it had swallowed him. Then he shot out of the end of the barrel, a triumphant spray of whitewater exploding behind him.

  He paddled back out, his face lit with a pure, infectious joy. “Your turn!”

  A fresh wave was coming. For her.

  Frankie turned her board, her breath catching in her throat. She dug her hands into the water, paddling hard, feeling the immense power of the ocean gathering behind her, lifting her up.

  She pushed to her feet, dropped the face of the wave, and the world dissolved.

  It was a liquid cathedral. A roaring, grinding tube of pure energy. Time slowed down. The sound was deafening, a low thunder that vibrated through her bones. Light filtered through the wall of water, turning everything a surreal, glowing aquamarine. She wasn't riding a wave. She was inside it. A part of its violent, beautiful life.

  She held her line, every muscle taut, every move an instinct honed by years in the water. The wave spat her out into the calm channel, her body buzzing with adrenaline, a wild grin splitting her face.

  Kimo was there, clapping his hand against the surface of the water. “See? I told you. You’re a natural.”

  For the next hour, they traded waves, a silent, rhythmic dance. The fear that had been her companion for days dissolved in the salt and the sun. The hard knot in her chest loosened. Out here, with the raw power of the ocean demanding her full attention, there was no room for anything else. No room for monsters or myths.

  She was relaxing. She was believing she had been wrong about him.

  They sat on their boards in the channel, waiting for the next set, the sun a warm hand on their backs.

  “My father taught me to surf here,” Kimo said, his voice quiet, his gaze fixed on the horizon. “He said this place has mana. A spiritual energy. Said if you listen, listen, you can hear the island’s heartbeat in the waves.”

  His words painted a world steeped in magic. A warmth spread through Frankie's chest, unwanted but there. She looked away, focusing on a drip of water falling from the nose of her board.

  “What happened to him?” she asked, her voice soft.

  Kimo’s smile faltered, just for a second. “He was a fisherman. Went out in a storm a few years back. The ocean gives,” he said, his voice an inaudible murmur, “and it takes away.”

  He turned to look at her, and his gaze lingered. It wasn't just a look. It was a physical touch. His dark eyes traced the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the water droplets clinging to her eyelashes. It was intimate. Appraising.

  And for a moment, under the warm, tropical sun, the look in his eyes was cold. As cold as the deepest, darkest part of the ocean.

  Frankie’s breath hitched. Her shoulders tightened. A cold weight settled low in her stomach.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  A sea turtle surfaced a few feet from them, its ancient, reptilian head breaking the surface with a soft hiss of air. It blinked its dark eyes at them.

  “Honu,” Kimo whispered, a wonder in his voice. “They’re good luck.”

  He paddled a little closer, his hand outstretched as if to touch its shell. The turtle, which had been floating peacefully, panicked. It let out a frantic gasp of air and thrashed, its powerful flippers churning the water into a foam. It dove, a clumsy plunge, and vanished into the depths.

  Kimo pulled his hand back, a flicker of annoyance crossing his handsome features before being replaced by his calm smile. “Guess he’s shy.”

  But Frankie had seen it. The animal’s terror. It wasn’t shyness. It was a primal, instinctual flight from a predator. Her vampire senses, lulled into a stupor by the sun and the surf, flared back to life.

  She noticed his scent again. Out here, in the open water, the clean, salty air should have washed it away.

  But it was there. A shift in the surrounding air. When a breeze blew from him to her, she could catch it. That musky undertone. The smell of something that belonged in the deep.

  The tension was back, a cold, coiling serpent in her gut. A dangerous current caught her, pulled between the charm of the boy on the surface and the chilling warnings of the predator she sensed beneath.

  *****

  The Kona Public Library was a small, squat building that smelled of old paper, mildew, and lemon-scented cleaning fluid. It was an oasis of air-conditioned quiet in the humid afternoon. Dee Dee was in heaven.

  She sat at a heavy wooden table in the archives, a stack of dusty, leather-bound ledgers in front of her.

  Ted slumped onto the chair opposite, poking at his phone.

  “This is pointless,” Ted grumbled. “We should be out there, looking for… I don’t know. Shark-proof armor?”

  “Information is armor, Ted,” Dee Dee said without looking up, her fingers delicately turning a brittle, yellowed page. “We can’t fight what we don’t understand. We’re looking for a pattern. An anomaly. Something the reports would have missed.”

  “Or maybe we’re looking for a ghost story in a bunch of boring old books,” he said.

  “History is never boring,” she said, her voice sharp with focus. “It’s a crime scene. You just have to know how to read the evidence.”

  She was scanning the county coroner’s reports from the late nineteenth century. Drowning, drowning, lost at sea, drowning. The coast was a dangerous place. It was all tragically, predictably normal. She was about to give up on the volume when a small, handwritten annotation in the margin caught her eye.

  It was next to the report of a young man, a plantation worker, whose body had washed ashore near the Pula cove in 1888. The coroner listed the cause of death as drowning, with injuries consistent with a shark attack. But the note in the margin, written in a different, spidery script, told a different story.

  Witnesses claim the beach pulled him itself. Not the water. The Pula elders will not speak of it. They say the sea was collecting debt.

  Dee Dee’s heart gave a hard, excited thump. She pushed the book across the table to Ted. “Look.”

  Ted leaned forward, his boredom forgotten. He read the note, his brow furrowing. “Pulled from the beach? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means it wasn’t a shark,” Dee Dee said, her voice a low, intense whisper.

  She was already pulling another ledger from the stack, this one from the 1920s. She flipped through the pages, her fingers flying. It took her ten minutes to find it. Another drowning. A tourist who had gone for a midnight swim at the Pula cove. Body never recovered. A tragic accident.

  But tucked into the back of the ledger was a loose, folded piece of paper. A transcript of an interview with a local fisherman, conducted by a constable a week after the tourist disappeared.

  The old man said he saw it. Said it wasn’t a man, and it wasn’t a shark. Something in between. Walked right out of the water, he said. Big. Wrong-looking. The constable wrote him off as a drunk. But the old man swore it was the Mano Ha’i. Said it had come back.

  “Jesus,” Ted breathed, his face pale.

  Dee Dee’s mind was racing, connecting the dots, the pattern emerging from the dusty pages like a ghost. It wasn’t a threat. It was cyclical.

  It appeared for a short, violent period, then vanished for decades. Long enough for the reports to forget, but not long enough for the whispers, the legends, to die completely.

  “Someone knows,” Dee Dee said, her voice tight with a cold, dawning realization. “This isn’t the first time. The village… the elders… they’ve covered this up before.”

  The silence in the small, dusty room felt heavy, charged. The truth they were uncovering wasn't just about a monster. It was about a conspiracy. A secret kept for centuries, paid for with the lives of the unlucky few who got too close to the Pula coast at the wrong time.

  And now Frankie was right in the middle of it.

  *****

  Frankie returned to the Pula house just as the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in fiery shades of orange and purple. Her body was tired, her muscles aching with the good, clean burn of a long surf session. Her mind, though, was a storm of conflicting emotions.

  She had left Kimo on the beach, after he had taught her how to weave a lei from fresh ginger flowers. He had been patient, funny, his fingers brushing hers as he guided her hands. The spark of attraction had flared again, a stubborn, treacherous warmth in her chest. She had wanted to believe in his kindness, in his simple charm.

  But she couldn’t forget the turtle’s terror. She couldn’t ignore the cold flicker in his eyes.

  She found Ted and Dee Dee on the lanai, their faces grim in the fading light. They had the old, dusty ledgers spread out on the table.

  “Where were you?” Dee Dee asked, her voice sharp with accusation.

  “Surfing,” Frankie said, her own voice defensive. “With Kimo. He’s a local guy. He knows all the best spots.”

  Ted let out a short, harsh laugh. “A local guy. Yeah, I bet he is.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Frankie snapped.

  “It means we found something,” Dee Dee said, her voice dropping. She pushed one ledger toward Frankie, her finger pointing to the handwritten note in the margin. Pulled from the beach itself.

  Frankie read the words, and the pleasant exhaustion from her day in the sun turned into a deep, chilling cold. She read the fisherman’s transcript, his terrified description of a creature that was neither man nor shark.

  “This has happened before,” Dee Dee said, her voice low and urgent. “Over and over again. For more than a century. A string of ‘drownings’ and ‘shark attacks,’ always right here. And always, the locals get quiet. They stop talking. They hide it.”

  “They’re protecting something,” Ted added, his voice barely a whisper. “Or someone.”

  The pieces clicked into place, the ugly truth undeniable. The charm. The skill in the water. The scent. The coldness. The animals’ fear. It all pointed to one, terrifying conclusion.

  Frankie felt a wave of nausea. She had spent the day with him. Laughed with him. Felt a pull toward him. The predator had charmed her, willingly swimming into the shark’s territory.

  “He’s part of it,” she whispered, the words tasting like poison. “Kimo. He has to be.”

  She looked up from the dusty books; her gaze drawn to the beach. The last sliver of the sun sunk into the ocean, and the village was sinking into shadow. A path, worn into the grass by years of foot traffic, led from the edge of the Pula property down toward the more isolated coves to the south.

  And walking down that path, silhouette in a dark, confident shape against the dying light, a male figure.

  He wasn’t heading toward the main village. He was heading away from it. Toward the dark, quiet places.

  He stopped for a moment, turning his head, not to look back at the house, but to scan the line of jungle that bordered the path. And in that instant, his face was no longer framed by a charming, calm smile. In the deep shadows of the twilight, his expression, cold, calculating vigilance.

  The look of a hunter surveying his territory.

  He turned and continued down the path, disappearing into the growing darkness.