The theory was a fragile shield against the dark. They sat huddled on the lanai, the night pressing in, the cheerful torchlight doing little to push back the shadows. Dee Dee had the old library ledgers spread across the koa wood table, her finger tracing a line of faded ink.

  “Kimo doesn’t fit the timeline,” she said, her voice a low, academic whisper that was more chilling than a shout. “These attacks, these ‘drownings,’ they go back over a hundred years. The creature hibernates, or goes dormant, then returns. It’s a cycle. Kimo’s just a kid.”

  “A creepy kid who smells weird and scares turtles.” Ted hugged his knees tighter to his chest. “And who’s way too good at surfing.”

  “He’s a distraction,” Dee Dee said. “A piece of the puzzle, maybe, but not the whole thing. We need to look for someone who’s been here a long time. Someone who stays apart. Someone who watches.”

  Frankie’s mind sorted through the faces of the village. The smiling cousins, the gossiping aunts, the stoic uncles. And then, an unfamiliar face emerged from the periphery.

  A man she’d only seen from a distance. Old. Weathered as a piece of driftwood. A reclusive fisherman who lived in a ramshackle hut at the far end of the beach, well away from the village. He never came to the feasts. Never spoke. She’d seen him once, cleaning his nets, a necklace of massive, yellowed shark teeth hanging against his leathery skin.

  “The old man,” Frankie said, the words feeling heavy in her mouth. “The one who lives by the south cove. Ikaika.”

  Ted sat up straight. “The guy with the teeth. Yeah. I saw him once, sharpening a hook on a rock. Didn't blink. Not once. Just stared at me.” Ted wrapped his arms around himself, his shoulders trembling.

  “He fits the profile,” Dee Dee said, a grim excitement in her eyes. “Reclusive, connected to the sea, a deep knowledge of sharks…” She started typing furiously into her phone. “And he’s lived here his whole life. His family has been on this stretch of coast for generations.”

  A thought sparked in Frankie's mind, sharp and dangerous. Reckless. “We have to see his hut,” she said, her voice low. “We have to know what’s in there.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on,” Ted said, his eyes wide. “Break and enter is a little different from library research, Frankie. The guy carries a fish-gutting knife the size of my arm.”

  “We’re not going to fight him,” Frankie said, her voice hushed and intense. “We’re just going to look. He’s out on his boat all night. We’ve seen him. We just need to find proof.”

  Dee Dee looked from Frankie to Ted, her face pale in the torchlight. “She’s right,” she whispered. “We can’t just wait for it to kill someone else.”

  *****

  The moon, a mere crescent, cast a faint, ethereal glow upon the palm trees that reached skyward. The path to the south cove was a tunnel through the thick, wet leaves of the jungle. Every rustle in the undergrowth, every strange, nocturnal chirp, sent a jolt of adrenaline through Frankie’s veins. Her senses were on fire, her night vision turning the deep shadows into a landscape of shifting grays. The air was a damp blanket that smelled of rotting flowers and salt.

  The hut was a dark shape against the slightly less-dark sky, a crooked silhouette hunched near the water’s edge. It looked less like a house and more like something that had washed ashore and stayed. No lights. No sound but the steady, rhythmic crash of waves on the nearby rocks.

  They crept closer. Bare feet silent on packed sand. Frankie reached the window.

  Salt-caked glass. She peered inside. Blackness.

  “The door’s probably locked,” Ted whispered, his voice tight with fear.

  Frankie ran her fingers along the window frame. The wood was soft, rotten with sea salt and humidity.

  She pushed. It didn’t budge. She pushed harder, her vampire strength a controlled pressure.

  Crrreak.

  The sound was a gunshot in the silence. They all froze, every muscle locked, listening.

  Nothing. Just the waves.

  The window slid open a few inches, just enough to squeeze through. Frankie went first, landing silently on the hard-packed dirt floor inside. The smell hit her instantly. A thick, gagging stench of old fish, of brine, of decay. And something else. Something metallic and coppery, like old blood that had soaked into the very wood of the walls.

  She helped Dee Dee and Ted through the window. Ted clamped a hand over his nose and mouth. “Smells like something died in here,” he choked out.

  “Something probably did,” Dee Dee whispered back.

  Frankie pulled out her phone, the flashlight beam cutting a sharp, narrow cone through the darkness. The light swept across the single room, and they all fell silent.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  This was no ordinary fisherman’s hut.

  Bloody nets, stiff and black with age, hung from the low ceiling like monstrous cobwebs. Coils of thick rope lay in corners like sleeping serpents. But it was the tables that made a chill trace its way down Frankie’s spine.

  Teeth covered them. Hundreds of them. Great white, tiger, mako. And others she didn’t recognize, arranged in neat rows, sorted by size. And in the center of the largest table was a collection of bizarre, disturbing relics. Knives carved from the jawbones of sharks. Spears tipped with clusters of sharpened teeth. A necklace, bigger and more sinister than the one the old man wore, made from the vertebrae of some massive sea creature.

  Like an altar.

  “Frankie,” Dee Dee breathed, her voice shaking. She pointed her own flashlight beam toward the floor.

  In the center of the hut, scrawled into the sandy dirt, were symbols. Spirals, and jagged, wavelike lines, and a recurring, terrifying motif of a shark’s open mouth.

  “They’re the same symbols from my grandmother’s book,” Dee Dee whispered, her voice filled with a horrified awe. “The ones for the binding rituals. Or… or for summoning.”

  Frankie let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Ikaika. It's him. The proof was all around them. The monster had a name.

  Thump.

  A sound from outside. Close. A heavy, dragging footstep on the sand.

  They all froze, the beams of their flashlights extinguishing as one. The darkness plunged the hut. Frankie’s heart hammered against her ribs, so loud she was sure he could hear it. He was back.

  She grabbed Ted and Dee Dee, pulling them toward the back of the hut, away from the window they’d come through. Her eyes, now fully adjusted, could just make out a dark rectangle against the back wall. Another door.

  She fumbled for a latch, her fingers closing around a piece of driftwood tied with rope.

  She pulled. The door swung inward with a low groan.

  Another sound from the front of the hut. A wet, heavy thump, like a sack of fish being dropped on the ground. Followed by a low, gurgling sigh.

  Frankie didn't wait. She shoved her friends through the back door and followed, pulling it closed behind them. Back in the jungle now, the thick, wet leaves of a hala tree pressing against their faces. They scrambled through the undergrowth, not daring to look back, the sounds of the night now seeming to mock them.

  They didn't stop until they reached the edge of the Pula property, collapsing behind a thick hedge of hibiscus, their chests heaving, their bodies slick with sweat and fear.

  “We have to tell your grandfather,” Ted said, his voice ragged. “We have to tell someone.”

  Before Frankie could answer, a new sound reached them. A shout. Then another. Lights flickered to life down on the beach. Torches. Flashlights. A growing commotion from the village.

  “What now?” Dee Dee whispered.

  Frankie crept to the edge of the hedge, peering through the leaves. A group of villagers, her Uncle Noa among them, was running down the beach. Not toward the hut. Toward the water’s edge, just in front of it.

  They gathered in a tight, horrified circle. Frankie’s enhanced vision zoomed in, focusing on the space between their bodies.

  Someone was lying in the surf, washed by the gentle waves. A body.

  Her uncle turned, his face a mask of horror in the torchlight. “It’s Ikaika!” he yelled, his voice raw with shock. “He’s dead!”

  The words hit Frankie like a physical blow. She stumbled back from the hedge, her legs suddenly weak. Ikaika. The fisherman. The monster. Dead.

  But the body she had seen… it wasn’t just dead. Even from a distance, she had seen the mangled ruin of it. The shredded flesh. The dark, spreading stain in the water.

  It was a fresh attack.

  He wasn’t the killer. He was the next victim. They were wrong. So terribly, fatally wrong.

  Frankie lay in bed, not sleeping. Listening. Her hearing, a curse, pulled in the hushed voices from the kitchen.

  “…never this close to the village,” her Uncle Paulo was saying. “He’s getting bolder.”

  “And Ikaika…” her mother’s voice was strained, thick with a fear Frankie had never heard before. “He was strange, but he was one of us. To be torn apart like that… on his own beach…”

  Then, the words that made the blood in Frankie’s veins turn to ice.

  “It wasn’t like this before,” her Uncle Noa said, his voice a low, suspicious rumble. “Not until they arrived.”

  They.

  The word hung in the quiet kitchen. Not a name. A label. Outsiders.

  “Noa, don’t,” her mother said, her voice sharp. “One of them is your niece. Show some respect!”

  “I know!” he shot back. “But we don’t know her friends, Maka. And this trouble started the day they set foot on this island. The villagers are talking. They say the mainlanders brought a curse with them. I don’t know what else to say.”

  A heavy silence fell. The accusation was a poison seeping into the heart of the family. Frankie squeezed her eyes shut, guilt washing over her. He was right. The trouble had followed her. She had brought this darkness to their doorstep.

  Her secret investigation was a joke. A fool's errand. The killer wasn't just hunting strangers now. It had killed one of their own. And in the quiet kitchen, her own family had found their new suspect.

  Frankie sat up, the sheet pooling at her waist. She looked out her window at the ocean, now a soft, pearlescent gray in the pre-dawn light. It looked so peaceful. So beautiful. A perfect disguise.

  The killer was still out there. It was smart. It was ruthless. And it had just framed her.

  She was no longer the hunter.

  She was the prey.