Fangs and Fathoms Chapter 1, Part 1, Sebastian’s Point-of-View

Sea-mist tastes different after it’s been steeped in gunpowder and cheap fear. I haven’t eaten mortal fare in centuries; this acrid tang is my appetizer, the scent-equivalent of meat hitting iron. It pricks the fangs awake, reminds the body supper is near.

I cross the improvised gangplank from the pirate hulk to the listing research vessel—boots silent, coat-hem skimming blood that hasn’t decided whether to clot or keep running. My own ship, Nocturne, waits beyond the pirate craft, black hull slick as a blade. I already combed the raider’s decks: a few stragglers, quickly hushed. Necessary housekeeping when anyone drifts that close to Nocturne’s shadow.

Here, on the science tub, I appear to have missed most of the revelry. Pirates lie scattered like wet matchsticks. Evangeline’s kills, their seams stitched with surgical precision; Caspian’s handiwork hums in the rigging, laughter still vibrating the ropes. Sloppy pirates, I murmur, because the living go very still when words like mine fold into fog.

Evangeline says there are no survivors of interest. But a woman catches my eye.

A slim silhouette in the wheelhouse, knuckles white around a flare gun that might as well be a kitten’s bite. Salt-soaked jacket, shoulders carved sharp by tension she mostly masters. Admirable, given the deck’s resemblance to a butcher’s floor and the choir of corpses at her feet.

I taste her pulse before I hear it: quicksilver and deliberate, intellect treading water above rising panic. Not mere prey, something inside me notes. Interesting prey.

“Sloppy,” I call again, louder, just to feel her heartbeat stutter at my voice. The effect is exquisite. Adrenaline spikes, bright as a struck bell. The smell—salt, ozone, a faint copper note of old paper—slides under my tongue. My fangs graze my lower lip as they extend a bit further in anticipation.

Evangeline wipes blood from her cheek and chides me for my dramatic entrance. I let her; I’m listening to the woman behind the glass. She leans closer to her console, trying to think her way out. Smart. Reckless. Dangerous in the way fire is dangerous—beautiful until you’re inside it.

A pirate hauls himself upright behind me. He’s big, bleeding, and more desperate than wise. He sees my back and makes a choice born of stupidity. The woman warns me. The flare of protective instinct in her voice startles me, brighter than the flare gun I saw her fire into another pirate’s face. I wonder if she realizes she’s killed him.

I catch the pirate’s machete between two fingers, sighing at the waste of it all. I have no patience for theatrics that aren’t mine. I tell the pirate to at least make it memorable; then I oblige him by converting his heart into a sheath. Efficient, elegant, final.

Her eyes widen, but they don’t look away. Interesting. Most mortals avert their gaze, cataloguing horror later in stuttered dreams. She studies. Records. The flare gun dips a fraction—not surrender, just recalculation. She’s too frightened to realize that she never reloaded it.

I wipe the blood from my sleeve. Filth, my mother would have called it, were she still anything but memory. I turn fully toward the woman.

Her name isn’t mine yet, but it will be.

Silver meets hazel through cracked glass; her fear modulates to fury. I almost smile—true smiles are private currency, but she’s earned a fragment.

Evangeline’s voice cuts across the wind—polite steel.
“Nothing special. Standard crew. The captain might know something useful.”

The researchers huddle on their knees: cardboard souls soaked through with terror. Their heartbeats drum a single, panicked rhythm that crowds the night. None of it interests me. The trench has no use for extraneous bodies, and I have no patience for ballast.

“No.” The word leaves my mouth cold and flat. “We take what we came for—nothing more.”

The research data.
Proof the anomaly exists. Everything else is flotsam.

Caspian strolls in, wiping blood on a dead pirate’s sleeve, grin too wide for his boyish face.
“What about her?” He jerks his chin toward the flare-gun silhouette in the wheelhouse. “Flare girl’s still standing? Damn. I had my money on messy-but-quick.”

I let amusement ghost across my mouth. Just enough for him to feel it.
“So did I,” I murmur. “But there’s still time for that… and she smells delicious.”

It’s the truth. Her scent is salt and adrenaline, intellect sparking off panic—like lightning over seawater. It calls to everything hungry in me. I’m on an all-pirate diet lately, but she’s tempting.

I step once. The world blurs. One breath later I’m inside the wheelhouse.

She backs away, hands scrambling on slick metal. The flare gun quivers— kitten claws, yet she keeps it level. Courage or stubbornness; both taste sweet.

I inhale slowly. Her fear sluices over my tongue—bright, sharp, alive.
One heartbeat—hers—two—mine, unnecessary but echoing. Then I’m braced against the console, arm barring her exit, bodies separated by a thread of air I could cut with a sigh.

“I don’t make a habit of leaving witnesses,” I whisper, lips brushing the shell of her ear. A courtesy warning, nothing more.

My fingers sink into her damp hair; I tilt her throat to the light leaking through cracked glass. The pulse there shudders against my knuckles in invitation.

I could finish it in a blink: puncture, drain, shudder, collapse, silence.
Instead I linger, just at the edge of fangs. Savor first, decide later.

“I should end this,” I say, letting the silk of the words tighten. “Quick. Painless. Efficient.”

She surprises me. Voice ragged yet unbroken.
“If I die before I figure out what’s down there… I’ll haunt you. Every night, every dive.”
A breath. “And God help you if you touch my research.”

The threat is absurd, she’s a trembling mortal pinned to a console at the tip of my fangs, yet it lands. Not because of power but because of will. The ocean respects that. So do I.

“What’s your name?” I ask, though I already suspect.

“Dr. Isla Hart.”

Recognition strikes, clean and electric. I’ve read her papers, the ones peer-review boards mocked and I filed under useful. The trench’s most persistent whisper-chaser stands in the middle of total carnage with a flare gun and a spine of iron.

“The ocean’s most persistent mystery hunter,” I say, letting admiration curl through the words.

My laugh is low and dark against her warm, salt-sprayed skin. The sound feels… honest.
“Brains and bloodlust? You’re wasted on the surface, darling.”

Decision crystallizes.
“I think I’ll keep you.”

End of Part 1. Part 2 breaches the surface tomorrow. Check your email. 

I know. Waiting is torture.

Good.

– Sebastian