Dr. Diego Vegas—Daide to everyone—stood on Arkady’s broad deck watching Invercargill draw closer. One of New Zealand’s southernmost cities, it sat at forty-six degrees, which placed it eight degrees north of Ushuaia. Eight degrees meant a lot this far south, and it was warmer and wetter by a good, big bunch. He curled his gloved hands around the chilly metal railing. Whereas the tip of South America was nestled amid high, jagged mountains, Invercargill was farm county, stretching along a broad, flat plain.

What would they find there?

He sucked in a lungful of marine air and frowned. He didn’t want to jinx their visit by assuming the worst, but they hadn’t run across much that didn’t want to kill them, or suck their magic dry, since leaving Ushuaia.

The water swooshed in choppy waves as dolphins breached the surface, expelling plumes through their blowholes. Grinning, Daide waved. After an inauspicious beginning where he’d damn near killed one of them, he’d managed to coax the other eight dolphin Shifters back to health with far less fanfare. He and Karin, that is, a wolf Shifter who was also an M.D. and a damn fine healer. Recco, his long-time practice partner, had worked alongside both of them with his usual, unflappable competence.

Bright jets of magic threaded through the spewing water, and the dolphins joined him on deck in their human forms. Wet. Naked. Happy. Hair wound around them in all colors of the rainbow. They left footprints across the cement deck as they darted through a door to a locker set up just for them. It contained clothes and boots, except none of them ever put the boots on.

Five whale Shifters circled Arkady, looking like reincarnations of geysers as they exhaled enormous showers of water. Daide wondered what their human forms would look like. Distinct from him, where his coyote’s body was secondary, sea Shifters spent most of their time in their animal manifestation.

Leif, the dolphin he’d damn near killed, strode over to him still naked. Apparently, he hadn’t joined the rush to the clothes locker. Blue-gray hair shrouded his well-muscled body, and water dripped from his long, straight locks. His deep blue eyes twinkled with anticipation, and he slapped Daide across the back.

“I swear, coyote Shifter. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel stronger. I had no idea how feeble I’d grown.”

Daide eyed him. “You wouldn’t have because it’s not a black and white thing. When you fade slowly over time, there’s not such a contrast from day to day.”

Leif nodded. “Yes. I knew it was bad, but I was in full denial about how serious my condition was.”

Another dolphin, Lewis, joined them, clothes tossed on at haphazard angles. Straw-colored hair draped to knee level, and his eyes were smoky holes. He bared squared-off teeth and made a joking pass at Daide’s arm. “Care for a rematch, mate?” he asked in a distinct British accent.

“One go-round with your teeth was enough, thank you.” Daide put out a hand, and Lewis shook it.

“Will there be people there?” Lynda, another dolphin, pointed at Invercargill.

“People are fine,” Daide said. “It’s the other things I’d rather not deal with.”

She shook wet, black hair over her shoulders and regarded him with deep-violet eyes. “We used to avoid those like you, coyote Shifter, but I remember Vampires and demons. They didn’t bother those of us who lived in the sea.”

“I can see where they wouldn’t have. Not an easy environment for land-dwellers.” He hesitated. “This question will demonstrate my ignorance, but why did all of you select names beginning with L?”

A musical trill reminding him of whale song burst from Lynda, followed by a laugh. “That’s why. I just told you my sea name. Long ago, we only had sea names, but when we were human, we needed something pronounceable.”

“The L names were a stopgap,” Leif added. “Depending on which country we were in, we sometimes adopted something different if it fit the culture better.”

“Before the Cataclysm, how much time did you spend in the sea?” Daide asked, wanting to know as much as he could about the dolphins.

Lewis shrugged. “Maybe 80 percent. We rarely ventured onto land for obvious reasons.” He ticked several off on his fingers. “Clothes. Lodging. Money. Humans are a suspicious lot, and showing up naked and penniless doesn’t engender trust.”

“Leif!” Ketha called from a doorway. “I need you. Now.”

“Sounds urgent,” he muttered and trotted to her side. “Give me a moment, and I’ll cover myself.”

“No.” Closing a hand around his forearm, she dragged him inside.

Daide stared after them. “What the dickens was that all about?”

“If it’s important, our alpha will inform us,” Lynda said, her demeanor turning somber.

Daide was still staring at the door that had closed behind Leif and Ketha. He didn’t have a good feeling about her summons. Ketha had a cool head, and she’d sounded rattled. He turned his attention inward to his coyote. “Do you know anything?”

Before his bond animal could answer, Lewis spoke up. “There’s something else we don’t do.”

Daide quirked a brow. “What?”

“Hold conversations with our animals when we’re human and vice versa.”

“But how do you get to know one another?”

“We just do,” Lynda said. “We’re born in the sea in our sea form. Our parents raise us in the ocean. The human part is far less important. It shows up later.” She frowned. “I can’t imagine my dolphin not knowing everything there is to know about who I am as a human.”

Daide started to comment about how differently the two branches of Shifters had evolved when a startled look washed across Lynda’s face. Spinning, she ran for the nearest door leading inside the ship with all the dolphin Shifters crowding close behind her.

After a hurried internal argument where Daide lectured himself whatever was going on was none of his business, he ran after them. They could tell him to get lost, but he didn’t believe they would.

Shifters spilled out the door to Karin’s cabin and into the corridor. No way to force a way through them, so he yelled, “What the hell is going on?”

The crowd parted. Leif strode through them, an unconscious Karin clasped in his arms. Ketha walked right behind him, and Daide fell in next to her. “Talk to me.”

“It’s a long story,” Ketha muttered. “Follow us to the second dining room. We need a place Leif and the others can work on her.”

“What are they going to do?”

Ketha trained her unnerving gaze on him. “I don’t have access to their magic, so I have no idea. All I know is healing her was beyond my ability. And hers, which is how she ended up like this.”

“But she was all right a couple days ago,” he protested, followed by, “Never mind.”

A tight place formed behind his breastbone as he went down a flight of stairs. Concern radiated through every nerve ending, and his muscles tightened into unyielding lumps. He cared about Karin. She had sharp edges, but they were tempered by compassion. She’d done plenty to ensure his connection with his coyote was strong and healthy. And she’d seen all the way to the bottom of his soul, ferreting out secrets that caused him shame.

Dragged into the light of day, those secrets hadn’t been so bad after all.

The expression on Ketha’s face told him how serious Karin’s condition was. What had happened? She’d seemed subdued when they’d worked on the last two dolphins, but she’d never complained. Nor had she asked him to do more. He strode into the smaller of the two dining rooms. Leif had arranged Karin over one of the long tables. Lewis and three of the other male dolphin Shifters stood at her sides, hands extended over her prone form.

“What’s going on here?” Viktor demanded as he bolted into the room. A raven Shifter, and captain of Arkady, he was also Ketha’s husband. He’d been a vampire when they met, but she’d fallen in love with him anyway. Tawny hair spilled past his shoulders, and his green eyes were pinched at their corners.

“Silence!” Leif didn’t turn around. “Better yet, shut the door and seal it with magic so we’re not disturbed.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Ketha said and covered the short distance to Viktor. “In or out?” she asked.

“Depends. Is this as critical as it looks?” He lowered his voice to a whisper, but Daide employed his acute coyote hearing to listen.

Ketha nodded and bent so her mouth was right over his ear. “The sea Shifters’ magic is incompatible with ours. Incompatible enough, apparently they can’t coexist in the same vessel.”

Viktor’s eyes widened in understanding. “This happened when she kept their alpha from dying, didn’t it?”

“Good a guess as any.” Ketha thinned her mouth into a harsh line. “Damn it. That woman never asks for anything for herself. I caught her in the lab. She was running tests, but do you think she told me anything?”

“I’m guessing no.”

Daide edged closer, not wanting to miss anything. A sinking feeling twisted his stomach into a knot. Karin had stepped in because of his screw up. If he hadn’t been so goddamned certain what the dolphin shifter needed— He hacked his line of thought off at the roots. He could feel guilty and responsible later. Right now, the important one was Karin.

She had to survive. If she died because of his misplaced confidence in his rusty veterinary skillset, he’d have a hell of a time living with the fallout.

“Pretended nothing was wrong,” Ketha was saying. Daide had missed the first part.

Viktor gave Ketha a quick, hard hug. “Keep me posted. I’m going back to the bridge.”

Blue-white jets shot from her fingertips as she sealed the door once he was through it. She sidled next to Daide. “You heard all of that.”

“Yes.” He didn’t bother to deny he’d been eavesdropping.

“Good. Means I don’t have to say it again.”

A glowing nimbus flashed and flared in blues and greens around Karin. Leif clasped one of her hands; another dolphin Shifter had the other. The lyrical notes of the sea folk’s language rose in harmonic cadence, beautiful and enigmatic by turns.

The squeaks, howls, snorts, and grunts blended into a whole far more than the sum of its disparate parts. Daide had listened to dolphins and whales for years, but these notes spanned the scale from high to low and back again. They beckoned to him, invited him to immerse himself in the sea.

He shook himself hard. A sea dragon had used words to entice him to join it in the ocean, but all it wanted was to drain his magic. Even his coyote hadn’t seen through the wily creature. Panic engulfed him. Whose side were the sea Shifters on? When they were done, would Karin be one of them?

Ketha caught his gaze and held it. When she was certain she had his attention, she shook her head. “The die is cast. This course was the only one open to us, so we must believe in it.”

“We don’t know if this was the only way,” he hissed. “What else did you try?”

“Nothing. Goddamn stubborn woman wouldn’t admit anything was wrong until I dug her slides out of the biohazard waste and confronted her.”

Daide leaned closer. Science was his comfort zone. Where he lived. Never mind it had turned into an anachronism. Dolphin song bleated around him, the antithesis of science. Compelling and foreign, it made it harder to think, but he couldn’t block it out. “Slides? So she must have known—or at least suspected—how ill she was. What’d you find?”

“Her blood is chewing itself up. Looks like an autoimmune reaction at the eleventh hour.”

“Must be some way for us to intervene.” Daide sucked in a tight breath as possibilities bounced from one side of his brain to the other. Every potential intervention required drugs they didn’t have, though.

She shook her head. “Wish we could, but I don’t see how. What’s magic-spawned requires magic to fix.”

The corona around the sea Shifters grew, forming walls, and the salt smell of the sea intensified as water filled an oblong container around Karin and the Shifters. Breath stuck in Daide’s throat. In the space of a minute, flashing lights had transformed into a capsule full of saltwater. He ground his teeth as helplessness pummeled him.

“But she won’t be able to breathe,” he protested and started forward.

Ketha latched onto his arm. “They’re cetacean. They don’t have gills, which means they have to drain that contraption sometime soon. Do not disturb them. No matter how alien this seems to us, if we interfere, goddess only knows what might happen.”

“Are you certain she was dying?”

A quick, harsh glance answered him without the need for words. He balled his hands into fists. How could something like this happen so fast? He wasn’t exactly a virgin where magic was concerned, but the ten years he’d been a Vampire didn’t count for much. He’d only been a Shifter for a handful of months, a timespan when they’d fought for their lives almost every day. Of the other three men aboard, who’d been Vamps right along with him, he’d had the most difficult time with their transition.

Maybe because his bond to his coyote had been weak, he’d been targeted first by a sea dragon, and then by demons. He still felt raw and dirty from the dark things that had taken up residence in his body, but Karin had admonished him to move past the personal.

This was about all of them, not his horror and distaste at being chosen by evil.

Karin.

He tried to peer through the wall of sea Shifters to see what was happening, but they’d closed ranks. Maybe on purpose to shield whatever their alpha was doing.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered.

“How do you think I feel?” Ketha twisted to stare at him. “Quite aside from my long friendship with Karin, she and Rowana stood in as mothers when my own decided I didn’t need her anymore.”

Something about Ketha’s words snagged his attention. “How old were you?”

She made a sour face. “Doesn’t matter.”

A gurgling gagging sound rose over the chirps and honks from the dolphins.

“Damn it. She’s drowning.” Daide ripped his arm out of Ketha’s grasp and covered the distance to the sea Shifters in two long strides. All of them were inside the translucent wall. He splayed his hands across its rough surface, and a blast of electricity shot him halfway across the room.

One minute he was on his feet. The next, he sprawled on his ass. Every part of his body vibrated from shock and pain. He bellowed his outrage.

Ketha fell to her knees next to him, hands moving over his body and checking for his pulse. “I was afraid something like that would happen if we touched the barrier.” She punched a fist into the floor. “I tried to warn you, but you moved too fast.”

The strangled gurgling noises grew more frantic. Daide lurched upright and forced his legs, which didn’t want to cooperate, to carry him closer. He needed to see. Except the wall of dolphin bodies hadn’t budged.

“I trusted you, and you were nearly the death of me.” Leif’s voice blasted into his head. “I require the same trust from you. That jolt of current cut both ways. Another like it, and the wolf Shifter won’t make it.”

“How can we help?” Ketha asked.

“By not interfering.”

“A tad bit of faith wouldn’t hurt,” the dolphin with the British accent added.

“It would be easier to have faith if we could lay eyes on our friend. May we talk with her wolf?” Ketha raked hair back from her face.

“Best idea you’ve come up with,” Leif replied. “Now, leave me to this. I must concentrate, and I only have a few more minutes before I’ll have to take down my healing dome.”

The wall of Shifters moved, allowing a partial view of Karin. Her body was convulsing, hair fluttering around her in water that danced to its own tune, ebbing and flowing from one edge of the tank to the other.

Ketha dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “I’m opening my magic to you, so you can hear this too.”

Daide waited, unable to stop staring at Karin. At least she was still twitching, but damn if her movements didn’t mimic death throes.

Faith. Leif said I had to have faith.

He swallowed around a bitter taste where bile had splashed the back of his throat. The hard truth was he didn’t trust anything magical. His attitude had its roots in his tenure as a Vampire, but it hadn’t truly changed over the months fighting alongside Shifters. Chagrin filled him with a creeping, uncomfortable sensation.

Apparently, this stint on Arkady was his opportunity to come to terms with himself—in an uncomfortably up-close and personal way. Whether he wished to or not.

“Well met, old friend,” Ketha’s wolf said.

A gravelly growl reverberated through Daide’s skull. “Scarcely well met, though you and I are indeed compatriots.”

Daide did what he could to still his racing heart. The second voice had to be Karin’s wolf. Deep within him, his coyote yipped once and quieted.

“How can we help you?” Ketha’s wolf went on, voice liquid with compassion.

“The alpha is doing everything he can. I tried to tell my bondmate we’d been contaminated by sea Shifter residue, and that it wouldn’t end well, but she ignored me. Until she was almost too weak to stand.”

“Why didn’t you let one of us know?” Daide asked.

“Doesn’t work that way,” Karin’s wolf replied. “My first loyalty is to my bondmate. If she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”

“You’re still within Karin,” Ketha’s wolf observed.

The statement was open-ended, so Daide assumed it was significant, but wasn’t certain quite how. Would the wolf abandon Karin before she died? It had that option, but might not choose to exercise it.

Ketha’s fingers tightened painfully around Daide’s shoulder. Her teeth grated together; hot breath grazed his cheek. “Get ready. This next part will happen fast.”

Daide pushed his primitive magic outward in an arc. Something monumental bore down on them. Harsh, arcane enchantment sucked the air from the room and left him gasping as if water surrounded him too. His lungs burned, and his vision hazed to gray. A crackling thud battered his ears, and the seawater container fractured down one end. Water rushed across the dining room floor but was absorbed almost as fast as it escaped.

Ketha let go of him and shot forward to the table where Karin lay. She turned her on her side and pushed on her back. Water spewed from Karin’s mouth and nose. Seeing something as simple and non-magical as first aid broke into the inertia that had him in its grasp, and Daide leapt toward them.

He and Ketha worked as a team clearing Karin’s lungs and starting CPR. At first, he couldn’t find a heartbeat, but he kept pushing on her chest, willing her to live while Ketha did rescue breathing. Thirty compressions, followed by two breaths. Over and over.

Leif hovered, but remained silent. Daide met his worried blue eyes. “The thing you did, was it...? Er, were you...?”

“Yes, coyote Shifter. But my success will be moot if—”

Karin choked and gagged. Daide flipped her onto her side, and she vomited seawater onto the floor, followed by a coughing fit. When he looked at Ketha, her eyes shone with tears. She knelt and gathered Karin into her arms. “Thank the goddess you’re as tough as you are,” she muttered and planted a kiss on Karin’s forehead.

“Too mean to die,” Karin choked out between coughs. “Jesus, I feel like warmed-over dogshit.”

Leif pushed Ketha aside and gathered Karin close, pushing curly white hair out of her face. “Be grateful you feel anything, wolf Shifter,” he admonished. “The dead feel nothing.”

“Why’d you almost drown me?” She struggled to a sit.

“Not a quick answer for that.” Leif sat next to her. When he wrapped an arm tenderly around her to support her, a dart of jealousy stabbed Daide between the eyes. He wanted to shove Leif out of the way, kick his ass across the dining room for making Karin suffer. And for having the temerity to hold onto her in such a familiar way.

Christ on a fucking crutch, whatever is wrong with me?

Muttering, “Glad you’re okay,” he stalked across the room before he made a huge mistake. Going after Leif would alienate the sea Shifters forever.

“Where are you going?” Ketha called and withdrew glowing magic flickering around the sealed door.

“To report to Viktor,” he replied without turning around. If he did, the expression on his face—desolation mixed with anger—would give him away. As he made his way up endless stairs, truth pounded into him. Somewhere along the line, he’d fallen in love with Karin, but his insight came too late. Plus, it was a bad idea.

Even worse now Leif was in the picture. Leif was old—like Karin. Far better mate material for her. She’d treated Daide like the green, newly hatched Shifter he was. She’d been kind, maternal even, but those were scarcely the elements in a romantic partnership.

“Coyotes fight for our mates,” his bond animal spoke up.

Daide didn’t bother to reply. He didn’t need his coyote reminding him how deficient he was, and it rankled. Fighting for Karin was out of the question. He’d make a bigger fool of himself than he already had.

He stepped onto the bridge. Viktor took one look at him and swore in German. “That rough, eh, mate? Do I need to officiate at another sea burial?”

Daide gazed at him, bleary-eyed. “Oh no. Nothing like that. She’ll recover.”

Viktor stared hard at him. “They why do you look so trashed?”

“It was a hard road.” Daide shrugged. “Mostly, I stopped by here to let you know Karin was all right. If you don’t need me, I’ll be on my way.”

“What the fuck is the matter with you?” Viktor pressed. “You don’t seem anything like yourself.”

“Just tired. Once you’ve figured it out, let us know how you want to finesse landfall in Invercargill.” Without waiting for Viktor to reply, Daide retraced his steps and ducked into his cabin. Maybe if he stayed there long enough, he wouldn’t have to see Leif with his arm around Karin again.

At least not today.