Page 36 of Subduing the Shark

Nero looked at him. The dark eyes did what they always did, reading the scene, cataloging the details. Jack on the steps in new clothes with bandaged arms, no threat visible, no distress in his posture. A man sitting guard on a building that didn't need guarding.

"What are you doing out here?" Nero asked after a moment.

Jack looked at the street. A car passed, headlights sweeping, gone. "I wanted to make sure no one was here to bother them."

The words came out before Jack had fully decided to say them. They were true. He was sitting on the steps at three in the morning because the shiver was gone but the world wasn't and the lions were asleep upstairs in apartments that were safe because people like Nero and Harold made it safe. Jack wanted to be one of those people. Wanted to sit on a step, watch a door,and make sure the person he'd helped break could sleep without worrying about what was on the other side.

Nero didn't say anything for a long time. He stood in the doorway and looked at Jack.

Jack looked at the street and the silence between them was the fullest silence Jack had experienced since the pool stopped working. This silence was peaceful. He'd said what he needed to say, and Nero wasn't going to make him move. He was sure of it. It was just them and the quiet night around them.

Then Nero nodded. Once. Small, precise, deliberate. The nod of a man who'd spent weeks standing between Jack and Amani and who was, in that moment, choosing to stand beside him instead.

"Goodnight, Jack, get a few more hours of sleep," Nero said. He went back inside and left the door propped open behind him.

Jack sat on the steps until dawn. Then he went upstairs to his apartment and locked the door and lay down on his bed with white sheets and fell asleep for the first time in a room where no one could reach him without his permission.

Chapter Twenty-One

Harold took Jack back to the pool a week after he'd killed Rashe in the same waters.

The dolphin facility had been cleaned, the water drained and refilled, the blood scrubbed from the concrete. Harold had checked with the manager, a tired-looking dolphin who'd been more annoyed about the damage to his tile grout than about the dead shark. Pool B was open. The waiting list for Jack's time block was empty because word had gotten around about what had happened and nobody wanted to swim where a shark had killed another shark, which meant Jack had the pool to himself for as long as he wanted.

"I don't know if I can go back in there," Jack said. He was standing in the parking lot beside Harold's truck, looking at the painted warehouse wall. His arms were out of the gauze. The cuts healed to thin pink lines. The stitches in his side were out. He moved carefully but he was moving better at least.

"You don't have to," Harold said. "We can turn around. I know you like being here, and I want you to do what you enjoy. If you want to come back another time, that's fine."

Jack stood there for another minute. Then he walked toward the door.

The lobby was bright and smelled like the slightly fishy undertone of a building full of aquatic shifters. The manager was behind the counter. He looked at Jack, looked at Harold, looked at the security badge on Harold's belt, and pointed them toward Pool B without comment.

They walked down the hallway together. Past the other pools where dolphins and seals glided through their laps, past thecrocodile in Pool D who was floating on his stomach with his eyes closed. Jack stopped in the doorway of Pool B.

The water was clear. Blue-green, still, the lights above making the surface glow. The concrete around the edge was clean, new grout in the seams where the old grout had been stained. No blood. No evidence. Just a pool, ten feet deep and thirty feet long, the way it had been before.

Jack stripped at the edge and dove in and shifted. Harold watched the human body dissolve into the shark, the gray muscles stretching, the dorsal fin breaking the surface, and then Jack was gone, sunk to the bottom, a dark shape against the concrete floor.

Harold waited. He sat on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, jeans rolled to his knees, and watched the shark settle on the bottom. Jack stayed there for a long time. Five minutes. Ten. Not moving, just lying on the bottom, letting the water hold him. Harold watched the dorsal fin and the slow sweep of the tail and thought about what it must be like to return to the place where you'd killed someone and find it clean and quiet and waiting for you.

When Jack surfaced, he was in human form. He treaded water in the center of the pool, naked, wet, looking up at Harold with those gray eyes.

"Get in," Jack said.

Harold looked at the water. "I'm not a water shifter."

"I know. Get in anyway."

Harold pulled off his shirt. Kicked off his shoes, stripped out of his jeans. He stood at the edge of the pool in his boxers and looked at the shark in the water who was watching him with an expression that was part challenge and part invitation.

"You know bloodhounds can't swim like you," Harold said.

Jack smirked up at him. "You can swim. You just look stupid doing it."

Harold jumped in. The water was cold and the shock of it made him gasp and Jack actually laughed. A real laugh, short and rough, startled out of him by the sight of Harold flailing in the deep end with his arms windmilling and his legs kicking too hard.

"You look like a washing machine," Jack said.

"I'm a land animal. We're not built for this."