He held out his hand.
Why?
Instead, he climbed down the iron ladder to the landing dock. It took him five minutes. His hip screamed. The brass lantern swung wild shadows across the rocks.
A bell. A single, heavy note, struck at irregular intervals. It came from the north side of the rock, where the reef teeth jutted up like broken molars.
It wasn’t the storm that bothered him. He’d seen jugo winds that could strip paint from stone. No, it was the quality of the dark. The sky was clear—a blade-sharp canopy of winter stars—but the water between the lighthouse and the mainland had turned into a slab of black glass. No phosphorescence. No chop. Just a terrible, waiting stillness.
“It’s her,” Vladimir whispered, the truth cold on his tongue. “The one you didn’t hear.”