By midday, Coral Bay was awake in full color and sound.
The open-air market sprawled along the narrow path beside the shore. Fishermen shouted prices over the clatter of baskets and the shrill cries of gulls overhead. The tang of salt and fresh fish mingled with the sweet aroma of baked bread from Mrs. Vella's oven. Nets hung from poles, drying in the sun, their frayed edges fluttering in the wind like tired flags.
Liora stood behind Old Marek's stall, fingers moving quickly as she sorted clams into neat, glistening piles. Marek had a way of making customers believe every fish in his basket was a treasure. His laugh was loud, his words quick, his eyes always shrewd — but when he looked at her, it was with a kind of protective fondness.
Still, even here in the heart of the village, she couldn't relax.
A faint burn had started low in her spine. Small at first, like the warmth of sitting too close to a fire. But she knew better than to ignore it. It was the first ripple before the storm.
"Liora," Marek called over the din, "take the rest of the clams home with you. Sell them tomorrow if you can."
"That's too much," she protested, brushing the wet sand from her hands.
"Consider it payment," he said with a shrug. "Besides—" He tilted his head toward the ocean. "—you look pale. Go on before the sea gets any more ideas."
She followed his gaze. The tide was inching higher, foam curling around the ankles of a boy chasing crabs along the shore. The waves moved strangely, their pull uneven, almost impatient.
"Thank you," she murmured, lifting the basket onto her hip.
She wove through the crowd, exchanging smiles and nods. Mrs. Vella pressed a sweet bun into her free hand. "You're too thin," the baker fussed. "Eat it before it goes cold."
An old man she barely knew stepped into her path, holding out a crooked piece of driftwood. His eyes were clouded with age, his voice barely a whisper. "Keeps the sea spirits away," he said.
She hesitated, then accepted it, slipping it into her satchel alongside the bun.
Every kindness in Coral Bay was like this — small, simple, and offered without question. And yet every step she took away from the market made the burn in her spine spread, curling through her ribs, into her arms.
By the time she reached the edge of the village, her breaths were short, shallow. Her hands were shaking enough that she nearly dropped the clams. She glanced over her shoulder, scanning the path for onlookers. No one was watching.
Good.
The dunes rose ahead of her, pale gold in the afternoon light. Most villagers avoided them; they shifted unpredictably in storms, and they whispered in high winds as if the sand itself was alive. Liora's home was carved beneath one of the largest, a hollow she'd built slowly over the years — a space where no eyes could follow.
She slipped inside, the dimness closing around her like a second skin.
Three hours left.
The basket thudded softly onto the sand as she sank to her knees, pressing her palms against her thighs to steady the tremors. She closed her eyes and tried to count her breaths, but the ache kept growing.
She'd felt this cycle too many times to mistake it for anything else. The first time it had happened, she'd thought she was dying. Her bones had twisted, her heart pounding like a drum, her skin crawling with a strange, electric heat. Then she'd woken hours later in the sand, her mind foggy and her body… not her own.
It wasn't only her body that betrayed her.
Her thoughts shifted when the change came — sharpening, narrowing, becoming something primal. Her hearing turned razor-sharp, every grain of sand seemed to hum under her skin, and scents painted the air in layers she could almost touch. Under it all throbbed hunger, raw and insistent.
She hated the hunger most of all.
A gust of wind whistled through the narrow entrance of the hollow, carrying the sound of the waves pounding harder against the shore. She lay back, staring at the shifting ceiling above her. Sand shifted there sometimes when the tide was restless, but she'd grown used to it.
Then she heard it again.
A voice.
Not the shouts of the fishermen. Not the laughter of children. This was deeper, carried in the crash of the sea, as if the ocean itself had a throat to speak.
Her name.
"Liora."
She bolted upright, heart hammering, eyes fixed on the small slit of daylight at the entrance. Nothing moved beyond it — no shadow, no figure. Just sunlight and the restless dance of the tide.
She swallowed hard and lay back down, forcing her eyes shut.
It was nothing.
It had to be nothing.