Read Chapter 9: First Blood

The scream came from the water before dawn.

Owen was at the kitchen table, the torque cold against his wrist beneath his watch strap, Wulfstan’s blade propped in the corner. He’d barely slept. The bell had stopped tolling at 3 a.m., but the silence since felt weighted, like a held breath.

He hit the shoreline at a sprint, gravel crunching under his boots. A pale circle of torchlight trembled at the water’s edge where Danny Yates, one of the undergraduate volunteers, was crouched on his knees, both hands pressed to his mouth.

"Get back," Owen said, slowing. "Danny. Get back from the water."

Danny didn’t move. His shoulders shook. The torch in his grip swung low and caught something half-submerged in the rushes—a dark shape, tangled in silt and weed, one arm trailing out limp into the lapping shallows.

Owen’s stomach turned cold. He waded in without thinking, the water shockingly cold even through his boots, and grabbed the body by the shoulder. The weight rolled easily, too easily, and when the face turned up into the torchlight Owen saw that it was Matt Hollis, twenty years old, archaeology undergraduate, eager, talkative, the one who’d asked Owen yesterday whether the lake had ever given up a human body.

"Get the police," Owen said. "Now. Don’t touch anything else. Don’t touch the water."

Danny scrambled backward, still shaking. Owen knelt there, knee-deep in the frigid lake, and forced himself to look.

Matt’s eyes were open, fixed on nothing. His lips were blue. There was no obvious wound, no blood in the water that Owen could see in the weak light. But when Danny’s torch—still swinging, still erratic—swept across Matt’s chest, Owen saw it.

An incision. Clean, deliberate, cut through the wetsuit and into the skin beneath, just above the sternum.

And it wasn’t random.

Owen knew that symbol. Three concentric arcs, opening downward, like an unfinished spiral.

He’d traced it with his thumb a hundred times over the past four days. It was etched into the inner surface of the bronze torque that was at this moment still strapped to his own goddamn wrist.

He reached down, slowly, and pressed two fingers to the incision’s edges. The flesh was cold, pale. No sign of defensive wounds on the hands. No bruising. It was as if Matt had simply floated there, perfectly still, and allowed someone to open him like a letter.

"A mark of offering," the white woman had said in the dream. But she hadn’t meant a gift. She’d meant a toll.

Ruiz arrived within the hour, her face unreadable, flanked by two uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective who introduced himself as Inspector Graves. The site was cordoned off. Owen stood on the bank in a dry change of clothes, watching divers from the local search team pull Matt’s body onto a stretcher with practiced, impersonal efficiency.

"Walk me through it," Graves said, notepad out, eyes flat.

Owen told him: He was in the cottage. He heard the scream. He found Danny on the shore. Matt was already in the water. No, he hadn’t touched anything except the body to check for signs of life. Yes, he was the site director. No, he hadn’t authorized any dives this morning.

"Where’s the rest of your crew?" Graves asked.

"Quarters at the north end. I haven’t rounded them up yet."

"We’ll need statements from all of them." Graves glanced toward the water. "You dive this lake regularly."

"Under permit."

"Anyone else have access to your equipment?"

"Everything’s locked. I keep the keys."

Graves’s mouth tightened. He didn’t say anything else, and that was worse.

When Ruiz pulled Owen aside behind the equipment trailer, her voice was low and hard. "Tell me you’re not tangled in this."

"I didn’t—"

"I know you didn’t kill him. That’s not what I’m asking." Her eyes cut toward the water. "You’ve been acting strange for a week. Pushing the survey grid deeper into the eastern shelf. Canceling dives you told me were fine. Lying to me about permit conditions." She took a half-step closer. "And now a boy is dead with a mark on his chest that I saw you sketch in your field notebook two days ago."

Owen’s blood went cold. "You went through my notebook?"

"I read the pages you left open. Don’t be naive." Ruiz’s jaw tightened. "What is that symbol, Owen?"

He opened his mouth to lie, found nothing ready, and closed it again. The torque felt hot against his wrist now, burning, impatient.

"I don’t know yet," he said.

"Bullshit."

"Ruiz—"

"Dr. Callahan." She stepped back, formal again. "This site is closed. State conservation archaeology is assuming oversight. You’re not to dive here without written authorization, and I need to tell you that Inspector Graves has requested a copy of your field records and sonar logs from the past two weeks."

Owen felt the sealed chamber in his pocket. The coordinates. The glinting metal object that represented his only chance at clearing his father’s debt, at finding the third thread, at understanding what the hell he was tangled in.

"Fine," he said. "He can have them."

Ruiz’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t believe him. She was right not to.

They found the second body at dusk.

A volunteer named Priya, searching the tree line for Matt’s missing dive flag, tripped over something half-buried in the reeds fifty yards from where Matt had been recovered. The scream went up again, higher this time, and Owen was running before he understood what he was running toward.

Priya was on her knees, hands over her eyes, rocking. Owen pushed past her and saw it.

A second dive suit. A second body. Not one of his crew—he knew all of them by sight, by name, by the way they tied their gear. This one was older, the suit older too, patched at the shoulder with black tape. The face, half-eaten by the water and time, was barely recognizable. But the hand—the hand that had surfaced above the silt, fingers still partially curled—clutched something.

A rusted dive knife. And on the back of the hand, carved into the weathered skin with a clean, deliberate line, was the same symbol Owen had seen on Matt’s chest.

The torque on his wrist turned cold, then hot, then cold again, pulsing like a second heartbeat. And in the sudden, ringing silence of his own shock, Owen heard it again—faint, far off, but unmistakable.

The bell, tolling beneath the lake.

One ring for Matt.

One ring for the stranger whose body the water had finally given back.

One ring for whatever was still down there, waking up.

Owen stood there in the failing light, the torque burning against his skin, and understood that he had not found the third artifact yet, but the lake had started sending him messages. And they were not invitations.

They were warnings.