Grace and death.
Those were the two things Tessa thought of as she watched the sharks patrol the Seven Deadly Seas. She’d seen sharks on TV and in movies and in books and everything, but that was nothing compared to watching them glide only a few feet away from her face, just on the other side of the glass.
Tessa quickly identified the distinctively shaped hammerheads and the sand tiger sharks with their ferocious-looking, snaggly teeth. She also recognized the shortfin makos, nurse, lemon, bull, and tiger sharks. She saw a number of other species, too, that she couldn’t identify. And that kind of bugged her.
From inside the glass-enclosed pathway that wandered along the floor of the twenty-foot-deep exhibit, the sharks looked like a flock of great, dark, six-hundred-pound birds-who just happened to have rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Tessa leaned closer, close enough to see her breath flutter across the glass. And being that close, it almost seemed like she was in the water with the sharks as they soared silently around her, with perfectly honed power rippling through their supple, deadly bodies.
Silent beauty.
Primordial hunger.
Grace and death.
Tessa glanced at her watch. She wasn’t too concerned about the one-hour deadline Patrick had given her, but she didn’t want to be in the glass observation tunnel during the next shark feeding, which was scheduled to start any minute, especially if they were going to use live fish.
Ew. Disgusting.
She stepped onto the conveyor-belt-people-mover-thing on the right side of the passageway and was halfway to the next exhibit when she saw the message appear on one of the plasma TV monitors mounted on the ceiling that the shark feeding had been post-poned.
Hmm. Good.
More time with the sharks.
She stepped off the conveyor belt and returned to the world’s largest shark exhibit. This time, she raised both hands against the glass, her arms extended like wings, and imagined that she was flying with the sharks through a vast, water-filled sky.
A sky with no boundaries and no restraints.
But of course, the whole time her feet remained planted reluc-tantly on the floor of the aquarium.