Granted, he could not help questioning how stable--or not--Karin's mental state must have been when she finally confessed to what was upsetting her. But he looked nonetheless, because it was the polite thing to do, even if he was only humoring her. Despite whatever overall condition her mind might be in, she'd thus far seemed normal enough, and he had walked a distance with her. And, more to the point, he couldn't forget how shaken Karin had been when they'd originally met, and how something about her fear had unintentionally led to his brief consideration of what might possibly be lurking in the shadows.
"I'm sure it's nothing," Dominic stated, though when he turned and cast his gaze upon the waterfront to confirm this and further alleviate her fears, he quickly felt like a liar. Were those what he had seen out of the corner of his eye? The shapes were not outlined in a definite sense, be it because of the darkness or the ocean's constant movements (perhaps both), but there was something in the water. It was hard to tell exactly what the forms were, but he immediately knew that he wanted to latch onto Karin's explanation of them as nothing but stray dogs.
It wasn't an uncommon occurrence, after all, when it came to beaches. The dogs would have been attracted by the fire, by the warmth of human bodies, and would have been eager to make friends. They'd simply followed his and Karin's path along the sand--though on their part, they'd stayed in the water.
And yet this did not make sense. There was more than one set of eyes, blinking, watching, and if Dominic knew anything about dogs, he knew they weren't necessarily given to silence for long. Not in pairs, at any rate. Where were the cheerful barks? The playful growls that no doubt would have been heard had the dogs been frolicking in the surf together? Dominic squinted in an attempt to pick out their true shapes, as if that would help make things clearer, or make the set of eyes simply fade away into the ocean.
It didn't. The eyes continued to stare, and he became more certain that his eyes weren't deceiving him, and neither were Karin's. "They're watching," he said quietly, as if against the threat of them hearing and understanding his words. "But you're right, they're probably stray dogs. Maybe they're a little shy," he tried to sound firm in his statement, but there was something unsettling about this entire situation. The fire was doing nothing to shed light upon the circumstances, nor warm the chill that had begun to creep up his spine. He swallowed, thinking back to the shadows cast by the Pax apartment building, to Karin's clearly distressed visage.
"We should keep walking, maybe head back towards the fire..." He looked to Karin, to see if she agreed with his suggestion. He hoped she did.