1. Moss

1

Moss

The kitchen hummed with life. Moss hummed along with it. It was Friday night. Dinner service started in a matter of minutes. They had a full house: half a dozen tables, booked out up to a year in advance, and a select few diners about to dive into the most glorious gastronomical experience of their lives.

*Feeling humble tonight, huh?* His cousin Pania's telepathic voice washed over his mind like a wave streaming into a rock pool. His inner octopus perked up, exploring the psychic resonances that came with the connection between his mind and hers.

Pania was a long-finned eel shifter. Her psychic presence felt like riverbanks overshaded by hanging branches, silty waters, and long journeys.

A lifetime of teasing from Pania and her twin sister Ataahua taught him that his octopus felt like an annoying little shit who broke everything it touched and then scooted away in a cloud of ink before it got caught.

Honestly… They might be right.

He snorted and sent Pania the mental equivalent of a poke in the ribs. * You were listening to me think about how great my life is and what an amazing cook I am? That was private.*

*Think more quietly, then.*

*Maybe if your head wasn't so big, your private thoughts wouldn't sound like someone honking on a foghorn?* Ataahua's voice was mock-sincere.

His lovely big cousin, just trying to be helpful. Definitely not waiting with her teeth bared to bite any toes that ventured into the water.

* I heard that too, genius.*

"Doors open, chef!" a voice called from the front of house.

Moss raised his head. Everyone in the kitchen was looking at him. He took a moment to soak it in, the same way he did every night.

Who the hell would have thought he'd end up here? A shrimpy kid from Aotearoa New Zealand who didn't know a filleting knife from a sharp stick, to this. King of his own shining domain, a kitchen that ran like a well-oiled machine and a team that produced meals that were as much works of art as they were delicious, exciting puzzles of taste and texture and temperature and—

* We're all waiting, cuz,* Ataahua drawled.

He grinned at her, then spoke to the whole room. His cousin wasn't the only one who'd gotten fidgety while he lost himself in daydreams. His inner octopus was sneaking a look out through his eyes, wondering not-so-quietly how securely the extractor hoods were stuck to the walls, and how hard it would be to undo the screws that kept them there.

Don't you dare, he warned it silently, then cleared his throat. "Here we are again. Some poor sod just walked in that front door. They have no idea what they're in for." He paused, letting a grin spread across his face. "Let's blow their minds."

"Yes, chef!" everyone chorused.

"All right. What are you all waiting around for? We're gonna kill it toni—"

A sudden, nauseating emptiness clawed through him.

"I—" he began, and everything went black. When he came to, he was doubled over a stainless-steel counter. Pania was right next to him, her brown eyes concerned.

His stomach rebelled. He swallowed hard, automatically checking in with his octopus. What the hell was that about?

There was no reply.

Nausea roiled through him. No. No, this couldn't be happening.

Anything but this.

"Cuz? Everything okay?"

Pania touched his arm gently. Her concern nudged the edges of his mind.

"It's gone," he gasped, too horrified to remember to speak telepathically. The rest of the team were human. His shifter nature was a secret. They had no idea their head chef could transform into an octopus.

Except he couldn't. Not anymore.

The world he was so in tune with, the world he'd built for himself here, halfway around the world from his home, disappeared as his soul fractured into a thousand sharp edges.

Darkness boiled up inside him, filling and overfilling the space where his octopus had been.

* What do you mean, it's gone?* Pania asked warily. Out loud, she said, "You don't look so good. Sit down for a minute." A bubble of laughter caught in his throat. Trust Pania to keep her head when the world was falling apart.

Oh, god. Pania. Ataahua. The rest of his team—the front of house staff, the guests—

He forced the words past the pain and panic fracturing his mind. "I have to get out of here."

"Yeah, nah, you don't look so great. Take a minute. Ataahua and I'll hold the fort."

Ataahua whooped from across the room. "Finally! In charge, where I belong!"

Pania leaned closer. The creature inside Moss raised its head. "Seriously, cuz, you look like—"

* Our great-uncle's dead.*

She flinched as though someone had slapped her. * He's dead? How—no. Oh, no, Moss. You…?*

He didn't dare to look at her. He could guess what she looked like: her face ashen, her expression stricken. Her big brown eyes wide with horror.

Their great-uncle was dead, and the duty that their family had upheld for hundreds of years had chosen him to carry on his vow.

It was an honor, he reminded himself. A sacred trust, part of an ancient pact between his people and the shadow dragons to protect shifterkind from their greatest enemy.

It was important.

It was a death sentence.

For him, and for anyone who got in his way.

* What are you waiting for? Run!* Ataahua shouted into his mind.

Her words broke through his paralysis. He shoved away from the counter. Pots clattered to the ground. He stumbled into someone. Their mouth moved, but he couldn't hear them over the ringing in his ears. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud and too quiet, and the creature who'd broken into his soul was pressing against his skin from the inside.

Soon it would break free.

Run.

He burst through the doors to the front of house. Shouting followed him as he shoved his way out onto the street. Someone called his name—someone he knew, someone he'd worked with and drunk and eaten with, who invited him over for family dinner, but he couldn't let himself even think their name in case the monster inside him caught hold of it.

Cold air struck the breath from his lungs.

He needed to get in the water. Thank whatever gods were listening that he'd picked up sticks and moved closer to the harbor. If he'd had to fight through busy streets to reach it—

It wouldn't be a fight. It would be slaughter.

Darkness writhed inside him. The monster was pressing against the inside of his skin. How long did he have? A minute? Less?

Adrenaline spiked in his veins. This wasn't something he could control. He could only hold it off. And when the creature taking form inside him reached its full strength and prized away his last defenses, it would all be over.

No more controlled chaos. No wonderful machine of moving parts. No knife's-edge anticipation of that one flash of heat or carefully measured heartbeat to bring a dish from great to exquisite. No more team, no friends, no family—

He choked on a sudden, smothering wave of grief. He could barely remember a time when his octopus wasn't there to poke through his memories with him, adding its interested commentary to his own thoughts. And now it was gone, and there was a monster in its place.

His feet stumbled, and he gasped as he crashed into a low guardrail. The water stretched out in front of him, wide and flat and welcoming.

Why was he wasting his energy grieving what he would lose? If the monster got out now, it would destroy everything around him.

Priorities, kid.

He clambered over the guardrail. Behind him, a woman shouted. He closed his eyes and smiled bitterly.

You got a lot of weird shit in this city. Some dickhead running full tilt into the river wouldn't even make the top ten of any random passerby's what-the-fuck list.

But you got good people, too. The dickhead jumping into the water might not be the weirdest thing you saw all week, but that wouldn't stop you telling him to cut that shit out.

Sorry, he said silently to whatever good Samaritan was trying to stop him jumping overboard. Gotta go. I promise you don't want to see the alternative.

"Hey!" the woman yelled again. "It's going to be all right. Right? Whatever's going on—"

He half-turned and saw a Black woman, late twenties or early thirties, whose day had probably been going just fine before she saw a crazy man running for the river. Nice coat, sensible shoes, hair hidden under a wrap that Ataahua would have given her left eye to tie so perfectly. If he'd seen her walk into his restaurant, he would have pegged her as—

His heart sank. He wasn't going to see anyone walk into the restaurant ever again. And this woman? Whatever she'd come out for tonight, celebrating the end of the work week with good food and drink and friends or just a quiet evening to herself—she wasn't going to get that, either. He was going to ruin her day.

She was down the stairs now, one hand out like she was approaching a wild animal. If only she knew how accurate that was.

"It's okay," she said again, and she must do this for a living, because he almost forgot how not okay it was and let himself be reassured. "I can help you."

Something about her itched at his mind. Was she another shifter? Was that what she meant? That she was sensing his inner creature's turmoil?

Well. More fucking reason to go, then.

"Sorry," he said, stepping backwards. His heels hovered over the edge. "This is for the best. Believe me."

"No, you don't understand, I can—"

A huge, alien awareness opened its eyes in Moss's mind.

It stared out at the woman through his eyes. Moss tried to throw himself off the edge, but his body was frozen. He felt the monster inspect the woman who was trying to save him. What the hell was it searching for?

Whatever it was looking for, it didn't find it, and Moss's neck muscles creaked as it turned his head up to the city behind her.

Hundreds of thousands of lives. A world that thought things like the creature inside him were stories. Even shifters didn't believe in monsters. Not ones like this.

He wouldn't be the one to teach them how wrong they were.

"It's all right," he forced out, echoing the woman's own words.

With one final surge of effort, he leapt into the water.

The ocean had always welcomed Moss. Freshwater was fine, too, but it was the ocean that really called to him. Its shallows and depths, currents and waves; the surface, silver-bright and rippling or whipped into foam, and all the layers of shadows beneath. He opened his mouth, which might have been the stupidest thing he'd done so far, and behind the polluted sourness of the river water he tasted the sea.

And the saltwater sang to him.

He hung in the water, still with shock. The song was faint. He'd never heard anything like it before, but it was somehow instantly familiar. As though the ocean itself had a voice. It sang of all the things he loved about it and showed him more things he could so easily learn to love—hidden grottos, chasms and underwater volcanoes, a world of crushing pressure and glorious beauty.

And somewhere, far beyond all that beauty, his future.

Unless he fucked the rest of this up as badly as he had the start of it.

He shivered, and the shiver was all the monster inside him needed to escape. Huge black tentacles billowed from his chest, dark and searching. His body twisted, its own shape dissolving to make way for the creature.

It was too late. He'd been too slow, and now the monster his family had guarded for hundreds of years would kill everyone it saw.

Monster.

Ship-killer.

Kraken.

The world shrank around him. This river was nothing; if he stretched out to his full size, his tentacles could fill it bank to bank. Reach up and pluck people from the waterfront tables, swipe cars from the bridges.

Wind around pylons and buildings. Crush. Tear. Destroy.

No! Moss screamed into the kraken's mind. It was like shouting into a cave so deep it had no echo; his voice disappeared into the darkness. He scrambled for control—his octopus liked to play silly buggers when he was in human form and he used to return the favor, taking over its limbs and swimming where he wanted to go, instead of squeezing into whatever bloody piece of rubbish it decided was its new home sweet home.

But this wasn't his octopus.

The kraken barely acknowledged his attempts. Its attention was elsewhere—still watching, still seeking. For what? Moss screamed. We're not meant to be here! We're meant to go—

Somewhere that it made his whole soul shiver to think about.

The kraken twitched. Tentacles like steel hawsers churned the water. Then it was moving, its huge form straight as an arrow shooting to the mouth of the river and the ocean beyond.

The ocean's song was so beautiful and so welcoming that Moss wanted to cry.

Then—south. They were going south. Moss let himself feel a shudder of relief. South was right. South was where they were meant to go. Down to the ice and the darkness and a lifetime of waiting for a call he hoped would never come.

That was his future. Locked away in the lightless depths—or a murderer a hundred times over.

Moss shivered, and this time, the shivering didn't stop.

He was aware of the kraken's mind, the slow, alien movement of its thoughts. He couldn't guess what those thoughts were. He didn't want to. For now, he was still him. Even without his octopus, even without the life he'd built for himself—he was still Moss. If he reached too closely for the kraken's mind, tried to understand it, how long would he last before all that was left of him disappeared in its monstrous depths?

The taste of the ocean changed. The water became colder, darker. Pressure built as the kraken followed currents into the depths, and Moss couldn't bear to listen to the ocean's song anymore.

He pulled himself in, putting up walls between himself and the kraken until he couldn't taste the ocean or hear its bittersweet music.

He would never see his parents again. What had he said to them the last time they'd called? Some bullshit about the new restaurant and how long it would last before his octopus wanted to find somewhere new again. Ah, fuck, his octopus. How was he meant to keep himself whole if he didn't have the inner animal who'd made him who he was?

Would he ever see Pania and Ataahua again?

They would live their entire lives without him. Do things that were forever forbidden to him. Find their fated mates. Have children. Their lives would go on, and if they ever overlapped with his again, he would be… something else.

His heart gave an extra lurch at the thought that he would never find his fated mate. He'd never given it much thought before. All his focus had been on his career, and his career had rewarded that focus.

Was that really the reason? Or had some part of him—not the part of him that had been convinced it would never happen to him, not the part that flinched from the thought of his family's oath like a burning brand—had some secret, curled-away corner of his mind realized that if he did take on the burden of being the next kraken, then having found his fated mate would only make it worse?

He was already losing so much—but those losses only hurt him. If he found his mate, the one person in all the world whose soul was made to intertwine with his own, and had to lose her to fulfil his duty?

Even the thought of it hurt too much to bear.

Small blessings , he thought.

And then the kraken found what it had been seeking.

Its whole body jerked with electric excitement. Forgetting his fears of losing himself, Moss reached for the kraken's senses.

They were on the surface. All around, the ocean was battered by a storm—and above them, the tiny blinking lights of a plane, barely visible through the rain and clouds.

Who the hell would fly in weather like this?

The kraken stared up at the plane. Its vision was strange, its eyes not built for the lack of pressure at the surface, but it pinned its gaze on the plane like an eagle sighting its prey.

No, Moss thought, terror gripping him. No. You can't. No one called us—this isn't our duty! This isn't what we're here for!

This was why the kraken was locked away. It only wanted to destroy. And now there was nothing Moss could do as it gazed up at the plane, rigid with victory.

It had found what it was seeking, and now—

No! Moss shouted, but the kraken ignored him. It reached up into the boiling sky. Lightning flashed, outlining the solid black of its tentacles. They stretched up and up as the plane veered through dense clouds, its lights flickering like a panicked heartbeat.

Frustration crashed against Moss's mind, whiting out his thoughts.

It can't reach. Relief thudded through him. The plane was too high for the kraken to reach. Leave it , he urged it. We need to go further south. To the trench. We need to be ready, if the dragons call on us.

The kraken had to know that already, right? Moss didn't know how the magic worked, but the kraken had existed for generations. Its hosts changed, but the soul-beast remained. It had to know what it was here for.

We have to go, he repeated, and the kraken's refusal was a whip across his mind.

It wasn't just frustrated. It was desperate, reaching for the plane until half its body heaved above the waves. It crashed down again. Water closed over its head, and for a moment Moss thought that might be all.

Then it reached up again—slower, deliberate. Like when his octopus was determined to figure out how to pull apart something new and expensive.

Moss's blood chilled. The kraken reached as far as it could and it still wasn't enough, but there was an iron determination in its mind. And then a shudder rippled through it.

New tentacles burst from its body. Not fleshy, muscular limbs, but tendrils of pure shadow. They whipped up like ribbons of pure night, farther than the kraken's physical tentacles could reach.

Up towards the plane.

Moss wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but they were the kraken's eyes, and the kraken fixed them on its prey.

What could be in that plane that it wanted so much?