11. Moss

11

Moss

They headed back down to the beach, where Carol stared at the ocean as though it had a grudge against her and she was wondering whether it was feeling particularly vengeful today.

"Okay," she said, her veneer of confidence so thin it would shatter at a hard look. "Time to go have a scout around."

"Underwater?"

She turned those hypnotic eyes on him. "We've already seen everything we can from up here."

"And what we've seen is that we're stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere. Wouldn't we be better off starting with some breakfast?"

What a whinger he sounded like. And it was going to get worse, if he had to keep finding excuses not to put on his octopus form and help her explore.

Carol shrugged. "Sure. Breakfast. We can kill two birds with one stone and grab something while we're in the water." She hesitated. "I hope you don't mind your fish with bite-marks in it."

"Pree-REE!"

"I'll get some for you first, Maggie, don't worry."

"Whee- oo ."

"Only the best bite-marks for you."

Maggie chirped and gnashed her teeth together excitedly, then looked around. The foggy image of a fridge bumped against Moss's mind.

He laughed. "We're going straight to the source today, kid. No refrigerated salmon steaks here."

"Prrr?" Maggie tipped her head to one side.

"I don't think she has any idea food doesn't come from a cupboard," Carol said. She stretched and shot another strange look at the ocean.

Moss nudged her mind and sensed a shiver of unease. * You don't need to go in if you don't want to,* he told her.

"What should I do instead? Sit around on the beach?"

"Enjoy a delicious meal?"

"I can eat while I'm swimming," she said, still staring distractedly out to sea.

"How far are you planning on going to find anything you recognize? What are you expecting to recognize underwater, anyway?"

His stomach lurched, but he hid his misgivings behind a veneer of his own. Joking and casual. He hoped his was less see-through.

Carol's eyebrows drew together, but she was frowning at the water, not at him. "Some clues about where we are, maybe. A familiar trench?" The more she said, the less convinced she sounded.

He folded his arms. "How many trenches are you familiar with?"

"The Mariana Trench?" The corner of her mouth quirked, reminding him of what lay behind her soft lips. "I mean, not personally."

"Not well enough to recognize it through the muck kicked up after a storm like last night?"

"I don't think I'd recognize anything! But I have to do something ! I can't just sit around and be useless again!" The shout burst out of her, a sudden, volcanic explosion.

And behind it, a pain that lanced through her eyes and cut at the very edges of his mind.

He strode to her side, as though whatever hurt had welled up inside her was an external threat he could protect her against. By the time he reached her, she'd gotten herself under control. The volcanic explosion, and whatever pain had brought it on, were hidden behind closed lips and dark-shadowed eyes. Maggie had stopped in the middle of her explorations, peering back over her shoulder with a watchful expression on her scaly face.

"I'm sorry," Carol said, scrubbing one hand over her eyes. "I shouldn't have yelled. It's just—this whole thing…"

"The last day's been a lot," he agreed wryly. "I reckon you deserve to shout a bit."

She flashed him a grateful smile that didn't show any teeth. "I could at least be shouting something useful. Like ‘Help.'"

"Save it for when Search and Rescue get their act together and come find us."

"You really think they're coming?"

"You don't? You think your boss is just going to give up on you?"

She looked as though she didn't know what to say. Or maybe she did, and just didn't want to say it. "I mean, the circumstances—what's he going to do, call up the Coast Guard and say a bunch of monsters that looked like they jumped out of a horror movie tore the plane apart and someone fell out? Would they even think I'd survived that? I shouldn't have. I wouldn't have, except that…" She stopped, her lips parted. "I don't know. I don't know how I survived. It still doesn't seem real. And—they must think I'm dead." She looked over to Maggie, who was busily turning over stones. "They must think we're all dead. If—if they're even still alive."

"Carol…" He leaned towards her, not reaching out to hold her, not looming, just… offering. Here's a big, warm body, he hoped his body language was communicating. Feel free to take advantage of its presence.

To his surprise, she did. She leaned against him, and the soft weight of her took his breath away. He put one hand around her waist, slowly, gently, as though she was a mirage and might vanish.

She didn't.

She let out a ragged breath. "I have to do something. I can't just sit around waiting for someone else to fix this. I can't do nothing. "

"You saved Maggie," he reminded her. "You saved those other two eggs. You saved yourself, and you dragged me out of the ocean with you. That's more than nothing."

She looked up at him, a half-smile on her lips. "Okay. I haven't done nothing . But I have to do this, too."

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"Much as I'd love to see—" She broke off, turned bright red, and coughed. "Uh. Er. I mean, would you mind staying here and watching Maggie? I'm not going to take her with me swimming, obviously, and I don't want to think about all the trouble she could get herself into on the island by herself, and—and, um. Um?"

Much as you'd love to see what? He wanted to tighten his grip on her, hold her chin to keep that blush front and center, and tease the answer out of her.

He let her go. She stepped back, cheeks still furiously red.

"Sure, I'll look after the baby dragon. Can't be that hard, right?" He grinned easily, and caught unawares, she grinned back. Her teeth gleamed like moonlight on rippling water.

"Thanks." She pressed the backs of her hands over her cheeks, grimacing. "Oh, for the love of— Guess we won't have to worry about lighting a fire tonight. I'll just hold the sticks up to my face."

"You get much brighter, we could use you to signal passing ships."

She glared at him, amusement warring with embarrassment. "You—"

"Pree-ree! Ee- ooooo !" Maggie launched herself into the air, shrieking with excitement. Something dangled from her claws. It fell, and she darted after it, peeping at top volume. "Ee! Ee!"

"What have you got there, kiddo? A crab?" Moss intercepted the crab before it could scuttle under another rock. "Good catch. We could make a start on brunch while Carol goes for a recce, eh?"

"Pree-oo?" Maggie tilted her head in a question, then forgot about it immediately when she spotted the crab in Moss's hand. She shrieked in indignation.

"Don't worry. You caught it fair and square. I'm not stealing your dinner, I'm just—"

"EEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

"—and there you go." He dropped it in front of her. She stared at it as though she'd never seen it before.

"Prrrt," she announced, and turned away to look under other stones. The crab scuttled to safety.

Carol reached down to tickle the little dragon on the top of her head. "If you can figure out some food for her, that would be great. She normally eats almost constantly. I'm worried—" She pressed her lips together. "About so many things."

"But food is a nice, easy thing to worry about?"

Relief at his understanding flashed in her eyes. "It's nice and easy so long as we find something to eat. If we don't?"

He frowned and folded his arms. "Carol. I'm a chef. An octopus shifter who grew up on the coast. You're suggesting I can't find anything to eat in the world's biggest larder?"

Her lips quirked. "No insult intended."

"Well, I'm taking it as an insult, and I'll use my righteous indignation to make sure the best meal you ever had is waiting for you when you come back."

With no cookware, no seasonings, and oh yeah—no fire. How the hell was he going to live up to that promise?

"I look forward to it," Carol said, with the barest hint of a smirk. Well, damn. She'd seen through him. He really was going to have to pull this off.

After a moment, she said, "Um?"

"What is it?"

"I'm going to shift to start swimming around, so…" The blush was back like it had never left. "Would you mind turning around?"

"Right. Of course." He turned away at once, giving all his attention to the little dragon hunting through the stones in front of him and none at all to the fact that his mate was stripping on the beach behind him. Nope. No thought at all. Zero thoughts.

Zero.

Ze-ro.

Definitely no thoughts about her pulling her salt-crusted sweater over her head. Or what her body looked like underneath. What it felt like. Would she shiver as the breeze touched her bare skin, or relax in relief, trying to soak as much heat from the sunlight as she could?

Something light dropped to the ground. He bit back a groan.

Pants. Okay. She was going to take her pants off. This was a normal, boring thing that people did all the time when they had to shift and didn't want to end up wearing a pile of rags when they returned to human form.

Unless they were him.

He looked down at himself. His clothes were scuffed and dirty, but he'd turned into a fucking kraken. A creature so immense it could tear ships to pieces. How had his clothing survived something like that exploding into existence?

It wasn't normal. He wasn't normal. What he was, what he had to do, become—it had no place in the world Carol came from. The world he had to make sure she got back to.

Before he sank beneath the depths forever.

He had to remember that, no matter how tempting her smiles were.

Or how silent the kraken was. It was holding to their agreement. Staying away from Carol while he worked on getting her home safe.

And that was tempting him in a different way. A shiny lure, making him think maybe the kraken would always be this docile. Maybe he could control it. Maybe his fate wasn't set in stone.

His heart felt heavy. Lures worked. And this one could easily work on him. He knew that. He was capricious, changeable—he always found a way out. Some way to avoid the boring and get on with the fun stuff.

He wasn't the right person to hold the kraken.

Maybe that was why it had chosen him.

He clenched his fists. The kraken was still silent—but that could be part of the trick. It was harder to fight an enemy who just fucking disappeared on you. His octopus could have told him that.

Except his octopus was gone. Everything he had was gone. Grief pooled inside him. Everything was gone—and soon he would lose Carol, too.

Something moved in the depths of his soul. The barest ripple, indicative of huge upheavals elsewhere. He frowned, searching towards it, when Maggie shrieked.

"It's okay!" Carol's voice was sharp enough for him not to believe her. "Maggie—it's fine, I'm fine. See? The water isn't going to—"

A storm surge exploded in Moss's mind. A memory so intense it sent him reeling. Darkness sent knives of rain lancing through his scales, and there was no way out because the only thing all around was more darkness and more icy rain. Then, worse than the rain, water so cold and so everywhere he couldn't breathe in it. He clung to the only thing that was warm and solid in the whole world, and she flung one safe-keeping arm around him. There was one moment of enough air to breathe and then the water pulled them both down, so deep, so cold, so tumbling wings-over-tail. He wanted to be somewhere else, but there was nowhere else, and what if he couldn't find Carol again?

Somewhere else and very close, Maggie shrieked.

He hauled himself out of the memory. Maggie was scampering back and forth on the very edge of the waves, distress shooting from her mind like telepathic needles. Fuck. Of course the memory was hers. Of course she'd be terrified at the thought of any of them going back in the water.

There was a splash, and Carol yelped as she fell into the water. Only waist-deep, and she surfaced at once, but Maggie let out a keening wail that stripped everything else from Moss's mind.

"Maggie—" Carol blurted, then switched to telepathy. * I'm fine, I'm coming back now, I—*

She lost her footing again as Maggie's barrage of concern intensified. Moss strode into the water and picked her up. Seawater poured in sheets down her hair and shoulders, and he—

Felt it.

Tasted it.

His senses swam through every droplet that surrounded her, coursing down her skin, dripping from her hair and limbs and the tip of her chin. The ocean sang to him, and it sang about her.

Another shriek ripped through the air. Maggie was singing, too, and her song was far more insistent.

He took Carol back to shore, pushing the ocean's song away. It clung to the edges of his mind, even once they were out of the water.

He put her down above the high tide mark. Maggie scampered over, leaping into Carol's lap and checking her over with the same air of worried ownership as when she'd inspected the dragon eggs the night before. Hell. Had it only been last night?

Carol bent over the little dragon, running her hands down her flanks and cupping her head in her hands. Maggie's golden eyes peered up at her, wide and anxious.

The storm in Moss's head retreated, Maggie's lightning-strike terror easing to a background static.

"I know," Carol said gently, smoothing the spines that ran from the top of Maggie's skull down to her tail. "Thank you for looking out for me, Maggie. But you know, I'm a shark. I'm meant to be in the water."

Moss braced himself for the terror of Maggie's memory flooding into his mind again, but it was gentler this time, with the curl of a question.

Carol sighed. "Well, yes, but—there's a difference between storm seas and a day like this, and my shark can breathe underwater, so…"

Another slap of memory. Moss blinked. The image was gone faster than he could see it, but Carol's face went tight and pinched.

"I know," she said quietly. "That wasn't a good time either, huh?"

"Eee!"

"It won't happen again."

"Eee eee !"

"All right—no swimming. I promise."

"Ee oo. " Maggie looked over her shoulder at Moss. Her tail lashed. He blinked. He'd never known a creature with a lizard face could look so… dismissive.

Carol made a choking noise. "Oh… it's okay if Moss goes swimming, though?" She looked up at him, amusement barely held back behind dancing eyes and twitching lips. "I don't know how much of that you caught, Moss, but…"

"She doesn't mind if I chuck myself in the big, scary ocean?"

"Prrr-eep!"

"Wow." He crouched down in front of the little dragon. "You don't beat around the bush about playing favorites, do you?"

He glanced up to meet Carol's eye and share an amused look, and she was… naked.

He knew she was naked. Of course he fucking knew that. He'd kept his back to her while she undressed and listened to every piece of clothing fall to the ground, and he'd gone and pulled her out of the water, holding her in his arms. Naked. He'd been so busy listening to the ocean sing about her, he hadn't fully registered…

He gritted his jaw. That small cave was going to get really awkward tonight.