18. Carol

18

Carol

"Home?" she echoed, and the single word sounded lost in the darkness.

Moss swore. Which helped, actually. A good, solid, normal reaction. "I grew up under these stars. In New Zealand. You don't get them in the States; it's a different sky—" He reached up, gesturing, as though he could spin the night sky back to where it belonged. Or themselves to where they belonged under it.

"I don't understand. How could we be that far south? We hadn't been in the air long enough to—that's a s-sig-signif—that's half the world away. Did we travel that far floating in the storm? We can't have. It's impossible. It's—"

"What was your flight path?"

"New York to—we were going to land in Chile—Lance was grumbling about having to switch planes—but we'd only been in the air a few hours—we shouldn't have been—" She clamped her mouth shut. Say one thing at a time , she ordered herself. She'd literally told Moss a few minutes ago that she could speak clearly around him. What was he going to think if she started babbling uncontrollably? "We should have gone south over the North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea, then overland. South America." There. All complete words, mostly complete sentences, in the correct order.

She looked at Moss. He was still staring up at the sky, his face ashen. Had he even heard her?

She put a gentle hand on his arm. "Are you—"

"This isn't right." He turned to her. "I was off the coast of New York, too. There's no way the storm could have carried us this far."

"Could something else?" She looked back over her shoulder to where Maggie was sleeping in the cave. "Maggie can teleport. Herself a-and if someone's holding her, that person too. We were all so close together, she might have done it."

"Has she ever teleported that far before?"

Carol blinked. He sounded… urgent. Hopeful. Like he wanted Maggie to be the answer.

As though he had another answer he didn't want to be true.

She licked her lips slowly. "No. A few feet at most. Through a wall, once."

And there it was: the unmistakable hint of disappointment before he wiped his expression clean.

And something else, too. Something like fear.

Her chest tightened. What was he thinking?

"There's another possibility," she ventured.

His eyes snapped to hers. "What?"

"When I was falling…" She hesitated at the flash of darkness in his eyes.

Was that the only answer she needed? The evidence that proved her suspicions correct?

No. She needed more.

"Something reached up to me. Like the ocean itself, but—darker. I shouldn't have survived that fall, but I did, because it caught me. It saved me," she said, as though emphasizing the one word meant she didn't have to say the rest of it. It had saved her, so why was he pretending it wasn't real? "It wrapped these—these tentacles around me, and I should have been scared, but…"

Her voice gave out. Moss didn't look reassured. He looked worse. As though her words were making him sick.

"I—" she began, and stopped as the familiar nerves gripped her throat in a chokehold.

"It caught you," Moss said, flat and hard. "And then it brought you here. Somewhere safe. With fresh water and an ocean full of food. So far away from where you were lost that no one would ever find you, and we would never find them."

He stood up. Carol moved with him, feeling like a speck caught in the flood.

"Stay here with Maggie," he said.

"What? Where are you going?"

"There's something I need to do."

"What?"

He was already walking away. She hurried after him, her body the wrong shape for hunting but—

She stopped, reeling. Hunting? She wasn't hunting him. Why had she thought that? Was her shark— No. This couldn't be happening. Her shark couldn't finally be making itself heard and the first thing it said was to hunt her mate.

Her pause cost her precious seconds. Moss was already at the water. She ran to catch up and he turned, one hand out to halt her.

"Please," he said, and the echo of grief in that one word made her stop where nothing else would have. "This is something I should have done when we first arrived. I have to do it now. Please. You deserve better than this."

And he was gone.

Carol stood on the beach, water swirling around her ankles. She wanted to scream. She wanted to smash open the silence in a way she never had since she first shifted. To draw attention. To demand attention.

But it was too late.

She couldn't follow him. He must have known that. That would mean leaving Maggie and the eggs, and she couldn't do that.

So she was left here, alone, while whatever Moss had kept hidden from her took him from her.

And she'd been worried about telling him the truth about her face.

She was about to turn back when her senses flared. She followed them to the source—and froze.

Moss was gone—and out there in the darkness where he'd been, beneath waves flecked with the reflections of distant stars, was something else.