24. Carol

24

Carol

They were all alive. She made Lance repeat it until even the most scared corners of her heart believed it. Everyone had survived. The plane was severely compromised, but Ames had made an emergency landing, and they had all made it.

They'd thought she was dead, too, until two shifter women had bullied their way through the phone lines from HQ and told them their missing people were stuck on a rock in the South Pacific.

* They didn't seem as convinced of your mate's friendliness as you are.*

The roar of the helicopter made talking out loud a problem, even through the headsets the seats were equipped with. But that clearly wasn't the only reason Lance was choosing to speak privately.

* He isn't a threat.*

*His cousins disagree.* Lance gritted his teeth. * A kraken shifter? I didn't want to believe them. And what we saw on the beach—*

*Was only an aspect of the kraken's power.*

Lance cursed, a wordless grumbling yowl that sounded more snow leopard than human. * An aspect of it? That wasn't his full form?*

*It wouldn't have fit on the beach if it was.*

The conversation halted as Lance stared unseeing into the middle distance.

* If you think that's bad…*

Lance's eyes snapped to hers. * Out with it, Zhang. *

Unease curled in her gut. * This is something everyone needs to hear. And I'm not the right person to say it. *

His lips thinned, and the rest of the journey passed in excruciating silence.

Even Moss was silent. She'd smiled at him as they boarded the helicopter and he'd smiled back, wanly, like a man walking to his own execution.

He'd only had his powers a few days and had pushed himself so far, thinking it would be the last thing he ever did. And now he had to keep going.

Her chest twinged. They all had to keep going. No matter how much it felt like their legs would give out beneath them, or their chest was too heavy to breathe into.

She knew that too well.

But she'd never been left holding a weight like Moss was carrying. Her own burdens were nothing compared to what he was going through. She'd twisted herself into pieces over something as small as her looks, while his fate closed around him like a cage.

She was ashamed of herself.

* Carol?*

She looked up. Moss was frowning at her. * Everything okay?*

*You're asking if I'm okay?!* She made an agitated gesture. On the other side of the cabin, Lance's attention flicked towards them. Which meant he was already watching them; he'd just decided to make it obvious. * I'm—I'm…*

Their headsets crackled. "Coming in to land," the pilot said.

The nearest land to the island where they'd washed up was New Zealand. As they approached the mainland, Lance explained that he'd secured a base on the South Island, on a peninsula that jutted out along one side of a medium-sized city.

Moss snorted gently. * Used to think Dunedin was the big smoke,* he said when Carol glanced at him. * Medium-sized city might be pushing it, coming from anywhere else in the world.*

The "base" Lance had mentioned looked more like a luxury lodge, with multiple outbuildings and a pool complex. It was perched on craggy cliffs on the ocean side of the peninsula, surrounded by windswept trees and low shrubs.

Moss squeezed her fingers as they descended. His eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, but there was a light in them that had been missing before.

* Stopping off at home before the end of the world,* he said, his voice a half-wry, half-fond murmur in her head. * Even my octopus couldn't have managed a trick like this.*

The doors to the main building swung open as they landed, and Keeley ran out.

Good, she thought absently as she dismounted from the helicopter. She'll hug Lance and fuss over Maggie, and while they're busy, I'll talk to Moss.

When Keeley wrapped her arms around her, all the breath left her lungs.

"You're safe!" Keeley blurted out. "All of you! Maggie—"

The little dragonling shrieked and bounded from Lance's shoulder onto Carol's, her front half winding around Keeley's neck in a dragon-hug. That was fine. She could unhook Maggie's back claws and let Keeley hold on to her and make sure for herself that the baby dragon was okay, and—and—

Keeley wasn't letting her go.

"Um?" she mumbled.

"I thought you were dead. Again. I thought—when you fell out of the plane—" She covered her mouth with both hands as though if she didn't say it, it wouldn't frighten her as much.

She was shaking. Keeley was shaking. Because she'd thought Carol was dead.

I didn't think…

At the very back of her mind, her shark stirred, a slash of white in the murk, and cold sweat broke out on her skin.

"Everything's fine. Maggie wasn't hurt. She's going to be scared of the ocean forever, I think, but she wasn't injured. The eggs aren't damaged, and I can sense that they're still—still the same as they were. They didn't hatch. But they're still okay. Everyone's okay."

Except Moss, who looked like a man facing his own death. The cold on her skin dug inward, towards her bones.

The need to talk to him was a physical hurt, a hook in her chest that would kill her if she didn't get it out.

"Keeley…" she began, awkwardly.

Lance gave her a searching look and touched his mate's arm. "I think she'd appreciate some space," he said gently.

Keeley let her go. Maggie slithered off with her, coiling around Keeley's neck like a shimmering scarf. The same way she'd clung to Carol during the storm.

Maggie considered Keeley to be part of her hoard, and the closest thing she had to a parent. And the hug had been awkward and unexpected. So why did Carol feel a pang as Keeley stepped away, and Maggie with her?

"You'll want a chance to get settled in before we debrief." Lance was all business.

"We're fine. We survived," Carol said—automatically, because she'd spent her whole adult life avoiding people probing about how she looked. "The bird shifters didn't reappear, and though we can only theorize why they attacked in the first place—"

"We've got one of them in custody."

Carol stared. At her shoulder, Moss went still. The shadows around him stretched. "You have one of the metal bird shifters in custody?"

"We're calling them Stymphalian birds. Like the Greek legend. God knows we have no other leads." Lance rubbed his head. "You'll want to freshen up. Eat something."

"No," Carol burst out, surprising herself. But if Moss was that affected by the news too, then—

She straightened her shoulders. "I want to talk to the prisoner."

Lance led her and Moss to the basement level beneath the main building. They passed laundry and storage facilities and even a wine cellar.

None of it seemed capable of keeping in someone who could cut through solid steel.

"Is this safe?" she asked.

Lance's jaw set. "I like it as little as you do," he said as they reached a solid door and he punched a code into a security interface. "But we can't involve the authorities with this. I don't have the right sort of connections here to make sure we wouldn't wake up tomorrow to international news about a half-woman, half-bird existing. Or worse."

"Worse" being the thing that all shifters feared: that their existence would be discovered by the human world. And that they wouldn't just end up locked away—they would disappear, to be experimented on and exploited.

Carol touched her mouth absently, then pulled her hand away when she realized what she was doing.

"So you're keeping her in the dungeon?" Moss asked, a strange undercurrent in his voice.

"An empty basement room. It's heated. Ventilated. And it—"

"Comes with convenient shackles attached to the wall? The hell sort of a place is this?"

Carol's stomach twisted as she saw what lay behind the security door. The room was bare concrete. The woman inside wasn't shackled, but she was… defeated. Slumped against the wall.

There were manacles on her wrists, but what good would they be against her razor feathers?

Moss frowned, his displeasure clear. Lance sighed. "We can't risk her escaping."

"She doesn't look like she wants to escape." Carol crept closer. She recognized the woman. She had an eagle's face, her bronze beak as dangerous and sharp as the tiny razor-edged feathers that merged into wild curls of human hair. Her shoulders were human, her tanned skin scarred by a thousand tiny cuts and several larger ones.

Carol's stomach hollowed out.

She'd had to learn how not to bite her tongue or lips, but once she figured it out, it took barely any attention not to hurt herself with her shark teeth. This woman must live on a literal knife's edge at all times.

She hadn't shown any sign that she'd noticed them come in. Her shoulders were slumped, her head downcast, her wings arrayed like a heap of knives around her.

"Hello? Can you hear us?" Carol asked. There was no response. "My name is Carol Zhang. What's yours?" She repeated the words telepathically.

The woman might as well have been a statue.

* It's no use, Zhang. She hasn't talked to any of us.* Lance's voice was tired. * She's not deaf. She can hear us. Whether she can't understand us or just refuses to speak, we don't know.*

"You tore a hole in our plane and almost killed us and three innocent children. Don't you think we at least deserve to know why?" The hardness in her own voice surprised her. She knelt in front of the cage. Crouching still like this made her nerves twang, but she forced herself to hold in place. "Why did you do it?"

The woman's eyes snapped to hers. They were a dull gray-brown, sunk into deep hollows of exhaustion.

Carol's head buzzed with static.

Just like on the plane. She's trying to talk to me.

"You remember me from the plane too, right?"

No response. The woman's eyes flicked to her mouth, then back to her eyes, but didn't change expression.

All right, so she might not speak English. Lance would have tried other languages. He had the whole agency at his disposal. Any one of them would have done better than her own half-remembered, tourist-level second languages.

Think. They had to communicate somehow.

Nobody has ever heard of shifters like this before. Part-shifted or fully shifted, birds with razor wings didn't exist. The same way the kraken didn't exist. The same way dragons didn't. All these secret communities of mythic shifters living separate not only from the human world but the shifter world, as well.

The woman didn't have a human mouth to form words with, and she wasn't the only one. A society made of shifters who might end up any combination of bird and human… Who must have existed separate from humans…

Maybe they didn't speak using words at all.

The buzzing in her head intensified.

Maggie instinctually communicated using her emotions and had graduated to pushing images into other people's heads. What if she tried that?

She didn't want to remember the fight on the plane. If you could even call it that. But she forced herself to relive it—the suddenness, the confusion, the shine of cut metal and the wind ripping the air from her lungs.

Then she opened her mind to the insistent buzzing.

It was like plunging into cold water. The bird-woman stumbled into her mind like she'd been pushing against a door that suddenly gave way. Carol winced at the sensation of the other shifter floundering in her thoughts.

In the memory of her falling from the plane.

Shock rushed through her, jagged-edged, and her memory doubled. She was falling from the plane, and she was seeing herself fall, disappearing into the storm that froze her wings and dashed ice against her softer skin. She was calling desperately for Maggie and watching the sharp-toothed woman reach for the scrap of tumbling gold. She was terrified and despairing, and the branch was breaking beneath her nest, the serpents waiting with their jaws stretched wide, blood seeping onto the dry earth—

And then, far below, a monster swallowed the sharp-toothed woman whole. She flared her wings, terrified and electrified. Was this her chance?

Carol reeled back, gasping. The room wavered around her as she untangled her thoughts from the bird-woman's. For a moment, she saw herself crouching outside the cage, tense and disheveled, all the blood draining from her face.

She saw Moss. The kraken.

If that's what the kraken rescuing her had looked like from the outside…

No wonder Moss was afraid of what the kraken would do to me.

Her legs wobbled as she got to her feet. The woman was still staring at her, wide eyes flicking between her and the two men. She wet her lips.

"What the hell was that?" Lance growled.

"Communication. She-she talks like Maggie does." Carol took a step, and the room spun. "It was… a lot."

"Did you find out who they are? Why they attacked us?"

No, I just got a multi-perspective playback of almost dying. Carol shook her head. "Something about—nesting? A threat?" Moss was next to her, his arm around her waist. She leaned into him. "She saw you catch me in the storm."

The image leapt to her mind again—huge black tentacles stretching up from the storm-whipped waves. It melted into a memory of the kraken hauling Moss back to shore, back to her , then the wonder of diving into its mind. The way it had been so delicate with her.

Metal screamed against metal.

* Get back!* Lance's shout jolted her back into her body. Metal clanged to the ground. The bird-woman was standing, her wings cutting through the concrete around her like butter.

She looked desperate, pleading and terrified and hopeless, and that was a dangerous combination with her wings.

Black tendrils exploded from Moss's chest. Carol pushed him towards the door—she didn't want him to get hurt, she didn't want him to hurt anyone, why did anyone have to get hurt—but she couldn't move him. She flung her mind against his. * Wait! Wait, I can still talk to her, we can understand each other!*

The mind that responded wasn't Moss. It was the kraken. Dark and dangerous and absolutely without mercy.

* Moss! *

His hands closed around her shoulders. "I promised I'd keep you safe."

"Keep her safe, too!"

She looked over her shoulder, terrified of what she would see. The woman was so like her. Trapped between two forms. She wanted to understand her.

Thick nightmare-tendrils held the bird-woman bound in mid-air. They wrapped around her razor wings, unharmed. She stared past Carol at Moss, her brown eyes despairing.

Her thoughts buzzed brokenly in the air. Carol swallowed and opened her mind.

Violence and anguish, everything she had been given to fight with, take it away, please, please, take it away—

Blood filled her mind. Songs ripped from mournful throats. Feathers shining like knives, torn from scarred brown skin.

Take it away, take it away—

"She thinks you're the Soul-Eater," she gasped.

"What?" Moss's voice was sharp with horror.

There was a soft hiss, and Lance stepped away from behind the bird-woman, a needle in his hand. She sagged, her eyelids fluttering and then closing as the sedative took effect.

* Put her down gently,* he said. * That should keep her out for a while.*

Moss's fingers tightened reflexively on Carol's shoulders. "Long enough to sort out this mess?"

Lance eyed him grimly. "What do you think?"