33. Carol

33

Carol

The ground heaved beneath her. Water slopped over her face. She half-rose—then jerked to a stop, held fast by chains around her neck and limbs.

Panic shook her like a terrier with a rat.

Images exploded in her mind. Still leaves. Still grass. Something like an argument took place just outside her psychic hearing, like a hurried conversation in another language on the other side of a door that was banging in the wind and why did her head hurt so much . Forget not talking straight. Even her thoughts were—lost…

The images came again. Still waters. Clear skies.

The image of the water felt tentative, as though whoever was communicating with her was testing it out. Clear skies came through clearer, reinforced by more voices and with a hint of…guilt?

Carol opened her eyes to a bronze-stained beak half an inch from her face.

She thrust herself backwards, kicking with both legs. The chain stopped her, and she folded over, pain shooting through her ankles. The scrape of metal on metal filled the air.

Those razor-sharp wings. The metal shifters were back. She had to warn the others—but where was she?

In freezing, sour-tasting saltwater. Her body reacted before her brain formed the thought, calling instinctually on the safest shape for being in the water.

Her neck crunched.

Agitated screeches echoed in her ears as she lost the shift, falling back into her human form flat on her face.

A rope snare, tightening! A rope snare! She didn't recognize the image that blazed into her mind, but whoever sent it to her loaded it with enough context to make their meaning clear. A hunter's trap, meant to weaken and torment until their captive was exhausted enough to kill without danger to the hunter themselves.

This time, she rose slowly, testing her bonds. If she raised her head, her arms were yanked down; if she moved her legs, the collar dragged her face back down into the brackish water. The floor was wide-spaced metal grating, which made sense as she pieced together the rest of it. One length of chain attached to manacles and passed through the grating to keep her down.

There was more water below the grating, obviously, but it was dark, and she couldn't see how far down it went. The floor rolled again, and the water slopped higher. She was on a ship?

She looked up at last, wary of her chains but not, despite everything, frightened by what she saw.

Maybe she'd maxed out her ability to be afraid. That would be nice.

Six Stymphalian bird shifters had attacked the plane. One was back in the basement where Lance and the others had caged her.

The other five were locked up here with her.

They shuffled feet and claws on the same grating she was lying on, and one level up, on another layer of cages. There was barely any light down here, but enough to glint on bronze feathers and the cage walls. She stared silently at them. Shifters like her, trapped gargoyle-like between bird and human. The same way she was trapped.

And all caught in the same snare.

"Hey," she said, for lack of anything else. Her voice sounded like she'd been gargling with glass shards.

Rising sun! Warm updrafts! Plentiful food! Safe nests!

Someone hissed. The shifter in the cell on the far left hunched down as his neighbors flared their wings at him. She peered, trying to see through the shifting shadows and glint of metal, and thought he might be a he, and younger than the others. The bird-faced woman between him and Carol ran a human hand down her beak and smacked the cage above her head.

The cage above held another woman. With a human face. The same one she'd seen at the plane window? The woman knelt on knees that bent too high on her legs, threading hand-claws through the grated floor to keep her balance.

"Apologies."

It took Carol a moment to realize that had been a word, outside of her head. The woman's mouth worked again.

"Regret?"

It was like talking to Maggie, she decided. If Maggie was a year or two older and knew words instead of just pictures and feelings. Their images were so layered with meaning, it was like language—like looking at a single picture and reading a whole paragraph from it. Speaking English out loud must feel thin and lacking in information by comparison. Rising sun, warm updrafts… things that were welcoming. Home-like. Safe nests?

Regret?

Carol licked her lips. "Yeah, I guess safe nests isn't an appropriate thing to say to someone who knows you tried to kill a dragon hatchling and a clutch of eggs."

The woman frowned, sharp and severe. "Dragon? No fight with… dragons." She hesitated.

"Then why did you attack Maggie?" She layered her thoughts with memories of the little spitfire dragon: her joyous ferocity. Her curiosity and endless hunger. The way Carol's heart melted when she curled up in her lap, those bright golden eyes closing as she fell asleep with perfect trust.

"Not dragon." The woman hissed. "These words… new. Strange."

"I know Cantonese and Spanish. Some Arabic, if that would help." But not enough of any of them to hold a conversation more complicated than Hi, how are you? and What's the WiFi password? Let alone Who are you and where did you come from, and why do you look like that, and if you're trapped in these cages with me then who the hell is the bad guy here and what do they want?

It was almost a relief when the bird shifters all stared at her in puzzled bafflement when she tried a few phrases on them.

English it was, then. English, and pushing images into their minds, which probably felt to them the same way Maggie's poorly rendered piles of gold and salmon felt to her. Clumsy and childish, but still communication.

"If you weren't after Maggie and the other baby dragons, why did you attack us?" The plane. She didn't want to remember it, but she did, and pushed the memories out to the other shifters.

Metal scraped on metal. "Regret."

"You said that. Regret for what, exactly?"

Images flocked thick and fast. She struggled to keep up. Another snare—but this time, cunning claws picked the trap loose, freed the terrified animal within. The crest of a mountain, bare stone bleached white by the sun. An… altar? The rescued creature laid down, a shining knife raised high—

"What the hell?" She tried to stand and almost choked herself. "Some sort of— sacrifice ? That's why you wanted Maggie? And now you regret that? What, because you got locked up in here?"

And then she had to stop and turn her angry words into images layered with context and meaning, and hope they understood.

Their reply came, slow and tentative. Not the dragons. A figure with a pale face framed by dark hair, eyes like black stones. Teeth like their wings.

Carol went cold. "Me. You wanted me for a… sacrifice." And now she was trapped in here with them.

I can really pick them, can't I? For a moment there, I thought I'd gotten them all wrong. That there was a reason behind all of this that would make it okay.

Like Eloise on the boat. Or Briers at work, acting nice so she would stay by his side like a loyal puppy, ready to be used as a scapegoat while he stole Maggie and the eggs. Like the razor-winged woman in the basement, despairing and desperate. Thinking that because they were in the same situation, they would be on the same side.

Like Moss…

No. She couldn't think about him in the middle of all this. She didn't even know what this was. Not yet. Being kidnapped? Being taken as a sacrifice to…

Oh.

"Not to kill. Take… for gift. The god takes, and we receive. Gift to you. Like us. To make right."

And there it was. It all made sense.

"The Soul-Eater. You're going to the Soul-Eater, to free him, so that he'll take away your shifter abilities. Turn you into normal humans?"

The bird woman nodded.

She'd guessed right about that, with the other bird woman. But to have it made clear—she was horrified. Did they understand what they would be unleashing on the world?

What would I unleash on the world, to be rid of a shifter side that hurt me? I already begged Moss to stay with me. Is the kraken less bad than the Soul-Eater?

"You want to be rid of your shifter sides. And you thought I would want the same thing." Her voice was flat. That's where they were being taken. To have her shark stripped out of her.

By a monster who would go on to wipe shifters from the face of the planet.

"Why?" she burst out. "You want to damn everyone else just to be human? That's horrific! It's not a gift, it's murder!"

"We were betrayed!"

I bet you were, given you're locked up in here same as me. The thought died on her lips—but enough of it must have escaped. Metal rang on metal as the bird shifters hissed angrily.

The woman above her pursed her lips, images flickering too fast for her to follow—or maybe being pulled back before she broadcast them fully, like stuttering half-words as she tried to figure out what to say.

"Before. When—"

A war. Another one, because there were always wars, but this one had done worse than kill—it left their warriors broken, human things. Denied the sky, denied the plummeting exhilaration of death.

Then a god offered them stronger wings, killing wings, to defeat the enemy. The gift was meant to be temporary; after, she would give them something new. A shape fit for living in, not only death-dealing.

Then that god had died.

Carol winced, trying to sort through the images. Maybe if she thought of it like watching a foreign film? Previously, on CSI Shifters…

They'd gone to… someone. For more magic? Something that put them in a sort of Sleeping Beauty sleep, until the god who'd promised to restore their old shifter forms returned.

But when they woke, it was to a world utterly changed.

"The god who gave you these forms? I think we call her the Weaver of Souls." Carol tried to put weaving into images.

The bird-woman blinked at her. Weaver. Gift-giver. Soul-tender.

A god who reincarnated into different bodies over hundreds of years must have many names.

"She's dead," Carol whispered. "And so long as the Soul-Eater is alive, she'll stay that way. That's why you need the Soul-Eater."

Someone else had betrayed them, too. Carol strained to understand. They'd woken up—and then…

"But who told you all this? How did you know the Soul-Eater is the only one still around? Or—or who I was, and where to find me? Whose ship are we on?"

It was too many questions all at once. She caught the tip of her tongue between her front teeth, carefully, holding back her impatience. "Who—"

"Him."

She didn't notice a door had opened above until it shut. There was a gangway along the front of the top row of cells; a man walked along it, flanked by guards, until he was staring down at her through the floor.

"Ah," he said. "Miss Zhang. It has been too long."

Water swirled around her wrists and ankles. The ship swayed back and forth in its steady swell, but for Carol, the ocean opened in a pit beneath her.

"Mr. Fairchild?"

Adrian Fairchild. A man she hadn't seen since she was a teenager. Since his daughter had invited her out on their yacht and pushed her overboard to see if she would shift, or die.

Eloise's father.

"You b-brought me here," she stuttered.

"Of course!" The lights had gone on when he entered; she could clearly see the fine lines on his face, the way his eyebrows rose in perfect amusement. "What luck, isn't it, that our paths have crossed again. It's beyond time I put right my what my daughter broke. Wouldn't you agree?"