44. Carol

44

Carol

He wasn't coming.

Not the Soul-Eater. And not Moss, either.

She was on her own.

The new confidence she'd found began to shrivel. Maybe that was a good thing. If she became small and scared and helpless again, maybe that gut-churning fear power would come back, and she could blast Fairchild off the deck—

The fact that she was imagining exactly what his face would look like as he fell probably meant she was still too sure in herself for it to work. And how freaking typical of her life was it that finding her own strength meant losing the one magical power that could have made a difference?

Fairchild's voice faltered. Tension rippled through the onlookers. The crowd had grown as he spoke, crew members shepherded up on deck by armed guards. A literal captive audience.

His arms dropped. Was this it? Carol tensed—if he gave up now, she might have another chance to escape.

Then he gestured to one of his bodyguards. Hands grabbed her upper arms and shoved her forward.

"This is your moment," Fairchild whispered urgently. Another sailor began to fasten a harness around her waist. "Give yourself to the water. Let him wake and find you. Don't worry. We won't pull you back in until your monstrous side is gone."

"You mean until I'm dead." She felt dizzy. Her pulse throbbed against the collar that would stop her from shifting. And once she hit the water—

How the fuck did I end up getting drowned by Eloise AND her dad? She let out a sob of panicked laughter. "What if I don't want to give up my shifter side?"

Something inside her twisted—a double echo to her own panicked heartbeat. Another mind searching for a way out. Any way out.

Fairchild's expression was almost paternal. "It's for the best. We both know that." He pushed her, gently but firmly, towards the edge.

"Wait!" she cried out. "What if I—"

"Stop wasting time and go!" he hissed.

Panic rose up, strangling her before the collar had a chance to. But it wasn't her panic. It was colder and deeper and older and newer , somehow. The overflowing emotions of a creature that always kept itself hidden.

Shark? she thought, stunned, as her feet dragged along the deck. My shark?

For the first time since that terrifying night on the water with Eloise and her friends, she sensed her shark fully in her head. In her heart. In her soul. Not swimming slowly and silently, looming in the darkness as she'd imagined it so many times, but thrashing in panic.

It slammed up alongside her, the mental effect so intense, it drove the breath from her lungs. And she heard its thoughts.

I can't save you this time.

One small sentence, and so much more. Layers of meaning interwoven like the currents in the ocean, like salt and grit and blood and moonlight, which she never would have been able to interpret before meeting Maggie or the Stymphalian shifters. Her shark's panic at being unable to help. Its guilt over being so late, almost too late, the first time she'd almost drowned. Its confusion. How it hadn't known what to do with this human soul it found itself in— her soul, their soul—and had tried to keep itself small, not remind her of the memories that terrified her so much.

Keep yourself small? she asked, as though that was the most important thing here. You're a part of me. You stayed on my face, even if you stayed hidden in my soul.

More confusion. Her shark wasn't the one that had stitched its features onto her human form.

But why—

Her feet hit the ridge at the edge of the deck. Her connection to her shark's thoughts flew out of her grip. Fairchild held her by the hands, saying something she couldn't hear past the buzzing in her ears.

She stared past him. Back north, back the way they must have come. Where the sun split the sky and burned the sea.

And something huge and monstrous moved beneath the waves.

All her senses opened up. She was liquid movement, sharp teeth and hydrodynamic sleekness, a form that had survived millions of years far below the sun's burning gaze. And that shape, the power and strength, the truth behind a thousand sailors' legends, was…

* Moss?*