5. Carol

5

Carol

She shouldn't have looked at him.

Moss's expression was one she'd seen too many times before. Wide eyes. Slack mouth. That first moment of shock, in the split second before it twisted into horror.

She looked away before she could see what he truly thought of her, now that he'd seen her face.

Whatever you're afraid of can wait. She'd been so worried about the dragon eggs that she'd forgotten her greatest fear.

That she would meet her soulmate, and he would look at her like she was a monster.

She wanted to curl up and close her eyes and never get up again.

"Those are dragon eggs. You have a dragon with you." Moss's eyes were a warm, deep brown, sharp and confused and painfully human . "You—are you sure you aren't hurt?"

She blinked. Of everything she'd expected and feared he would say, that wasn't it.

"No worse than you'd expect," she said automatically, and heard her own voice like a recording. "Less… less hurt, actually, than you'd expect. After falling out of a plane."

"You're sure?"

His voice was soft and rough. She shouldn't have been able to hear it over the roar of the storm outside, but it was somehow stronger than the battering of waves and rain. She couldn't place his accent—not American, not British, something strange and exotic and home .

In the firefly glow of the tiny flashlight, he reached out and cupped her face.

All the breath left her body. His hand was big, and warm, despite the chill in the air, and he touched her as gently as she'd touched the eggs, checking them all over for any sign of damage.

His eyes softened. "You're caught in your shift," he said.

It took a moment for his words to register. When they did, she flinched.

"Caught—?" she stuttered.

"It happens sometimes." He grimaced, and then added with a wry smile, "When you're under stress, for example. When you're in a terrifying situation, and your body is screaming at you to shift into your animal form and get the hell out, but your mind knows you have to stay human to keep others safe."

A shadow passed behind his eyes. Carol's heart was in her throat.

His thumb brushed against her cheek. "I wondered why you didn't shift into your shark form. Now I get it. You wouldn't have any way to keep hold of the little dragon here, or those eggs. You needed to stay human to keep them safe, even as all your instincts tried to get you to shift to keep you safe. So you got stuck partway."

"Oh," she whispered.

Not no, I'm not caught in my shift, I always look this way. Not that would be a great excuse, but the truth is…

Just oh.

She swallowed.

"Pree ee !" Maggie slithered up onto her lap, standing four-square with her tail lashing behind her and her wings stretched big and scary as she glared up at Moss. "Eee! Ee ee ee!"

"Maggie!"

"Eeeeeeee!" Maggie stretched out her neck, looking exactly like a tiny baby dragon who wanted to bite Moss again. Images flashed through Carol's mind. Sharp, pointy teeth and—oh god, that was her. Was that how Maggie saw her? Just teeth ?

Moss held up his hands in surrender. "I agree, little dragon. She's very beautiful and impressive," he said. This time, when he raised his eyes to meet Carol's, the expression in them was… different. Still kind. But warmed through with a heat that promised a thousand different things. "The most beautiful woman I've ever met."

"Pree!" Maggie puffed up her wings then, satisfied, turned her attention back to Carol. She curled up in Carol's lap and tipped her head back, peeping bird-like up at her.

Carol barely noticed. Moss's words were still echoing in her head. She didn't think she would ever stop hearing them.

The most beautiful woman I've ever met.

He must be imagining her as she would be without her shark's eyes. And—her teeth. Had he seen her teeth? Had he connected the dots between what Maggie showed him and the monstrous woman crouched beside him?

He couldn't have. There was no way he could say the word beautiful without choking if he'd seen her teeth.

Even if she was his mate.

"You're—" she began. Her voice cracked.

He reached out, covering her hand with his. "I know." His voice was strange, like he was holding something back. "It's a lot. If it's easier… we can leave the life-shattering declarations for later. When we're not both at risk of pneumonia." His eyes flicked down to Maggie. "All three of us at risk, even."

"O-okay. Um. You don't happen to have something to light a fire in your pockets, too?" she joked, determinedly not thinking about when that later might be, or how he might look at her when he found out the truth.

"Nope, sorry. Nor anything dry to light on fire." He patted his pockets anyway and froze the same moment realization crashed through her.

"You didn't shift, either." The blood rushed from her face. "What were you doing out in the storm? Were you with other people? Oh, god. I'm so sorry. The storm—"

She'd been flying through it. What must it have been like at sea level?

"I was alone. It was only me." His jaw tightened. "No one else. I was—"

"Were you on a boat?" It was the only reason she could think of. "Sailing in that weather by yourself—our pilot said the storm came up out of nowhere."

"That's about the shape of it." He winced. "As for why I didn't shift…"

He looked down at his hands as though he'd never seen them before. Carol looked, too. How could she not?

His forearms were firm and muscular, a scattering of burn marks and scars marring his brown skin. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt that had been hammered by the waves; one of the sleeves was torn, and the fabric was soaked and twisted, clearly showing the muscular body beneath. She could only imagine what was hiding under his pants.

She shouldn't, though. Imagine. She should be focusing on other things. Not imagining what was in his trousers.

"My octopus—" he began, and his voice twisted. "My octopus prefers to hide away. When we hit the storm, the closest place to hide was in me. Which left me in human form. You know. Humans, famously able to breathe underwater and survive at sea. Thanks, octopus."

There was something almost like grief underpinning his dry words. On impulse, she reached over and took his hand again.

There were too many terrible thoughts battling for her to pay attention to them. Too many painful things to acknowledge and know there was nothing she could do about them, out here, hiding from a storm on this island in the middle of the ocean.

"So," she said, clutching at normality, "you like sailing?"

He stared at her. His cheeks puffed out, and then he burst out laughing.

"Sailing, fishing, diving. You name it. I'd rather be on the ocean than most other places. The kitchen being one exception." He lifted the hand she wasn't holding. Thin silver scars cross-hatched his fingers and palms. "Even if it took me a while to figure out what end of the knife was the pointy one. Shifter healing only goes so far, eh?"

"You like the ocean and you like to cook," she said weakly. She bit her tongue before she could say, My parents are going to be thrilled.

"And I'm a workaholic. I have a large, terrible family, including two cousins who decided aged four that I was their favorite dress-up doll and haven't changed their minds since. And my octopus"—another flash of grief twisted his face—"never met a screw it didn't want to unscrew or a lock it didn't want to pick. If you like your car doors to stay attached and your furniture to not collapse underneath you, you're in for a bad time."

"I have seven older brothers."

He stared at her. "Hell."

"They're all great white shifters, too."

" Hell. "

She laughed. She couldn't help herself. Everything was terrifying, and the future yawned ahead of her like a whirlpool she couldn't stop from dragging her into the depths, and—here she was. With her mate. Laughing.

"You should all go out sailing sometime," she suggested, like they'd met over drinks and not in the face of death.

He looked as though he was trying not to look like he was trying not to cry. "My octopus would take the boat apart underneath us."

"They'd love it."

She swallowed hard. So did he. Fate had picked them out for each other and here they were, mapping out their future at the edge of the world. As though there was no question they had a future.

"I guess you'd need a new boat first, though," she said, her voice wavering.

He looked down at their joined hands.

"I thought I was about to die," he said, his voice so soft she could barely hear it over the storm outside. "And then you appeared. And now we're…"

Silence hung in the air. Even Maggie was silent. She'd given up her baby-bird routine. Exhausted by their adventure and lulled by Carol and Moss's quiet voices, she'd curled up in Carol's lap and fallen asleep.

Moss frowned. "I was on a boat. But you—you were on a plane. How the hell did you fall out of a plane?"

And how did I survive falling all that way? A shiver ran down Carol's spine. She remembered—

She shook herself. "We were attacked. A type of shifter I'd never heard of before. Like birds made out of metal. They tore right through the side of the plane."

"They were after the dragons?"

"They must have been." Carol looked down at Maggie, asleep in her lap. "Have you heard of anything like that? Shifters who—who look caught between their two forms. And one of those forms is a bird with razor-sharp feathers."

"Never." He hesitated. "The world's full of surprises, though."

Tell me about it. Carol's chest tightened.

"They tore a hole in the plane. Maggie and I fell out of it. The others—" She swallowed hard, her chin trembling in that way that told her if she didn't get hold of herself now, she wasn't just going to be a freak with black eyes and pointy teeth, she was going to be all blotchy and teary, too. Nobody wanted that. "The pilot was going to find a place to land. I—I hope they're okay."

Moss's eyes flickered to the mouth of the cave and the rain-whipped darkness outside. She didn't need telepathy for her to know what he was thinking.

We were flying over the ocean.

"Do you think these bird shifters could follow you here?"

Carol jerked. "I hadn't even thought—shit. Shit. "

She closed her eyes. Her shark was so deep inside her, she had to hunt after it. When she found it, the shock struck her like she'd actually been out swimming and turned around to find a great white looming behind her.

There you are , she said, hiding her hammering heart behind exasperation. I need your senses again. She'd used them on the plane, and again as they stumbled up onto the beach of this deserted island, but her shark had been easier to find then. She hadn't needed to go searching for it to connect to its abilities.

Her shark didn't respond to her, but suddenly she could sense the electric hum of life all around her.

Maggie's heartbeat was as slow as the little dragon's pulse ever got, even and calm in exhausted sleep. Moss's heartbeat was strong. Powerful. She pulled her attention away from it reluctantly, forcing herself to focus further away.

The tiny prickles of life, the bugs and critters that had led her to this scrap of shelter in the cliff. Farther up, in smaller shelters, the thrumming hearts of sea birds hiding from the storm. In the ocean, hundreds of fish, big and small, torn this way and that by wild currents. Some of them flickered out as she watched. The sea in a storm like this wasn't a safe place for any creature.

But the metal shifters wouldn't be in the sea.

She sent her senses up, tilting her head as though she were looking with her eyes and could see through the rock above their heads.

The sky was empty.

"I can't sense anything out there," she said uncertainly.

"How are you doing that?"

Moss's voice was hushed, as though they were in a church. She blinked hard, pulling her focus back to her eyes instead of her other senses. Her eyes were stinging. Why were they open? God, had she kept them open the whole time, staring black-eyed up at the ceiling like that girl from The Ring ?

She risked a glance at him. His eyes were wide, the shadows around him somehow deeper. As though he was surrounded by a dark, strangely possessive aura.

Right. Probably his octopus trying to hide him from the freaky shark lady.

She swallowed and looked away. "It's something my shark can do."

"Electrolocation?"

"I—yes. You've heard of it?" She hesitated. "And it doesn't freak you out?"

"My whole family are marine shifters of one sort or another. A couple of them have a similar thing. Though I don't think they can use it while they're in human form."

Neither could her brothers or parents. A shameful heat crept over her face, and she raised one hand to rub her cheeks, turning her face away.

Moss was instantly apologetic. "I didn't mean to upset you. Shit. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. One silver lining to being stuck mid-shift, right?"

The lie came out too easily. She immediately wished she could take it back.

Moss reached out and hesitantly put his arm around her shoulders again. She leaned into him, equally as tentative. Slowly, awkwardly, they relaxed into one another.

Oh. Oh, god. Was it worth the lie, to have this? No one had touched her like this since before her shark first emerged. Before she transformed from normal teenage girl to the freak with a monster's face. Even her family treated her carefully, as though if they got too close she might break worse than she already was—and that was her fault, wasn't it? Because she knew that as soon as she let anyone see how much it hurt to be always kept at a distance, she would have to let it all out, all her loneliness and brokenness and shame.

But Moss didn't know that this was all there was of her . He wasn't holding her out of pity and horror, because she was a broken thing and you were meant to be kind to broken things. And because he didn't know, she didn't have to be that broken thing. She could be… some other Carol. The version of herself that he thought existed. Waiting for this aberration in her ability to shift to pass, like walking off a cramp.

A Carol with normal human eyes and a normal human mouth. Who was like other shifters. Who could transform into human or animal, and not be trapped as some monstrous combination of both.

Like those metal bird shifters.

"We don't know how far the storm took us before we found land," Moss said, and she silently thanked him for pulling her away from her spiraling thoughts.

"Where were you sailing? Our flight path was meant to take us over the water to South America. But the pilot said the storm messed with the controls."

"I was… off the coast. Not really keeping track." He grimaced.

"Your accent…"

"I'm a Kiwi. New Zealander. Don't worry. I've been living in the States for the last half decade. So it's not like the storm took you halfway round the world."

"We can't have gone that far off route," Carol mused, trying to convince herself more than anything. "And there's no trace of the shifters who attacked us. Or—or the plane, but my range wouldn't reach that far, anyway."

Moss squeezed her shoulders in silent comfort. She drew a deep breath.

Like she'd told him, this was her job. This was what she'd trained for. Supposedly. After she had to drop out of college and Lance MacInnis took pity on the weird girl with the creepy face. She was meant to work in the office, not in the field, but… here she was.

"As soon as the storm clears, we can see about heading back to the mainland and—and getting in contact with my team. And your family; I'm sure they're worried about you."

The slightest tension went through Moss's arm—not a comforting squeeze like before, but as though he was bracing himself. "Yes. I'm sure they are."

"We can shift if we have to, too. Between us we'll be able to rig up something to keep the eggs safe and stop Maggie from trying to swim away."

"…Right." Moss relaxed. "We'll figure it out in the morning." He moved slightly, and she found herself leaning further into him, her head pillowed on his shoulder. "Until then, I think Maggie's got the right idea of it. You should get some rest."

She wanted to protest, but he was right. The metal shifters might have lost track of Maggie for now, but that didn't mean they'd given them the slip for good. If they returned, she needed to be ready, and that meant being as well-rested as it was possible to get while stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere.

With her mate beside her.

"Everything all right?" Moss asked, his voice intimately close.

They were pressed against one another, side to side, both soaked through. Her wet clothes made the heat of his body more noticeable: the strength in his arm around her, the exhilarating comfort of his closeness.

If they'd met in any other circumstances, she wouldn't be worried about not resting well because of the uncomfortable surroundings. They'd be doing what all shifters did after they met their mates. For hours on end, to hear her brothers brag about it.

She bit back a sigh. If they'd met in any other situation, he would have known that she wasn't caught in her shift. That what he saw when he looked at her was all there was to her.

They wouldn't have spent the night fucking like bunnies either way.

"I'm fine," she said. "Just cold."

"I can help with that."

Before she could respond, he pulled her into his lap. Maggie squeaked sleepily, but she barely heard it over the pounding of blood in her ears.

"Better?" he murmured, his cheek pressing against the top of her head.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

He'd lifted her like it was nothing. Which shouldn't have been surprising. Shifters were strong; everyone knew that. And she'd already seen—felt—how muscular he was, underneath his sodden clothes.

If she were any other person—

But she wasn't. It was pointless to imagine otherwise. And no matter how guilty she felt over hiding the truth about herself…

It wasn't like she was the only one hiding something, here.

"I thought I saw something else out there," she blurted out. Fuck. She really shouldn't have trusted herself to speak. Super-secret spy field agent, she was not.

But there was no mistaking Moss's reaction this time. His whole body tensed, as though ready to fight.

Or flee.

"What do you think you saw?" he asked, his voice so carefully neutral she could practically feel him fighting to keep his breathing even, his tone flat.

Her skin prickled. "I don't know. It was when I was falling. It was like—like the storm itself reached out and caught me." She laughed weakly, wondering if it sounded as fake to Moss's ears as his careful non-reaction had sounded to her. "Maybe my shark sensed your octopus below us, and the shock made me blow it all out of proportion."

Never mind that he'd never shifted into octopus form. But some people could sense shifters' inner animal type without seeing them shift. It wasn't that unbelievable.

Not as unbelievable as seeing a dragon, and being more shocked by it biting him on the chin than the fact that dragons existed at all.

Not as unbelievable as what she'd really seen, as she fell through the storm.

Moss's voice rumbled through her. "My octopus? Could have been. Or the waves. Storms like that do strange things to your senses."

"Yeah," she agreed. "You're probably right."

Which made them both liars.

There was no mistaking what she'd seen. Those huge, nightmarish tendrils, stretching towards her from the ocean. Gathering her up. Holding her.

Whatever it had been, it wasn't an octopus.

And as she drifted to sleep, in the arms of her fated mate, it was those nightmare limbs that filled her mind.