6. Moss

6

Moss

The moment Carol fell asleep, the kraken raised its head.

You're still here, Moss said, his thoughts flat and exhausted.

The kraken observed his mind, then moved to look out through his eyes at the woman slumbering in his lap.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

She thought she'd seen his octopus. He could never let her know the truth.

Frustration boiled beneath his skin. The kraken's emotions, like its thoughts, were so huge that he only felt the edges of them—and even those edges seemed too large for his body to hold. A small, unworthy vessel for the great duty his family's oath demanded of him.

A duty that he would sacrifice everything for. And which would hurt the woman in his arms beyond imagining.

This couldn't have happened before. He searched his memory for stories about his great-uncle, about the unbroken line of ancestors who'd fulfilled this role before him. They had always been alone. Nothing about wives or husbands, or children. Whoever their soulmates had been, over the centuries, they must have roamed the surface world long after the kraken descended into the depths. Never knowing what sort of creature fate had chained them to.

It was a kinder fate than the one chosen for him. To find his soulmate in the hours before he left the surface world forever.

The kraken surged against his mind like a king tide. He slammed up walls against it, and the monster retreated.

But the tides tore down all walls, in the end. The kraken would wear down his defenses the same way the ocean wore down rocks to sand.

You said you would help me keep her safe, he reminded it, his thoughts disappearing into the cavernous void of the kraken's mind. Tomorrow, she'll make her way back to the mainland. She'll be safe then.

A vision of a chasm opened in his mind. The darkness and the deep.

When she's safe, we'll go there , he told it. Not before. You stay hidden—you don't touch her—and as soon as she's safe, I'll fulfil my duty.

What was he doing, negotiating with a monster? What possible leverage could he have against this creature of the deep? But the kraken drew back.

Are we agreed? he asked it.

There was only a low rumbling in response, like the distant movement of rocks falling on the sea floor.

Moss opened his eyes. The tiny flashlight turned the cave wall into a twist of shadows, transforming the tiniest bumps in the rock into huge, long shapes. But he was the only one looking at them. The kraken was dormant.

For now.

Which brought the total sum of his problems to an easily manageable several thousand, instead of several thousand and one.

He was the kraken. All right. Fine. Fuck his life, but whatever.

Carol had fallen out of the sky with a baby dragon in her arms and two unhatched eggs on her back.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

The shadow dragons were meant to be safe, in their fortress in Antarctica. That was the bargain Moss's ancestors had struck, all those centuries ago. That was the whole point of all this bullshit.

The dragons guarded their prisoner. And the kraken guarded the dragons. The kraken was the last resort. He didn't know what they called something like that back then, but these days, you'd call it the self-destruct button.

If the prisoner ever escaped—if the shadows dragons' fortress was threatened from within, or under attack from outsiders—they would call on the kraken. And the kraken would destroy every living thing it found, to prevent their prisoner from getting away.

Unease rippled through him. Deep in his soul, the kraken echoed his worries.

Something had gone wrong.

It could be nothing. The shadow dragons didn't spend their whole lives on the ice. They needed to add a bit of spice to the gene pool somehow. Moss remembered what his grandmother and aunties had told him: that the dragons went out on pilgrimages to explore the world and find their mates, bringing them back to the fortress to join their vigil.

Maybe that had happened here. Maggie and her two unborn siblings were the result of some over-excited shadow dragon popping out a few kids before returning to the homeland. Carol was… babysitting? Nannying?

Or something worse had happened.

Icy fingers crept down his spine. His great-uncle was dead. The kraken was in the surface world. And something had brought the shadow dragons from their ancestral fortress.

Nothing about this situation was right.

And he…

He had found his mate.

Safe in the knowledge that the kraken was still submerged in the depths of his soul, Moss let his gaze fall to Carol. She'd seemed so small, falling through the storm. Then when they'd fought the waves together, he'd seen how strong she was.

She was small again, tucked into his lap. But he knew how much strength and determination was hidden behind her slight human form.

She was a protector. She'd fallen through that storm and kept herself and the little dragon alive, and the other two eggs safe.

And he was lying to her about who he was.

Because dangerous as the storm had been… the kraken was worse.