She sounded ragged and desperate.
Had she encountered some danger? Alarmed, he shifted and splashed ashore.
"Mira? Are you all right?"
"Dane!" she cried, her anxious voice turning glad. She ran down the beach and threw herself into his arms.
Dane hugged her back, startled by the vehemence of her greeting. He was even more startled when she took him by the shoulders and gave him a shake.
"And that's for scaring me out of ten years' life! Don't ever do that again."
"Do what?" he asked, genuinely confused.
"Disappear without telling me where you're going!" She made as if to shake him again, but instead she clutched at his arms and held onto him, as if to anchor him down to the beach with her body weight. "Please. We're a team, and I'm all alone here if you go anywhere."
It had never even occurred to him that he might have alarmed her. He was so used to being on his own that he had grown completely unaccustomed to the idea of anyone worrying about him or missing him.
"I'm sorry," he said, taking her into his arms and smoothing his hand over her salt-stiff hair.
"I came back to find you gone," Mira said into his shoulder. "I didn't know what had happened to you."
"I'm sorry. I didn't think you might—" He broke off, unsure how to explain. "I won't do it again."
We're a team.Her words echoed in his head.
A team.
He hadn't been part of a team—a proper team, a decent team, who supported each other and had each other's backs—in a very long time.
* * *
Together they carried their gear to the bunker. Mira began to collect driftwood for a fire. She suggested making lunch, at which point he explained that he'd eaten, and then he had to explainwhathe'd eaten.
"Raw fish?" she said in horror.
"It's perfectly normal for an orca."
"Yes, but you're also a man!"
"When I'm an orca, I can eat like one. It doesn't hurt me."
Mira twisted her face into an incredibly eloquent, screwed-up look of disgust.
"I can bring back some fish to cook," Dane suggested. "I do prefer them cooked, honestly. At least when I'm human-shaped."
"That would be great, but right now I don't want to let you out of my sight, for fishing or any other reason," Mira said. "Let's see what flavors we have in the incredibly tasty foil pack food group."
The emergency food packs came in Hamburger Macaroni, Homestyle Eggs and Bacon, and Pork and Rice.
"I guess if you're a stranded vegetarian, you're just out of luck," Mira remarked, picking through them.
"Most people on Black Rock Island are big predator shifters, so they probably don't have very many vegetarians."
This took his mind back to the island, but it was less of a traumatic flashback than usual. In fact, he was wondering about the fate of the shifters he and Mira had freed. He hoped they had managed to get away, and caused a lot of trouble for the Colonel and his personal guard along the way.
"Do you think anyone will be coming after us?" Mira asked, her thoughts clearly moving along similar lines. He liked that about her.
"I don't know. It depends on how much chaos we managed to cause before we left, and how quickly they've recovered. If we're lucky, then the escaped shifters will have stolen the boats, and the Colonel and his loyalists will be stuck on the island until they can fix the helo or have someone bring another."
