When the door closed behind them, she went back to the desk. She rested her hands on it and let her head hang, just for a moment.
The pieces were starting to come together. Most of them were still missing, but it wasn’t like they could make the picture any prettier.
There was one piece specifically she needed to know about. Was it missing, or was it not part of the puzzle?
She closed her eyes and concentrated. Her senses stretched out through the ship, a hum building beneath her skin as she counted dozens of life-pulses.
Human, human, human. Part-human, part-bird. A few rats and other small creatures, lurking in the bowels of the ship. Real animals, or shifter crewmates hiding in animal form?
No dragons.
No Maggie. No faint glow of her unborn siblings in their eggs.
They were after me. The whole time… they were after me.
Fairchild wanted to free the Soul-Eater. The way he’d talked was sickly familiar, though she’d never heard it about shifters before. Cleansing the population. Fixing people who weren’t the right sort of people, and by fixing, he meant wiping out.
She and the bird shifters in the cages below decks were his offering to the Soul-Eater. An initial distraction to keep him occupied after they freed him.
But Fairchild didn’t strike her as the sort to include himself among the list of freaks. He wouldn’t want to risk losing his lion, so he must have a way out. Something fast and reliable. A helicopter, maybe.
Let’s face it. I’m one supervillain monologue away from imagining he has a submarine hidden away somewhere.She rubbed her face, letting her mind circle around the next thought before she had to face it directly.
Fairchild wouldn’t rely on just a helicopter to ensure his escape. He’d want to keep something in between him and the Soul-Eater.
And now she knew what it was. A meat shield made of a crew of shifters who couldn’t flee under their own power, and who were cheaper to hire than real mercs would have been.
He probably had the real ones waiting offstage. She wasn’t going to fool herself that the ship was staffed only by bargain-basement goons who had been lured aboard with promises of beer and titties.
If Lance were here, or any of the others who’d been doing this longer than she had and had any experience at this sort of thing, what would they do?
If Moss were here—
She clenched every muscle in her body until the thought went away. Mosswasn’there. And if he was right about losing control over the kraken, then that was a good thing. These people deserved better than a violent death at sea.
She needed to stop this ship before it got to that red pin on the map.
On her own.
Just her and the lurking nothing that was her shark.
So, on her own, then.
36
Carol
She had to turn this boat around, and to do that, she needed to find the wheelhouse, scare everyone else in there away, and lock herself in.
Easy. Right?
Because what the hell else am I going to do?Sure, there was the possibility Fairchild was hiding a helicopter somewhere on board. Carol couldn’t fly a helicopter. Submarine? Absolutely not.
And if the ship kept its current course, everyone on board would die.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Fear.She’d spent so long being afraid. Afraid her shark would never show up. Afraid, when it did, that she would hurt her friends. Afraid she would scare people, that she was too much, or not enough…
