There was no point pretending anymore. The whole “yes, Mr. Fairchild, of course I’m on your side, please take me to have my soul literally ripped out of me” schtick didn’t survive her attacking him. Weird, right?
They took her up on deck.
“So, uh.” Her feet didn’t want to keep moving. It didn’t matter. The guards dragged her anyway. “What is the plan here? How does it work?”
If she knew how it worked, she could plan against it. Right? She could still find a way out of here.
Everything would turn out okay, the same way it absolutely hadn’t every other time in her life.
They reached the edge of the deck, where the railing had been taken down. For a moment, she was back on the yacht withEloise and her other friends. She could almost feel the blunt end of the paddle against her chest. Was someone laughing?
“How are you going to get to the Soul-Eater from here?”
“We will call him to us.” Fairchild’s eyes glowed as he looked towards the horizon. Unease curled in Carol’s stomach. Was it not all an act? Did he really believe the Soul-Eater was some sort of god?
Moss had called them gods, but the way he described them, they were just super-powerful shifters.
Like the kraken.
Fairchild was still talking and yep, shit, he actually sounded like he believed what he was saying. “We will call him, and he will rise again, knowing he is needed.”
“You’ll… call him?” Carol said weakly.
Fairchild nodded, his certainty ironclad.
“And he’ll come. From his prison?”
He bestowed a look of kindly condescension on her. “He is not imprisoned. He waits, thinking we no longer need him. He waits for the call of his true believers.”
Carol’s heart slammed in her chest.
They’ve got it all wrong.
It made sense, the distant, logical part of her brain reasoned. Whatever stories they had of the Soul-Eater’s existence would be ancient. Over the years, details would have been changed, or lost, or mis-translated.
They’d confused the legend of the kraken, waiting to be called, and the Soul-Eater, imprisoned in the ice. An easy mistake to make.
The less distant, less logical part of her brain was thinkingoh fuck oh fuck I’m going to die.
These Soul-Eater worshipping dipshits were going to throw her in the water to drown because they’d mixed up their god with his enemy.
She was going to die by drowning. Not in open air, like she’d been afraid of since she’d been tasered. In the water. The traditional way.
She was a freakingshark shifterand she was going todrownin theocean.
“Can we talk about this? I think. Um. I think your research may have led you in the wrong direction?”
Mr. Fairchild smiled beatifically. “This moment has been years in the making, Miss Zhang. Ever since I found out what my dear Eloise had been doing. What she’d turned people like you into.”
He touched her face fondly, and she shivered.
“You know, for a short time after I found out what she’d been doing, I wondered if my daughter might have been the Bestower reborn? Silly, really. Dear Eloise wasn’t gifting powers to anyone. She was simply using proven methods to bring out what was already there. Sometimes the presence of other shifters is enough to spark one’s latent inner animal. Sometimes it takes a little… push. And sometimes it goes wrong.”
“She almost drowned me!”
Fairchild tsked. “And I told you. You’re here to undo her mistake.”
“I’m not a mistake! And she should be locked up!”
