The lion shifter was standing in front of his mate, little Chloe, who was batting his arm away as she scootched around him. “You weremelting,” she said as the two men opened their mouths, presumably to stop her telling him he almost melted.
Hell, his head hurt.
“Melting?”
“You went all oozy.” Chloe flipped out her tablet. “The video’s not great, but—”
“Don’t!”Mathis and Lance bellowed in unison.
She let out an unimpressed huff. “Well. Heaskedwhat was going on.” Her eyes met Moss’s, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled at the concern hiding behind her impudent expression. “We didn’t think you’d make it through the attack. By the end, you were the only one the attackers were focusing on, and—they shot you. A lot.”
He looked down at himself. Bandages, check. Pain, check. “I guess it didn’t take.”
“It almost did.” Pania wrung her hands. “You’ve been healing. Slowly. I don’t know if the kraken was hurt too, or—if the krakencanbe hurt—but you…”
“You’ve been phasing in and out of your kraken form since you fell unconscious.Partof your kraken, anyway. I get the feeling the whole thing wouldn’t have fit in here.” Chloe flicked a glance at Lance, as though she was checking something with him.
They were hiding something. All of them. And he was too bound up in pain and nausea to figure it out.
He searched inside himself. The kraken was there. The silver bond that would always lead to his mate, no matter how much he feared it, no matter how far away she—
She wasn’t here.
His senses flooded out, telling him what his eyes had already seen but his mind had somehow missed. Everyone else was crowded into the room. But not her.
“Carol—” he began.
“She’s gone,” Ataahua said, before he could say anything else and before anyone could stop her.
At the bottom of the bed, Maggie hissed angrily.
“But I felt—” What had he felt? Her presence. Her name on his lips as he woke. Why had he thought she was close?
The silver bond wrapped around his heart kept them connected, but it shouldn’t trick him into thinking she was close when she was far away.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“They took her—”
*Moss!*
Carol’s voice and heart crashed through the mate bond, a surging tide of hope and fear that froze the blood in his veins.
*Kraken! Come to me! I need you!*
44
Carol
He wasn’t coming.
Not the Soul-Eater. And not Moss, either.
She was on her own.
The new confidence she’d found began to shrivel. Maybe that was a good thing. If she became small and scared and helpless again, maybe that gut-churning fear power would come back, and she could blast Fairchild off the deck—
The fact that she was imagining exactly what his face would look like as he fell probably meant she was still too sure in herself for it to work. And how freaking typical of her life was it that finding her own strength meant losing the one magical power that could have made a difference?
