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 herselfandthe 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.
7
Carol
Carol slept fitfully, cold and damp and torn between a thousand different anxieties. The nearness of the ocean—the sound of it, the taste and scent and shiver of it drying on her skin—must have filtered into her dreams, because she found herself underwater.
She swam through waters that should have been pitch black, even to her shark. An unearthly glow, a sort of deepwater moonlight, outlined dark sheets of rock. They lay tumbled against one another like a giant’s playing cards. Carol slipped through the gaps. Ahead, the light brightened. No—brightwas the wrong word for it. Too sun-like. It became… more. Softer, gentler, wrapping around rocks and ghostly weeds like—
Like him.Even in her dream, Carol’s skin prickled. The moonlight glow wasn’t possessive, like the strange aura that surrounded Moss, but it responded to her dream-self’s presence. It deepened when she was near and faded behind her. And somewhere ahead…
Something she couldn’t see, couldn’t sense, but every part of her knew it was where she was meant to be.
She pushed onwards. But the faster she swam, the longer the vast plane of rock between her and whatever was ahead of her became. The slab of rock above her pressed down until there was barely enough room to squeeze through. If only she could get to the light ahead and whatever it was waiting to illuminate for her—
But maybe she wasn’t meant to? Maybe it wasn’t waiting for her but for somebody else.
I’ll go anyway.She pressed on until there was no space for her shark body. She transformed. Her human form slipped through the gap, hands grabbing rocky outcrops, eyes straining towards whatever lay beyond the light.
There was something there.Someone.Couldn’t he tell that she was searching for him? Why didn’t he reach back to her?
This place was magical, and he was the most enticing man she’d ever laid eyes on, and she was…
She ran her tongue over her teeth and tasted blood.
She wasn’t the sort of person people reached back to, even in her dreams.
