Priorities, kid.
He clambered over the guardrail. Behind him, a woman shouted. He closed his eyes and smiled bitterly.
You got a lot of weird shit in this city. Some dickhead running full tilt into the river wouldn’t even make the top ten of any random passerby’s what-the-fuck list.
But you got good people, too. The dickhead jumping into the water might not be the weirdest thing you saw all week, but that wouldn’t stop you telling him to cut that shit out.
Sorry,he said silently to whatever good Samaritan was trying to stop him jumping overboard.Gotta go. I promise you don’t want to see the alternative.
“Hey!” the woman yelled again. “It’s going to be all right. Right? Whatever’s going on—”
He half-turned and saw a Black woman, late twenties or early thirties, whose day had probably been going just fine before she saw a crazy man running for the river. Nice coat, sensible shoes, hair hidden under a wrap that Ataahua would have given her left eye to tie so perfectly. If he’d seen her walk into his restaurant, he would have pegged her as—
His heart sank. He wasn’t going to see anyone walk into the restaurant ever again. And this woman? Whatever she’d come out for tonight, celebrating the end of the work week with good food and drink and friends or just a quiet evening to herself—she wasn’t going to get that, either. He was going to ruin her day.
She was down the stairs now, one hand out like she was approaching a wild animal. If only she knew how accurate that was.
“It’s okay,” she said again, and she must do this for a living, because he almost forgot how not okay it was and let himself be reassured. “I can help you.”
Something about her itched at his mind. Was she another shifter? Was that what she meant? That she was sensing his inner creature’s turmoil?
Well. More fucking reason to go, then.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping backwards. His heels hovered over the edge. “This is for the best. Believe me.”
“No, you don’t understand, I can—”
A huge, alien awareness opened its eyes in Moss’s mind.
It stared out at the woman through his eyes. Moss tried to throw himself off the edge, but his body was frozen. He felt the monster inspect the woman who was trying to save him. What the hell was it searching for?
Whatever it was looking for, it didn’t find it, and Moss’s neck muscles creaked as it turned his head up to the city behind her.
Hundreds of thousands of lives. A world that thought things like the creature inside him were stories. Even shifters didn’t believe in monsters. Not ones like this.
He wouldn’t be the one to teach them how wrong they were.
“It’s all right,” he forced out, echoing the woman’s own words.
With one final surge of effort, he leapt into the water.
The ocean had always welcomed Moss. Freshwater was fine, too, but it was the ocean that really called to him. Its shallows and depths, currents and waves; the surface, silver-bright and rippling or whipped into foam, and all the layers of shadows beneath. He opened his mouth, which might have been the stupidest thing he’d done so far, and behind the polluted sourness of the river water he tasted the sea.
And the saltwater sang to him.
He hung in the water, still with shock. The song was faint. He’d never heard anything like it before, but it was somehow instantly familiar. As though the ocean itself had a voice. It sang of all the things he loved about it and showed him more things he couldso easily learn to love—hidden grottos, chasms and underwater volcanoes, a world of crushing pressure and glorious beauty.
And somewhere, far beyond all that beauty, his future.
Unless he fucked the rest of this up as badly as he had the start of it.
He shivered, and the shiver was all the monster inside him needed to escape. Huge black tentacles billowed from his chest, dark and searching. His body twisted, its own shape dissolving to make way for the creature.
It was too late. He’d been too slow, and now the monster his family had guarded for hundreds of years would kill everyone it saw.
Monster.
Ship-killer.
