It had found what it was seeking, and now—
No!Moss shouted, but the kraken ignored him. It reached up into the boiling sky. Lightning flashed, outlining the solid black of its tentacles. They stretched up and up as the plane veered through dense clouds, its lights flickering like a panicked heartbeat.
Frustration crashed against Moss’s mind, whiting out his thoughts.
It can’t reach.Relief thudded through him. The plane was too high for the kraken to reach.Leave it, he urged it.We need to go further south. To the trench. We need to be ready, if the dragons call on us.
The kraken had to know that already, right? Moss didn’t know how the magic worked, but the kraken had existed for generations. Its hosts changed, but the soul-beast remained. It had to know what it was here for.
We have to go,he repeated, and the kraken’s refusal was a whip across his mind.
It wasn’t just frustrated. It was desperate, reaching for the plane until half its body heaved above the waves. It crashed down again. Water closed over its head, and for a moment Moss thought that might be all.
Then it reached up again—slower, deliberate. Like when his octopus was determined to figure out how to pull apart something new and expensive.
Moss’s blood chilled. The kraken reached as far as it could and it still wasn’t enough, but there was an iron determination in its mind. And then a shudder rippled through it.
New tentacles burst from its body. Not fleshy, muscular limbs, but tendrils of pure shadow. They whipped up like ribbons ofpure night, farther than the kraken’s physical tentacles could reach.
Up towards the plane.
Moss wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but they were the kraken’s eyes, and the kraken fixed them on its prey.
What could be in that plane that it wanted so much?
2
Carol
We’re safer inside the plane than outside it,Carol told herself and her inner shark for the thousandth time.
It did not help.
The seatbelt lights were on. And every time the plane lurched or bucked as the storm tossed it around, she had to fight off the urge to leap up and throw herself out the emergency exit.
Tens of thousands of feet above the sea,she reminded it.Hitting the water from this height would be like hitting concrete.
Her shark stayed silent.
Shark go splat,she told it.
Still nothing.
She tensed her jaw. Her shark not talking wasn’t new. It had never communicated with her. Not like other shifters’ inner animals did. Her family, her colleagues—they talked about how their animals communicated with them through thoughts or feelings, or used their enhanced senses to draw their humans’ attention to things. That had been why she wanted to studycommunication science at college, back before college became another of the things she couldn’t do.
Hers just… swam. Silently. It probably wasn’t even her shark making her want to jump out of the airplane.Just another screwed-up Carol thing. One more to add to the list.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe slowly. There were worse things in the world than turbulence. She knew that. Some people would say she was one of those things, and on her bad days, she would agree with them. When she had her head on straight, she could tell herself that just because she looked like a monster, didn’t mean she was one, but that was cold comfort when one glimpse of her teeth made people walk into traffic.
But a real monster wouldn’t be so scared of being trapped that she wanted to tear open the airplane emergency exit and fling herself into the night, tens of thousands of feet above the sea. Right? Yeah.
Real monsters were frightening. Not frightened.
Her fingers tightened around the catch of her seatbelt, and she glanced quickly around the cabin. Nobody else had noticed she was white-knuckled with totally un-shifter-ly terror. Good.
This plane was like nothing she’d ever been on—not that she’d flown anywhere since her face changed. Airport security got antsy when you said you couldn’t take out what they thought were Halloween contact lenses, and what sort of a weirdo filed down their teeth to points, anyway?
The few times she’d been on a plane as a kid, she’d flown economy. Not byprivate jet.She and the rest of her team weren’t crammed in like sardines; their seats were more luxurious than the furniture in her own apartment. She had adrinks cabinetnext to her. And a footrest. There was so much leg room she had afootrest.
