“But—a shifter myth, I’ve never…” She stopped. Her lips thinned, and she looked away. “I’ve never heard of any shifter myths before. That’s strange, isn’t it? Even if we live our lives in hiding, all societies come up with some sort of stories about themselves. But there must be stories we’ve forgotten, aboutwhy we’re like this. The Weaver of Souls… I can see why shifters would come up with something like that.”
He stayed silent, and a moment later she rubbed her face and sighed. “It’s just a story,” she said, as though reassuring herself. “No. I’m not some mythic figure from a fairytale.”
I am.
His jaw tightened. Carol looked up at the stars, but all he could do was stare at her. He was the monster from the fairytale, the demon from the old stories. The idea of shifter myths had caught her interest, but how would she react when she learned he was one of them?
And what it meant for their future. That they didn’t have one.
“Carol,” he said, his voice hiding a misery deeper than his own heart could hold, “whatever you’ve been hiding, it doesn’t matter to me. All that matters is we found each other. We’ve been given this time together—”
“Moss—”
Her voice was tight with fear. Moss reacted on instinct. He flung one arm around her, reaching out into the night with all his senses.
All his senses.
The darkness burned away all around him. He breathed in salt air, felt it wrap around his body, inescapable this close to the water—and heard its song. Bright and flighty, the ocean’s chorus a deeper thrum beneath it.
Carol’s voice cut through the magic like a hot knife through butter.
“There’s something wrong with the stars.”
He looked up. Two nights in this place, and the night sky had never been as clear as it was tonight. His vision swam.
“There’s nothing wrong with the stars,” he said as soon as he could speak again. “They’re just the wrong ones. That isn’t the sky above New York, or the northern Atlantic.”
He paused, the enormity of what he was about to say looming ahead of him like the waves that had crashed down on them in the storm.
“Those are southern stars,” he breathed. “The Cross and Pointers… I’m home.”
18
Carol
“Home?” she echoed, and the single word sounded lost in the darkness.
Moss swore. Which helped, actually. A good, solid, normal reaction. “I grew up under these stars. In New Zealand. You don’t get them in the States; it’s a different sky—” He reached up, gesturing, as though he could spin the night sky back to where it belonged. Or themselves to where they belonged under it.
“I don’t understand. How could we be that far south? We hadn’t been in the air long enough to—that’s a s-sig-signif—that’s half the world away. Did we travel that far floating in the storm? We can’t have. It’s impossible. It’s—”
“What was your flight path?”
“New York to—we were going to land in Chile—Lance was grumbling about having to switch planes—but we’d only been in the air a few hours—we shouldn’t have been—” She clamped her mouth shut.Say one thing at a time, she ordered herself. She’d literally told Moss a few minutes ago that she could speak clearly around him. What was he going to think if she started babbling uncontrollably? “We should have gone south over the NorthAtlantic and Caribbean Sea, then overland. South America.” There. All complete words, mostly complete sentences, in the correct order.
She looked at Moss. He was still staring up at the sky, his face ashen. Had he even heard her?
She put a gentle hand on his arm. “Are you—”
“This isn’t right.” He turned to her. “I was off the coast of New York, too. There’s no way the storm could have carried us this far.”
“Could something else?” She looked back over her shoulder to where Maggie was sleeping in the cave. “Maggie can teleport. Herself a-and if someone’s holding her, that person too. We were all so close together, she might have done it.”
“Has she ever teleported that far before?”
Carol blinked. He sounded… urgent. Hopeful. Like he wanted Maggie to be the answer.
As though he had another answer he didn’t want to be true.
