19
Moss
You lied to me,Moss raged to the monster in his soul.
It didn’t reply. Not in words. Its meaning thundered against his mind.
*I never lied.*
We had a deal. She would be safe until she returned to her friends, and you wouldn’t touch her. You would stay hidden.
*She IS safe. I have not done anything to her. And I have stayed hidden.*
We’re thousands of fucking miles from where we thought! Nobody’s going to find her, and we can’t get off this rock with the dragon to find them! You did this. You brought us here, somehow. You tricked me.
The kraken was silent.
She was meant to be SAFE.
*She is safe.*
Stuck on an island in the cold end of the Pacific with nobody but a baby dragon and US?Moss snarled. He struck out for the distant horizon, arms ploughing through the water.That isn’t safety! It isn’t a life! She needs more than that! Anyone would!
The kraken’s thoughts loomed like an iceberg in the night. It showed him an alternative to a life alone on this isolated rock, with her mate and a dragonling for company.
A life utterly alone, beneath the waves.
No. That isn’t an option.
The island—the chance to be together, to avoid that lonely fate—
It’ll drive her mad. She’s already hurting. What will happen when she finds out she’s stuck there because of me? That you saved her to keep her trapped? What will the shadow dragons do when they discover you’ve held their child captive?What will they do to the mate of the kraken who broke its vow?
It would do what it always did. What it was here for.
Moss frowned. Was he imagining the hint of resentment in the kraken’s thoughts?
You’d kill Maggie’s family?
*The sun-bright shimmer of light and mischief? No.*
Then what? What do you want? To doom Carol to the same fate as us? She shouldn’t have anything to do with this. She should never have met us.
Memories so old and big he couldn’t span them with his mind rolled over him. Time so vast it ceased to have any meaning. Minds and souls so much smaller than the kraken—so delicate, beneath their hard shells of determination. All washed away, worn down, as the ocean wears everything down. Until there was only a glint of life left, then a mote, then nothing.
A grief Moss barely understood clawed at his throat.
That can’t be her future. I won’t let it.
He concentrated.
The kraken’s powers were his powers. That was the way it worked. He didn’t know how the fuck it had managed to drag them all to this godforsaken rock, but that didn’t matter. That wasn’t the power he needed right now.
He reached out with the kraken’s senses—hissenses—and reached for the ocean’s song.
It hit him like the full weight of the ocean. All the breath left his lungs. And then the kraken was there, a mental shield against the symphony before it boiled him from the inside out.
It wasn’t about to let him kill himself. There was so much of him still left.
