Something huge and fast surged out of the darkness and tackled her awake.
She gasped, her eyes shooting open, sprawled on the sand. The sand? The beach. Waiting for Moss. Waiting with Maggie. Shit. The whole reason she’d stayed here was to look after Maggie, and she hadn’t even gone back to the cave to watch over her. Anything could have happened. If the metal bird shifters came back—
“Chr-eeek! Chr-eek!”
She was so relieved to see the little dragon that it took her a moment to register the strange tone of her chirrups. Alarm? Interest? Both? Maggie’s spines were sticking straight up, her tail flicking like a whip. Her golden eyes were fixed on something out at sea.
Carol followed her gaze.
It was mid-morning. The sun was low enough to make her squint, transforming the sea into a glittering silver mass. But there was something dark beneath the eye-watering brightness. Something that was getting closer.
She got to her feet, slowly, mouth open as though she could taste the air in human form the way she tasted blood on the water in shark form. As though she were still in her dream.
Her dream…
“Pree-ee!” Maggie stood up on her hind legs, delight exploding from her mind like a sunray crown. “Eee!”
“Eee?” Carol echoed faintly, and then—
Familiarity washed over her. She didn’t know if it was a scent, a sound, the brush of his mind, but she knew at once.
It was Moss.
And not only him.
She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even think. Just ran down into the water, sprinting until the water dragged at her thighs, pushing through the waves until the shadow beneath the water resolved into something solid.
She almost saw it. An impression of unbelievable size, of tentacles that stretched far beyond the shallows of their little beach.
But as she approached it, water slapping her face, feet leaving the sand with each wave, it collapsed in on itself. Shadows unraveled. The darkness fell away.
Leaving Moss.
He fell into her arms. Heavy. Too heavy. She shouted his name, but his eyes were closed. His face slack.
The next wave almost pushed them both under.
She should have been terrified. Instead, she was furious.
“Don’t just leave him like this!” she yelled at the creature that had abandoned its human host. Water filled her mouth, and she spat. *I need you here still! Help us!*
And all at once, she was surrounded by the same black tentacles that had plucked her from the storm. They bent around her like a cage, holding her and Moss close, while others clawed for the beach and pulled them to dry land.
Again.
Her heart was thudding in her ears,thu-thud, thu-thud,and that was what it was saying. Again. Again. This creature was saving her, was saving both of them, again.
She staggered to her knees on the dry sand, Moss in her arms. He was too heavy, the sort of weight she had to stop herself fromcallingdead weight.He couldn’t be dead. He wasn’t. His inner animal was alive, and that meant he was, too.
Because there was no doubting it now. Moss had been lying about being an octopus shifter. This was what he’d been hiding: the tentacles that sprang from his back like coils of pure night, translucent in the blinding morning light and yet somehow solid.
What would his shifted form look like, if this was it still hiding behind his human form?
The moment she thought that, the tentacles began to retreat. “Stop,” she burst out.
They hesitated.
“Thank you,” she said. “For bringing him back to me.”
