“You remember me from the plane too, right?”
No response. The woman’s eyes flicked to her mouth, then back to her eyes, but didn’t change expression.
All right, so she might not speak English. Lance would have tried other languages. He had the whole agency at his disposal. Any one of them would have done better than her own half-remembered, tourist-level second languages.
Think.They had to communicate somehow.
Nobody has ever heard of shifters like this before.Part-shifted or fully shifted, birds with razor wings didn’t exist. The same way the kraken didn’t exist. The same way dragons didn’t. All these secret communities of mythic shifters living separate not only from the human world but the shifter world, as well.
The woman didn’t have a human mouth to form words with, and she wasn’t the only one. A society made of shifters who might end up any combination of bird and human… Who must have existed separate from humans…
Maybe they didn’t speak using words at all.
The buzzing in her head intensified.
Maggie instinctually communicated using her emotions and had graduated to pushing images into other people’s heads. What if she tried that?
She didn’t want to remember the fight on the plane. If you could even call it that. But she forced herself to relive it—the suddenness, the confusion, the shine of cut metal and the wind ripping the air from her lungs.
Then she opened her mind to the insistent buzzing.
It was like plunging into cold water. The bird-woman stumbled into her mind like she’d been pushing against a door that suddenly gave way. Carol winced at the sensation of the other shifter floundering in her thoughts.
In the memory of her falling from the plane.
Shock rushed through her, jagged-edged, and her memory doubled. She was falling from the plane, and she was seeing herself fall, disappearing into the storm that froze her wings and dashed ice against her softer skin. She was calling desperately for Maggie and watching the sharp-toothed woman reach for the scrap of tumbling gold. She was terrified and despairing, and the branch was breaking beneath her nest, the serpents waiting with their jaws stretched wide, blood seeping onto the dry earth—
And then, far below, a monster swallowed the sharp-toothed woman whole. She flared her wings, terrified and electrified. Was this her chance?
Carol reeled back, gasping. The room wavered around her as she untangled her thoughts from the bird-woman’s. For a moment, she saw herself crouching outside the cage, tense and disheveled, all the blood draining from her face.
She saw Moss. The kraken.
If that’s what the kraken rescuing her had looked like from the outside…
No wonder Moss was afraid of what the kraken would do to me.
Her legs wobbled as she got to her feet. The woman was still staring at her, wide eyes flicking between her and the two men. She wet her lips.
“What the hell was that?” Lance growled.
“Communication. She-she talks like Maggie does.” Carol took a step, and the room spun. “It was… a lot.”
“Did you find out who they are? Why they attacked us?”
No, I just got a multi-perspective playback of almost dying.Carol shook her head. “Something about—nesting? A threat?” Moss was next to her, his arm around her waist. She leaned into him. “She saw you catch me in the storm.”
The image leapt to her mind again—huge black tentacles stretching up from the storm-whipped waves. It melted into a memory of the kraken hauling Moss back to shore, back toher, then the wonder of diving into its mind. The way it had been so delicate with her.
Metal screamed against metal.
*Get back!*Lance’s shout jolted her back into her body. Metal clanged to the ground. The bird-woman was standing, her wings cutting through the concrete around her like butter.
She looked desperate, pleading and terrified and hopeless, and that was a dangerous combination with her wings.
Black tendrils exploded from Moss’s chest. Carol pushed him towards the door—she didn’t want him to get hurt, she didn’t want him to hurt anyone, why didanyonehave to get hurt—but she couldn’t move him. She flung her mind against his. *Wait! Wait, I can still talk to her, we can understand each other!*
The mind that responded wasn’t Moss. It was the kraken. Dark and dangerous and absolutely without mercy.
