*Moss!*
His hands closed around her shoulders. “I promised I’d keep you safe.”
“Keep her safe, too!”
She looked over her shoulder, terrified of what she would see. The woman was so like her. Trapped between two forms. She wanted to understand her.
Thick nightmare-tendrils held the bird-woman bound in mid-air. They wrapped around her razor wings, unharmed. She stared past Carol at Moss, her brown eyes despairing.
Her thoughts buzzed brokenly in the air. Carol swallowed and opened her mind.
Violence and anguish, everything she had been given to fight with, take it away, please, please, take it away—
Blood filled her mind. Songs ripped from mournful throats. Feathers shining like knives, torn from scarred brown skin.
Take it away, take it away—
“She thinks you’re the Soul-Eater,” she gasped.
“What?” Moss’s voice was sharp with horror.
There was a soft hiss, and Lance stepped away from behind the bird-woman, a needle in his hand. She sagged, her eyelids fluttering and then closing as the sedative took effect.
*Put her down gently,*he said. *That should keep her out for a while.*
Moss’s fingers tightened reflexively on Carol’s shoulders. “Long enough to sort out this mess?”
Lance eyed him grimly. “What do you think?”
25
Moss
“Who is the Soul-Eater?”
Lance stood at the head of the table, arms folded. He’d called a meeting the moment the bird-woman was secure—or as secure as they could make her, given that as soon as she woke up, nothing could stop her escaping.
Except the kraken.
Sourness roiled in his gut. He’d seen the bird-woman coming towards Carol and acted on instinct.
And Carol had begged him not to hurt her.
No matter what she thought she knew about the kraken, this was the truth of it. It was violence, and death, and she had topleadwith it not to straight-up fucking kill people at a moment’s notice.
It was all over. She knew who he was.Whathe was. And what he was capable of.
And now she was looking at him from across the table with a question in her eyes, tired but trusting.
He felt sick.
Ataahua and Pania were sitting either side of him. He’d never expected to see either of them again. They’d never expected to see him, either. They’d hugged, kissed, and then remembered who he was. What he was.
It was really bloody awkward. They were glad he was back, amazed he was still himself—but he was the kraken, too. All the familial love in the world couldn’t make that not weird.
But they were his cousins. They were here, and they were on his side. And when Moss didn’t speak, his tongue twisted up by the reality of what he was and what the future held for them all, Pania filled in for him.
“The Soul-Eater is an enemy to all shifters. A being with the ability to take a shifter’s animal away from them and add it to his own power.”
