Francine
Darkness swept in all around her. The screech from behind her came again, but the sound didn’t register.
He’d left her here.
After everything they’d been through, he was trying tosaveher.
“Youbastard,” she growled, thudding one fist on the rock.
Voices rose somewhere behind her, itching against her mind.
*This isn’t where Harper’s maps said the entrance is.*
*I don’t know what to tell you, mate. She won’t let me go any other direction.*
*We don’t have time for tourist stops—*
An image blazed into Francine’s mind, so intense it winded her, and so fleeting she was only left with an impression of power and excitement and … home?
*Who’s there?*
Francine turned and stared into the face of a nightmare.
A hulking creature roiled above her, stretching from the ice broken beneath its slithering bulk to the sky, blotting out the sun. The creature in the prison was a chimera of broken pieces, but this monster was whole: an octopus or squid so huge it should have been crushed beneath its own weight, dragging itself forwards with monstrous tentacles the color of blackened iron. More tentacles sprouted from its body, like the night sky given ghostly flesh.
Two massive eyes stared down, gleaming purple and green and blue, like the aurora poured into two shining disks.
And directly in front of her, held carefully in one of the monster’s tentacles, tense as an outraged cat and staring at her with mixed shock and suspicion, was Lance MacInnis.
“You can put me down,” he called, and the monster set him on his feet, its tentacle immediately coiling backwards to join the writhing mass. But Lance wasn’t the only one. Francine stood frozen in place as the nightmare creature placed its other passengers on the icy ground. They were all so well wrapped up against the cold, she couldn’t see much of their features.
Then her lioness chirped a greeting that punched the air from her lungs.
“Mathis?” she stammered.
“Frankie. What are you doing here?”
Her brother stamped towards her through the icy snow. He was here. The brother she’d almost destroyed herself trying to save, the brother who’d saved himself, who’d been beaten and broken but had escaped Harper’s clutches while she turned into a monster.
She hadn’t talked to him since he’d come home. And now he was here.
Her face twisted, her mouth already forming words that came easier than breathing. A snide rejoinder, something snarling and haughty and—
Afraid.
She swallowed. “Julian’s in there,” she said. To Lance, because she’d thought facing up to him would be hard, but she hadn’t dared to even think about what it would be like to see her brother again. “He locked me out because he’s planning to kill himself and take everyone attacking the fortress with him.”
“And the Soul-Eater?”
“You know about that?”
Her gaze rose to the monster looming behind them. “Of course you do,” she said, her pulse thudding in her ears. “That’s the kraken.”
*Geez, is it that obvious?*The kraken’s voice was too friendly to come from a monster so immense.
Francine’s throat was tight. But if she thought about that too much, she might cry, so she forced herself not to. “I’ve heard about you,” she said. “But you don’t look like a mindless beast destroying everything in your path.”
*Yeah, nah, not so much. Was a near thing, though.*
