Page 86 of Hummingbird and Kraken

In the heavy blackness, Declan made out the slither of small cephalopod arms and something shiny and pointed below. A shaft of moonlight glimmered on one wide, dark eye.

His kraken had come for him.

Declan watched as Geir slowly stepped backward, fading into the woods. He heard quiet rustles and snaps all around him. He trusted Geir, but he sure hoped he had a plan. And he really, really wished he could see.

“We can do that.” Declan recognized the voice as Tier’s. “We don’t want anyone hurt. Where are you going to leave him?” Did the Chief trust Declan, or was he going to throw him away as a bargaining chip?

No, Geir would never let that happen. More leaves rustled behind him. The man holding him turned to look that direction, but Declan doubted he could see anything. The shifters probably could, though.

Jack answered, his tone cold. “He’ll call you when we drop him off.”

Declan knew with startling clarity that if he got into a car with this man, he wouldn’t ever make that call.

“Alright,” came the Chief’s calm voice. “We’ll just give you a number he can use. Sas and Obed with me. Kayla, get the keys. Everyone else back to the vans.”

It was hard to make out anything in the dark, but it looked like a human and some large predator moved to stand behind the Chief. A cougar? A coyote? He could see only the yellow of its eyes. He heard more movement behind him. God, this better be a fucking stalling technique.

The man holding Declan suddenly leaned to the side. It felt like he was shaking out his foot, the movements jostling Declan with each jerk. Then he twitched, his arms tightening once before they started to quiver. What the hell?

Shadows blended and moved, and that terrifying cold circle that had been pressed to his temple moved. Something thumped hard against his leg.

Another shot rang out, this one so close that it made his ears ring. He heard scuffling in front of him, and the arms holding him released.

He wanted to run, to hide, to curl up in Geir’s arms, but he didn’t know where to go. He was pretty sure he’d been rescued, but he just couldn’t see.

Unable to wait any longer, he shone the light below. The man who’d attacked him lay prone on the ground, Geir pinning him down with two tentacles. Geir’s head had shifted, his eyes enormous with U-shaped pupils and his nose gone. Where his mouth should be was a white tube with a black beak protruding from it surrounded by a smaller form of his kraken arms, lined with tiny suckers.

Declan had heard that squids had beaks, but he hadn’t expected Geir’s to look so much like, well, a beak. There were two shiny black pieces, each one curved and meeting at a point, almost like a parrot’s bill. Geir withdrew them from the man’s leather jacket and snapped them back under the tangle of moving arms.

A dark liquid oozed across the leather on the man’s back, and Declan realized it was blood. Was that from Geir’s bite? It had to be.

Declan moved the light up to take in the man’s face. It was definitely Jack, his hair still perfectly combed over his brow.

One of the shifters stepped in and pulled the gun from Jack’s fingers, which Declan now noticed were twitching. Then they went still.

Declan spun around, shining the light on his other attacker. The man lay on the ground, wheezing and motionless. It wasn’t Marlon, though.

“It’s a neurotoxin,” said one of the shifters. “If it’s like other cephalopod toxins,” she looked at Geir for confirmation, “low doses cause paralysis and can lead to death within hours or days without life support to keep fluid from filling the lungs. High doses,” she gestured toward the body that Geir was still kneeling over, “like from a bite, lead to cardiac arrest.”

“So he’s dead?” Declan confirmed.

“If he isn’t now, he will be in a few minutes. That one,” she gestured toward the still twitching one, “we might decide to keep alive for questioning. Right now, he can probably still hear us, but he can’t move.”

“Whoa.” Declan couldn’t think of anything else to say. Jack had been alive a minute ago. Declan had never seen a dead body before, not even at his grandfather’s funeral. And this guy was just… dead.

He must have had family. Friends. A whole history. And now he didn’t have a future.

He’d also been a giant douche who went around kidnapping people’s children, so there was that.

“You doing alright?” the shifter asked kindly.

Declan took stock. The fighting seemed to be over, and the good guys had won. He was alive and safe. His boyfriend was alive and safe and could kill people with his spit. That was actually kind of awesome.

Not to mention that Geir had a whole other partial-shift thing going on that he hadn’t even told Declan about. He looked like an alien, with those giant eyes and retreating beak of a mouth on his human body.

Declan was definitely going to have to get him to pose like that.

“Yeah,” he smiled. He was still feeling a little shaky, but he wouldn’t have missed this for the world. He dropped to his knees at Geir’s side. “Thanks to my hero…”