Charlotte glanced out the narrow porthole, little more than an air vent. The ship had activated a cloaking device the moment they raised anchor. A dense cloud of magic-infused fog slid over the vessel, wrapping it like a blanket. The myriad tiny droplets of water that created the mist acted as countless minuscule mirrors, busily reflecting the ship’s surroundings. An outside observer wouldn’t see the ship. He might perhaps notice a smudge against the perfect line of water and sky. In bright daylight, this distortion would be quite obvious, but at night, with the mist rising from the water, the Intrepid Drayton was practically invisible. Unfortunately, from the inside, the reflective fog was opaque and all she saw now was a dense curtain of mist.
They must’ve been sailing for at least an hour or two. Time stretched here, inside the hold.
“I want out of this damn ship. How are we gonna get out of here?” a blond woman next to her murmured to Miko. “We can’t kill the sailors until we get to port, and if we kill them when we get there, there will be a commotion.”
The slender girl nodded at Charlotte. “She’s our key.”
The blond woman stared at her. “You don’t look like much.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” Charlotte told her.
“They better be.” The blond woman bared her teeth. “Because if they lead me out of this bucket in chains and into the slave pens, you’ll be the first I come after. You’ve got a skinny throat. Easy to cut.”
Charlotte’s magic stirred in response to the menace in the woman’s voice, bubbling to the surface. She kept it in check and stared back at the blond woman with disdain.
The woman yanked a knife from inside her rags.
Miko stepped in her way and hissed. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Did you see the way she looked at me? Like I’m gutter trash, and she’s the Marchesa of Louisiana. I’ll cut her throat!”
Miko moved and suddenly there were two slender blades in her hands. “You are gutter trash, Lynda. Jason has a plan. You fuck with his plan, you fuck with me.”
“You got a big mouth for such a dumb bitch. About time someone shut it for you.”
Lynda lunged forward. Miko spun, thrusting, and the woman crumpled to the boards, gurgling on her blood.
Miko turned, one arm held high, the other low, blood dripping from her knives, and surveyed the hold. “Anybody else want to fuck with the plan?”
Nobody volunteered.
Lynda writhed on the floor, hot, dark blood spreading around her on the wood. Charlotte let her magic lick at her. External jugular vein cut, internal jugular vein partially nicked, rapid blood loss, estimated time of death: two to three minutes. A familiar sense of obligation tugged at Charlotte, but this time it wasn’t backed by kindness, only habit.
“Do you want me to heal her?” Charlotte asked.
“No. One less psycho.”
“Then finish it. She’s suffering.”
Miko dropped down on one knee. The knife rose, plunged down, and Lynda stopped struggling.
The door swung open, revealing Richard. About time.
He motioned to her. Charlotte approached.
“We’re about to make landfall,” he whispered. “There are nineteen sailors on this boat.”
“What about the captain?” she asked, glancing at the boys.
Two pairs of eyes stared back at her, one of them glowing amber.
“He’s ours,” Jack said, his voice a ragged, inhuman growl. People backed away from him.
“Wait until I call you,” Richard said, and looked to her. “Sailors only.”
She raised her chin. “Very well. Let’s get this over with.”
Richard turned and climbed the ladder up to the deck. She followed. The ship sliced through the blue-green waters and the salty breeze, barely skimming the surface of the ocean, its grandiose sails spread wide. The dense barrier of magic fog surrounded it on all sides except for the prow, where the curtain parted. Orange and blue lights winked through the gap—their destination.
Sailors moved along the deck. Some sat, some talked quietly. Richard pulled her against the cabin and braced her with his big body, hiding her from the rest of the crew. She rested her hands on his leather-encased body, feeling the comforting strength of his muscular shoulders. It felt so intimate standing like this. It was almost an embrace. She knew she was reading too much into it, but she needed an embrace so badly.
Something brushed against her. She glanced down. The wolfripper hound leaned against her legs.
“How fast do you need them to die?” she whispered. She was so angry, and they were scum who ferried slaves and fed children to sharks. She would extinguish their lives.
“At the speed we’re going, we’ll dock in fifteen minutes. They’re about to light the colors,” he said. “The port is likely armed with cannons. They will send a challenge signal. We must send the proper reply, or they’ll consider us hostile. Once the reply is accepted, they’re yours. Kill them as quickly and quietly as you can.”
“Challenge!” someone called out.
Richard leaned over to glance at the bow of the ship. She did, too.
A pale green flare shot upward from the port. Charlotte held her breath, waiting.
“If it’s green again, they grant us safe passage,” Richard whispered in her ear, his breath a hot cloud.
“Light the colors,” a deep voice bellowed from the deck above them. “One two, two two, one three!”
Magic dashed up the masts. Arcane symbols ignited on the surface of the sails, one each in those on the middle mast and the third in the sails of the center mast on the left side.
A second green flare blossomed in the night sky.
The deep voice barked a string of nautical nonsense. The crew sped about the ship, spinning wheels, adjusting metal levers in the control consoles by the masts. The sails shrunk. The segmented masts began to straighten slowly.
“Now,” Richard said.
The monstrous magic in her chest stirred, waking. She listened to it, sorting through the plagues she carried within, until she found one that felt right.
A sailor brushed by them. “Hey, Crow, who have you got there?”
Charlotte reached out above Richard’s shoulder and gently caressed the man’s weathered face. Her magic rose from her in narrow dark streams, like the tentacles of an octopus, and bit into him. He barely noticed. His skin fractured under her fingertips, sloughing off in tiny white scales of epithelium glistening with magic, and the breeze carried them on, down to the rest of the crew. The man stared at her, seemingly mesmerized but really just dying very quickly. The skin of his face turned to powder, as if he’d dipped his head into a bucket of silvery flour.
Her magic wrapped around him, draining his reserves, and withdrew. The wind stirred the powder that used to be the top layers of his skin, blowing it off. The tiny particles caught on his eyelashes. He sighed and crumpled down softly.
Richard turned, still shielding her, to look over his shoulder. The sailors began to fall one by one, silent, soft, each releasing a cloud of scaly powder as they sank unmoving to the deck.
They were bad people who deserved their deaths, yet she felt a crushing sadness at their passing all the same. She buried it away, deep inside, wrapping it in the layers of her anger and resolve. There would be time for self-pity later.
Richard had the strangest expression on his face. Not quite shock, not quite panic, but an odd mix of awe and astonishment, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.
At the far end of the ship, Jason Parris turned, his eyes wide, as the sailors around him folded like deflated balloons. The dog raised his muzzle to the moon and howled, his lonely cry floating above the waves like a mourning wail.
Above them something thumped quietly. A man tumbled from the upper deck, his face ashen with powder. Richard lunged at him, trying to catch the body to keep it from making a loud thud. But a gust of wind beat him to it—four feet from the deck the body broke into a cloud of particles. They slid harmlessly from Richard’s skin and melted into the breeze.
He turned to her. “What is it?”
“White leprosy,” she said. It was a terrible disease. She had fought it before, she knew all its little habits and quirks, and she had twisted them with her magic just enough to turn it into her silent assassin. He would think twice about letting her touch him now. Something inside her contracted at that thought.
“Jack,” Richard said, his voice low. “Tell them the ship is ours.”
“He can’t hear you,” she told him.
“Jack has good ears,” Richard reminded her.
Sure enough, Jason’s crew poured out of the cargo hold and spread across the deck, people taking up positions where the sailors once stood. People kicked the fallen bodies overboard. The corpses broke in the wind.
Someone gasped. She saw panic in some faces.
“Tell Silver Death thank you for the pretty ship,” Jason said to them. “And stop gaping. We still need to bring this baby to port.”
There was no escape. Death was now a part of her name.
George and Jack emerged from the crowd.
“I need you to guard your father,” Richard said. “There are things he knows that we need. If you can’t help yourself, tell me now.”
“I’ll do it,” George said. “Jack will need a few moments to vent.”
“I’m counting on you, George. This is your only second chance. If I come back and he’s dead, you and I are done. Do not harm your father.”
The boy reached behind his neck and pulled a long, slender blade from inside his clothes. “Understood. I’ll keep him in perfect health.”
Richard rapped his hands on the door of the cabin.
“What is it?” Drayton called.
“There’s a problem,” Richard replied in his normal voice.
The door swung open, revealing Drayton with a rifle in his hands. He saw Jason’s people and jerked the gun up.
Magic pulsed from George, dark and potent. A woman charged out of the crowd and grabbed the gun. Charlotte saw her face and nearly gagged. Lynda, her slit throat a red ribbon across her neck, her face still splattered with the spray of her own blood.
