14. Chapter 14
If I’d had time to react, I may have enjoyed the wonder of the open gateway. I might also have observed it with a little caution, considering what had happened at the barrier. But before I could entertain any such emotions, the portal dragged us in like bugs down a drainpipe.
I held on tight to Bronwyn as we tumbled into an air pocket in a deluge of seawater. Kira, Ben, and Adrian collided together under the force of the waterfall, and we slammed into the ground in a heap of limbs. The water subsided, and I looked up just in time to watch the portal shrink until it became nothing but a porthole in the ship wall once more.
“Ow, get off me! How much do you weigh?” Kira snapped, shoving Adrian off her legs.
“Says a lot about your choice in men,” Adrian said as he rolled away from her. “You’ve never had anyone who wasn’t a string-bean, have you?”
I rolled over onto my stomach as Bronwyn groaned at my side, massaging her forehead. Where were we?
We had landed in a room made entirely of wood but for the glass portholes. Hammocks hung between the pillars, and worn leather boots and clothes littered the floor.
“Are we...?” I didn’t get to finish my sentence as footsteps pounded on the ceiling, and a horde of men stormed down the stairs.
The man at the head of the crowd wore a bandana on his head and an eyepatch across his left eye. His one working eye narrowed, and he grabbed the hilt of a cutlass at his hip and swung it free. His followers surrounded us, and the sound of metal on metal filled the room as they drew their weapons and pointed them in our direction.
Adrian scrambled backward, his back hitting the wood wall, and tried to pull Ben with him. But Ben remained kneeling, resolute, as he met the gaze of the man that held his cutlass just inches from his throat.
I swallowed hard as I sat up and took them all in. Pirates. Every one of them.
“How in Jesus’ name did you get in here?” The Eyepatch pirate rounded on Bronwyn, who stuffed her amulet into her scuba suit and rolled up to her knees.
I tried not to breathe as hard as my body urged me to.
“Magic.” An older pirate pushed his way to the front of the crowd with only a dagger in his hand, his frizzy grey beard almost completely obscuring his mouth. “We got ourselves more witches.”
Angry rabble burst from the mouths of every pirate present, and they shook their cutlasses in our direction.
“We should slay them all where they stand,” a pirate with an assortment of tattoos running up his arms hissed.
“That’s too good for them.” A man with long hair and a thick scar on his neck spat on the floor. “We should flay them alive!”
“Enough, now!” Eyepatch lifted a fist into the air and the rabble died down. “The captain will decide what he wants with them.” A tremor rippled across my bare skin as he looked me up and down with his one good eye. “And something tells me he’ll enjoy himself a nice long chat with this one.”
Eyepatch jerked his chin in my direction, and I swallowed hard.
The captain... was he the same man who had pursued a mermaid-witch hybrid and earned himself a curse on his ship and his crew? Gods, why hadn’t I thought of that before we busted into this place?
“Hey!” I shouted as several pairs of hands seized me and lifted me off the floor. I flicked my tail and the two pirates who had grabbed it jerked backward, knocking two of their shipmates down like bowling pins.
“Let go of her!” Kira cried as she and Ben dove for me.
But a wall of cutlasses drove them backward into a huddle on the floor. Four more pirates seized my tail, wrapping their arms around it so tightly that I could barely move it.
“Maeve!” Ben’s voice followed me as the pirates hauled me up the stairs and down a short corridor.
“Don’t hurt them,” I demanded.
“That’s not a choice for us to make, lass.” Eyepatch kept his eye on the door at the end of the hall.
Several lines indented the solid door, and its handle gleamed with gold, a far cry from the iron ones on all the others we passed.
“Captain!” An overeager younger pirate banged on the door with his fist when we arrived at it. “We’ve got a catch like you wouldn’t believe!”
A catch? Would I have to get used to everyone calling me a fish the same way they called Allison a tree? But if it kept my friends safe, they could call me whatever they wanted.
The slow thudding of boots on floorboards approached, each step booming with a gravitas that made the hairs on my arms stand up despite the slick of seawater still there.
When the door creaked open, a sombre hush fell across the men. A pirate wearing a faded brown coat that draped down to his knees stood in the doorway, his face so creased and weather-beaten that it wouldn’t have surprised me if skin-cancer was on the horizon. His beard was short and trimmed, revealing cracked lips discoloured from years of drinking what I guessed was rum.
Was this the pirate captain?
His gaze found me, and for a moment, the tiresome, defeated look in his eyes gave way to a tinge of sorrow and fury.
“How on God’s green earth did you find a mermaid?” The Captain’s voice grated on its way out.
“She came through the porthole, cap’n!” The eager pirate didn’t tone down his enthusiasm, even in the presence of his superior. “Her and all these others!”
The Captain looked to Eyepatch. “Banbury. Explain.”
“It’s true, cap’n,” Eyepatch said. “Five of them appeared downstairs. Seemed to me you’d want to talk to this one.”
A long silence followed, in which my arm slipped a little in one of the pirate’s grasp, and I lurched sideways, suddenly. The clumsy pirate scrabbled to hold me upright again and cleared his throat. Were these guys even professional pirates? If there even was such a term. Maybe centuries stuck in a ship with nothing to do had turned them into fumbling fools.
A part of me wondered if I should transform back into my human form, break away, and make a run for it. If we could get back out through the portal we had come in, maybe we could return with a better plan. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn myself half naked in front of all these men who were literally renowned for problematic behaviour against women. And that was putting it lightly.
The captain stared at me, and I returned him a hard look. No way would I let him think he could walk all over me. After what felt like an age, the captain threw his door open.
“Bring her in. Leave her on the floor,” he said.
The floor?
Before I could argue, the pirates barrelled into the room and deposited me onto what looked like a wolf-skin rug. I rolled onto my back and sat up, flipping my hair out of my face.
The Captain’s room had an eloquence the rest of the ship lacked. Paintings, trinkets, and a bed so big that someone must have carved it out of an entire redwood tree trunk. Furs draped across every chair and stool, and an iron-wrought candelabra hung from the ceiling, spattered with wax from its many candles.
“Out.” The Captain spoke the word with as much gravitas as his stride, and the pirates scuttled back out the door.
Only Eyepatch hesitated in the doorway, but the Captain shut the door in his face before he rounded on me.
I notched my chin up a little. On the ground, I couldn’t have looked even a little intimidating, but it was the best I could do.
The Captain ignored me and walked straight past me. Confused, I shuffled around to see what he was doing. He sat down on a stool at a desk covered in parchment and with a quill sticking out of an inkwell. He took several gulps from an already open decanter of amber liquid, draining a quarter of the container.
But the second he put it back down, the decanter refilled, the amber liquid rising back to the top as if by... magic.
“Why are you here?” His voice had the edge of gravel crunching on stone. “Has she sent you here to torment me further?”
“She?” I asked.
“Do not play games with me.”
“If you’re talking about the witch that put you here, I don’t know her. My friends and I are here because we’re trying to break our own curse,” I said.
“You have either lost your wits or never had any.” The Captain swigged again from his decanter. “Nobody can enter this place unless Kendra wills it.”
Kendra. So that was the name of the woman he had pursued relentlessly.
I flinched as the Captain’s fingers curled around the hilt of a dagger on the desk and held the blade close to his face, almost as if he was admiring his reflection in it.
“Which means I have no choice but to kill you and those you brought here,” he said.
Okay, enough was enough. I twitched my tail, trying to pull it back into legs, but my tail just flopped on the ground. What crazy magic was this? I tried again, but all I achieved was looking like a beached whale trying to get back into the water.
“Uncomfortable, isn’t it?” The Captain got to his feet and sidled toward me, and I scooted away from him. But for every shuffle I achieved, one of his strides doubled the distance. “Forced to remain in one state, unable to change. No hunger, no thirst, no will to live.”
My breath caught in my throat. Of course. The spell preserved the pirates at one time and one place. They couldn’t age in this place, and perhaps the same applied to everything else on the ship, even the magically replenishing alcoholic beverages. If they couldn’t change... then neither could I.
He squatted down next to me as my back hit the foot of his bed.
“Tell me why she sent you.” The Captain pressed the blade to my throat, and every pulse in my body thrummed with urgency. “And I’ll make it quick.”