25. Chapter 25
Ihad never felt pain like it: an all-encompassing agony that radiated to every corner of my body, as if every cell understood the severity. Crackles of lightning pain shot out from the epicentre of the wound, building to an excruciating tearing sensation as the Captain pulled the blade out of my body.
All the sound disappeared into a vacuum, except for a vaguely audible high-pitched ringing. My abdominal muscles spasmed, spurting more blood down my front, and my stomach rolled so violently that I retched. My knees buckled, but I barely fell an inch before Ben seized me and wrapped me up in his arms.
His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he said, terror and tears in his eyes. I inhaled a ragged breath just as the pain vanished. The sound returned like watercolours on a canvas, spreading in watery waves until it restored completely. Only then did I scrape the courage to look down at my wound, but underneath the sheen of blood lay nothing but smooth, unadulterated skin.
“Your dramatics are amusing.” The Captain wiped his blade clean on his trousers, but the blood soon vanished from the fabric, too. “You took my men through a portal. Why?”
“If that’s all you wanted to know, why didn’t you just ask?” Kira shrieked, gesturing wildly at him. But Adrian grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back, fixing her in his grip. “Why did you do that?”
“I’ll not have my orders disobeyed on this ship,” the Captain said, sheathing his blade. “Consider that your warning.”
I reached with trembling fingers to where the bloodied tear in my polo shirt had been just a moment before, and lifted it up to find that everything, blood and all, had disappeared. Then I recalled what Eyepatch had said before he had tried to hurt Kira.
“Do you know how many times we’ve all killed each other on board that ship? How many throats I’ve slit and guts I’ve stabbed just to end our hell? Just for us all to return to health as if nothing ever happened?”
Did the curse include an automatic magical reset button? If anyone got hurt or died on the ship, did they return to normal because of the magic? Of course, I thought. If the Captain had wanted to end his torment by ending his own life, would he have truly been able to suffer? Which, by the sounds of the story, was the entire point of the curse.
I searched the slowly unravelling pile of pirates to find the one I had bludgeoned with a tree branch. He rubbed his head with a shaky hand as he sat up, but his nose was as straight and unbloodied as when I found him in the park. All injuries just healed here, indiscriminately.
“It’s okay,” I said, breathlessly. “I’m okay.”
“It is not okay.” Ben helped me up and dusted me off. “To think, I just told your mum I’d take care of you.”
Boy, was I glad she hadn’t seen that. I might have been born three days early. But since I had recovered thanks to the ship’s magic, I had to put something right with this captain and his stupid crew.
“Your subordinates ended up with us because they pushed us through that portal during their punch-up,” I said. “We didn’t take them. And when we got there, they were all too happy to jump ship and stay there with or without you.”
Eyepatch had struggled to orient himself, waving his hand in front of his face as if trying to bat away some irritating hallucination. But the moment he registered what I said, he sat bolt upright and glared at me.
The Captain whipped his sabre back out and pressed it to Eyepatch’s cheek, right underneath his good eye. “How much truth is in this?”
“None, cap’n. We were trying to return to the ship the same as they were,” Eyepatch said. “Right, lads?”
The others nodded as they clambered to their feet.
“Right,” Kira said, beating her wings so fiercely that a burst of fairy dust flew into Adrian’s face and he sneezed. “That’s why we had to knock you all out with a siren song to get you through the portal.”
I noted the smug smirk in the corner of her mouth and enjoyed a swell of pride. She had every right to get her own back on him.
The Captain sheathed his sword again, and my face fell. Of course he’d trust his crew over us. Kira would have to get her revenge another time.
But the Captain pointed a heavily ringed finger at Eyepatch. “Throw them in the brig and make damn sure they bleed.”
“Aye, cap’n!” The rest of the crew’s jubilant response gave me no doubt that they took some pleasure in the command.
While Eyepatch and the rest of his renegade pirates protested, the crew dragged them away, hurling punches and kicks as they went. Kira lifted her middle finger the second Eyepatch looked her way, and he gritted his teeth, wheezing as a fist hit him in the gut. Good riddance.
“Do you have my potion?” the Captain asked.
I held my hand out to Adrian, who looked quizzical for a moment until he remembered. He took it out of his pocket and threw it to me. My heart leapt as the Captain reached a hand to snatch the vial out of the air, and I lunged forward to grab it first. We had so little leverage on this ship, and the potion represented a sizeable piece of it. But my hand grabbed at nothing, the vial gone.
The Captain withdrew his hand, but it was also empty. Ben held up the vial, staring the Captain down with venom in his eyes.
“Yes, we have it,” he said. “Now what?”
“Now you give it to me and you,” he gestured at me, “will come to my quarters for a chat.”
That didn’t sound good.
“That doesn’t work for me,” Ben said. “I don’t think I trust you around Maeve after what you just did.”
The Captain squared his shoulders, but his posture remained relaxed. I eyed the sabre at his hip. Even if we couldn’t die here, I wouldn’t have recommended that stabbing to anyone. Nothing would let me stand by and watch Ben receive the same treatment.
“Then, by all means, accompany us,” he said in tones smoother than silk.
Yet, the sound still had my skin prickling.
“Will you be okay?” I asked Kira.
After all she had been through, I didn’t want to leave her alone unless absolutely necessary.
“Yeah. Do your thing,” she said.
The Captain swept an arm down the hallway as if introducing us at a ball, and I took the invitation to walk ahead of him. Ben kept close, wrapping an arm around my waist.
“I don’t know how smart that was,” I whispered.
“Doesn’t matter now. Besides, I’m not leaving you alone with him.”
Warmth blossomed through my veins. It never ceased to amaze me how much comfort he could bring me in fraught situations. Even when pirates held us hostage. The boy had a gift.
I didn’t wait at the Captain’s door for him. Instead, I walked on into his quarters as if I owned it. I would take plenty of liberties after that stunt he just pulled, punishing me for something his less than trustworthy crew had done. Despite many of the crew still at his beck and call, his first mate and many others had betrayed him today... or whenever this was. That put him at a disadvantage I was happy to exploit.
He shut the door behind us with great care, perhaps hoping we wouldn’t notice that he locked the door behind him. I noticed.
“Give it to me.” The Captain held his hand out to Ben.
“I’ll give it to you. After we walk away from this conversation without any fresh stab wounds,” Ben said. He pocketed the vial, and the Captain’s gaze followed it until it disappeared.
I stayed still, despite wanting to nudge Ben. As much as I wanted to rebel against the Captain, he had a sword. We couldn’t push our luck too much.
“There’ll be no conversation.” The Captain stepped up to a curtain hanging on the wall and ripped it down.
The curtain rings scattered across the floor, one of them pinging off my sandal. But not even the sight of a flying pig could have distracted me from what stood against the ship”s wall.
Two mirrors, one next to the other, set in gold frames fused to the floor as if something had melted them. But neither one reflected an image; the first showed a turbulent sea smashing into rocks from the view of a beach, lightning spearing through the night sky. The sight of the other had me grabbing Ben’s arm and squeezing so hard that he winced. It showed Freddie’s stately home, with construction vehicles on the driveway outside. That was it: the portal we had searched for all this time.
“You knew it was here,” I said, glaring at the Captain. “You knew this was the portal we needed.”
“It appeared shortly before your arrival.” The Captain stood in front of the mirrors, blocking our view. “I suspected.”
“Then why didn’t you tell us?” Ben demanded. “You could have gotten out of here so much faster.”
“If you trust strangers who cross your path without question, you are a fool,” he said. “The only thing I trust - and expect - you to do is to give me the potion and send me through that portal.” He gestured to the stormy sea.
The many scattered puzzle pieces of this situation finally clicked into place. As soon as we had come through the portal, he knew we were his way out of here, specifically to the time he had come from.
“That’s why you want the potion,” I said. “So you can go back to where you came from and what? Make your witch fall in love with you?”
I exchanged concerned looks with Ben. We couldn’t allow that to happen under any circumstances. Not even if he cut both our heads off. Dusk had thrived because the mermaid-witch had imprisoned the pirates. How would Dusk’s fate change if we allowed him to return to his time and try to coerce her with magic?
“What I do is no concern of yours.” The Captain beckoned with his fingers. “The potion.”
My throat tingled with the urge to sing him into a stupor, as if my siren song sensed my anxiety and offered itself as a defence mechanism. But the memory of Eyepatch stealing my voice made me think twice. He had gotten the idea from the Captain after all.
“No way,” Ben said.
The Captain took a step toward us, a hint of swagger there. He had the upper hand, and he knew it. His fingers curled around the hilt of his blade.
“I’ll gut the two of you over and over until you concede, but make no mistake, you will give me that potion and send me through the portal,” he said.
After his display earlier, I knew he wasn’t bluffing. Ben took a step back and pulled me with him, but the Captain slid the sabre from its sheath.
“Wait,” I said, and he paused. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Ben muttered. “Are you crazy?”
“Crazy enough to not want to get gutted, yeah. Give him the potion.”
Muttering under his breath, Ben handed the potion over to the Captain who held it up to his eyes and gazed at it before tucking it into his jacket pocket.
“That wasn’t too hard, was it?” The Captain slid the blade back in the sheath to its hilt and swept an arm toward the mirror. “Shall we?”
I chewed my tongue so hard that I nicked it on a sharp tooth as Ben and I made our way toward the mirror.
“Maeve,” Ben muttered.
“Sssh.” I took the amulet out of my shirt and, for a long moment, gazed at it in my hand.
Then, with all my might, I slammed my shoulder into the Captain’s chest, knocking him backward into the second mirror. I pressed the amulet to the portal as we careened into it, and a flash of white light enveloped us.