Chapter 25
Chapter
Catherine knows she only has moments before James recovers. She uses them well, dashing out the door of the boiler room and climbing the ladder to the upper decks. She had intended to head topside to find and warn Andrew, but she can already hear James behind her. Closing in on her.
Too close.
Instead of climbing another ladder to find Andrew, she swerves instead down the long passageway that connects the galley, mess, berthing, and captain’s cabin.
The entire left side of the ship—port side, she corrects herself—is damaged.
The galley, mess, and many of the spaces look to be destroyed, but she has no time to contemplate the true severity of it as she rushes by, leaping growing pools of seawater on the deck as she goes.
The Elphame, she realizes with a growing sense of alarm, is taking on water.
She shakes her head and keeps running. She can’t think about that now either.
Not with James behind her, his footsteps coming ever closer.
She races the last steps to the captain’s cabin and flings herself into the room, reaching up to slam the door closed just as James throws himself against it with a hard, loud thud.
She slides the interior bolt into place, her breath punching out of her in sharp, hard gasps and her side cramping with a violent stitch.
She bends over and presses her forehead against the door, her arms crossing her middle, as if to hold the wild beat of her heart inside her chest where it belongs.
She pants, trying to slow her breathing and ease the pain in her side.
In and out, she inhales and exhales. In and out.
For the moment, she’s safe.
James, outside the door now, rattles the doorknob. She can hear him pounding harder and harder against it, until he finally gives up with a bitter laugh. “Stay there and drown, then,” he calls to her, before she hears his footsteps recede.
McGann surveys the damage when the gunsmoke clears. The schooner’s cannonball hit just above the waterline. They escaped an immediate sinking but not by much.
They have more cannonballs aboard, but he thinks it too risky to engage with the damage they’ve already sustained.
Especially not when he’s all but certain the schooner is better prepared for battle.
They came looking for one, after all, and he’d wager they did so with a hundred cannonballs or more at their disposal.
He and Crawford loaded barely fifty onto The Elphame.
He might consider surrendering if Catherine weren’t on board, but she is, and he won’t risk her safety any more than he has to. Who knows what kind of men are aboard that vessel and what they might do to her. That leaves only making a run for it. But their engines are down.
“Captain,” McNeil says, “run out the cannons?”
“‘Tis a dangerous tactic, that,” a deep Gaelic brogue drawls from behind him.
McGann whips around. There are no other Scots on board except him and McNeil, and McNeil is a Lowlander. He speaks in the kind of light Scots burr that’s very nearly English, not the heavy Gaelic accent of the Highlanders.
“James?” McGann asks, momentarily stunned.
The man standing in front of him now no longer looks like the one who was too deep in his cups to properly navigate.
That man was jovial. And English. This one has the same features but they’re recast into a hard, mean face.
One with seething anger in the eyes. And a knife in his hands, too.
McGann shakes off his shock, reacting just as James comes at him.
He darts to the side, the blade just missing his abdomen.
That slice might have killed him had James managed it, but McGann moves well for a man his size.
He turns to counterstrike, but The Elphame lurches under his feet and throws James forward.
The momentum drives the knife deep into McGann’s thigh.
McGann drops to his knees, a howl of pain escaping from his lips.
James uses his advantage to twist the knife further, and a bright, hot agony tears through McGann’s body as his muscle rips open.
He tries to struggle to his feet but he can’t.
He can barely stand. As soon as he’s almost upright, James sends him careening backward with a jab square to the jaw.
McGann staggers, his thinking clouded by the torment in his leg. He shakes his head, trying to clear his mind, and pushes himself up again, only to meet a heavy fist to his stomach. He reels and clutches the railing, glancing about him.
There are men aboard. He blinks. Not his men.
The lurch that drove James’s knife into his leg was the schooner securing itself to The Elphame. He sees the rope ladders thrown from one ship to the other, connecting them, and blinks again.
What in hell?
He feels like his mind has left his body and he’s in some strange netherworld where any goddamned thing can happen. McNeil comes tearing toward him, and he barely has time to register it before the younger man is swarmed by the men crossing onto The Elphame via those rope ladders.
Fuck, he thinks, just as James hits him again.