Chapter 14
14
Marcelis
I heard the clomp and scuff of Bodie’s heavy boots before he stepped into Toorin’s cabin. He puffed up as soon as he saw me. “What are you—”
“ Shhh . You’re going to wake him.”
Bodie’s sizable body blocked the natural light filtering in through the door. I couldn’t see the details of his face, but between his rigid stance and the fisted hands at his sides, I didn’t need to.
For Torrin’s sake, he lowered his voice when he said, “What are you doing in his bed?”
I didn’t move my hand off the center of Toorin’s chest where I’d rested it for hours. “There wasn’t enough light to tell if he was breathing. I wanted to keep my hand on him to be sure.”
Bodie glowered at me. He didn’t like my answer, but I didn’t care.
“Time he got up.” Bodie reached out and shook Toorin’s leg. “We’re going to be hoisting sails soon.”
Toorin snorted and sat bolt upright. My hand dropped away, but I felt the ghost of that rough whir on my skin.
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Toorin turned to me and patted the bed. “Sleep. You earned it.”
He hopped up, stepped into his boots, and followed Bodie on deck while I settled down in his covers. I sank into the mattress, and my eyes closed as a wave rolled under the Lark. The breeze shifted through the open porthole, cooling my over-warm skin as the Lark got underway.
Never in my wildest dreams, as I’d observed the harbor in the distance from the tower, had I ever thought I’d step foot on a boat, much less be sailing away in one.
I thought about getting up and watching the chancellor’s residence disappear into the distance, but I’d hardly thought of my sire in the past couple of days, and I liked it that way. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of me watching the only world I’d known fall away, even if he’d never know I’d done so.
I fell into a fitful sleep, not used to my bed rocking and rolling. I didn’t know how long I’d been in Toorin’s bed before I heard the shout seconds before the water fell away beneath the hull, and we crashed into the bottom of a wave.
On the upswing, the wave unceremoniously dumped me out of Toorin’s bed harder and faster than Bodie ever could. I landed on my ass, jarring my spine. Pain ricocheted throughout my body and stole my breath.
I clamored to my feet, the boat bumping and swaying beneath me, knocking me off balance. I had to grab on to any part of the cabin that I could to keep from falling to my knees.
And to make everything worse, my empty stomach lurched, and I tasted bile at the back of my throat.
From hand hold to hand hold, I teetered onto the deck, and I’d have a few extra bruises to show for it. I started working toward Toorin, who stood at a big wooden wheel near the center of the boat.
“Hold on!” Toorin shouted.
The Lark dropped into another deep trough, the nose of the boat catching the meat of the wave, and for a second, I thought we’d go under.
I wrapped my arms around the railing and held on. What little sun remained dipped behind a cloud. The front of the boat broke free of the wave, sending a mountainous cascade of water crashing over the deck, drenching us.
I sputtered, choking on the water before we climbed up the backside of the next wave, and all the water ran off the deck.
“Whooo!” Toorin shouted, the smile on his face as mesmerizing as the flap of the sails in the wind and the whitecaps on the water. Was he… enjoying himself?
I managed to work my way to him. “Are you okay?”
I had to shout over the flapping sails and the ring of the ropes in the wind. The wind whipped my words away, but it seemed that Toorin read my lips well enough.
He grinned. “Never better.”
It was then that I concluded that sailors had sun-addled minds. “What’s happening?”
“A squall,” Darwin shouted, coming up from behind us. “The gale won’t come until later.”
Moon and mars and the stars . If this was only a squall, I didn’t want to ride through a gale. Up ahead, a wall of dark gray sky disappeared into darker, angrier clouds.
In the past, I’d seen storms roll into Toonu off the bay, wide sheets of rain devouring everything in its path and spitting them out on the other side while I’d remained warm and dry in my room in the tower, never once considering how anyone on the boats survived.
I guess I was about to find out.
“Can’t we go around?” I asked as if no one had given that option a thought.
We all braced and held onto something as the Lark took on another wave. This one didn’t come over the decks, but the spray caught us, soaking our skin and stealing our precious warmth.
I glanced at Toorin, and he grinned back. “It’s too big and moving too fast. There’s no going around this. Our only way out is to go through it.”
The next wave dropped me on my ass on the slippery deck, though Toorin and Darwin remained standing. Before I could regain my feet, the pitch of the boat and the slick deck had me sliding backward.
At the last second, Darwin caught my hand and yanked me to my feet.
“Get him a rope and tie him to one of the cleats,” Toorin told Darwin. “Or else we’ll lose him over the side or through one of the scuppers.”
Darwin pulled a coiled rope off one of the pegs around the center mast in front of us and cinched one end around my waist and the other around one of the brass cleats on the side of the boat.
The first band of rain hit, cutting our visibility in half. But it didn’t last long. Before I knew it, the winds died, and the water flattened.
“We’ve got to reef the sails more while we have the chance,” Toorin said. “The wind will be too strong.”
“Take the wheel,” Toorin told me.
I took a step back. “I don’t know how to steer.”
“Do you know how to lower the sail?”
That was also a no, and we both knew it.
“Steer us into the waves. If a wave hits us broadside, it could roll us over.”
I took that to mean rolling over was a bad thing.
It sounded bad.
I took the wheel, and Toorin and Darwin dealt with the sails.
The strength required to hold the wheel surprised me. I didn’t know how Toorin had held onto it and kept us pointed into the waves for so long. The first wave I hit nearly ripped it out of my hands.
I held on tight, putting all my weight onto the wheel's grips and leaning into them. Then, our speed abruptly slowed. I noticed the slack in the mainsail as Toorin and Darwin brought it down.
There came another shout. Bodie stood at the front of the Lark with Lyric and Juniper, partially lowering the front sail.
As massive as the mainsail was, in this wind, Darwin and Toorin had a fight on their hands.
“ Fuck! ” Darwin shouted.
I looked up as the big man lost his hold on the rope securing the long arm of the sail. The Lark shifted in the water, rolling to her right. The loose arm swung with it.
The last thing I heard as the arm aimed for my head was Toorin shouting, “ Duck! ”
Toorin
“ Duck! ” I yelled as soon as the boom started swinging toward Marc. You had to keep your wits about you on deck, especially for swinging booms, but Marc didn’t know that.
Why the fuck had I given him the helm instead of sending him back to the cabin for his safety?
Because the storm could take the Lark if you don’t get the sails in. What choice did you have?
Maybe not set sail during gale season with an inexperienced crew?
And yeah, I knew without my heart I was on borrowed time. I was lucky to be alive as it was, but one of these days, my heart would stop pumping, and no amount of thumping on my chest would get it started again. I’d rather avoid that, but as that boom swung on a collision course with Marc, I realized I didn’t want my heart back at any cost.
My crew mattered.
Marc mattered.
Darwin caught up the slack rope with his bare hands, but he couldn’t gather all the slack before the boom swung to starboard. Somehow, Marc heard me. He turned wide-eyed as the boom arced toward him.
“ Bodie! ” I yelled for help even though the chance of him hearing me over the wind was zero.
I sped toward Marc, but the boom swung faster. On instinct, Marc raised his hands to protect his head, but it wouldn’t be enough.
As soon as his hands left the helm, the wheel spun, the Lark lurched. The waves tossed the Lark, hitting us broadside and threatening to roll us as the boom slammed into Marc and swept him overboard.
I slid to the gunwale, now only an arm’s reach from the frothy, swirling, treacherous water. I caught an arm around the rail before another wave bounced me over the side. The spray and sting of the cold water on my face and body nearly blinded me and chilled me to the darkest depths of my marrow.
Darwin must have grabbed the helm because the Lark righted, the water fell away, and the bow headed into the waves again. The line tied to Marc lay taut against the railing. He had to be on the other end, but I feared what I’d find when I pulled him aboard.
If I could pull him aboard.
Then Bodie hit the gunwale at my side. Then Lyric. And Juniper. We all took hold of the rope and started pulling. Inch by inch, foot by foot, we gained traction, only to slip on the slick deck and lose our hard-won ground.
The wind drove the rain, cold as fuck, sharp as a freshly honed blade, obscuring our vision and drenching us to our bones. I started shivering, even as we worked harder and faster.
All around us, the wind swirled, confusing the seas but slowing our speed enough that it didn’t feel like we were hauling in a whale instead of one slightly built human.
“He’s coming,” came Bodie’s voice from behind me.
I realized then that I’d clamped my eyes closed, subconsciously too scared to witness what I feared I’d find. I opened them as Marc’s head breached the surface of the shadowy water, coughing and sputtering and nearly blue from the cold but alive.
He’s fucking alive .
Aware of the dangers, I wrapped the rope around my wrist. I couldn’t chance a rogue wave ripping the rope through our hands. Not now. Not when I had Marc in my sights.
“Heave… heave… heave,” Bodie called out the rhythm as we hauled a half-drowned, exhausted Marc up the side of the Lark. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t have thrown the rope ladder over the side in these conditions because Marc didn’t have the strength to do anything but dangle from the rope by his waist. He didn’t even bother sticking his hands out to keep his head from thudding against the Lark’s hull.
“That’s gonna hurt,” Lyric said from the far side of Bodie as we hauled Marc up the last few feet.
Bodie scooped Marc up under his arms, coughing and shivering as Bodie hauled him over the gunwale and dropped him on the deck. I unraveled myself from the line and fell to my knees beside him.
The Lark’s deck pitched and rolled worse than a rank camel bull on his first day of saddling. My sire took me to watch the camel boys break the young bulls once—that one time I thought about leaving scrapping for a life on land as a camel rancher. I’m still a scrapper if that tells you anything.
At least the rain had slowed to a freezing drizzle. I wiped the water off Marc’s face, the soot long washed from his hair. I leaned over him and patted his cheek while his lungs worked overtime to fill his body with oxygen.
At least he was conscious. His eyes followed me and softened when he raised a shaky hand to cup my face. The gravely, wet words he spoke sounded foreign coming from his lips. “I didn’t think you were coming.”
“I’ll always come.” The words came out so softly, I didn’t think anyone would hear, but then Bodie scoffed, his hands on his hips with that now ever-present glower on his features.
I didn’t know where my words had come from. Somewhere deep down because they hadn’t even run through my conscious thought before falling from my mouth. They were true. I couldn’t take them back. Even if they didn’t make complete sense.
I didn’t have time to process that revelation because Darwin shouted for the foresail—the only remaining sail we had rigged—to be trimmed. Lyric went for the sail. I expected Bodie to follow, but Juniper did as if she knew what she was doing. I didn’t doubt that she did.
Lyric and Darwin had been teaching her how to earn her keep on a sailing vessel. She knew her way around the Lark better than those worthless deckhands I’d picked up at the last port.
Marc had another fit of coughing and rolled to his side. I stood and met Bodie’s narrowed gaze straight on. “Help me get him out of these clothes before he freezes.”
Lyric and Juniper trimmed the sail, and the Lark heaved to and dropped into the trough of a smaller wave, my knees absorbing the hit with the ease of a man who’d lived on the water most of his life. The water wasn’t as rough now as we sailed from beneath the squall.
“ What? ” I asked Bodie, when he didn’t answer. The wind swirled my words, not stealing them away so no one could hear but in a way that probably everyone on board heard. I didn’t care. I was annoyed that Bodie refused to stop eying Marc with suspicion.
“You two seem… close.”
“He has my heart. What do you expect?” It was a rote answer that I didn’t take the time to consider what Marc would think when he heard it, even though he was no longer just someone who had something I needed. He was a man. A man that, for some reason, I couldn’t help liking. A lot .
Bodie stepped back and eyed me up and down as if he could find the truth in my body language. “There’s more. What aren’t you telling me.”
I was not getting into this with Bodie or the rest of the crew. Moon and mars and the stars. I was barely coming to terms with my attraction or whatever it was I had for Marc myself. I didn’t need my crew’s—especially Bodie’s judgment—in my head.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
Bodie studied me for a second or two longer before wiping the water from his face. “Take the head. I’ll take his feet.”
When Bodie angled for us to take Marc to his bunk, I turned toward my cabin, where we stripped Marc down and covered him in one of the spare blankets I saved for the winter when the bitter winds off the IP stole all my heat like a pirate in the dead of night.
I settled Marc in my bunk against his protests. “I have my own cabin.”
“Yeah,” Bodie said in a tone that made me want to slap him or challenge him. “He has his own cabin.”
“Someone needs to keep an eye on him.” I was already tired of arguing with Bodie. I couldn’t remember when we’d had so many cross words. And the thought of traveling to the heart of Mercy bickering with him like a couple of directionless spawns made me weary. But Marc and I couldn’t make the trip without him. It was too dangerous.
“I thought he was keeping an eye on you .”
“I’m fine.” When he spoke, the wheeze in Marc’s chest said otherwise, but I didn’t want to fight with him, too. I shoved him back down when he tried to sit up. This time, he stayed there. And using the brains the universe bestowed upon him, he kept his mouth shut.
“I don’t like it.” Bodie’s thin lips and the ticking muscle in his jaw made his words redundant.
“Go see to the crew.” That was the closest to an order I’d given him in I couldn’t remember when.
He cursed under his breath before spinning on his heel and leaving my cabin. I turned my back to Marc, stripping to nothing and drying off with a scrap of cloth so old I didn’t remember what it was originally. A scrap of cloth wasn’t ideal, but nothing in this world was.
“He-he doesn’t l-like m-me m-m-much.” Marc’s teeth chattered so hard I wanted to shove a piece of camel leather between them to prevent him from snapping or cracking every last one.
I pulled on my last pair of dry trousers and a shirt that had more holes in it than cheese in a rat-infested storehouse. “He’s protective of me.”
Fully clothed, I turned around. Now that we’d sailed out of the squall, the skies had brightened as the worst of the gale did the unexpected and slid around us. Marc still looked blue, and if he shivered any harder, he’d pitch himself right out of the bunk.
He needed heat, and he needed it before he got more hypothermic. I stood at the foot of the bunk. “Move over.”
I pointed to the side away from the bulkhead. The gale might be sliding around us, but the outside temperature continued to plummet. I worried about the rest of the crew, but even as mad as Bodie was with me, I knew he would see to it that they all got dry and poured a gallon or two of hot coffee into all of them.
Marc shifted over. I stripped out of my shirt and wedged under the covers between him and the wall to block some of the cold from leaching into his body. The bunk hadn’t been designed with two men in mind, but I was trying to warm him, so we didn’t need that much space.
As soon as my bare skin touched his, I regretted it.