The Beginning (Vile & Virtue #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The Pirate Queen Sasha gripped her saber hard in her hand as she prepared to board the enemy ship

Today was the day she died.

She’d written off the stories of the phantom vessel known as the Dark Tide as legends. Just more myths told by sailors over nearly-emptied bottles of rum to stave off boredom.

But there it was, with its tattered and torn sails, and its telltale skull with wings for a flag, announcing just who had come for them.

The exposed wood had weathered and rotted to a blackish gray.

The ship looked like it barely had any business being afloat, let alone being one of the fastest ships Sasha had ever seen on the high seas.

It had come for them without warning. Cannon fire had rocked her ship in the dead of night, and the full moon cast a startlingly eerie glow over the skeletal ship that bore down on them like a nightmare.

Her men were terrified. But they were ready to fight. But when the derelict ship prepared to board them…and no one appeared? In fact, when it seemed that there were no crew at all aboard the strange, ghostly ship?

She didn’t blame her crew at all for standing behind her, cowering as they let her be the first to cross the wood plank they’d slung between the two vessels.

The deck was empty. Silence reigned, save for the footfalls of her men and the jangle of weaponry and belts as they all piled onto the Dark Tide.

The deck was empty.

Until it wasn’t.

The fight was over before it really had a chance to begin.

They never stood a chance against the unnatural crew that attacked them.

Sasha supposed she shouldn’t be so frustrated as she was shoved down to her knees on the rough wooden deck. She’d been easily disarmed by one of the things that had attacked them.

What chance did the living really have, fighting ghosts? Her blade had gone straight through a man, only to have her whole arm follow with it, as though he hadn’t even been there.

A few of the surviving men were weeping. She couldn’t say she blamed them for that, either.

Footsteps caught her attention. Raising her head, that was when she saw him. The Captain of the Dark Tide. Pale skin that matched the color of a corpse in the moonlight. Black-stained lips, as though he had been drinking tar. And where his eyes should be, nothing but empty hollows.

But there was something in her that couldn’t help but be entranced as the man—the thing—walked up to her, no expression on his hard-set, sharp features.

He opened his mouth to speak.

WHAM.

Sasha jolted, dropping her pen on the floor, and nearly knocked over her plastic maroon water bottle. It was capped at the top——but she still scrambled for it before it went teetering off the edge of her desk.

She’d been daydreaming. Again. Bored out of her mind. Again. Doodling little circles in her notepad. Again.

Until some rancid personality had decided to not so much place a book down on her desk as throw it down. Leaning down, she grabbed her pen from where it’d landed near her foot and prepared to be as passive aggressive as she could be, in true librarian fashion.

She’d dealt with a great deal of “problematic customers” in her couple of years at the BPL. It wasn’t anything new. Especially not when one worked in Restricted, where they kept the books that weren’t allowed to be checked out or leave the room because of the nature of their content.

Things like Nabokov’s works, the Marquis de Sade, how to build pipe bombs or explosives, and so on—or anything else that was deemed “not okay.”

It all seemed really stupid in the age of the internet.

But whatever. It gave her a job.

All the books were attached to sticks on chains, like when you borrowed a bathroom key from a place that wanted to make sure that you really, really didn’t walk away with it.

The tables in the middle of the room were long, and arranged in such a way that the librarian on duty—today, it was her—could see exactly what everyone was doing at all times.

Just in case.

Because, well, humans were gross sometimes.

So her expectations were low when she finally looked up to see who’d thrown a fifteen-pound book onto her desk. Whatever she’d been expecting?

What she saw wasn’t it.

Not to say that she hadn’t also seen her fair share of people who were a few screws loose. But the man in front of her didn’t look so much like he was crazy and had spent a few months sleeping on a park bench.

More like he’d just been back from war. Or maybe a serious car accident. There was a sharpness in his dark eyes as he stared at her. Directly at her, like she was the important one, and the book he’d just hurled at her wasn’t.

Which, as a librarian, usually wasn’t the case. Usually she was just part of the scenery.

His beard was dark and scraggly, clearly because he hadn’t shaved in a while.

There were dark bruises at his neck and along his left ear.

His hair, which looked like it had been cut normally at some point, was unkempt and disheveled.

His clothes were ripped and torn but looked otherwise clean.

There was a split in his lower lip, and a cut that had scabbed over along his chin.

“Sir, are you okay…?” She held perfectly still, her hand hovering over the silent alarm underneath the desk. “Do you need me to call you an ambulance?” Maybe he’d been hit by a car outside. Maybe he was concussed, or—

“Burn it. Bury it. I don’t care.” His voice was low and cracked as though he hadn’t had water in a long time. When he smiled, there was a manic kind of relief in his voice. “I’m free. I’m finally free.”

With that, he turned on his heel and walked away from her desk, heading quickly for the door and disappearing out of view into the hallway. Sasha sat there in stunned silence for a moment before hopping up to follow after him. “Sir? Sir—”

He was gone. No sign of him down either direction of the narrow space. Shaking her head, she headed back into the room and to her desk. He wasn’t the first cracked-out weirdo she’d had to deal with in her life. Wouldn’t be the last.

Half of her almost expected the book to be missing along with the man. Just another ghost story from the BPL. But no, there it was.

She’d been so caught up in staring at the man staring at her, she hadn’t even really taken in the book he’d thrown onto her desk.

It was huge, some eight inches wide by twelve or fifteen inches tall, and four or five inches thick.

It looked almost like one of those centuries-old family Bibles, with the intricate leather covers.

It was old. Really, really old. If it belonged to the library, it certainly didn’t belong in Restricted, it had to belong in Rare.

Sasha had majored in the preservation and restoration of antiquities, having hoped to land a job in the Rare Documents collection. But they had no openings, since that was the most prestigious department to work in. Everyone who had a masters in library sciences wanted to work there, naturally.

That meant that while she was stuck in Restricted waiting for her chance, she knew that what she was looking at did not belong on the shelves in the standard rotation.

The heavily embossed black leather cover looked as though it had once been gilt with foil.

The edges of the pages, though slightly irregularly shaped and worn by time and fingers, shone with the same gilt metallic tone.

It was an odd color, almost a purple hue.

The four corners of the leather cover had metal plates bolted through the binding.

The metal was tarnished a strange, muted blue-green.

She couldn’t identify what metal it was.

An elaborate letter “V” in a strange, asymmetrical, and eerie font was embossed on the cover. Touching the cover delicately, she pulled her finger back to see the slightest hint of purple dust.

What in the hell was this thing?

The spine didn’t have any more identifying marks. For all its age, the leather looked in solid shape. It didn’t feel brittle or dry. Carefully picking it up, she discovered it weighed a ton.

She should pick up the phone and call Rare immediately. Or bring it to them and have them take it. But…

It was a mystery.

And she was bored.

She’d take a look inside, figure out what it was, and then bring it to Rare.

The cover was shut with a metal clasp that locked it closed.

It was the same, strange, blue-green metal of the corners.

The inside of the book would certainly tell her what it was.

It didn’t look water damaged, so it’d be easy to identify.

Chances were it was in Latin, but even still. Search engines would fix that problem well enough for her to glean what it was about.

As she was grasping the latch, time seemed to freeze.

Piano music, eerie and forlorn, filled the air. Hands drifted over ivory keys. Little more than a silhouette in the shadows. “You want a story to be about you? Oh, darling, be careful what you wish for.”

The voice was like a knife in the darkness. Sharp and dangerous. It reminded her of every movie villain of the old black and white era. The voice laughed, and a feeling of ice water ran down her spine.

Sasha pulled her hand away from the book. The music seemed to linger in the air, twisting with the laughter that gave her goosebumps.

Looking down at her hand, she scrambled for an explanation. Had the purple powder been drugs? No. Not possible. Nothing worked that fast. Or like that. But…what other option was there? Stress? Hallucinations? LSD in the water supply?

Okay. Okay. That was not normal. Putting out the little sign on her desk that said she’d be back in fifteen minutes, she pulled on her coat and dug around in her desk drawer for some napkins that some other librarian had shoved in there a few years back.