Chapter 26 The Storm
Calla
They didn’t reach the storm until almost a full turn of the suns, and the entire time, Calla remained rooted by the helm.
All she saw as she looked at the dark, angry clouds swallowing Aelion’s setting rays was the compass that was meant to lead them to the Heart–to Sable–swinging wildly before her eyes.
She’d snapped it shut after a heartbeat and hadn’t looked at it since, but the image burned behind her lids.
Directionless.
Useless.
Like her.
Calla clung to the helm like a lifeline while the wind whipped at her face, her hair, her clothes. Sable couldn’t be gone. She would’ve felt it. She was sure of it. And all she knew to do to prove it was this–heading headfirst into a storm wild enough to rip her ship to shreds.
“Captain, are you sure–”
“Do I look like I’m not sure?” Calla snapped.
Merrow’s tight-lipped silence was heavy with disapproval, and he bowed to her stiffly before walking out of sight.
Calla’s fingers tensed around the helm, her grip tight enough to hurt. This was beneath her. She should not be snapping at her crew–even if this hadn't been the first or even the fifth time she’d heard that question today. Their doubt. Their fear.
But she would not be challenged.
Not on this.
As the waves swelled and frothed beneath the Moonshadow’s creaking hull, Calla called Thorian to her side. “Keep her to the waves,” she said. “Don’t let her get broadside.”
Thorian, not unlike Merrow, pursed his lips at the order, but he settled at the helm as asked. The waves were already tugging at it, and a light rain pattered against their faces and their coats. Sharp, high-pitched thunder resounded somewhere in the distance.
Just before she stepped away, Thorian said, “Calla, this is madness,” crashing her hopes that someone would keep their mouths shut about this and just do as told. “Last time–”
“This won’t be like last time,” she said, walking off before she could hear any more of his protests.
This time they were prepared. Calla swept the deck to personally assure herself of that, even though she trusted Gadrielle blindly when it came to her ship.
And indeed, she needn’t have worried. Barrels, crates, rigging, even the weapons were all lashed tight to avoid any impromptu projectiles while they faced the full rage of the storm.
The topsails had been reefed to half, and the royals taken down entirely.
Sailors stood ready at the pumps and buckets for when water inevitably poured over the deck, while anyone with no assigned tasks hunkered below decks.
Calla’s eyes lingered on Riley, who was busy securing the last of the sails.
As if she could feel the weight of her gaze, Riley’s hands stilled, and she glanced over her shoulder.
The brief look they exchanged was sombre, and still it soothed some of her nerves.
They hadn’t talked since last night, but this–Riley being right on deck with her, through the night and day following Calla’s decision to sail into the storm–said more than words ever could. They were in this together.
And they would find Sable.
She was in the eye of this storm. She had to be.
When the pattering rain turned to lashes against her coat and the strike of thunder rattled through her bones, Calla joined Thorian at the helm once more. Thunderstorm clouds had choked every last gasp of light by now, and darkness as thick and heavy as a moonless night settled over the deck.
Calla squinted through the lashing rain, trying to determine where the storm was thickest. There, in a flash of lightning, she saw it, and veered deeper into the cursed waters, driven more by instinct than by eyesight.
The instinct led her true.
The waves swelled and frothed against the hull, and Calla clung to the helm, bracing her feet against the deck to keep her balance.
When the entire ship juddered against a stray wave, she had to lever the whole weight of her body against the helm to roll the Moonshadow into it–to keep them upright.
She didn’t have the time to regain her breath before a blinding flash of lightning struck the water just ahead of them.
Close enough to fill her mouth with static and numb her tongue.
She had to blink several times before she regained her sight, and yet she barged on.
Through the towering waves. Through the booming thunder.
Through the rising panic in her own chest as she searched the sea with every flash of light, frantic, hoping to spot something, anything, any sort of clue that her plan was not utter madness. That Sable was still out here.
But there was nothing. Nothing but the implacable storm raging around them.
And then she heard it.
The thunder.
It was not thunder.
It was high-pitched, overlapping screeching, a sound like tearing metal so loud and nightmarish that the pirates on deck flinched into a crouch, covering their ears with gritting teeth.
“Watch out!”
“Storm drakes!”
Blood flowed like ice in Calla’s veins at the shouted warning.
She slowly dragged her gaze up to the sky, searching the clouds.
With the next bout of lightning, she saw them, light glinting off their scales.
There were two of them, zipping through the sky, ripping through the storm with their blood-curdling roars.
The storm of their own making.
Calla had never seen storm drakes so big before.
She hadn’t known they could summon storms of such magnitude.
One of the two drakes soared high in the air, black as night, only visible under bouts of lightning.
It roared, and thunder boomed in her ears, shaking the Moonshadow to her foundations.
The other, green-tipped and bigger, answered the challenge with a screech, and lightning burst from its mouth, missing the black drake by inches.
The burst of lightning struck through the carved raven at the Moonshadow’s bow, splintering one of its wings to pieces.
All everyone could do was watch, struck with awe or horror–Calla couldn’t tell which–as the two beasts fought above them, angry and vicious, bloody talons stretched out and fangs bared.
“Captain!” Thorian gripped her arm, drawing her gaze from the sky. “We need to turn around. Now!”
Calla gritted her teeth, and something wild thrashed in her chest as she scanned the sea.
Waves rose tall as buildings under the light of the drake-summoned storm.
Electricity crackled in the air, prickling her skin and raising the fine hairs on her arms. The roars and screeches of the drakes made her sailors flinch and cower.
Pirates deserted their posts. Those who didn’t run were staring, ropes and buckets clattering from their hands onto the half-flooded deck.
And yet Calla still searched, with the taste of blood and lightning coating her tongue.
There was nothing.
This was the eye of the storm, and no one was here but the blasted drakes.
She cursed out loud.
“Captain!”
“Shut up, Thorian, or so help me–”
But she did not get to finish her threat. A dark shadow fell through the clouds, plummeting into the waters on their starboard. The black drake. The ship tilted with the impact, and the drake’s splashing wings sprayed Calla and everyone around her with water from head to toe.
Calla cursed again and nearly dislocated her shoulder trying to keep the Moonshadow from capsizing, but no matter how much of her weight she leveled, the ship kept tilting.
Thorian lent his own strength with a strangled grunt, his meaty palms nearly crushing Calla’s fingers against the helm as they pulled together.
The wood creaked and cracked with their effort, and for a heart-stopping moment, she thought the helm would break before it gave.
Then the ship leaned the other way.
Calla’s heavy exhale of relief remained stuck halfway out of her throat when she heard her pirates screaming.
Her head snapped the way the Moonshadow had tilted, and her heart froze in her chest. The storm drake was clawing its way out of the water–using her bloody ship to do so.
Its eyes were blue as ice, and they were trained on Calla.
But Calla didn’t think of its eyes, or herself.
For one half-delirious moment, all she thought was that Gadrielle would kill the beast if she could–because its claws dug hard enough into the deck’s planks to splinter them.
Then something obscured her view of those eyes and those sharp claws.
Thorian.
His gun was halfway out of its holster before Calla unfroze and reached for his arm, pulling him back with all the strength she had.
“Thorian!” He didn’t even look back at her.
His muscles were hard and unyielding, and he was strong as a mountain.
Calla redirected all her strength into her voice instead, because his arm was raising, and he was going to kill them all.
“Thorian!” Calla shouted, moving herself between her quartermaster and the drake. The look she leveled at him was sharp enough to halt his movements. “Do not shoot at the angry storm drake. You will only piss it off.”
As if to prove her point, the green drake screeched overhead, and a bolt of lightning missed their mizzenmast by inches.
Thorian let go of his gun as if burned. A heartbeat later, the ship tilted under their feet again, the incline so steep Calla had to cling to his arms to stay upright.
A chilling, ripping sound cut through the rage of the storm, and she could only stare as the black drake clung to the mainmast, its claws catching one of the sails as its wings unfolded.
With a burst of air strong enough to make even Thorian stumble, it soared into the sky once more.
The Moonshadow careened in the water, on the verge of capsizing, and both she and Thorian flung themselves at the wildly spinning helm to right it.
Her heart drummed so loudly in her ears she didn’t hear her crew’s frightened shouts over it, and it was a blessing.
She focused on the burn in her arms, on the pump of her own heart, strong enough to make it burst. And the feel of the deck against her feet, the sea below.
The helm wouldn’t give. Her muscles screamed.
The ship felt alive beneath her–bucking, fighting her.
In a hopeless, desperate moment, she pleaded with the water.
Don’t let us sink.
A rogue wave battered itself against the hull then. It righted the Moonshadow’s careening, and suddenly the helm became pliable in her hands once more. Calla could almost cry in mad relief, but she didn’t get a chance to.
A hand caught her arm, fierce as a shackle. It pulled her from the helm to meet furious green eyes.
“You’re a mad, mad woman, Calla,” Rowe gritted through her teeth, hair plastered to her cheeks under the lash of rain.
All the lines on her face sharpened with grief and anger.
“We won’t be able to save anyone if you get us killed by fucking storm drakes, for fuck’s sake!
Are you even thinking?! If I die before we get to Kittredge, I’m taking you out with me, too, and I’ll make sure you have no fucking rest in whatever fucked afterlife we fuck off to. Get us out of here. Now!”
All Calla could do at that was stare, her chest seizing with loss.
Only Sable would’ve dared talk to her like this.
And she would’ve been right–Rowe was right.
She couldn’t save anyone if she got everyone killed on the way there.
She snatched her arm out of Rowe’s bruising grip, drawing in a sharp breath as she searched the horizon not for Sable this time, but for a way out.
A softer, shyer touch at her elbow drew both Calla’s and Rowe’s attention. Eryx.
“That island.” Calla followed their pointed finger to a dark smudge in the distance. “We’ll be safe there until the storm passes.”
By now, she knew better than to question them.
She nodded, both at them and at Rowe, who walked off with a sharp exhale.
With a last searching gaze towards the waters and a heart as aimless as the needle she’d shut away, Calla steered towards the island, leaving the drakes to battle each other up in the skies.
She didn’t search for Riley’s gaze as she gave the word for retreat.
She wouldn’t be able to meet the disappointment in her eyes.
Not until she made good on the promise she’d made for both of their sakes.
You better still be alive, Sable.