35. The Ghost of Jonah Lovibond #3
This was impossible. She’d buried her father, and even if she hadn’t, he could no better sail a boat than he could make himself a prince, so this had to be some sort of supernatural mess, a magic trick meant to torment her. Magic like the knives and the mermaid and the sea serpent.
In an anguished whisper, Jonah asked, “Vanetta?”
Cecily struggled to shake her head, her eyes blurring with tears. She blinked them away, too eager to see the face of her father even if it caused her so much pain. “No…”
“What witchcraft is this?” Jonah spun to Copson. “What have you done?”
Copson shook his head, terror plain on his face. “I’ve done nothing.”
Her father. That was her father, and every broken piece of her surged to the surface, keening and agonized and demanding—
“Why?” she gasped. “You have my father’s face—why do you have his face?” Her breath sputtered as tears raced down her cheeks. “Have you come to torture me?”
Jonah turned back to her, as quickly as if he’d heard his own child’s voice. “Who are you?” he demanded, his eyes pained at the sight and sound of her.
He sounded like her father too. She wanted to run to him and from him, and it kept her anchored to the spot, her feelings warring between sobbing and screaming because she didn’t know what he would see or how he would judge her.
“My name is Cecily,” she said, her voice thin and wavering.
“And your father’s name?” he asked, staring at her like he was trying to determine an answer to a particularly difficult riddle, and perhaps this would give him a clue.
She swallowed hard as he drew nearer. “William Shoard,” she told him weakly, and even his name hurt to say, like she’d reached into her grief and shoved her thumb into every bruise she’d never taken the time to heal. Her tears renewed. “H-he was a swordsmith.”
Jonah’s brow wrinkled. “Was.”
Her answer was a single stiff nod. Dead, she didn’t need to say, because as Jonah studied her tears and heard her voice, he knew. She could see the recognition in his eyes—the same deep pain that he understood because he, too, had lost precious family unfairly and too soon.
He stopped when he was only inches from her, his ghostly gaze roving over her features. “You look like my Vanetta,” he said. “But not quite. You have a certain spark in your eye. And your chin is different.”
She could see the differences in him too.
His eyes were a lighter shade of brown than her father’s had been, and his skin was weathered, his shoulders wider.
They were small details she had to look for, but noticing them didn’t detract from the near perfection of his likeness or the aching sense of longing it wrought through her.
“I was the one meant to die that day,” she whispered, terrified to say the words but unable to keep them in.
“But death doesn’t come for me like it should.
It always turns away.” A harsh sob blew the tears from her lips and right through the ghost captain.
“I’m so sorry it turned to Vanetta. It shouldn’t have.
It should have been me, and I cannot tell you how much I regret that it was not me. ”
Jonah’s frown etched deep into his face. He didn’t agree with her, however, saying instead, “The sea is full of strange things.” He spoke slowly, his voice low enough that the gathered crews wouldn’t overhear. “Creatures, spells, impossibilities.”
She nodded, unable to tear her gaze from his. Stede had told her the same.
Stede. Oh, Stede…
“This is one of those things,” Jonah went on.
“They call it a fetch, though I’ve never heard of one like this—seeing the likeness of the dead rather than the living.
To see oneself is an omen of death, but I don’t know what to make of this…
” His head tilted, his gaze trailing the tears that raced down her cheeks with stoic interest. “Do you cry for fear or sadness?”
Cecily trembled at the first bit of softness in his voice. Even though she knew it wasn’t her father, her heart was torn in its agreement. She wished she could touch him, hold on to him, and tell him everything she ached to say to her father.
“I hardly know,” she whimpered. “You came to avenge an innocent life and found me instead, and I’m not innocent. The things I’ve done…” She ripped off her gloves, revealing her bloodstained hands.
Jonah’s frown deepened, like he could see the blood too. She realized he could, as he lifted his hand to gather hers in his palm—but he passed right through her.
“You’re here to kill us,” she said, and she covered her face with her hands, her words spilling in a tearful rush, “and if this is punishment—seeing you wear my father’s face with no love or mercy when that’s all I ever knew from him—then I am truly cursed.
There’s so much I want to tell him, to explain if only to know he could forgive me for what I’ve had to do. ”
She sobbed as though her heart were being torn from her chest and flayed in front of her, because here was the fullness of the grief she’d avoided all this time.
Every sorrow surged from her innermost being and demanded that she face them, feel them, and acknowledge every wound she wished she didn’t have.
She missed her father, and it was made all the worse because she was no longer the daughter he’d raised and loved.
And though Jack’s love healed a great deal, it would never cover the wounds of all she’d lost, beginning with her father, then her future, her life, her home, her freedom, and on and on and on until she had the scraps of herself she’d managed to piece back together.
She wept for all of it while the face of her beloved father looked on.
There was a quiet commotion, a whisper moving through the gathered crews like a breeze. She’d all but forgotten they were there, but she was too afraid to pull her hands away from her face to see what had rattled them.
Then a warm hand gently wrapped around her wrist.