44. Pippi #3
“Alistair, what are you—” I blanched when he lifted me up and swung his head toward Valiant . “No.”
The runes on his head bubbled and popped, boiling into his flesh until he bled. Heavily. Thick ribbons of crimson meandered down his face.
He bellowed and kept going.
“Alistair!”
With a thrust that was a little too shaky to be gentle, Alistair bonked his nose up. And sent me spiraling against the side of the ship.
Hands immediately snaked down and encased my arms, my shoulders. Fingers grasped on to the back of my vest.
“Stop!” I croaked. “Alistair!”
He sank back to the sea while I was hauled up and over the ship railing.
“I’m sorry, Pippi,” he whispered.
My butt kerthunked against the deck. And an ocean of worried faces swarmed me, people asking, with full sincerity, if I was alright. If I’d been hurt. Most were strangers, but I recognized some of them.
“She’s covered in blood.” Elisabeth knelt and fussed over the state of me.
Dazedly, I stared at the crimson splotches decorating my clothes. Not my blood.
Not all of it, anyway.
“Get her some water.”
“Grab a blanket too.”
I panted. Panicked. As I shifted my eyes between all the unfamiliar gazes, trying to work up the strength to force the words past the ball of dread that’d lodged in my throat.
“I need to get his head secure again to finish the rune!” Rune shouted.
“Move! For feck’s—I said MOVE!”
I blinked sluggishly, as Onyx barreled her way through the throng of concerned people and zipped to my side.
“Back up,” she snarled at them when they pressed in, trying to fiddle with me. “ Back up! How many feckin’ times must I repeat myself?”
And they did, because the cutting command in Onyx’s voice was the sort you obeyed without question.
“Pippi, is it?” Onyx crouched by my side.
I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t.
At that moment, with so many emotions and voices gunking up my head and heart, I barely remembered my name.
“Pippi? Yes?” Onyx shook me roughly.
“I…Yes.”
Alistair’s desolate keens filled my head. The bleats of a suffering person begging for the end.
“I need ye to look at me, Pippi.” Onyx slapped my cheek. “Look at me!”
I did, but her face swam meaninglessly before my eyes.
“Do ye love him?”
“I…”
“It’s a yes or no question,” she said. “But yer heart hasta answer it. Not yer head. Do ye love him?”
“Yes,” I said. With no hesitation.
She smiled, bitterly. “Then they can’t hurt him. Not anymore.”
“They are hurting him!”
ZZZAAAAPPPP!
White light exploded over the ship. A blinding, all-consuming flash that wrenched the sight from my eyes—there was nothing anymore, beyond the bleached haze. No shadows. Or colors. Or shapes. Only an endless sea of white.
For a terrifying heartbeat, I wondered if I was still alive.
If the wails around me were from the people aboard the ship, or the souls trapped in this glaring afterlife.
But color returned. Slowly. Spilling back into the world one tendril at a time.
I saw the black of Onyx’s hair as it billowed in the wind. And then the soft, ivory curve of her cheek, and the deep jade green of the dress she wore.
Around us, other people began to take shape and color as they sorted themselves out. Several of them had fallen—as I would’ve, if I hadn’t already been sitting.
“What—”
SLOOSHHH!
A wall of water plumed into the air, rocketing well above the tallest sail on Valiant .
The frightened screams swelled.
I gaped, silently.
The water was…No.
Surely not.
This was terror making my vision funny, right?
That funnel of water was not really a shimmery periwinkle.
Right?
I blinked.
The colorful cyclone remained glistening periwinkle as it bashed against the sides of the ship, flecking off several layers of old, splintered wood.
My heart hammered against my ribs. “What’s happening?” I yelled.
“The curse is breakin’,” Onyx said.
I whipped my head to her. “There was a way to break it?”
“Aye. Ye canna lock a door without a key,” she said. “Curses need to have a way to be broken. It’s the nature of magic. And I made this key meself.”
The water twister roared and whipped the fog into a frenzy.
Movement fluttered across the ship deck as people ran and then panicked when they realized there was nowhere to run to .
Their fear mingled with my own terror frothed into a noxious vat of hot, sour milk.
We’re going to die!
The undulating periwinkle tornado swarmed the ship.
Wood shuddered beneath our feet. Boards came loose. Anything that wasn’t bolted down went flying—and some of the bolted stuff did too, when the watery typhoon ripped the nails up.
Onyx and I ducked when half a bench careened past us.
The water funnel slurped it up.
The wet, viscid air grappled for body parts next, clamping on to legs and arms, and hauling people bodily across the deck.
It hooked around both Onyx and me and shoved us into the railing.
“Curses don’t like to be broken, ye ken.” Onyx seethed.
BOOM! BANG !
A shard of wood clipped the side of my head on its trip to the typhoon.
Terror left a foul taste on my tongue. I gagged.
ZAP !
The water twister vanished.
It didn’t shrink back to the sea.
It just…poofed out of existence. Leaving the air still and eerily silent.
People didn’t dare speak as they peered wild-eyed at each other. Even the sea seemed afraid to make a noise. So it was easy to hear that feeble, plaintive voice as it snaked over the ship.
“Pippi?”
My heart leapt.
“Alistair?” I scrabbled, my feet moving too quickly for the rest of my body to keep up, and half stood, half fell onto the railing, peering down.
But Alistair’s mountainous body was gone.
Instead, a man treaded water, his mop of black hair sopping into his pale blue eyes as he stared up at me.