Chapter Thirty-One
I claw at the air where my little sister stood moments ago.
Behind me, Lewis drops to his knees, a sob ripped from his chest.
“Now would be a good time to get out of here!” comes Owen’s voice from down below; he’s somewhere outside the ship, but he sounds as if he were a million miles away.
Lewis doesn’t move. He just stares at the place where Elsie vanished, his hands shaking in his lap.
I don’t know how long it is before Titus finds us, but it feels like an eternity.
“Where’s Elsie?” Panic cracks his voice. “Where is she? Aster, where—”
“What is given must be gained,” Lewis answers, his voice hollow. “We took the Helm, so it took her.”
Titus’s eyes go wide. “What? No—no, that can’t—”
Their voices fade beneath Owen’s shouting from down below and the earsplitting drum of blood pounding in my head. “She’s gone!” I scream, my fingertips raw, bloody from where I scrape the wooden boards.
“Stop!” Titus’s hand on my shoulder. “It won’t bring her back!” he says, trying to grab me, but I shake him off. Claw. Scream. “It won’t bring her back!”
Owen shouts again. Lewis weeps.
She can’t be gone. She can’t be. She can’t—
Titus throws me over his shoulder. “Grab the Helm!” he barks at Lewis.
My vision blurs as Titus carries me from the Tidesinger. It isn’t until we reach the jolly boat that he lets go, but I lurch forward, toward the ship, toward the last place I saw her.
It’s Owen who blocks my path. “What happened?” he asks, the laughter gone from his face. “Aster?”
Lewis collapses just shy of the jolly boat, dry heaving onto the rocky bank.
“There’s no time!” Titus’s voice is sharp, but it trembles as he lifts Lewis up from under his arms and tosses him into the jolly boat along with the Helm. “Those pirates won’t stay dead for long. We have to go—now!”
I can feel my heart splitting open—can feel the blood gushing from my chest. I must be wounded. I must be dying.
“Where is she?” Owen’s voice is so small. So broken. So loud.
“The Helm!” Titus says, pushing the jolly boat off from the shore.
“They’re getting up!” Diana says from the jolly boat, pointing her blade at the mangled corpses of the pirates, their dismembered limbs stitching back together in a haze of smoke.
“What’s the plan?” Rook draws a curved knife from his belt. “Are we staying or—”
“What happened?” Owen demands.
“They found the Helm!” Titus explains, grabbing hold of Owen and me both and pushing us toward the jolly boat. “And it—” A strangled cry escapes him. “It took Elsie.”
“What do you mean it took her?” Owen looks faint. He stumbles a step, catching himself on the lip of the boat, and it’s Rook who pulls him the rest of the way into the hull.
“I don’t know!” Titus shouts. He shoves me, and Diana reaches out, hauling me into the jolly boat as if I were a child.
“We can’t—leave her—” I choke, gasping for breath.
“She’s not here!” Titus’s hands are on my face. “Look at me, Aster. My love,” he says. “My love, look at me. She’s not here. She’s not here, but we’re going to find her, all right? I promise you; we’re going to find her.”
Rook and Diana row us out of the tunnel. Titus seems reluctant to let me go, his jaw clenched, tears streaking his face, but he holds out his hands, his eyes shut tight, controlling the waves as we break from the mouth of the cave and into the storm.
We reach the Starchaser by some divine miracle.
As the jolly boat is hoisted into the air, Titus grabs hold of me again.
He trembles, soaked through from the rain, but I feel nothing. My face is numb, my chest hollow.
“We’re going to get her back,” he tells me, droplets of rain dripping from his nose, his chin.
“We’re going to find the Relics, and we’re going to get her back.
” He pushes wet strands of hair out of my face, grabs my shoulders, shakes me as if trying to wake me from a deep sleep. “I swear it to you.”
Relics. Wishes. None of that seems to matter now.
“She’s gone,” I croak. Elsie is gone.
Diana and Rook haul Lewis, unmoving, from the jolly boat. But the instant Owen’s feet hit the deck of the Starchaser, he’s barking orders to set sail.
Blood, I think I hear him say. He wants blood.
It’s the first thing—the only thing—that snaps me out of my daze.
Because I know what he means.
Something—someone—took Elsie from us. Some twisted magic. Some curse.
He will not rest until someone pays for it in blood.
And I stand, finally, ready to follow him wherever that path leads.