Chapter Fifty-Six
ELARA
The whispers made sense now. The visions. Even Isra’s those many months ago—how she’d felt a coldness in Elara like that of the dead. Elara’s body trembled, not just from the water’s assault but from her magick’s, too, as spectres moved in and out of her vision on the ghost ship.
She whirled to the Starred Siren, where the deck lit up in flashes of green starlight and, unmistakeably, a golden blaze. She froze. ‘Who’s on that ship?’ she whispered to herself.
Her stomach dropped. ‘No.’
Her soulmate had returned.
An explosion of fire painted the sky and sea in gold and orange.
‘I need to go,’ she rasped, as though trying to affirm that she was alive, that she could speak. She finally looked around the deck of her own ship.
She almost wished she hadn’t.
The corpses she had reanimated dragged themselves across the husk of the ship, its timbers rotten and smelling of damp and sea salt. As she laid eyes on them, they began to whisper, voices overlapping each other in her head as they fought to speak with their queen.
‘Hush,’ she commanded, and they fell still.
The mortal Elara wanted to stagger back, wanted to sink to her knees at the horrors this new power controlled, at what she had just awoken.
And yet her moonlight, now so very alive, filling up the cavern her shadows had left her with, wrestled for control.
She felt an utterly new part of herself grow, a primal force keeping her back iron-straight, her eyes unflinching, as though muscle memory was taking over.
She had done this before—commanded the dead.
‘What do I do?’ she asked pleadingly.
You already know, came a quiet reply within her.
Elara took a deep breath as she assessed the Starred Siren and the sounds of battle she could hear from across the water. She raised a finger, pointing to it. ‘Take me to the Sun,’ she commanded.
The ghosts around her began to move, quicker than anyone alive could. They assumed their places, scuttling in silence across the ship. The tattered sails billowed, the ship beginning to sail impossibly fast.
As they approached the Starred Siren, Elara squinted, trying to make out as much of the situation as she could.
It seemed Enzo and Scorpius were contained, each focused on the other.
She looked blindly for Adrian as rage began to claim her vision.
She thought she saw a flash of blue that could be him, and then, to her left, she saw Leo—thank the gods—alive and fighting.
Elara raised her hand in the air, and her ship began to slow, quiet as it slid towards the larger ship.
It continued to glide until they were side by side.
She could see the scene more clearly now.
Pride filled her as she saw Scorpius wrapped in a ring of fire that he was trying to battle his way out of, Leo taking on the brunt of the mutinous crew who were attacking him, though Adrian was fighting right alongside him.
She saw Santi with them too, three men against fifty, though some bodies were already strewn across the deck.
She pointed. ‘Kill them all,’ she said.
Her wraithlike subjects bowed before beginning to climb the ropes around the ship and swinging aboard the other vessel.
Screams filled the air as more of Adrian’s crew met Death in human form. The corpses scuttled and ran, their rusty, barnacle-encrusted weapons drawn.
Leo, Santi and Adrian whirled in shock. Though, once they realized that the dead were not attacking them, but rather helping them, they seemed to fight with renewed vigour.
And her dead—they fought without mercy, without pause.
Elara watched in part-horror, part-awe as Ivan shoved his cutlass through one of the walking corpses, who simply kept walking along the blade until he pushed his own through the pirate’s gut.
The man fell with a cry, and the corpse continued on, a gaping hole in his stomach.
Elara scanned the deck, assessing it from her own ghost ship until she laid eyes on Pieter, who was paving a way through the fight as he tried to get to Leo.
Elara picked up a weapon. ‘I hate swords,’ she sighed.
Careful to place an illusion over herself so she could get to her friends undetected, she scaled the same ropes the others had, and then took a deep breath as she let herself swing between the ships, before grappling with the ropes that snaked up the side of the Starred Siren.
When she landed on the deck in the thick of the battle, chaos overwhelmed her.
Elara took it as her cue to weave through the bodies.
The first to meet her blade was a young, burly man, who saw nothing as she slit his throat.
The next had his heart pierced; the third took a blade to the gut.
They began to drop, and it was then that Elara saw panic and fear truly set upon the men as a ghost began to cleave through them.
It surprised her how delicious it was to drink, how much a dark and immoral part of her craved their screams.
‘What’s happening?’ a tall, gangly pirate shouted as he watched a body simply drop before him, blood dribbling from its mouth.
‘It’s Death herself!’ someone cried. ‘She’s come for us all!’
Elara continued to make her way towards Adrian, Leo and Santi.
Just as Pieter raised his sword at Leo’s back, Elara lunged. Her blade pushed through the back of Pieter’s neck with a gurgle, and the old cook staggered, whirling as he clutched himself.
Elara whipped off her illusion. ‘You should have worshipped the Moon, not the Stars,’ she said quietly. Pieter slumped to the floor.
‘Elara,’ Adrian said faintly.
She turned. ‘Give me my dagger back,’ she demanded.
Adrian, pale, hurried to take it from his belt and had just pushed it into her hands when she heard footsteps rush at her. She whirled.
Scorpius had made his way through Enzo’s ring of fire, skin mottled with burns, wounds gaping upon his skin. The fire that Enzo had wrapped around him had turned poisonous and green, now forming a wall that stopped Enzo crossing from the other side.
‘You’re just as slippery as you used to be, with your tricks and illusions,’ Scorpius hissed to her. Leo tried to attack but his lightning fizzled the moment Scorpius blasted him with his sickly green starlight. ‘But you won’t win a second time.’
Scorpius turned his palms upright and let out a deep, reverberating hum. Starlight swirled in his palms as Elara watched, eyes flicking desperately to where Enzo struggled behind the flickering green flames. ‘I think it’s about time you met my pet.’