35. The Ghost of Jonah Lovibond #2
He tore his eyes away, raising his sword with a shout as a burly ghost appeared.
Their blades clashed, Jack shoved the ghost into a retreat, then followed to whip his sword through the man’s translucent body.
The ghost pivoted, and Jack raised his weapon again, barely fast enough to block the next attack.
Like so many times before, Cecily accepted that death was here for her. For how many times she’d thwarted it, this seemed like a fitting way to go—surrounded by ghosts when she was practically a ghost herself, and next to the man she loved.
She was not afraid.
With her sword in one hand, a mermaid-scale knife in the other, her focus locked on a massive ghost hulking toward them, cutlass in hand, his scowling gaze set on Jack’s unsuspecting back.
Cecily stepped behind the first mate, her back to his, and threw up her sword to catch the weight of the cutlass before it could split his skull, screaming as the force of it hammered down her arm.
Her other hand moved of its own accord, following instinct and memory before she could remember the futility.
The mermaid-scale sliced knife deep into the ghost’s stomach. The blade met flesh and bone, and blood poured from a deep cut. The ghost flickered, gaping as his body lost its translucence—and he became real enough to sink to his knees.
He carefully touched his wound then looked at his shaking, bloody fingers.
Cecily met the ghost’s gaze. They stared at each other in shock.
Then a jerk of her arm had her sword buried in his gut. He gasped and slumped to the deck—well and truly, impossibly, dead.
Behind her, Jack had stopped, and so had the ghost he’d been fighting. When she turned, they both gazed at the knife in her hand.
Whatever awful power imbued the mermaid scale had suddenly made this fight possible. Realizing this, Jack locked his sword with his ghostly opponent’s and shoved him toward Cecily. Wielding the dagger, she pierced the artery under his arm.
He became fully man and was run through with Jack’s sword.
“You’re a dream,” Jack panted with a maniacally gleeful grin. “A damn impossible dream.”
She stepped into him, crushed her lips to his, and slapped a mermaid-scale dagger into his palm—the one with Copson’s gifted hilt. Then she spun away and reached for another knife.
They threw themselves into the fight, scale-daggers slicing into ghostly flesh, followed by their swords. They cut some ghosts as they passed so the pirates could finish them, while others they killed with their own blades.
They passed Greyson and Hester who fought back-to-back, Greyson with his axes and Hester wielding cleavers, their faces drawn and blooming with sweat despite the chill. As Jack and Cecily tore through, turning the ghosts corporeal, Hester broke into a cackle.
“You Copson fiends!” she cried joyously, lodging her cleaver into a ghost’s neck with a spray of blood as Greyson dispatched another.
Cecily moved across the deck, consumed with this deadly dance for the sake of her husband, her friends, her father-in-law, and his crew she’d protect like her own because she was a Copson, and this ship and its company were her family and her life.
Her feet were sure, her precision terrifying, and by the time she reached the bow and the foremast she’d hidden behind so many times, she killed the final ghost in her way and spun, weapons raised, to begin her way back.
A wall of ghosts stood behind her, but none of them rushed to attack. She flinched toward them, prepared to meet their assault—but they recoiled, staring at her with their weapons lowered.
Some gaped. Others looked confused. Then a tall, skinny ghost stepped forward, his brow creased. “Vanetta?”
Cecily’s breath clouded before her as she panted from exertion. “I’m not—”
Winter wind blasted over the ship. She threw up her hands to shield her face, gritting her teeth as the air dropped to a temperature that burned her lungs and skin. Had it not been so frigid, so punishing and searingly painful, she might have cried out.
But the icy power had her body curling in on itself, preserving what little heat she had left.
As quickly as it had come, the wind abated, though the chill remained. Quiet descended over the deck, and she slowly straightened, panting, and lowered her arms.
The ghosts still stood before Cecily, unaffected by the cold. They didn’t advance, but she didn’t trust they’d stay that way. She forced her limbs to move, brandishing her sword. But as she took a tentative step forward, they backed away and split down the middle, revealing the middle of the deck.
Jonah’s crew had surrounded Copson’s pirates, holding them at sword-point. Hester and Greyson were among them, detained but alive.
But Jack—she couldn’t find Jack. Cecily sought him, her heart pounding faster, each sweep of her gaze growing more frantic with every second that passed.
The center of the deck had been left clear, except for spilled the blood that puddled on the wooden boards—and Captain Copson, who knelt by the mainmast, shivering as he faced the Neptune.
Cecily followed his gaze—just as a towering ghost drifted through the hull of the Neptune and stepped onto the Fortuna Royale.
Ice splintered beneath his boot, frost spiderwebbing from each slow step as he advanced.
He was tall, his strong body slightly translucent, though the twin swords hanging at his hips were entirely real as they gleamed in the moonlight.
Dark hair spilled from beneath a wide hat that hid his face in shadow, but even unable to see his expression, he carried a fury that was as cold and unforgiving as the air.
Every nerve in Cecily’s body sang with warning, pleading for her to flee. But this—
This was Captain Jonah Lovibond, and there was nowhere to run.
He approached Copson, his heavy steps silent. Before he reached the living captain, another ghost drifted to his side and deposited the glowing tide stones into his palm. For a breath, Jonah only looked. Then his mouth turned down beneath the shadow of his hat.
Jonah’s deep voice carried over the deck, pitched with fury and biting derision. “You’re a fool to think you could outrun me.”
Though Copson knelt, he spoke boldly. “I knew I would face you, Jonah. I only wished to spare lives.”
“Spare lives!” Jonah barked, his voice booming loud enough to make the pirates flinch. “My wife’s tears call to me in mourning for my innocent child, and you wish me to spare any of your men? You did not spare her, and surely a hundred pirates would not be enough to repay the life taken.”
“Nothing could be enough,” Copson said, holding Jonah’s gaze with resolve. “But I’ve kept the man responsible so you may have your vindication. The others here are innocent.”
Another of Jonah’s men pushed forward. Though blood dribbled down one of his arms from where he’d been cut by a mermaid scale, the edges of his body were beginning to fade as he shoved Jack, hands bound, toward the captains.
Cecily tried to call out, to go to him, but she was held frozen by fear and cold. Her heartbeat turned deafening as Jack was forced to his knees next to his father, blood seeping from his temple. The first mate glared at Jonah as the man behind him tossed the mermaid-scale knife to the deck.
Jonah caught it with his boot before it could skitter away. With deliberate slowness, he stooped to pick up the small weapon, and then he held it flat in his palm, staring for long enough that the pirates began to shift.
A low, eerie chuckle sent a trickle of dread down her spine.
“A mermaid,” Jonah mused. “How cunning. Did you catch one solely to deal with me?” He ran his finger over the edge of the blade, but not hard enough to cut into his ghostly flesh. “Did you torture the creature too? Tear out its scales so you might save yourselves?”
Copson shook his head. “No, Jonah. We didn’t—”
With a flick of his fingers, Jonah flipped the knife so the blade extended from the back of his hand, like he was about to plunge it into the first person who tempted him.
“Was it you?” he asked, taking a step toward Jack.
Frost crawled toward the first mate’s knees.
“How’d you get a knife that can kill a ghost? ”
Jack trembled, but his voice came strong. “I bought it in Tortuga.”
“No,” Cecily rasped, but she was too far away. She tried to catch Jack’s gaze, to beg him not to do this. It was her knife, only hers, and she couldn’t let him die for it.
“Liar,” Jonah snarled. “You Copsons are lying, murdering cowards. You are a curse to your family and your crew, and you will not be helped.” Jonah reached down to grab Copson’s face in a crushing grip.
“I will kill your crew. Every single one.” His fingers tightened around the knife. “Starting with your precious son—”
“I made the knife!” Cecily’s voice split the frozen quiet, ice scraping her throat. She tripped forward, pushing into the open deck. “You can’t kill him—it was me. I did it.”
“Cecily, don’t!” Jack shouted.
“I tore the scales from a mermaid,” she confessed in a desperate rush. “I didn’t know what they could do. It wasn’t to thwart you but to—”
Cecily broke off when Jonah spun to face her. Time seemed to stop, the world fell silent and blurred at the edges, everything felt upside down and backward because that—
That was her father.
Even from several paces away, she recognized the angles of his features, the laugh lines around his brows and buried in his cheeks. She knew the shape they would take when he smiled, and how kind it could make him look.
He didn’t look kind now. He looked heartbroken and furious, and she recognized that too because she had known that face and its emotions for eighteen years.
He peered at her with dark eyes she knew so well, and they cut right through her heart and straight to her soul, directly into the well of pain and grief she’d kept shut tight for a year.
All the words she was about to say dissipated on a gust of breath, the kind that came before a sob.