Chapter 46
Forty-Six
Neal
“Ithink one of the engineers is doing it,” Ansel said, slamming open my and Sorcha’s bedroom door at one o’clock that morning.
“Will you ever learn to knock?” I muttered, groggy. Sorcha just pressed her face into my shoulder and tried to keep sleeping.
“I’ve spent the last seven hours talking to everyone below decks,” Ansel said. “The cleaners. Anyone in steerage who could speak English. The engineers. And everyone agrees about the disappearances. How it was horrible. Traumatizing. Who it was. When they left. Where it happened.”
Ansel paused.
“And?” I prompted.
“Except the engineers,” he continued. “They just insist nothing happened. That they don’t know.”
“So now we go snoop around the engine room?” I asked, still groggy, still trying to coax Sorcha properly awake.
“Now we go snoop around the engine room,” Ansel said. “Now get up. There’s work to do.”
“Why is there always work to do late and on a stupid boat,” Sorcha muttered as she scrambled to her feet and grabbed her dress.
The reek of blood was the first clue. Strong enough I passed Sorcha a handkerchief immediately, wishing I had something to douse it in to cut the smell.
The stench clung to all the lower decks, getting stronger as we neared the engine room.
By the time we reached the reinforced steel door it clung like a physical presence.
And that was when I spotted the splatters.
Not a few drops of blood, but a consistent trail, dripping from beneath the engine room door, but leading away, out toward the water.
“Did they kill someone in there?” Sorcha asked.
“Possibly,” Ansel replied, voice low, focused.
“Should we check?” Sorcha pressed.
“Follow the trail,” Ansel instructed, gesturing at the blood splatters tracking along the floorboards.
Halfway between the engine room and the railing, in a dank, narrow passage leading out to the gunwales, we turned a corner and came face to face with a young, terrified engineer on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the trail of blood with a strong, tallow soap mixture that reeked of ammonia.
His sleeves were pushed up, his hands cracking and bleeding from the chemical, and there on his inner arm was a tattooed eye and spiral.
“Stain don’t want to come out,” the boy muttered then went utterly still as he looked up and realized who we were.
Ansel grabbed the young man by the collar and hauled him against the wall.
“Stain from what exactly?” he asked.
The boy scrabbled against Ansel’s hold for a futile moment, then went limp. Soapy water streaked with blood dripped off his fingertips.
“I’m not supposed to tell nobody,” he said.
Ansel gripped tighter, pushed him harder against the wall.
“I’d reconsider,” he growled.
There was a massive splash, then a single scream cut off mid-wail.
Ansel dropped the boy onto the soapy ground and rushed forward, Sorcha and I close on his heels.
We emerged onto the open deck just in time to watch a massive violet tentacle emerge from the waves.
There were six engineers, cultic symbols painted on their skin, and one unconscious young woman on the deck between them.
She was bleeding from a wound on her head, and from dozens of cuts lined up methodically along her arms and legs.
One of the engineers bent and licked blood directly from the young woman’s face before reciting something out toward the emerging sea monster—his words obscured by the creak of the steel hull and the lapping of waves.
Another of the engineers shoved a pig carcass into the churning sea, eye and spiral carved at least a dozen times on the flesh. Four more carcasses—of various butcher-shop animals in various states of disassembly and decay—lay on the deck.
“Summon something,” Ansel hissed.
“There’s nothing to summon,” Sorcha insisted. “Everything left half an hour ago.”
“They were fleeing the kraken,” Ansel said. “Clearly. But something must be close enough for you to try?”
“Ansel, we are in the middle of the ocean and my magic doesn’t properly work on fish,” Sorcha snapped.
“It worked on a spider!” Ansel snapped.
“One single time,” I hissed back.
“How about a whale?” Ansel suggested.
“I thought we said no summoning giant animals until further notice?” I countered.
“Fine,” Sorcha muttered. “I’ll try.”
“Is this not the exact situation when you could use that Ironmoot-forged gun and kill it?” I asked.
“With our things in the hold,” Ansel replied, “she’s all we’ve got. Unless you’d like to try regular lead rounds and see how far those get you.”
Sorcha dug in and focused.
But there was nothing nearby—she’d told me as much every night at this time. And the growing frustration on her face just proved it. The ocean was big. And there just wasn’t time, because the engineers had pushed two more of the carcasses into the sea. More tentacles emerged.
A few moments later the last two carcasses were shoved into the waves and a massive beak broke above the roiling sea.
All but one of the engineers dropped to their knees, still chanting.
And the last engineer picked up the unconscious young woman from the deck and shoved her over the gunwale, into the waiting beak of the monster.
“No,” Sorcha cried, but I clamped a hand over her mouth. Ansel and I rushed back down the hall, pulling Sorcha with us. But it was too late. The engineers-turned-cultists turned and followed after as the beaked kraken disappeared back below the waves.
“Weapons,” Ansel said as our pursuers rounded the corner. He drew his gun. I did likewise.
“Be quiet, be good,” I murmured into Sorcha’s hair, grabbing my own knife and pressing it into her palm as I finally removed my hand from over her mouth.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” one of the men said, voice low, gruff, knife at the ready. Then his eyes tracked down to the weapons in our hands.
“You weren’t supposed to do it,” Ansel replied.
“What’s a few deaths to save hundreds?” the man spat back. “We’ve kept the ship steady course this way. Avoided icebergs. Sacrificed our way to favorable winds.”
“See there’s a problem with that sentence,” Ansel said. “The word sacrificed. You’re throwing passengers to demons.”
“Nobody that’ll be missed,” the man replied.
“You’re to stop,” Ansel said.
“We’ll see,” the man retorted.
Ansel drew the hammer back on his pistol.
“Leave it,” Sorcha said suddenly. “Let them be. We’ll deal with it another way.”
“And what do you suggest, Sorcha lass?” Ansel asked.
“I’m a pregnant woman in a silk dress,” Sorcha said. “I go to the captain and act morally outraged.”
We climbed the steps back up to our rooms, stopping on the upper deck to take a few minutes to breathe the night air and recover from the gory display. Sorcha curled against my side, knees drawn up.
“They’ll be here in a minute,” she murmured.
“Who?” I asked, pressing a kiss to her hairline.
“The whales,” Sorcha said.
And sure enough, a moment later a pod of humpback whales breached the surface of the ink-dark waves.
“Good cetaceans,” Sorcha murmured, then went limp against my chest, magic draining out of her.
“We really need to make a rule about this,” I whispered, kissing her again and pulling her into my arms to carry back to bed.