Wake of the Bloody Angel

Chapter Twenty

It took four men to carry Suhonen belowdecks, and three more to manage Jane. I had to coax Duncan out of the boat; he clutched his sword and stared at the other ship as if he expected the creature beneath it to come after us. Honestly, the same thought had occurred to me. I wondered if we’d dealt it a mortal blow, or just an inconvenience.

The ship’s surgeon, a portly old man named Skurnick, judged Suhonen the more seriously injured and began working on him at once. Jane was carried unconscious to her cabin, but she was already pale and sweaty, and she began to mutter to herself without waking up. Dorsal waited outside the cabin and watched, wide-eyed, as Jane was tended, then slipped in when only I remained watching over her.

“She’s hurt real bad,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Yeah,” I agreed. I was still covered with slick, sticky monster spit, and it did not grow more pleasant as it dried. “Can you watch her until I get back? I need to get this gunk off. If you need me, holler.”

“Sure,” he said.

I undressed, went on deck, lowered a bucket, and washed as best I could with seawater. Around me, the crew worked in grim silence, aware of what lurked beneath the innocuous ship across the way.

Good- natured, secretly love-struck Captain Clift was as furious as I’ve ever seen anybody. He stalked the deck like a panther, snapping orders that Seaton did not have to repeat. He glared at me as I cleaned up, but I knew his anger wasn’t personal. He’d narrowly avoided the fate of all those other ghost ships, and the nearness of it rubbed him the wrong way.

“Cap’n!” a sailor called. They were tying up the boat we’d used, and several men stared into it. One of them reached down and retrieved the dismembered tentacle tip. “Appears we have a souvenir.”

Clift looked it over. He lifted one of the claws from the center of a suction cup, and muttered a curse I didn’t catch.

I said, “Ever seen anything like that?”

He nodded. “Bigger than any of ’em, of course, but I know the type.” He flicked one of the claws near the tentacle’s end. It was only two inches long, but no less intimidating when you thought about it buried in your flesh. “Want to hear the worst part?”

“There’s a worst part I don’t already know about?”

He pulled the claw free. It was smooth, and with a wide ball at the base. Blue ichor dripped from it. “There’s no barbs.” “What does that mean?”

“They don’t get the barbs until they’re full grown.”

I was so tired, it took a moment for that to register. “You mean it’s a baby?”

“More likely a teenager. But yeah, it’s not full grown.” He handed me the claw. “I hope we don’t run into Mama before we’re done.”

WHEN Clift and I returned to Jane’s cabin, Skurnick stood over her leg. Dorsal had vanished, no doubt chased away by the doctor. Skurnick had cut away half her trousers to expose a single puncture on the inner side of her thigh, dangerously near the big artery that ran there. The edges of the wound were crusted with scab, but the center was still dark red and oozing. Each time he wiped it, more blood trickled out.

“Not much I can do for her,” he wheezed. “I’ve cleaned it, and the wound’s closing on its own, but she’s lost a lot of blood. She’ll either survive or she won’t.” He looked at me. “She’s tough. I was with her for three years before she left the sea. If anybody can pull through this, it’s Captain Argo.” To Clift, he said, “She shouldn’t be alone. She might be delirious, and she could hurt herself.”

Clift and I exchanged a glance. I said, “I’ll stay with her until midnight. You can send someone to relieve me then.”

“I’ll relieve you,” Clift said. “I don’t want the crew to see her like this.”

Skurnick said, “She’s got a fever, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better. Maybe we should tie her down.”

I shook my head. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

He looked me up and down, measuring my apparent strength against Jane’s. “If you think you’re up to it, son.” Then he left, chuckling to himself.

Clift looked at the nameless ship through the porthole. “Who does that, LaCrosse? I mean, it’s one thing to catch a beast like the one over there, which I admit is impressive. But to allow it to do your dirty work, and then just sail in and pick up the pieces… Who does that?”

“Someone pretty smart. I bet every other captain rushed in to rescue his crew and never came back.”

“I learned from their mistakes,” he said with no irony.

Jane said something we didn’t catch. Her eyes were open, and she licked her lips before speaking again. “I said… he’ll be coming to check his trap.”

Clift nodded. “I already figured that. I’ve got a plan.” But Jane’s eyes were already closed.

“What is it?” I asked Clift.

“You’ll see.” He turned toward the door. “I have work to do. We have to gather Veasely’s and Kaven’s gear and toss it overboard. Keeping it is bad luck, or at least the crew will think so. I’ll see you at midnight, and I’ll make sure Skurnick stays sober. If anything changes, yell good and loud.”

“Aye,” I said, and half saluted.

Dorsal slipped in before the door closed and joined me at Jane’s bedside. “I hope she doesn’t die.”

“Me, too.”

He touched Jane’s hand. She gasped and jerked her hand away without waking. Dorsal took a step back, and I said, “Don’t take it personally.”

He looked up at me. “I don’t.”

“Thanks.”

I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall. I was asleep within minutes.

The sun woke me when it had crossed the sky and now shone through the porthole. I hadn’t intended to sleep, but there was no resisting it. I got up, stretched, and opened the cabin door to allow what little breeze we could get. Dorsal sat outside the cabin and nodded at me. I saluted back.

Jane was breathing steadily, but sweat poured from her, soaking her hair and the bedclothes. I removed the blood-soaked bandage on her leg; the wound was now closed, but the scab was fragile, like the first ice on a pond. I decided to let it air out a little before I rebandaged it.

She opened her eyes. They were shiny with delirium and didn’t focus on anything. “Miles?”

“No, it’s Eddie.”

“Eddie? Where’s Miles? Is he here?”

“He’s home. Safe.”

“Are you sure?” Her voice was pitiful in its concern. “He’s not a fighter, he gets hurt so easily…”

“Absolutely,” I said. “He’s fine.”

“Good,” she sighed. Her eyes closed again.

After sunset, I lit the lamp, and again her eyes opened. This time they were clear, and they looked right at me. “Have you been here all day?”

“Yeah.”

“How am I?”

“ ‘Bitchy and foul-mouthed’ seems to be the consensus.”

She smiled. “I’m too tired to look. Have I still got my leg?” “Yeah.”

She chuckled weakly. “Skurnick usually doesn’t wait to amputate. I think he keeps score; his bone saw has little notches on the handle.” She raised herself on her elbows, an effort that took all her strength. “Goddamn if it isn’t the same leg I broke back at that conference where we met. Do you remember that?”

“I do.”

“Can I have a drink of water?”

I found the jug and tipped it up for her. She was still very pale, but her fever had broken and the sweat had dried. She asked, “How’s Suhonen?”

“Fine, the last I heard,” I said. Which was true. Like Jane, he’d either live or die based on his own innate toughness.

She lay back. “Who was that boy that was in here?”

“His name’s Dorsal.”

“Is he the cabin boy?”

I nodded. “But he thinks he’s the captain.”

“And the little girl?”

“I think you might have been dreaming her. There’s no little girls on board.”

She laughed, weak but unmistakably Jane. “That figures. Not sexy young men, just a strange little girl.” She smiled and lay back. “At least it wasn’t the handmaiden again.”

I remembered Clift’s drunken assertions. “You dream about her a lot?”

She nodded. “Don’t you dream about your failures?”

“I used to. Talking to Liz about it has helped, believe it or not. You ever talk to Miles?”

She snorted weakly. “What do you think?”

“You want to talk to me?”

She thought for so long, I worried she’d passed out with her eyes open. Then she said, “Close the door.”

I did so and sat on the floor opposite her bunk.

She said, “You were a mercenary before you became a sword jockey, right? What made you change jobs?”

I didn’t want to get into detail about the whore house massacre that left me the only survivor, with no idea who’d killed everyone else or why. It made me take a long look at myself and the life I’d chosen. “I saw who I’d become and didn’t like it.”

She nodded. “Me, too. I was a pirate, and a really good one. My crew made tons of money. Then one day we captured a ship with some noblewoman on board. She wouldn’t tell me where her jewels were hidden. I told her I’d kill her if she didn’t cooperate, but she was stubborn. That snotty kind of stubborn, you know? When I threatened to torture her, one of her handmaidens jumped to her defense. So I snapped the girl’s spine across my knee.”

I knew where this was going. I’d suspected something like this ever since I met Jane. “Did the noblewoman change her mind?”

She laughed, weak and without humor. “No. She didn’t think any more of the girl than I did. Except after a while, I couldn’t get the girl out of my mind. The look on her face, the terror…” Big tears welled in her eyes, but her voice remained steady. “Sometimes we have to be ruthless, you know? Show no mercy. But I killed that girl for all the wrong reasons, primarily just because I could. For the hell of it. I was fucking showing off.” She wiped her eyes. “I didn’t like myself much after that. I became a pirate hunter because I thought I could help balance the scales for that girl’s life, you know? But they don’t ever balance, do they? The past never goes away.”

“No,” I agreed.

“So I became a sword jockey. I make my own rules, decide who and how to help, and choose what lines to cross and why. No ship’s crew to satisfy, no Anti-Freebootery Guild to boss me around.”

I took her hand. It was as big as mine, and callused around the many rings.

She looked up at me. “Don’t you get mushy on me, LaCrosse.”

I didn’t pull my hand away. “Stop telling sob stories, then.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Must be the blood loss talking. Gets me all light-headed.”

I squeezed her hand. “I think you’ll be all right.”

She yawned and stretched. “Mind if I go to sleep?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Not a damn bit,” she slurred, and in moments she was out.

She slept until Clift relieved me at midnight. I passed Dorsal on my way to the deck, lurking in the shadows by the ladder, and he nodded sagely. I wondered if he’d overheard Jane’s story.

A very light breeze blew across the deck, and the moon illuminated the monster’s ship. I got a drink of rum, found a spot to sit, and sipped it gratefully. My involuntary nap that afternoon had thrown me off, and now I was wide awake.

I spotted Duncan Tew trying to concentrate on unwinding and de-kinking the grapple line again, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the job. Instead he kept glancing at the other ship, watching for any change.

I sat down beside him. “Weird to think what’s out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said without looking at me.

“You know, you did a great job. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it without you.”

“I pissed my pants,” he said, eyes downcast. “When it tried to grab me out of the boat.”

“I don’t think anyone noticed. And you still did the job. Hell, I was scared to death, too.”

“Then why didn’t you piss your pants?” he demanded bitterly.

“Because I have more experience being scared like that.”

“Is that all it takes? Experience?”

He said it sarcastically, but I answered him with the truth. “Yeah.”

He snorted as if he didn’t believe me.

I asked, “Did you ever hear the story of the colo nel’s red shirt?”

He shook his head.

“There was this colo nel in the army of his kingdom, it doesn’t matter who or where. Whenever he’d be about to go into battle, he’d say, ‘Fetch my red shirt.’ No one knew why, until one day a lowly private worked up the nerve to ask. Do you know what the colo nel said?”

He shook his head again.

“He said, ‘If I’m hurt, the bloodstains won’t show on a red shirt. My men will think I’m invincible, and follow me into hell if I want them to.’ ”

Duncan smiled. “Clever.”

“Yeah, until the day his army had to fight one five times larger. You know what he said then? ‘Fetch me my brown pants.’ ”

Duncan laughed for a long time. At last he settled down, worked silently for a while, then said, “You think my father is behind that ship and the monster?”

“I hope not, for your sake.”

“I mean, being a pirate is one thing. But this is… so fucking cowardly. Letting a monster do all the dirty work.”

“Can’t argue with your take on it.”

He didn’t look at me. “Part of me hopes he is behind it. That way I can hate him with a clear conscience.”

I put a hand on his arm. “Just wait until you know for sure.”

He shrug-nodded the way some kids do. He was still half kid, despite being a father. He was struggling toward maturity all on his own, with no template to go by.

Seaton came on deck and blew his whistle. “Captain wants everyone here, now,” he bellowed. “All hands on deck!”

The crew quickly gathered below the quarterdeck. Clift stood up there with his hands on his hips, looking over at the nameless ship outlined by moonlight. When there was reasonable quiet, he said, “Men, we narrowly avoided the same fate that befell those ghost ships we encountered. But whoever set that trap doesn’t yet know that. So we’re going to disguise ourselves as a ghost ship and wait to see who comes to salvage us.

“We don’t know how long it’ll take. There’s no way for the villain to know his monster has snagged a victim, so he probably comes around on a regular schedule. We have to lie low and play dead, possibly for days. Maybe weeks. That means no one on deck during the day, no lights at night. We shift the weight so that the ship lists a little. I want some cut lines and spare canvas draped over the side, like they’ve fallen from disrepair. And here’s the hard part.”

He paused for effect. “We have to be ready to fight as soon as they appear. No matter how much time it takes. I’m asking a lot of your patience, and your courage, and your strength of character. But I promise you, the fight will be worth it. The Guild will reward us handsomely for capturing the bastards behind this. And we get the satisfaction of doing what no other pirate hunter has been able to do. Songs about the Red Cow will be sung in every tavern along every coast. What say you?”

A roar that might’ve disturbed the exhausted sea monster rose, along with fists and brandished weapons.

Clift smiled. “Aye, lads, that’s the spirit. Now let’s get the Cow ready for her date, eh?”

Another cheer rose from the men. Clift came down and walked among them, thanking and encouraging them individually. He knew how to command, that’s for sure. At last he reached me, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “I’d like to speak to you a moment.”

“Sure.”

He pulled me aside but stayed within view, if not earshot, of the men. “I left Skurnick with Jane. Her fever’s gone, and she’s sleeping normally. It looks good for her.”

“And Suhonen?”

“We don’t know yet.” He paused. “When the moment comes, when the carrion crabs come around to see what they’ve caught, I’d like you to lead the attack.”

“Me? I’m just a passenger.”

“False modesty is still a falsehood, Mr. LaCrosse. You’re also the man who got away from that sea monster with barely a scratch, as well as rescuing both our best fighter and my former captain. I know how good they are. You seem to be better.”

“Just luckier.”

He leaned close. “I’m serious. The men know what you did. If you don’t lead them, they’ll assume it’s because you think we can’t win, and then I’ve lost them. I need you.”

I glanced past him at the crew. All of them watched with varying degrees of discretion. I’d fought on ships before, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with it, but at the same time, I barely knew these men and, except for Suhonen, I’d seen little to impress me. If we spent our days cowering belowdecks, we’d have no chance to practice and drill so I could get to know them better, either. We were all on this ship together, though, and that meant I had a vested interest in how the battle came out. “Okay,” I said. “But I want a third of my money back.”

He nodded. “A man deserves a fair pay for a job. But only if we win.”

I grinned, the kind of sideways grimace that has nothing to do with humor. “If we don’t, Captain Clift, poverty will be the least of my problems.”