“Dinner is in five minutes, so it’ll have to do.” A string of slurred orders flew from his mouth as final preparations began. The captain had said dinner didn’t have to be anything spectacular, but Randolph made it clear that if I set out the wrong forks, I’d be dumped with today’s space trash. If this wasn’t considered spectacular, then I feared the day when spectacular was expected.
When he finished lecturing about proper place setting, I sank into a chair just as the hallway door opened. In came a youngish man in a black suit, a wool overcoat, and a red, silk scarf, his blond hair slicked back behind his ears. This groomed, and kind of attractive man didn’t fit inside this drab titanium room with the voluptuous Esmeralda smirking at him. He belonged on a ship like the Nebulous with its million dollar views and luxury tablecloths.
He circled around the entire table while tapping the wall with his index finger. An imperfection on the wall, one of Esmerelda’s nipples, the crack between the double doors, the telecom. Tap, tap, tap, all before folding into one of the chairs closest to the door he’d just entered, completely ignoring me.
Then he finally looked up, his expression empty. “I don’t know you.”
I shook my head in agreement. I’d seen that vacuous look before, and that was reason number twenty-two why I didn’t have a Mind-I. Did this guy even know where he was? And what was with all the tapping?
He placed both manicured hands on the table and went back to whatever he was doing on his Mind-I.
Captain Glenn came in soon after, much more relaxed this time, though still exhausted-looking. “Yes, that seems about right, Daryl. We can check on them again after dinner.” He held his hands out and flashed me a bright grin. “Dinner! It smells amazing. What are we having?”
Randolph poked his head from behind the double doors. “Jamessss,” he hissed and curled a finger at me.
He must have finished that flask because the lack of alcohol was dulling his spirits dark like Satan’s again.
“Um, it’s a surprise,” I told the captain and popped up before Randolph forked his own tongue.
He shoved a piping hot plate of bread into my arms, twirled me around by the elbow, and pushed me through the double doors again.
A surge of heat that had nothing to do with the bread boiled through my blood. I threw the plate on the table and tried to shake the burn from my fingers. But then I remembered that I needed to hide my girly hands so I shoved them into my pockets and marched into the kitchen again.
Randolph carried the pan of stew toward the door with trembling hands. I took the handles from him and slammed it back on the stove.
“You need to drink more of this.” I flashed a hand into his vest and shook the contents of his flask under his nose. Except he’d drank it all already. I pitched it onto the stove where it clanged against the pan. “Dinner doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be edible, and it will be unless you burn my fingers off. Calm. Down.”
“But someone will notice the stew meat is undercooked, the vegetables just seconds past raw, the shortbread burnt,” he whispered, his eyes watering. “I can’t get fired again.”
I flexed my burnt fingertips, still in my pockets, with a sigh. At least they weren’t frozen like the rest of me. “Blame everything that’s wrong on your new apprentice. Tell everyone I skipped apprentice school since it’s the truth, but tell them I’ll do better next time. Just don’t freak out again.”
He nodded at the flask as he looked at it longingly. “Get the stew in the bowls. I’ll be out in a minute.”
The tips of my fingers were as bright as heatherberries. I picked up the pan by the handles and sawed my teeth across my lip at the stinging pain. The food couldn’t be that bad because it really did smell amazing. If Randolph was fired, then I’d have to find another ride to deep space and Ellison, and how long would that take? Randolph couldn’t get fired. Besides, Captain Glenn seemed like too reasonable a man to fire someone on their first day. I didn’t see any toes around his neck.
As I nudged the handles into my palms so my fingers wouldn’t have to touch anything, I kicked open the double doors just as the hallway door opened. Another man stood there, charging the entire dining room with a sweep of his gaze. When he pinned me under it, I froze. One blue eye held mine. His other one was several shades lighter, like wispy clouds laced over the sky. Above it, a deep scar cut down his eyebrow and his cheek to his jaw.
“Smells good in here,” he said and sauntered to a chair close to me in cowboy boots that clipped the metal flooring. Frayed jeans dragged stray threads behind him. He scraped the wooden legs of the chair backward, and when he turned, my gaze instinctively travelled upward to a backside I’d already committed to the man candy section of my memory.
That guy, the one I’d seen arguing in the Waiting Room, was here, and his front side was just as lickety-lick as the back. Delicious. Even the scars couldn’t mar that face. His muscles bulged under a tight, white thermal as he took off his brown coat and draped it over the chair. He shook a head full of messy blond hair out of his eyes, his gaze fixed on the empty plate in front of him while he sat.
At the sound of someone clearing their throat, I snapped out of my trance and threw myself into stew-serving overdrive, a blush heating my cheeks. I needed to act like a boy, not some sex-starved school girl, but no amount of inner-scolding could slow the rush of my heart.
It seemed logical that the captain should get his food first, though I had no clue if I was right. I never paid attention to proper serving etiquette on the Nebulous.
When I’d managed to fill Captain Glenn’s bowl without slopping any in his lap, I moved to the chair to his right, just inside the door that led to the hallway. A man with wildly untidy hair, a long face, and crooked teeth sat there, his gaze aimed at Esmerelda’s poster.
“Esmerelda, you devious vixen, you,” he said. “Didja miss me?”
“I doubt it, Nesbit,” said the man with the multi-colored eyes. “But I’m sure the paper she’s on missed your globby splooge streaking down her tits.”
A wave of disgust jerked my serving hand, and a potato popped out of the spoon and landed on the table with a wet splat. Did he seriously just say that in front of everyone? At the dinner table of all places? Even Smixton students knew how to rein it in every once in a while. I scooped the potato back up and, not sure what to do with it, put it back in the crooked tooth guy’s bowl. Nesbit, was that his name?
“Not in front of the boy,” Captain Glenn warned, unfolding his napkin.
“Yeah, Mase,” Nesbit said.
“What? How else do you think that poster has hung on the wall so long?”
Mase, kind of like mace, the spiked iron weapon in Earth’s medieval times. I was pretty sure I could remember that.
Next to Nesbit sat the pristine man who was still absorbed in his Mind-I, then at the end across from the captain sat Mase, his watchful gaze pointed at me. The weight of it quavered my stomach. Could he see me, the real me, hidden behind this façade of a fourteen-year-old boy?
Or maybe it was my hands. They were right out in the open, but it was too late to hide them. I held my breath as I spooned stew into his bowl because the force of his eyes pressed on my chest like an accusatory finger. Just breathing felt like a crime around him. I allowed myself the smallest of inhales after I served Randolph, who still hadn’t come out of the kitchen, and sat down.
Randolph finally burst into the dining room carrying a bottle of wine, his cheeks rosier than they’d been five minutes before. I’d bet a couple frozen toes this bottle wasn’t the only one he’d found.
He put the wine in the center of the table, and with a dramatic sweep of his hand, said, “Savory red duck stew with a delicately spiced sauce, potatoes, caramelized onions, and the sweetest of carrots. A crisped loaf of bread on the side and a bottle of red wine to compliment your taste buds.” His mouth slid into the first relaxed smile I’d ever seen on him. “But save room for dessert. Enjoy.”
Ra
ucous applause and the banging of cutlery pulled a beaming flush from the tips of his ears to his bulbous nose. He caught my eye, and I couldn’t help but smile. After a description like that, who cared what the food actually tasted like?
Everyone shoveled food into their mouths with the speed and carelessness of starving dogs. Randolph had passed the wine around the table, and everyone but Mase filled his glass.
“I only drink milk,” he said to no one in particular. “A whole pitcher of it.”
Randolph dabbed his napkin over his mouth and stood. “And milk you shall have. Anyone else need anything?” When no one said a word, he shot through the double doors. I could’ve guessed the reason he didn’t have me get it.
“You’ll have to forgive our table manners,” Captain Glenn said, giving Mase a pointed look. “Some of us think we were born in a barn. Let’s not forget to be civilized so we don’t scare off our new chefs.”
So what had happened to the old one? Why had they quit so suddenly? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare draw more attention to myself than I already had.
The captain set his fork down just as Randolph came back and set an empty glass and an entire pitcher of milk in front of Mase.
“You’ll have to forgive me, too, for my lack of manners,” the captain said. “I was so excited about the food, I didn’t introduce everyone. Randolph and James, meet the entire crew. Doctor Daryl, who keeps himself entertained when no one is sick or hurt by writing for medical journals. What’s the one you’re writing now?”
The man with the red scarf blinked. “Perioperative allogeneic blood transplantation.”
“Yes, that. And Mason Ryan, the best pilot in any solar system I’ve ever been to, and Nesbit, our genius engineer.”
Nesbit pushed out a high-pitched giggle between his crooked teeth along with a half-chewed chunk of duck.
“Crew,” Captain Glenn continued, “meet our newest chef and his apprentice who have both outdone themselves tonight, Randolph and James.”
“Hear, hear,” Nesbit said and emitted another nasally cackle of laughter.
“To Randolph.” Mase raised his glass of milk above the center of the table and cocked an eyebrow at me. “And James.”
Was it me or did he give a hint of a question mark at the end of my pseudonym? I kept my eyes averted from his penetrating stare as we all raised our glasses and smashed them together with loud clinks. But I couldn’t keep my gaze from straying to his side of the table and his bouncing Adam’s apple as he finished off his entire glass of milk and filled it with more. Rusted balls, it took a lot of milk to make that man go.
“But wait,” Nesbit said, wiping the drops of wine from his lips with the back of his hand. “You’re the pilot, right Mase? So if you’re here…”
The captain groaned. “Nesbit…”
“If you’re here…” Nesbit said again. He raked both hands through his hair, spiking it into wild tufts, and rocked back and forth in his chair like he was having some kind of fit. “Then who’s flying the ship?”
Mase ran a hand down his face then leaned his forearm on the table toward Nesbit, the set of his jaw like steel. “It wasn’t fucking funny the first hundred times, Nesbit.”
Oh my Feozva. Was that one of the reasons why deep space was considered so dangerous—because it made you psycho? I shifted in my chair and let my gaze roam over their faces for clues of just how far gone they were.
A deep blue pocketed all their eyes, like they hadn’t slept in days, weeks even. Maybe they were all just sleep-deprived, which would make anyone a little nuts. Small crews such as this probably had to stay awake all hours to make sure the ship didn’t drop out of the sky.
“Captain,” Mase started, twisting the bottom of his second empty glass in half-circles, “the light at the end of the hallway broke again.”
The atmosphere in the dining room seemed to stiffen, as did fists and shoulders from the other three crew members. Even Doctor Daryl swallowed thickly, and as he adjusted his scarf around his neck, he glanced over his shoulder at the hallway door.
Again? So the light had broken before.
The thought of the scream I hadn’t heard earlier shivered up my back. Maybe that hadn’t been the engine protesting. Had it been Mase? But no amount of imagining it could solidify that picture in my brain. He didn’t seem like the type who screamed at falling lights. What could possibly make a grown man who reduced my stomach muscles to mercury with one look scream like that?
The captain pushed his bowl of stew away. “Will you fix it, Nesbit?”
Nesbit gave a curt nod, with no sign of an upheaval of giggles.
Randolph looked just as perplexed as I felt at the sudden shift in mood. “Who’s ready for dessert?” he asked with a clap of his hands.
Hands shot up, lifting corners of mouths and the mood along with them.
“Okay, then. James?” Randolph stood.
I did too and followed him into the kitchen.
He spun around as soon as the double doors flapped closed behind us, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear. “Did you hear ‘em? They loved it!” His words slurred through a haze of wine breath.
“Yes, I heard. You did great. Just…keep drinking, I guess.” Whatever made him happy. And tolerable.
He guzzled from an open bottle of wine next to the stove then stumbled toward the small table in the middle of the kitchen. “We’ll cut off the bottom of the shortbread, and no one’ll be the wiser.” With a spatula and a knife, he made quick work of slicing around the burnt edges, easing the cake out, and flipping it over to carve the black off the top that used to be the bottom. “Ta-da!”
No doubt about it—I liked Randolph a hell of a lot better when he was drunk.
After he turned the cake over gain, he showed me how to slice it into perfect squares, dollop it with the whipped cream, and arrange the heatherberries into a beautiful rose pattern on top. It almost hurt to think about something so pretty about to get mauled, but we carried it out on little plates anyway.
“May I present to you James’s first heatherberry shortcake,” Randolph said, serving the captain first.
“It looks like heaven on a plate, James,” Captain Glenn said.
“My favorite,” Mase said as I leaned over to set a plate in front of him. His breath caught my earlobe, and I jerked back at the unexpected warmth. “James.” He said my bogus name like an afterthought, but I wondered if in some way he was making fun of me. He knew. He had to know.
I turned away and risked a glance down my front to make sure everything was still bound up tight. All the bumps there were just the result of an ill-fitting sweatshirt, though. Maybe his cloudy eye had been modified for x-ray vision. That idea stirred heated possibilities to every corner of my brain. I forced myself to focus or I’d have to scoop the puddle that used to be my panties off the floor.
Once everyone was served, I settled back into my seat next to Randolph and slid my fork through the top of my dessert. Moans from the crew after their first bites reminded me of Moon and our dorm room. Sex and food. I was beginning to think she was right about men.
My first bite included an unexpected crunch, and I swallowed back a grin. I won the egg shell prize.
Everyone had already devoured their dessert. Everyone except Mase. His dessert was only half-finished like mine, with his odd pair of eyes closed and his head thrown back in complete bliss. It looked like he was caught in some sort of sexual trance. I squirmed in my seat and crossed my legs to absorb the electrical charges that kept melting into my lower belly.
“Tastes like summer. Like picnics at midnight and water balloon attacks,” he said. Then his laugh danced across the table, not crazy like Nesbit’s, but soft and deep.
All of it caught me off guard. My iron melting, chemistry experiments, and research papers never elicited moans of pleasure or made anyone so emotive, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do or say to that.
Captain Glenn looked at his watch, then out of the corner of his e
ye toward the hallway door. “It’s after seven o’clock.”
The doctor flicked his gaze up from his dessert. “Should we—?”
“No,” the rest of the crew answered in unison.
“What are you goin’ on about?” Randolph asked, his eyes half-closed.
The captain searched for an answer in the swirl of a knothole with his fingertip, but settled on a shake of his head. Everyone else shuffled their feet or gave nervous glances over their shoulders at the hallway door. Quiet gripped the room in an iron fist.
Pieces clicked together in my head, faster and faster until the contents of my stomach lurched. I gripped the underside of my chair and buried my fingernails into the wood to keep myself from hurling myself off this ship.
They didn’t have to tell me what they were talking about. I knew.
Something lurked outside that door, something that chased these grown men into sleepless nights, something that made them run screaming. I knew because all their faces reflected the nightmares I’d witnessed as a child. I felt it in the bone-deep chill inside this ship that never went away, in their nervous glances, in the importance of certain times of the day. I knew, without a doubt, that something dark haunted this ship.
And it was too late to jump off.
Chapter 6
I spent the entire night wondering what to do. I couldn’t just hitch a ride on the next spaceship headed for deep space and Ellison, but I couldn’t stay on a haunted ship either.If I demanded to be dropped off on the nearest planet, I risked being caught by the police. Then Ellison would be left in the incapable hands of the Ringers, who would rather think she turned traitor and sailed rather than investigate why her telecom was switched off.
As long as I had my iron, I’d be safer here. If I didn’t swallow any and let it rest on my tongue, it would last longer.
Besides, Moon had said the Vicio was heading in the same direction as Ellison. If I somehow got lucky for once, maybe we’d pass right by her ship, and I could see if there was any sort of structural damage to it or if we could pick up a life sign from inside. Then I would at least know something.
Sail (Haunted Stars Book 1) Page 6