The air above rumbled, and something crashed behind us. The vague shape of an old titanium transport ship smashed into the opening of the ice-packed tunnel to cave it in. Vicio was stenciled across its sides in faded red lettering, off-center since that wasn’t its true name. Still, it was such a welcoming sight, I squeezed the holy shit out of Ellison’s hand as we rushed toward safety. Toward titanium, not iron.
But something else moved in the sky, something massive and roiling. A cloud of black smoke churned toward us. Billions and billions of ghosts.
Ellison must’ve read my face because she squeezed me to her.
I fished through my pockets with numb fingers for the piece of iron Josh had given me. When I finally found it and threw it in my mouth, it dissolved instantly. That was it. I couldn’t ward the ghosts off, and even if I allowed some in, I had nothing left to force them through me to the other side. I had nothing.
“They’re dying,” Ellison said shrilly. Her wide panicked gaze pinned to mine, she searched underneath the seat and between the cushions. “I don’t see a black bag!”
The sky sagged down toward us with the weight of the ghosts clinging to it. There were too many, and we needed to escape before the Saelis or humans killed us. There wasn’t time to cross them all over, but they drifted toward me anyway. Without iron, they would find me. And massacre me.
More bullets whizzed over our heads, but I barely registered anything other than the ghosts drifting closer. There were too many. I huffed out a breath while their combined darkness crushed the remaining air from my lungs.
“Mase, do you know where it is?” Ellison screamed.
“I know he left it in here,” he yelled. “It must have shifted.”
She pressed her cheek to the back of Mase’s seat and thrust both hands beneath it again. That time, she grasped a black bag.
The ghosts’ smoky forms watched me watch them, their long fingers reaching toward me. A ghost flung its dark smoke through the car. Another one followed. And then they were all around me, pulling, tearing, shrieking my name, demanding entrance into my body all at once.
I screamed. A hulking male ghost solidified between Ellison and me in the back seat and whirled around to fix me with depthless black eyes. It flashed its arms out to yank my jaw open. One hand clawed at my tongue while it brought its face closer to mine. Chunks of hair and flesh peeled away in the wind to reveal shiny red muscle.
“Let me in,” the ghost roared.
I bit down hard on the ghost’s fingers before they wormed down my throat and pushed at it with all my strength. Pieces of muscle faded away to bone, then the rest of it dissipated through the air
Ellison stabbed a needle into my arm while another ghost took the old one’s place above me. It lifted me from the car while others swirled around us for their turn.
Then it tossed me out. I landed with a crash that whooshed the air from my lungs. Cold, hard ice lanced pain up and down my back.
“Absidy!” someone shouted, but it sounded so far away over the din pounding at my head.
Tires slid past me as the car skidded to a stop. Frigid air stung my eyes. A needle poked from a vein in my arm and bent sideways. I stared down the length of my arm, and underneath the hooked needle, spirits boiled like thick shadows several yards away.
Bullets from the cars behind us whizzed past my ears, and behind them, Saelis wailed. Coming closer. The rest of the cars stirred up a whirlwind of black dust that fused with the shadowy ghosts.
A girl, maybe about fifteen, appeared over me and straddled my hips. Her long blonde hair twisted like tentacles around her black eyes. Skin slid down her face and dripped down her open mouth. She leaned over and shrieked into my face. Her piercing screams raked nails up my neck, and I couldn’t draw a deep enough inhale to scream right back. Even if I somehow survived her, there were thousands more that could kill me.
A tangy cube of iron slipped into my mouth, and she instantly vanished. Trembling hands plucked the needle from my arm.
“Get up, Abs!” Ellison begged.
The iron wasn’t dissolving. Its tart, sweet flavor surged a powerful energy through my body and extended outward. While some of the approaching men with guns watched with frightened gazes, the ghosts shrank back behind them.
I had my iron shield back. Relieved breath filled my lungs. My head spinning, I posted my arms underneath me, and Ellison helped haul me to my feet. But as she did, the black bag slipped from her hands. Little glass vials and iron cubes slid across the ice in all directions.
I glanced behind me at the waiting entryway of the Vicio and tugged at Ellison’s shoulder. “We have to go.”
She yanked out of my grip and sank to her knees. “This is what I came here for!”
Several guns aimed at us, but Mase blocked us from the wall of black-smocked men, his gun leveled at them in a steady hand. Shots rang out, and two of them dropped to the ground, their guns still curling smoke. I blinked over at Mase, whose face swam with a menacing kind of purpose.
Two Saelis had worked their way free of the heaping rubble by the tunnel and raced toward us, rolling their ferocious growls in front of them.
“Make a move, lizard lovers,” Mase shouted while he backed into us.
Ellison shoveled the last of the vials inside the black bag, then she wrapped a hand around my waist to support me. Blood poured down my front. Something rattled inside my lungs with every breath and sounded like I’d swallowed loose rocks, but it didn’t matter. I had my sister back.
Mase herded us onto the ship’s ramp and under the first door in the entryway. Claws screeched over metal behind us. One of the Saelis.
A choked cry tumbled from my mouth.
Ellison gasped.
Mase dragged us forward and shot over his shoulder at the same time, but I couldn’t go nearly as fast as we needed to. The feverish click of claws hurtled toward our backs.
Click. Click. Mase’s gun was empty.
Almost to the second door. I cried out when Ellison touched my side to get a better grip on my waist. Her steps hesitated, but we didn’t have time for that. I gritted my teeth and shoved us on. We were almost through. Almost.
The Saelis’s claws bit into my heels. Its teeth snapped at the back of my neck, then wrenched me backward.
Time slowed. I was falling. Mase and Ellison sailed through the ghost of Doctor Daryl and under the second entryway door without me. Daryl stood outside it, too, his face and neck swollen purple, while hovering over the button that would close it. Before I could reach safety. He poltergeisted the gun out of Mase’s hand. It whirled through the air and tapped the button.
The Saelis toppled me backward onto the titanium floor with a crushing blow that shocked all the air from my damaged lungs.
The door began to close. Ellison whirled around to stare in horror. Mase reached for me a split second before the door slammed closed in front of them.
The Saelis pressed down on top of me, squeezing more blood from my wounds, and swiped at me with its claws.
I tried to scream, but there wasn’t enough air.
Doctor Daryl pushed his translucent form through the closed door and paced the length of one wall, tapping, a malicious glare to his glowing green eyes.
The first entryway door closed behind me. Trapping me with a Saelis and a demented ghost.
Chapter 24
“Absidy!” Ellison shouted.
“No!” Mase’s cry ended when he threw himself against the door again and again. “Captain, open the entryway door right now!”
I wanted to call out to them, but I couldn’t breathe let alone move. The Saelis’s green-rimmed eyes locked onto mine. It heaved a low guttural growl that blew putrid breath into my face. It reared back with two of its arms, and I rolled out from underneath it before it plunged them into my skull.
The ship’s engines wound down but not fast enough. Mase punctuated his calls for the captain to hurry with his fists on the door. Ellison simply wailed the word please
over and over.
Doctor Daryl rounded to the wall behind me. Tap. Tap.
I backed into the first entryway door, away from the advancing Saelis, and hoped the world didn’t fade to black before I could reach a hand into my pocket.
Because this would not happen. Not today and not ever. I would die of old age with Mase and Ellison at my side, not a pissed off ghost and a Saelis. I let that thought course through my veins and fight off the pain that threatened to pull my head into unconsciousness.
I gripped the ice pick as tight as I could, then lunged at the Saelis.
It jerked back with a rough howl. I’d punctured it through the eye. I swung my arm again and sank the pick into the other. The Saelis spasmed and twitched backward, blood streaming from its eyes, and sagged against a side wall.
“Just hang on!” Mase yelled. “Hang on!”
Doctor Daryl circled around to the final wall, then he’d likely charge straight at me. A growl sounded from between the Saelis’s razor teeth as it blindly stumbled toward me. Blood had settled into the cracks between its black scales along its snout, making it look even more malicious than before. More blood gushed from gunshots in two of its arms and one in its shoulder. It was hurt enough to be pissed off, but maybe I’d bought myself time to take care of the doctor.
The ship’s engines stuttered to a stop.
Plucking the iron from my tongue, I sidestepped in front of Daryl who’d nearly finished his tapping. “Go inside,” I said.
His mouth yawned open in a deafening scream as his body morphed into dark smoke. I inhaled him, my gaze pointed at the Saelis. Burning spikes stabbed down my throat. Memories flashed through my head. A deep, penetrating hunger for my blood. Saelis Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Daryl, alone, clutching his medical degree.
Before I could lift my fist to my mouth, black movement slammed into me and knocked the iron to the floor. I tried to breathe, I tried to move, but the force on top of me was too much. Teeth ripped into my neck. Claws from every direction shredded through my clothes and into my skin.
Doctor Daryl wormed farther into me to take root. Everything inside me thrust aside to make room for his spirit. He was taking over. He was killing me from the inside out, while the Saelis attacked from the outside in.
“I’ll slurp it from your insides,” a voice that wasn’t my own growled between my clenched teeth.
Fingers crushed around my heart. The titanium entryway began to melt into darkness, but if I let it take me, I’d be finished. But I wasn’t finished. I wanted so desperately to begin this new life without fear because it was a life worth living. Truly living and not hiding. Not dying.
The pain focused me, made me sharper and more in control of my body. I clenched the ice pick and stabbed the Saelis between its blinded eyes. Its endless slicing at my body turned into convulsions, its heavy weight sealing me underneath it.
Tap, tap, tap. Doctor Daryl’s Mind-I clicked on in his memories with the serial number 1215005 flashing on the bottom of its screen.
My body bucked. My arms and legs flailed while my heart echoed between my ears in faltering beats. The tip of my finger grazed the iron piece almost within arm’s reach. So close.
The pounding and shouting outside the door faded. Ellison and Mase. So close.
With what I was sure would be my last breath, my fingers brushed iron again. I gripped it tight and dropped it into my mouth. A dying moan wailed from somewhere deep inside me. My heartbeat surged to life, and my next breath washed the pain from my body. It was mine again. Damaged and exhausted, but mine.
With hisses of pain, I squirmed out from underneath the Saelis just as the door swished open.
Maybe Ellison and Mase had been preparing for what they might see on the other side because they rushed forward with both their mouths set in firm lines of determination. But when their gazes settled first on me and the bloodied and tattered state I was in, then on the dead Saelis, their steps wavered.
“Oh,” Ellison rushed at me again, a mess of emotions playing over her face.
All the color drained from Mase when he moved to my side. His hands hovered over my arms, my neck, my face as if he didn’t know which gash to compress first.
I pointed to the twitching Saelis without looking at it. “That one needs to be dumped off this ship if it goes all…ghosty.” I swallowed on the word, savoring the fact that I couldn’t taste the fear I usually associated with it.
Captain Glenn turned the corner, gazing at Mase and Ellison, before his dark eyes fixed on me with a look that reminded me so much of Pop. “I’ll take care of it.”
I nodded, and instead of succumbing to the darkness of death, I submitted to my own darkness where strong arms were sure to catch me and never let me go.
Chapter 25
The voices inside my head wouldn’t shut up. They were like a sugared up gnat, one in each ear, spinning donuts inside the canal. They sounded vaguely familiar, so maybe I knew these gnats from somewhere. Hello gnat who can talk. Can you please be quiet and stop touching me?
Because there was that, too, enough prodding and poking to shoot pain to every nerve ending in my body. The voices stopped then, and a flood of melted chocolate through my veins washed everything away.
A gnawing in my gut wouldn’t leave no matter what, though, and finally it sharpened so much, I cracked open an eye. Bright light blinded me, and I let out a pained whimper.
“Absidy.” Not a gnat this time. Ellison.
I opened both eyes, blinking at the intense glow of the room.
“Hey,” she whispered and squeezed my hand. “How do you feel?” She sat next to me on a stool, the harsh light seeping all the bronze from her skin so that it matched the white wall behind her. She’d swept her dark hair off her face and into a loose braid that tumbled over one shoulder, like how she wore it aboard the Nebulous when she was working. But she didn’t have on her doctor’s coat, just a pair of baggy tan pants and an extra-large smock that swallowed her petite frame whole.
I flicked my tongue over dry lips so I could speak. “Hungry.”
She nodded. “Let’s start with water first, okay?” She slipped her other hand under my back and pushed until I sat upright.
My ribs felt stiff, but there wasn’t too much pain. The hand not clasped in Ellison’s looked severely bruised, but nothing felt broken. I didn’t know what the rest of me looked like under all my blankets, but I felt whole again. Still a bit spaced out, but that was kind of how I felt every day.
Ellison put her face close to mine with lifted brows. “Okay?”
“Yeah.”
She let go of my hand and backed away, keeping a close watch on me while she filled a cup with water at the sink along the wall. Always fiercely protective, my sister.
I sat on one of the padded gurneys in the infirmary, and it looked like Ellison had completely taken over for Doctor Daryl. She’d cleaned up, and by that I meant that the room had been organized for the highest efficiency and scrubbed to a spotless perfection. All traces of Doctor Daryl’s blood and hair caught in the broken glass in the door were gone. When and if Ellison released me out of here, she’d probably make me glue cotton balls to the bottom of my feet before I stepped on the floor.
“Nice and slow,” she said, tipping the cup toward my mouth.
Cool water slid down my parched throat, and it tasted like the best thing ever. I didn’t down it like I wanted to, though, because I’d been here before, in this exact same situation with Ellison telling me that ‘Slow and steady gets all the healing done.’
My stomach grumbled for something more substantial, but I put a hand on it to silence it. “How long have I been out?”
“Forty-seven hours, six minutes, and thirteen seconds.”
I sighed, letting my shoulders sag a little. There was so much to do, people I needed to see, so much to talk about, and I’d lost two whole days? I slid my feet off the gurney, but Ellison’s hands flashed out and shoved them back.
“
Don’t you dare,” she said, her voice a sharp warning.
“Ellison, I—”
“No. You need to heal. You know that, Abs. Then we’ll think and process and plan what’s next.”
I blinked. “We?”
“Do you think I can just waltz back onto the Nebulous like nothing has happened? When people think I’ve turned traitor to the human race so I could work for the Saelis? And you, a known fugitive and suspected murderer with a bounty on your head? Were you just going to go back to Mayvel?” She squeezed my toes with a warm hand while avoiding my eyes. “We. Us. You know that’s how it’s always been.”
I stared down into my cup, at the drops of water clinging to the edges, and tipped it so the beads would absorb themselves into the rest. “What about Pop?” I asked, my heart heavy.
“I’ll get word to him somehow. He’ll understand.” She sank onto her stool and gave a brief smile that didn’t fool me for a second. She didn’t know if he would or not. How could he when both his daughters were sailing around space like a couple…sailors? Rusted balls, I felt loopy.
“Why did you go to deep space without telling anyone?” I asked. “And don’t dodge around the question either.”
Ellison released my foot and folded her hands in her lap while she chewed her lip. Finally, she said, “For you.”
“You’re going to have to help me connect the dots a little better than that.”
She stood and stepped to the sink again to post her arms on its edge. “The shot I gave you…” she began.
“Yes, I remember…” I prodded.
“It contains a parasite that thrives on solid iron, especially inside a host that consumes iron, like the Saelis. Saelis used to live on a cannonball planet, a planet made completely out of iron. The parasite would worm itself between the female’s sparse scales and make a home inside it.” She glanced at me, I guessed to be sure I hadn’t fallen behind in my fogged state.
Sail (Haunted Stars Book 1) Page 24