He gave a grunt and looked down at himself. And then at her.
She’d hit his sternum. A scratch only; it wouldn’t stop him.
She slashed out again with the knife, this time aiming at his throat. She knew it was a risk. Putting the knife so high up—so close to his hands—gave him the opportunity to block it. But he didn’t expect her to do it and so only glared at her in pain and fury. Ella punctured him from his left ear down across his throat and brought her knees up to kick him away as the blood from the cut fountained out and foamed down his chest.
He gave a groan, his face white, his eyes rolling back in his head, and pitched forward, narrowly missing Ella, who scrambled out of the bed, her heart pounding.
Not waiting to see if she’d killed him, she ran to the door and opened it to peek out. There was no one in sight. The storm was fully lashing the deck now, and clearly even pirates knew when to take shelter.
Mad dogs, Englishmen and me, Ella thought, feeling a little mad herself as she forced herself to ease open the heavy cabin door and slip out. She inched along the side railings. The storm had darkened the day until it was nearly the color of night with no moon.
Over the railings she saw the darkened outline of the beach and the outcroppings of mangrove. The rain stung her arms and face as it pelted her.
Pirates weren’t the only ones who needed shelter, she thought. She glanced back at the open door of the cabin, then ran back, praying her would-be rapist wouldn’t meet her at the door. She pulled the door shut and dropped the bar. At least the alarm wouldn’t be raised any sooner than it needed to be, she thought.
That is, assuming I’m able to get off this boat in one piece.
***
The cut on the little cook’s back was shallow but bloody. Rowan knew for a fact he wasn’t the most knowledgeable surgeon on Die Hard, and Scab’s injury didn’t call for one in any event. The bosun, Albert, as well as Denny, Aesop and half a dozen other sailors were crammed into the kitchen playing cards when Rowan and Ansel arrived below decks. Indigo, the navigator, was already binding up the cook’s wound.
“Doesn’t look like you much need me,” Rowan observed, starting to turn around and head back up to the captain’s cabin.
“Avast, lad,” Ansel said. “There’s talking needing doing.”
Rowan looked at the crew and noticed the players had folded their cards. Likely they hadn’t even been playing.
“Talking about what?”
Aesop stood from his seat and had to stoop to keep from touching the ceiling with his shiny, bald head. He was the only one onboard taller than Rowan. “We all have to agree,” he said. “The vote needs to be…” He searched for the word in the bare rafters of the galley.
“Unanimous?” Rowan said, resting a hip on one of the wooden dining tables.
“Aye,” Aesop said with satisfaction, as if he’d thought of it himself, and sat back down.
“We’re deciding amongst us lot here first,” Ansel said. “We need to be of one mind.”
“We’re all of a mind that Sully is shite!” one of the card players yelled. Rowan didn’t know the man well.
“Aye, the man’s been holding out on us,” Albert said.
“You’re talking about the Dutchman’s treasure?” Rowan asked.
“Aye.”
“How do you know he really had any?”
“Arrr, he had it,” Ansel said. “The look in his eyes? He was trading it for his life, that’s sure. Nobody bluffs that well with ‘is life.”
“Fine. So we need a new captain. Who’s campaigning for the honor?” Rowan asked. He looked from face to face.
Ansel spit on the floor. “Ye ken verra well who,” he said. “Are ye in or no, old lad?”
Rowan was about to speak when he thought, what do I care who’s captain? I’m outta here. Get the lighter and get gone.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m in. Count my vote for the lead candidate with everyone else’s.”
A slash of lightning lit of the sky and Rowan could swear he smelled something frying as a result. The following boom of the thunder shook the rafters in the room. A dish fell off a shelf and broke on the wooden floor. The looks of his shipmates’ faces both startled and amused him. They were fearless when it came to facing down a fully armed man-of-war, but they jumped out of their collective skins over a little thunder and lightning.
Ansel stood up. “That’s good, so it is. But ye’ll not be wanting to go out in this weather. Best stay below and play a few hands.”
Rowan grinned. “Or tell a few stories?”
The men at the table tossed their cards into a pile and began to scoot chairs and benches closer to where Rowan stood. They reminded him of a wide-eyed band of six-year-olds begging for a goodnight story.
Sully wouldn’t be able to make it back to the ship tonight anyway, he reasoned. Not in this storm. The rain beat against the open porthole in the galley and Rowan felt the ship rock beneath his feet. Plenty of time to search the cabin before dawn.
“All right,” he said, finding an empty bench that faced the group. “Do I at least get a drink to stir the juices?”
***
The sea below the boat was black and choppy—it would feel like plunging into the icy void of eternal damnation—but it was either that or stay and wait to be discovered. Ella climbed partway down a rope ladder that hung from the ship’s side and, just as the night sky lit up with a shock of lightning, she jumped the remaining distance, praying the black waters didn’t hide a coral shoal or a dinghy to break her fall.
She hit the water like death arriving in the middle of a celebration. When she felt the cold saltwater rush over her head she kicked hard to reach the surface, feeling her thin leather shoes kick off into the water when she did. The rain slashed her face when she finally broke free and tilted it up, gasping and frantic, to suck in air. So close to the beach the waves had her in its grip and she wondered for one panicked moment if it could be an undertow. The cold was making it difficult for her to move her limbs, and she knew her only hope was to keep moving—if nothing else to try to warm herself—and swim for shore.
One glance back at the black hulk of the pirate ship as it blotted out the ominous sky made her gasp in terror. It was so close she thought it might suck her under its terrible keel. She swam parallel to the shore in case she was in an undertow, and when she felt the waves begin to draw her toward land she let herself go limp with exhaustion and fear.
With a last contraction of the waves she was finally dumped onto the beach, where she lay for several minutes, trembling in the cold and the rain’s onslaught and her own exertions. She grabbed two handfuls of sand in her fists and rested her head on the beach.
I am safe.
She lifted her head and looked into the island’s interior past the ring of mangroves not forty feet from the shoreline.
Is anyone looking for me? When the Judge realizes it isn’t Adele that Sully has, will they know it’s me they’ve taken? How does Daisy figure into this? If only I’d let Rowan know about Adele and her father—and Lawrence—he’d know where to find me since he knows where the pirates are.
She hauled herself to her knees and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Resisting the urge to look back at the looming pirate ship, she staggered the few feet to the line of mangroves and collapsed again, this time behind a hedge of palmetto bushes where she was hidden from view.
I just have to stay alive until everybody talks to each other and the cavalry shows up.
When she felt strong enough to walk, she climbed to her feet and went further inland. As she walked, the ground spongy and giving beneath her bare feet, she found herself wishing she’d grabbed up whatever had been on that tray for her dinner. Although the rain hadn’t abated, the sky seemed to have lightened somewhat, going from black to a sick pea green, and the wind had all but stopped.
Very strange weather, Ella thought, but she was grateful to no longer feel chilled. Walking barefoot was its own challen
ge, however, and in the dim light she stepped on sharp shells and twisted roots that had her feet bleeding and raw before she’d gone a quarter of a mile inland.
As she was peeling back a curtain of Spanish moss in front of her path, she saw something move in the depths of the mangrove that lined her path. She took in a sharp intake of breath and blinked to see it again. She realized she was holding her breath and as she eased it out, never taking her eyes off the spot where she thought she’d seen it, another movement dragged her eyes away from the original source.
There was no noise, no sound at all. The movement she was seeing—and there was another off to her immediate left—suddenly revealed itself to be not so much of a movement as a blinking of a light. A light that blinked once and then went dark. By the time she waited to see it blink on again, a light blinked in her peripheral vision and she turned to it, losing the original light.
That is, until all of the lights seemed to blink on and off at once and she realized they weren’t lights at all but a hideous display of several sets of reptilian eyes watching her every move.
Crocodiles. And from the number of eyes blinking and staring, there were at least a dozen of them. Maybe more. Ella forced herself to look down nearer to where she stood, but so far they were watching her from a distance of at least twenty feet.
Make that ten feet.
When she saw one set of eyes materialize into a fifteen-foot log with gleaming teeth and lurch in her direction, she screamed and took several hurried steps backward. She saw the others begin to move, each of them morphing into sliding fluid forms of pure evil as they glided toward her. She looked frantically at the widespread overhead branches and, ripping the hanging moss away and forcing herself not to focus on the advancing crocodiles, she grabbed a tree branch.
Without testing first to see if it might hold her, she wrenched her body off the ground just as the largest of the brutes charged her, his maw gaping wide like the demented reptile from Peter Pan, her feet dangling inches from his jaws.
She tucked her legs up on the branch, praying it would hold her, as she watched another croc approach and testily take a bite out of the first one’s tail. As she watched the two of them vault into each other, tails crashing down on the ground and their wide glittering jaws snapping and making deep, thunderous bellowing growls, she saw the other smaller crocks slither up to under where she clutched the branch, their stunted feet, scurrying with perverted intensity.
That was when she heard the first ominous split of her perch. Before she could move toward the trunk of the tree, she heard a last terrible crack as the branch broke in half beneath her, flinging her to the ground.
25
Sully watched the two men hurry away. The rain, which had abated during his demonstration, was back with a vengeance. He smiled to think of the soaking his Honor would endure before reaching Key West. He put up the collar of his own coat. He didn’t have as far to go as the judge, but with the rain creating thick rivulets in the sand and the hard-packed trails of shells and dirt, he would have his own challenges to return to the ship. He waited just long enough to ensure the judge wasn’t planning on finishing their agreement with a bullet to the back of his head and reached into his leather pouch to touch the certificate, safe and dry.
As he turned to retrace his steps back to the boat, his eye fell on the bonnet, ruined and sodden near a large palmetto bush. Perhaps he’d have another try with Miss Morton. She was definitely a pretty little thing.
The rain seemed to be pushing him down into the mud and the moving sands beneath his feet. At one point, two vipers shot out of the underbrush, literally swimming in front of him, thrashing and squirming to get away.
This rain would bring out all manner of creature, he thought, his hand dropping to his musket. The path around the mangrove, which had led him to the meeting place, was now a small river. He looked at the mangrove itself wondering if he could possibly cross on it, but the snakes had reminded him of what lived in the mangrove.
One thing was certain, the rain was coming down harder and the water was rising. Waiting to decide which way to go wasn’t helping. In another quarter of an hour the whole island might well be submerged. Panic ate his jubilation like an acid. Holding the leather bag tightly inside his coat, he plunged into the knee-high water to try to find the path back to the ship.
The mud underfoot nearly sucked his boots from his feet and he had to use both hands to pull each foot up. The water was nearly to his hips now. Abandoning the path he’d taken earlier, he pulled himself up an incline that now served as an embankment. He barely had time to orient himself when he heard what sounded like a woman’s scream.
Surely the rain and the wind were playing tricks on his hearing? He staggered against the blast of air and moved further inland away from the beach when he suddenly heard it again. Tearing past the low hanging moss and dead limbs of a stand of ancient coral trees, he broke into a small clearing just as she screamed a third time.
It was Adele Morton. She was facing a trio of crocodiles and appeared to be beating them with tree branches.
For a moment, Sully just stood there stunned, but when she screamed again as one of the crocs lunged at her snapping at her long skirt, he pulled his musket and took aim at the beast as it leapt again. Its white underbelly and neck exploded in a gory confetti of crimson and gray, the sound of the pistol shot seeming to echo and reverberate as if the sound were coming from all over the island at once in varying volume levels.
The other crocs instantly slithered away and he saw the girl drop the branch to her feet, clearly exhausted. He ran to her and grabbed her hand.
“No time for fainting,” he shouted over the din of the storm. “Follow me.”
He was relieved he wasn’t going to have to carry her. She looked like she couldn’t go another step. She was barefoot and her dress was plastered to her body. Her wet hair now appeared to be cropped short against her neck. He hurriedly drew her away from the mangroves and the rising water. Even as they ran, he was splashing through puddles and filled holes of mud and water. She fell once, nearly taking him down with her, and he jerked her back to her feet.
“Just a little bit further,” he yelled. “Up there. Can you make it?”
He pointed to the rocky formation protruding above their heads, and when he did he thought he saw her sway uncertainly on her feet.
Best not to think about it too much, he decided, and turned around and grabbed her by the hips and boosted her up the boulder.
“Grab on to something!” he shouted. At first he didn’t think she understood him as her hands simply clung to the rock face. The water was now rushing around his legs it was rising so fast. Finally he felt her move out of his arms and upward. She’d found a branch and was pulling herself up. He didn’t dare let go of her in case her strength gave out, but the water was climbing up his legs by the second.
Finally, she kicked free of his grasp and was gone. Sully looked wildly about for anything that might give him a hand up the rock face. He knew the path he normally took up there was washed away. The rain came down even harder, and when he put his hands on the rock looking for purchase everything was slippery. He jabbed the toe of his boot in the rock fighting to find a hold, and then grabbed the sides of the rock. But the toehold wasn’t big enough, and when he lifted his other foot to climb he fell back into the water.
Sputtering and splashing to his feet, his hand went to the leather bag in his jacket to confirm the hard lump was still in there. Angry now, he reached down below the waterline on the rock with his hands and felt for the toeholds he knew must be there. Lower and lower until he put his face in the water to be able to reach them. When he did, he jerked his head up and found the hold with his shoe. The water was past his waist now—and climbing.
But he had it now. He reached up and found a small sapling growing out of a crevice in the stone and wrapped his hand around it and pulled. Twice more and he was up and over the top. He collapsed, sides heaving, on the f
lat rocky outcropping as the rain pounded him from above.
When he opened his eyes after a moment, he saw her huddled and shivering in a squatting position as far away from the ledge as she could get.
Poor lass, he thought. She has more grit than I’d ever imagined a judge’s daughter to have. Mind you, that would make sense if she’s a traveler.
He dragged himself to his feet and staggered to her.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s a cave back around the first line of rocks there.”
She climbed to her feet and followed him. It was more of a natural stone lean-to than a cave, but it would give them shelter from the storm. It was dry inside, if not warm, but there was a place just inside the lip where he could build a fire.
Sully dropped his bag and stripped off his coat. He watched the girl peer into the cave and then settle down in a dry spot near the mouth. He stood next to her for a moment watching the sky erupt into a series of demonic flashes followed by terrible rumbles that seem to shake the island to its core. When the lightning illuminated the sky, he was able to briefly see the silhouette of Die Hard, black and ghostly, moored in the cove a few miles due east.
He touched her shoulder and she jumped. “I’m going for firewood,” he said and she nodded. He returned within minutes with an armful of driftwood and gnarled mangrove branches. They were wet but they’d burn. Damn. Now would be a good time to have that lighter. As he set to work building the fire, he noticed she had stopped shaking.
“I don’t supposed it would do me any good to ask you how you got here when I left you cozy and dry under guard back on the ship?”
“One of your men tried to rape me,” she said, her voice full of indictment.
I will kill whoever it was, he found himself thinking. And if it was Toad, all the better.
Race to World's End (Rowan and Ella Book 3) Page 23