by Rob Kidd
Jack wrinkled his nose. “Too much rum?” he guessed worriedly.
“It was the Shadow Gold,” the dark figure said, pointing at the vial in his hand. “Seven of those vials, exactly like the one you hold in your hand. And here I am now…living forever, master of all the shadows, greatest alchemist and pirate who ever lived.”
“Well, I don’t know about the ‘greatest pirate’ bit—” Jack started to argue, but the Shadow Lord interrupted.
“I had just enough orichalcum left for seven more vials,” he went on, his eyes glittering with hatred. “I thought to myself…perhaps one day I would take an apprentice. Perhaps one day I would train someone to control the shadows by my side. But as the years wore on, I became more and more certain that there was no one worthy of such a prize.” He narrowed his eyes. “Least of all you, of all pirates.”
“You do like to talk a lot, don’t you?” Jack said. “As it so happens, I don’t want to be anything like you anyway.”
“Ha!” said the Shadow Lord. “Who wouldn’t want to be like me? I shall live forever!”
Jack thought about that—what it would be like to live forever, unafraid of death. It was tempting. But then he looked down at the Shadow Lord and the angry shadows that writhed around him. Shadow creatures were Henry’s only companions now. Jack looked across the deck of his beloved Pearl and thought about how the thing he wanted more than anything else was to keep sailing it around the world, certain of his freedom and with the wind in his hair. He wanted that even more than living forever or an army of gloomy shadow creatures obeying his will.
But Jack! Tia Dalma’s voice cried in his head. Only one of equal strength can defeat the Shadow Lord! That is why I sent you for the vials…I knew if you drank them all, you could fight him. But not wit’ only six!
Jack popped the cork off the vial. The Shadow Lord clutched Carolina closer and stepped toward him.
Power beyond your wildest dreams, Jack! Immortality and strength! T’ink on that!
But Jack could remember another voice…Captain Teague’s, reminding him that whatever he chose, he’d have to live with himself afterward.
He tipped the vial over and poured the Shadow Gold into the sea.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” howled the Shadow Lord. He let go of Carolina and leaped to the railing. But it was too late—the pale liquid was disappearing into the dark waves.
Carolina grabbed her sword and jumped back out of his reach, safe for the moment. She felt an odd burning pain near her neck, but not where the Shadow Lord had cut her. She glanced down and realized that her blood had trickled down to her moonstone necklace. The gem had been given to her by Sri Sumbhajee’s wife while they were in India…for protection, Parvati had said.
Now, as her blood touched the cool, translucent stone, it started to glow. A pale, eerie light, like the silver sister of the Shadow Gold, spread out from the stone, illuminating the space around her. On the plus side, this made it a lot easier for her to see in the darkness of the eclipse. On the minus side, what she could see was the Shadow Lord trying harder than ever to kill Jack Sparrow.
Shadows swarmed up from the dark ocean, slithering over the railings and pouring toward Jack like a river of malevolence. Above them, even the halo of the sun had disappeared behind a choking cloud of shadows. Carolina looked around desperately and saw more shadow creatures clambering onto the decks of the other ships. The pirates were horribly outnumbered, and the Shadow Army continued to grow and grow.
Giving Jack the Shadow Gold hadn’t done any good at all. Maybe it had saved him from the shadow-sickness…but only long enough for the shadow warriors to kill him. And it hadn’t even slowed down the Shadow Army. In fact, it had only made the Shadow Lord more angry—and more deadly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jack knew he should probably feel worried, but he was still too elated by the sparkle of the Shadow Gold inside him. He ducked another swing of the Shadow Lord’s sword and got in a good poke with his own, although the shadows around Henry absorbed most of the impact.
“I loathe you most of all, Jack Sparrow,” the Shadow Lord growled. “I should have known you’d be the one to ruin everything. Only a monster like you would dare to steal my Shadow Gold.”
“Now now, technically, I didn’t steal it,” Jack pointed out. “That was Alex.” He jerked a thumb at the zombie, who was on the quarterdeck, placidly grappling with a creature made of netting and shadows.
“I should have sought you out when you were a baby and slaughtered you in your sleep,” the Shadow Lord added, slashing violently at Jack’s chest. “I knew her descendants would be as much trouble to me as she was.”
Jack dodged and vaulted over another barrel. “She?” he said quizzically. “She who?”
“You even look like her,” the Shadow Lord snarled. “That face…you look exactly like your grandmother.”
That stopped Jack cold. He lowered his sword, pressing one hand to his chest and looking injured. “Well, now, that’s just hurtful.”
“I should have killed her, too! When she chose Bartholomew over me!”
“Blimey,” Jack said, trying to picture Grandmama and Henry together. “You dodged a musket ball there, mate. Trust me, you should thank this Bartholomew fellow.”
Suddenly Jack felt a choking grip around his neck. He gasped for air, scrabbling at his neck with his free hand. While he was distracted, thick ropes of smoke had come billowing out of the Shadow Lord’s ring. Like snakes, they had crept across the deck and wrapped themselves around Jack’s throat, and now they were squeezing, tighter and tighter, cutting off his breathing.
“Gaa-ack,” Jack protested, staggering sideways. “Aaaggaaaack!”
“Stop it!” Carolina yelled, trying to get away from her shadow attackers to help Jack. “Let him go!”
She heard a thump behind her and turned to find Diego lying on the deck. He’d finally made it across from the Seref, where he had been watching Carolina’s brush with death in transfixed horror.
“Help Jack!” she said.
Diego staggered to his feet and limped toward the Shadow Lord. It felt like he was wading through a swamp of smoky eels, all of which wrapped themselves around his legs and slowed him down. He pressed forward, ignoring the pain in his leg and the darkness obscuring his vision.
Meanwhile, Jack had had a revelation. Maybe there was still a way to stop the Shadow Lord! If Jack didn’t die first. “Dgggg!” Jack gargled. He flapped his hands wildly and urgently. “Ggggt! Hssggh! Rrrrgggg!”
Diego peered at him through the dark. The glow around Carolina barely reached the spot where Jack and the Shadow Lord were grappling, so it was difficult to see them. But Jack seemed to be pointing frantically at his own fingers.
“RRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGG!” Jack’s strangled cry was almost impossible to understand.
But then Diego looked closer at the Shadow Lord—and at where the strangling ropes were coming from.
His ring!
Bracing himself for a serious jolt of pain, Diego leaped forward, seized the Shadow Lord’s left hand, and yanked the large ring off his middle finger.
The Shadow Lord howled with mingled fury and shock. The smoky ropes immediately fell away from Jack’s throat. Diego even thought he felt the air get lighter all around him.
But the Shadow Army was still there—still fighting. And now the Shadow Lord was staggering toward Diego, his eyes glowing with rage. Losing the ring seemed to have thrown him off balance, as if now the shadow eels were dragging him down as well.
“You don’t know what you’ve done!” Henry bellowed. “They have to be controlled! The Shadow Army without a master—they’ll never stop! They’ll consume the world!” His hands clawed at the air. “Give that back!”
Jack snatched the ring out of Diego’s hand before the Shadow Lord reached him. “Nicely done, although a bit slow on the uptake,” Jack said, winking at Diego and rubbing his throat ruefully. “Carolina! Join us!”
Jack bolted toward hi
s cabin. Carolina threw her shadow warrior back just long enough to grab Diego and help him and Jack. All three of them fell through the door into the captain’s cabin and slammed it behind them.
“Uh-oh,” Jack said.
The glow from Carolina’s moonstone lit up the cabin, so they could see all the things that had come alive to attack them. A creature of pillows with a globe for a head and rum bottles for arms came flying at them. They had to beat back a warrior made of charts and maps that seemed determined to paper-cut them to death. Jack and Carolina grabbed the low couch and dragged it in front of the door while Diego sliced the pillows and maps to ribbons with his sword.
“I say, careful there,” Jack said, giving Diego an outraged look. “I rather like those pillows.”
“What do we do now?” Carolina asked, panting. She stabbed a hostile curtain to the wall with her dagger as it lunged at her. They could hear the Shadow Lord pounding on the door of the cabin. It wouldn’t be long before some very large, angry shadow warriors bludgeoned their way through.
Jack held up the Shadow Lord’s ring and inspected it, casually fending off another shadow warrior with his sword at the same time. He’d noticed that the large stone in the ring had gone from inky black to crystal clear.
“If this is what the Shadow Lord uses to summon his dread beasties,” Jack mused, “I wonder what would happen if we destroyed it?”
“Using what?” Diego gasped. “Everything in here is trying to kill us!”
Jack looked around thoughtfully, and his gaze fell on the one thing in the cabin that was not moving.
A broad smile spread across his face. “Well, that should have been obvious.”
He seized the golden sun spear the Incas had given him. Maybe being sacred to the sun made it invulnerable to the shadows, but for whatever reason, it was not possessed. As Carolina and Diego fought back the creatures around him, Jack carefully placed the ring on the floor, lifted the spear high above his head, and brought it smashing down on the clear stone.
They all fell to their knees as a piercing shriek split the air. Jack watched with astonishment as shadows began flying back into the ring. As though they were being sucked back from the rest of the world, the shadows whirled through the windows and spiraled down into the crushed fragments of the stone, vanishing forever in a puff of black smoke.
In the space of a few moments, it was over.
There was a long pause.
Carolina and Diego climbed to their feet, blinking.
The sun shone brightly through the cabin windows, lighting up a scene of utter chaos. Objects lay where they had fallen when the shadows left them, scattered haphazardly around the room.
Jack flung open the cabin door and found a similar scene on the deck. Barrels and ropes and nets and buckets and mops and chains were lying in piles all over the ship.
And crouching in front of the cabin door with his arms over his head, whimpering furiously, was Henry.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Used to sudden reversals of fortune, the pirates recovered faster than the soldiers and East India Trading Company agents. While they were still standing side by side, blinking in confusion at the abrupt end of the battle, the pirates quickly turned and began knocking out the soldiers around them.
Benedict Huntington had his rapier in hand and was about to race back to the Pearl, his sights set on Jack, when his face ran into Jean’s fist. He landed hard on the deck of the Centurion, unconscious.
“Ow,” Jean said, shaking his hand. “That man’s head is very…solid.”
“He’ll still come after you,” Billy pointed out to Jack as they dragged Benedict back to the Peacock.
“Per’aps,” Jack said. “But we are leaving him quite a lovely present.” He gestured at the former Shadow Lord, now trussed up in a sad little heap at the base of the Peacock’s mast. “Maybe that’ll mollify him, eh?”
Billy rolled his eyes. “We should be so lucky.”
“I usually am,” Jack confided with a cheeky grin.
“I still want to kill him!” Villanueva bellowed from the Centurion. “That was the deal!”
“You’re welcome to try,” Jack said, waving at Henry. “But he’s pretty well protected by the Shadow Gold. You might have to settle for him living forever in an East India Trading Company cell.”
“Oh,” Villanueva said. “Well, that sounds all right, too.”
The Ranger pulled up alongside the Peacock so that Marcella could do the honors of tying up Barbara Huntington. Marcella had confessed about her scheming stowaway “friend” to Gentleman Jocard, and they both were extremely pleased to leave the shrieking redhead in the Peacock’s own brig…after snapping off the key inside the lock, to ensure that it would take a very, very long time to get her out again.
Jean was delighted to find his and Jack’s old friend Tim Hawk on the Seref. “Jack, look who it is!” he called, pumping the young man’s hand up and down.
“Ah, Tom!” Jack said, hopping over the railings from the Peacock to the Pearl to the Seref, the ships having been lashed together with grappling hooks to make it easier to transfer the unconscious agents back to their own ships.
“Er…Tim,” Tim corrected him.
“That’s what I said,” Jack said. “You’re alive! How astonishing! And not possessed by anything or controlled by any sinister figures at the moment…correct?” Jack was thinking of the sorceress who had controlled Tim when they first met, long ago in New Orleans.
“I am possession-free,” Tim laughed. “And I found my uncle!” He turned to introduce them to Captain Hawk and found his uncle near tears.
“It’s him!” Captain Hawk said in a shaky voice, pointing across at the Pearl. “It’s Barnabas!”
They all turned to follow his gaze…and found that he was pointing right at Catastrophe Shane. The hapless pirate was standing in the middle of the Pearl ’s deck, looking around in surprise.
“Oooh, sorry,” Jack said to Captain Hawk. “That’s no Barnabas. His name is Catastrophe Shane. But you can have him if you want him,” he added quickly.
“Barnabas!” Tim called.
Shane turned to face them. It looked like clouds were lifting from his vision. A wide smile spread across his face.
“Father!” he cried. “Tim!” He galloped across the deck and jumped to the Seref with a grace that Catastrophe Shane had never had.
“All right,” Jack said, astonished. “Maybe that is Barnabas. Not sure what happened to our Catastrophe Shane, though.”
“I think I’ve been under an enchantment,” Shane/Barnabas babbled, his words tumbling over each other. “I didn’t even know.…All I remember is being pulled out of the sea…and then I went to this tavern… .” He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I met a friendly old guy.…He bought me some ale and said I could do him a favor.…But it’s all foggy from there.”
“Ah, there’s your problem,” Jack said, nodding sagely. “Should have asked for rum instead. Much less foggy than ale.”
“I bet that’s how the Shadow Lord was spying on us,” Jean burst out. “I knew there was something weird about Shane! Henry was watching us through him, and he didn’t even know it!”
“Well, that explains the clumsiness,” Jack said. “Hard to be much of a pirate when someone else is using your eyes, I imagine.” He clapped Shane/Barnabas on the back. “All right, then, I forgive you for accidentally shooting a hole in my mizzenmast.”
“And for spying on us,” Jean prompted.
“Right,” Jack said. “And that.”
“This is all very touching,” Ammand the Corsair interrupted, striding up to them. “But it is time for anyone who is not a corsair to leave my ship.” He gave them all a fierce glare, and Captain Hawk’s crew quickly scurried to the side and began climbing over onto the Pearl instead.
“Splendid,” Jack said, looking Ammand up and down. “Welcome to the Brethren Court. It was—actually, it was rather alarming to meet you.”
“I’m sure
we’ll meet again,” Ammand said, narrowing his eyes. “Unfortunately. And next time, I will not be so merciful.” His glare flicked sideways to Carolina, standing on the deck of the Pearl. She sidled behind a mast, looking innocently up at the sky.
“Si, Jack Sparrow,” Villanueva called from the Centurion, floating nearby.
“Captain Jack Sparrow!” Jack called back.
Villanueva ignored him. “I insist that you leave the Mediterranean at once! These are our waters!”
“AHEM. MY waters,” Chevalle added from the deck of the Fancy, glowering at all of them. “You should all get back to your own territories tout suite ! That means you, too, Eduardo and Ammand! Next time I catch you here, I will carve you all into bits and feed you to Fifi!”
Arf! agreed the poodle, its small white head popping up from Chevalle’s arms.
“And I will sink your precious ships to the bottom of the sea!” Villanueva threatened.
“And I will sell you all to the sultan!” Ammand chimed in.
“All right, all right, I think we get the point,” Jack said drily.
“Pirate Lords,” Carolina said to Diego, rolling her eyes. But she didn’t come out from behind the mast until Ammand’s green Jolly Roger had disappeared over the horizon, along with the Centurion and the Fancy.
“Now what are you going to do?” she asked Tim when the coast was clear.
“Well, I guess my uncle needs another ship,” Tim said with a shrug.
Captain Hawk sighed. “I don’t really want to be a captain anymore,” he said. “I’d much rather just be a ship’s surgeon. There’s a lot less pressure.”
Carolina sighed, too. “I would love to be a captain,” she said. “Then whenever I bossed people around, they’d think, Oh, of course, that makes sense, instead of, There she goes, acting like a princess again.”
“You’d be a great captain,” Diego said, thinking of how quickly Carolina made decisions and the natural authority in her voice.