The Sea Wolves

Page 7

“Last chance,” she whispered, glancing up at the deck. Jack could not hear footsteps, but her dark eyes had gone wide, and her head was cocked to one side, listening to things he could not hear.

“You won’t give me away?” Jack asked. He breathed in deeply, and hers was the first clean scent since he’d boarded the Larsen. She was fresh air, cool and lightly perfumed like a spring day on Mount Diablo. Dangerous thoughts to be having about a woman who might be the captain’s beloved, if one such as Ghost was capable of love.

Jack pushed past her in the narrow corridor, and for a moment they were both bathed in moonlight from the grille above. It surrounded them, blinding Jack to the shadows beyond, and it was just the two of them, so close that when she exhaled, he inhaled her breath and found it intoxicating.

Then, their first contact—she touched his hip and pushed him past her, surprisingly strong. She glanced at the ceiling again, turned from him, and walked along the gangway toward the small door through which he had originally entered the bowels of the ship.

Whispers rose from the hold, but Jack barely heard them.

Sabine opened the small door and slipped through, then glanced back just as she slammed the door behind her, hard. He saw the first smile meant for him. And then footsteps were running above, coming to investigate the bang.

Jack rushed in the opposite direction and slipped through the door where Sabine had entered and found himself in another gangway, with a steep staircase before him and a shadowy space beyond. He heard the sounds of sleeping men—snoring, groaning, the soft moans of unknown dreams—and he paused for a moment. She reads the sea, Louis had said. Ghost calls it finding order in chaos. She could find people and ships, predict where they would be at any given time.

He wondered just what Sabine had come down here to find.

Someone cried out in his sleep, in a language that Jack could not understand. He moved cautiously to the foot of the steep staircase. To venture fully into the forecastle would be to put himself in too much danger—Sabine had saved him once, and now he owed it to her to return to his small bunk in the galley.

He’d found out enough for one night. And in truth, Sabine’s appearance had distracted him. He scratched a fingernail across a bulkhead, banged his head on the staircase’s underside. His stealth and sensitivity had been disturbed.

The man cried out again, a despairing noise.

“He’s crying for home,” a voice said, and Jack gasped in shock.

Ghost emerged from the shadows to Jack’s left, slipping through a doorway he had not even seen. He seemed to fill Jack’s whole field of vision, bordered by shadow as Sabine had been framed by moonlight.

“All of them do, on occasion,” the captain continued. “I come here and listen. Men might be hard, but they’re all babies when they sleep.”

“I…,” Jack began, but he had nothing to say. He didn’t want to offer an excuse for his nighttime excursion, or to beg.

“I thought I smelled you prowling,” Ghost said. He glanced behind Jack at the closed doorway to the hold. “Found ’em, then?”

“You must let them go.”

“Must?” Ghost’s single word made Jack feel like a child again.

“They’re not animals.”

“Not animals, no. Less important than that.”

“You’ve got to give them something more than bread and water,” Jack said.

Ghost pondered for a moment and then gave an uncaring shrug. “You can bring them scraps from the kitchen tomorrow, if it pleases you.”

Jack nodded. Perhaps if he had time alone with the other prisoners, they could conceive some plan of escape.

“You’re not going to thank me?” Ghost asked curiously, studying Jack as he might some laboratory specimen.

“I’ll thank you quite effusively when you’ve put us all ashore, alive and well.”

Ghost smiled thinly. “You’re brave, young Jack. I’ll give you that.”

The menace in his tone, and the malicious implications of his words, were unmistakable.

What am I to do? Jack thought, panic descending. If it came to it, he would kill this man in order to survive. He had killed the Wendigo. Surely he could kill a pirate? Yet Ghost was more than just a pirate, that much was clear. And though the Wendigo had a savage, wild hunger and ferocity unlike anything Jack had ever encountered, the captain of the Larsen had all that and one thing more—cunning. Ghost exuded power and strength, and out here on the wild ocean, they were all alone.

“Come,” Ghost said. “It’s the last night we can talk for a while. And I have a question.” He climbed the staircase to the deck, not doubting for an instant that Jack would follow.

And Jack, confused and disturbed by the terrible man’s presence, could only climb up after him.

CHAPTER FOUR

NOBLEST OF ALL

The moon was a sliver away from being full. Pale light washed over the Larsen’s deck, casting the ship in shades of silver. The night sky was clear, the stars infinite, lighting their way toward whatever fates and destinations awaited. The sails were full, and the vessel knifed through the Pacific as though it were some creature of myth, born to water instead of beaten together by the hands of men.

“Your anger fascinates me,” Ghost said, drawing on his pipe and letting out a plume of smoke.

Jack’s heart slammed and his temples throbbed to its pulse. Ghost had known he was down in the hold, knew that he had discovered the other prisoners from the Umatilla, and yet he had issued no punishment. Beneath the captain’s calm veneer, his savagery waited, dormant, and might erupt at any moment. Jack had seen it happen. But Ghost kept trying to draw him in, urging him to speak his mind.

So be it, Jack thought. He had wearied of watching his tongue.

“Is there some reason I should be anything but angry?” Jack asked.

Ghost raised an eyebrow, clearly surprised and pleased that Jack had engaged him at last. He pressed the pipe stem between his lips, tobacco flaring orange in the night, and let the smoke curl slowly from his nostrils. Jack could not help but see Satan in this devil’s face.

Careful, he thought. You’re sparring with Lucifer.

“You believe you have some right to be treated as more than an animal—”