Ethan cut himself off when he realized said person looked a hell of a lot more like a corpse than a living body—ashen skin, sunken chest, withered frame, and tattered clothes being the first thing that clued him in.
Then he caught the unmistakable, sickly sweet scent of death floating through the air and cringed. “Oh crap,” he grumbled. “He better not get up.”
“What are you on about?”
Ethan wiped his nose, some part of him thinking it would clear the smell from his nose, and turned around. “There’s a dead body by the docks,” he said.
“Damn,” she said, shaking her head. “Knew I smelled something. Let’s furl that last sail and drop anchor. Then we can row in.”
The two went to work; all the while, Ethan kept half of his attention on the port, thinking something awful would happen the moment he looked away for more than a minute. Nothing did, but once they’d finished and were about to lower one of the longboats, Ethan happened to spy something at the end of the docks that seemed new.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing to a bulletin nailed to a post with its own makeshift peaked roof. The parchment didn’t have much to it, some writing for sure that Ethan couldn’t read, but across the top was a faded, rust-colored X that had been painted with a couple of broad strokes of a brush. “I think it’s a warning?”
Zoey came to his side and leaned over the bow to look for herself. As soon as she saw it, her shoulders fell, and she cursed under her breath. “It’s a notice.”
“For?”
“The plague,” she answered, her voice barely a whisper. After a few beats, she shook her head and straightened. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “That doesn’t change anything. We still go in. Look for survivors.”
Ethan’s hands went up, as did his eyebrows. “But…the plague?”
A forced smile flashed across Zoey’s face. “We’ll be fine. Perk of being a vampire.”
Despite her assurance, Ethan still had reservations. “We’re actually immune to the plague? You’re sure about that.”
“I am,” she said but then immediately sighed heavily and shook her head. “Usually,” she corrected. “Most of the time. There have been a few diseases throughout this world’s history that have jumped between humans and vamps. But they’re rare. I promise.”
“Ugh. I knew you were going to say that.”
“Do you want to leave?” she asked in all seriousness.
“I get the feeling you don’t. Surely we can find a crew elsewhere, still.”
“We might be able to find a trustworthy crew in time,” Zoey said with a shrug. “If we had a month to prepare? Sure. That’s easy. A day or two to spare at the most? That’s something else entirely—especially given our nature.”
“Right,” Ethan said, frowning and drumming his hands on the railing.
“I know I said that girl was obsessed with not only me, but being turned, but she could still be there, maybe, and need our help. Others, too,” Zoey added. “And I know I owe you my life, so if you insist on moving on, then we’ll go and figure something out. But it would mean a lot to me for us to at least spend a little bit of time ashore.”
Ethan turned his options over in his head for a few moments, trying to weigh the pros and cons of staying versus going. Basically, they boiled down to avoiding the plague (good) and rolling the dice when it came to being infected (bad), and neither option seemed to guarantee him a crew, which he desperately needed. Then he thought of one last point that drove away any indecision: As Zoey had said, people could still be alive on that island that needed his help. And he couldn’t leave them, no matter how dangerous said island might be.
“Okay, let’s row over and see what we can find,” he said.
Zoey smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
Chapter Two
Lenada
“I always thought rowing was hard,” Ethan confessed once they were about halfway between shore and ship. “I mean, other than being a little warm in the shoulders, I feel pretty good.”
Zoey, who sat at the bow of their little craft, craned her head over her shoulders and grinned. “Try it for an hour as hard as you can and let me know how you feel.”
“Ah, right,” Ethan replied.
A few minutes passed, and in that time, Ethan brought them to the dilapidated docks. The waves ended up being a little more aggressive than Ethan had anticipated, so instead of gently brushing up against one of the wood pylons, it became more of a controlled crash that nearly tossed Zoey from the boat and into a face full of barnacles.
“Easier on the gas next time,” she said, annoyed.
“Sorry. I’m not specced rowboat. You okay?”
“I’ll be fine, but I’d rather not have to deal with a split hull.”
Ethan raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I was coming in that fast.”
“You—” Zoey cut herself off and sighed heavily. “No, you weren’t. Sorry. I’m anxious, is all.”
“I figured. No worries, ” he replied as Zoey jumped up on the docks and tied a line from their craft to the pylon. When he stepped out of the boat and joined her on the docks, he wrinkled his nose. The stench of decay assaulted his senses, and he had to force rising bile back down to where it came from. “God, this place reeks,” he said.
“Focus on something else,” she said. “That’ll help.”
“It will?”
“A lot,” she said.
Ethan shut his eyes a concentrated on what scents floated through the air. He nearly lost his stomach contents once more when the first thing that struck his mind was gooeyness from whatever poor dead sap still lingered. But he quickly turned his attention to other parts, and the easiest to pick out was the salt coming off the ocean. Though he did pick up floral notes coming from the nearby rainforest—as well as the scents of mint, copper, and chocolate of all things—he worried they were too faint to last, and he’d be right back to taking deep whiffs of a corpse. As such, he kept his mind on the salt.
Which wasn’t that bad at all, and having general fond memories of being at the beach as a kid, he simply stuck with that.
“Okay,” he said, slowly drawing a deep breath to make sure he got it. “I think I can manage. Let’s go.”
“Lead the way, Captain,” she said with a bow and sweep of her hand.
“I get the feeling this deferment isn’t out of respect for the position.”
Zoey shot him a playful look. “Creepy, desolate town ravaged by the plague? Not sure why you wouldn’t want to lead the way.”
“Exactly.”
With that, Ethan started walking. When he was about halfway down the docks, he noticed a small sunken ship two dozen yards away and about ten feet underwater. Even with Ethan’s limited view and even more limited knowledge, he could tell it was a small cutter, probably forty or fifty feet long.
“What do you make of that?” Ethan asked, nodding his head toward the vessel.
Zoey pressed her lips into a thin line before frowning and shaking her head. “I don’t know, but I know I don’t like it.”
“Enforcing quarantine, maybe?” Ethan proposed. “You know, keeping anyone from leaving and whatnot?”
“That’s as good a guess as any,” Zoey said. “If that’s true, if we find anyone still alive, they might not be too keen on letting us leave, either.”
“Should’ve brought Maii,” Ethan replied, looking back to their ship.
“Still think you had the right idea leaving him, actually.”
“You do?”
“I do. As you said, we want to make sure we have a ship to come back to,” Zoey said. “And a territorial ahuizotl on guard duty is a great way to make that happen.”
“I think he just wanted a chance to eat someone,” Ethan said.
“That, and he didn’t want you to take a bite out of him as well,” she replied. “Still, good call on your part keeping him there.”
Ethan nodded, feeling a little bit smarter than he normally did, and continued down the docks. Aside from the clomp-clomp-clomp of his hard leather boots on the weathered boards and the occasional call of one unseen tropical bird to another, the area held an unsettling quiet.
“Man, he looks like hell,” Ethan said once they reached the body they’d seen from the Victory.
Though Ethan had pegged him for dead long ago, he hadn’t appreciated up until now exactly how dead this guy was. Withered skin clung to a skeletal frame, and tight leathery lips were pulled back, revealing a blackened mouth devoid of tongue and most teeth. His eyes had long disappeared, be it from scavenger or rot, Ethan didn’t know.
“He looks like more than that,” Zoey said, kneeling and picking at his clothes with the tip of her cutlass. “He looks like he can tell us quite a bit.”
“Such as?”
“Plague didn’t kill him,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“How can you be sure?”
Zoey dropped the tip of her weapon and looked up at him. “You tell me,” she said. When he balked, not understand where she was going, she quickly tacked on. “Go on. It’ll be good for you. Stretch that new plus three intellect of yours.”
“Do I get a reward if I’m right?”
“Why would you get a reward?”
“You know, classic Pavlov conditioning,” he said. “It’s a psych thing.”
“I know who Pavlov was,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Does this mean you want me to get a bell, too, and make you drool?”
“I was thinking something a little more girlfriendy in terms of a reward,” he said. “The bell doesn’t quite do it for me.”
Zoey toyed with her necklace as she looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “Oh, girlfriendy,” she said. “I could probably come up with something should you come through on a couple of things first.”
“Such as?”
“Knock my socks off with this investigation, for starters,” she said. “Because smart is sexy.”
“And the second?”
“Kick Maii out of our cabin for the night. Bells might not do it for you, but he really doesn’t do it for me.”
Ethan interlocked his fingers and turned his palms out, so they all cracked together. “Consider it done.”
“Good,” she said before motioning to the body. “Now go on. Tell me what you see.”
Ethan shot her an air kiss before redirecting himself back to the corpse. He had no idea what the hell he was looking for. He was a pirate, damn it, not a doctor. The guy was dead. How the hell was he supposed to know what he died from?
Ethan drummed his hands on his thighs, working out his initial frustration. It only took a few seconds for him to realize that if Zoey was pushing him this hard, and if she had picked up on what was going on that fast, he wasn’t going to need to do a full autopsy to figure this out, let alone any kind of specialized bloodwork.
His eyes studied the body, going over every inch from top to bottom. The first thing he decided was that the elements had taken their toll on everything from skin to fiber. Then he realized the man was missing his cutlass as the scabbard was empty, and there was a sizeable gash on the inside of his right forearm.
But that wasn’t lethal, was it?
Surely not.
But why wasn’t it bandaged?
Lacking an immediate answer, Ethan moved his investigation on. The man’s clothes didn’t seem like anything of note, unless worn-out, caked-with-dirt shirts and trousers were somehow special, but he was missing his boots. Gnarled feet covered in callouses rested on the ground, splayed outward.
Ethan frowned. The feet didn’t tell him anything either. He huffed, frustrated, but then his eyes went back to the man’s torso. It was at that point he realized that it wasn’t just dirt clinging to the fibers. There was a sizeable stain in the man’s left chest—a stain that surrounded a small hole, about as large as his thumb was wide.
“He was shot?” Ethan said, more speaking his thoughts than anything else.
“He was,” Zoey said with a pleasant tone of approval. “What does that mean?”
Ethan looked at the ground. It looked ordinary. Lots of dirt. Some bits of grass. When that led him nowhere, he turned his attention to the building, or rather, what was left of the building. It, like all those around it, was a charred mess.
“He wasn’t killed because of the plague,” Ethan said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, more confident this time.
Zoey’s eyes brightened. “Which means?”
“He got in a fight with someone, going by the wound to his arm,” Ethan said. “Whoever that was, they killed him and left his body out here while the town burned. But why?”
Zoey sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. “Close,” she said. “Want to try again and really impress me? Or do you just want to take the consolation prize?”
Ethan shook his head. “No. I want the whole thing,” he said. Ethan rubbed his hands together and knelt at the corpse’s side. His eyes studied every crack in the skin, every wrinkle of cloth, every hair on his head.
Ethan straightened.
“You see it?” Zoey asked, sounding hopeful.
Ethan didn’t reply right away, though he felt like he was right there. His eyes went from the body, to the burnt-out building, and back to the body several times. The distance between them couldn’t have been more than a foot from one blackened wall to the top of his head. “He was killed after the fires,” Ethan said. “Something put them out first. Rain, maybe? He’s too close to have not burst into flames, or at the very least, not to have had his hairs and clothes singed.”
“Exactly.”
“So what does that mean?”
“That, my dear, sweet, clever boy, is what we need to figure out.”
Chapter Three
The Black Sea Devil
The Black Sea Devil.
That’s what the name of the tavern was. Ethan knew this because of the two-foot-by-two-foot sign hanging above, gently swinging on rusted iron chains as the wind swept through.
“Question for you,” Ethan said, looking up at said sign. “Is that a devil from the Black Sea or a sea devil that’s black?”
“Good question,” Zoey said. “I’m guessing it’s the angler fish, but who knows. They could’ve at least provided a picture.”
“Remind me to complain when we get inside,” Ethan said. “Maybe we’ll score some free rum.”
“I imagine the barkeep has bigger worries. Let me know how that goes for you.”
Ethan ignored her playful pessimism and pushed through the rickety, mostly intact door. It opened with a screech of metal on metal thanks to the hinges, but only after he coaxed it with a stiff shoulder.
Two things greeted them when they stepped through: rubble and a charred interior. Most of the furniture had been reduced to coals, though portions of tables and chairs still remained, most notably those off in one corner. Even the bar was standing, likely due to its mostly brick design. The stairs leading to the second floor appeared suspect, and the ceiling looked blacker than the abyss—but it was there, as were six of the eight load-bearing columns, each a foot thick.
A gaping hole did exist in the ceiling where two of the columns had failed. Light from the late-morning sky poured in, illuminating not only the rubble that remained, but also a fair amount of water that pooled around it.
“I guess that answers that,” Ethan said, pointing to the damage. “The rains came before everything was wiped out. Must have been a big storm, though, to put out this big of a bonfire.”
Zoey nodded. “Big storms happen a lot around here. Something to keep in mind later as we’re sailing.”
“Which do you think came first, the plague or the fire?” he asked. “Or maybe someone set the fires to battle the plague?”
“That would be my guess,” Zoey said with a heavy si
gh. “And if I had to guess more, I’m thinking whoever set them probably was infected and died not long after. Maybe our friend back at the docks was trying to leave, and they stopped him, trying to protect the rest of the world.”
Lines of worry formed across Ethan’s brow, even though he tried his best to remain optimistic. “We’ve still got time to look around,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find some of your friends further inland.”
“Maybe,” Zoey replied, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
Ethan went for the bar, and Zoey started for the second floor. She only took a few steps before she drew her sword and pulled the pistol from her belt. “Care to join me?” she asked.
Ethan pulled his sword, too, feeling her unease, and came to her side. “Sense something?”
“No, but if there is something deadly up there, I don’t want to die from a classic horror movie mistake,” she admitted.
Ethan chuckled. “Yeah, I mean, this place is screaming the ‘get out now’ vibe, isn’t it?”
“Exactly.”
The two climbed the stairs, wood creaking with every step. At the top, they found themselves in a long hall with a peaked ceiling. Doors lined both sides, spaced at regular intervals. Not surprisingly, each one led to a guest room, and like the rest of the town they’d seen so far, they found not a soul.
“Unrelated question,” Ethan said as they stood in the hall. “About this girl that lives around here.”
“The obsessed one?” Zoey asked.
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “Why didn’t you turn her? I mean, I’m assuming you two were friends and all, and she obviously knew what you are.”
“It’s not that simple, for starters,” Zoey said. “The vampire lords, the absolute top of our lineage, take it very seriously. If they found out other vampires were giving away immortality to every commoner they came across, they’d hunt down and kill everyone involved.”
Ethan, not expecting such a thing, stiffened. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” she said. “This is a very exclusive club, which is why we need to be lowkey about it all. Yeah, there are humans who like to think of themselves as vampire hunters. And the overzealous clergy or crusader can be a pain in the ass to deal with, too, especially if you don’t want to have to kill them. But when it comes to a vampire lord hunting you down—let alone several—all bets are off.”
The Crew (Captains & Cannons Book 2) Page 2
