The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1

by Devon Taylor

  “Make sure we’re ready,” Mak said. “Protect the Harbinger. And if anybody sees Treeny…” Her eyes flicked to the big wooden steering wheel, where she had probably seen the captain maneuvering the ship thousands of times. “They’re to ghost her on sight,” she finished savagely.

  Henry was nodding frantically. “Okay. Okay. I understand.” He seemed to be reassuring himself more than he was reassuring them. “Where will you three be?”

  “The steam room,” Rhett said, hoping that he was understanding the plan that Mak was putting together. She nodded at him in confirmation.

  “Got it,” Henry said. “But you should hurry.”

  “What for?” Basil asked.

  Henry lifted a hand that shook ever so slightly, his senses breaking through, the fear taking over. He pointed toward the window and the storm and the psychons’ frightening ship.

  “We’re under attack,” he whispered.

  Basil, Rhett, and Mak whirled around.

  Rhett expected cannonballs. He expected psychons swarming the Harbinger in insectlike hordes. He expected the storm to throw the ship off-kilter and for the whole world to seem like it was falling over. All of that was happening. But what he didn’t expect—what he had forgotten about—was the sea monster.

  When he was fully turned and seeing what Henry was seeing, the first thing that caught Rhett’s attention was the massive tentacle curling up out of the chopping waves, swinging like a baseball bat toward the bridge tower. It was mammoth and slimy-looking, dwindling to a rounded point like a serpentine tongue. It cut through the torrential rain, gaining momentum. Lightning flashed, and in the brief light, Rhett saw that where there would normally have been suction cups on a regular octopus’s tentacle, this tentacle had circles of creeping, spindly legs. They looked like crab legs, hundreds of them, reaching and clawing at nothing, eagerly awaiting the chance to grab something and pull it apart piece by piece.

  And behind the tentacle: everything else. The cannonballs, the psychons, the storm. There was barely a second to process everything before the tentacle had filled up the space just outside the bridge windows.

  “KYMAKER!” Henry screamed.

  All four of the syllektors in the bridge dropped down, flattening out with their faces in the puddles of water.

  The tentacle smashed into the roof and the windows. The whole tower that the bridge sat on jerked to the side, leaning. Glass and metal rained down around Rhett. He instinctively covered his head, knowing that even if he wouldn’t feel the pain of something falling on top of him, it would surely crush him anyway.

  He felt the rush of air as the tentacle passed just above him, and, in the panic of the moment, he allowed his senses to come on for just a second, flooding his nose with the sickening smell of rotting fish.

  The sea monster—Henry had called it a kymaker—swung its tentacle away. Metal screeched somewhere, and the bridge tower lurched again, going completely crooked, like a broken limb. Without the roof to shield them, the syllektors were washed over with the driving, relentless rain. Rhett felt it flooding his mouth and his nose, felt it soaking him in an instant. The floor of the bridge was now smooth, wet, and leaning. Rhett and the others slid down it as if it were made of ice.

  As he struggled to find a grip, Rhett looked up just in time to see the top half of the now-pulverized steering wheel flipping toward him. He rolled onto his back and let it hurtle past him.

  “Look out!” he screamed down at the others.

  The wheel missed Mak and Basil by a margin, but Henry looked up too late. The splintered half-sun shape of the wheel slammed into him. Henry grunted, lost his grip, and fell backward over the opening to the upper deck, off the edge of the misshapen platform that had been the bridge only moments before. He vanished.

  Rhett heard Mak curse.

  The Harbinger’s siren continued to wail.

  “Where is it?” Basil yelled over the storm. “Where did the bloody thing go?”

  Rhett was still sliding, trying to aim for the opening to the spiral staircase, hoping to get down to the main deck. If they could just get inside the ship, they might have a chance at preparing the crew and protecting the steam room.

  But, as if in answer to Basil’s question, Rhett caught sight of the kymaker again, its tentacle snapping into the air like a whip, preparing for another swing. And from somewhere down below the bridge, on top of the ship, he could hear the sound of hundreds of running feet and the gong sound of something smacking iron. The psychons were on board, trying to make their way down into the lower decks.

  Above them, the tentacle swung, moving like a wrecking ball toward the base of one of the smokestacks. When it hit, the entire ship seemed to move backward in the water. The smokestack buckled at the spot where the tentacle connected, bending forward as if bowing to them. It was going to fall right on top of the bridge, where Rhett and Mak and Basil were still trying to hold on.

  The dark metal of the smokestack loomed, continuing to cast out its enormous plume of black smoke. Rhett caught blue lightning zapping across the inside of the plume, as if it were just another storm cloud. Metal groaned and shrieked. The stack fell.

  “Everybody jump!” Mak screamed.

  She and Basil leaped off the side of the crooked platform in the same spot that Henry had fallen. Rhett let go and allowed himself to slide full force toward the edge. The smokestack rushed down to meet him. He planted his feet on the broken edge where the window had been and jumped.

  The rain obscured pretty much everything, but when the lightning uncoiled into the growing waves, Rhett could see the onslaught of psychons flooding the ship, looking like packs of grotesque bats with their cloaks billowing out around them. There were too many of them to count.

  He smashed into the black iron hull of the ship and rolled, hoping to avoid a broken leg. Or two broken legs. The last time he’d been in the presence of psychons with an injured limb, it had almost been the end of him.

  Luckily, when he sprang to his feet and sprinted to the railing at the edge of the ship, everything seemed to be intact.

  The smokestack crashed into the bridge tower with an almighty roar of tearing metal and collapsing supports. The base of the tower stabbed into the Harbinger’s hull, and the smokestack split apart into sections, turning into something that looked more like a spring than a cylinder. More smoke erupted from the breaks in the stack. It swept across the top deck, engulfing the rest of the ship.

  Rhett stumbled away from the destruction. He came to the portside railing and gripped it, searching for something solid to hold on to. He looked around for Basil and Mak, but there was no sign of them. He glanced over the railing and saw what was waiting in the water below.

  The kymaker had broken the surface, showing its horrid face. Really, there was no face. Just a gaping mouth, a funnel that was lined with a spiral of teeth that seemed to lead the way down into its throat. There were more than a dozen tentacles, some smaller, some bigger, flipping and snapping in the air, all of them equipped with those circles of weird crab legs. The monster also had two jointed arms that extended from the top of what Rhett assumed was both its head and its body. There were giant, unshapely lobster claws at the ends of the arms, one of which was currently buried in the side of the Harbinger.

  All of this Rhett saw from the height of at least one New York high-rise, but some of the monster’s tentacles still whipped dangerously close to his face, spraying him with even more water. The monster let out a pathetic-sounding moan, something akin to a whale call, and the Harbinger listed to port, leaning down toward the monster’s terrifying maw.

  Rhett held on to the railing as the ship tilted and the water (and the monster) came closer. Tentacles smacked and clanged off the railing. Rhett looked back, hoping to see a way to climb away from the edge, and saw another tentacle curled up over the starboard side of the ship. The monster had wrapped one of its appendages all the way around the ship and was pulling it down, trying to sink it.

&nbs
p; Loose pieces of metal and broken sections of the smokestack and bridge dislodged and tumbled across the angled deck of the ship. Rhett rolled around on the port railing like the lone survivor in a game of dodgeball, barely avoiding pieces of debris as they whistled past him. Some of them crashed into the railing itself, sending the whole thing into teeth-chattering vibrations.

  “RrrrrrrheeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEETT!”

  He looked up. Mak and Basil were sliding toward him, hands clasped, kicking and flailing, trying to slow themselves down. Rhett didn’t know where they had come from, but behind them, a portion of the already mangled smokestack was rolling toward the edge.

  Rhett put out both of his arms, steadying himself on the narrow bars of the railing. Basil and Mak smacked into the crooks of his arms, and all three of them tipped over the side of the ship. Mak caught one of the bars and dangled there, Basil caught another with one hand and, with the other, caught Rhett, who had lost his grip altogether, before he could plummet down into the kymaker’s hungry mouth. They hung there, suspended over the writhing tentacles and gnashing teeth, as the Harbinger listed further and further. Rain sloshed over the side of the deck. Rhett looked down at the front of the crooked ship and saw a few psychons go tumbling into the water.

  “Is this not just, like, the worst day ever?” Basil said.

  A few seconds later, the unmoored chunk of smokestack that had followed Basil and Mak down rolled over them with a crunch, leaving a trail of falling bits and pieces in its wake. It was a piece probably the size of a large house, and it flipped end over end toward the water, toward the toothy pit of the sea monster’s mouth.

  The debris barreled into the kymaker’s throat, breaking off a few pointed teeth as it went. The monster pulled away, loosening the tentacle that it had wrapped around the ship and yanking out the claw that had punched a hole in the riveted iron hull. Instantly, the Harbinger righted itself in the water, rocking back and forth for a moment as it regained its balance. The kymaker sank down below the surface, using its claws to try and pull the giant circle of metal out of its mouth. It let out an agonized wail of pain that seemed to synchronize with the Harbinger’s siren.

  Rhett, Mak, and Basil heaved themselves back over the railing, sopping wet and mentally exhausted.

  “Yep,” Basil said. “Definitely the worst day ever.”

  “Come on,” Mak said, getting to her feet. “We just got lucky. That’s not going to happen again. If we don’t get back inside the ship now, we’ll be stuck up here when the psychons start their next advance.”

  Rhett stood and glanced back over the railing. There was no sign of the sea monster, not even a shadow.

  “How do we get back in?” he asked, gesturing to the crumpled heap of metal that had been the bridge tower.

  “What, you think this thing only has one door?” Basil said as Mak helped him up. Then he gripped her under her elbows and pulled her close. He kissed her for a long moment, with the rain pattering down around them and lightning flickering between the clouds. When the kiss finally broke, he said, “Are you all right, my love?”

  Mak nodded, and for just a second Rhett thought she might be crying.

  “Good,” Basil said gently. “Then let’s get out of here.”

  FOURTEEN

  Running along the top deck of the Harbinger was like running across several city blocks in New York. Platforms rose and fell, sometimes in a fluid way, sometimes in a jarring, haphazard way. There were wide-open stretches, with the one remaining smokestack looming above them and the flat black canvas of the deck spread out around them. There were cramped, narrow alleys where they had to shuffle sideways between tall compartments with windows that were all blacked out. The amalgamation of all the different ships that had come together to create the Harbinger was less clean up here. It was like the pieces from a bunch of different jigsaw puzzles had all been jammed together.

  Rhett followed Mak and Basil, the rain driving against them, soaking them, blinding them. From far behind, at the front of the ship, they could hear the banging of psychon claws against the hull and the distinct sound of their skeletal feet scraping against the metal as they ran. They were flooding the ship, trying to find a way through the thick steel to the lower decks. And they weren’t far behind.

  “Keep moving,” Mak said.

  After running for what felt like hours, Mak and Basil finally slowed their pace and ducked into a little alcove formed by rising stacks of metal shipping containers. Their colors were faded to varying shades of dark gray, but Rhett could see the subtle variations and the places where their ribbed sides didn’t quite line up. Cables were strung over the tops of the stacks, pulled taut to keep them from toppling over. The three of them moved single-file between the containers.

  Once they were inside the alcove, Rhett thought for a moment that he was looking at the set of some bad pirate movie. While the outer edge of the alcove was surrounded by stacks of shipping containers, hiding their view of the rest of the ship, the space inside the alcove was all wooden, made of badly swollen and warped boards that were frayed with splinters. There was a raised quarterdeck that was surrounded by a mostly destroyed railing, with stairs leading up to it that didn’t look very reliable, either. Beneath the quarterdeck were the cracked and shattered windows looking into what would have been the captain’s quarters themselves. There was a door in the center, though, that was made from the same riveted steel as the rest of the Harbinger.

  “Secret passageway?” Rhett asked Basil.

  “Secret passageway,” Basil replied, looking proud.

  “Yeah, except everyone on board knows about it,” Mak said, slipping her fingers in the space between the door and its frame. It had been left ajar. “Someone’s already been here.”

  “Henry?” Rhett offered.

  Mak pushed the door the rest of the way open with an iron squeal. “Or Treeny.”

  From beyond the alcove, they heard the sound of booming thuds, three or four of them, one right after the other.

  “They’ve started with the cannons again,” Basil said with a sigh. “Luckily they won’t be able to do much damage with those. It’d take about a million hits from one to break through the hull.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Rhett murmured, listening to the distant metal ping of the cannonballs bouncing off steel.

  Mak disappeared into the shadows within the door. Basil and Rhett followed.

  Inside there were no captain’s quarters to be found. Only a sharply descending stairwell that went on burying itself deep into the ship for as far down as Rhett could see. He thought of the apartment building and decided he would be done with stairs for a while after this.

  Once they were all inside, Mak pulled the door shut behind them, completing the darkness. Rhett heard something slide and then click into place. Mak had locked it.

  “Everyone hold your breath,” Basil murmured.

  Rhett felt his way down, clinging to the wall and the railing. They all fumbled for a solid grip, sometimes bumping into or grabbing each other’s shoulders. The darkness was total, unbreakable.

  Rhett shuffled his feet across the occasional landing, looking for where the next set of steps began. He was blind, trying to imagine each step in his head before he took it. Each time they came to a new landing, he hoped that Mak or Basil would say that they had gone far enough. But they just kept going, seemingly unbothered by the complete absence of light.

  After they had gone down at least ten or eleven sets of stairs, there was a violent clanging from above them, followed by a horrible screech that made Rhett think of a rake scratching along the hood of a car. Then another clang.

  They stopped. Rhett looked up in the direction of the sound, knowing that the other two were doing the same.

  “Damn,” Mak whispered. “They found the door. We have to move.”

  They moved quicker, no longer reaching out delicately with their feet for the next step but letting themselves to half-fall down the stairs. Above them, t
he clanging got louder. So did the scratching.

  “Will this take us to the steam room?” Rhett asked, allowing himself a little too much hope.

  “Sort of,” Mak said without pause.

  Rhett lost track of how many steps they had gone down. Each new landing was at once a potential oasis, the end of their long descent, and then immediately became a fading, bitter memory. They were so far into the black now that Rhett wasn’t sure they were even surrounded by walls anymore. For all he knew, the unending shadows could have stretched out in all directions forever.

  From high up, there was a horrendous crumpling sound. A few seconds later, something large and heavy rushed past Rhett’s head, tossing his hair, falling down the middle of the stairwell. He wasn’t sure if he ever heard it hit the bottom.

  He squinted up through the abyss, to where there was now a speck of gray light cutting into the black. He could hear the rain again and the thunder. And he could see the faint silhouettes of the psychons as they poured into the stairwell. They were like floating skulls racing down through the darkness to meet him. Really, all he could see were their frozen grins.

  “Run!” Mak yelled, her voice deafening in the small space.

  And now, by the scant light of the storm outside, the three of them ran down the steps, skipping over two and three at a time. Rhett could sense the psychons behind them, not bothering with the steps anymore but leaping from one landing to the next, darting across the opening in the middle of the stairwell. He could hear the ruffling of their cloaks and the scratching of their boney claws.

  “Faster!” he cried at the other two. “Go!”

  They went lower and lower. The darkness that they plunged deeper and deeper into was absolute. The psychons gained on them. Rhett thought he could hear one breathing just behind him.

  Finally, as they came around to the next landing, Rhett saw the outline of another door. It was red and glowing, and thin wisps of smoke floated out of the cracks.

  “There! There!” Mak yelled.

  They all jumped down the last set of stairs, crashing into one another on the landing. Rhett turned back, clambering to his feet, and saw a psychon standing at the top of the steps, where he had just been a moment before.