by Matt Forbeck
Several people had already clambered on top of the white-bottomed boat, lying there like beached seals warming themselves on a sun-scorched rock. The waves that had rushed from the sinking ship had shoved the tiny craft farther and farther away, and it would be a long swim to reach it. Still, there seemed like no other recourse, not if Quin and Abe wanted to live.
"That's our chance," Quin said, already crawling through the freezing waters separating him from the overturned boat. "Come on!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Brody Murtagh backhanded Trevor McPherson across the jaw so hard that it would have shattered the bones of a living man. The man only cried out in surprise rather than pain though and glared back at the Irishman as they trod water next to each other in the wake of the sinking Titanic.
Just about everyone else unfortunate enough to find themselves in the water was shivering against the near zero temperature, but the two men and their companions didn't feel it at all. The grave had long since robbed them of any fear of the cold.
"What the bloody hell was that for?" Trevor rubbed his jaw.
"For not listening to me," Brody said. "'Stay away from the ship,' I said. 'Give the thing a wide berth,' I said. And what good did that do poor Brigid now, can you tell me? Just tell me that."
Trevor stared at Brody, refusing to utter a word.
"It's not a rhetorical question, laddie," Brody said at last. He turned to the two others with them. "What do you think's happened to our blessed Brigid now?"
"I couldn't rightly say." Fergus Kielty moved away from Brody as he spoke, eyeing the man's hands as he went. "But if she was dumb enough to ignore you, then maybe she got what she had coming."
"Aye," Siobhan Kelly said. "But then it wasn't her bloody idea to drag us out here into the middle of the North Atlantic all by our lonesomes now, was it?"
Brody glared at Siobhan, but as he did he spotted a man swimming toward them from behind her. A grin played across his lips. "Now, you're the one who spent the whole trip so far whining about how damned hungry you were, and you're going to complain to me because I brought you out to the greatest buffet you've ever seen?" Brigid had all of her immortal life ahead of her, barring an unfortunate incident, and what does she do? She gets careless. She goes wandering off after a quick kill, something too shiny for that little bird to ignore, and what happens to her?"
"Just what you said would happen." Trevor gave Brody a sullen glare. "She gets too close to the wreck, and a wave sucks her down."
"Right," said Brody. "Knocks the wind right out of her. In case you hadn't noticed, my friends, we don't carry too much air in our lungs in the first place."
"Well, we don't rightly need it now, do we?" said Fergus.
"That's my point." Brody began to swim around Siobhan with long, languorous strokes. "It means we're not so buoyant as the breathing folks, and it doesn't take much to sink us."
Siobhan let out a little gasp, then breathed in deep and rose just a bit in the water. "Do you think Brigid is dead? Well and truly, I mean?"
"For her sake, let's hope so," Brody said. "Otherwise, she's going to spend the rest of her days trying to walk across the bottom of the Atlantic."
"Help!" the man behind Siobhan said as Brody approached him in the water. "I say. You wouldn't happen to have seen a lifeboat going by, would you? My wife is in number five. Her name is Amiee Achilli."
Siobhan turned around and cackled at the man. "You think if we'd seen a lifeboat we'd still be soaking out here in this frozen stew with you?"
"I– I meant no harm by asking," the man said. "I just hoped to see her and my little girl again."
"Don't you worry yourself, mate," Brody said as he came up next to the slim, bald-headed man. "I'm sure you'll meet each other again soon enough, whether in this life or the next."
The man's voice trembled as he shivered from the cold. "That's all well and good, but I'm afraid I'm not quite ready to give up on this life quite yet. Even if I can't get into that lifeboat, I'd like to know that they're going to make it – that they'll be all right."
"There are no guarantees in life." Trevor, who had dived under the sea's black surface, emerged from the water behind the man. "Who can do more than hope for the best to happen?"
"Right," said Fergus. "We've already lost one of our own tonight. I'd thought her invulnerable."
"You mean the ship?" the man said, turning back to where the Titanic had disappeared beneath the waves. "I think we were all guilty of that to some extent. It's hard to believe she's gone, isn't it? And that she took so many souls with her."
"What's your name, my friend?" Brody asked.
"Justin," the man said with a faint smile. "Justin Achilli of Atlanta at your service. I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm not sure I can feel mine any longer."
"Fair enough," Fergus said. "I've had that same problem for years."
The others laughed at this, all but Fergus, who only scowled at them.
"Is there anything around here I could cling to?" Justin asked. "I'd hoped that the four of you might have discovered something stable and laid claim to it."
One by one, the others shook their heads at him. "We just came out here for a swim on this beautiful Sunday night." Brody smiled, but took care not to show his teeth. His fangs had extended, but he didn't want Justin to see them and spoil all the fun.
How often, after all, did any of them get to play with their food like this before feasting? If they wished to feed back in the States, they always had to strike fast and take great pains to make it look like an accident. The failure to do that properly was one of the reasons that Dushko had herded them all on to the Carpathia, after all.
Brody hadn't seen the harm in it. Who cared if people knew who he was or what he was? He'd been a killer before he'd died, and he was a killer now. He could handle the heat from such revelations. All you had to do was pick up and leave.
Not all of them had done so well though. Siobhan, for instance, had been discovered feeding on a child and had to kill off an entire family once they started screaming about it. Brody snickered to himself as he thought about it. That was the first time he'd ever actually heard someone scream "Bloody murder!"
But once it had happened, Siobhan had refused to leave her home behind. "I've been here since before I died," she said, "and nothing's ever going to make me leave."
She'd been wrong about that, of course. When the police started poking around, even Siobhan had realized that it would only be a matter of time before she was found out. She'd killed the first patrolman to become suspicious of her, but that had only brought more attention to the murders.
The cops didn't always care if a family of immigrants turned up dead, after all, but when it was one of their own they went out of their way to figure out what happened and put a stop to it. A certain sense of self-preservation motivated them. A killer who was mad enough to murder a policeman might be mad enough to do it again.
"Very funny," Justin said to Brody. "I'm glad you're doing well enough here to be able to find the humor in this horrible tragedy. Did you have no one on board that ship that you cared about, sir? Did you think it such a pleasure to be dumped into the freezing drink that you couldn't be bothered to find safe passage for your young lady there?"
"Now," Trevor said, coming closer to the man. "There's no need to be nasty about it."
"It's a nasty situation," Justin said. "We're all going to die nasty deaths. Us lot here, we're all going to freeze to death, but all things considered we might be better off than the women and children shoved into those lifeboats. How long do you think they'll be able to make it out there without food and water."
"Perhaps they'll be forced to turn to cannibalism." Fergus chortled at the thought.
"That's exactly what I'm talking about," Justin said. "At least we'll be spared the horrors of that prospect. It's one hell of a day when you have to count freezing to death or drowning among your blessings."
"That it is, friend," Brody said, moving
straight toward the man now. "That it is. But perhaps we can help you with that problem."
Justin barked a short, bitter laugh. "How? Do you happen to have a submarine under there that you're standing on."
"You misunderstand me," Brody said. "I can't offer you salvation."
"Of course not," Justin said. "That is in no man's power."
"No, you're right." Brody reached for Justin and held his face between his ice-cold hands. Despite having been in the frigid water for so many minutes, the man's skin still burned with life, and Brody could feel that fading heat leeching into him through his long-dead skin.
Justin's eyes grew wide as a sharp terror sliced through him. He brought his hands up to try to pry Brody's fingers from his head, but he found them to be as strong and unforgiving as steel bands. "No," he said softly, his voice trembling from far more than the cold.
"But," Brody stretched open his jaw, exposing his long, white predator's fangs, "I can allow you the blessing of an even quicker release."
CHAPTER TWELVE
"The ship is gone!" Lucy shouted at the sailor in charge of their boat. "We have plenty of room aboard our boat! We must go back!"
Her fellow passengers murmured at her outburst, some of them agreeing with her and others clinging to their fears. With one exception, though, none of them proved willing to stand with her against the sailor that had been placed in charge of the boat. He'd refused whatsoever to return to the ship, even when Captain Smith himself had shouted an order through a blowhorn for the man to do so.
"Mr Hichens," Lucy said. "We only have twenty-four people on board, and this boat can hold three times that without issue. It is a crime against our fellow passengers and against humanity itself that we were put out to sea when so many were still aboard the Titanic, and you compound that error every minute that you refuse to return to the scene of that crime."
Hichens leaned back against the lifeboat's prow and glared down at Lucy. She had been complaining to him for over an hour, and the bald-headed sailor had ignored her pleas as if they were little more than the wailings of a small child. As the grand ship finally disappeared beneath the waves, frustration got the better of him, and he shouted back at the woman.
"How many times do I have to spell it out for you idiots?" he said. "If we return there, it's death for every last one of us!"
Lucy turned to look back at the other sailor in the boat, a Mr Fleet, who sat in the aft with his hand on the tiller. He hadn't said much all night. He just continued to nod his head in glum agreement with Hichens.
"But the ship is down now," Lucy said. "The so-called suction you warned us about hasn't formed a gigantic whirlpool there waiting to pull us to the bottom of the sea." She stabbed a finger toward where the Titanic had been until just moments ago. "There are people out there! They're swimming about in that freezing water while you insist we do nothing at all but sit back and listen to them die!"
Lucy wouldn't admit it to Hichens or any of the other passengers, but she knew exactly who she meant when she said "people." It tore at her heart to think that Abe and Quin might be out there somewhere, still alive and floundering about in the wake of the Titanic's absence. She knew they might already be dead, that it was not just possible but even likely, but she hadn't yet been able to give up hope.
Lucy hadn't explored the depth of her feelings for her two friends. There had always seemed like there would be plenty of time. They were young and heading to America, and she was going off to college, far away from her parents and her home, so that she could learn about the wider world and how it worked. Despite pressures from her parents and her female friends, she hadn't time for things like romance or marriage.
She supposed that was the reason she'd accepted Abe's request to court her. She had already been spending plenty of time with him and Quin, and it put the endless badgering about her romantic plans to rest, at least for a while. She had hesitated at first, unsure if it was fair to lead Abe on in that way, but he'd been so insistent and so sweet that she had decided to go through with it.
While she had allowed outside pressures to force her into producing a suitor, she had sworn to herself that she would not allow that to build into the kind of inertia that would transform her into a young bride. She had no designs on Abe's wealth or his title. The notion of someday becoming the next Lady Godalming held no allure for her.
Even the idea of the nobility – that one person was inherently superior to another by nature of his birth – rankled her. That sort of notion was cut from the same cloth as the idea that women were second class citizens, the kind who could work and pay taxes and contribute to society in a myriad of ways but were unable to vote. She'd become an outspoken suffragette to fight against such injustices, and she had zero desire to become part of a similar problem.
And then there was the way that Quin looked at her, with the sort of burning intensity that the callow Abe had never been able to muster. She had long wondered if he'd had feelings for her, but he'd never once given voice to such longings. So she'd settled for Abe, who seemed content to give her as much space and time as she required, which suited her well.
Now she'd let the boys put her on a lifeboat and send her off to live without them while the two of them suffered a noble death. It galled her that she'd permitted them to get away with that, and now that the Titanic had slipped beneath the waves, she felt a terrible guilt squeezing her heart. She already worried that it might never go away.
That fact had prodded her to protest Hichens's behavior, and she had vowed to herself that she would not stop until either he gave in or the point had been rendered moot. As far as she could tell, they were still a long way off from that moment. People still splashed about and screamed and bellowed and called and begged for help out there in the darkness. There had to be not just scores of them but hundreds.
"There isn't enough room!" Hichens said. "Not for all of them. If we go anywhere near that mob, they'll pull us under. They'll swamp and sink us for sure."
"Then we go back and save the ones we can," Maggie Brown cut in. She had been arguing for Lucy's points the entire time, and that fact had given Lucy the resolve to carry on, even in the face of the fear-ridden apathy evinced by the rest of the boat's passengers.
"Right," said Lucy. "If we save even one more person, isn't that worth it? Don't you think he'll be grateful? That his family will be thrilled to see him delivered safely from this disaster?"
Lucy turned to the rest of the passengers, appealing to them. Perhaps if she could get enough support, they could override the cowardly Hichens. "Think of that," she said. "Every person we save is one less family left bereft."
"She's right," said Maggie. "We're almost all women here in this boat. Where are your men? Your husbands? Your boys? Are you going to just let them all die?"
"By the time we'd get to them, they'd already be dead," Hichens said. "The water's filled with nothing but stiffs, and there's nothing you can say or do to make me row through that God-damned graveyard out there!"
Lucy stood straight up in the boat now and glowered at the repulsive man. "If you're not going to help, then get the hell out of the way," she said. "We can pull those oars as well as anyone!"
"You touch those oars, and I'll toss you overboard with my bare hands!" Hichens said, the veins on his neck popping out as he bellowed his threat.
Maggie stood up next to Lucy now and put a hand on her shoulder. She scowled straight into Hichens's hateful eyes, and in a voice filled with quiet menace said, "I'd just like to see you try that."
Hichens tensed up, and Lucy braced herself for the man's attack. Would no one, she wondered, come to her aid?
There were two men on the boat besides the sailors: a yachtsman named Major Peuchen and an older Arabian gentleman, named Mr Leeni, who seemed to have sneaked on board. Would they stand by and watch Hichens murder two women? Would the other women scream in horror and cower from the man's actions as much as they had from his threats?
Lucy
was about to find out.
Hichens stood halfway up and then sat back down again, curling up against the bow on his other side. "Fine," he said, shaking his head. "Do whatever the hell you like. It's a fool's errand. It's too damned late for any of them anyhow."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"There's no room here," one of the bedraggled crewmen already on top of the overturned lifeboat said. "Go find your own bit of flotsam."
Quin glanced around and saw that there were precious few things to find this far out from where the Titanic had sunk. Most of the people must have been too exhausted after escaping the wreck to swim the distance required to reach the lifeboat, but Quin and Abe – who'd had a head start on most of them – had managed it. Now they'd found that their effort might have been made in vain.
