Barabas barked a short laugh. “He’s probably right.”
“I prefer the other version,” I said.
Saiman shrugged. “Romanticism will be your undoing, Kate. To answer your question, I’m not worried about suicidal Greeks, but about their more violent countrymen. The Aegean is a haven for pirates.”
Romanticism will be your undoing, blah blah. “Isn’t that why you have that gun mounted on the front? Or is it for other reasons, because I would’ve thought that a man with your powers would be past the urge to compensate.”
Barabas grinned.
“I had forgotten that talking to you is like trying to pet a cactus,” Saiman said dryly. “Thank you for reminding me.”
“Always happy to oblige.”
“I’m compensating for nothing. Pirates come in two types. Most of them are opportunistic, situationally homicidal, and driven by profit. They kill as means to an end. They evaluate a vessel of this size and realize that a sea battle would be too costly and their chances of winning it are slim. Unfortunately, there is the second type: the rash, the stupid, and the insane. The Rush wouldn’t prove a deterrent; on the contrary, they would view it as a great prize. Capturing it would at once give them a flagship of decent firepower and allow them to make a name for themselves. They can’t be reasoned with—”
A small cutter swung around the western edge of the nearest island. Saiman looked at it. Another boat joined the first, then a third, a fourth . . .
Saiman gave out a long-suffering sigh. “Right. Please go and get your brute, Kate. We’re about to get boarded.”
“I’ll go.” Barabas jogged away.
Over a dozen cutters now sped toward us. With magic up, the giant gun was useless.
A bell rang: three rings, pause, three rings, pause. A woman barked, her voice deep, “General quarters! All hands to battle stations! General quarters!”
“Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?” I asked.
“The ship must have only one captain,” Saiman said. “Russell is perfectly competent to handle any emergency, and I don’t want to undermine him with my presence.”
The shapeshifters spilled out onto the deck, Curran in the lead. Andrea brandished a crossbow. Raphael strode next to her, carrying knives. The boats headed straight for us. The Beast Lord braked next to me. “Are you planning to ram them?”
“That would be futile. Their boats are more maneuverable. They would simply scatter.”
A person dived into the ocean off the lead boat. That must’ve been a cue, because the pirates began dropping overboard like their boats were on fire.
“What the hell?” Eduardo muttered.
“As I said, we’re about to be boarded,” Saiman said with afflicted patience.
Above us on top of the brig, two sailors manned a polybolos, a siege engine that looked like a crossbow on steroids. An antipersonnel weapon, a polybolos fired large crossbow bolts with deadly accuracy, and just for fun, it was self-loading and repeating, like a machine gun.
Sleek shapes dashed through the water toward us.
“Do they have trained dolphins?” George asked.
“Not exactly,” Saiman backed away, toward the center of the deck.
The dolphins shot toward the Rush all but flying beneath the waves.
I pulled Slayer out.
“Form a perimeter,” Curran called. “Let them get on the deck, where it’s nice and dry. Don’t let them pull you into the water.”
We made a ring in the center of the deck.
“This is utterly ridiculous,” Aunt B said.
Keira stretched. “Fun, fun, fun . . .”
Something smashed into the side of the hull. A deformed gray hand clutched the top edge of the deck and a creature leaped over the railing and landed, dripping water. Nude except for a leather harness, it stood on short muscular legs, hunched over but upright, the sun glistening on its thick, shiny hide. Its body was all chest with a smooth, wide trunk of a waist. Broad shoulders supported two massive arms with surprisingly small hands. Its neck, disproportionately thick, with a hump on the back, anchored a head armed with long, narrow dolphin jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth. Two human eyes stared at us from the thickly fleshed face. A big bastard. At least four hundred pounds.
A weredolphin. Pinch me, somebody.
Greek legends spoke of some pirates who’d captured the god Dionysus. They were planning to rape him and sell him into slavery. Furious, he transformed them into dolphins. Apparently, their descendants were alive and well and still in the family business.
The pirate glared at us. Hell of a neck. Strikes to the throat were right out.
Other pirates leaped over the railing. One, two . . . seven . . . thirteen. A baker’s dozen. Wait, fifteen. Eighteen . . . Twenty-one. The odds weren’t in our favor.
“Maybe they just came over to borrow a cup of sugar,” I said.
Andrea barked a short laugh. Curran put his hand on my shoulder. “That’s a lot of sugar. Must be a big cake.”
The lead weredolphin opened his jaws, displaying teeth designed to pierce struggling prey and not let go. English words spilled out, sotto voce, accented and mangled. “Give us your ship and your cargo and you can go.”
“He lies,” Saiman said. “I lost two vessels to them in the last six months. They will butcher us like cattle for the sake of the cargo.”
“Do you speak Greek?” Curran asked.
Saiman shrugged. “Naturally.”
“Ask him if he thought this through.”
A melodious language spilled from Saiman.
The weredolphin stared at Saiman like he had grown a second head.
“Leave this ship,” Curran said, his voice deepening. He was about to explode. “And you will survive. This is your only warning.”
Saiman translated.
The dolphin drew back and pointed at Curran. “First, I kill you. Then I rape your woman.”
Gold drowned Curran’s eyes. I’ve seen people put their foot in their mouth. This was the first time I saw a fin jammed into one.
Curran’s body exploded. The change was so fast, it was almost instantaneous. One second a man stood next to me, the next a monster towered over me, fully seven and a half feet tall. Gray fur covered his muscular limbs, dark ghostly stripes crisscrossing it like the marks of a whip. The colossal leonine mouth gaped open, flashing scimitar fangs, and a huge sound burst forth, dangerous, rough, grating, primal in its fury and sheer power, like a battle challenge delivered by a tornado. It hit you straight in the gut, bypassing logic and thought, into the bundle of nerves that made you freeze. I’ve heard it dozens of times and it still shook me.
The weredolphins had never heard it before, and so they did exactly what most people would do when faced with an enraged lion. They cringed, paralyzed.
I lunged forward, drawing as I struck. The head pirate saw me coming and raised his arm to ward off the strike. Slayer’s blade cut through the flesh and bone of the narrow wrist like a knife through warm butter. The hand fell to the deck. The pirate clutched the stump of his arm and screamed, a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek. I buried my sword in his gut and disemboweled him with a single rip.
The pirates swarmed me. Behind me the shapeshifters snarled, in a terrifying chorus: the deep roar of the father-and-daughter Kodiaks mixing with the howls of the wolves and the pissed-off snarl of a jaguar, laced with hyenas’ psychotic cackle.
I carved the closest attacker’s chest, then slashed the side of the second one open and dropped him with a cut to the neck. The smell of blood filled the air. Behind me Derek moved, breaking the necks and limbs of the bleeding pirates before they had a chance to recover.
I sliced a gaping mouth across a weredolphin’s groin. He dropped, snapping his teeth at me, and through the gap in the bodies, I saw Curran pick one of the pirates off the deck and break his spine over his knee. He tossed the limp body aside. His giant lion mouth gaped. Next he bit someone’s shoulder. Bones crunched, followed by a blood-c
hilling desperate scream.
To the left a large weredolphin charged forward, shoving shapeshifters out of the way. The crossbow bolt whined, cutting the air, and sprouted in his eye. The weredolphin spun and the seven-foot-tall striped nightmare that was Aunt B lunged at him, slicing his stomach open. She buried her hand deep in the wound and yanked out a handful of pale guts. I kept moving, carving my way through the gray, shiny bodies.
Teeth bit my arm, ripping into the muscle. I reversed my sword and stabbed Slayer deep into the weredolphin’s neck. He gurgled. Blood poured from between his teeth, burning my wound as the magic in my blood reacted to the Lyc-V in his. I twisted the blade, ripping through his throat. The pirate went down. To my left, two weredolphins rammed Eduardo at full speed and dove off the deck.
Crap. In the water they had an edge. I reversed my course, trying to cut my way to the side.
Another pirate blocked my way. I thrust. He turned into my strike, and the blade pierced the thick hump of his neck. The dolphin screamed and smashed into me. The impact took me off my feet. I flew a bit and hit the cabin with my back with a solid thud. Ow.
The dolphin dived at me, too fast to avoid, too heavy to impale. I raised my left leg. The body hit me, the full weight landing on my leg. Crooked dolphin teeth snapped at my face. Heavy sonovabitch. I grunted, bending my knee more, and slid him right onto the point of my sword. Nice and easy.
He jerked, flailing on the blade, as if shocked with a live wire, his weight pinning my legs. I pulled my throwing knife out with my left hand and stabbed it into his side, turning his innards into mush. The dolphin convulsed. Teeth ripped at my clothes, scratching my side. I stabbed him again and again. Blood wet my hand, spraying on my face in a hot mist. The pirate screeched, the high-pitched desperate shriek turning into a gurgle, and sagged on top of me. The four-hundred-some pounds pinned me in place. I strained. The body didn’t move. Damn it.
Suddenly the weight was gone. The dolphin hovered three feet above me and was tossed unceremoniously aside. A gray monster stained with blood crouched by me.
Curran.
“You’re taking a nap? Come on, Kate, I need you for this fight. Stop lying around.”
You sonovabitch. I rolled to my feet and grabbed my sword. “You must think you’re funny.”
A weredolphin threw himself at us from the right. Curran tripped him and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him back, and I sliced the pirate’s throat and punctured his heart with two quick strikes.
“Just saying, you have to pull your own weight. A hot body and flirting will only get you so far.”
Hot body and flirting, huh. When I’m done killing people . . . “Everything I do, I learned from you, boy toy.”
Another pirate rushed us. I dropped, slicing the tendons behind his knee, while Curran headbutted him and ripped out his throat. The pirate fell.
“Boy toy?” Curran asked.
“Would you prefer man candy?”
The deck was suddenly empty. Blood painted the ship. Gray corpses lay here and there, torn and savaged by claws and teeth. A huge shaggy Kodiak bear prowled the deck, his muzzle dripping gore. The last pirate still on his feet was running toward Andrea and Raphael near the bow. Andrea raised her crossbow. She was still in human form. Raphael stood next to her, light on his feet, his knives dripping red. A trail of bodies led to them, bristling with crossbow bolts. The pirate rushed her. She sank two bolts into his throat. He gurgled, his momentum carrying him forward. Raphael let him get within ten feet and cut him down in a fury of precise strikes.
Past them a black panther the size of a pony slapped a weredolphin with a huge paw. The shapeshifter’s skull split, crushed like an egg under a hammer.
On the left a humanoid creature crawled onto the deck, lean, furry, with a round head and short round ears. Disproportionately long, sharp brown claws protruded from his oversized fingers. He strained and heaved another, much larger body onto the deck. It landed in a splash of water and a shaggy pile of brown fur, turned over, and vomited salt water from a half-human half-bison muzzle. Eduardo.
The reddish beast sank next to him, baring sharp white teeth. His bright red eyes, the color of a ripe strawberry, had a horizontal pupil, like that of a goat. They made him look demonic. I knew of only one shapeshifter with eyes like that—Barabas.
“Why don’t you know how to swim?” His diction was almost perfect.
Eduardo unloaded more water on the deck. “Never needed to.”
“We are crossing an ocean. It didn’t occur to you to learn?”
“Look, I’ve tried. I walk into a pool, I thrash, and then I sink.”
Ahead the flotilla of boats fled behind the island. Bodies littered the deck. I counted. Fourteen. None of them ours. We were bloody, hurt, but alive. The pirates weren’t.
What a waste of life.
And I’d loved it. I loved every second of it: the blood, the rush, the heady satisfaction of striking and seeing the cut or thrust find its target . . . Voron had succeeded. I was raised and trained to be a killer, and nothing, not even happy peaceful weeks in the Keep with the man I loved, could change that. I’d come to terms with what I was a long time ago, but sometimes, like right now, looking over the deck strewn with corpses, I felt a quiet regret for the person I could’ve been.
Curran, naked and covered with blood, wrapped his now-human arm around me. “You okay?” he asked quietly.
I nodded. “You?”
He grinned and squeezed me to him. My bones groaned.
“Congratulations,” I squeezed out. “I survived the fight, but your hug did me in.”
He grinned and let me go. We’d both made it.
“We have a live one,” Raphael called out.
We crossed the deck to where he crouched. A young man, maybe early twenties, with a mass of dark curls, laid on his back, his right leg twisted under at an odd angle, his face contorted by pain. Raphael held the point of his knife over the man’s liver.
The man’s gaze fastened on Saiman. He held up his hand and said something, his words tumbling out in a rush.
Saiman asked something. The man answered.
Saiman turned to Curran. “He has some information that would be of particular interest to you. He will tell you if you set him free, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Fine,” Curran said.
Saiman nodded at the man. The pirate said something halting and looked at me. Saiman looked at me as well.
“What?”
Saiman turned to Curran. “It appears that this is for your ears only. I believe it’s in your best interest to have this conversation in private.”
“Give us some space,” Curran said.
People moved back.
“Do you want me to stay?” I asked.
He reached out and squeezed my hand. “No.”
I moved back with the others. Saiman leaned over and whispered something to Curran. They spoke quietly. Saiman asked the man something. The man answered. Saiman relayed it back.
Curran turned, his face dark. All humor fled from his expression. He met my gaze and didn’t say anything. Not good.
“How can you stand it?” Andrea murmured next to me. “I’d be right in there.”
“I didn’t tell him about rescuing Saiman,” I murmured back. “If he needs to keep something private, I’m fine with it. When he’s ready, he’ll tell me.”
“Lock this man up,” Saiman called.
Two sailors came, picked up the pirate, and carried him off.
“Let’s get this place cleaned up,” Curran called.
People spread out. He came toward me.
“Bad news?” I asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
I nodded to him and we went to help scrub the gore off the deck.
CHAPTER 6
We arrived in the port of Gagra at dusk. First we saw the mountains, triangular low peaks sheathed in vibrant emerald green, as if blanketed with dense moss. The sunset behind us shifted to the right as the
ship turned in to a sheltered harbor. The deep, almost purple waters of the Black Sea lightened to blue.
All twelve of us were there, on the deck. The shapeshifters looked uneasy. Even George, who usually met everything with a smile, seemed grim. She stood next to her father, hugging herself, as the wind stirred the dark spirals of her hair.
“Are you alright, cookie?” Mahon said.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” she murmured. “That’s all.”
“Shall I hoist the flag?” Saiman asked.
“Yes,” Curran said.
The gray-and-black striped flag of the Pack with a black lion paw on it rose up the mast.
The shore grew closer. The mountains wove in and out of the sea in gentle curves, soaking their roots in the water. The beach was a narrow strip of pebbled ground. Stone piers stretched into the waves, as if beckoning to us, and behind them, buildings of white stone sat perched on the side of the mountains, their colonnades facing the sea. They looked Greek to me, but most of what I knew about Greece came from books.
The water turned turquoise. The Rush slowed, then came to a stop.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“A signal from the port,” Saiman said. “I would suggest you gather your belongings.”
We had already packed. Everything I intended to take with me was in a backpack, which Barabas promptly confiscated. Apparently as an alpha, I wasn’t permitted to carry my own luggage.
Twenty minutes later a blue flare shot from the pier.
“We’re clear to land,” Saiman said. “Once you disembark, I will depart. I have business in Tuapse, Odessa, and Istanbul. I’ll return within a week or so.”
That suited me just fine. Saiman loved to amuse himself, and we’d have our hands full without trying to contain him.
Fifteen minutes later the crew was tying the Rush to the pier. I stood on the crowded deck, Curran next to me. George’s anxiety infected me. I wanted off the ship. I wanted to see Desandra and get to work. Unfortunately if I started pacing back and forth like a caged tiger, I’d be immediately told by nine people that it wasn’t proper.
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