At some point, Ethan realized he was on his stomach, face pressed into the cold stone floor. He took air in with ragged breaths and could feel his skin sticking to the ground. A coppery taste filled his mouth, and then the world spun as Zoey rolled him over.
“No, no, no,” Zoey said as she feebly peeled back his shirt and inspected what he’d done to himself. Her fingers prodded the hole for a brief second before retracting. “Damn you, Ethan,” she said, her voice cracking. “Why did you have to go do something stupid like that?”
Ethan spent what little energy he could muster into focusing on the vampire. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
At the end of his sentence, he broke into a coughing fit that sent bright-red blood in all directions. It bubbled out of his mouth, ran down his neck, and even spattered Zoey across her frightened face.
“Come on,” she said, trying to pull him upright. “We can get you to a bed. Maybe we can sew you up or find another potion.”
Ethan grimaced and shook his head. “I’ll never make it. We both know that.”
“No! You’re stronger than this!” Tears welled in her eyes and stained her cheeks. Zoey sat back on her haunches for a moment to wipe them away. “You’ve got a dog to save. You can’t quit.”
Ethan beckoned her closer with a wave of the hand. When she drew near, he grabbed her by the back of the head and pulled her down so he could kiss her one last time. As they pressed together, he shut his eyes and savored it all, while her alluring, albeit unnatural, scent reassured him everything was going to be just fine.
Dying, Ethan decided, wasn’t so bad. Especially when it was in the arms of his vampire.
With his eyes still closed, he felt the tip of Zoey’s tongue slide across his blood-tinged lips and then slip into his mouth. Her hands pushed against his chest, and her fingers tightened on his skin. Then she pulled away, and Ethan opened his eyes to find her staring back at him with her dark predatory gaze.
“Ethan,” she said, her voice sounding full of so much power, it could send a kraken running. “I can save you, if you want.”
Deep crevasses formed in his brow as Ethan tried to understand what she was saying. But with his head feeling light, and the world rapidly dissolving into a black mist, all he could do was mutter some nonsense about not quite following what she’d said.
“I can turn you,” she explained. “Make you like me. But being like me isn’t easy. Actually, it sucks a lot of the time, no pun intended. I don’t want to you to feel like I condemned you to that sort of life. So, I need to know, right now: do you want me to save you?”
Though he was on the verge of losing consciousness, Ethan had a vague awareness of what she was offering. What the ramifications of such a gift were, however, he had no idea. On some level, he felt as if that was the last thing he’d ever want, but at the same time, staying alive didn’t seem too bad either.
“Ethan? Ethan, I need you to answer me,” Zoey said, stroking the top of his head. When he didn’t respond, the woman sucked in a deep breath before kissing him one last time. “Please don’t hate me for what I’m about to do,” she said. “Some things I don’t want to lose.”
“Like?”
“You.”
With that, Zoey held her wrist above his face so he could see and sank her fangs into it. Her blood flowed down her arm for a brief second before she pressed the wound against Ethan’s mouth. “Drink and don’t you dare stop.”
The dark liquid poured into his mouth. It tasted like cherries as it coated his tongue and ran down his throat. A euphoric feeling started on the tips of his lips and quickly spread across his body. Goosebumps raised across his skin, and as every hair across his body stood on end, an insatiable thirst gripped his soul.
Ethan shot upright and clenched her arm with both of his hands. He sucked on her wrist as hard as he could. Her life force pumped into him with massive spurts. He longed to take it all, to make sure he didn’t miss a drop, but it never felt enough. The pain in his gut and chest eased and then disappeared altogether.
His eyes regained focus, and the world seemed a thousand times sharper and more vibrant than it had ever before. His skin felt alive, and the hairs across his body alerted him to every microcurrent in the air. His nose filled with a thousand different scents that he could easily pick out. Some sweet. Some metallic. Some musty. Some he didn’t even have a word for.
But when his hearing increased a hundredfold, that’s what really got his attention. He could pick up the whistling of air as it rushed in and out of Zoey’s nose. He could hear the oil lamps on the wall steadily burn, and the grunts of Maii, still unconscious. Most of all, however, he could hear not only his heartbeat, but Zoey’s as well, and how they beat together in perfect synchronicity.
“This is incredible,” Ethan said, tearing himself away from Zoey’s wrist. “How—”
His words cut short as his stomach turned sour, and it felt as if a herd of elephants had decided to stomp on his chest. Ethan rolled on to his side and curled into a ball before screaming at the top of his lungs. Muscles throughout his body contracted violently, threatening to split themselves apart.
Then the heaving began. At first, nothing came from his mouth but vile curses and spit. But after a few seconds, dark, coagulated goo flew out, spattering on the floor. Ethan clawed his shoulders and sides before reaching out to Zoey who had now backed away a few feet.
“There’s a war going for your body,” Zoey said. “The holy versus the unholy, if you will.”
Ethan cried out in pain once again before retching a second time and then a third and fourth. That’s when he stopped counting.
Finally, when he was thoroughly exhausted and had been long convinced that he had nothing left to defile the floor with, Ethan rolled onto his back and tried to catch his breath. “Is it over?”
“Yeah,” Zoey said, straddling his thighs and sitting down. “It’s over.”
Several moments passed before Ethan dared to believe. When he did, he realized he could feel something new in his mouth. A quick run of his tongue across his teeth showed he now sported exceptionally sharp fangs. He wasn’t sure what face he made when he found them, but it had to be something notable because Zoey giggled.
“Those are for biting, in case you were wondering,” she teased.
“Thanks for the info,” Ethan said as he pushed himself up to his elbows and looked himself over. His wounds, both the one in his chest and the one through his gut, were still open, but were no longer gushing blood. In fact, they even looked smaller. Likewise, the imperfections on his skin seemed to have all but disappeared. To all of that, he couldn’t help but grin. “I guess being like you isn’t so bad,” he said.
“Glad to hear you say that,” she said. “How do you feel?”
Ethan paused as he tried to put a word to it. “Godlike?”
Zoey laughed. “Don’t let that get to your head. You’re not immortal.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I only wish I could move my legs at this point.”
“Why can’t you?”
Ethan flashed her a wry grin. “You’re sitting on them.”
“Ha. Ha,” Zoey replied. She then stood and helped him to his feet. “There’s probably some extra gear and weapons around here we could use, not to mention goods to sell. That’ll come in handy. But there’s something else I saw when he took me that you’ll like.”
Ethan perked. “What would that be?”
“His ship.”
“Like a ship, ship?” Ethan asked. “Like one better than we had before?”
Zoey shrugged while grinning wryly at the same time. “I guess you’ll have to be the judge of that yourself.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Fin
Ethan stepped aboard the late Lord Belmont’s brig-sloop, the Victory, and whistled. She was a gorgeous ninety-eight-foot vessel with two masts and eighteen cannons, including a pair of light, six-pound chasers in the forecastle. Her dark wood seemed to hum the
moment he stepped aboard, which convinced him that not only was this a sleek, powerful ship that could navigate high seas as well as punishing combat with ease, but that it had been imbued with powerful magics that had to be nothing short of insanely awesome.
“Holy crap, this is way better than what we had before,” he said. “I mean like, way, way, way better.”
“It is pretty nice,” Zoey said, hopping off the gangplank, setting the still unconscious Maii down, and coming to Ethan’s side. She snaked an arm inside his and gave him a squeeze. “But if you’d rather have the cutter we left back at the cliffs, I suppose we could leave this one here.”
“Uh, no,” Ethan said, laughing. “She’s all mine.”
Zoey tutted. “I believe the arrangement was you get a half share. You can have that section over there.”
“I did save your life,” Ethan pointed out. “Twice, in fact.”
“And you’d never have made it out of Bartigua without me,” she pointed out.
“You don’t know that.”
Zoey raised her eyebrow.
“I would’ve made it out eventually.”
Zoey grinned and draped her arms around his neck before kissing him softly. “Of course, you would have, my adorkable little baby vampire.”
“This baby vamp should still get an equal share of the ship.”
“You can have it all,” she said. “I just like messing with you. Besides, I’m not the captain type, you know?” When Ethan nodded with approval, she changed subjects completely. “Have you figured out how you want to spec, yet?”
“Yeah, well, sort of,” Ethan said, pulling out his character sheet. There had been several notable changes since she’d turned him. First and foremost, obviously, under race, it no longer said…well, whatever it had said before. He hadn’t paid attention. Or at least, he couldn’t remember. It was probably human. Regardless, it said “vampire” now.
The other notable difference was the fact that his primary stats had enjoyed a sizeable boost of one point each, except for luck and intelligence, each of which had jumped a total of three. And while being stronger and faster than before was nice, not to mention now enjoying an insane amount of luck, Ethan was glad he also finally boasted a whopping eleven intelligence and could even do some multiplication in his head without causing an aneurysm.
The changes to his character sheet didn’t end there. Beneath the increased primary stats were several potential new abilities he could pick from. He’d narrowed his choices down to three. “I’m thinking about Mist Form, Call of the Night: Bats, and Paralytic Gaze,” he said. “What do you think of those?”
Zoey leaned over and looked at his sheet. “They’re all useful,” she said. “I mean, you’re not exactly going to become the Lord of the Undead with your starting choices, but none of them are even remotely useless. I’d say pick whatever you think you’d enjoy the most.”
“I kind of like the bats one,” he said. “It says I can summon them three times a night, and the total number of bats coming scale with my level.”
“True, but we’ve got Maii. Not sure summoning bats competes with having a pet ahuizotl. That would be the only drawback I can see to that.”
“Good point,” Ethan said. “What happens when he’s big, though? I mean, we can’t keep him forever. This ring only works for so long.”
“True, but if you were to work those new vampiric charms on him and convince him to be a willing and valuable party member, he’d be great to have stick around.”
“How do I do that?”
“Become a much more formidable lord of the night than you are,” she said. “Ahuizotls are drawn to power. If you can pull that off, you’re back to my original point: bat summoning will always play second fiddle to having a pocket ahuizotl.”
Ethan mulled the thought over and eventually agreed to what she’d said. If he was going to have some ferocious monster at his side, anyway, the bats did seem pointless. Or at least not as useful as the other options could be. He didn’t want to put all his talents into one tree, to speak. He was about to go with his second pick, mist form, on account of it was how Zoey had freed herself, when he noticed one more option he hadn’t seen before.
“Oh, now, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” Zoey asked, leaning in for a better view.
“Luck of the Devil,” he said. “Prerequisite: Twenty-one Luck. What’s that do, I wonder?”
“It should say.”
“It doesn’t.”
Zoey snorted with disbelief. “Then don’t pick it for sure.”
“Too late,” Ethan said, stuffing his character sheet back into his pocket.
Zoey pulled away with shock splashed across her face. “You’re joking, right?”
“Nope. Sounds cool, and let’s face it, my luck saved our ass.”
Burying her face in her hands for a moment, Zoey sighed before doing exactly what Ethan knew she had to: concede the point. “Fine,” she said. “You’re right. It did. But please, as you get stronger, don’t make any rash decisions like that when it comes to abilities. There aren’t any respecs here. You pick it. You live with it. Forever.”
“It wasn’t a rash decision,” Ethan said. “It was a lucky one.”
“Whatever.”
Ethan smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m kidding, by the way. It says what it does.”
“Which is?”
“Luck of the Devil: Succeed all rolls for the next ten seconds. Cooldown: one week.”
Zoey gave a pained expression. “That’s situational.”
Ethan nodded, knowing she was right. “True, but it also has to be stupidly overpowered if chained correctly.”
“Maybe. Possibly.”
“It will be. You’ll see,” he said. “Now then, I’ve got a question: even with my novice skills as a sailor, I know we’re going to need more than the three of us to get this fine ship sailing properly. Where do we get a crew? I’m guessing we need like fifty.”
“We could get by with thirty, but that’s pretty bare-bones,” Zoey said. “And we won’t be able to fight worth a damn. We’ll want a hundred or more.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“It is, but we’ve got a few options,” Zoey replied. “First, and easiest, we go back to Weynock, sell some of the loot we got, hire us a crew.”
“Straightforward. Simple. I like it. What’s the catch?”
“The crew will be dirty pirates and mercenaries for the most part who won’t take kindly to us snacking on them,” Zoey replied, chomping her teeth a few times for extra effect. “It’ll be difficult to keep the feedings low-key. Not impossible, but difficult for certain. And if that cat gets out of the bag, we’re going to have to be ruthless to put down whatever mutiny is guaranteed to follow.”
“Okay, what else do we have?”
“Lord Belmont’s ritual book and staff,” she said. “We could potentially raise an undead crew.”
“Potentially?”
Zoey nodded. “Yes, but I’m not exactly a spellcaster, and neither are you. We’ll probably screw something up.”
“Which means?”
“At best, we get an army of skeletal hamsters.”
“And at worst?”
“We become skeletal hamsters.”
Ethan snickered and rolled his eyes. “Okay, that one is definitely a no-go.”
“The final option,” Zoey said slowly, “is we go to Lenada—a small port on an island a few days away. Two people live there we’d be interested in.”
“Who are they?” Ethan asked.
“The first one is a girl who won’t mind us snacking on her, provided we stock up on healing potions so she can heal after each meal,” Zoey replied.
“She sounds crazy.”
“You’re not too far off from that,” Zoey said. “I had her as a blood doll for a while, but she quickly became annoying. Every day it was ‘Zoey, make me a vampire.’ And ‘Zoey why won’t you make me a vampire?’ and ‘Zoey,
please! You know we’d make the cutest, most powerful unholy couple to sail the eleven seas.’”
“Couple?”
Zoey nodded. “She’s a little infatuated with me.”
“A little?”
“A lot. Still, we’re going to need food. She’d be the easiest.”
Ethan balked. “Eh.”
“It’s hardly ideal, I know, but if you want to keep what we are quiet—and believe me, we do—Lenada is going to be our best option, in my opinion. We’ll just have to put up with the drama.”
“I’m not a fan of drama.”
“Me either,” Zoey replied. “However, there’s also one more guy there we might be able to hire on who would definitely come in handy, and he won’t care if we’re vamps at all, provided we leave him alone during meals.”
“Who’s that?”
“Marcus, a necromancer,” Zoey said. “He might be able to raise us a crew with Lord Belmont’s staff and ritual book. If that’s the case, we wouldn’t have to hire more people, and that means—”
“We don’t have to worry about anyone else knowing who we are,” Ethan finished.
“Exactly.”
Ethan turned her suggestion over a bit. It sounded good, but a nag in his gut told him there was more to the story. “This seems too easy of a choice. What’s the catch with this Marcus guy?”
“He’s bullheaded and weird.”
“Weird?”
“You’ll have to see for yourself,” she said with a shrug. “He also likes to try unconventional experiments, which don’t always turn out well.”
“Okay, well, that doesn’t seem too bad as long as we aren’t turned into skeletal hamsters,” he said before mulling the options Zoey gave one last time. In the end, there wasn’t a lot for Ethan to consider when he realized he didn’t like the idea of snacking on an unwilling crew. In fact, he didn’t like it so much, he figured whatever the future had in store for them at Lenada had to be a thousand times more agreeable than dining secretly on others.
The Pirate (Captains & Cannons Book 1) Page 27
