Page 7 of Stalking Wendy Darling

I was aboard. We were setting sail. They would all be trapped aboard with me, nowhere to run, no way to escape my wrath.

“The fuck are you grinning at?” Wynton demanded in a gruff voice, the dark-skinned, forty-something man giving me a look like I’d lost my mind.

“Oh, just… excited for the voyage.”

No one had to know voyage was a euphemism for bloodbath.

Chapter Four

WENDY

The waters were favourable for Death’s Right Hand, the bow cleaving through the waves impressively. I alternated between glaring at the helm and helping my two new buddies, Wynton—who swore a lot but was almost friendly for a pirate—and Neville, a thirty-something man with a buzzcut and eyepatch whose conversation was limited to grunts. Across the broad deck, past the buzzing bees of activity necessary to keep a ship flowing through the water, the captain loomed in his great hat, occasionally adjusting our path, his eyes fixed on a chart that had been pinned to the table beside him by four knives.

I had yet to see the behemoth who stole my sister, but I scanned every new face, searched every new room I had the chance to explore—a grand sum ofoneroom when a man with a shocking orange beard and bright hair yelled at me to haul up a box from the stores below.

Now, as night fell and the seas calmed around us, islands so far away we couldn’t even glimpse their lights, the captain yelledto drop anchor. My knee had been throbbing for hours, putting me in a foul mood, but as everything wound down for the night, the opportunity to sneak around the ship drawing closer, my mood mellowed.

Or maybe I’d just been hungry, and the goat stew took the edge off my temper. The stew also answered a mystery that had been bugging me for hours—the whereabouts of the behemoth. He appeared around sundown with a vat of food, his clothes splattered. He was thechef.I trapped a smile between my lips, pressing them thin. How difficult would it be to sneak down into the kitchen and use one of his own knives to kill him?

It would be a shame to lose his cooking, though. His stew was even better than Mama’s, not that I’d dare utter that thought in her vicinity. She’d probably whack me around the ear with a wooden spoon. Or worse. Her shoe.

I settled onto a turned-over crate beside my new friends, Neville grunting as he finished his bowl, either in satisfaction at a good meal or frustration that it ran out so quickly. Wynton was quiet except for the clink of a spoon against the metal bowl, his hard brown eyes out of focus on the dark sea around us as the stars came out to play.

I jumped when the Schnauzer sat down heavily on the crate opposite us, his small eyes narrowed on me. Oh, goody.

“If you’ve come to pick a fight,” I told him, “come back tomorrow. I can’t be arsed now.”

He snorted, his moustache rippling with the breath. “At ease, lad. Although I wouldn’t go around telling everyone you’re an easy target if you want to keep breathing.”

I rolled my eyes, scooping up the last bit of goat stew. “Never said I was an easy target.” Just because I couldn’t be bothered fighting didn’t mean I wouldn’t happily kill someone, just that I’d half-arse the whole thing. “If you’re not here to beat my pretty face to a pulp, what can I do for you, Rolando?”

I tried not to wrinkle my nose, but up close the man stank of fish. Not in a normal pirate-sailing-the-high-seas kinda way. Like he’d been hugging a tuna for the past twelve hours and had only prised himself away from his beloved for a quick bowl of stew. My eyes watered. Beside me, Neville grunted.

“Wondered if you wanted to join us for a card fight, since you’re so prolific at betting,” Rolando said, his voice nothing but friendly.

I smirked. If he and his buddies wanted to delude themselves into thinking they could fleece me of my coin, who was I to stop them?

“I would be delighted,” I told Rolando with great relish.

My smile widened when I saw who he was gesturing to—a fifty-something whose body was entirely round, a stick of a man with onyx skin and long, long braids, and lo and behold, the behemoth.

I let my grin sink deeper into my skin.

“Why do I not like the look of that smile?” Wynton asked, eyeing me with suspicion. “That’s a maniac’s grin.”

“Aw,” I said in my faux-deep voice, laying a hand to my chest. “You noticed.”

I forced myself not to skip across the deck when I followed Rolando, but I really, really wanted to.

Chapter Five

WENDY

“That’s gonna get confusing as fuck real fucking fast,” Sterling, the onyx-skinned man huffed, an easy smile on his face as he leaned forward on his skinny elbows. I’d learned he was the master gunner, in charge of weapons on board the Banshee. “We’ve already got Wynton and now there’s Wendell.”

“We’re thinking of starting a double act,” I told him brightly, trying very, very hard not to glare bloody murder at the behemoth sitting across from me.Barrington.Instead, I looked at Rolando, the Schnauzer with his bushy moustache and scowl as he read his hand of cards, and the rotund man beside him, his head bald and polished, the grey-black striped shirt he wore straining across his belly and starlight glinting off his round spectacles. “You could start one, too. Rolando and Ramone.”

The big man snorted. “A double act for what? Drinking ourselves into a coma and pissing money off the railing?”

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