Page 79 of Astrid at Sea

“I thought I told you to wait at the ship?” Viktor groaned, drawing my attention back to him.

“Since when did I listen?” I chuckled, and he playfully narrowed his eyes at me. “I did go to the ship at first, but two pirates went back there, so I snuck away.

“How many more are still alive?” Caspian asked, a fierce look on his face.

“There are three dead on the ship,” Viktor said. “There’s this one that we got here as well.”

“And we got one as well,” Roscoe murmured in a small voice.

“That makes five,” Hammond countered. “There’s three left.”

“Two at the ship,” I repeated. “And possibly one more guarding the others.”

It was apparent that all these pirates needed to die if we wanted to get the entire crew off the island alive. As long as they were still alive, they were a threat to us, and we had already been through so much to get here.

Viktor, Jerrik, and Odin broke off from us to find the last pirate on the island with our remaining crewmates, and I led the rest of us back to the pirate ship.

It was time to end this once and for all.

CHAPTER FORTY

Heading back to the ship was a waste of time. The two pirates were no longer here. I didn’t need to snoop through the second floor to know the two pirates had figured out what had happened on the ship.

The doors to the last two rooms at the end of the corridor were open even though Viktor and I had purposely closed all of them.

They knew the truth, and now they were somewhere on the island, looking for us. I hated to admit it, but whoever found the other first would have the upper hand.

“I should have known,” I muttered under my breath as we retreated to the forestry island with no sense of where to go or look.

“There’s no way you could have known,” Manny tried to assure me. The gesture was sweet, but I wasn’t in a very compliant mood right now. Not when all our lives were in danger, and we had just wasted so much time trekking back to the ship not to find the pirates.

It felt like we had been walking forever, looking for the pirates. In reality, it couldn’t have even been an hour.

“Do we go back and check if they’ve returned to the ship?” Caspian groaned, dragging his feet.

I mulled over his question momentarily, but before I could answer, Hammond dropped to his knees behind a bush and pressed a finger to his lips, silencing us all. My eyebrows furrowed together at first, confused by his strange behaviour, but then my eyes widened, and I dropped to the ground behind him. I frantically but silently gestured for Caspian, Roscoe, and Manny to do the same.

“What are they doing?” I asked, struggling to see over the tall bush we were hiding behind.

“The holes seem far too big to be digging for treasure,” Hammond murmured.

Caspian crouched taller from behind me to get a better look. At the horrified gasp that escaped him, I couldn’t hold back my curiosity any longer. I rose on my knees, and the moment my eyes landed on Garth, Dagfinn, Gustav, Latham and Crosby, all dirty, sweaty, tired and overworked, forced to dig holes so deep I could only assume they were their own graves, I reacted the same way as Caspian.

Three pirates watched our crewmates, meaning Viktor and the others hadn’t yet gotten to the lone pirate. Perhaps making our crewmates dig graves for everyone was revenge for the bloody scenes the two pirates had witnessed on the ship.

How could they be so cruel?

When we heard some rustling over our shoulders, we all glanced back. Viktor, Odin, and Jerrik had found their way to us, looking as horrified as we felt.

“I’ve never seen something like this before.” Viktor crawled over to me and shook his head, looking more disgusted than I’d ever seen him. “Who has a weapon on their person?”

Roscoe and Caspian held up their daggers, and Hammond held up his recently acquired sword. Viktor’s eyes lingered onManny and Roscoe before flicking over to me. I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking. Manny and Roscoe were young and had already been exposed to so much. They didn’t need to be traumatised anymore. He subtly dismissed Roscoe and instructed him to hand the dagger to Caspian.

Together, Viktor, Hammond and Caspian snuck away to take care of the remaining pirates and free us all.

The first pirate was the easiest to kill. Hammond snuck on him from behind and slashed the sharp edge of the sword against his neck, nearly slicing it all the way through. He died almost silently, coughing and gurgling quietly on the ground as the blood oozed out of him. The second pirate was far louder than the first, and he screamed and yelled loudly long after Caspian stabbed him in the back and chest multiple times.

Both were relatively easy kills, but they set off the third, making him more difficult to deal with than he should have been.

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