Page 3 of The Withering Dawn
God, she weighed nothing.
A sick feeling agitated my stomach again. I was no angel and my men certainly weren’t either, but we would never trade in flesh.
Never.
Holding her so close, I could smell the days, maybe weeks’ worth of filth and grime that she’d been forced to live in. She hadn’t been cared for let alone fed in some time.
“Captain!” Cathal bellowed.
I was going as fast as I could without losing my footing. I looked up at him to tell him as much when I saw him pointing his pistol at me. No… not at me. Past me.
The woman stiffened and gripped me harder, a soft whimper escaping her as I turned.
One of the men from the other crew was lurching to his feet, his head covered in blood. One hand was pressed to his bleeding abdomen and his other had a tiny pistol in it.
I swore under my breath when I realized it was aimed right at me.
“She cannot live!” he yelled, blood splashing from his lips. “She cannot—”
A shot was fired and the man’s head snapped back, but not before he squeezed the trigger on his own pistol. That time, there was no question. The slug hit me right in my shoulder, throwing me back and robbing me of my balance. My foot slipped off the wooden plank and I went careening toward the ocean below.
My body hadn’t exactly been positioned well for a plunge into choppy waves, and I was immediately disoriented.
The water was cold and filled with debris. The woman squirmed from my arms and in the madness, I opened my eyes, glimpsing the light from above. My clothes and boots did nothing but weigh me down as I kicked toward the surface, losing some of the papers I had stuffed in my coat.
The wood plank came crashing down above me, nearly knocking me on the head. Behind me, the sinking merchant ship, or whatever the hell it was, was eerily submerged halfway, its contents spilling out around me. And as if I needed anything else to go wrong, another explosion blew a hole clean through the hull. My ears were ringing. My vision wavered. I pushed toward the surface, my lungs burning. When I reached it, the Amanacer was swaying on the waves and rocked toward me, nearly crushing me against what remained of the other ship. I dove, attempting to get around it, but the moment I tried to use my left arm to swim, I was reminded that I’d been shot.
I was starting to lose my way in the rubble-filled water, too. Between the blood spilling from my shoulder and the floating gunpowder and debris, I was getting buried.
And then I saw her. The woman. She was nothing but a blurred image of herself in the murk, but it was her. I could tell by the way her hair followed her like a plume of blood in the water. Her skin was sowhite it practically glowed. No… it was glowing. It was so faint a detail, I could have denied it.
She moved toward me with grace as if we weren’t caught up in a disaster. Then she reached out, grabbing my coat and pulling me toward her. I started to swim again, hoping she knew something I didn’t because I was too disoriented to figure my way back to the surface.
I felt as if we were going deeper. The pressure in my ears made me question it until I saw the faint light from the sky above us come back into view. I pushed through the water, my legs compensating for my left arm, and breached the surface with a desperate breath. Men were shouting above me, pointing and waving as the climbing nets were unrolled along the side of my ship. I pushed toward them, grabbing hold of the ropes with one hand and then hauling the woman to my side with the other, tensing through the aches and pains of my wound.
Not that she needed my help. She swam like she was born in the ocean. If I didn’t know better, I would have said she was inhuman. She didn’t look entirely human in the water. Now that she had surfaced, perhaps I could reason that it was a panicked hallucination. That the light had caught her just right to make her look ethereal.
But I saw what I saw and warning bells were chiming in my head like the low hum of a bronze bell. Panting, the woman looked up at me, her hands tight around the ropes of the net. She peered deep into my eyes, her gaze pleading and soft and saying a thousand different words I couldn’t hear.
Even without her words, I knew what she was saying, though. She didn’t want me to kill her.
Because shewasn’thuman.
The small fangs peeking out from behind her full lips were further proof of that. They slowly receded after a few seconds, but I saw them. She was shivering as if she was cold, but something told me she couldn’t get cold the same way I did. Likehumansdid. Her trembling was because of something else.
I strung my arm around her narrow waist and pulled her tighter to me, glaring, caught between driving my blade through her gut and thanking her for guiding me out of the debris.
I wanted her to explain herself, but her silence was evidence enough that she couldn’t.
“Have you a tongue, señorita?”
She blinked and then subtly shook her head. I looked up at my men. They were waving at me to climb so we could sail away from the unexpected mess we’d fallen into and I wanted nothing more than to leave that cursed ship behind. I nodded and then gradually released my grip on the woman.
“I’m feeling grateful. Swim away now. Disappear. You’re no longer in a cage.”
She inched away from me, but she didn’t let go of the netting. Instead, she held my gaze, her eyes briefly glossing over the still-bleeding wound in my shoulder. Then, she did something I didn’t predict. She shook her head again as if to tell me “no.”
I groaned, getting sick of being in the water, and started to climb, hooking my good arm around the netting every time I pushed up with my feet so that I could pin my other arm to my side. When I came to the railing, my men helped me onto the ship and I collapsed, exhausted.
