Passenger (Passenger, #1)(18)

“Mr. Phelps, Mr. Billsworth, please escort this ship’s crew down into the hold. And see that the carpenters begin their work posthaste.”

“Aye, Captain.”

These men…they’d been fighting, hadn’t they? And not just fighting—killing one another.

The man said to bring them down into the hold, she thought. They’re being locked up. Because…they were the enemy? Where the hell was she? How the hell had she gotten from the Met to a ship in the middle of nowhere?

“Now, sweetheart, come here,” the man—the captain—said, beckoning her forward with a hand missing its last two fingers. Etta wasn’t sure she trusted her instincts in that moment; the sight of him, bloodied and massive, made her chest clench. But there was nothing menacing about the way he was approaching her, or even a thread of threat woven through his words. She shook her head to clear that last thought before it made her do something reckless again, like let her guard down. If he thought he was going to grab her, he was going to get every last ounce of New York City she possessed. Etta swung her head around, searching for something sharp.

“Don’t be afraid, sweetheart,” he said, firmly, hand still outstretched. Soft eyes. Soft voice. Perfect for luring unsuspecting ingénues to their untimely deaths.

“I am not your sweetheart!” she snarled.

The man cleared his throat, a poor disguise for his laugh. “We aren’t scoundrels. Any man who attempts harm to you—who casts a single unwanted glance in your direction—will find himself eating barnacles off the keel.”

In some strange way, she did believe him. If they’d wanted her dead, then fishing her out of the ocean and reviving her probably wasn’t the most competent way of going about it.

Funny how it didn’t make her feel any safer.

These people were strangers, and by the looks on their faces when she’d first appeared, they’d seemed just as surprised to see her as she was to see them. If anyone actually knew what was going on, and where she was, Etta knew her best and maybe only bet would be the girl she’d left below deck—the one who had pushed her through that strange door of glimmering air at the museum.

“Scoundrels?” Etta repeated in disbelief. “Are you supposed to be…pirates?”

The young man looked highly offended, but the red-haired man merely shrugged. “Aye, pirates. Legal ones, though I suppose His Majesty would beg to differ. That ship—” He pointed to the ship sitting alongside the one they stood on. Countless lines of rope and hooks connected the ships to one another. “She’s a privateer outfitted in New London, Connecticut. The Challenger. We’ve captured this one,” the man continued.

Right. Etta forced herself to nod. Of course.

The men who hadn’t been sent to the hold were working now, scrambling around the deck like ants rebuilding their colony. Planks and beams of wood were being handed up from below, over from the other ship. Men disappeared below, still bloodied, and reappeared with bandages. Her stomach flipped and flipped and flipped, and she thought that there was a real chance she was going to tear the jacket apart at the seams just to do something. Something other than sit there and feel helpless.

You are not helpless. Being down wasn’t the same as being out. She just needed to—find her bearings. Get her sea legs under her. Or whatever pirates said.

And now they were clearing the deck of…

Bodies. Say it, Etta. Bodies.

Alice. Did they have something to do with hurting her?

Killing her, a voice corrected at the back of her mind.

She swept her eyes back out over the water to avoid the grim efficiency of it, their twisted, stretched bodies—their pieces—being stitched up into linen bags by sailors with faces like stone. There wasn’t a speck out on the far horizon. No land. No other ships. Just a sparkling blue that was darkening along with the sky. Just her, these ships, these men, and these bodies. The water and foam sloshing across the deck had turned a revolting shade of pink from the blood.

Etta barely made it to the rail in time to lean over it, stare into the dark water, and throw up. She closed her eyes, tried purging the images that were clinging to her mind like rosin on a bow. By the time she finished, she shook with exhaustion and more than a little embarrassment.

But she felt better for it. Clearer.

“Ma’am—”

Her shoes were long gone—if she’d ever been wearing them at all? Her heel slid against an edge of sharp metal, and she instantly seized on the idea of finally having a weapon. She stooped to pick it up. The many-pronged hook was nearly the size of her head and weighed twice as much—Etta barely got it in the air before it was trying to tumble out of her hands.

“Ma’am, please,” the older man said, sparing a brief glance up at the heavens. “If I may, I would far prefer death by harpoon to death by grappling hook. Less of a mess for the men to clean up after, believe me.”

“Perhaps you should take a moment to think through your course of actions.” The younger man remained where he was, arms crossed over his broad chest again. Was he speaking to her?

That’s when Etta noticed that he was as drenched as she was.

Idiot. You didn’t get back up onto the ship by yourself.

“I don’t…You were the one that…saved me?” she asked.

“I should expect that’s obvious,” he said pointedly.