A Dawn Most Wicked (Something Strange and Deadly 0.5)(25)

Worse, it would jostle the boilers, and jostled boilers were a guaranteed explosion.

“Full stop!” I roared, and this time she roared back, “I’m trying! Murry ain’t responding!”

Black fear uncoiled in my chest. The command bells were broken—Cochran had said that. . . .

But why were they broken?

My eyes locked on Joseph. On Jie. We were going to die, and they saw it in my eyes.

As one, we burst into a sprint for the engine room. Behind the main stairwell, past the blacksmith, and finally into the electric-lit engine room.

But what met my eyes was far, far worse than I could have imagined. Sprawled just inside the doorway, blood seeping from the front of his head, was Second Engineer Schultz. I pulled up short, spinning my arms to keep from falling on him—and then I caught sight of Barnes, also in an unconscious heap a few paces away.

There was no sign of Murry. Or of Captain Cochran.

“Are they alive?” Joseph asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before crouching to check Schultz’s pulse.

And my attention whipped to the far greater emergency at hand: the paddles. Both pistons had clubs lodged in them—the valves were completely open and steam shrieked into the engine. But worse, the clubs were wedged twice as far as they were ever supposed to go—too far to be pulled back out. If the steam didn’t lessen, we could never slow the ship down.

I twisted toward Jie a few steps away. “Stop the firemen,” I ordered. “No more coal on the fires—none!”

Nodding once, she rocketed from the room. I jumped over Barnes, Schultz, and the kneeling Joseph, and scrambled for the speaking tube. I yanked desperately at the pilothouse bell. “Murry’s gone,” I screamed into the tube. “Schultz and Barnes are knocked out, and we got two engines jammed at full steam.”

I pushed my ear to the tube, and when Cassidy’s voice slid down, my heart stopped.

“Then God save us all,” she said.

A half breath later, the whistle screeched through the night, stabbing over the engines and shaking through the speaking tube. It would alert everyone on board to the emergency.

Then Cass was back on the tube. “Are Schultz and Barnes all right? And where’s my father?”

I glanced at the prostrate men. Joseph was applying pressure to Schultz’s head wound, meaning the engineer must still be alive, and Barnes’s chest moved steadily.

“You’re pa ain’t here,” I told Cass. “Schultz and Barnes will survive, but they can’t help me unjam the pistons.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“I’ll be too slow if I fix the paddles alone,” I argued. “But if someone could help me—”

“Danny,” she snapped. “It doesn’t matter. We’re coming up on Devil’s Isle, and I can see from here that the water’s low.”

My eyes clenched shut. Devil’s Isle. A vicious sandbar that ran more boats aground than any other bar in the Mississippi. Even if the river wasn’t low, it would take constantly changing speeds, constantly shifting directions, and constant maneuvering to get around that bar.

And we couldn’t maneuver if the ship was stuck in full steam ahead.

“How close?” I asked, my voice pinched.

“Less than half a mile,” she said. “Even if the furnaces aren’t fed and we release the extra steam, the ship can’t stop in that little a time. Not without the paddles in reverse. There’s only one thing to do, Danny, and that’s get everyone off the ship. Now.”

For three pounding heartbeats I didn’t answer. There was really nothing I could say.

Because of course we couldn’t get everyone off the ship and Cass knew that. The roustabouts had cleared away all the excess weight—including lifeboats.

A ghost flickered in front of me, rasping in the voices of my past, but for once I was too distracted to care.

“Cass,” I started. But then Jie’s voice exploded in the engine room: “The horns!”

I flinched, my body snapping around.

“The engineer has them!” Jie cried. “I saw him up on the Texas.”

Joseph pushed up from his crouch beside Schultz. “You are certain?”

“Yeah.” She nodded quickly. “Big man with white hair and coveralls like his.” She pointed at Schultz. “He was heading toward the pilothouse.”

That was when it all locked into place—when I suddenly knew who had cursed the horns. The answer had been staring me in the face all along. There was only one man on this boat who would benefit from a haunting on the Sadie Queen. Who had a real, vicious reason to hate the captain. A man who wouldn’t care about passengers but would want revenge.

“Murry,” I said roughly. “He’s behind this. He’s locked us full steam into Devil’s Isle. He knows we can’t escape, and that’s exactly what he wants.” I rolled my head back, my throat tightening until I could barely breathe.

“You must pay,” the ghost whispered, still floating beside me. Its frozen breath sent ice down the side of my face. “You killed me, and now you will die.”

“If the engineer has the horns,” Joseph said, coming up beside me and staring at the ghost, “then we can only assume the horns do possess the curse and that he intends to cast it soon.”