Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)(79)

Bo stared at Max while the engine hummed. “They . . . switch bodies.”

“Every decade. Well, all but the Sibyl, of course.”

Astrid’s vision. She’d said the priestess in red was old. Mrs. Cushing was young. Was she the only one who was actually extending her life? The rest of them were . . . what? Hopping from body to body? That would mean . . .

Not a sacrificial ritual, but an exchange.

The people in the burlap sacks weren’t being killed. They were the Pieces of Eight members. He thought of what Little Mike had told him outside Mrs. Cushing’s house—about Kit Manson, the heroin addict. The Pieces of Eight club had offered him wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Had they told him the catch?

Max had taken Kit Manson’s body.

“Heaven,” Bo said. “That’s where they pick out new bodies.”

“I’d give anything to choose my own body,” Hammett said. “The Sibyl’s six are the only ones who can do that, but hopefully tonight will change things a little for me. When Nance gets his vigor back, the Sibyl is going to give me a little taste of the runoff.”

“Runoff?”

“A little shot of the blond girl’s youth. And maybe a shot of yours. If you do exactly what you’re told, you might even live through it.”

Fear knotted Bo’s stomach. Not for himself, but for Astrid. He eyed the radio headset. One second. That’s all he needed. He waited for Mad Hammett to look away.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Take your hands off me, or I promise you’ll regret it.”

Astrid took in labored breaths as two of the survivors restrained her arms while standing in front of the piano in the yacht’s main cabin. Her previous captors, a thin woman and a dark-haired man, now had a scratched eye and bruised balls. That left one strange man who wouldn’t stop laughing . . . and Mrs. Cushing. Max was somewhere; she’d heard him earlier but hadn’t seen his rotting face since the yacht began moving.

“Miss Magnusson,” the laughing man said. He wore his dark hair a bit longer than fashionable, hadn’t shaved, and spoke in a foreign accent. He also seemed to rank higher than the rest of them; he hadn’t left Mrs. Cushing’s side. “Sibyl,” he’d called her several times. Astrid wasn’t sure if that was the woman’s given name or an honorific. “If you do not settle down,” he said, “I will put you back inside the sack.”

Her skin chilled at the thought of being thrust back into breathless darkness, unable to move or think. She’d nearly lost her mind inside that sack. She wasn’t sure if she’d survive it a second time.

A door banged shut.

“It is well?” the laughing man said to the person circling out of sight behind her back.

“We should be there any minute.” Max. His voice sent a fresh wave of rage coursing through her limbs. “What in hell is going on down here?”

“Your girl will not behave,” Mrs. Cushing said. Her blond hair, which was pulled tightly into a crown of braids, gleamed under the cabin lighting as she removed her crimson coat and laid it atop the bar. “Fleury was suggesting we bag her up again.”

Fleury. Astrid looked at the laughing man as the Wicked Wenches’ tale of pirates flashed inside her head. Jean Fleury. She’d found a dark oil painting of him inside a book in Winter’s study—one before he was supposedly hanged for piracy in 1527. The man in that painting had looked nothing like the one standing before her now.

“Tie her arms to her sides and bag her up to the waist,” the man she’d kneed in the balls said from his curled up position on the floor. “I will break her.”

“You can have her after we’re done,” Mrs. Cushing said. “Nance will need to be physically connected to her during the ritual. Your seed will only muddle the energy.”

Max coughed. “Can you even get it up, Bechard? It looks like she got you in the stones pretty good.”

“Won’t stop me from swiving you,” the man said with venom.

“Enough!” Mrs. Cushing barked and pointed a finger at Max. “You losing your turquoise is the reason we’re all here right now. She’s your responsibility. Restrain her. We haven’t survived together over the last four hundred years only to be disbanded over one small girl.”

Max said something under his breath and limped over to Astrid. His chest rattled with every breath; sweat gleamed on his skin. The open sores and peeling flesh that covered one side of his face smelled putrid.

“I don’t think I’ve hated anyone so much as you,” he said a few inches from her face. “I am going to hurt you so badly, you’ll beg for death.”

She fought the shudder that fanned through her bones. “Where’s Bo?”

“He’ll be joining us soon enough. We need blood to open up the passage, and unfortunately, the Sibyl says it can’t be yours or my vigor might slip out. But after I have it back . . . you will bleed.”

“What passage?” Astrid said. “If you hurt Bo—”

“I will do more than hurt him, Goldilocks.” Max pulled a knife out and held it in front of her face. She recognized the ivory handle; it was the one he’d held to her throat in the elevator. “I will cut him open so wide, his entrails will spill onto the floor.”

His free hand moved toward her neck to hold her in place. She saw the blue of his ring, twisted loosely around to face his palm—as if it were too big for his hand—and tried to jerk away, but the men who were holding her tightened their grip. The moment the ring touched her neck, the same terrible electricity she’d last felt in Gris-Gris’s restroom suddenly shot through her nerves.