Leashing the Tempest (Arcadia Bell #2.5)(8)

Jupe made a small noise, just as surprised as the rest of us. “Uh-oh.”

“Godammit,” Lon complained. “What the hell have you done to him?”

“Crap. I don’t know. He can’t literally be brainless . . . can he?”

“You’d bettertifu’d b sure as shit hope not. What did I tell you about using your knack?” Jupe gritted his teeth in embarrassment as Lon plowed on, not waiting for an answer. “I told you to ask permission and never use it on strangers.”

“He’s not a stranger. And I’m sorry, but he was being—”

“This is not a joke,” Lon barked. “You can’t go around using it without thinking.”

“Okay, okay,” Jupe said, scratching the side of his neck. “I’ll fix it. Give me a second.”

“Yes, you damn well will.”

“Hold on. Let’s think about this carefully,” I said, stepping between the two of them. “You didn’t ‘make’ him brainless, Jupe. You must’ve just tricked his mind into believing that he’s, well—”

“Dumb,” Kar Yee said. “You turned him into an imbecile. But let’s be honest—it wasn’t a very far trip.”

I shot Kar Yee a not-helping look. “What’s done is done. Let’s just get him back to normal.”

After a few minutes of heated debate, we settled on the best way to counter the captain’s condition, and Jupe geared up for another try. “Captain Christie, you will forget my last command and return to your normal state.”

Nothing.

He tried again. “Captain Christie, you are not a brainless idiot. You can speak and function as you did when you walked down here.”

Nope.

“Captain Christie, you want to talk and stand up and you aren’t a brainless idiot.”

He tried three more times, variations on the same message, but nothing registered. The captain just stared blankly across the room, unmoving.

“Oh, God,” Jupe moaned.

“Maybe you need to cool down and try again in a few minutes,” I said, squeezing his shoulder for encouragement. “Let’s all just stay calm and wait it out. Everything’s going to be fine.”

But as we waited, staring at the mute captain like he was a pot of water heating to boil, the light inside the salon began to dim. After a couple of minutes, a steady rain stippled the cabin windows and pattered against the hull.

Not good.

And if anyone had any doubts about what was transpiring outside, Kar Yee vocalized our fears. “Guess the captain’s cloudbusting knack is offline, too.”

With nothing metaphysical pushing back the storms, the clear skies circling the boat began worsening, and fast. Wind roared against the windows as the water roughened. My stomach lurched as the full brunt of the storm hit the boat.

“Try it again, Jupe,” Lon encouraged after several minutes.

Still nothing. I glanced at Lon and wondered if he was thinking the same thing that I was, that this was perhaps the limitation on Jupe’s persuasive knack: maybe there were no takesies-backsies. And if that was true, then we’d h>Anhen weave to wait it out and hope like hell its duration wasn’t permanent.

More time passed. I glanced out darkened windows. Nothing but dusky gray and a torrent of rain pummeling the glass, until a flash of lightning zigzagged across the sky. A clap of thunder quickly followed.

“That was close,” Jupe said nervously. “How far away is the storm, Dad?”

“Five seconds equals a mile. Start counting from the next bolt.”

When lightning struck again, Jupe began counting out loud, “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, four—”

Thunder startled all of us.

“Jesus!” Jupe said. “It’s less than a mile away. Maybe I should try my knack again on the captain.”

But before Lon could answer, the boat tilted back and forth like a rocking horse, then pitched to the right. I tumbled off the sofa. Lon snagged me around the hips, saving me before I fell on the floor. The boat pitched wildly in the opposite direction. We shouted in unison as our cooler slid off a table and crashed into the cabin wall. Jumping up to rescue the spilled contents, Jupe momentarily lost his balance and sloppily righted himself.

But someone else wasn’t able to do the same. The captain lurched like an emotionless rag doll as his body swayed violently toward the corner of a side table near his temple. And when the boat settled, his eyes remained closed, and he didn’t get back up

.

Blood bloomed from a wound on his head.

Lon crouched over the captain’s body, checking the wound.

“Oh, God,” Jupe whispered. “Is he alive?”

He had to be: I could still see the man’s halo, though it had shrunk considerably.

“Unconscious, but he’s got a pulse,” Lon confirmed. After the boat rocked again, he said, “No other injuries I can see.”

I hastily stripped the orange bandana off the man’s head—nearly bald up there, just as I suspected—and pressed it against the wound to stanch the blood. It was bleeding like crazy. “Hey, Captain Christie, wake up,” I shouted into the man’s face, hoping that the bump on his head might’ve cancelled out the effects of Jupe’s knack. No such luck. “Should we slap him? Shake him?”