Page 12

T he storm raged for two nights and two days.

When dawn arrived on the third morning, it was difficult to believe they had just been through a maelstrom.

The air was perfectly still, the surface of the sea was smooth as glass.

A thick fog bank had enveloped the Black Wind , blanketing the ship in gray clouds.

The air was gray, the sea was gray, the eerie veils of mist that shifted with any movement on deck were gray.

Water dripped constantly from the rigging and sails, which hung sodden and limp from the yards.

There were broken spars overhead and the top fifteen feet of the mainmast had been split down the middle by a lightning strike.

The gate at the gangway was missing, blown off its hinges, and two of the big guns that had been unseated lay at odd angles to the gunports.

Anything not securely fastened before the storm struck was gone, swept overboard by the fury of the sea.

The rudder was slow in answering the helm, which meant it likely bore damage below the water.

Fonteyne had run dry of curses. Neither he nor his navigator, Nathanial Reed, had any idea where they were or how far off course the storm had thrown them.

For all they knew, when the ghostly miasma lifted, they could be sitting a mile off the shoreline of Havana, surrounded by a fleet of Spanish galleons.

Making matters worse, they had no idea in which direction Hispaniola even lay, for the glass casing around the binnacle had been smashed and the compass needle was gone.

The fog and clouds overhead blocked any possibility of taking a reading from the sun …

assuming they could even find the horizon.

Archibald Penman joined Fonteyne and Reed at the rail and stared at … nothing.

“Do either of you have a best guess where the devil we might be?” he asked.

Reed shrugged and spat over the rail. “Until I can see the sun or stars, I can only go by what my gut tells me.”

“And what does it tell you?”

He lifted a finger. “Bow’s pointing that way.”

Penman pursed his lips and nodded. “Helpful.”

Reed was a tall, lean man with snow white hair braided to his waist. He had been at sea for thirty years and had lost half a leg in battle.

He wore a wooden peg fitted with leather straps that buckled onto his belt, a handicap that did not hamper him in the least. There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen, and rarely anything that spooked him but judging by the way his eyes flicked constantly left and right, he was spooked now.

“Capt’n—?”

Fonteyne nodded. He felt it too, a sensation like the sticky filaments of a spider’s web dragging down his spine.

“Double the lookouts,” he ordered quietly. “Put men with the keenest eyes and ears into the tops where they might be able to see or hear something above this mess.”

Reed touched a forefinger to his brow and went to relay the orders. A dozen men scrambled immediately up the ratlines and vanished within a few rungs of the shrouds, swallowed into the dense fog.

Sebastien felt an irrational urge to step back from the rails as the fingers of mist circled his ankles like shackles.

He was not an overly superstitious man, not on most days at any rate, but there were tales of ships getting lost in thick fog banks like this.

One such story recounted how an entire fleet of treasure galleons had vanished off the coast of Bermuda without a trace of wreckage ever being found.

He frowned and blew out a breath. “What of the crew? Any serious injuries?”

“Two goats missing, likely washed overboard. One lad with a broken arm,” Penman said. “Otherwise mostly bruises and scrapes. It could have been much worse, I suppose.”

Sebastien took the remark as a subtle criticism for taking the risk of leaving the main sails up for so long.

He glanced to the side, but the surgeon’s face was as placid as ever.

Penman’s cravat was crisply tied, and while he was not wearing a formal jacket, his waistcoat was buttoned over a shirt so white, the fashionably full sleeves glowed against the eerie gloom of the fog.

Immune to the steely glare, Penman adjusted the ruffle on his cuff. “By way of consolation, one must suppose our quarry has found herself in similar straights. Lafitte’s ship, like the man himself, wallows like an overstuffed pig and would not have borne up well under such high winds and seas.”

Sebastien said nothing. His last glimpse of Rose St. Clare’s three ships had put her on a course heading south and east but he had no way of knowing if she had outrun the storm or, like them, been blown in circles.

“Should we, perhaps, light the big deck lamps and try to burn off some of this vile mist? We can?—”

Fonteyne held up his hand to silence Penman. “Listen.”

Penman fell obligingly silent. The fog was muffling what few whispers of conversation that were passing between the crew.

Beyond that, he could hear the faint gurgle of ripples lapping gently against the hull.

Overhead, the massive canvas sheets were still shaking off spickets of water that fell in a patter to the deck.

“What am I supposed to be?—?”

“Listen! Close your damned eyes and listen !”

Penman turned his good ear to the fog … which was not much better than trying to hear out of his bad ear. But even though he closed his eyes to help focus on sounds, he detected nothing aside from the faint clinking metal from a loose cleat rattling somewhere overhead.

“Sebastien, I’m not?—”

“Watch out!”

Penman’s eyes popped open in time to see a mermaid, her long hair streaming back like flames, emerge from the fog and hurl herself straight toward them. She was bare-breasted, her body gleaming from the moisture of the heavy fog. The scales on her lower body were iridescent silver, blue, and pink.

Sebastien shoved him out of the way a moment before the top of Penman’s head would have been taken off by the carved wooden figurehead.

Half a breath later, both men were thrown across the deck as the reinforced prow of another ship slammed into the side of the Black Wind , crushing through the rails.

A loud roaring sound followed. Whether from Fonteyne’s throat or the timbers of his ship as she canted suddenly to the side, it was difficult to tell, for the roar was accompanied by the shouts of men above deck who lost their footing on the slippery yards, and from men below who were tipped out hammocks and tossed onto the boards.

One long scream marked the descent of one of the lookouts, who, because of the tilt of the ship, splashed into the sea.

Fonteyne and Penman lay sprawled on the deck.

They watched, stunned, as a score of grappling hooks came spinning out of the fog to bite into anything solid.

Even before the two ships were solidly locked together, there were ghostly shadows swinging across on ropes that came out of the fog and seemed to be attached to nothing.

Fonteyne reached instinctively for a sword that was not at his hip, for though he had brought it up on deck with him, it lay across the top of the capstan where he had set it down while relieving himself over the side earlier.

There had been no warning of an impending attack, nothing to indicate another ship was lurking out in the fog.

More shadowy figures swarmed across on planks like a pack of wolves, cutlasses and pistols to hand.

Dozens of them, scores of them, armed to the teeth came aboard screaming like banshees.

They spilled across the decks and ran down the hatches, shocking the already fuddled crew into submission before anyone knew what was happening.

Two minutes.

That was all the time it took for the Black Wind to be overrun, for her crew to be put on their knees, for the few stalwart defenders to be disarmed, their efforts knocked into submission.

Fonteyne staggered to his feet, blinded in one eye by blood pouring out of a deep gash on his forehead.

Instinctively, he snapped a dislocated thumb into its socket, then looked for Penman, who had been flung hard against the base of the mainmast. He, too, was stumbling to his feet, dazed, disoriented by the fog, by the pain of a bruised hip, and by the sudden influx of armed attackers.

One of those attackers leaped onto the deck, landing with a mighty thud.

He towered nearly seven feet in height, his bald head gleaming like ebony.

His chest was a fearsome wall of bulging muscle, bare but for a slender bamboo tube suspended between the two leather crossbelts that held a brace of long- snouted pistols.

Eyes like two black pits scanned what little area of the deck was visible before settling on Sebastien Fonteyne.

Stark white teeth flashed in a grin. “And so, we meet again, Captain.”

Fonteyne angrily dashed the blood out of his eyes. He was fairly certain he had never seen the black giant before, but he most assuredly knew that voice. He had heard it moments before he’d been knocked out cold on the waterfront at Barataria Bay.

The giant raised his clenched fist in a signal and seconds later, three hissing globes of light emerged from the fog.

A trio of enormous ship’s lamps burned cavernous gaps into the mist as they were carried on board and set in a hot yellow triangle around Fonteyne and Penman.

They were followed by another figure who swung easily down off the bowsprit—now lodged firmly into the crush of broken rails and warped planking— and landed with a cat’s grace on the Black Wind’s deck.

Light from the lamps reflected off the sword held in one hand and the pistol brandished in the other.