Carpathia (4 page)

  "We'll be fine." Quin mustered up what he hoped would seem like a confident smile. "Once they get all the women and children away, we'll catch the very next boat."

  Lucy frowned, and he knew that she'd seen straight through his bravado. He'd never been able to fool her about his fears – only about the content of his heart.

  Quin opened his mouth. He knew that if he didn't tell her how he felt right then and there he might never have another chance. But should he burden her with such things at such a horrible time? Could she bear it? Did he really have a choice?

  Abe stepped forward then and took Lucy in his arms. He brushed his lips against hers in a tender kiss, and she buried her face in his shoulder.

  "It's now or never, little Lucy." Maggie took Lucy by the elbow and guided her away from Abe and toward the lifeboat.

  Lucy looked back at Quin, a terrible desperation in her eyes. Instead of speaking to her, though, and confessing his secret love, he closed his mouth and instead put up a reluctant hand to wave good-bye.

 
 

 
 
 

"Where is that little, Irish bastard?" Dushko Dragovich smashed his fist into the great steel bulkhead that separated this part of the
Carpathia's
cargo hold from the thrumming engines in the room beyond. "And don't tell me none of you know."

  The menace in Dushko's voice was enough to set most of the people huddled in the hold on edge. They stood shivering together among the low wooden crates scattered about the chamber, right where they'd been chatting in small groups to pass the time until he'd burst in, bringing both fresh air and the night's chill with him. They stared at him as one with their pale, bloodshot eyes, some of them unaware of what he was talking about, others unwilling to be the first to respond.

  None of them wanted to be the one to bear the full brunt of his attention.

  Despite that, one of them cracked under the horrible tension that had swept over the room with Dushko's arrival, and he let out a helpless little sound as he cowered in a distant corner. Dushko's red-rimmed eyes zeroed in on that man, and he stalked toward him like a hungry wolf, weaving through the crates and the others as if they weren't there.

  Dushko reached down, snatched the little man by the collar of his jacket, and hauled him up into the air until his shoes dangled beneath him, small clods of dirt spilling from his clothes as he trembled in them. Dushko wasn't a tall man himself, but he had the chest and shoulders of a boxer, and he held his small victim out at arm's length without any apparent effort.

  "What is it, Piotr?" Dushko's voice hissed out between his teeth at the man, carrying with it the stench of the grave. "What do you know?"

  A thin, rat-faced man with a chin that receded so far that Dushko couldn't tell if he actually had one, Piotr refused to meet Dushko's glare. "I told them," he said. "I told them all."

  Dushko slammed Piotr into the steel-plated hull behind him. No one else gasped at the violence of the act. Nor did they move even an inch to put a stop to Dushko's treatment of the man. "What did you tell them?" Dushko asked, each word striking the scrawny man like a bullet.

  Piotr cringed and whimpered at Dushko. The man might have cried, Duskho thought, if only he and every other one of the occupants of the hold hadn't given up on shedding tears long ago. "Not to leave the ship."

  "But they did anyway," said a slender woman with her steely hair bound up under a babushka. "There was nothing that would stop them."

  Dushko snorted at that and released Piotr, who dropped to the hold's cold, steel floor and lay there moaning. "Did you even try, Elisabetta? Did you even say a word?"

  The woman shook her head at Dushko as if he were a slow child. "And what good would that have done? Would it have stopped him and his friends for an instant? It's more amazing that we didn't all go with them."

  Dushko glared at Elisabetta as he moved closer to her, ignoring everyone else in the room. Despite her startling and natural beauty, her looks had faded more than a bit already on the journey, and they'd only been aboard the ship for two days. She noticed him looking at the wear showing on her face, and she snarled at him. "You can't keep us down here for the entire trip," she said. "We're already starving down here. It's not going to get better."

  "You know how this works," Dushko said, looming over the woman with an intimacy reserved for old lovers. He spoke in a quiet voice, as if the words were only for her, even though they both knew that everyone in the hold could hear them.

  "It's been a long time since we took that ship to the New World together," she said. "And we'd laid in better preparations that time around."

  "We need to keep a low profile," Dushko said. "We are as vulnerable out here on the ocean as anyone else. Maybe more so. Should we be discovered out here, to where would we be able to flee?"

  Elisabetta turned her violet-blue eyes away from him. She knew he was right, much as it might rankle her and everyone else in the hold. They'd made the decision to head back to the Old Country as a group because it had no longer been safe in Manhattan for the exact same reason.

  They'd blown their cover there, and it had taken every bit of Dushko and Elisabetta's wealth and influence – plus a few applications of a judicious amount of force – to repair the damage done. The writing had been on the wall after that though the mistakes that had been made once could – and would – be made again. If they'd stayed around, they would have been destroyed for sure.

  "It is the same old conflict as always." Elisabetta hooded her eyes as she gazed at Dushko. "Between our natural urges to feed and to live. But if we do not feed, then what sort of life can we expect to have?"

  "I am not advocating starvation on the part of anyone," Dushko said. "Every one of us had our fill before we left America, and that hot repast should have been enough to see us all through to our destination. But that was not good enough for Murtagh and his friends." He glanced at the people pretending to be ignoring them. "I should have killed him when I had the chance. It would have made everything so much simpler."

  "And to young Brody, his solution is the simpler one. He hungers, he feeds." She ran her tongue along the edge of her sharp, pointed teeth. "What could be simpler than that? Even an animal could understand it."

  "That's the exact problem I'm talking about," said Dushko. "As long as we act like human beings, we have a chance. The moment we behave like animals, we can expect to be hunted down and killed like mad dogs."

  "But we're not human beings, my dear Dragomir." A sly and seductive smile curled the edge of Elisabetta's full, red lips as she ran a finger down Dushko's chest. "We haven't been for a long time."

  Dushko grabbed her hand in his and squeezed it hard enough that his grip would have broken the fingers of a lesser woman. "You think we're better than them, do you?"

  "Aren't we?" Elisabetta rolled her eyes at him. "They're the animals. It is we who feed on them."

  Dushko shoved her away from him, disgusted by her lack of concern. How had she survived for so long? "You might have ruled over them in your youth, my dear countess, but those people out there are no longer sheep for us to cull. They have science on their side: cars, planes, machine-guns."

  Elisabetta snorted. "And you think that sharpening the sheep's teeth has transformed them into wolves? They're still sheep under that clothing. They have no instinct for the hunt, no scent for the blood."

  "Yet their teeth are sharper than ever, and if we corner them – if we force them to employ those incisors – their bites will cut just as deep."

  "Ha! The only thing you're in danger of murdering, my dear Dushko, is that metaphor." Elisabetta strolled away from him, toward the darkest corner of the hold, the place where Dushko knew their crates of livestock sat, their terrified contents shivering in the blackness. "It's been too long since you've fed, hasn't it?" she said over her shoulder. "I can tell from the gray in your hair."

  "Should I have stopped to feed while I protected the rest of us from the spotlight? Should I have let the rest of us be slaughtered just so that I could slake my thirst?"

  Elisabetta gestured toward one of the others in the room, a tall thin man with a large nose. Understanding her intent, he opened the lid on one of the crates. He reached in with his long arm and snatched up something with a single, sharp move.

  The man raised his arm and brought up a young woman along with it. She dangled there from her long, dark hair, pale and sickly, too weak to scream. She reached up with her arms to shield herself from the man as he drew her toward him, but he pinned her feeble limbs to her side by wrapping an arm all the way around her battered form. With his other arm, the man grabbed the woman's head and pulled it back toward him, exposing her naked throat.

  "No!" Dushko commanded. "We need those to last us until we reach Fiume. There are barely enough of them to go around as it is."

  Elisabetta slid over to the woman, who struggled without a hint of success in the man's arms. She traced the captive's jawline with a long nail, then brought her fingers down to caress a pair of puncture wounds that marred the deathly pale skin there. "Better we feast now, therefore," Elisabetta said, "rather than starve the entire way."

 
 

 
 
 

"You know, I thought she'd never leave," Abe said as he lit the fat cigar he'd produced from somewhere inside his dinner jacket.

  Quin recognized that the words had been meant as a joke, but he couldn't bring himself to laugh. For one, he'd shared that exact fear right up until the moment when Lucy had climbed into the lifeboat. They'd watched her go the entire way down to the water and then stood there at the railing with the other men, waving at them as they helped the quartermaster in charge of their boat row away.

  Afterward, they had made their way toward the ship's stern, working along the deck as it tipped further and further toward the bow. Every one of the lifeboats had either already been deployed or was being stuffed with nervous women, children, and the occasional man, whom Quin hoped had a decent excuse. None of them seemed like they had a seat to spare for the two young men, much less for the rest of the desperate souls thronged around them.

  As Quin and Abe strolled from boat to boat, an unreal sense of doom seemed to have settled over them, accompanied by a resignation to their fate. They'd cut through the Smoke Room when they'd reached near to the stern, if only for a short respite from the shouting and screams and tears that filled the air. The opulent room had stood almost empty at that moment, with the exception of a few men and a pair of stewards who'd given up any hope of finding a rescue for themselves and had decided to content themselves with a final drink.

  After chatting for a moment, they'd gone through to the other side of the ship and made their way back through the agitated, shuffling crowds as far as the bow, still hoping to find some way off the ship. They'd had no luck there either and had wound up in the same spot at which they'd left Lucy, which now stood empty.

  "Do they have to go so far?" Quin leaned over, his elbows on the railing, and tried to pick Lucy's lifeboat out of the blackness. The lights of the
Titanic
still burned bright, but they only extended so far into the moonless night.

  "Afraid so, chum," Abe said. "When a ship the size of
Titanic
goes down, it sucks everything nearby down with it. What's the point of climbing into a lifeboat and then going down with the ship anyhow?"

  "How do you know that? There's never been a ship the size of
Titanic
."

  "There's the
Olympic
, her sister ship. It's not quite as nice but just about the same size, I hear."

  "But it's still afloat."

  "The last I heard." Abe drew another cigar from his pocket and held it up for Quin. With deft, practiced moves, he clipped both ends of the cigar and then lit it before passing it over to his friend.

  Quin eyed the cigar for a moment before taking a tentative puff on it. "These are Cuban," he said. "Where did you get your hands on them?"

  "When we passed through the Smoke Room while we were scouting out the other lifeboats."

  "Weren't the stewards too busy with the drinks to stop to sell you a smoke?"

  Abe shrugged and eyed his cigar with a mischievous glint. "I didn't want to bother anyone about them." He waved the cigar around with a casual air. "And I didn't think anyone would miss them."

  A laugh leaped out of Quin's chest. "You light-fingered swine," he said. "I never figured you for a thief."

  "Let's just say I like to squeeze as much as I can out of life."

  That cut Quin's laughing short. He gazed out at the void beyond and the abyss below, and he wondered then about all the things he was doomed to miss in his life. He'd miss his parents for sure, but since he was moving to America, he'd already resigned himself to that. He knew then that the thing he would miss the most was Lucy.

  He'd allowed himself to be talked into coming along on this trip for one reason, and one alone. Not so that he could be forced to accept his friend's generosity for sharing his first class cabin with him. Not so that he could get to New York City to look for a job in the spring, with all the promise of what a new world might hold. But so that he could be nearer to Lucy, both during the trip and when she registered at Radcliffe in the fall.

  Perhaps it would be easier this way. At least now he wouldn't have to face the shame of having fallen in love with his best friend's girl. He wouldn't have to wrestle with the fact he couldn't tell her how he felt about her – but he couldn't keep it inside any longer either. That decision, that chalice, had been taken from him. All it had cost him was the remainder of his life.