The Sea Wolves (8 page)

The whispers came again, sibilant arguing, and though Jack could make out no individual words, their desperation was obvious. He pressed his ear to the door and listened, and now he could catch snippets of what was being said inside.

“… get rest…”

“… do something soon…”

“… kill us, like they did…”

“… ransom…”

“… I'm scared!”

These had to be the prisoners from the
Umatilla
.

Jack scratched at the door and the whispering stopped.
They'll think it's rats
, he thought, but then realized that he had seen no rats aboard this ship. Not one.

“Hey, in there,” Jack whispered, pressing his mouth to the space between door and frame. There were two bolts here, but he could tell from the air moving between boards that this door was not lined with metal. He glanced back along the corridor to that first, much more formidable door and wondered again just what might be inside.

“Who's that?” a voice hissed, far too loud.

“Keep it down!” Jack said. They fell silent for a few seconds, Jack looking up at the nearest grille. Faint moonlight flowed in, unhindered by the shadow of anyone watching or listening.

“Who?” the voice asked again, quieter.

“I'm from the
Umatilla
.”

“What? You're hiding from them?”

“No,” Jack said, but he didn't know quite how to explain what had happened to him. “How many are you?”

“Eight of us in here,” the voice said. “What of the
Umatilla?”

“Long gone, friend.”

“Then what—?”

“Sh.” Now that he'd found them, Jack had no idea what he would do next. Given time and the right equipment, perhaps he could have pried the padlocks loose, or even pulled the hasp and staples from the wood, and freed the prisoners. But what then? He had no weapons or plan, only a certainty that any conflict between prisoners and pirates would end in a bloodbath. They could expect no mercy. At best, the prisoners would be slaughtered quickly. At worst… Jack's imagination, rich and given wide scope by his experiences, painted terrible scenarios, of which keelhauling was a lesser torment.

He blinked them away.

“You'll have to wait,” Jack said. “I let you out now, and we'll all be killed.”

“But we can take a boat! Escape!”

“Can you feel the ship's motion? We're in deep sea, friend. We'd drown, or starve, or freeze to death. No. There has to be another way.”

“What's your name?”

“Jack London.”

“Well, Jack London … we're locked in here with our own filth and stink, and given a loaf of stale bread and one bucket of water a day.”

“And I'm sorry for that. But believe me, I've seen what these men can do. They killed many aboard the
Umatilla
, and—”

“Killed?”

“Dozens, I'd say.” Jack paused, heard the man's heavy breathing and others whispering within. “You didn't know?”

“No,” the man said. “We thought it was just…”

“Gold,” Jack said. The man was silent again, and beyond the door Jack could sense a thickening of the atmosphere.
How terrible it must be for them
, he thought. And he almost changed his mind and vowed there and then to get them out.

But when the gangway door to his right swung open, any decision was taken from him.

Jack instinctively crouched low and went for his knife. But he'd dropped the blade when Ghost had thrown him into the sea, and even with a knife, the fight would be one-sided. A shadow paused in the doorway, silhouetted by weak lamplight from the compartment beyond. It was slight—Kelly or Louis, or perhaps the dark-eyed Maurilio. But whoever had found him down here would doubtless be ready to mete out rough justice. They hadn't forbidden him to snoop, but the last thing he expected from these pirates was fairness.

When the voice came, it stroked a cool finger through his memories.

“Go back,” she said, exotic and husky.

Then the ship rose and jarred sideways, and as Jack reached out for support, the shadow came toward him.

Sabine.

“Go back,” she said again. The moonlight paled her skin and shadowed the wavy hair framing her face, and it darkened her full lips. “You must go back.”

“Sabine.” It was the second time he had uttered her name, the first to her face.

“Jack. Go back to the galley. Sleep. Stay alive.”

“But—”

“I'm amazed he hasn't killed you.” Her voice was almost wistful, quiet, as though talking to herself.

“I can look after myself,” he said, and for a moment the scene was frozen and silent, the ship balanced atop a wave as if waiting to see which way the discussion would fall.

“Not here,” she said. Her voice was so old and filled with a startling wisdom, and Jack stepped forward to see her face fully. For an instant he was terrified that he had been deceived, and that she was in fact a crone, a sea witch casting spells over whomever she chose even as she scried the waters for the
Larsen
's next target.

But Sabine came forward to meet him, and when she stepped into a splash of moonlight, her beauty winded him. Her eyes were heavy and sad.

Jack and Sabine reached out for each other but did not quite touch. Could this creature love a man like Ghost? It seemed unimaginable. Yet here she was, roaming freely about the ship. Would she have such liberty if she were not here of her own accord? Though she had a gentle sadness about her that seemed entirely opposite to Ghost's looming brutality, logic suggested there must be some relationship between them.

“Last chance,” she whispered, glancing up at the deck. Jack could not hear footsteps, but her dark eyes had gone wide, and her head was cocked to one side, listening to things he could not hear.

“You won't give me away?” Jack asked. He breathed in deeply, and hers was the first clean scent since he'd boarded the
Larsen
. She was fresh air, cool and lightly perfumed like a spring day on Mount Diablo. Dangerous thoughts to be having about a woman who might be the captain's beloved, if one such as Ghost was capable of love.

Jack pushed past her in the narrow corridor, and for a moment they were both bathed in moonlight from the grille above. It surrounded them, blinding Jack to the shadows beyond, and it was just the two of them, so close that when she exhaled, he inhaled her breath and found it intoxicating.

Then, their first contact—she touched his hip and pushed him past her, surprisingly strong. She glanced at the ceiling again, turned from him, and walked along the gangway toward the small door through which he had originally entered the bowels of the ship.

Whispers rose from the hold, but Jack barely heard them.

Sabine opened the small door and slipped through, then glanced back just as she slammed the door behind her, hard. He saw the first smile meant for him. And then footsteps were running above, coming to investigate the bang.

Jack rushed in the opposite direction and slipped through the door where Sabine had entered and found himself in another gangway, with a steep staircase before him and a shadowy space beyond. He heard the sounds of sleeping men—snoring, groaning, the soft moans of unknown dreams—and he paused for a moment.
She reads the sea
, Louis had said.
Ghost calls it finding order in chaos
. She could find people and ships, predict where they would be at any given time.

He wondered just what Sabine had come down here to find.

Someone cried out in his sleep, in a language that Jack could not understand. He moved cautiously to the foot of the steep staircase. To venture fully into the forecastle would be to put himself in too much danger—Sabine had saved him once, and now he owed it to her to return to his small bunk in the galley.

He'd found out enough for one night. And in truth, Sabine's appearance had distracted him. He scratched a fingernail across a bulkhead, banged his head on the staircase's underside. His stealth and sensitivity had been disturbed.

The man cried out again, a despairing noise.

“He's crying for home,” a voice said, and Jack gasped in shock.

Ghost emerged from the shadows to Jack's left, slipping through a doorway he had not even seen. He seemed to fill Jack's whole field of vision, bordered by shadow as Sabine had been framed by moonlight.

“All of them do, on occasion,” the captain continued. “I come here and listen. Men might be hard, but they're all babies when they sleep.”

“I…,” Jack began, but he had nothing to say. He didn't want to offer an excuse for his nighttime excursion, or to beg.

“I thought I smelled you prowling,” Ghost said. He glanced behind Jack at the closed doorway to the hold. “Found 'em, then?”

“You must let them go.”

“Must?” Ghost's single word made Jack feel like a child again.

“They're not animals.”

“Not animals, no. Less important than that.”

“You've got to give them something more than bread and water,” Jack said.

Ghost pondered for a moment and then gave an uncaring shrug. “You can bring them scraps from the kitchen tomorrow, if it pleases you.”

Jack nodded. Perhaps if he had time alone with the other prisoners, they could conceive some plan of escape.

“You're not going to thank me?” Ghost asked curiously, studying Jack as he might some laboratory specimen.

“I'll thank you quite effusively when you've put us all ashore, alive and well.”

Ghost smiled thinly. “You're brave, young Jack. I'll give you that.”

The menace in his tone, and the malicious implications of his words, were unmistakable.

What am I to do?
Jack thought, panic descending. If it came to it, he would kill this man in order to survive. He had killed the Wendigo. Surely he could kill a pirate? Yet Ghost was more than just a pirate, that much was clear. And though the Wendigo had a savage, wild hunger and ferocity unlike anything Jack had ever encountered, the captain of the
Larsen
had all that and one thing more—cunning. Ghost exuded power and strength, and out here on the wild ocean, they were all alone.

“Come,” Ghost said. “It's the last night we can talk for a while. And I have a question.” He climbed the staircase to the deck, not doubting for an instant that Jack would follow.

And Jack, confused and disturbed by the terrible man's presence, could only climb up after him.

T
he moon was a sliver away from being full. Pale light washed over the
Larsen
's deck, casting the ship in shades of silver. The night sky was clear, the stars infinite, lighting their way toward whatever fates and destinations awaited. The sails were full, and the vessel knifed through the Pacific as though it were some creature of myth, born to water instead of beaten together by the hands of men.