“That’s good,” the captain purred. “Then ye won’t be too upset when ye look up and see that.” He pointed to the rigging with his hook.
The last thing Larten wanted to do was raise his gaze. He knew what was waiting for him if he did. But a vampire of good standing never tries to hide from the truth, and Larten had been trained to always face his fears and losses.
It was a bright day and his eyes were narrow slits against the painful rays of the sun. But he could see the sails clearly enough, and the wooden rigging to which they were attached. And he could also see poor Malora hanging from one of the poles, a length of rope looped around her neck, swaying lifelessly in the breeze and from the ever-constant rise and fall ofthe ship.
A cold calm washed through Larten Crepsley. Many years earlier, as a boy, he had experienced a similar calmness just before he’d killed the brute of a man who had murdered his best friend. It was as if he withdrew emotionally from the world. He forgot every rule he’d lived by and every moral restraint he had ever placed upon himself.
In that moment he was neither man nor vampire, but a force, one that would not stop until it had been spent. In the factory he’d only had one man to direct his fury against. Here he had dozens. And for that he was glad.
“They used to call me Quicksilver,” he whispered, smiling hollowly. “Fastest hands in the world.”
Then the smile vanished. His eyes flashed. And like a sliver of deadly mercury, he attacked.
Chapter Twenty-four
Larten sat near the prow of the ship. He was holding the baby and absentmindedly bouncing it up and down. The baby was cooing happily. Larten’s hands were soaked with blood and the red, sticky liquid had seeped through the baby’s shawl, but neither seemed to notice or care.
He would never recall the slaughter in detail. Fragments would haunt him, both awake and sleeping, for the rest of his life. Faces would flash in front of him or shimmer in the theater of his dreams. He’d see his nails, jagged and deadly, slicing open a throat as if it was a slab of butter. His fingers gripping a man’s skull, digging deep, crushing bone, sinking into brain.
Sometimes he’d get a strange taste in his mouth. It always puzzled him for a few seconds. Then he would remember biting off a sailor’s salty toes while the man was alive, leaving him awhile, then returning to finish the job like a butcher who had been momentarily sidetracked.
He had saved the captain for last, letting him bear witness to the destruction. The seasoned sailor wept and begged for his men’s lives, then for his own. Larten only grinned and pointed to the girl dangling above their heads.
In his dreams he often chased sailors into the rigging. In reality only three had tried to climb to safety, but in Larten’s nightmares there were hundreds and the poles stretched to the sky and beyond. But no matter how many fled ahead of him, he always killed every last one of them before he stirred and woke.
The baby gurgled, then started to cry hungrily. Larten bounced him a few more times, hoping to shush him, but the infant boy wasn’t to be distracted. With a sigh, Larten reluctantly turned from the prow and surveyed the deck of corpses.
He knew it would be bad, but this was even worse than he’d feared. So many hacked (bitten, chevied, tom) to pieces. Blood everywhere. Guts hanging from the ropes in the rigging. Heads set on spikes and hooks. The eyes of one were missing, two crosses rammed deep into the bloody sockets.
Larten had seen much in his time on the battlefields ofthe world, but nothing as vicious as this. He wanted to weep, but he could find no tears within himself. It would have been hypocritical to cry. He didn’t deserve that release.
Steeling himself, Larten stared long and hard at the bodies. This was his work. He could blame it on the flu, but that would be a lie. He had chosen to do this. Malora had been murdered and he had let himself go wild and wreak a terrible revenge. He felt shame and disgust, more than he could ever express. There was no justification and no hiding. He did this. He had become the monster these people feared. Paris had warned him of the dangers of indecision and isolation, but he had ignored the Prince’s advice. This was the result. This was what happened when vampires went bad.
Larten picked his way through the mess, holding the baby high above it, glad that the child was too young to understand any of this. Entering the boy’s cabin, he found a small bottle half full of milk. Sitting on the bed, he perched the baby on his lap and let him feed.
It was only as the baby greedily gulped the milk that Larten wondered what had happened to the boy’s mother.
When the child had his fill, Larten scoured the ship from top to bottom, praying he’d find the pretty Yasmin alive, cowering in a corner. If he could hand her baby back to her, he would have done at least that much right on this awful, notorious day.
But Yasmin was nowhere onboard. He found the body of the other woman, along with the corpses of the male passengers, mixed in with the remains ofthe sailors, but Yasmin must have leapt overboard, preferring the sea to death at the vampire’s wretched hands.
Or else he had thrown her off.
Until the night he died, Larten would pray a few times a week, begging the gods to reveal Yasmin’s end to him. It seemed important, a crucial missing piece ofthe puzzle. Until he put it in place he could never draw a line under the calamity. But as hard as he prayed, that memory would always be a mystery to him.
What he did find during his search was a sealed door. It had been locked from the outside. The key was missing, but to Larten — Quicksilver, he’d told them, as if by using a different name he could distance himself from the guilt — it was a simple thing to pick. Moments later he pushed the door open, and four terrified pairs of eyes stared out at him.
One of the four was a high-ranking mate. Larten immediately understood why he had spared this man — even in his murderous rage, he’d known that he would need someone to steer the ship. Right now Larten didn’t care if he lived or died, but a part of him had been thinking about life, even while he was dealing out death to all in sight.
But what of the others? There were two men, and the boy, Daniel Abrams. Why had he let these live? It couldn’t have been mercy or because he needed them for the ship — he would have spared another mate, not a worthless boy, if that was the case. So why…?
The answer came to him and he chuckled drily.
He’d had to keep a few alive. The deck was awash with blood, but it would soon spoil and be of no use to him. He had to assume that they were a long way from land. He might be on this ship a good while yet.
He would need to feed.
Still chuckling — edgily now, the laughter threatening to turn into a scream — he shut the door on the moaning, weeping humans, locked it, then retired to the deck with the baby, to wet his whistle before the pools of blood thickened and soured in the sun.
Having drunk his fill on deck, Larten retreated from the daylight before it burned him. He didn’t care what happened to him now, but if he gave in to bloodthirsty insanity or let himself die, the baby would perish too.
Larten cradled the boy in the shelter of the captain’s cabin, holding him gently as if he was something precious. Nothing would ever set right this dreadful wrong, but if he could protect this innocent child, that would be one less dark mark against his name when he passed from this world of hurt and shame. He felt as far from the gates of Paradise as it was possible to get, so it wasn’t redemption that he sought. He simply didn’t want to add to his crimes, even though in the greater scheme of things one more wouldn’t make any real difference.
He changed the baby’s undergarments when he realized why the boy had started crying again. Then he went below deck to find more milk and look for other food.
They slept in the cabin that night, the baby tucked between Larten and the wall. But although the boy snoozed sweetly, Larten spent most of the night staring at the ceiling. It wasn’t because he had become
