Race to World's End (Rowan and Ella Book 3) (26 page)

Ella scooted as
far away from the man as she could on the narrow bed. He smiled at her as if he
were contemplating devouring a large meal. She even saw him lick his lips.

“Ye’ll be ‘aving
your dinner, luv,” he said, standing over her, his hands flexing at his side as
if having trouble controlling them. “As soon as I plant me pole in the cap’n’s turf,
ye ken.”

Ella knew exactly
what the man had in mind. Although there was a bolt on the inside of the cabin,
he hadn’t bothered to throw it. That probably meant he was high enough up the
food chain that her screaming wouldn’t bring help from anyone who valued their
life.

“’At’s right,
petal,” the man hissed as he lunged for. “They’ll be none to stop what’s
coming, scream as ye might.” He grabbed her hands and jerked them apart so the
duvet dropped from her shoulders as he drove her back onto the cot, his knee
coming up sharply between her legs to pry them apart.

24

In a panic, Ella
squirmed to close her legs or free one of her hands, but she felt his weight
come down hard on her chest, knocking the air out of her. When he felt her
collapse breathless beneath him, the man loosened one of her hands to wrench up
her skirts. Struggling for breath, Ella felt his nails grind into her flesh through
the fabric in his attempt to pull the heavy skirt away. Stars shot into her
eyesight as she felt his filthy fingers touch the bare flesh on her inner
thigh.

“You bastard,”
she shouted hoarsely, trying to twist away from the invading fingers. She heard
him laugh as he removed his hand long enough to start unbuttoning the front of
his trousers. With her one hand free, she pushed against his face and neck but
he was immovable. She grabbed his long hair and tried to pull him away but her
fingers slipped off his oily locks.

“Only a moment now,
petal,” the man said, gasping, his breath rolling over her with the suffocating
smell of rotting fish. “And I’ll be in ye. Just a little bit longer now. Can ye
wait or do ye want ol’ Edward so bad ye can’t lie still?”

He was almost ready;
she could tell by the way he settled down in seriousness for the next few
seconds. In her mind, she already felt him punch into her, already felt him
take her in all the viciousness she knew was in his mind to give her. Her hand
flew back in desperation, the agony of his weight pressing down on her such
that she could barely breathe, and knocked over the items on Sully’s
nightstand. She reached for anything—
anything
that might help her—when her fingers closed around Rowan’s lighter.

Without caring
which way she held it, she brought the lighter to the man’s head, flicked it
open and spun the spark wheel with her thumb. The fire flared greedily, fed by
the grease on the man’s head, and exploded into a halo of flames in his hair
and his scarf. He screamed and released her to snatch at his scarf and fling it
away.

Ella ignored his
curses and the sight of the blood-red rash on his cheek where the grease-fed flames
of his dreadlocks had seared him. She reached with both hands at this waist
where she knew, prayed, his knife would be. Her fingers gripped the handle and
wrenched it free. She brought it down hard into his chest.

He gave a grunt
and looked down at himself. And then at her.

She’d hit his
sternum. A scratch only; it wouldn’t stop him.

She slashed out again
with the knife, this time aiming at his throat. She knew it was a risk. Putting
the knife so high up—so close to his hands—gave him the opportunity
to block it. But he didn’t expect her to do it and so only glared at her in
pain and fury. Ella punctured him from his left ear down across his throat and
brought her knees up to kick him away as the blood from the cut fountained out
and foamed down his chest.

He gave a groan,
his face white, his eyes rolling back in his head, and pitched forward,
narrowly missing Ella, who scrambled out of the bed, her heart pounding.

Not waiting to
see if she’d killed him, she ran to the door and opened it to peek out. There
was no one in sight. The storm was fully lashing the deck now, and clearly even
pirates knew when to take shelter.

Mad dogs, Englishmen and me
, Ella thought, feeling a little mad
herself as she forced herself to ease open the heavy cabin door and slip out.
She inched along the side railings. The storm had darkened the day until it was
nearly the color of night with no moon.

Over the railings
she saw the darkened outline of the beach and the outcroppings of mangrove. The
rain stung her arms and face as it pelted her.

Pirates weren’t the
only ones who needed shelter, she thought. She glanced back at the open door of
the cabin, then ran back, praying her would-be rapist wouldn’t meet her at the
door. She pulled the door shut and dropped the bar. At least the alarm wouldn’t
be raised any sooner than it needed to be, she thought.

That is, assuming I’m able to get off this boat in one
piece.

***

The
cut on the little cook’s back was shallow but bloody. Rowan knew for a fact he
wasn’t the most knowledgeable surgeon on
Die
Hard,
and Scab’s injury didn’t call for one in any event. The bosun,
Albert, as well as Denny, Aesop and half a dozen other sailors were crammed
into the kitchen playing cards when Rowan and Ansel arrived below decks.
Indigo, the navigator, was already binding up the cook’s wound.

“Doesn’t
look like you much need me,” Rowan observed, starting to turn around and head
back up to the captain’s cabin.

“Avast,
lad,” Ansel said. “There’s talking needing doing.”

Rowan
looked at the crew and noticed the players had folded their cards. Likely they
hadn’t even been playing.

“Talking
about what?”

Aesop
stood from his seat and had to stoop to keep from touching the ceiling with his
shiny, bald head. He was the only one onboard taller than Rowan. “We all have
to agree,” he said. “The vote needs to be…” He searched for the word in the
bare rafters of the galley.

“Unanimous?”
Rowan said, resting a hip on one of the wooden dining tables.

“Aye,”
Aesop said with satisfaction, as if he’d thought of it himself, and sat back
down.

“We’re
deciding amongst us lot here first,” Ansel said. “We need to be of one mind.”

“We’re
all of a mind that Sully is shite!” one of the card players yelled. Rowan
didn’t know the man well.

“Aye,
the man’s been holding out on us,” Albert said.

“You’re
talking about the Dutchman’s treasure?” Rowan asked.

“Aye.”

“How
do you know he really had any?”

“Arrr,
he had it,” Ansel said. “The look in his eyes? He was trading it for his life,
that’s sure. Nobody bluffs that well with ‘is life.”

“Fine.
So we need a new captain. Who’s campaigning for the honor?” Rowan asked. He
looked from face to face.

Ansel
spit on the floor. “Ye ken verra well who,” he said. “Are ye in or no, old lad?”

Rowan
was about to speak when he thought,
what
do I care who’s captain? I’m outta here. Get the lighter and get gone.

“Sure,”
he said. “I’m in. Count my vote for the lead candidate with everyone else’s.”

A
slash of lightning lit of the sky and Rowan could swear he smelled something
frying as a result. The following boom of the thunder shook the rafters in the
room. A dish fell off a shelf and broke on the wooden floor. The looks of his
shipmates’ faces both startled and amused him. They were fearless when it came
to facing down a fully armed man-of-war, but they jumped out of their
collective skins over a little thunder and lightning.

Ansel
stood up. “That’s good, so it is. But ye’ll not be wanting to go out in this
weather. Best stay below and play a few hands.”

Rowan
grinned. “Or tell a few stories?”

The
men at the table tossed their cards into a pile and began to scoot chairs and
benches closer to where Rowan stood. They reminded him of a wide-eyed band of
six-year-olds begging for a goodnight story.

Sully
wouldn’t be able to make it back to the ship tonight anyway, he reasoned. Not
in this storm. The rain beat against the open porthole in the galley and Rowan
felt the ship rock beneath his feet. Plenty of time to search the cabin before
dawn.

“All
right,” he said, finding an empty bench that faced the group. “Do I at least
get a drink to stir the juices?”

***

The sea below the
boat was black and choppy—it would feel like plunging into the icy void
of eternal damnation—but it was either that or stay and wait to be
discovered. Ella climbed partway down a rope ladder that hung from the ship’s
side and, just as the night sky lit up with a shock of lightning, she jumped
the remaining distance, praying the black waters didn’t hide a coral shoal or a
dinghy to break her fall.

She hit the water
like death arriving in the middle of a celebration. When she felt the cold
saltwater rush over her head she kicked hard to reach the surface, feeling her
thin leather shoes kick off into the water when she did. The rain slashed her
face when she finally broke free and tilted it up, gasping and frantic, to suck
in air. So close to the beach the waves had her in its grip and she wondered
for one panicked moment if it could be an undertow. The cold was making it
difficult for her to move her limbs, and she knew her only hope was to keep
moving—if nothing else to try to warm herself—and swim for shore.

One glance back
at the black hulk of the pirate ship as it blotted out the ominous sky made her
gasp in terror. It was so close she thought it might suck her under its
terrible keel. She swam parallel to the shore in case she was in an undertow,
and when she felt the waves begin to draw her toward land she let herself go
limp with exhaustion and fear.

With a last
contraction of the waves she was finally dumped onto the beach, where she lay
for several minutes, trembling in the cold and the rain’s onslaught and her own
exertions. She grabbed two handfuls of sand in her fists and rested her head on
the beach.

I am safe.

She lifted her
head and looked into the island’s interior past the ring of mangroves not forty
feet from the shoreline.

Is anyone looking for me? When the Judge realizes it isn’t
Adele that Sully has, will they know it’s me they’ve taken? How does Daisy
figure into this? If only I’d let Rowan know about Adele and her
father—and Lawrence—he’d know where to find me since he knows where
the pirates are.

She hauled
herself to her knees and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Resisting the
urge to look back at the looming pirate ship, she staggered the few feet to the
line of mangroves and collapsed again, this time behind a hedge of palmetto
bushes where she was hidden from view.

I just have to stay alive until everybody talks to each
other and the cavalry shows up.

When she felt
strong enough to walk, she climbed to her feet and went further inland. As she
walked, the ground spongy and giving beneath her bare feet, she found herself
wishing she’d grabbed up whatever had been on that tray for her dinner.
Although the rain hadn’t abated, the sky seemed to have lightened somewhat,
going from black to a sick pea green, and the wind had all but stopped.

Very strange weather
, Ella thought, but she was grateful to no longer feel
chilled. Walking barefoot was its own challenge, however, and in the dim light
she stepped on sharp shells and twisted roots that had her feet bleeding and raw
before she’d gone a quarter of a mile inland.

As she was
peeling back a curtain of Spanish moss in front of her path, she saw something
move in the depths of the mangrove that lined her path. She took in a sharp
intake of breath and blinked to see it again. She realized she was holding her
breath and as she eased it out, never taking her eyes off the spot where she
thought she’d seen it, another movement dragged her eyes away from the original
source.

There was no
noise, no sound at all. The movement she was seeing—and there was another
off to her immediate left—suddenly revealed itself to be not so much of a
movement as a blinking of a light. A light that blinked once and then went
dark. By the time she waited to see it blink on again, a light blinked in her
peripheral vision and she turned to it, losing the original light.

That is, until
all of the lights seemed to blink on and off at once and she realized they
weren’t lights at all but a hideous display of several sets of reptilian eyes
watching her every move.

Crocodiles. And
from the number of eyes blinking and staring, there were at least a dozen of
them. Maybe more. Ella forced herself to look down nearer to where she stood,
but so far they were watching her from a distance of at least twenty feet.

Make that ten
feet.

When she saw one
set of eyes materialize into a fifteen-foot log with gleaming teeth and lurch
in her direction, she screamed and took several hurried steps backward. She saw
the others begin to move, each of them morphing into sliding fluid forms of
pure evil as they glided toward her. She looked frantically at the widespread overhead
branches and, ripping the hanging moss away and forcing herself not to focus on
the advancing crocodiles, she grabbed a tree branch.

Without testing
first to see if it might hold her, she wrenched her body off the ground just as
the largest of the brutes charged her, his maw gaping wide like the demented
reptile from
Peter Pan
, her feet
dangling inches from his jaws.

She tucked her
legs up on the branch, praying it would hold her, as she watched another croc
approach and testily take a bite out of the first one’s tail. As she watched
the two of them vault into each other, tails crashing down on the ground and
their wide glittering jaws snapping and making deep, thunderous bellowing
growls, she saw the other smaller crocks slither up to under where she clutched
the branch, their stunted feet, scurrying with perverted intensity.