The Devil's Tide (19 page)

"You haven't told me your name."

"Jacqueline Calloway. Just 'Jaq,' where the men are concerned. They're so easily fooled, aren't they?"

"Only when they want to be," Kate said, scaling Calloway's long, slender legs. "I'd offer my name, but I think you already know it."

"What makes you think that?"

"You would've asked by now."

"Who says I'm here to talk to you?" Calloway tersely replied, eyes steadfastly fixed on Dillahunt.

"Your new captain, I imagine."

Calloway confirmed Kate's suspicion with an apprehensive glance over her shoulder while chewing on a thumbnail.

"Nathan can't hold a grudge as well as he'd like," Kate went on.

The girl tilted her head, frowning. "I would think grudges easily preserved at sea, with nothing else to think on."

"He's inexperienced. Grudges come more naturally with
age
." Kate protracted the last word, studying the girl for a reaction.

Calloway smiled sweetly at her, but her eyes gleamed abhorrently. "Some youths are more experienced than others."

"I expect he told you to free my bindings as well," Kate added. "Gain my trust, and all that."

"He didn't want you to know it was his idea."

"Nathan sends me a friend. How nice."

Calloway's jaw muscles tightened visibly. "Nathan may be captain for now, but he cannot command my friendship. I haven't decided I like you."

"Why the hesitation?" Kate said. "We're both women. There's no reason we shouldn't get along."
At least, that's how Nathan sees it,
she realized.

"I've known many women," Calloway sighed, "most of them far less trustworthy than men. And now I see a woman among men, and I wonder what she has done to be held in such high regard."

"You're a strumpet, aren't you?" Kate hazarded.

"Of course I am," Calloway said, irritation doing little to diminish the sweetness of her voice.

Kate took a seat in one of the ornate chairs in front of Hornigold's desk, in the corner opposite Dillahunt. Hornigold had actually carted his furniture onto the beach. He'd even brought his wine cabinet. Kate set her hand on the desk, which had a freshly polished shine, despite a thin layer of sand it had already collected since yesterday. Had he meant to hold meetings in here? Discuss retirement plans with his men? The absurdity was more than Kate could subdue, and she snickered loudly.

Calloway turned round, annoyance painted plainly on her face. "Is something funny?"

"Not really."

The girl lifted a thin eyebrow, her mouth tweaking into a lopsided frown. "You're a queer woman, laughing at things that aren't funny."

"Spend a year with pirates," Kate replied, "and you'll find yourself laughing at all sorts of things that aren't funny."

The girl screwed up her mouth. "I can't imagine what Nathan thought the two of us could possibly have in common."

"Tits?"

Calloway allowed a chuckle, in spite of herself. "There is that, I suppose." Her eyes met with Kate's for a brief moment, before flickering back to Dillahunt. She kneeled beside him, lifting the bandages to peek at his face. "It's not as bad as it looks," she said, more to herself than to Kate.

"It looks pretty bad," Kate hazarded.

"He'll be fine," Calloway snapped.

It was becoming obvious why the girl had stowed away on Dillahunt's ship. "So that's why you're out here," Kate said. "For him?"

Calloway's freckles nearly vanished as her cheeks flushed. "Does there always have to be a reason?"

"No," Kate admitted, crossing her legs and throwing an arm over the back of the chair. "But there usually is."

"What's yours?" Calloway said, taking a seat in the blankets next to Dillahunt and hugging her legs.

"My husband died."

Calloway laughed. "No, that's not it."

Kate was too intrigued by this girl's gall to be annoyed. "I think I would know."

"Then why didn't you go back to London when you had the chance? You escaped your former captors only to throw in with more pirates? Seems a bit daft, doesn't it?"

Kate grinned. "So you
do
know who I am."

"Everyone knows who you are," the girl replied indifferently. "Amazing what a bounty will do for you."

"A reward," Kate corrected.

The girl pursed her lips and shrugged. "Reward, bounty, it's all the same to whoever's collecting it."

A sudden gust parted the flaps of the tent, and blinding sunlight and the salty scent of the ocean swept in. The tent billowed from the inside like a balloon. Kate felt her hair blow back, and saw Calloway's expression change into something that might have been concern. "What happened to your ear?"

The breeze softened, the flaps fell, and the tent was dim once more. "A pirate made a meal of it."

"And what happened to him?" Calloway asked with trepidation.

"I killed him."

"Really," the girl blurted, suddenly beside herself with curiosity. "How did you kill him? What did you do it with?"

"Does it matter?"

"Was it a pistol? A sword?"

"A sword," Kate said, massaging the rough, leathery patch of skin where her ear used to be. She had visited with Hornigold's surgeon before the man was lost to the sea, and he told her how lucky she was the wound hadn't become infected. She told him 'lucky' was a strange choice of words.

"Where did you stick it? The sword?"

"I stuck it in his belly," Kate replied flatly. She had hoped to find some kind of common ground with the girl, but this was not what she'd had in mind. "I pinned him to the deck of a ship and watched him burn to death."

The girl shuddered, but she was smiling. "Did he deserve it?"

"He didn't seem to think so."

"Do you have nightmares about it?"

"I've answered enough of your questions," Kate said. "How about you answer mine, for a change?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Why are you here?"

Calloway laughed. "I don't know. I don't think you do either."

"Most would conjure a reason," Kate said, joining in her laughter.

Calloway stopped laughing at once, as though she didn't want her laugh mingling with Kate's.

"Not so long ago," Kate said, "although sometimes it seems like a century, I knew a pitiful surgeon. When I first met him, I immediately saw something in his eyes . . . something very sad . . . a dreadful calamity I didn't understand at first."

Calloway feigned a yawn. "Oh no. Is this going to be a long, sad story?"

"Sad yes," Kate replied sweetly, "but not long."

The girl waved her hand, allowing her to continue.

"I knew very little about anything," Kate went on, "but I came to realize fairly quickly that this man wanted to die. He was not a pirate. He was not where he was supposed to be. They had stolen him from his ship and corrupted his purpose. He was forced to aid villains who brought harm upon innocents. It went against everything he was. He so desperately longed for release. I'd never met such a hopeless man. And then, after the sustained torture his life had become, death came for him at last, welcoming him with open arms. But just then, right before the end, something changed."

"What?" Calloway said, unable to sustain her curiosity.

"He wanted to live."

After a moment of consideration, Calloway said, "That's very sad, but what's the point?"

Kate ran her finger along Hornigold's desk, trailing a smudge across the polished surface. Tiny grains of sand rolled beneath her finger, grinding thin, barely detectable scratches into the wood. "The point is no one really knows what they want until they're certain to lose it."

"Wants are fickle," Calloway said, adjusting a loose bandage on Dillahunt's forehead.

"You lost someone," Kate realized suddenly. There was a haunted, elusive wisdom behind the girl's blue eyes that often accompanied tragedy. Kate had glimpsed it in her own reflection, after her husband died.

Calloway nodded. "My mother."

"I'm sorry. She was a strumpet too?"

"Yes," Calloway said. "Until one of her clients murdered her. There was no reason for it. My mother was very good at making men feel good about themselves, so I can't imagine she offended him. She knew all the right things to say. Any good strumpet does. Maybe he just wanted to see the color of her blood. Maybe he couldn't get off. I've seen men get angry when that happens. They pretend like it's your fault. Can't be anything wrong with them, so it must be something you did or didn't do. Anyway, he must've been very angry. The other girls heard the screams, but no one would go in there. They tried to stop me. I wish they'd tried harder." She had gone distant now, projecting some unimaginable horror upon the wall of the tent. "I had no idea a person had so much blood in them."

"I'm sorry," Kate said.

"You said that already," Calloway snapped.

Kate stopped herself before she could apologize for apologizing. She looked down at her hands and started picking at her fingernails.

The girl kept going, sweet voice laced with disdain. "Ever since that day, when I see the color red, I see blood. I think I always will. Before then, I never realized how much red there is in the world. It's everywhere you look, really."

Kate looked up from her fingers and found the girl surmising her with large eyes. Her pupils were dilated in the dim light, like a cat as it readies to pounce on a mouse. "I bet people tell you how beautiful your hair is all the time," Calloway said. "It
is
truly beautiful. So wild and perfect and so very, very red. How can hair be so messy and so perfect at the same time? That's probably what they say, isn't it?"

Kate shook her head. "No one's ever said that."

"I bet someone has," Calloway replied, nodding with a confident smirk. "If they haven't, they've at least thought it. You want to know what I think?"

"Not sure I do," Kate replied, staring at the sliver of light where the flaps of the tent parted. She suddenly wanted out of this stuffy, dark place.

Calloway's voice remained as sweet as honey. "When I look at your hair, all I see is blood."

On the dawn of the sixth day at Griffith's Isle, Nathan was stirred from a deep slumber.

He had been dreaming about Annabelle. They were naked on a little island with no trees. It was nothing more than an oval of sand amidst a shallow ocean, with the two of them in the center. The sand was warm and soft against his back, with no grain biting into his skin. The crystal water was no deeper than three feet for as far as the eye could see, and the sand shimmered beneath a fluctuating web of light. The sky made no sense, and its weirdness alerted him to the dream. The sun remained directly above for the duration of the dream, never descending toward the horizon. Nathan was able to stare directly at it without squinting, and it was not hot upon his skin, but pleasantly warm. The sapphire sky deepened into a navy blue near the horizon, and stars twinkled along the circumference.

His left arm had grown back. Rarely was it missing from dreams. His subconscious had yet to catch up with reality. He knew it wasn't supposed to be there, but he was happy to fool himself for the time being.

He held Annabelle with both hands, and her skin was smooth against his, her kisses wet against his lips, and her dark hair blotted out the sun. He stared at her, but he could not fixate on any single feature for long, as her face was too deeply shadowed by her hair. There was an overall impression but no detail. The more he tried to focus, the less he could discern.

He wasn't sure what they were talking about. They giggled at each other's jokes, made small talk about the scenery, and whispered sweet nothings in each other's ears. He promised never to leave her, and she promised the same in return, and the promises made as much sense as the hand he held against her back and the stars on a midday horizon.

She lifted her head and looked out to the sea. "A ship," she said.

"No," he replied. He wouldn't allow any ships infiltrating this dream. No pirates. No plots. No thoughts of treasure. No fear of death. They had their little island, and that's all they needed.

"Captain," she insisted, pounding on his chest. "A ship approaches."

"No it doesn't," he replied.

She balled her hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his chest, and the wind puffed from his mouth, and his eyes shot open.

Candler was hunched over him, fear etched in his face. "Captain, there's a ship on the horizon. It's big."

Nathan nudged Candler away with his stump as he sat up in his blankets. It was dim in the little tent, and beyond the parted flaps he saw the low purple light of early dawn. He threw on his shirt, which he had discarded at some point in the night, and retrieved his pistol and cutlass as Candler waited impatiently by the exit. He gestured for Candler to leave, and Candler ducked outside, holding the flaps open for him. Nathan stepped out, greeted instantly by a nip in the early morning air. He scanned the purple horizon, past
Crusader
, until he saw a much bigger ship not much further in the distance and approaching fast. A chill ran through him, but he could not attribute it to the morning air. "That's a bloody frigate," Nathan murmured.

"Ogle says it's
Queen Anne's Revenge
," Candler replied immediately.

Nathan started for the prisoner tent. Candler hurried after him. "Where are you going?"

"To ask the expert," Nathan said.

"Who's that?"

Nathan withered. "Benjamin Hornigold. The reason we're here, remember?"

"You think Blackbeard's come for him?"

"Amongst other things," Nathan said. Kate Lindsay had led them to the largest chest on the first day, and over the next week, Dillahunt's crew had discovered six more chests. All of the chests were concealed a little ways in the jungle, but Blackbeard would easily find them if he bothered to look.

Many of the men were gathered near the firepit, staring at the approaching ship. Peter Lively signaled Nathan to come over, but Nathan ignored him. He turned to Candler. "Give me the keys."

"The what?" Candler said, gawking at the ship.

"The keys to the prisoners' chains."