Blood Oath (27 page)

It would be too late to do Cade any good. The men were a wall around him, closing in, determined to do something—anything—to deal with the horror that was living with them on the boat.

A strong hand took Cade by the arm, and he reached for his knife. He would at least go down fighting.

But then he was moved back, toward the forecastle wall, and William and Jonas stood in front of him. William had a harpoon and he held it out so it almost touched the first man in the crowd.

“Stop it,” William said. He wasn’t so brave that his voice didn’t shake. But the harpoon didn’t tremble. “This is Nathaniel, damn you. He’s one of us.”

The sailors looked at Cade, and he stared back at them. And something in them broke. They saw him and knew William was right. Cade was just as frightened and just as bewildered as all of them.

The man with William’s harpoon at his chest looked down and stepped back. The suspicion of the other men subsided—like the sun gone behind a cloud.

Adams and the captain were there by then, waving pistols and shouting, but the mob was gone, replaced by the men Cade had lived and worked with for over a year.

Owens’s corpse went into the sea. Adams and the captain ordered more chores and brought out the whip for anyone who hesitated even slightly to carry out his duties. The captain took to wearing his pistol in his belt, just as a reminder.

They clamped the lid back on the ship, just barely. William and Jonas stuck close to Cade after that. They never said it, but they were afraid for him.

And perhaps just a little afraid of him.

 

 

AFTER THE NEAR MUTINY, it was regular as clockwork.

The sailors tried to stay awake all night, but eventually, exhaustion overtook them. The extra chores didn’t help, and Adams was whipping them all to get every bit of speed out of the sluggish old whaler.

But the closer they got to home port, the more men vanished. Every few days, the morning would find the crew’s numbers reduced. If two men were on watch, both would be missing. Sometimes a body was left for all to see; most of the time, there wasn’t a trace.

The word “vampire” was still going around. Cade heard arguments about the creature—disagreements about its abilities and powers, depending on where each man came from. Stavros, a Greek, called it a
vrykolakas
, and insisted it took the form of a young woman. The Portuguese cook said it could fly and was preying on them from above like a hawk. It was supposed to have amazing strength and did not need air or water, as long as it had enough blood.

No one knew why it had chosen the
Charlotte
, or even how it had joined them. But they all agreed: they were only safe in daylight.

The captain never left his quarters now, day or night, and for all intents and purposes Adams was in charge. And they learned fast not to use the word “vampire” around him. He’d respond with a club or a whip. He was certain his men were deserting him, drowning themselves to escape the ghosts and phantoms of their imagination. He was trying to stop it, the only way he knew how.

Looking back, Cade could almost understand the mate’s thinking. Sailors were wildly superstitious, even for the time. If word got back to land that the
Charlotte
was haunted by something supernatural, it would be the end of the captain’s and the mate’s days of running a ship. No sailor would ever follow them back out to sea, and no company would hire a captain who couldn’t hire a crew.

Adams probably didn’t want to starve. He was a rational man.

He never really believed in the vampire. Not until the very end.

 

 

THEY WERE LESS THAN a week away from port when Samuel, a shipkeeper—a boy, really, not much more than sixteen—lost his mind.

He had spent the last day huddled on his bunk, refusing food, refusing water, refusing to move even when Adams brought the club down on him.

Cade, who remembered what it was like to be a shipkeeper, brought the boy a cup from the freshwater keg on deck.

Samuel took it, gratefully, and then clutched at Cade’s arm when he turned to go.

“Nathaniel,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “We have to get off this boat, we have to.”

Cade didn’t know what to do. Samuel’s hand felt like an iron cuff around his wrist.

“We’re almost home,” he said. “Just a few more days.”

“No,” Samuel said. “We have to get off this boat right now. There’s no more time.”

“We’re almost home,” Cade said again, trying to pull away.

Samuel sat up in his bunk and pulled Cade’s face closer. “No,” he hissed. “You don’t understand. I was out on the deck last night. I was out there—and I saw it.”

His eyes were filled with panic.

“It was just standing there,” Samuel said. “Like it owned the whole ship, looking out over the rail. It looked like a man, but I saw—I saw it!”

Cade pulled away from the boy, trying to find something comforting to say. “We’ll tell Adams,” he said. “We’ll let him know, and—”

He got no further. With a shriek, Samuel knocked him over and ran out onto the deck.

Cade took off after him. When he reached the door, he saw Samuel, already standing at the rail.

The rest of the crew was frozen, watching him with the same attention they would have given a shark.

“We have to get off this boat!” he screamed at them. “All of you! We have to!”

“Easy, boy,” one of the other sailors—Quinn, Cade remembered—said to Samuel.

“You don’t understand!” Sam screamed, tears running down his face now. “I saw it!
I saw it!”

And then he leaped. Everyone rushed to the rail, but there was no trace of him in the water below.

He sank like a stone.

Cade, standing there with the others, realized they were looking at him.

Then Adams broke the silence.

“Sun’s going down,” he said. “I think we should get ready.”

 

 

THERE WAS NEVER any shortage of sharp edges on a whaling vessel. What was left of the crew armed themselves with harpoon heads, lances, knives and grapnels.

Each man was given a lantern or a torch. Two barrels of whale oil were put into the tryworks, the brick ovens on deck used to render the whale blubber. Now they were just being used to throw as much light as possible. Thick, greasy smoke filled the air.

Cade held his torch in one hand and a double-flue iron in the other. The crew—down to sixteen, with Samuel’s abrupt exit—seemed calm. Even confident. The night was falling fast, but now they were taking arms against the invader. Perhaps they were going to die. But this way, they would die like men, on their feet, rather than like cattle selected from the herd and slaughtered.

Then the captain announced he’d be leaving.

He would take one of the whaleboats under full sail and head for Georges Island in Boston Harbor, and the military fort there. He would return to the ship with soldiers and guns.

They were less than a day away. It was the best plan, he said.

The men said nothing, because the captain had his gun drawn. He didn’t put it back in his belt until he was well away from the Charlotte.

From the rail of the ship, they all watched him go.

Adams decided that they should search the ship.

They lashed the wheel into place, on course for Georges Island, and split up.

As newer men on the crew, William, Cade and Jonas often got the worst jobs. This was no different. They were sent into the hold, to find whatever was hiding there.

 

 

THE HOLD HAD NEVER seemed quite so big before. He should have been able to search it alone. Three of them should have been able to find anything in there.

But the silence yawned around Cade like a chasm, and his lantern barely seemed to touch the dark.

He gripped the harpoon iron tight in his right hand and took another step forward.

He heard something, like a sigh, and spun around a stack of barrels.

The thing was still feeding on Jonas. In that half-second while it was occupied, Cade got a glimpse of what had stalked them for days.

It was taller than Cade, even hunched over. Its body seemed distorted, its head too long for its neck, its elbows bent the wrong way.

Cade’s eyes fixed on the long, tapered claws at the end of its arms, the ones that held Jonas.

Cade didn’t have much of an imagination back then. He never had time for it, with the hours of labor and the struggle just to stay fed.

But he had the first and only flash of intuition in his life looking at those claws. He remembered the sound of something digging into the hull, as if it were clawing its way from the water and onto the boat.

He realized that’s exactly what had happened. The creature had never been on the boat. But where else would a thing that hated daylight hide? A thing that didn’t need to breathe? It had latched to the underside of the ship, waiting for them to reach the open sea. Until it was too late to turn back. Every sunrise, it went back down under the waterline, safe from the sun, until it got hungry again.

Cade was trembling. The creature’s claws worked Jonas’s chest like a bellows, pumping every last drop of blood out of the wound on his neck.

It was the teeth that snapped Cade from his paralysis—revulsion at those long, needlelike fangs.

Pure reflex took over. Cade remembered the harpoon iron in his hand, and screamed as he launched himself at the vampire.

He didn’t even see Jonas after that, his friend’s body hanging on those strangely bent arms like meat on a rack. He just slashed blindly at the thing holding him.

The vampire plucked him from the air and held him at arm’s length while it finished draining Jonas.

It had known he was there the whole time. He was no threat.

Cade struggled. He hacked wildly with the iron. The blade struck something.

Then the vampire was gone. It moved too fast for him to see. Jonas sat on the floor, a great cavity carved out where his neck once met his shoulders.

His eyes still seemed to plead with Cade.

Cade no longer cared. His mind finally caught up with his body, and he wanted nothing more than to run.

It was already too late.

There was a whisper near him, and he was flying across the hold. He hit a barrel hard enough to crack it open.

Another slight whisper in the air, and he was flying again. This time he landed on the rough planks face-first.

The blade was gone. Dimly, he realized he was bleeding, two bloody gashes up and down his chest.

The thing was right on top of him now. He felt himself lifted again, but only to its mouth. The breath on his neck was cool and rank, the smell of an open sewer in the rain.

His head tipped back far enough to see that the thing had been scratched slightly across one side of its distorted face.

A thin trickle of blood ran from the scratch, hung at the edge of its jaw—and then dripped onto Cade.

He hadn’t even hurt it. But he could feel its rage, like the heat off a stove. Somehow, he knew it was the indignity of being touched that sparked the creature’s anger. It toyed with him, rather than simply gutting him.

All those thoughts were retreating into the distance, getting further and further away. He knew not much time had passed, but his legs and arms were numb. He felt cold.

Two things saved him.

First, another light: far off, maybe a million miles away. Some last part of him knew it was William, coming back for him. He was running as fast as he could, but it was all so slow to Cade.

The vampire had to shift, slightly, to meet William’s attack.

Then, the second thing: the ship ran aground on the rocks near Georges Island. The entire hold jerked and shuddered, and the thing at his neck was thrown away by the impact.

He landed somewhere in a corner, the sounds of the ship’s timbers groaning under the insult of the crash. He tried to get his feet under him again. Couldn’t.

The darkness took him then. He thought he was dead. Some small part of him was glad, because it meant he would no longer have to live in a world where things like that existed.

He had never been so wrong.

 

 

EVERYTHING HURT. The whole world was the edge of a razor blade, slashing at Cade, as he opened his eyes.

He’d never before felt the millions of tiny frays in the threads of his clothes, but now they were tearing at his skin like thorns. The wooden floor of the hold was as jagged as rocks where it touched his face. His bones felt too heavy, as if they would rip through his skin like paper.

Everything hurt. The stink of the sea just outside, as it filled his nostrils like acid. The light, where it sliced through the chinking in the hull. The air, a lead weight on his skull, in his lungs.

But all of it was nothing compared to the emptiness at his core.

The words “thirst” and “hunger” were far too small for what Cade felt. Too human. Even words like “lust” or “starvation” couldn’t begin to describe the emptiness, the raging need, when he woke. He had gone hungry before—his family was poor, which was how he ended up apprenticed to a whaling vessel at sixteen. And he had known thirst, when the water supplies on the ship were down to the damp wood of the barrel.

None of it was even close to what he felt then. It was as if he was collapsing in on himself—burning down to a finer, harder point that was somehow also larger than anything else in the world.

He could feel himself vanishing, disappearing into the void inside. He clung to whatever remained, but his body screamed in pain, and he lacked the strength to hold on.

His heart no longer beat—it oozed. Slowly shifting the blood in his body, dripping out every precious drop. He could feel it.

Other scents reached him. His sense of smell seemed just as acute as his vision now. Dimly, he managed to connect the various flavors and varieties of the scents with memories of people he’d known. It seemed like a very long time ago.