Dance of devils and dayl.., p.14
Dance of Devils and Daylight (Legion of Thieves Book 2), page 14
“I need a medic!” Hex roared. He withdrew his hand from Davie’s chest. A bloody handprint remained where it had been.
The crewmen closest to him scrambled. “Medic!” they called, echoing Hex’s command.
One man dropped to his knees beside Hex. Another ratliner, Petar – a friend of Davie’s. He was dripping with water, his clothes hanging off him like dead skin.
Hex cut the bloodied line from Davie’s stomach.
“Help me lift him,” he ordered.
“Aye, Captain.” Petar’s hands hooked beneath Davie’s knees while Hex wrangled with the boy’s shoulders. Together they carried him towards the hold, their boots sliding against the deck, their balance thrown by the deadweight they shared. The hatch door was thrown open. The ship medic’s weathered face appeared.
It wasn’t easy getting Davie belowdecks, but once he was, the medic took command. He ordered Hex away, claiming he could not help Davie with Hex hovering – captain or not.
Feeling like his stomach was in knots, Hex reluctantly left. Anger, fueled by fear, swelled inside him. He stormed from the hold, leaving bloody streaks on everything he touched. He needed to find Connell and Freya and discover how the hell he’d almost lost two of his crew today.
Twenty-One
Something crashed into Freya right before she reached the edge of the ship. She clung to it desperately, not knowing what it was, but hoping it would not let her go. Or not let her go alone. Sure enough, there was something holding her wrists. Her fingers curled around whatever it was, her knuckles aching as she refused to let the sea claim her.
She felt as though her clothes were being ripped from her body. Like she was being pulled between two worlds.
One that promised a watery death, and one that told her she would not die today.
The water drained away from her, but she remained on the deck.
She looked up, wondering what had kept her from being carried overboard. Connell sat on the deck, water dripping off him. The end of his tether was taut against his stomach as he held her wrists. His chest rose and fell heavily, his face set in sheer determination as he scrambled back. The muscles of his arms and shoulders bulged as he pulled her away from the edge of the ship, towards safer ground.
He did not let her go until the water had finished spilling over the edge of the ship, and even then, he only released her to curl an arm around her waist, helping her to her feet.
“Are you okay?” he asked. There was panic in his eyes, and Freya realized how close he’d come to not reaching her in time. How close she’d come to being lost. Every angry thought she’d had about him leached away in that moment. She sagged against him, her lifeline, reluctant to let go. She was crying, but water ran through her hair, dripping down her face, merging with her tears.
“Thank you,” she rasped.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” he demanded. His hair was dripping. He was soaked. “You almost got yourself killed.”
It seemed like a stupid thing to say. As if she hadn’t just looked death in the eye. She stepped away from him, then almost collapsed as agony ripped through her leg. She stumbled, catching herself against the railing of the steps as a whimper escaped her.
Connell moved closer, his dark gaze moving over her. “Your leg. What happened to it?”
“I guess I didn’t escape the water entirely unscathed,” she ground out, lowering herself onto one of the steps. She extended her leg, breath hissing from between clenched teeth. The material of her pants was still intact, but the fabric was stretched taut over her knee. She hated to think what damage lay beneath for it to have swollen this much, this fast.
“Can you walk?” Connell asked, an eye on the waves as the ship swayed. “It’s not safe for you up here. Especially if you’re injured.”
The idea of walking made Freya feel faint, but she swallowed her concern and made to stand. It was clearly the wrong decision. Her knee seized, rendering her leg useless. Connell caught her before she fell flat on her face.
He ducked under her arm and shouldered her weight. “I guess that’s a no,” he murmured.
With his free hand he pulled on the knot of rope around his waist, loosening it until it fell to his feet. He stepped clear and gently but steadily guided Freya across the main deck towards familiar wooden doors with stained glass detailing.
“Not there,” Freya said between panted breaths. “Take me back belowdecks.”
Her request fell on deaf ears. Connell opened the door to the captain’s quarters and helped her inside. She contemplated trying to walk on her own, but even without trying to use her leg, pain was firing through it. She doubted she’d make it five steps before she burst into tears. Even now she was fighting them.
Wood screeched as Connell dragged a chair away from an all-too familiar desk and lowered her onto the seat. Freya shivered. She was glad to be out of the wind, but the damp of her clothes sucked the warmth from her skin. Water still ran through her hair, making her scalp tingle, chilling the back of her neck.
Connell crouched, producing a knife from his belt. He placed the blade against her thigh.
“What are you doing?” she hissed, tensing even before he ripped the blade through the fabric. Drops of water beaded on the ends of his dark hair and dripped onto the now-exposed skin of her thigh.
“We need to understand what damage was done in order to treat it,” he said, as though that was excuse enough to be cutting the clothes from her body. His fingers lifted the ankle of her trouser, and he ran the blade up the seam until her whole leg was exposed. An angry bruise had already begun to blossom across her knee, which resembled more of an apple than part of her leg. Connell’s hands were cool as he pressed them against her calf. Squeezing gently, he worked his way towards the obvious injury.
The door to the quarters slammed open, a gush of wind sweeping through the room. A figure paused on the threshold.
“What’s going on here?” Hex’s voice was sharp, demanding. A captain’s voice.
Connell rocked back on his heels, his hands falling away from Freya’s leg. He rose to stand, and for a heartbeat, Freya felt his guilt, though they had nothing to feel guilty for.
“She was injured in the wash,” Connell explained.
Hex stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, cutting off the whistle of wind. He crossed the room with quick strides, coming to stop in front of them. He looked at Freya, his eyes going first to her face, then to the bare leg stretched out in front of her.
She stiffened under his scrutiny, wishing he would tell Connell to take care of it and leave.
“I’m fine,” she gritted, before Hex could do something awful like attempt to take care of her. “It’s just a sprain. I’m sure I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow.”
Hex leveled her with a somber glare. She held her breath as she waited for him to crouch, intent on tending to her like he had done in the past. “Is that so?” he said.
Relief flooded over her. Perhaps he would let her get out of this with her dignity intact.
“Yes,” she lied. “In fact, it’s feeling better already.” It wasn’t. The truth was, she was barely able to stop herself from screaming. Pain shot up her leg in waves, acidic and blinding. Her eyes stung and her fingernails bent against the bottom of the seat as she gripped it for strength.
Hex stepped back, his arm sweeping towards the door. “Then by all means, please return below deck where I am confident you will find much less danger.”
His words were courteous as he called her bluff. She could read it in his eyes, his understanding of her. His ability to know when she was lying, despite her efforts to hide the truth. She looked at the door, swallowing. There was no way she could make it there, let alone down the ladder of the hatch.
The seriousness smoothed from Hex’s face, replaced by that all-too-familiar smugness. “That’s what I thought.”
He crouched in front of her, his brows furrowing as he placed his hands where Connell’s had been. His fingers were steeped in blood. Whether his own, or someone else’s, she did not know. They pressed into her skin, tenderly palpating her leg.
“Your leg isn’t broken,” he said, pressing the hollow beneath her kneecap.
Freya gasped, her leg spasming involuntarily as a fresh wave of pain rolled through her.
Hex lifted his gaze to her. “But your knee may very well be.”
Freya winced. “How does a knee even break?”
“Painfully,” Hex answered dryly, not breaking his solemn gaze.
She stared back, questions forming then dying as pain obliterated her thoughts. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Connell,” Hex said. “Inform the infirmary that we have another patient. Though they’re going to have to come here to treat this one.”
Freya listened to Connell’s footsteps as he left the quarters. When she opened her eyes again, she was alone in the room with Hex. She shivered again, cold despite the fire that racked her body.
Hex stood and moved to a trunk in the corner of the room. He retrieved a blanket, unfolding it as he approached. “Here, this will help. Though with your clothes being as wet as they are, I would recommend considering changing them.”
Freya glared at him. “And how do you suppose I do that? I can’t even stand.”
He hesitated but said nothing as he draped the blanket over her shoulders. When his eyes met hers again, she could read what he was holding back from saying.
A bitter laugh escaped her, cut off by another hiss of pain. “Absolutely not,” she said, fingers aching as she gripped the chair.
“I’ve undressed you before,” he replied, as if this were normal conversation. “Though then, at least, you were standing. I imagine it would be considerably more difficult to do so now.”
“How about you imagine nothing?” Freya snapped. “It’s not happening.”
“So you’d rather freeze to death?” he challenged.
Freya pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders. “I think I’m more at risk of suffocating from your arrogance than I am of dying from exposure.”
Hex shrugged, but there was a hint of a smile on his lips. “Suit yourself.”
He pulled his knife free and began to cut strips from the bottom of his shirt. Freya watched as he bound them around his palms, which looked as though they’d been put through a cleaver. His breath hissed as the salt in his shirt bled into the open wounds. Watching him fight his pain only made Freya’s more pronounced.
She felt the odd urge to distract him. And herself. “Aren’t you mad?” she asked.
His eyes flashed to hers. “Furious.”
She released a shaky breath that had nothing to do with his answer. After a hard swallow, she said, “Then why aren’t you acting furious?”
He used his teeth to pull the makeshift bandages tight around his hands. “Would you prefer I yell and stomp around like an overgrown child?”
“That’s what you usually do.”
He scoffed a wounded breath and stared at her incredulously. “Take that back.”
Freya almost smiled. She hadn’t forgotten that she enjoyed toying with him, but she wasn’t doing it now for pleasure. She was doing it for pain. Or rather, to keep her mind from the pain.
She closed her eyes again. “You told Connell to tell the infirmary there’s another patient. Was someone else injured?”
“Yes,” Hex answered. She heard wood scraping against the floorboards and imagined him pulling up a stool. “One of my ratliners. He fell from the mast. It’s my fault. He never should have been up there in these conditions.”
“What happened?” Freya asked, thinking of the man she saw swinging on the end of his tether.
“The sails needed slacking. One of the ropes had been tangled. He volunteered to go up, and the wind knocked him down.”
“You went up after him,” Freya murmured. She remembered watching Hex climb the shards, desperate to reach his crew member. She’d been swept up in the wash before she’d been able to witness the results of his heroism.
“Of course. If I didn’t, he would have died.”
Freya opened her eyes and found Hex gazing out the door window at the deck being battered by wind and water. His frown had returned, and there were shadows in his eyes. She could see the weight of responsibility pressing into his shoulders. He was carrying the burden of his crewman’s injury, as if he himself had inflicted it.
“But he’ll live,” she said, less of a question than a statement.
Hex turned back to her, his green gaze finding hers. “For today.”
“And tomorrow? Is he likely to succumb to his injuries?”
“No,” Hex answered. “But in this line of work, there is often more risk than reward. Especially now.”
Freya didn’t ask more. She wondered what had become of the oceans now that Kila had unleashed her creatures. She knew the sirens were wreaking havoc on the trade vessels that ventured close to Orlenea. But what of other waters? What of other ships? Could the Emporia survive an attack from below? What happened if the sirens spread across the sea, terrorizing the western waters as they did the eastern waters?
A knock came from the door. A balding man wrapped in a blood-stained apron entered the quarters carrying a leather satchel. Connell followed him, swaths of cloth tucked under his arm. The man who Freya presumed was a doctor came to stand beside her. He looked at her knee, his face betraying nothing, and then fished through his bag. He produced a wooden object, flat and oval in shape, and held it out to Hex.
Freya watched the exchange curiously. She had never seen a tool like that, and couldn’t place what it was for. Until she saw the teeth marks. Indented crescents crisscrossed the worn surface. Her eyes flashed in alarm as she looked at Hex, then at the doctor. Hex nodded to Connell, who came around to stand behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders.
She looked around wildly, panic flaring within her. “What’s that for?” she demanded, eyeing the object. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m sorry, love,” Hex said grimly. There was guilt in the depths of his eyes. “This is going to hurt.”
“What? What is?” Freya pleaded. She tried to rise from the chair, but Connell’s hands held her down. The doctor flexed his fingers above Freya’s leg. “Wait, no. Wait –”
Hex pushed the wood into her mouth at the same time the doctor’s hands gripped Freya’s knee. There was hardly any time to breathe before his fingers began squeezing her joint, mashing into her shattered kneecap.
Pain like nothing she’d felt before tore through her, turning her vision white, and the roar of the ocean was lost as her screams filled the room.
Twenty-Two
Freya lay in a cradle of pillows, glaring out the window of the captain’s quarters. The seas had calmed, and now they drifted through gray waters that mirrored the flat, colorless sky above.
She wasn’t sure what time it was. Light enough to still be day, but with no sun it was impossible to tell how long they had until nightfall. She’d passed out during the doctor’s torturous treatment of her knee and awoken again in the bay of the large window built into the rear of the ship. A thick bandage bound her leg, rendering it immobile. Her damp clothes had been removed, replaced with fresh, dry ones. Something Hex had assured her had been mostly Hetty’s doing. Mostly.
When she’d glared and yelled at him, accusing him of all sorts of indecency, he’d insisted he’d only helped to hold her weight. Apparently undressing and redressing an unconscious patient was quite laborious work. And though the knowledge had eased her temper, she hadn’t wanted to concede so easily. So, she banished him. From his own quarters. She hardly expected him to take her seriously, but he had. For now….
Freya glanced around the room, noticing for the first time how it had changed. The desk had been organized, no longer crowded with stacks of paper and leather-bound books. The walls had been cleared of the half-dozen swords that had adorned them before, and now showcased a display of maps, some covering large expanses of land and sea, others homing in on smaller locations. A cabinet stood by the door, secured to the wall with heavy iron brackets. Behind the glass panel door, a collection of books lined the shelves.
From her position in the window, Freya couldn’t read the spines, but each book sat neatly tucked beside the next, as though someone had taken the time to organize them. She had to admit; she was surprised that Hex would keep such order. It reminded her a little of her father’s workshop, though Hex’s quarters were infinitely tidier. But the display of maps and the bookshelf added a scholarly feel to the quarters. A place for learning and exploring, not just for plotting and scheming.
She tried not to think of where he drew his inspiration from. If any of it stemmed from her father’s time on this ship, from Hex’s relationship with him. She had yet to understand their history, or the truth behind her father’s death. Whether or not Hex had had a hand in that, too. But she would not let the opportunity of being here slip her by. If nothing else came from this venture, she would learn the truth about the years he spent aboard this ship, and what led to his demise.
The hatch that led belowdecks flung open. Freya startled, drawing herself up on her elbows. She was surprised when no pain lanced through her knee. After passing out from the doctor’s treatment, she expected an ache at the very least.
A long wooden object appeared from the hatch, sticking up like a bodyless scarecrow. Freya watched with a mixture of curiosity and concern as two hands tossed the wood onto the floor. A moment later Nyar’s head popped up, and then she was shutting the hatch behind her. She straightened, smoothing her clothes before bending to pick up the wood, which loosely resembled a signpost, but with a thinner leg and padding wrapped around the top. Freya recognized it as a crutch – for her.
