I grabbed him by the beard and pulled. “That was rude.”
“Now you see why I stabbed him?” Alex chuckled and stepped closer. “I considered killing him once I had enough pills, but his knowledge and his skills might still be useful.”
Hob spat. “You cosmic dumbass. R’gngyk is going to devour this world and shit it out in comet-sized chunks.”
Alex ignored him. He stabbed his cutlass into the floor and picked up a blotchy blue-green metal triangle, identical to the ones I’d seen in the galley. “Hob also helped with the spellcraft on these. They’re my little portholes to R’gngyk. They’re made of metal from a meteorite that’s older than this planet, and you have no idea what I had to go through to get my hands on it.”
He tossed it to me. I caught it and immediately wished I hadn’t. It was ice cold, and the texture was like desiccated bone.
“I need you to cut yourself,” he said. “Let your blood fall directly through the center of the triangle.”
“How much blood?”
“No more than ten pints, I think. I need to rouse R’gngyk enough to tap into his power but not enough to destroy the world. I thought building a small band of worshippers would do it, but their little blood prayers barely interrupted R’gngyk’s snores. Metaphorically speaking.”
“You’re willing to risk the world—a world you’re a part of, mind you—for more power?” I didn’t know why I bothered to ask. I’d built a career out of stopping people who’d risked the world for their own power. None of them ever considered the possibility that they could fail. None of them gave a damn about who they hurt or killed in the process.
True to form, Alex just scoffed. “I’ve studied and prepared for decades to become a Hunter of R’gngyk. I promise you, the world will be just fine.”
Hob made a disgusted—and disgusting—snort. “At least once R’gngyk consumes us all, I won’t have to listen to this whiny speck of ass dandruff go on about how unfair his life has been.”
I placed the blade of my Bowie near my wrist. “What about Morgan and the others? Can you undo what’s happened to them?”
“They’ve been touched by R’gngyk, and they will serve him for as long as they hear his call. I couldn’t change that if I wanted to.”
I threw the knife. Eight and a half inches of enchanted steel buried itself in Alex’s chest.
“About fucking time,” crowed Hob.
I tossed the triangle to the floor.
Alex stared at the hilt protruding from his sternum. When he looked up at me, fury twisted his features.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
He yanked the knife from his chest and charged me. I blocked his arm at the wrist. It was like blocking a Buick. The impact jolted me to my heels. I wrapped my fingers around his forearm and extended my claws through skin and into the muscle.
Alex tried to yank free. The knife fell. I reached for his throat.
He clubbed me from the other side.
My vision flashed. I found myself on the floor, reviewing basic math. Alex had one arm. I’d been holding that arm. One minus one was zero, so what the hell had he hit me with?
I blinked until I could focus again. Alex held his hand over the oozing wound in his chest. From the stump of his left arm, a thick black tentacle drew back for another blow.
I rolled to the side. The tentacle slammed the floor so hard, the floorboards snapped and splintered. I slashed the tentacle with my claws as it drew back.
Alex howled in pain.
Interesting. It hadn’t appeared to hurt much when I stabbed his human flesh. I got to my feet and beckoned with one claw, daring him to try again.
Instead, he turned tail and fled through a door markedBRIG.
I snatched up my knife and went after him.
The brig was a cramped room with two pirate mannequins trapped behind bars and what looked like a recently added doorway off the ship.
I ducked through the raggedly cut hole in the wall to find Alex pulling himself up onto the gangplank by his tentacle, which had thinned and stretched to more than ten feet in length.
