“Well, if he’s so good with a needle, why isn’t the captain here to sew you up?”
“He’s busy,” I reply tersely as she swipes at a particularly ruined patch of flesh.
“Your back is a real mess.”
I roll my eyes, gritting my teeth as she sets to cleaning the wound. The air fills with the scent of clove, and it stings like a motherfucker, but I don’t let the pain show, gritting my teeth and keeping my fists clenched. “I don’t need it sewn up, anyway. Just give it a quick wipe, and we can both get to bed.”
“You keep telling yourself that, champ.” She pauses before adding softly, “Does this happen every time you shift?”
“Yes.”
To my surprise, she doesn’t press further. “So, Bones is pretty chatty when he’s got a drink in him,” she says conversationally.
I grunt, shifting slightly as she goes over another particularly ragged bit of skin.
“He was telling me something about a mutiny. Very piratey,” she says lightly.
I snort. And maybe it’s because talking is helping to distract from my screaming back, but I find myself sharing more than I usually would. “Jack and I found our way onto a ship together. It couldn’t have been more different from this one.” Shrugging my now tense shoulders as the memories flood back, I feel the telltale prickle of my spines as they threaten to break through the skin again.
Our old captain was a lot like Finch in some ways. He selected his crew carefully. But instead of wanting to give a bunch of washed-up sailors a home on the water, the old captain wanted to sell us to his highest bidder. It didn’t matter that he didn’t own us and didn’t care what they wanted to do with us.
“So you killed him?” She doesn’t seem surprised, let alone as terrified as she should be.
Truly terrible instincts.
“He had a few loyal crew who figured the loyalty went both ways.” I give an unamused snort. “Idiots. Mutinies are messy. Ships are all about the chain of command so once you get rid of the person at the top of the chain, people start taking out all of their old grudges. It was a bloodbath.”
“But you survived.”
“An abomination survived.”
I barely remember who or what I was before people forced their power on me and I got so fucked up.
She pauses, and I can feel the weight of her stare on my back. Without looking, I can imagine her expression. Horror and pity and disgust, all rolled into one.
“You should get to bed,” I grunt.
“You sound like someone’s nanna,” she replies without missing a beat. “You look like one too, with your old-lady glasses.”
As though she’s a snake charmer for the riling shame and self-disgust inside me, it all collapses in on itself. My chest expands, and I can’t stop the low chuckle that rumbles out of me. When I twist around, her eyes widen, and she grins.
Bloody fucking hell. She might not be the only one who’s in trouble.
Chapter 17
Reva
The next morning is a bad one.
Despite my exhaustion after leaving Torin in the small hours, I tossed and turned for hours. By the time I finally wake, I feel like a soggy dish towel left twisted and forgotten in the laundry basket. I ache all the way from my skin down to the hollow in my gut. A steady reminder of the nightmare yesterday turned out to be.
Keeping my face pressed into the pillow, I suck in some deep breaths as panic tries to wrestle me into its clutches. After all the chaos yesterday, it’s hitting me all over again just how dire this situation is. It’s been one blow after another, tides shifting around me as I struggle to keep my head above water.
I have two... now three males who are connected to me by magical forces I have no control over. Kit, who I’d come to for help, is now in the wind and likely in worse danger than any of us if it’s the same sorcerers that held Aster who took him from his bed. And that seems pretty likely, unless Port Yarrow is a hotbed for dark magic all of a sudden.
I force myself to focus my thoughts. I’ve always thought of Noush as my soul mate, but I suppose that isn’t exactly right. Noushismy soul, neither of us can exist without the other. Right now, it seems like an insane biological failing that I’m not able to communicate with Noush as soon as I remove her skin.
But maybe Icanfind a way of sensing Noush, just like I did with Kit yesterday. I try to recreate the feeling from yesterday when Aster helped me to follow the connection with Kit. This time, I concentrate all my attention directed on that hole in my gut as I mentally revisit that feeling I get when the two of us are connected. The soaring, floating sensation when Noush surges forward and the memory of her voice fills my head, followed by how it feels when she wiggles our tail in joy. I’m filled with a giddiness I don’t get to experience when I’m on two legs as all my human worries fade into background noise.
