Page 149 of The Worst of Them

This was Captain Jonah Lovibond, and there was nowhere to run.

He approached Copson, his heavy steps silent. Before he reached the living captain, another ghost drifted to his side and deposited the glowing tide stones into his palm. For a breath, Jonah only looked. Then his mouth turned down beneath the shadow of his hat.

Jonah’s deep voice carried over the deck, pitched with fury and biting derision. “You’re a fool to think you could outrun me.”

Though Copson knelt, he spoke boldly. “I knew I would face you, Jonah. I only wished to spare lives.”

“Spare lives!” Jonah barked, his voice booming loud enough to make the pirates flinch. “My wife’s tears call to me in mourning for my innocent child, and you wish me to spare any of your men? You did not spare her, and surely a hundred pirates would not be enough to repay the life taken.”

“Nothing could be enough,” Copson said, holding Jonah’s gaze with resolve. “But I’ve kept the man responsible so you may have your vindication. The others here are innocent.”

Another of Jonah’s men pushed forward. Though blood dribbled down one of his arms from where he’d been cut by a mermaid scale, the edges of his body were beginning to fade as he shoved Jack, hands bound, toward the captains.

Cecily tried to call out, to go to him, but she was held frozen by fear and cold. Her heartbeat turned deafening as Jack was forced to his knees next to his father, blood seeping from his temple. The first mate glared at Jonah as the man behind him tossed the mermaid-scale knife to the deck.

Jonah caught it with his boot before it could skitter away. With deliberate slowness, he stooped to pick up the small weapon, and then he held it flat in his palm, staring for long enough that the pirates began to shift.

A low, eerie chuckle sent a trickle of dread down her spine.

“A mermaid,” Jonah mused. “How cunning. Did you catch one solely to deal with me?” He ran his finger over the edge of the blade, but not hard enough to cut into his ghostly flesh. “Did you torture the creature too? Tear out its scales so you might save yourselves?”

Copson shook his head. “No, Jonah. We didn’t⁠—”

With a flick of his fingers, Jonah flipped the knife so the blade extended from the back of his hand, like he was about to plunge it into the first person who tempted him. “Was it you?” he asked, taking a step toward Jack. Frost crawled toward the first mate’s knees. “How’d you get a knife that can kill a ghost?”

Jack trembled, but his voice came strong. “I bought it in Tortuga.”

“No,” Cecily rasped, but she was too far away. She tried to catch Jack’s gaze, to beg him not to do this. It was her knife, only hers, and she couldn’t let him die for it.

“Liar,” Jonah snarled. “You Copsons are lying, murdering cowards. You are a curse to your family and your crew, and you will not be helped.” Jonah reached down to grab Copson’s face in a crushing grip. “I will kill your crew. Every single one.” His fingers tightened around the knife. “Starting with your precious son⁠—”

“I made the knife!” Cecily’s voice split the frozen quiet, ice scraping her throat. She tripped forward, pushing into the open deck. “You can’t kill him—it was me. I did it.”

“Cecily, don’t!” Jack shouted.

“I tore the scales from a mermaid,” she confessed in a desperate rush. “I didn’t know what they could do. It wasn’t to thwart you but to⁠—”

Cecily broke off when Jonah spun to face her. Time seemed to stop, the world fell silent and blurred at the edges, everything felt upside down and backward because that⁠—

That was her father.

Even from several paces away, she recognized the angles of his features, the laugh lines around his brows and buried in his cheeks. She knew the shape they would take when he smiled, and how kind it could make him look.

He didn’t look kind now. He looked heartbroken and furious, and she recognized that too because she had known that face and its emotions for eighteen years.

He peered at her with dark eyes she knew so well, and they cut right through her heart and straight to her soul, directly into the well of pain and grief she’d kept shut tight for a year.

All the words she was about to say dissipated on a gust of breath, the kind that came before a sob.

This was impossible. She’d buried her father, and even if she hadn’t, he could no better sail a boat than he could make himself a prince, so this had to be some sort of supernatural mess, a magic trick meant to torment her. Magic like the knives and the mermaid and the sea serpent.

In an anguished whisper, Jonah asked, “Vanetta?”

Cecily struggled to shake her head, her eyes blurring with tears. She blinked them away, too eager to see the face of her father even if it caused her so much pain. “No…”

“What witchcraft is this?” Jonah spun to Copson. “What have you done?”

Copson shook his head, terror plain on his face. “I’ve done nothing.”