Sail

I couldn’t tell her. Maybe someday, but I wasn’t so sure she’d believe me like Mase had. Or sort of did. Dear Feozva, I didn’t know anything anymore.

But Mase had experienced it for himself. As far as I knew, the closest Moon had come to a ghostly encounter was what she’d heard that morning. She was my friend, the only friend I’d ever had, and that was what friends did, right? Believe each other when things got…weird. Only what if she didn’t?

Maybe I’d tell her when I wasn’t afraid of what lurked right outside the double doors. I didn’t hear anything for the rest of the morning, but that meant nothing. I’d been around the block often enough to know that silence offered a false sense of security.

As quietly as I could, I prepared lunch, without my spatula since it was still wedged through the double doors’ handles, and hoped that when the rest of the crew came, their reactions to the dining room would clue me in if it was safe or not. Just like my mind, my figurative balls had rusted out a long time ago.

Just as I spooned macaroni and cheese onto a plate, the dining room door clicked shut behind the double doors. No shouts. Just a clearing of a throat, the soft thud of feet circling the entire table, tapping on the walls, and the creak of a bench. Doctor Daryl. Relief lightened my shoulders at the reassuring sounds of his OCD tendencies.

I edged the spatula through the handles of the double doors inch by slow inch. With a thick swallow, I nudged the doors open just enough to see straight through. There sat the doctor in his assigned seat, totally oblivious that the gurney hadn’t been set for lunch yet.

I bumped the door open, and to show my gratitude that it was only him and not some other dark presence, I twirled the spatula in a grand sweep in front of my face, not caring one bit that it wasn’t a boyish thing to do.

But the spatula slipped from my slick hands and clipped the bottom of my chin with a sharp edge. I wiped at the sting with the back of my hand. Blood smeared my knuckles.

I glanced up at Doctor Daryl to see if he’d noticed my klutzy moves. He stared back at me with eyes shining an unnatural green.

What in Feozva’s hell? My breath hitched, and I stepped back.

A rough growl peeled his lips back.

“Doctor…?” My skin prickled. I squeezed the spatula, questions tumbling through my mind too fast to catch.

He hunched low over the gurney until his chin nearly touched it. He looked like an animal, ready to pounce on its prey.

Me.

He leaped. I screamed.

The gurney skated toward me with him on top of it. He jumped on me, and we both crashed through the double doors. The titanium floor slammed into my back and head with the force of a cannonball. Pain stitched through every nerve in my body. My lungs emptied, both from the harsh landing and the doctor’s weight on top of me.

He clawed at my arms and fought to pin them over my head. I punched and kicked and tried to squirm out from underneath him. There were shouts, but I couldn’t pull in enough air to make any myself.

His teeth snapped at my face, around the blade of the spatula, which somehow I still gripped tight in front of me. Still dazed, I pushed the end into his face to cover his hungry mouth and to bite the sharp edge into the spot just under his nose. I didn’t need air to scrape the doctor’s fucking face off.

Then, just as suddenly as he was on top of me, he wasn’t. The captain and Mase held a writhing, drooling, mad doctor in a death grip while he lunged and reached for me.

“Get him out of here,” Mase shouted and pulled at him while the captain pushed him out the door.

I lay there gasping for a long time, wondering what in Feozva’s hell just happened, when the tears started. They couldn’t be stopped no matter how much I wished them to, so I just let them come. These weren’t self-pity tears—I’d stopped crying those long ago. But tears did manage to wash some of the pain and fear away when I felt both. And I’d felt both so often.

“Absidy.” A whisper, but not one that came from something that sounded like it had swallowed rocks. This one was gentle, deep, and soothing.

I brushed the tears from my cheeks and peered up into a pair of mismatched eyes. Concern waved wrinkles across Mase’s forehead. “Are you all right?”

I honestly didn’t know how to answer that question, so I offered him a gloved hand instead.

He took the hint and helped ease me up off the floor. His gaze roamed over my face and lingered for a split-second on my mouth. He looked away quickly, rubbing his knuckles over his eyes. “Are you going to make me ask that question again?”

“I’ve been better,” I said and staggered toward the nearest stool. “If your next question involves me trying to kill the doctor, you can save it. I didn’t do anything to him.”

“I know. I saw.”

“What did you see?” I asked with the hope he could piece together what I couldn’t.

“Him flying through the air and tackling you to the ground.”

“I take it he’s never done anything like that before.”

“No,” he said. “The captain put the doctor in his quarters. We’ll wait until he calms down to ask him what the hell happened.”

Groaning, I touched the back of my head. I’d sprouted another smaller one in just minutes like some medical marvel. I stood with a nod and started for the door to the hallway. “I’d like to know that, too.”

Mase popped up and blocked my way with a wall of muscle. “Hey, whoa. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Says who?” I asked without bothering to step out of his personal space.

“Says me,” he said, curling his lip into an irritated scowl. He held my gaze for several faltering heartbeats before looking away. His voice, his nearness sizzled a fiery energy over my skin, a welcome distraction of the panicked aftershocks still trembling through my body.

He cleared his throat. “Clean yourself up. You’ve got blood sliding down your neck. You’re going to ruin everyone’s appetites.”

I took the hand towel from my waistband and pressed it to my chin. Red dotted the white fabric, and that horrible scene in the snowy forest sprang into my mind again. I’d been bloody then, too. Both before and after the vendor chased me since little scabs still dotted my fingertips where I’d gripped Pop’s nails.

“I’m bleeding,” I whispered.

“I see that. What are you going to do about it?”

“I was bleeding that day in the forest,” I said. “One of the… The vendor who worked at the market… He thought I was stealing some of a neighboring vendor’s products, and—”

“Were you?”

“No.”

Mase arched an eyebrow.

“Maybe a little bit,” I admitted.

“A little bit?” Mase scoffed. “Like the little bit of iron you’ve been stripping from this ship? Are you sure you didn’t murder those two men just a little bit?”

I met his steady gaze with a heated glare that I wished would burn him from the inside out. “You’re being flippant.”

“Oh, am I, college girl?” He chuckled, and the sound and feel of his warm breath on my cheek startled me. “Am I being flippant?” He took the hand towel from me and dabbed at my chin, his harsh tone opposing his gentle touch.

His full lips just inches from mine, the occasional slip of his fingertips across my jaw—all of it made breathing difficult. The air inside the inch of space between our bodies shocked a static heat down to my toes. It made me want to pull him closer, and I knew if I did, I’d forget everything that had just happened, if only for a while. His eyes searched mine, tempting me, but then he shoved the towel into my hands and circled around me to sit on his stool a safe distance away.

“You were saying?” he said.

“Yes.” I swallowed, trying, and probably failing, to pretend I hadn’t noticed what just happened between us. “The…the vendor chased me. He grabbed some of my chains and yanked them out, and I started bleeding all over the snow.” I showed him the white towel with my blood on it as if he could see into my memories. “I thought it was a trick of the light, but…his eyes glowed a green color just like—”

“Yeah. The doctor,” Mase said, his head cocked to the side, studying me with eyes tightened at the corners. “I saw when I got him off you.”

“The vendor growled, but I thought it was my panic making me hallucinate. When he chased me, I dodged to the side of a rapier tree, and a branch caught him in the eye before he had a chance to swerve. I’m not sure who, or what, he was. I don’t understand any of it, Mase.”

He gave me a curious look, one I had no idea how to read, then examined his raw fingertips with a frown. “I don’t either.”

“You believe me?”

“I saw the doctor attack you, didn’t I?”

“I mean the rest of it.”

He didn’t say anything for the longest time, so I filled it in with the answer myself. Fine. I didn’t care what he believed. Frankly, I didn’t know why he hadn’t gone running to the captain about me already.

On shaky legs, I headed to the kitchen since we still hadn’t eaten lunch yet. The macaroni would probably be a little soggy—well, soggier—but the scrodfish still warmed in the oven. I carried plates and silverware out to the gurney and set the table under Mase’s watchful gaze.

When I came to his place setting, I gave a pointed look at his boots propped up on the gurney. “Are you going to move those?”

He slid me a wicked grin that sparked a different kind of tremble to my knees. “No.”

“Don’t you have something to do?” I asked. “You could go check on the doctor and the captain.”

“I could,” he said with a nod. “I’d rather sit here and ask you more questions, though.”

“Can you move your feet first?”

“What does your sister—Ellison?—do?” he asked without budging.

“She’s a doctor, a brilliant one, aboard the Nebulous.”

“And your dad?”

“An engineer on the Nebulous.”

“Is he brilliant, too?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you?”

I set a plate across the gurney at Randolph’s spot, just in case he finally ran out of river beans and made his way back to us. “I’m…not on the Nebulous.”

Mase threw back his head and laughed, its deep, soothing notes breaking down some of the pressure at the base of my skull. “Nice answer. What’s your major in college?”

I sighed. Was there no end in sight to his questions? “Undecided. I can’t seem to find an area of study that I’d want to do that involves melting down iron and staying away from ghosts, which are pretty much the only things I’m good at. Nothing really, I don’t know, speaks to me.”

I allowed myself a single glance at the scar slicing down his eyebrow and cheek. If I had to guess, I’d say it was given to him somewhere else and not on this ship. From a fight over a woman maybe? It was easy to picture women draped all over him with a face and body like his. A dimple in the middle of his square jaw, a scruffy head of hair that was long enough to graze across the stubble on his cheeks, wide shoulders and thick arms underneath a tight white thermal... Okay, three, two, one, look away.

He leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms behind his head so the bottom of his shirt skimmed the button on his pants. “I thought about going to college once,” he said, a contemplative look on his face.

I shook my head at all my distractions so I could focus. “I don’t care about that right now. I want to know why I was just attacked for the second time by a person with glowing green eyes.”

Mase raised his arms to the ceiling with an exaggerated shrug, then settled his hands back behind his head. “I wish I knew. He’s usually a mellow kind of guy. Weird, but mellow.”

“Well, it doesn’t make any sense. And they don’t let people who won’t move their feet off the lunch gurney in to college, anyway. It’s this thing they have against annoying pilots and dirty boots.” I came closer with the intent to nudge his toe with my hip because the macaroni wasn’t going to get any firmer. As I drew nearer, the smirk disappeared and his lips parted. I stopped, mesmerized. Those lips were criminal, and I ought to know, being a fugitive and all.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t apply then,” he said, his voice soft.

Things seemed to be happening in slower motion than they had been with a quiet muffle on everything except my rapid heartbeat. I leaned into his boots so that the toes rubbed up against my ass instead of my hip. At Mase’s angle, he could probably see the fabric stretching tighter over my curves since his gaze pointed right there. I let out a gasp when he tipped one of his toes up to lift my butt cheek, his bottom lip caught under his teeth. His brief, dirty grin rushed a divine kind of heat to my belly before he dropped his feet to the floor and cleared his throat.

What the hell was he doing? And why in Feozva’s hell did I like it? He was distracting me from what really mattered, and for some reason, I imagined that was his intent.

“Being a pilot speaks to me. I’m good at it, so… I’m sure you’ll find something.”

“Maybe.” I set the plate down in front of him, not sure what to say. Was I supposed to get angry at him for doing that? Because I wasn’t sure I could pull that off with my breathing so out of control. “I get to ask you some things now, okay?”

“If you get caught by the police, you’re going to have to get used to answering questions. Consider me your question…trainer…guy.” He swept his hands out like he was doing me some giant favor.

He could distract me from a lot of things, but he wasn’t the only one with an insatiable curiosity. “See that salt shaker?” I asked, pointing to the corner of the dining room where it had rolled.

“Yeah.”

“I will dump that whole thing in some undivulged lunch dish. Every bite will be a mystery.” I lowered my voice conspiratorially. “It might even be in your precious dessert.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

I snatched the shaker and barreled into the double doors with Mase hot on my heels.

“What’s your question?” he asked before I’d done any real damage.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“That’s a deep question, college girl. From what I’m told, it all started when my parents—”

“I mean why are you here with me right now? Still, after I told you I’m fine? Aren’t you worried about the doctor?”

“Yes, I am, but—”

“Well, what if he’s attacking someone else, like the captain? You could be helping.”

He picked up a stray, uncooked macaroni noodle from the small table and rolled it between his fingers. “I think we both know he was after just one thing.”

“What? My macaroni and cheese?”

He looked up and cracked the noodle in his fist. “Your blood.”

My blood? Type O positive, the most common kind among humans. Nothing special about it. And yet the last two times I bled, I’d had to fight for my life.

“Maybe there’s something about it that drove the doc and that guy, Vissle, mad.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” But it was completely normal, probably the most normal thing about me. I shook my head. “You didn’t answer my first question. Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” With a shrug, he deposited the broken noodle onto the table and brushed his hands. “To see if you were really okay? To figure out the real Absidy Jones?” He looked at me then, straight on, without a trace of humor or teasing in his expression. “To find out what makes you so special.”

I held his steady gaze for as long as I could while that s-word broke apart around me into its real meanings: Cursed. Terrorized. Completely fucked. “I hate being special.”

“But you are,” he said, and something in his voice made it sound like a good thing.

“James? Mason?”

At the sound of the captain’s voice, Mase and I spun far away from each other just as he walked in. A blush heated my cheeks while I busied myself with the scrodfish in the oven, but I didn’t know what specifically ignited it: that the captain had burst in on us or that Mase thought I was special.

“James, are you all right? The doctor… I don’t know what got into him,” Captain Glenn said.

I attempted to shrug it off like I thought a fourteen-year-old boy would do. “Yeah. Fine.” Standard answers worked best for people not in the know. I wasn’t fine, but I was pretty sure the only person who knew that was Mase. Secretly, I was glad he’d stayed to bug me.

“How is he?” Mase asked.

“Well…” Glenn scrubbed a large hand down his face, his gaze aimed at me. “I had to give him one of his own tranquilizers. Did he say anything to you, James, before…?”

I shook my head, then glanced at Mase. Was he going to tell the captain what he thought about my blood? Or about anything?

“Did you see his eyes, captain?” Mase asked as he stared down at his cowboy boots.

“Yes, and I don’t understand it, just like I don’t understand most of what happens on this ship,” Captain Glenn said and sighed. “I hope Randolph doesn’t need a doctor if we find him.”

“When we find him, you mean,” Mase corrected and glanced at me.

“When is right,” Glenn said with a nod. “After lunch, we can see if Daryl is awake and calm enough to explain himself. Did you see Randolph’s door?”

Mase gave a curt nod.

“What about Randolph’s door?” I asked.

“It’s been sucked in or pushed in or…” Captain Glenn shook his head. “It’s so warped, I’m not sure anything will open it.”

A thick, almost tangible worry weighed on my chest. Was he even in his room? And more importantly, was he okay?

Talk of Daryl and Randolph took up most of the conversation at lunch, but Mase kept quiet during all of it while Nesbit grilled the captain about what had happened. Mase kept sliding glances my way, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do the same to him even though worry clenched my gut. Nesbit and Glenn seemed too preoccupied to notice that their fourteen-year-old boy chef and their pilot were totally checking each other out.

“Was he possessed by a ghost or some shit?” Nesbit asked, panic squeaking his voice. “We have to worry about that now, too?”

Vissle’s ghost was the only glowing green-eyed one I’d ever seen. When he was alive and chasing me, my fear felt different toward him, not the usual kind I was used to feeling. Same with Daryl. If I had to guess, I’d say they were something else entirely, and that kind of unknown scratched my nerves until they were raw.

After lunch when I entered the dining room with dessert, Nesbit and Captain Glenn seemed to have given up trying to explain Daryl and had moved on to topics that comforted Nesbit.

“Tits. That’s the best part of Esmerelda. And her ass and legs. I even love her pointy little chin. Did you know she’s actually played by lots of chicks who all look the same?”

Captain Glenn sighed. “No, I didn’t know that, Nesbit.”

“Yeah, it’s like there’s lots of Esmerelda copies running around out there. Hey, I just about have my old Mind-I fixed, guys. I got to keep it when they took it out to put the plate in my head,” Nesbit said, tapping his temple. “I’ll bring it in during dinner and I can rig it so we can watch her show. Oh man, how I miss her show. Mase.” He leaned over to flick his shoulder. “You gonna watch it with me?”

Mase looked down at the spot where Nesbit had touched him with disgust then glared at him. “Probably not.”

“What? It’s Esmeralda, man. You can’t tell me you’ve ever seen a finer body than that. Even if she’s a bunch of bodies.”

“I’ve seen finer. Much finer.”

I dropped a lemon bar on Mase’s plate and stepped around him. I didn’t even have to look to know that his gaze pointed at my ass. The sizzle sent tingles all the way up to the tips of my ears. Knowing that he was looking put an extra involuntary swing in my hips, so before I made a fool of myself, I ducked through the double doors.

He’d seen me very naked, but the idea that he may have been talking about me just then bloomed excitement through my body. Of course, he’d probably seen dozens of women naked, but still. I’d rather not think about that.

A blood curdling scream from somewhere on the ship ripped open the silence. Forks clattered to plates. Chairs scooted back, and all of us rushed out the dining room door and into the hallway.

Mase turned, saw me coming after him, and stopped me with his hands on my shoulders. “I don’t think you should come.”

“What if it’s Randolph?” I asked, squirming out of his grip. “I’m coming.”

“What if it’s not?” He looked over his shoulder, probably to make sure the others had gone. “It could be the doctor, Absidy. He could’ve gotten loose.”

“Then I’ll repel the ghosts from everyone so we can find him easier.” If that even worked anymore. I patted the miniscule stash in my pocket, my mind already made up. “I’m coming with you. I have to know if it was really my blood that drove the doctor crazy.”

His grip on my arms tightened as he pushed me back into the gurney so hard, it rolled into a corner. Locked in place, my chest heaved at his closeness. His torso pushed against mine with each quick breath. His tongue wet his bottom lip as it slipped out, and the broken off tip of some kind of tool rested in the middle.

“I have my own iron,” he said. “I’m locking the door behind me. He could come after you again.”

So he did believe me. The iron part anyway. “But—”

“You’re not coming.”

He stood so my thigh was between his legs, and I squirmed it against him in my rush to get away. Fire blazed in his eyes so bright, a gasp parted my lips. His gaze connected to them with a need that quickened both our breaths. With a stifled groan, he dropped his hands to my hips and pulled me flush to him.

“I—”

He put his fingers over my mouth. “No arguments.” He slipped his hand away with a slow touch, seeming to enjoy the soft give of my lips under his fingertips. He turned, clicked the lock into place, and shut the door in my face.

Blood boiling, whether from anger or the liquid heat he’d just pooled between my legs, I paced the dining room while I scratched my head, giving him a ten second lead. Had that been Daryl’s scream? Or Randolph? Or none of the above?

Mase’s iron wouldn’t work for him since he wasn’t a magnet, but he hadn’t let me explain. The crew needed me to keep the ghosts away so we could find out who’d screamed.

I tried to ignore the part of my brain that warned my presence out there could escalate things, especially if I bled. Deep down, I knew it was reckless to leave the safety of my titanium haven in the dining room/kitchen. But Daryl had corrupted these rooms when he’d attacked me. I wasn’t safe anywhere anymore, especially since I had nothing left in my pockets. Nothing. Just the small piece of iron on my tongue. I had to go.

Quiet as I could, I twisted the lock and peered out. Arctic air blasted through the crack and pierced sharpened icicles into my skin.

Down the hall, Mase rounded the corner under the broken light. I grabbed the ice pick from my coat pocket, clutching it tightly, and slipped out.