The Scrolls of Gideon Read online

  We’d all be powerless until we could reach the surface again. If we ever did manage that somehow.

  There was a soft groan as Taeral manipulated the metal, just enough to open a small hole at eye level. The breach failed to gush salt water into the sphere. But it did let in a soft, strangely colored ray of light.

  “We are not submerged,” Taeral said. “I cannot believe it actually worked.”

  There was a collective shiver of relief. “Can you see anything out there?” I said.

  “Not particularly. I must enlarge the hole.” Taeral held his glowing hand a few inches from the surface, groaning sharply as the magic surged and the opening widened. When he’d created a roughly door-shaped gap big enough to let us out, he gasped and staggered back. “I’ve nothing left,” he whispered as his glamour started to flicker.

  Sadie grabbed him and helped him stay on his feet. “Come on, let’s get you out of here,” she said gently, leading him through the gap and into the unknown.

  Still almost too shocked to believe we were still alive, everyone else filed out after them. I waited to head out last, because I’d just gotten a strong feeling that something was very, very wrong. Besides being trapped in a random magic barrier a mile under the ocean. The feeling had nothing to do with our situation, and everything to do with the crew.

  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But some of them — specifically Mr. Wilt, Dom the angry security guard, and the twins — had been way too calm and collected about our little trip to the bottom of the ocean.

  Still, I couldn’t stay in here and figure it out. I had to join the rest of them.

  When I cleared the sphere, it was to find a vast wall of water standing maybe five feet ahead, behind a softly glowing blue-green shield. The ground between the remains of the ship and the held-back mass of ocean was coarse, damp sand dotted with rocks, shells, and exposed blazes of coral, and the sound of dripping water echoed hollowly through the sea-scented air.

  As I watched, a dark shape flashed by on the opposite side of the barrier, dragging something along the outer wall. A mermaid, frustrated and still trying to make us its next meal.

  “Uh, Gideon?” Sadie said in a strange, almost horrified voice behind me. “You should probably turn around and look at this.”

  Right then I decided turning around was the last thing I wanted to do. But I didn’t have much choice, so I pivoted and headed for Sadie, who was standing next to the sphere and looking at something beyond it.

  I came up next to her, and any words I might have spoken died before they could leave my mouth.

  What we’d landed on was a kind of sandy platform, roughly circular and about fifteen feet in diameter. Just beyond the platform, at the bottom of a slight incline, were two clipper ships facing us and angled toward each other so the bows touched, leaving a gap between them. The ships sat like silent guardians at the mouth of a long, wide canyon that stretched down and back as far as the eye could see.

  And the canyon was completely filled with shipwrecks.

  Ships and boats of all shapes, sizes, and ages cluttered the canyon. Some looked no more than a few years old, while others were rotted into nearly unrecognizable hulks. There was everything from schooners and galleons that must’ve been built somewhere around the golden age of actual pirates, to modern tugboats and yachts, steamers and trawlers and battleships, at least one huge cruise liner. The barrier keeping the ocean back continued along the canyon, creating a shimmering wall of water about ten feet above the largest of the vessels, and the dripping, plonking water sounds came from there as the ocean leaked through in several places.

  This was not a safe space. This was a massive underwater graveyard. I could feel the souls of the dead, hundreds of them out there among the wreckage.

  Somehow, we had to get out of here fast.

  But before I could vocalize that thought, another sound echoed in the damp, cold air. One that chilled my blood. It was a distinctive click, the sound of a hammer being thumbed back on a pistol.

  “Well, now that we’ve all gotten the lay of the land,” said a voice with an Australian accent. “I think it’s time to let you know who’s really in charge here, and what we’re gonna do now that you nasty beasts have brought us where we needed to go.”

  My blood boiled with rage as I turned toward Mr. Wilt, who had Dom’s silver bullet loaded gun trained on Sadie.

  CHAPTER 21

  “What the hell are you doing?” Alex said in a tone that she probably meant to be commanding, but came out injured and confused.

  “Our jobs, you insufferable cow.” Mr. Wilt took a step closer to Sadie, who’d started to growl. “Try it, princess, and I’ll plug you full of enough silver to buy a small country.”

  My own hackles rose, and my fists clenched tight enough to draw blood from my palms. Mr. Wilt wasn’t alone in the mutiny. Dom had a similar gun pointed at Taeral, one that was probably loaded with cold iron. Kjell was holding off Alex, Junkyard, and Low Tide with a semi-auto, and Solveig was just behind him, pulling things out of the duffel bag I’d noticed Kjell wearing on his back during the mermaid attack. More guns, extra ammo, handcuffs, walkie-talkies, two cold iron crowbars, and a bottle of red liquid that looked a hell of a lot like mandrake oil.

  So maybe Alex hadn’t poisoned Taeral back on the ship after all. Because Mr. Wilt was the one who’d started giving him drinks.

  “Touch her, and I will tear out your throat with my bare hands,” Taeral snarled.

  Mr. Wilt shook his head and glanced at Taeral. “You’re a bit more trouble than you’re worth,” he said, gesturing with his free hand at Solveig, who picked up one of the cold iron bars. “Why don’t you take a nap, big guy?”

  They were damned fast. Before anyone could react, Solveig slapped the crow bar into Dom’s hand, and the security man whipped it around upside Taeral’s head. He crumpled to the ground, his skin smoldering where Dom had hit him.

  And there was an immediate, answering roar of pure fury as Sadie’s choker sputtered with light, and she began to change.

  “Sadie, no!” I cried, lunging in her direction as she started to turn. “Na bo—”

  The sharp crack of gunfire split my words as the spell burned through me, taking my spark down to the faintest flicker. Mr. Wilt’s shot hit Sadie in the shoulder. She yelped and spun back, falling with a shudder as she reverted to full human. Her choker went dark and her moonstone-generated clothes vanished, leaving her completely exposed and bleeding.

  “You son of a bitch,” I spat as both Mr. Wilt and Dom pointed their guns at me. “Let me get the bullet out. It’s going to kill her.”

  Mr. Wilt gave a sardonic shrug. “Actually, it won’t for quite a while. Just a low-grade silver alloy,” he said, wiggling the gun slightly. “It’ll take a good half-day, maybe longer, to completely poison her. I had to make sure she stays weak.”

  For a few seconds I thought I’d lose the battle to not kill the bastard. I had maybe one spell’s worth of juice in the moonstone, and even if I took one of these assholes out with something, that’d leave three more standing. Then we were all dead. “At least let me cover her up, then,” I said through clenched teeth, hating every single word I said that wasn’t insisting on healing her. “If not for decency’s sake, then because it’s damned cold down here. She can’t stay like that.”

  “No, let me do that,” Alex said with furious determination. “She can have my coat.”

  One corner of Mr. Wilt’s mouth twitched. “Fine,” he said. “But don’t try anything stupid, Captain. If we shoot you, you’ll stay down forever.”

  Alex shivered and hesitated briefly, then squared her shoulders and marched toward Sadie, shrugging out of her lined slicker. She knelt next to Sadie and eased her gently from the ground. “It’s going to be okay,” she murmured as Sadie groaned and her closed eyes fluttered. “This will keep you warm.”

  I dragged in a hard breath and glared at Mr. Wilt. “All right, what do you want?” I said, scanning
the rest of them as best I could in my peripheral vision. Kjell had just kicked Junkyard to his knees, and Solveig was cuffing the first mate’s hands behind his back. Taeral still lay where he’d fallen, his glamour gone. And Low Tide stood trembling with his hands in the air, breathing in short, panicked gasps. “And what do you mean, you’re doing your jobs?” I added, despite the sinking feeling that I already had the answer to that question.

  Mr. Wilt switched guns with Dom and pointed the one loaded with cold iron at me, while Dom headed for the stuff Solveig had taken out of the bag. “I thought you were supposed to be smart, DeathSpeaker,” he said. “Why don’t you guess?”

  The instant the word ‘DeathSpeaker’ left his mouth, I knew my suspicion was right. “You’re Milus Dei,” I said.

  “Got it in one, mate.”

  “Don’t call me mate, you sick bastard,” I said. “Well, congratulations. You’ve captured the DeathSpeaker. And you’re at the bottom of the ocean with a shitload of busted ships and no way back to the surface. What are you going to do now, call it in to the office? Because I gotta say, I doubt you’re going to get a signal from here, you fucking moron.”

  Mr. Wilt laughed, and the sound made my stomach turn. “Capture you?” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that, actually, but it could make for a nice, tidy bonus. No, that’s not why we’re here.” He pointed toward the dripping, wreckage-clogged canyon. “What you’re going to do is lead us through there to the Nostradamus, and find the Scrolls of Gideon for us.”

  “The hell I am,” I said before I could think about it. So the Scrolls were real. No way was I letting a bunch of powerful, no-magic-required spells fall into Milus Dei’s hands. But that was beside the point. “Look, do you really think I have the first idea where the Nostradamus is?” I said. “I couldn’t even find the fucking Titanic if it was in there somewhere.”

  “Well, you’d better figure out a way to do it.” Mr. Wilt turned toward the rest of his group and made a precise gesture. As he did, Dom crouched by Taeral’s head and forced his mouth open, and Solveig approached with the bottle of mandrake oil.

  “Don’t you dare!” I shouted, already running toward them. But Mr. Wilt stopped me with a hard, booted foot to the gut that drove the breath out of me. I fell on my knees, and he blasted my jaw with a shot of bony knuckle, splitting my lip.

  I was trying to get up anyway when he grabbed me by the hair, the gun at my neck, and pistoned a fist repeatedly into my stomach until tears rolled down my face. Then he wrenched my head up and forced me to watch as Solveig poured the poison down my brother’s throat.

  “Their time is limited.” Mr. Wilt shoved me to the ground and stepped back, waiting for me to struggle back to my knees. “Twelve hours from now, they’ll both be dead. But that’s plenty of time to find the Scrolls and get back here to save their pathetic lives,” he said.

  I coughed and gasped in air, glaring up at him through watery eyes. “If I help you, you’ll save them. That’s the deal?” I said. “How do I know you won’t just kill us all once I get the damned Scrolls, if that’s even possible?”

  “You don’t. But let me assure you that if you don’t, we will kill them,” Mr. Wilt said, and made another gesture.

  This one prompted Kjell to raise the semi and shoot Low Tide in the head.

  Alex screamed as the engineer’s brains blew out the back of his skull, and his body thudded to the ground. “You bastard!” she said, starting to sob. “He was your friend!”

  “No, he wasn’t. D’you have any idea how hard it’s been, working with you stupid scrubs? Especially you, witch.” Mr. Wilt sneered. “You’re barely human. Now you just keep that massive, disgusting trap of yours shut and do what the twins tell you, while we head out on our little quest. And you’d better pray that this thing holds up his end of the bargain,” he added, kicking me in the side.

  “Please don’t do this.” Junkyard spoke for the first time since the takeover had started, in a raw, hollow tone. He was still handcuffed and on his knees. “Dom? You’re not … I mean … ” His wide stare settled on the bloody remains of Low Tide, and he shuddered hard. “The twins don’t even speak English,” he finished in a whisper.

  Kjell barked a laugh. “Of course we speak English, you big, dumb hick,” he said in slightly accented but perfectly clear words. “Can’t believe you bought it for this long.”

  The expression of utter betrayal on Junkyard’s face was painful to look at.

  “All right, get up.” Mr. Wilt yanked me to my feet. “I know you’ve got two blades on you,” he said, holding his empty hand out while the other one kept the cold iron gun pointed at me. “Hand them over.”

  I decided to comply without protest, hoping it’d keep him from searching me. The moonstone pendant was tucked back under my shirt, and I couldn’t let him take that.

  As I dropped the switchblade and the enchanted dagger in his hand, Dom stepped up next to him. The big man had yet another pistol, no doubt loaded with iron, and he’d also slung a high-powered scope rifle across his back. He carried the half-emptied duffel bag in one hand. Mr. Wilt dropped my knives in the bag, and Dom zipped it closed and heaved it onto a shoulder.

  “Let’s go, DeathSpeaker.” Mr. Wilt shoved me toward the incline to the canyon.

  I stumbled and almost fell again, but managed to start walking normally as the two of them fell in behind me. My limbs felt cold and heavy, and my heart was a block of ice in my chest. I had no magic, no tricks left, and no fucking clue how to find this ship.

  But if I didn’t somehow pull off the impossible, everyone down here would die.

  CHAPTER 22

  I generally tried not to kill people if I could help it, even if they were bad guys. But I was already trying to figure out a way to make these two an exception.

  I’d gone down the incline, and now I stood at the gap between the three-masted clippers, peering into the corridor. The sheer number of ships in this canyon was astonishing. This must’ve been every vessel that disappeared since the dawn of people sailing the seas. I couldn’t even imagine how they’d all ended up here.

  “In case you didn’t hear me the first time,” I said, turning to look at the armed assholes behind me. “I don’t know how to find the Nostradamus. Are those words too big for you or something? Because I’m not sure there’s another way to say it. I don’t even know what the fucking thing looks like.”

  Mr. Wilt reached inside his jacket and produced a folded piece of canvas. He shook it open and held it toward me. “Like this,” he said.

  It was a painting, not a photograph, of a massive wooden galleon — or at least, I was pretty sure it was a galleon. Multi-decked with five masts, the flag of England flying from the tallest one in the center. The name Nostradamus was painted on the side, and the figure of a mermaid was carved into the prow. Not like the monsters we’d just escaped from, but a classic half-human female with a seashell bra and a fish tail.

  “Now you know what the fuckin’ thing looks like,” Mr. Wilt said as he tucked the canvas back in his pocket. “So get in there and find it.”

  “Hold on.” Dom opened the duffel bag and pulled out a length of thick chain and a padlock. “We don’t want him trying to run off, do we?”

  I gave him a flat stare. “If you put iron on me, I won’t make it long enough to find the damned ship.”

  “This isn’t iron. It’s good, hard steel.” He stepped up to me, and his eyes flared with warning. “Try anything while I’m doing this and you lose all your teeth when I knock ’em out with a crow bar. Got it?”

  “Yeah. I got it.”

  I made myself hold still and not gouge his eyes out with my bare hands while he looped one end of the chain around my neck and secured it with the padlock, just tight enough so it wouldn’t choke me unless someone jerked on it. Which I fully expected to happen, more than once.

  Dom stepped back, playing out the chain until he reached the other end and wrapped it twice around his wrist. I’d have about twent
y feet to move away from him before I hit the stopping point, and I intended to use every inch of it. “You done?” I said, looking at him coldly. “This isn’t necessary, you know. I’m not going to let my brother or my friends die.”

  “Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But I say better safe than sorry, because I don’t trust a single word that comes out of your mouth. Half human isn’t nearly human enough,” Dom said, and then grinned as he gave the chain an experimental yank that brought me gagging to my knees.

  “All right, that’s enough. Let’s get moving,” Mr. Wilt said.

  I got up, brushed myself off and headed into the passage between the clippers. At least Dom didn’t try to pull the chain tight and force me to strain against it. I moved as quickly as I dared while I tried desperately to think of a way to find the ship. I was never going to spot it on sight alone. Even from here, I could see at least three galleons in the endless mix of vessels.

  The second I cleared the back ends of the clippers, bright pain exploded in my head as it filled with a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard. I clapped my hands to my ears, stumbled and bent double. Blood started streaming hot from both nostrils as the relentless noise continued, and I could barely draw breath.

  The roaring shriek in my head eased just enough for me to finally realize what it was. Voices, hundreds of them. The voices of the dead. They’d sensed me here, the same way I’d sensed them while I’d looked out on the ship graveyard, and now they were clamoring all at once. Screaming, crying, begging for help.

  They were trapped in this place, just like we were. The barrier somehow prevented them from crossing over.

  “Stop. Please,” I panted, dimly aware that I’d fallen to the ground. “I can’t…”