The Burning of the Sea Serpent

The explosion was a physical blow, a wave of heat and thunder that slammed into Captain Isabella's back. But she didn't break stride. Her leather boots pounded a desperate rhythm on the weathered planks of the jetty. Salt spray stung where the heat had cracked her lips. Somewhere beneath it all, her own breathing was almost lost under the roar of her dying ship. In her arms, he was a beautiful, terrible weight. Lucian. His head was crowned with a tousle of sandy-blond hair. His bare torso, usually a canvas of lean muscle and pale, old-world perfection, was alarmingly still. The late afternoon sun hung low and merciless over the water. It was a relentless poison to him, and he had been forced into its dying light moments before the attack came. Isabella was broad-shouldered and strong, with a wild mane of brunette hair escaping its salt-stiffened braid. Her dark eyes, usually alight with mischief and command, were narrowed now with feral focus. She'd been built for hauling rigging and wrestling crocodiles. Even so, the dead weight of an unconscious vampire tested even her. Somewhere a man was screaming. One of the boarding party, or one of her own. She couldn't tell anymore, and hated that she couldn't. Behind them, her pride, her home, the Sea Serpent, was being torn apart. Another detonation, this one deeper in the hull, sent a geyser of flame and splintered wood a hundred feet into the sky, embers hissing where they met the water. Cannon fire answered from somewhere unseen. It was the Navy frigate, still out past the reef, slow and methodical, the way only a ship that already knew it had won could afford to be. A cannon ball smashed into the main mast. Already alight, it cracked with a sound like the sky breaking and toppled into the turquoise water with a colossal hiss. A third explosion followed almost immediately, smaller, sharper. The powder store, she guessed, going up in stages rather than all at once. Her ship was dying slowly, and she would have to bear witness to every painful part of it. Figures had gathered along the shoreline; fishermen, dockhands, a woman with a child on her hip. All of them watching from a careful distance. No one moved to help and Isabella didn't blame them. Word of what she carried travelled fast on an island this small, and fear made for cautious neighbours. One old man crossed himself as she passed and she didn't slow down to resent him for it. "Almost there, you infuriating creature," she grunted, her breath coming in ragged bursts. "Told you they would find us eventually. Told you flying their flag upside down was a bad idea." Lucian didn't answer, of course. He was lost to the sun-sickness, a torpor that would kill him if he wasn't brought to shade. His handsome face, usually a mask of stoic grace or sardonic amusement, was pale and slack. He looked impossibly vulnerable. It was a look no one but her had ever been allowed to see, and some petty, aching part of her resented that the circumstances of it were an act of war rather than an act of trust. The jetty seemed to stretch on for miles. Embers rained down around them, tiny orange stars that sizzled and died on the wet wood. She could smell it all. The acrid bite of gunpowder and the cloying sweetness of burning tar. And beneath it, faint and wrong, the copper tang of blood that wasn't hers. Her entire life, everything she had plundered and fought for, was going up in flames behind her. Her crew were either dead, captured, or scattered on the island and underneath the grief, something colder kept surfacing. Something she didn't want to look at directly. The Navy hadn't stumbled onto the Sea Serpent's anchorage by luck. Someone had known exactly where to find them. Isabella thought of her crew, one face at a time, and despised herself for it. Every one of them had earned their place twice over. She paid better than any captain in these waters, fed them better, tended their wounds and buried the dead with her own hands. They would walk into cannon fire for her. She'd seen it. And yet, someone had betrayed her. A final, catastrophic explosion ripped the Sea Serpent in half. The ship's figurehead, a magnificent carving of a fanged hydra, was flung into the air before crashing back into the bay. For one strange moment the water around it burned like something out of a fever dream. Isabella flinched as the shockwave washed over them, stumbling for just a moment. She had stolen that ship, christened it, and made it the most feared vessel in these waters. And now it was gone. Fury rose hot in her chest, but she didn't stop. She couldn't. She reached the end of the jetty, her boots hitting the soft, white sand of the beach. The jungle loomed just a few yards away and with a final, guttural cry of effort, she plunged into the cool undergrowth. The giant leaves of palm and banana trees closed over them like a comforting hand. The beach and the burning bay were swallowed up behind her, almost as if they'd never existed at all. Isabella collapsed to her knees, carefully lowering Lucian onto a bed of soft moss. The roar of the fire was now a muffled, angry hum. Here, the air smelled of damp earth and blooming flowers, thick and green after the smoke. Panting, she brushed the sand from his face. His skin was cool to the touch, no longer deathly pale, slowly returning to its usual alabaster. Lucian's eyelids fluttered. "Isabella?" he rasped, his voice still thick with weakness. "I'm here," she said. She looked back through the foliage at the black column of smoke rising up through the late afternoon sky. "The Serpent is gone." Lucian reached up, his fingers weakly tracing the line of her jaw. "But you are not." "No," she said. "Not yet. Not while I've got breath to spend on whoever commanded that frigate." She said it like a curse she intended to make good on. Lucian's mouth curved, faint and pained. "You'll need a name if you mean to spend a curse." Isabella looked back towards the beach, where her ship was slowly sinking beneath the water line. "He'll turn up. Men like that always do." She smoothed his hair, more from needing something to do with her hands than because it needed doing. "You gave me a fright, you know. Going still like that." His eyes found hers, sharper now, some of the old amusement creeping back in even through the exhaustion. "Did I? And here I thought I was simply resting my eyes while you did all the interesting work of nearly dying." Isabella scoffed. "There's the insufferable creature I know," and despite the smoke still curling black against the sky behind her, she felt the corners of her mouth twitch upward. It didn't last. A low guttural moan drifted above the undergrowth. It was very human, and very near. Isabella was instantly on her feet, cutlass drawn, putting herself between the sound and Lucian's prone body. The leaves parted, and a man staggered through them on hands and knees. One arm hung wrong at the shoulder. His coat was burned to rags and stuck to his side with blood gone tacky and dark. "Vance." The name came out of her flat with disbelief. Her quartermaster. "Captain." He said it like a man greeting a rope thrown to a drowning sailor, and dragged himself another foot toward her, favouring his good side. "Thank God. Thought I was the last one breathing on that whole cursed thing." He stopped himself, eyes flicking past her to Lucian, then back. Something moved behind them too quickly for her to name. "How!" she said. Not a question. A demand. "Swam." He said it too fast, and winced as he shifted his weight, as though the wince were doing work the words weren't. "Went over the rail when the second blast hit. Rest is a blur, Captain, God's honest truth." Isabella didn't lower her cutlass. Vance had served her four years and taken a musket ball for her once at Tortuga without flinching. She trusted him the way she trusted the tide: utterly, and only because she understood exactly how it moved. But no one swam clear of an inferno with burns like that and a shoulder wrenched from its socket. Someone had thrown him clear. Or let him go. She'd given the order to abandon ship moments after the first explosion. And she'd stayed long enough to see it done, watching her crew go over the rails, before going below for Lucian. There was no way Vance had gone over at the second blast, not off a ship she'd searched herself. Yet his injuries told a different story. "Rest," she said, "on the moss, before you fall on it." Behind her, low enough that only she could have heard it, Lucian murmured, "You don't believe him?" As Vance began to settle, Isabella turned to look at Lucian, her voice barely a whisper. "I don't know what to believe. That's the trouble." Somewhere behind her, deeper in the green dark, something else shifted and it wasn't the wind.