“Not yet,” a voice said, deep and inhuman.
He heard terrified voices, and a man crying out in shock. In his mind he could see the faces of the prisoners from the Umatilla, and he forced himself not to match those faces to the shouts of dismay and cries for mercy.
Another growl, vibrating through the wall. “Not … yet…,” the voice said again, separate from the growl, yet so similar. “Go. Run.”
A sudden clamor of footsteps rushed past the door, and others faded in the opposite direction. The prisoners, escaping! But Jack already knew how wrong that idea was. He heard heavy thumps on the floor, smelled the stink of beasts growing even stronger, and then a low rumble that might have been an animal snarl or quiet, monstrous laughter.
This was not an escape.
The whole ship seemed to hold its breath. Distant, muffled screams shattered the moment, and then different footsteps thumped along the gangway outside the locked door, and these had claws. A howl rose up, so powerful and wild and familiar that Jack’s spine seemed to vibrate.
“No!” Jack shouted, the word bursting from him. He hammered the door. “Let them alone, damn you! They’ve done nothing!” He slammed his fists against the wood several times and then froze, chest rising and falling with ragged breath … staring at the locks.
He grabbed the latch of the heavy dead bolt and began to draw it back.
“Jack, stop!” Sabine said, clutching his shoulders and trying to pull him away.
The dead bolt unlocked, he spun on her, searching her eyes for a thousand truths that seemed to have escaped him thus far. Who was this tragic creature and what hold did Ghost have over her? Could it truly be love?
“Give me the keys to the padlocks,” he demanded.
Some strange exhilaration lit her eyes, and he thought he caught the glimmer of a smile before terror crashed in to fill her features again. “You can’t unlock the door. We’re safe in here, with all the locks on, but if you go out there—even if you just open the door—we’ll both be fair game.” She gave a quiet, brittle laugh. “Fair game.”
“They’re killing the other prisoners!”
Sabine faltered and lowered her gaze as if in shame. “You can’t stop it, Jack. You can only die with them, if that’s your choice. But if you open that door, you’ll be killing me as well.”
Paralyzed by her words, Jack racked his brain for some alternative, some tactic that would let him rescue the surviving prisoners—whose distant screams reached them even now—but he was at a loss. He could picture every one of their faces—the trapper, the woman in her torn dress, the man in the broken spectacles—but the one that haunted him most powerfully was the girl with the bow in her hair.
The horror was unfolding above and around them with each passing second, the howl of beasts overriding cries of human terror, and he had no time to plan something clever enough to save lives. He could set the ship afire and attempt to get himself, Sabine, and any other survivors to the small boats while the crew put out the flames, but he knew in his heart that there wouldn’t be enough time. He could do nothing but stand and listen to innocents die.
Jack screamed his fury and slammed his fists against the inside of the door. After several long moments, shaking with grief and rage, he slid the dead bolt he’d opened back into place.
“Sabine…,” he said. From elsewhere on the ship came another scream of terror, a cry of immeasurable agony … and then silence. “What are they?”
“You know what,” she said gently. “You’re bright enough, Jack, and the clues were all there. Don’t tell me you weren’t already thinking of them as wolves.”
CHAPTER FIVE
OUT OF SIGHT
Jack had read that if a person was deprived of one sense, then some or all of the others would be enhanced to compensate. And sitting there with Sabine in that strange room in the ship’s hold—a safe room, built for just this purpose, constructed to keep people protected from whatever might be outside—he closed his eyes, trying not to listen to the slaughter.
It seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He could easily distinguish between footsteps—the prisoners’ were panicked and shuffling, running this way and that through gangways and across a deck they did not know; the wolves’ were definite, methodical. And fast. A heavy thumping that he could feel in his bones. He followed both sets of sounds in his mind’s eye, and each would stop for a moment when another prisoner was cornered or caught.
He closed his eyes, trying not to listen to the slaughter.
Then would come the cry of terror, the scream of pain, the crunch of breaking bones.
And even in the safe room, Jack could smell the blood.
He and Sabine sat close together in the love seat, but for those few minutes they existed very far apart. Jack felt utterly alone, even though he could hear Sabine’s uneven breathing and smell her subtly perfumed scent. He thought of holding her hand, but that would feel wrong. She had known what was to come, and she had done nothing to warn him, nor to help those men and women locked away in the hold like rabbits caged in readiness for the hounds’ amusement.
Worst of all, if she truly had some second sight and she had used it to lead the Larsen to the Umatilla, then she had to share in the blame for the murders Jack bore witness to now—sightless witness, though in some ways they were worse in his imagination.
It was a surreal moment, sitting motionless while all around him were the sounds of pursuit and murder, and the ship swayed in tune with the Pacific swell. He felt like the center of things but not the focus. He was like the unmoving observer in the flow of life, a rock in a river of chaos. Sometime soon, he would have to shift.
When the running and screaming ended, the howling came again. There was more than one howl, and their tones were triumphant, some distant and some close by. The hair on Jack’s arms and neck stood on end. He opened his eyes, preferring the brash light of the room to the darkness behind his eyelids. The ship dipped and rose, and he wondered who was steering, who was watching the sails and ensuring the Larsen remained on course.
Of course, the answer was no one. The normal people—the human beings—on board were either in this room or scattered across the decks, torn to pieces, their insides being lapped up by monsters that followed the moon.
“But even we’re not normal,” he whispered.
Sabine’s hand touched his arm, a shocking contact. Jack jerked away. “Sh,” she said, holding his arm tighter.
“No,” Jack said, and he pulled away. “You’re not normal.”
“I’m not one of them!” she said, pointing at the door.
“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant…” Jack shook his head, not sure how he could verbalize what he had been thinking.
“They’re monsters,” Sabine said. “You’ve talked of the animal with Ghost, yes? He cannot stop talking of the nobility of beasts, the beautiful simplicity of wild things. But those things—those wolves—aren’t animals. They are low creatures.”
“Ghost doesn’t seem to believe that.”
Sabine scoffed. “Ghost has delusions of grandeur.”
“Why do you help them?” Jack asked. It was a question scorching in his mind and sizzling in his gut, because he so wanted the answer to make sense. Sabine was beautiful, and he had been enchanted by her beauty and sadness. But was she just a different sort of monster? “Is it Ghost? You love him?”
“Jack,” she said, and her eyes were sadder than ever. “I do hope you cannot even begin to equate me with them?”
“No, I—”