Riven Isles

28 | The Blood Bucket

       "FIND THAT BLOODY RAT, I WANT TO KILL HIM MYSELF!" the captain screams, fingers clenched around fistfuls of Leslie's bushy beard. "FIND HIM! FIND HIM!"

"Ay'll take cahrre of it, Cap'n," says Increas, looking aghast to the man's red-slicked tibia. He draws out his blade and stalks towards the stairs below decks. Simon dashes past him, holding his spectacles to his bright red nose and disappearing beneath the deck.

As he goes, Lydia opens the door to the captain's quarters and urgently beckons to Leslie. I can't feel my heart beating. My chest is all but frozen stiff, clenched and unmoving—the same as my eyes. I feel sick. I feel so sick. The hairs on my arms and up my nape stand on end, and the chill of an imaginary draft shakes me.

I half-expect to see the captain turned at the sound of a wild, blood-curdling howl, but, disappearing into his cabin, I see that he remains very much human. Just... human with a very mangled, very, very mangled hairy right leg.

"Walter," I hear. It seems so distant, I barely hear. "Walter!"

I sharply turn my gaze to Simon, ogling me from the stairs below decks with three medical bags in hand.

"What are you doing? Mr. Cobbe said that he'd given the rocks to the wolves," the professor hisses, coming up, coming towards me. I can't move. I listen, but he sounds so surreally far away. Even right in my face, it's as though he's speaking from underwater. "Pick a body, search it, find a rock, give it to the doctor. We need him now. Do you understand?" He snaps his fingers in front of my face. "Walter!" It is almost deafening, upon a sudden, but it's a little more than harsh whisper. "The longer you stand around—"

"I've got it!" I say hurriedly. I shudder, my breath returning to me with a long and shaky exhale. "I've got it." Now the incessant drone of siren static fills my ears again and all I see is the red of the water. I look over and it is blue, but it remains red to me.

"Good!" says Simon, but my feet aren't moving. He grabs my face in one hand and forces me to look at him. His focused, urgent eyes become suddenly more urgent, and his brows lower. He gives me a shove. "Go! Now."

I nod and stumble around him, suddenly recovering some sort of dizzy purpose. I almost fall over as I scramble, pedaling my feet, then my hands across the deck, then just feet again. The nearest fallen werewolf lies with his back across the scuppers and I slide to my knees before him, feeling them bruise with the impact.

I gag at the smell. As though all the fish in the sea had died in his cologne. I bite my hand to try and focus. Blinking the tears out of my eyes, I lift my sleeve to cover my mouth and nose, then reach over the deformed bulk of Pete to find a pocket—somewhere, anywhere. His trousers are little more than scraps of corduroy, tearing at their seams. There isn't much left of his clothes at all and—and I really don't know what to do or where to look or... A hand touches my back and I screech.

Harvey Cobbe, with his charred white hair standing right on end, crouches beside me. "What are yeu looking for?"

"The rocks," I answer, desperately. "The white rocks."

"They swallowed them, I think," says Cobbe, cringing with the shame of knowing that he had given the rocks to the beasts in the first place. "Increas said that the captain—"

"He's dying and we need the doctor!" I cry, but I don't really know if he's dying. He might be, and my mind is racing and my heart is pounding and my head is throbbing, and the captain might be dying, and I might be crying. I might be crying. My hands are wet when the come away from my face.

Cobbe licks his lips and looks to the swooning doctor at the mast. "All right, listen. Tie me to the mast and yeu can take my rock."

"What?"