Sail

A loud screeching hurled at us, blowing a gust of glacial air that pressed us against the wall. I turned my head into Mase’s with my eyes screwed shut, and he wrapped his arms around me as if to take me away from the horror.

A rotten stink radiated off of the ghostly thing, so thick my stomach rolled. It gave a low snarl then sniffed like it was testing the air. It sniffed again, this time much closer. If it had been alive, I’d feel its breath on my cheek. Quivers racked through my body, though I tried to stand still for fear any movement would help it detect me.

I ran my tongue over the metal, hoping, wishing, praying that it would be enough to change my energy. Go. Away.

A loud footstep boomed away from us. And another and another down the hallway and to the left. Randolph’s door banged closed in front of us, making us both jump, then with our arms locked tight around each other, we ran as fast as we could into the safety of the dining room and slammed the door behind us.

“What was that?” I demanded, but I didn’t wait for an answer. Tears blurred my eyes as I tore into the kitchen and opened and closed cupboards and drawers even though I knew I wouldn’t find any more iron in here. “A demon? An alien?” I stopped dead. “Was that a Saelis?” It came out as a whisper as if it might hear me.

Mase posted his arms on the small table, his face the color of the empty plate I’d forgotten to put away. “You think I’ve seen a Saelis and lived to tell about it? I don’t know what that thing was.”

“But what was it doing aboard the Vicio when it died?” I asked. “After the Saelis destroyed Earth, they didn’t stick around. No one has seen them for two hundred years. How old is this ship?”

“I don’t know.” Mase squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the edges of the table. “I’ve only ever seen the red-headed ghost, and dark shadow things, and…”

“And what?” I asked, slamming another drawer closed. An image of him from the other night standing in the hallway with a crowbar at his feet flashed through my head. What are you doing here? he’d asked. What had he seen? When he didn’t say anything, I turned to him. “Mase?”

“And nothing,” he said, shoving away from the table. “I’m going to find Daryl.” When he elbowed the double doors open, he turned back, the intensity in those mysterious eyes pinning me to the spot. “Iron won’t work for anyone but you, will it?”

I shook my head and hugged my arms to my body, still trying to rid myself of the chill that…thing had seeped into my bones.

“Too bad we can’t steal one of the Ringers’ rings after we pass into deep space.”

I barked out a shaky laugh. I liked how that man thought.

* * *

Nesbit tinkered with his old Mind-I, which looked like a thin piece of plastic the size of a small seed. Captain Glenn bent over his food with his head in both hands. Mase just stared down at his plate while he waved his fork through the spaghetti noodles.

They’d caught Daryl, again, strapped him to an extra gurney, and sealed him inside a room that locked from the outside. They’d also found the blood outside Randolph’s room. But no Randolph, even inside his room, which would now open. He had to be somewhere else on this ship, yet if he was bleeding, we should’ve spotted a trail by now. Unless that wasn’t his blood outside his room, which I doubted. Please just let him be okay.

The last time someone spoke, Captain Glenn snapped at them. No, this delivery wasn’t doomed from the beginning. The teralinguas would be delivered. We weren’t stopping for any reason. Period.

“We’ll make it to deep space. We’re almost there,” he said, and he kept repeating it as if to make us all believe it.

Daryl’s place setting was noticeably empty. All our gazes strayed to it throughout dinner, like we were waiting for him to somehow magically be sitting at his spot again, hardly aware of any of us while he concentrated on chewing his food twenty times or writing an article with his Mind-I. But he wasn’t. And something told me he never would be.

Despite what the captain said, this voyage was doomed from the beginning since it had started on a haunted ship, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the cause of many of the problems. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was about me or my blood that had set Daryl off though.

Since no one felt up to eating their dinner, I didn’t know what else to do but serve dessert, chocolate chip cookies straight from the oven. Checking to see no one was looking, I rubbed Mase’s back with a soothing touch when I circled around him. It was the least I could do, offer comfort food and touches to show I knew how he felt. Ellison and Pop always soothed me by playing their fingers through my long hair, and while my hands itched to do just that to Mase, I couldn’t.

He startled at my touch and then seemed to relax into it. I could feel his gaze on my back again when I circled around.

Blue static sparked from the center of Nesbit’s Mind-I, and a screen spread outward across the double doors to the kitchen.

“I got it,” Nesbit said softly, like he couldn’t believe it himself.

Mase and Captain Glenn looked up just as Esmerelda came into focus, squeaking in a high-pitched voice I could barely understand, dressed in little else but a smirk and a few scanty pieces I wouldn’t even call clothing. Nesbit aimed the screen at the wall the dining room shared with Randolph’s, and everyone settled back to watch.

I kept the cookies coming. Mindless, overly sexual entertainment that I guessed was supposed to be funny was good for something.

While the show looped to another episode, Mase stood from his stool without a word and lay on the floor with his coat for a blanket. It was freezing in here, though not as bad as it could be since I’d scoured the stasis pantry again. Behind an empty shelf, I’d found two small hooks in the ceiling that were used to hang meats. Hopefully they would be enough to get us through the night.

I dragged in my mattress and blankets while Nesbit and Glenn fell asleep with their heads and arms propped on the gurney.

The sounds of deep sleep drifted my eyes almost shut until Mase wiggled his fingers at me to get my attention. I adjusted my head to see him better, my heart speeding when I saw that he wore a small yet surreptitious smile. He flicked a screw at me across the floor, but it rolled under the gurney. His hand came up with something else, and he pushed that toward me, too. A washer.

The man was giving me more iron. No one had ever encouraged my iron addiction except Ellison and Pop. No one else ever understood how much I needed it, least of all the most beautiful man I’d ever seen handing it out like candy.

My fingers closed around the washer, and when he flipped another one at me, I grabbed that one, too, and the screw under the gurney. I felt like I was following a trail of breadcrumbs as he pushed more and more at me, and I left the warmth of my blankets to get them all. A grin spread across my face that matched his the closer I crawled.

I inched my head down to whisper a thank you, my lips magnetized to that full mouth. Raw hunger blazed in his eyes as I dipped my head lower to breathe his air.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He closed his eyes as the words sighed over his mouth, then he tipped up his chin so his top lip brushed over mine. An overwhelming heat spread to my middle at the sensation, taking all sense with it. I settled my lips even closer. He caught my bottom one under the edge of his teeth and sucked it.

My breaths turned to pants. His eyes lit with desire, and I could tell from the throbbing between my legs that my gaze was probably just as needy.

With a low groan, he sat up, pushing me with him, and grabbed the back of my neck to devour my lips with his. Oh, my Feozva, yes. I wanted this. I wanted him, but with a gasp, I braced my forearms against his chest to stop him. We couldn’t. Not here with Nesbit and Captain Glenn in the same room, not to mention Daryl and Randolph’s empty chairs.

He nodded, seeming to understand, yet a fire still lit in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. Really, really sorry. I should’ve just stopped with “Thank you” and called it a night, but damn. The man needed comfort just as much as I needed him inside me to coax us both into oblivion. We both deserved to feel a little of that.

I crawled back to my mattress, and once settled, I held my hand out to him over my blanket so he’d know just how thankful I was.

He smiled and slid his hand out from under his coat toward mine. Only two feet separated our fingertips, but the warmth blooming inside my chest made it feel monumentally smaller.

* * *

I woke with an agonizing ache between my legs and a crick in my neck. Dreams about heated looks and naked bodies and tongues and hands swam through my head the entire night. Apparently my subconscious was a dirty whore.

The subject of my dreams lay tantalizingly close, one broad shoulder peeking out from under his coat and rising and falling in deep sleep. I had a feeling Mase would love my subconscious and the things it wanted to do to him.

Glenn and Nesbit’s legs were bent under the gurney, their snores sawing at the otherwise silent ship.

Gritting my teeth against all my aches and pains, I untangled myself from the blanket and went to the kitchen. Hopefully cooking breakfast would clean my mind up and focus my body on something other than Mase’s lips on mine. His warm, lickable lips.

Breakfast! I ran to the pantry and loaded my arms with the ingredients for a breakfast hash.

The double doors flip-flapped open behind me. Mase saluted me on his way to the pantry, while lower down something else saluted with an enormous bulge in his pants.

“Don’t mind him. He only bites when necessary,” he said with a lascivious smile, raking his fingers through his sexy bed hair.

I exhaled slowly while I stared after the trail of sex appeal.

He came back out seconds later with a glass of milk, a white mustache already clinging to his upper lip. How I wanted to lick that off his face just before I tore all of his clothes off and begged every inch of him to bite me.

Good Feozva, where had that come from? Now wasn’t the time to drool over that man, not on a haunted ship where a doctor lay strapped to a gurney and a chef had gone missing while hurtling through dangerous space toward my missing sister. Not now, despite the fact that he’d given me iron.

“You know, I could tell you weren’t a boy the first time I saw you,” he said.

“Can you repeat that a little louder, please?” I hissed. “I don’t think the folks in the next solar system heard you.”

He sauntered up to me, his cowboy boots tapping a slow, suggestive rhythm. “Your face, your cheekbones, your little ears, those pouty lips—it’s all woman. You’re way too beautiful.”

My body hummed alive with his nearness. Each breath he drew in pulled me closer until we shared the same pocket of air between our mouths. His enormous erection rubbed against my lower belly, pulling the bundle of nerves just below it taut.

“You’re just saying that because I’m the only girl on this ship. You’ve probably said that to a hundred girls,” I said, my voice raspy.

“Wrong.” He slipped his fingers under my waistband and cupped my bare ass, and a grin curled his mouth when he realized I was going commando.

“Then you’re just trying to get in my pants.”

He arched a brow, considering, then shook his head. “Wrong.”

“But you are,” I said, breathless. My arms wrapped around his waist, even though I didn’t remember telling them to, and I inhaled the warm, spicy smell of his white thermal shirt.

“Because I can’t stop thinking about you.” His lips still cold from his milk, he dropped frosty kisses down my neck which cooled the blush heating my body. “You’re all I dream about.”

So his subconscious was just as slutty as mine. Good to know, because the very idea of coupling our involuntary thoughts and acting them out right here, right now, spiraled around the room with dizzying possibilities.

“Something tells me if any girl had pants, you would have your hands down them. Am I right?” I asked.

“There’s been a few pants, yeah, but never fugitive ghost magnet pants.”

“Never?” I breathed.

“Nope.” His lips popped on the p sound then continued in their exploration of my neck.

“Well, that’s just…” I lost my train of thought as he trailed his fingers up the back of my sweatshirt to the boob hugger cinching my breasts while his icy lips nibbled at my jaw.

“The day I saw you naked… I haven’t been able to get you out of my head since. The ghosts on this ship have nothing on you, Absidy. You’re haunting me.”

A loud yawn sounded from the dining room.

Without thinking, I shoved a potato at Mase. “Hold that,” I told him.

He leaned back with narrowed eyes. “Why?”

“So you’ll keep your hands to yourself, that’s why. Now do it,” I warned.

He chuckled but reluctantly slid his hands away from my body and took the potato. “Am I going to have to hold it all morning? I have stuff to do.”

“You can put it down whenever you want on your way out the door. I have to make breakfast. I don’t need you and your…” My gaze involuntarily tracked down his front to the swell in his pants.

“Morning potato?” he said with a grin.

“I was going to say allure.”

“Oh, allure? Is that what I have, college girl?” He smirked. “Okay, I’ll leave you to breakfast, and I’m putting my allure down on my way out.”

I shook my head as he left. What was I getting into with him? Something that would get me into more trouble than I already was, I guessed. Only I feared this kind of trouble would be worth putting on repeat. But we should be investigating what had happened to Daryl and Randolph and what haunted this ship, not flirting and rubbing all over each other.

“One more thing,” Mase said, coming back through the double doors. “We’ll be entering deep space in just a couple hours, so now would be the time to call…someone if…you know.” A strange look crossed over his face as he studied me with those mismatched eyes. “If you don’t have a Mind-I, that is. Do you have a Mind-I?”

“No, I don’t. Thanks.”

He nodded then left again. Weird guy.

Once we entered deep space, I’d be even closer to Ellison but farther away from a working phone tower, so I needed to work quickly. While the diced potatoes softened in the frying pan, I searched my phone for any mention of the Vicio.

Knowing the ship’s history would likely explain what haunted it and what Mase and I had seen. Because whatever it was, it wasn’t human, and I’d never come up against a non-human ghost before. It terrified me. So did my iron losing its effectiveness. Already I had gone through half of what Mase had given me last night.

But I couldn’t find anything on the Vicio. Nothing at all, which meant that this ship didn’t exist. Odd, because I was standing in its kitchen. That meant what exactly? That the ship’s past was a secret and had been wiped clean? But why?

My phone couldn’t offer those answers, so I dialed Franco.

“Hey. I need to speak to Moon,” I said once he answered.

“How’s my favorite fugitive?” he asked. “Hang on. She’s right here.”

“Absidy,” she said, breathless. “What the hell happened during our last conversation? What were those noises?”

“Just a TV show.” I grimaced, hating that I had to lie to her, but there wasn’t time for the truth. “Listen, Moon, can you find out all you can about the Vicio?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because in just a few hours, we’re going to be in deep space on a ship that doesn’t exist.”

A pause. “Oh. That’s…oh. A few hours, huh?” She sounded defeated and teetering on the edge of tears. The thought lodged a lump in my throat because what if I would never see her or Jezebel or Franco again? What if the dangers of deep space, not ghosts, finally did me in? A year and a half wasn’t long enough for friends that were worthy of a lifetime. But what if this was our last conversation?

“Yeah,” was all I could say.

She didn’t speak for what might have been minutes, but gulps and a few sniffs sounded in my ear and made my eyes burn. “Find her.”

“Okay,” I breathed.

“I love you, Absidy Jones,” she said through a choked sob.

“Love you too,” I whispered, then ended the call because it hurt too much to say anything else.

* * *

Mase came into the dining room just as I was finishing clearing the table of breakfast dishes, his face pale.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I thought I saw Randolph, but…it wasn’t him. It wasn’t anybody…just…” He shook his head and slumped into his usual seat. “Sit with me? Please?”

He looked so desperate to spill what was on his mind that I couldn’t refuse him. I sat. He took my hand and pressed an iron screw into it. “I want you to answer some questions that may be difficult to answer before I give you the rest.”

“Okay.” What could he possibly want to know that I hadn’t already told him? I’d told him everything, more than I’d ever told anyone.

“Don’t look so nervous. I’m going to give them to you anyway whether you answer the questions or not. Just let me ask them, and maybe you can think about the answers later. Okay?”

So far he hadn’t judged me; I didn’t think he’d start now, so I relaxed in my seat. “Fine. Ask.”

He took a breath. “Do you have a boyfriend back at college?”

“That’s the difficult question?”

He shrugged. “It could be, depending on the answer.”

“No. I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

“Never?” he asked, tilting his head in disbelief.

“People think I’m crazy, Mase, with my metal corsets and chains in my hair. I don’t invite people to get too close for a reason, so guys aren’t exactly flocking to be my lab partner. And I know they’re not thrilled with the things I put in my mouth.”

He bit back a grin. “But it’s such a sexy, dirty mouth.”

I leaned my elbow on the gurney to press a smile into my palm. “That wasn’t a question. And you owe me two pieces of iron.”

“What? I just asked if you had a boyfriend.”

“You also asked ‘Never?’” I wiggled my fingers at him. “Hand them over.”

With a sigh, he plucked two washers from his hand and dropped them in front of me. “You have wicked counting skills, college girl.”

I shrugged. “It’s a gift. What’s your next question?”

“Do the ghosts ever want to communicate with you?”

“Sometimes.” While screaming mostly, and occasionally showing me a residual memory that made no sense.

He put another washer in my palm. “Have you ever wanted to listen?”

“No.”

A look of doubt stitched his eyebrows together. “I don’t believe you.”

I lined my voice with an ice pick point and aimed it right between his eyes. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“But, Absidy, they’re attracted to you because you can help them. I’ve seen how big your heart is every time you put food in front of us, how you sleep in here with us, how you look out for us. If the ghosts weren’t so brutal with you, maybe you could—”

“No.”

“But you could find out why—”

“I don’t want to know.”

He smacked the gurney hard enough to make me jump. “I could help you, damn it!”

His burst of anger pushed my next refusal back down my throat. But how could he want me to do that, to put myself in their path just so they’d attack me? That was never going to happen.

“If things got out of hand, I could give you iron just like I did outside Randolph’s room. You could find out why this ship’s ghosts are here and make them leave.”

I pointed bullets at him with my glare. “It’s so easy for you to say that, isn’t it? You could give me iron if things get out of hand? It always gets out of hand, Mase. They fling me around like a doll. They cut me open, break my bones, and almost kill me. They first cracked my head open when I was two. Two. I don’t want to listen to them or help such wicked things cross to the other side, and why should I want to if they don’t care what they do to me?”

“Absidy…”

“Get out,” I said, my voice lethal.

He turned his head like I’d slapped him, sharp and hard, and maybe I should have. How could he say that? How could he give me iron only to suggest we take it away for the benefit of the ghosts? They didn’t deserve anything.

His jaw worked up and down while he stared at the double doors. “But from what you said, it sounded like a ghost got Daryl away from you in the teralinguas’ room. Maybe they were helping—”

“I can’t look at you right now,” I said, shoving myself away from the gurney. “Please, just go.”

He stood slowly, like he wondered if he should try to argue any more. One glance at my narrowed eyes seemed to change his mind, and he handed me the final screw then stepped to the door.

His hand gripping the doorframe, he said, “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” Then he was gone.