Free Fathom by Cherie Priest Page A

the rail. She was throwing up, or thinking about it.
    Bernice grabbed the woman’s ankle and threw it into the air, and the woman went over the side with a splash that no one noticed except for a man in an expensive suit. He was stunned, and slow with liquor. Bernice seized him, and he looked confused.
    She shoved him down, throat-first, across the rail the woman had unwillingly vaulted a moment before. She clutched the back of his neck and held it like a handle, using it to beat his head into the wood again, and again, and once more before he coughed blood and gave up his struggles.
    The blood delighted her.
    She stood back and gave the man a kick that sent him through the side rail, splintering it. A second kick finished the job, and the suited man splashed into the ocean, but did not try to swim.
    He sank, and Gaspar thought bitterly that Arahab had better leave her new visitor alone.
    Charged, svelte, and eager, Bernice followed a drifting tune through a set of double doors that led into the ship’s interior.
    Someone with terrible timing opened the left door right as Bernice reached it. Her hand was on his throat before he could remove his grip from the lever. She pulled him into the open night and opened her mouth, which stretched to reveal lines of teeth in needlepoint rows.
    The man was wearing a costume; he had a black patch over one eye, so he was spared the full view of her bite when it came at his face. Regardless, he squealed and screamed when her teeth punctured his cheek.
    She slashed again with her mouth. She wielded it like a scissoring set of daggers, cutting through the soft dips in his neck and scraping against the bones inside it. The connection made a dragging crunch, but it sounded to Gaspar like the clinking of wineglasses.
    Inside the boat’s belly, the music was still jingling forth in bells and violins.
    Bernice followed the music, and José followed her.
    The song pinged up out of the boat in a minor key that was made of metal and broken wires. He couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded wrong for a festival like this. It was more ancient than vintage, and too old-fashioned for a rich soiree.
    As he ran behind Bernice he could feel the old tug of the ocean, even though the boat was a preposterous farce, covered with fittings and fashions that didn’t remotely match the era they were meant to evoke. He felt like a cat chasing a ribbon; it was mindless and happy, and purely instinctive.
    He couldn’t
not
run through the narrow, wood-paneled corridors.
    He couldn’t
not
smile at the trail of blood his mate wiped around the corners.
    With no blunderbuss or pistols, without even a blade to hand, he chased her, knowing that between the two of them, they were a deadlier crew than any he’d ever commanded while he was alive.
    She dashed around corners, all slick and ferocious, all beast and all woman. She ripped through the bodies she met and cast them aside, where they leaked themselves into husks.
    Gaspar counted four more. He skipped over them and added them to his idle tally.
    And then he rounded a corner and he saw her holding an oil lantern. She’d pried it off the wall, where it had hung on a hinge. In theory, the lamp would rock with the motion of the ship andkeep a steady flame; in practice, the hinge had snapped under Bernice’s fierce little fingers and she was prepared to cast the lantern to the ground—except that José grabbed her wrist and held it aloft.
    She wrestled him for it out of surprise and indignation. She twisted in his grip, thrashing, while a boy on the floor cringed away from her.
    The boy didn’t understand what was happening, but he recognized evil when he saw it, so he retreated fast, scuttling halfway under a desk and silently cheering José. The boy had not yet gathered that the pirate had nothing like rescue in mind.
    “No,” Gaspar said to Bernice, lifting her up off the floor until her toes dangled and dragged. “No, not the lamp. No fires. We can’t sail