Free The Little Ships (Alexis Carew Book 3) by J.A. Sutherland Page A

outside the ship.
    Alexis spun around and tried to run, but knew it was hopeless. The shadows were behind her too, and to all sides.
    She turned and figures began to coalesce out of the darkness.
    Heads and faces simply masses of shadow, with barely the hint of features, but she could imagine them well enough.
    Alexis clenched her eyes shut, murmuring to herself. The phrases and explanations from books she’d read told her that these figures weren’t real, that they sprang from her own guilt.
    She whispered that to herself over and over, but still when she opened her eyes, what she saw were the figures of men she’d killed or, worse, failed to save still closing in around her.
    “You’re not real!”
    She opened her eyes, but they were still there. She squared her shoulders and faced the central figure. They were all known to her, at least the ones at the forefront, even though they had no faces. This one though, was the one that always drew her attention.
    Horsfall, a pirate captain and the first man she’d killed.
    He raised his arm to point an accusing finger at her.
    “Not real at all,” she said. “You’re my bloody Id or whatever it’s called, that’s what the books say.”
    The shadows remained unimpressed with her books, they never were.
    Alexis felt her own arm rising to point and fought to keep it at her side. That was another thing the books said, try to alter the sequence of the nightmare, but again she failed. Her arm leveled with Horsfall’s figure, a pistol heavy in her grip.
    “I had to,” she whispered, as her finger tightened and her arm jerked upward.
    Horsfall’s figure disappeared in flowing mist and Alexis found her hand empty.
    She braced herself. Now the other shadows would come for her as they always did.
    Only this time it was different. The others remained where they were while only one stepped forward.
    This figure was smaller, only a little taller than Alexis herself.
    “Who are you?” she whispered.

    A lexis woke thrashing in her bunk. Her blanket was tangled and knotted around her and her pillow had been tossed onto the floor sometime in the night. The compartment lights came on as she sat up, dim at first then adjusting slowly brighter. She leaned back against the bulkhead, breath coming in ragged gasps.
    The dream wasn’t new; she’d had it off and on since the end of her time aboard her first ship. She’d even come to understand it a bit, or at least think she did after reading on the meaning of dreams and some psychology.
    She knew well enough that she expected a great deal of herself and suspected, from her reading, that the dream represented that — her feelings that she’d failed the men those figures represented. Even Horsfall, the pirate she felt was the central figure of the dream — he’d have been doomed to hang if she hadn’t shot him, and yet she felt that she should have done something different, even though she couldn’t think what that might be.
    The smaller figure was new, though, and she couldn’t think of who it was, who it might represent.
    It could be Blackmer, she supposed, but she truly felt no guilt herself for his death. It was only a fluke of that particular action that he’d been killed, not any of Alexis’ doing or a result of her orders.
    The possibility that it might be Artley, something she was becoming more certain of as she thought about it, disturbed her more, for she’d always before been certain that the shadowy figures were not only men she’d failed, but those who’d died as a result.
    If that small figure was Artley …
    The boy’s not dead. True, I’ve failed to teach him as I should these last weeks, but he’s still alive. Even the accident with his suit was more his stepfather’s doing than mine. She scrubbed her face with her hands and rested her head against the bulkhead. What’s enough? And what does it mean?
    She had a sudden dread that it did mean something, that it meant Artley would die.
    “That’s