Aug 2, 1722. East of Kingston, at the tiny fishing village of Westmere. Stepping ashore to find the face of evil…

I jumped from the longboat the second it brushed limestone white sand. Seawater sloshed around my boots as I half-ran for the dry beach. Behind me, the others pulled the longboat ashore, then hurried to catch up.

White sand gave way to hard-packed dirt and a weathered wooden footpath into the village. Stray nets and bits of fishing gear littered the ground along the way.

“Not a good sign,” I murmured, running faster.

Sinister storm clouds had rolled in as the Silk Duchess dropped anchor. The promise of fresh rain still rode the wind, and those marble-gray storm clouds hung over the village of Westmere like a burial shroud.

I stopped in my tracks once I reached the edge of town.

“We’re too late,” I murmured in dismay.

A headache nudged at the back of my neck while a breeze stirred my gray long coat. The wind hinted at misery, like lost souls begging to be seen.

Elara, Durner, Lysander, and the rest joined me. The sight of Westmere stunned them nearly silent as well.

“Cor,” a gunner’s mate swore under his breath.

“Exactly,” I replied softly. “I’m surprised there isn’t a kelpwitch here to gather up the lost memories.”

Lysander shook his head slightly.

“If only,” he said with a shadowed frown on his dark face. “We could ask her what happened.”

“I think we know already,” Durner said in a craggy voice. “I don’t like a bit of it. Feels like we’re walking on a grave, or into a trap.”

“I’d take the former, not the latter,” Elara added.

“Hm, I’m for neither,” the rust-haired gearwright replied.

Silence fell on us like a wet wool blanket that smelled twice as rotten. Slowly, as one, we eased into town. No one spoke, or wanted to, for fear of insulting the dead.

Westmere didn’t look that old, but Mother Nature hadn’t been entirely kind. Caribbean sun and rain had done their brutal work. The town’s buildings stood as motionless as gray wooden tombstones, but with peeling paint. Fortunately, none were on fire, but they also weren’t the only thing standing.

Scattered across the dusty, grass-littered streets were the occasional withered wooden statues of people. It was some of the villagers, or really, victims.

It was only a petrified handful scattered between a well and the edge of town. Each one was trapped in mid-run with frozen screams of terror on their face.

“I see four,” I muttered to the others, or maybe just to myself. No one replied.

The sight of even that many petrified people was jarring. It felt like a ferocious wave of fear had rolled down the street, then crashed into us like an angry surf. Another gust of light warm wind from played through the nearby grass with ghost children we couldn’t see, but imagined.

Worse than the statues, in some horrific comparison, lay the bloody bodies of the dead. There were quite a few of those. Blood seemed to be pooled everywhere in the grass. A knot of emotion rose in my throat, trying to strangle me.

I shivered, and my headache throbbed along with my shoulder.

The tension shattered like thin glass when Elara softly cleared her throat.

“All right,” she spat, voice clipped. “We need to get busy, and be quick about it. If this was done by Captain Storm and his cutthroats, they’ve not been gone long. Blood’s too fresh.”

Elara glanced around at the lot of us.

“Skaldi? Signal the Duchess, we need work crews over here to bury the dead. They deserve that much,” the captain said in a somber tone.

“Aye.” Skaldi’s deep voice was thick with emotion. “On it.”

“Pedro?” Elara said sharply.

I interrupted before she sent me back to the Duchess.

“I’ll look for survivors in town,” I said, my own words clipped and tight. “Then I’ll check the petrified. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

“Be careful,” she emphasized, then added, “Durner? Go with him.”

The rust-haired grimling with the fire-copper eyes gave her a curt nod.

“I’ll be with him,” he rumbled in a craggy tone.

I started to object, but the sharp edge of concern in her jade eyes brought me up short. She was worried, and so was I. We all were.

Instead of words, I gave her a small smile I hoped was reassuring. A silent promise that I’d try to be careful. Elara inclined her head, just a fraction of an inch, to tell me she understood.

“The rest of you! Look lively!” The captain said. “I need sentries watching for Storm’s ghost ship, and some to help gather the bodies!”

It was slow, grim work. For Durner and I, it was a long half-hour walk through the village of the dead. We checked each body and statue we found, barely saying more than two words to each other. Soon, we simply ran out of words.

Finally, Durner broke the deafening silence first.

“It’s like a bloody graveyard where the statues stare at you,” he rumbled uneasily. The brass veins along his tanned skin glimmered softly from tension.

“True, but I’m not sure they’re staring at us,” I replied.

With a hand on my sword, I glanced through an open door to a woodcutter’s shop. The owner was inside, as wooden as his wares. Yet one more statue.

That made five.

It was five too many.

I eased inside. That petrified soul was in no better shape than the others we’d found. But that also bothered me.

“If the attack was so recent, why do all the petrified victims look like they’ve been weathering for years?” I mused.

Durner glanced inside, then glowered at the petrified woodcutter.

“Hm. Weathering don’t work that fast,” he stated.

“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. Something didn’t fit, and it nagged at me.

Still, I clenched my jaw and moved on for the town well.

Durner had checked the powder and shot in his flintlock pistol for the tenth time in as many minutes by the time we got there.

Two wooden statues stood south of the old stone well, while four bloody, cut up fishermen lay dead to the north. Blood splashed over the gray granite well stones had started to turn brown in the sun. My skin crawled as I rubbed the side of my head to chase back the headache.

Seven. That brought the total statues to seven. I’d lost count of how many had been cut down.

Durner knelt by the bodies and tapped a forgotten short sword with his pistol.

“Hm,” he rumbled thoughtfully. “They were making a last stand. Facing down something from in town, not the shoreline.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“That fits with the statues. They were all running from something in town.”

A gust of wind rushed in off the waterfront, then stirred the loose sand and dirt around us. I rubbed my nose with a frown as anger tore loose from deep inside me.

“Why do this?” I snapped. “It didn’t work last time! Why again?”

Durner shook his head sadly and shrugged. I didn’t have an answer either.

“I’ll check the statues,” I said, mouth pulled into a sour line.

The gearwright nodded, the set to checking the dead fishermen for anything more that could help us.

I stalked over to the pair of statues with a sigh.

Neither one looked older than twenty. The young woman was human, and the man with her was thayan. She was taller, maybe five foot ten, and her young man was a few inches shorter.

They were entirely wood, from skin to hair and clothes. Wood that had splintered like old, weathered driftwood. They had held hands the moment the petrification claimed them. My eyes lingered on that for a long moment.

“How can I undo this?” I murmured. Using my folding knife, I picked at the wood that used to be their clothing. It flaked away like powder.

That’s when I saw the tiny twig attached to the young man’s sleeve. My breath hitched. I knew that twig.

It was the same sort of tiny tree limb I saw in the warehouse. One that the potion created. It had the same shape and leaves, right down to the decay. I didn’t touch it, in case it might try to grab me.

“Mierda,” I swore. “He’s experimenting with cures,” I said bitterly. “I just know it in my bones. He’s dying from this petrification disease. So he infects others, then tries to cure them.”

A terrible thought occurred to me.

“What if Lucas is having Storm’s crew cut down any resistance to get at the ones he wants to experiment on?”

I ran a hand through my dark hair, blowing out a sigh through clenched teeth.

“This wasn’t a massacre.” I fought down a shudder. “He’s harvesting people.”

I felt a warm burst of heat, almost fire, from the tattoos on my hand. That didn’t go well with my headache.

“You’re more right than you know,” Durner snapped.

I spun around toward him.

Durner had moved from where I’d left him. Instead of by the bodies, he was a few steps away, kneeling in the dirt. He gestured to the dead fishermen.

“Those were buying time to let others escape.” He shook his head, tapping a calloused finger against the ground. “Didn’t work, though. Lots of tracks here. Two got dragged off, and another ten were marched off in a tight knot.”

I frowned sharply.

“To where?”

Brass veins in Durner’s skin flared forge-hot as he nodded to a large, bone-pale stone building at the far side of the town square. A black brick chimney stabbed at the sky.

“Over there, to that smokehouse,” His voice growled, rich with menace, copper eyes hard. “These tracks aren’t that old, maybe a couple of hours.”

Thoughts snapped into place like well-fitting gears. I glanced around wide-eyed while a spark of greenish-white fire ran along my hand tattoos.

“He’s nearby!” hissed that deep voice inside my head. It was so loud it hurt. I realized too late that was the source of my headache.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a faint finger of smoke curl up from the smokehouse chimney.

“Maldita sea! They’re still here,” I snapped.

Durner jumped to his feet, pistol in hand, and glanced around in alarm. I cupped a hand to the side of my mouth.

“It’s a trap!” I shouted at the top of my lungs to the others scattered across Westmere. We were easy prey.

The second I yelled, Captain Storm and his pirates boiled out from buildings lining the town square, swords and pistols drawn. Six Death whispers screamed their way into view with them from behind a granary.

A cold knot turned over in my stomach. Elara and I barely managed three at Morowen’s home.

Durner fired and dropped a pirate dead into the dirt. There wasn’t time to reload his flintlock, so he turned it around to use it like a hammer while he drew his cutlass.

“This is bad, Pedro,” he rumbled in a tight voice. “We’re too spread out! They’ll cut us down like wheat!”

I grabbed for my sword, but thought better of it. Instead, I tugged my tricorn hat low, then snatched a vial from a belt loop.

“Then let’s give them something to think about!”

There was more than one way to fight.

I hurled the vial at the closest pirates and murmured a quiet sea shanty. The Etherwave Arcana rushed to my aid. I focused on the vial, forcing power into the potion. The vial hit the ground and exploded in a wagon-sized ball of fire. Pirates flew to either side like rag dolls.

The remaining pirates ran past the fire as they charged in, but not at us. They broke into small groups to run right at our shipmates. Steel hit steel, while pistols and screams shook the air. Even Captain Storm avoided us, but the ugly glare he shot me spoke volumes.

This wasn’t his choice. He was following orders.

A lone figure followed the mob’s wake, escorted by two burly pirates. The man was painfully thin, even bone thin by anyone’s standards. He wore a ragged brown and green hooded long coat. Matching gloves covered his frail, thin hands. All the rest of his clothes, from cotton shirt to blue trousers, were as ruined at his coat.

The newcomer had his hood pulled up over his head against the sun. What little light made it past showed a face made of rotten wood, but pliable as soft skin.

A pair of spectacles perched on his emaciated nose. Orange hellish eyes, like burning coals in a forge, peered out from behind that glass with a bemused, predatory gleam. A stained Archbinder’s pin glimmered from the lapel of his black vest.

Despite all that, I still saw the resemblance to his brother, Joshua Argall.

“Lucas Argall,” I said in a brittle voice and inclined my head.

I tensed. All this time, I’d been chasing wood wraith. It would’ve been safer to kiss a siren, or even a vampire.

A sinister smile slid over his withered, wooden lips. He tapped his walking staff of twisted driftwood wrapped by rotten sailcloth against the ground.

I felt the magic faster than I could move. It snapped around Durner like a glowing ghostly rope, and dragged him to the ground.

Greenish-white flames burst to life around my right hand. I snatched a glass vial out of my belt in a flash. Lucas raised a hand before I tossed it.

“Ah, Doctor Sangre.” The wraith’s voice was chilly and smooth despite the faint, dry rasp behind it. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

His eyes flicked to my burning hand, then met my glare.

“Ghostfire?” Lucas chuckled with the sound of bone scraping wood. “Delightful.”

I narrowed my eyes and slowly tightened my grip on the vial of rolling gray smoke.

Lucas tilted his head slightly, as if amused.

“Let’s talk about a little bargain, Doctor. Before your companions and crew become a casualty.”