Frederick and Colin wrestled Braithe up the staircase as he continued to thrash. Arletta and I followed closely behind and together, we hurried away from the chamber. The chamber I’d waited eighteen years to find. Now, I was leaving it without my love.
We stumbled along the network of tunnels and made our way back out into the open, where we headed straight for our ship.
Arletta and I helped Frederick and Colin force Braithe onto the deck and down the staircase to the level beneath. The two brothers forced Braithe inside a cabin and locked the door. Braithe banged against it. Only a few seconds later, his fist smashed through the wood, spraying splinters everywhere. We looked at each other with wide-eyed panic as he forced the door back open and launched himself toward Arletta—the nearest person to him.
“He’s lost his mind,” Frederick grunted as he forced Braithe backward, “We’re going to have to sedate him somehow… I’m sorry to do this to you, brother.” The two brothers worked together in pinning Braithe against the wall. Colin gripped the back of his neck. I looked away as he jerked it backward, snapping his brother’s neck.
Braithe fell to the floor, unconscious. The four of us picked him up and carried him back into the room. We laid him on the bed and reentered the corridor, closing the splintered door behind us.
“What now?” I croaked.
“We have maybe twelve to twenty-four hours before Braithe’s spine heals,” Frederick said. “I’m hoping his behavior was just some kind of reaction to his own brother attacking him.” He looked unsettled as he glanced through the hole in the door at the still form of Braithe lying on the bed. “Hopefully, he will have recovered by the time he comes to.”
After we paralyzed Braithe, the first thing I wanted to do was gather blood and take it to Hans. But Frederick was against it.
“I don’t think we should go anywhere near that chamber again until Braithe has recovered,” Frederick said as we made our way up to the deck. “In fact, I don’t feel comfortable staying near this beach. We’ll move further into the ocean and float there for a while.”
“Why do we need to wait?” I asked.
“I just…” Frederick hesitated, a look of concern in his eyes. “I have a very bad feeling about this. I just want to see Braithe recovered before we go near that dungeon again.”
Colin and Frederick navigated the ship away from Cruor’s shore. My eyes stung with tears as I gazed back at the beach.
Once the shoreline had faded into the distance, Frederick guided the sea creatures to a stop while Colin lowered the anchor.
We sat around a table on the upper deck in tense silence. We were all still recovering from the shock of everything we’d just been through.
As the early-morning hours approached, even though we didn’t expect Braithe’s spine to have recovered yet—in fact, we weren’t expecting it to for at least another three hours—Frederick stood up and mumbled that he was going to go check on his brother. The rest of us were too anxious not to accompany him. Leaving our seats and descending to the lower deck together, we froze on the staircase as the corridor came into view. The damaged door behind which Frederick and Colin had laid Braithe on a bed was wide open.
“Didn’t we shut that?” Arletta murmured.
“Yes. We left it shut,” Frederick answered, daring to move forward again. We reached the bottom of the stairs and peered cautiously through the door into the open room.
It was empty.
My eyes falling to the floor, I noticed clumps of honey brown hair… Braithe’s hair?
A snarl came from our right. We twisted to see… Hans? A slouching skeletal figure with thin, stark-white skin, and a nose shrunken into its face. He had the same terrifying appearance as my lover and yet he was wearing Braithe’s clothes. He was also slightly shorter than Hans.
“Braithe?” Frederick gasped.
His small, dark eyes stared back at us, expressionless. Then he began to shuffle closer toward us, slowly at first, and then picking up speed.
“Run!” Colin yelled, and even though my legs felt numb with shock, I forced myself to race up the stairs. As the five of us bundled out of the trap door leading to the upper deck, we banged it shut behind us.
Frederick swore. “That was Braithe,” he said breathlessly. “I don’t understand. How—?”
His stumbling words stopped short as the trap door beneath us shuddered. That thing—Braithe—was beginning to attack it. From the force of his blows, I couldn’t imagine that it would be more than a minute before he broke through, for it was only made of wood. Frederick and Colin scurried around the deck looking for anything movable and heavy that they could place on top of the door. Apart from the table that they turned upside down and heaved over the door, there really wasn’t much else up here that we could use.