Kingdom Keepers VI(10)

“Psst!” Finn caught Maybeck’s attention. By moving the light from his phone away from the horror and incrementally to his right—starboard—he illuminated a line of thin S’s on the painted deck.

Maybeck picked up on it and nodded, wiping spittle from his lips.

Bloodred S’s, from the edge of a rubber-soled shoe stamping an ever-fainter line of color along the deck. Finn turned away, not wanting to make a big deal out of it.

The line led into the dark shadows between a pair of steel girders on the outer hull that supported the overhead deck.

Someone was hiding there.

Finn suppressed the urge to scream, to charge into the shadows and attack whoever had slain the hyena in this horrid manner. Retribution.

“We need to tell someone,” Maybeck said, louder than necessary, loud enough to be heard by whoever was lurking a few yards away. He leaned against the opposing rowboat, as did Finn, their backs to the girders.

Finn took notice of the coveralls, realizing whoever it was would believe them to be crew members, not kids impersonating crew members. For a moment both he and Maybeck had forgotten their roles.

“You mean to help us clean it up,” Finn said.

“Ah…yeah. Of course,” Maybeck said, catching on. “Disposal. Easiest thing is to toss it over the side, but they’ll want to incinerate it.”

“They’ll want to explain it,” Finn said.

“No joke. Since when are dogs allowed on board?”

“That’s one ugly dog,” Finn said. “You see the neck on that thing?”

All the while he’d been unpacking the defibrillator while signaling with his gloved hands, pointing first to the wall behind them, then counting down by putting up one finger at a time.

When Finn’s third finger lifted, Maybeck spun to the far side of the rowboat; Finn stayed on the bow side and charged the dark, lugging the defibrillator along with him. He dropped the main business of the thing, extending the wired stickers out like a weapon.

Two guys jumped out of the dark. No matter that Finn had been expecting something like this; he startled and tripped on a deck-mounted cleat and went down hard. Defending himself from the fall, he let go the defibrillator’s electronic stickers. Suddenly defenseless, he rolled into the ankles of the two boys and knocked them down.

Maybeck took the bigger of the two, while Finn rolled on top of the other one. But Maybeck jumped back as a steel blade flashed in the low light.

“Back!” Greg Luowski said, lunging with the knife. “Off him!”

Finn paused, then let go of the other kid.

The only light—and there wasn’t much of it—came from the open door to the jogging track. The light played across Luowski’s sullen face in patchy scabs. Finn was no stranger to the bully, but he’d never seen him like this. The boy’s dull Cro-Magnon eyes were alight with energy, like the eyes of a guy on a street corner talking loudly to the passing traffic. Luowski looked unsure and unstable. If anything, it made him more dangerous.

The other boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was in his thirties, maybe, with a bony, pinched face and unfocused eyes set close together. He wore all black, a stagehand’s costume, and a name tag that Finn couldn’t read because of the angle.

“No problem, Greg.”

“Shut up, Whitless.”

Judging by Luowski’s blood-caked clothes and hands, they were looking at the hyena’s killer.

“He swallowed it,” Maybeck said, figuring it out. “The hyena. They made you go after it.”

Luowski said nothing, but he didn’t have to: he was horrified by what he’d done.

“Nice people you’re working with,” Maybeck said.

“Shut it!”

“They’re not people,” Finn said.

Luowski waved the knife in Finn’s direction. “I said—”

“Yeah, yeah, we got it,” Maybeck said. “Let me ask you this: after what you just did, how can you possibly wave a knife at us? Fellow human beings. You gonna cut us open like that?”

Luowski’s knife hand lowered. He was breathing hard; he looked sick. “My advice: get off this ship before they carry you off. I’m telling you, she’s not going to let anything stop her.”

She? Finn thought. Which witch? What woman? What girl?

“From doing what?” he asked.

Luowski almost looked ready to tell him. With his hand lowered, Maybeck could have jumped him, but he thought better of it.

“Tia Dalma? Maleficent? The Evil Queen?”

“I have no idea,” Luowski whispered. “I don’t want to know.” His body shook from head to toe. Finn sensed that the real Greg Luowski was held in a spell.