Wounded(41)

I wanted to groan and beat my head against the dock. “Well, we’ll just have to run with it and hope the gods are looking out for us.”

Frank and Pamela nodded and Erik lifted an eyebrow at me. I lifted an eyebrow right back at him.

“Let’s get closer, find a spot to hunker down and get a good look at these fuckers.” I led the way, finding a small alcove about a couple hundred feet from the boat. A part of my brain was ticking away at a small problem, one that no one had pointed out.

“Why the hell would they be on a boat?” I muttered.

Alex lay at my feet, his eyes glowing in the darkness. He tipped his head up, and mimicked Frank, cocking it to one side. “So they can go swimming easy.”

Erik laughed softly, but the laugh on my lips died. “Fucking hell, he’s right.”

“What?”

“Salt water nulls spells. If you were raising demons and running spells that could end your life if you weren’t careful, wouldn’t you want a big ass amount of salt water around?” I crouched, elbows on my knees and hands under my chin. “This is their fail safe, the harbor could save their asses and they know it.”

Pamela’s mouth dropped open. “How did Alex know?”

Alex grunted and rolled to his back, tongue flipping out between his teeth as he grinned up at us. “I is smarty smart now.”

Whether or not he knew didn’t really matter, I was sure it was the reason behind them being here. I stared at the big boat, eyed the only gangplank onto it. It looked about three feet wide and wasn’t secured on either side; just a piece of wood going across a slim portion of water between the dock and the boat.

I gave them all a hard look, one at a time. “You all stay here. I’m going to get a closer look. Frank, if I give you a thumbs up, you start raising your buddies. Let them just float to the surface of the water. Pamela, I’ll give a closed fist for lifting them out of the water and onto the deck of the boat. Berget, you see if you can circle around, come in from a different angle.”

Frank pushed his glasses up his nose and then rubbed his arms. Pamela gave me a grim smile. Some days I thought maybe she enjoyed the fighting a little too much. One more thing to discuss when we finally had our little heart to heart. Berget gave a short nod and with her spooky-ass speed, ran around to the other side of the docks, disappearing as she leapt onto the boat with a single bound.

“I’m going with you, Niece.”

I didn’t argue with Erik—no point—and I didn’t really mind. He was a good man to have at my back. Crouching, I scooted forward until I was behind a set of crates about ten feet away from the gangplank, Erik tight on my heels. From there, I peered around the corner without exposing my body.

Fifteen minutes passed with no movement on the boat, and no feeling of much of anything from the witches or the kids. Everything was pretty quiet. It made me nervous.

The waves splashed against the dock below and I looked back toward my group. On the dock, the snow had accumulated and, fuck it all, Alex crept forward, leaving large footprints in the snow. I glared at him, but he didn’t slow until he was at my side.

“Boss says watch over you.” He sat, wagged his tail and looked up at me. “I keep you safe.”

Nothing I could do now.

The minutes passed and the snow fell, coating everything around us. That would make the plank slick, and even more deadly to cross. I signaled to Frank, giving him a thumbs up.

I didn’t feel anything, didn’t sense a disturbance in the force, as it were. A loud splash from below drew my eyes down. There, to one side of the boat, bodies floated to the surface. And damn they were nasty.

“Stinkers,” Alex grumbled. That they were. The zombies had not been well-preserved, and I wondered how so much flesh remained when they’d been in salt water for hell knew how long. Bones stuck through in a lot of places, flashes of white in the water, dark pits for eyes. I shuddered, remembering the old vampires we’d faced in the Australian desert. They’d started out with dark pits for eyes too.

The zombies floated along, like lazy vacationers, as the clouds above us opened up and icy cold rain poured around us. At least that would serve Pamela well in raising the zombies out of the water, rinsing portions of them clean of the salt.

A scream erupted from the deck of the boat, a woman’s voice letting out the sound of sheer terror across the docks, and I froze. Slowly, moving so I could see around the crate, I peered up at the deck.

“Fuck me,” I whispered.

A flash of a blue dress and a dark suit caught my eyes.

I didn’t know how the witches managed to grab them and beat us here, but the black coven had my parents.