Patriot (A Jack Sigler Continuum Novella) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Finkle said, keeping his eyes fixed on the captain. “And while gaining a straight answer from her is no easy task, I managed to glean some tidbits of truth from her honey-dipped tongue. Lanme Wa is supposedly not dead, but is indeed, only sleeping. Now hold on. I know the very notion sounds mad, but from the stories I’ve read of the man, it’s not beyond the impossible. After all, if you believe at all in the prize we seek, you can’t believe this impossible either.”
    “But from Greer’s account, the man has succumbed to putrefaction.” Captain Reardon paced back and forth behind the chart table. “I could buy this immortality business if he just appeared to be sleeping.”
    “Which is exactly why we need the woman. It was her grandmother who entombed him—at his own request—and it is the younger witch who knows how to revive him. But it will take time. More time than we have to waste upon this island.” Finkle shrugged. “What harm could come from letting her remain aboard until our next port? If she’s not revived him, we’ll set both of them off the ship, and will be on our way to Florida.”
    Reardon continued to pace, considering the old man’s argument. He then stopped, and glanced out the bay windows of his aft-side cabin, looking out at the silver reflection of moonlight off the white-crested surf outside. They were still anchored, just two hundred yards off shore of the island, and the waves were slowly building, rocking the twin-masted cutter back and forth in rhythmic chops. The captain rubbed at his scruff-covered chin, obviously in turmoil as to the next phase of the plan. Then, slowly, he turned around to face Finkle, his head shaking.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just can’t see where the benefits outweigh the risk. That woman is trouble, with the blackest of hearts. I kin see it in her green eyes. If we let her remain on board, there’ll be hell to pay for it. I can promise ye that.”
    “But I really must insis…”
    A sudden commotion from above—the sound of thirty-six pairs of feet running to and fro on the deck above—broke out, cutting Finkle’s protestations off in mid-sentence. Two seconds later, there was a pounding on the captain’s door.
    “Cap’n! Cap’n! Sails! We’ve got sails on the horizon, and they’re flyin’ pirate colors!”
    Captain Reardon bolted for the door, and swung it open. He ran up the stairs, onto the upper deck, with Greer and Finkle following close behind. Once on deck, they met the Irish captain at the foot of the bowsprit where he already had a glass up to his right eye.
    “Well, I’ll be…” Reardon handed the glass to Finkle, who brought it to his own eye to take in the large, square-rigged man-o-war sailing straight for them. “I ain’t heard of colors like that bein’ used in nearly a hundred years.”
    Finkle knew precisely what the captain meant as he stared, slack-jawed, at the waving black flag with a white skeleton wearing a golden crown atop its head. Except for the crown, it was the traditional flag of the pirates of old—the kind of pirates that hadn’t been seen in these waters since the days of Calico Jack and Blackbeard. But it was the crown that sent a gut-wrenching chill down Finkle’s spine.
    “The Presley’s Hound ,” he whispered.
    “What?”
    “Lanme Wa’s ship. It was the name of his ship. Legends say his crew lay in wait to protect him from any who might seek him out,” Finkle said. His mouth was suddenly dry, and he felt a disturbing desire for rum as he continued to stare out at the ship that surely must have come from hell itself. “When we encountered no resistance on the island, I’d just assumed the warnings were the stuff of myth. Or that the crew had long ago died away. I never imagined we’d encounter them at sea.”
    A sudden image flashed through the scientist’s mind. The strangely cloaked figures in the boneyard. Their hisses still chilled him to the bone. And he wondered if Lanme