The deck came alive in chaos and confusion, bodies stumbling upright out of a rum-heavy sleep into darkness that made no sense yet.
“Navy?” Titus was already reaching for his blade, eyes wild, still half-drunk and fighting to focus.
“They found us?”
“Bounty hunters,” Bess said, grabbing for anything that could be swung.
“Had to be, this fast—”
“It’s not the Navy.” Kofi’s voice cut through the panic, low and hard enough to steady them.
He was on his feet now, the compass gone cold and still against his chest, his eyes fixed on the hatch where the webbed hand had vanished the instant Pockets screamed.
“Something’s aboard. Weapons. Now.”
That got them moving faster than any argument could have.
Yaw had his pistols out before his feet fully found the deck, blinking hard against the drink still fogging him.
Theo came up with his cutlass already drawn, throw-club shoved through his belt, more alert than a man who’d been arguing about rum an hour ago had any right to be.
“Formation,” Kofi said.
“Backs to the mast. Clementine, Obi, center — keep low.”
They’d barely formed up when the first one came over the rail.
It moved wrong — too fluid for a human shape, too fast for the awkward drag its tail should have made against wood, webbed clawed hands finding purchase on the gunwale with a wet, scraping sound that raised every hair on Kofi’s arms.
Moonlight caught scales along its forearms, pale and slick, and eyes that reflected light back with none of the warmth an eye should carry.
“Mermaid,” Theo breathed, somewhere between horror and academic fascination.
“That’s — those are real. Those are actually real.”
“Now’s not the time to marvel, Marchand!”
Two more came over the port side at once, and then the deck was chaos — claws and cutlasses, the wet slap of tails against wood, Titus roaring as he drove one back over the rail with a boarding axe, Bess screaming something furious and unrepeatable as she cracked a skillet across a creature’s skull with more force than the pan should have survived.
“They’re everywhere,” Yaw shouted, firing once, the shot going wide in the dark.
“Kofi, we can’t hold the rail, there’s too many climbing—”
Kofi’s mind, old and shipwright-fast even in crisis, snagged on something.
“The hull. Bess — the cooking oil, all of it. Toby, the barrels of grease from the galley!”
“You want me cooking at a time like this—”
“I want the sides of this ship too slick to climb!”
Understanding cracked across Toby’s face and he was moving before Kofi finished the sentence, hauling barrels up from below with strength that belied his age, Bess right behind him smashing the lids free.
They dumped it over the rails in wide, desperate arcs — oil and rendered fat slicking down the hull’s outer planking, and within moments the climbing slowed, clawed hands sliding uselessly off wood that had gone treacherous as ice. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
“It’s working!” Obi’s voice, high and frightened but steady.
“They can’t get a grip!”
“Then we stop the ones already aboard,” Kofi said.
“Yaw — the swivel guns!”
Yaw was already there, wrenching the small cannon mounted at the rail around on its pivot, away from the water and in toward the deck itself, toward the knot of creatures thrashing near the mainmast.
“Everyone down!” Yaw’s voice cracked across the chaos.
“DOWN!”
The crew dropped as one, and the swivel gun roared, scattering iron shot low across the deck in a spray that tore through three of the creatures at once, sending them shrieking and thrashing toward the rail.
A second gun answered from the opposite side, Titus wrestling it into position with a grim, satisfied grunt.
“Interior’s clearing!” Kofi shouted.
“Now we push them back into the water!”
“Wait—” Theo was scrambling toward the hold, dragging up a crate marked for old fittings and spare hardware, kicking the lid open with one boot.
“Iron! We need iron, not steel — nails, spikes, anything!”
“Now’s really not the time for a supply inventory, Theo!”
“It’s exactly the time!” Theo hauled up a fistful of old iron nails, wild-eyed with the particular manic clarity of a man whose brain worked best under pressure.
“My father traded with a captain once who swore up and down these things can’t stand cold iron — burns them like acid, and their feet, look at their feet, they’re soft, webbed, no callus to speak of. Iron underfoot is glass to them!”
He didn’t wait for permission, just started flinging handfuls across the deck boards, and the effect was immediate — a creature that had been dragging itself toward Clementine shrieked and recoiled, thrashing backward as if the wood itself had turned to fire beneath it.
“Muskets!” Theo bellowed.
“Load iron instead of shot if you’ve got it — anything, just get iron into them!”
“And light,” he added, already moving toward the ship’s lanterns, “they live in the deep, their eyes aren’t built for this—”
He didn’t finish the thought before Kofi understood it, already smashing the glass from a lantern and flinging the burning oil in a wide arc across the deck, fire catching along the slicked wood in a hissing wall that sent two more creatures scrambling backward, clawed hands thrown up over inhuman eyes.
For one breathless moment, it seemed like it might actually be working — fire and iron and chaos driving the tide back toward the rail it had come from.
Then the water beside the hull went utterly still, and something vast rose out of it.
She came up slow, deliberate, water sheeting off shoulders too graceful to be entirely human, hair a drowned tangle around a face of terrible, ancient beauty, and when her eyes opened they weren’t reflecting the firelight — they were making their own, a cold blue-green glow that swallowed the deck’s chaos into sudden, dreadful silence.
“Oh,” Theo said, very quietly.
“That’s the Queen. That’s definitely the Queen.”
Her mouth opened, and the sound that came out wasn’t words, not exactly — a low, resonant note that vibrated up through the deck boards and into the soles of Kofi’s boots, and around him he felt the crew’s motion stutter, felt his own limbs go strange and light, an overwhelming, wordless pull toward the black water below.
“Fight it!” Kofi’s voice came out strangled, his own boots already sliding traitorous toward the rail.
Titus was already at the gunwale, eyes glassy, one leg swinging over the rail before Bess tackled him bodily back onto the deck, screaming his name.
“She’s pulling us all in!” Ezinne’s voice, high and terrified, her hands pressed over her own ears though it did nothing to stop the sound climbing up through the wood itself.
“Kofi, we can’t — nobody can get a clean shot from down here, it’s too dark, too much fighting—”
Kofi looked for Yaw and didn’t find him on the deck at all.
He was already climbing — a shadow scaling the rigging with a speed that had nothing drunk left in it, every ounce of steadiness he’d ever carried narrowed down to the single, desperate certainty that someone needed a clean line, and the deck wasn’t going to give him one.
He came out onto the yardarm high above the chaos, the ship swaying under him worse than any drink ever had, wind cutting cold through a shirt still damp with sweat and rum-sweat both.
Below, the fight had gone half-hypnotized, bodies drifting slowly and dreamlike toward the rail despite themselves, and at the center of it, the Queen’s glow pulsed steadily like a lighthouse aimed at drowning every soul aboard.
Yaw’s hands were shaking.
He made them stop.
He broke a pistol open, thumbed out the shot, and pressed an iron nail down the barrel instead — Theo’s shouted theory, untested, the only thing left to try.
His heart hammered against a hangover and a height he’d never loved and a fear he didn’t have time to feel properly.
“Come on,” he breathed, to no one; he imagined he could feel it radiating faintly from Kofi far below, to whatever luck a man got to spend once in a lifetime.
“Just once. Be true.”
He steadied his elbow against the mast, exhaled everything — the rum, the fear, the sway of the ship — until there was nothing left in his chest but the shot, and squeezed the trigger.
The nail crossed the dark and struck the Queen square beneath one glowing eye.
The sound she made broke something in the air itself, a shriek that cracked glass in two lanterns still standing on deck, and the terrible pull holding the crew in place shattered all at once, dropping bodies to the boards in a gasping, disoriented heap.
Her glow guttered like a snuffed candle, and she toppled backward off the rail into black water with a splash that seemed, after everything, almost anticlimactic.
The horde went with her — shrieking, scrambling, a chaotic retreat of claws and tails sliding off oil-slicked wood and vanishing beneath the surface, until the only sound left on deck was fire hissing against wet boards and nine people breathing hard in the sudden, ringing quiet.
Kofi looked up, found Yaw still clinging to the yardarm high above, pistol smoking in a hand that had finally, visibly, started to shake.
“YAW.” His voice cracked on it, half fury, half something closer to disbelief.
“Get down here before you fall and finish the job those things couldn’t!”
“In a minute,” Yaw called back, breathless, and even from the deck Kofi could hear the grin in it.
“Let a man enjoy this. I just shot a sea queen off a yardarm, drunk, with a nail.”
Below him, despite everything, Theo started to laugh — high and disbelieving and entirely too pleased with himself.
“Iron and light,” he said, to no one, shaking his head at his own charts and instincts.
“I can’t believe that actually worked.”