Chapter Text
Alec swallowed hard against the dehydration threatening to overwhelm him.
The two remaining werewolves were in a similar state, though at least the vampires had enough to drink from the corpses covering the decks. Of course, it was horrible that they had to drink from the dead bodies of either Circle members or friends who’d been killed by those Circle members, but at least they were alive. Would be for longer than Alec and the werewolves.
The bloodstained deck of the ship was dull in the burning sunlight — the vampires had, thankfully, been able to find a shaded place belowdecks — and Alec scanned the horizon yet again in the hopes of finding a cloud somewhere in the blue. No luck.
It had been only a few hours since they’d drunk the last of their water, but it’d been over a week since Alec had been able to drink his fill. Longer for the werewolves. Alec knew that the chances of survival were nearly nothing, for any of them — perhaps in a few months, the ship would wash up on the shore somewhere, fifty rotting corpses on board and nothing else. Or maybe no rotting corpses, only their bones.
That was a maudlin thought, though, and it wouldn’t help anybody for Alec to let himself sink into apathy. (Not that he’d ever really been able to help anybody. Not that he’d ever be able to help anybody.) With the ship’s motor gone, they were simply adrift, unable to get anywhere. Stuck here, until dehydration did them all in.
Even the vampires would most likely die, without sufficient blood to sustain them. Though they’d have longer than Alec, there wasn’t an infinite amount of blood on board the ship, and a lot of what was here was drying up, useless.
Raziel — how had it come to this?
~
Stupid, Alec thought, swinging in the cage strung from the upper deck of Valentine’s ship. He’d managed to get himself kidnapped, and judging by the motion of the ship, he was imprisoned in the middle of the ocean. Stupid, idiotic, foolish, utterly useless.
A particularly violent roll had Alec’s cage swinging wildly, crashing into neighboring cages, nearly dislocating his shoulder. A werewolf a few cages away was looking rather green, and as Alec watched, she vomited again. Seasick, and not the only one.
Fortunately, Alec had been spared that particular difficulty, thanks to his Nephilim physiology. Now all he had to do was escape.
It’d been only a few hours since his capture off of the streets of New York, but he’d been on his way to Magnus’s, and he’d probably been found missing by now. Not that they’d be able to track him, in the middle of the ocean as he was.
The cage he was in had been lowered to the ground by a lever in the wall, then opened with a simple open rune to put him inside. With a stele, he’d be able to open the cage and jump down, but getting the stele was the problem.
A guard patrolled back and forth below them, but his stele was in a holster at his side, unreachable from Alec’s height. Valentine had placed the cages well — they’d bang together as the ship moved, but they were too high to reach the floor or anyone standing on it and too short to reach the ceiling.
Alec sat himself on the bottom of the cage, trying to accustom himself to the swinging motion. Beside him, a vampire stumbled sideways. Around the room, a few people were looking at him with interest — either they recognized him, or they were just wondering why the Circle had kidnapped a Shadowhunter.
A bell rang somewhere in the ship, and the guard pacing below them straightened.
Another guard appeared in the doorway, this one a taller woman. The first guard left with a nod to her, and she took his place, pacing up and down below the cages, avoiding stepping below the seasick werewolf.
Scanning her for the location of her stele, Alec felt his heart leap. She’d used it to pin up her hair, sticking it through the bun on top of her head, which meant that if he could reach down far enough…
As she walked underneath him, Alec judged the distance. She was tall, very tall, but even with his arm fully extended, he’d be a few centimetres short.
Another roll of the ship nearly dislocated Alec’s shoulder as he, unprepared, was thrown sideways, and — of course. A dislocated shoulder was painful, but it would lengthen his reach by those necessary few centimetres.
When the ship rolled again, Alec let himself fall sideways, twisting the angle so that, with a pop and a surge of pain, his shoulder was pushed from its socket. The pain made it hard to focus, but Alec shoved it away, letting himself slip to the bottom of the cage. The metal bars were spaced out enough that Alec could let his arm dangle through them, limp.
The guard hadn’t looked up, thankfully, and Alec watched her progress across the ground. She was on the other side of the room, now, and turning back toward Alec. He waited, lying on the uninjured shoulder so that his dislocated arm didn’t hang down as far as it could reach — she would step around him if she thought his arm might stretch long enough. His shoulder throbbed as it was wrenched again with another roll of the ship, but Alec held on.
Closer, and then closer still, the guard walked. Alec could clearly see the Circle rune burning brightly on her neck.
Then, she was right underneath him, and Alec moved with the roll of the ship, turning onto his side so that his arm extended down toward her, the ship’s movement bringing him closer still, and his fingertips closed around the stele in her hair just before his cage swung away with the next roll of the ship, the stele in his hand.
He didn’t wait to see if she’d noticed her hair coming undone with the stele’s removal, pulling his arm up through the bottom of the cage so that he could take the stele in his right hand. Below him, the guard turned in surprise as hair fell down over her face, and he drew the open rune on the door of the cage so that it swung open.
She looked up at him, mouth open in surprise, as he jumped to the ground, and didn’t have time to draw a weapon before he knocked her unconscious. She crumpled to the wooden deck beneath their feet, sliding to the side with the next roll of the ship, her head slamming into the side of the deck with a crack that had him wincing.
He clenched his jaw, bracing himself, and then popped his shoulder back into place. He hadn’t realized that it had gotten a lot less painful until the pain ramped up again when he relocated it, but a quick iratze cleared up most of the pain.
Then, he went to the wall, and began pulling levers to lower the Downworlders to the ground. There must’ve been thirty of them, mostly werewolves and vampires with perhaps five of the Fair Folk mixed in. No warlocks, though that made sense, since Valentine was probably controlling all those he’d managed to capture with whatever gave them those black veins. A few of them looked at him with suspicion, wary of the Shadowhunter in their midst, but the majority were either too desperate to worry about it or had decided to trust him.
Once Alec had freed the Downworlders — warning them to be silent, though the sound of the ship’s engine and the creaking of the boards would have drowned out any noise anyway — he tried to figure out which of them were in a fit state to help him fight free of the Circle. The Fair Folk were all clearly weak, far from nature as they were in the middle of the ocean and surrounded by the iron in the ship and the salt in the sea, but the vampires regained some strength from drinking the blood of the guard whose stele Alec had stolen and quite a few werewolves seemed well enough to fight, too. The seasick werewolf stayed back, at Alec’s insistence.
A bell sounded, which meant that somebody would soon be coming to relieve the guard and would discover their escape. Alec gestured to those he’d deemed strong enough, and led the charge to the upper decks.
~
That first charge had taken the forty or so Circle members completely by surprise, though they recovered quickly and were better armed than Alec’s group. Fortunately, it’d been nighttime, so the vampires were able to help, and eventually, the ship was taken.
All the Circle members were dead, most torn apart by the Downworlders — Alec couldn’t blame them for it, and he’d killed a few himself. The victory hadn’t been without heavy casualties, though — of the seventeen vampires and eight werewolves who’d fought by Alec’s side, only nine vampires and four werewolves were left, and a few of those were badly injured. The seven Downworlders who’d been too weak to fight were still belowdecks, in the room where they’d been held. There was also the warlock who’d been on the ship, presumably holding up the wards — she’d been knocked down and trampled in the mélée.
And Valentine was nowhere to be found.
Everyone had paired up to search the ship — the injured, along with the Downworlders who hadn’t fought, were guarded by three vampires and a werewolf, while the remaining five Downworlders and Alec went looking for Valentine.
He might be hiding in the hold, or in one of the ship’s innumerable dark corners, but why would he? Most likely, he’d be trying to do as much damage as he could before he was found and killed — the injured and weaker Downworlders would be a prime target, but the people Alec had stationed there to guard them were more than capable of killing Valentine. But where else—
The ship’s motor stalled, then stopped entirely, the silence eerie without the constant sound.
Alec swore, then raced toward the motor room, the vampire he’d partnered with (a member of the New York Clan named Elliott) at his heels. The door didn’t open, even with an unlocking rune, but it did when Elliott slammed into it, wood creaking and breaking into splinters.
Sure enough, there Valentine stood, a manic grin on his face. He had a seraph blade in hand, but he didn’t try to swing it at Elliott, instead slamming it into the destroyed controls again and again until Alec’s seraph blade pierced his heart. Even then, the madman managed one last strike at the controls, laughter and blood bubbling up from his lips as he collapsed to the ground, dead.
~
Three more vampires died of their injuries, which no amount of blood could heal, and two werewolves. Two faeries followed them, already weak from the iron in the ship, salt in the ocean, and the lack of plant life.
That left three faeries, six vampires (including Elliott), and four werewolves, two of whom were weak from the silver Valentine had tortured them with, and Alec.
The ship had two barrels of water, each containing about fifty litres, and no food — Valentine had tossed it all overboard before going down to the motor room. The motor room was utterly useless, impossible to start the motor from, and when they tried to get it started another way, they found that Valentine had also managed to slice open the barrels of diesel, and it’d all drained away to nothing. Alec suggested attempting to make sails, but not only did they have no fabric with which to make them, there was nothing resembling a mast to tie it to — and nothing to make a mast out of, either. They were well and truly stuck, on this ship, in the middle of the Atlantic.
Hunger set in first, though Alec had nutrition runes and the vampires could drink from the dead — the remaining faeries died first, followed by the weakest werewolf. A new vampire who’d been struggling to keep control of himself was trapped in the depths of the ship one day, with no access to blood, and he accidentally stepped into the sunlight trying to reach some. He’d been ash in barely a moment.
Then came the thirst, and nutrition runes could do little for that. They had to ration, the hundred litres now down to nine (one of the barrels had been contaminated with salt water, and the other had a leak that they hadn’t noticed until nearly fifteen litres had been lost). Four people who needed water meant under two and a half litres each — and in the scorching heat, they needed at least half a litre every day. One werewolf, suffering still from the silver he’d been tortured with, was sweating so much that he needed a litre a day.
He died two days later. Four litres left, three people.
~
And now the water was gone, the two werewolves living on rats while Alec overused his nutrition rune.
In a few days, he’d be dead. His head ached dully, his mouth felt dry. He tried to stand up, and his head spun for a few moments before he steadied.
He wished he could see Magnus one last time.