CHAPTER ONE
The Pirate Queen Sasha gripped her saber hard in her hand as she prepared to board the enemy ship
Today was the day she died.
She’d written off the stories of the phantom vessel known as the Dark Tide as legends. Just more myths told by sailors over nearly-emptied bottles of rum to stave off boredom.
But there it was, with its tattered and torn sails, and its telltale skull with wings for a flag, announcing just who had come for them. The exposed wood had weathered and rotted to a blackish gray. The ship looked like it barely had any business being afloat, let alone being one of the fastest ships Sasha had ever seen on the high seas.
It had come for them without warning. Cannon fire had rocked her ship in the dead of night, and the full moon cast a startlingly eerie glow over the skeletal ship that bore down on them like a nightmare.
Her men were terrified. But they were ready to fight. But when the derelict ship prepared to board them…and no one appeared? In fact, when it seemed that there were no crew at all aboard the strange, ghostly ship?
She didn’t blame her crew at all for standing behind her, cowering as they let her be the first to cross the wood plank they’d slung between the two vessels.
The deck was empty. Silence reigned, save for the footfalls of her men and the jangle of weaponry and belts as they all piled onto the Dark Tide.
The deck was empty.
Until it wasn’t.
The fight was over before it really had a chance to begin.
They never stood a chance against the unnatural crew that attacked them.
Sasha supposed she shouldn’t be so frustrated as she was shoved down to her knees on the rough wooden deck. She’d been easily disarmed by one of the things that had attacked them.
What chance did the living really have, fighting ghosts? Her blade had gone straight through a man, only to have her whole arm follow with it, as though he hadn’t even been there.
A few of the surviving men were weeping. She couldn’t say she blamed them for that, either.
Footsteps caught her attention. Raising her head, that was when she saw him. The Captain of the Dark Tide. Pale skin that matched the color of a corpse in the moonlight. Black-stained lips, as though he had been drinking tar. And where his eyes should be, nothing but empty hollows.
But there was something in her that couldn’t help but be entranced as the man—thething—walked up to her, no expression on his hard-set, sharp features.
He opened his mouth to speak.
WHAM.
Sasha jolted, dropping her pen on the floor, and nearly knocked over her plastic maroon water bottle. It was capped at the top——but she still scrambled for it before it went teetering off the edge of her desk.
She’d been daydreaming. Again. Bored out of her mind. Again. Doodling little circles in her notepad. Again.
Until some rancid personality had decided to not so muchplacea book down on her desk asthrowit down. Leaning down, she grabbedher pen from where it’d landed near her foot and prepared to be as passive aggressive as she could be, in true librarian fashion.
She’d dealt with a great deal of “problematic customers” in her couple of years at the BPL. It wasn’t anything new. Especially not when one worked in Restricted, where they kept the books that weren’t allowed to be checked out or leave the room because of the nature of their content.
Things like Nabokov’s works, the Marquis de Sade, how to build pipe bombs or explosives, and so on—or anything else that was deemed “not okay.”
It all seemed really stupid in the age of the internet.
But whatever. It gave her a job.
All the books were attached to sticks on chains, like when you borrowed a bathroom key from a place that wanted to make sure that you really, really didn’t walk away with it. The tables in the middle of the room were long, and arranged in such a way that the librarian on duty—today, it was her—could see exactly what everyone was doing at all times.
Just in case.
Because, well, humans were gross sometimes.
