“That’s a big goddamned ward,” I said.

Ida and I were in the out door eating area where I had gotten drunk on the first night of the cruise. The tables had been moved (Or probably been tossed overboard. Pirates don’t strike me as environmentally friendly.) to clear a space for a rather impressively big spell drawn on the deck with what looked like stencils and spray paint.

The undercover Interpol agent (I’m referring to her as an agent until someone corrects me.) snuck me past the guards by way of loudly arguing with them while I climbed on the side of the ship past them, the sound of their conversation covering the sound of my claws digging into the ship. I had recovered quite well after downing three more bottles of water and another terrible sandwich. The athleticism that had been beyond me merely an hour ago—while not easy—was definitely doable for short distances.

Once I got past the guards Ida ended her argument and met up with me, usually by moving to the other side of the ship with another guard she hadn’t argued with and just passed by. After all, she’s a pirate, ain’t she?

Finding a spot where I could look at the ward without being observed by the guards would be hard I thought. That was until I got here, anyway. The guards were not the most thorough in their observation and seemed bored out of their minds. As long as I wasn’t jumping and shouting, these three gentleman wouldn’t even look back in my direction. One was watching porn on his phone with the volume cranked, while two more on the other side of the ship (port?) were playing Othello.

Ida stood with her back to the only wall in the area, between the two guard stations, smoking a cigarette. She had used the excuse of needing space from Jared—no wait, was it Jasper? She had said she needed space from the asshole or she was going to gut whim, which the two guards playing Othello accepted readily. Apparently Jared/Jasper’s tendencies were known.

“What does it do?” Ida whispered after I had been studying the ward for a minute.

“Fuck if I know,” I replied, my head rubbernecking to the ward to where the guards were just out of eye shot. “It’s not a design I’m familiar with.”

I lifted my hand and pointed at three spots. “Those parts are kinda familiar, and have to do with deception and hiding,” I pointed at the rest of the ward. “How it’s tied into all that I can only guess at. But if you put a gun to my head, I’d say it was a ward to keep the Coast Guard and the powers that be from tracking us.”

“What makes you say that?” Ida said as smoke leaked from her mouth.

I shrugged. “If these guys are here for me, which you seem to think is the case and I seem to think is the case, well… They haven’t been trying real hard to find me.” I stroked the stubble becoming a beard on my face. “I mean yeah, they probably turned the ship over a few times on the first day but after that, they didn’t take their little battleship and circle the cruise, or anything else really. You’d think they’d try the ole ‘kill hostages until you give up’ approach, but they probably think I’m a warlock like them and what warlock gives a shit about people?”

I glanced right and left, making sure we were still alone. “But they just pointed this ship southeast and are sitting back, calm and quiet. Gotta do something to keep the fuzz off them while they do whatever it is they’re planning.”

Ida blew a breath out her nose and a bunch of smoke, reminding me of an old Buick with an oil problem. “It would explain much,” she said. “We never have much trouble with local law enforcement.”

I glanced around again. “We should leave,” I suggested. “Don’t want to press our luck.”

She nodded and dropped her cig to the deck, grinding it under her boot. “Do you need another distraction?”

I glanced in the direction of the two guards playing Othello, then back towards the sounds of slapping flesh to my left. “No,” I said. “I’ll slip over the side on Mr. Culture’s side.”

“Meet back at the store,” she said and took off.

I waited a moment, my nerves in a weird place between frayed and maybe not frayed. How much time should I giver her? I wanted to wait a bit so if I fucked up and got spotted suspicion wouldn’t be leveled at her. I decided on a few minutes, spending the time studying the ward.

I wanted to get closer to it.

At heart I’m a nerd, and once I discovered magic I became the biggest magic nerd I could be. And here was magic I was unfamiliar with. New magic! Used in new and interesting ways.

If only my life wasn’t in danger.

… One little look wouldn’t hurt. I just—I just need to get a look up close.

I crept along the deck on all fours, doing my best army crawl. I kept my weight on the balls of my feet and my palms, my pelvis inches from the deck as I moved forward. Every few feet I’d look over my shoulder to make sure one of the guards weren’t showing some uncharacteristic initiative by looking behind them.

I made a slow circuit along the ward, memorizing as much as I could. Whoever drew the symbols on it preferred a Cyrillic alphabet for their casting so a lot of the ward I couldn’t parse, but what I could make sense of made me more confident in my assertions to Ida. The whole ward seemed to… nudge, things away from the center. And these symbols in the center, I’d bet my left nut they’re representing the ship itself. And these—

My danger-sense suddenly went off and I jerked aside to the left as a knife embedded itself into the deck where my lower back had just been. Three more were on the way, aimed to cut off my retreat. I put both hands under me and shoved, sliding me back under the three knives as they also thudded into the deck with intimidating force.

I spun and caught a look at my attacker. He was standing above me, on the little trellis-like roof over the bar. His hair was black with a few strands of silver here and there, cut military short. His eyes, also dark, were wide with delight. A playful smile curled his surprisingly full lips. If it weren’t for the many scars and his misshapen nose, I would have called him handsome. As it was, he was merely not ugly.

He wore a black combat suit like you see Navy SEAL’s wear in movies, sans helmet or any weapons that weren’t the knives he had in his hands. The little pouches on his vest that were meant for gun magazines were filled with something smaller but rounder, displacing the pocket slightly. When he moved he was followed by a kind of rattling sound similar to a Californian rattle snake.

“Ha!” He cried, tossing his two knives back and forth between his hands like a juggler. “Here I thought some passenger had gotten free and was poking around where he didn’t belong, but looky here! If you aren’t our prey then I’m fuckin’ Santa!”

He had an Australian accent and he accentuated the last word of his sentence by whipping his arms forward and sending those two knives at me. By this time I had gathered my wits and my danger sense had already warned me what was coming. Before he even released the knives I was shaping a spell in my mind.

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“Þrøngva!” I said as I pushed my hand at him, as if I was shoving something. I gritted my teeth against the mental feedback of the spell, which made me feel like my head feel like it was filling up with water.

A wave of force distorted the air and met the knives, catching and reversing their momentum. The two knives were tossed back towards the man in black, riding the wave like a pair of surfers. Just before it collided with the man he produced another knife somehow—this one a foot long Bowie—and cleaved it down into the force, dispersing it. With his other hand he plucked one of the knives I shot back at him out of the air, the other one sailing over his shoulder into the night.

Yeap, time to go.

I’ve used that spell to knock down walls. This guy just stopped it with a knife. I don’t know if he has any other tricks of his sleeve but he throws knives with enough force to embed them in hardened wood and can stop spells with them. That was enough to high tail it and see if I can get more info out of Ida about this guy… But first I have to get away from him.

“Hahaha!” The slightly unhinged man in black threw his head back and let out a hyena style laugh. “You know some real magic too!” His grin became cruel. “Let me show you some of mine.”

He chanted a short phrase that sounded middle-eastern. I tensed up, ready for some grand affect but my danger sense didn’t go off. Instead, a thin, glowing red line appeared between his two knives. He casually flung the Bowie knife at me. I didn’t even need my danger sense to dodge, I simply dipped left and it passed me by. The big knife was followed up by the other knife on my other side and I dodged that too, but couldn’t quite get out of the way of the red line as it touched my knee—

I screamed. Pain like I hadn’t ever experience consumed my knee. It felt like the joint had been crushed, mulched and set on fire in a heartbeat. But just as it came it faded. I found myself on my hands and knees, the knives and magic string behind me. I hurriedly took a look at my knee, which looked fine except for some small inflammation where the string had touched me.

My danger sense warned me but before I could react pain exploded on my shoulder and I lurched away from another string that had suddenly appeared. The man was holding yet another knife (Where the fuck was he keeping them?) and the string had connected to it from the other two knives behind me. With a casual flick he sent the knife, not at me, but at the wall I had been leaning against with Ida. He produced two more knives—seriously, what the fuck is up with that—and casually threw them behind me in two different directions. As the passed I had to duck and hop over two new glowing strings.

Oh fuck, I knew what he was doing.

The man did his hyena laugh again. “Oi, mate. Did ya figure it out, yet?” His hands were suddenly populated with eight more knives, one between each finger. They were small and meant for throwing. As he cocked his arm back to throw.

Fuck this. As the knives left his hands I got my feet under me and leaped.

I don’t like to use my full abilities. You may have noticed. For so long my life has been about staying under the radar and going unnoticed. You don’t go unnoticed by flinging magic around or showing off your cool abilities you got from the shapeshifting interdimensional lady who you’re kind of attracted to and kind of terrified by. I’ve been afraid for so long that people would notice that I’m a little too quick, a little too strong, that I know too much.

But you know what? I’m tired of being afraid. I’m still going run away, but I’m going to make this guy stop fucking laughing while I do it.

I sailed into the air, a good fifteen feet and landed on the wall with the knife sticking out of it. My left hands claws sunk into the side of the ship a few feet below the broken window I had escaped out of the day the pirates attacked. My right I pointed at the man in black who—predictably, at this point, had produced more knives.

“Brenna logi,” I hissed as the spell took shape in my mind. I felt my temperature spike from the feedback.

The trellis the man in black had been standing on suddenly erupted into six foot flames. I heard a faint shout from within and a lightly toasted pirate dove out of the fire and hit the deck in a roll. One of his knives fell from his grip and the red string it had been trailing came in contact with his thigh, causing him to scream in sudden anguish and convulse away from the line.

While he was distracted I climbed up and into the broken window, my body shaking and sweating with sudden fever. That spell was much bigger than I usually do and the feedback was something else. As I hurried down the hall a pirate came up the stairs to see what the commotion was.

He hesitated for a second, but I didn’t. As soon as I saw him I sprinted forward. He went for his gun but by the time he cleared it from his holster I was on him. My left hand slammed into his wrist, moving the gun to the side as I stepped forward and placed my right leg behind his. My right hand slammed into his neck as I pivoted and sent him to the floor over my leg. His back slammed into the deck with a satisfying thud. My training wanted me to strike him repeatedly in the head but—instead, I brought my hand down on in a chop on the mans clavicle, snapping it.

As he gasped in pain I disarmed him. I checked the gun, turning the safety on and tucked it into the waistline of my shorts. And then—then what? I had two options.

First, I could make good my escape and start sprinting, hoping I didn’t run into guards who were more competent than Mr. Broken Clavicle here. Or I could dip into my room real quick and hope my bag survived the fire. I really needed to find a better solution to the two spells I had glued to my body before they got infected and I started to come down with blood poisoning.

Caution won out and I started heading for the stairwell. The wisdom of the decision became clear as right as I exited the stairwell on Deck 2, half a dozen pirates sporting rifles came around the corner. I had a split second warning from my danger sense and formed a spell in my mind.

“Þrøngva!” I cried, thrusting out a hand. The wave of pressure in my skull was followed by blood dripping from my nose in a sudden squirt.

They fired at me but the wave of force caught the bullets just as well as it did knives, sending them back at my attackers. The wave met the pirates and slammed them back into the railing on the side of the ship. Clamor of bruised bodies slumped to the ground, followed by a series of confused groans. I pulled the gun out of my waistband, thumbed up the safety and took aim. I waited until my aim lined up with the result I wanted in my future sight (I really need to think of a name that combined the danger sense aspect and the future seeing aspect.) and quickly squeezed off six shots, putting a hole in either a foot or leg. I thumbed the safety on again and stuck the pistol back in my waistband as I dove for the stairwell that went down into the crew portion of the ship.

The door was locked but I lifted a leg and kicked it open, the metal anti-breach plate reinforcing the lock holding once, but not twice. The door deformed on my second kick and swung inward awkwardly, the hinges stripping their screws as they were forced to go in a direction they weren’t meant to.

I ran as fast as I could, slamming into the wall as I took corners too fast. My breath was coming fast and heavy, my lungs working overtime. My joints hurt, my head was pounding and I think I was running an actual fever. Maybe using so many spells and getting into several fights after starving myself for two days wasn’t such a hot idea.

I wiped my face on my stinking shirt, making sure I left no blood behind me. I don’t know if any fell before now and I wish I had thought of it sooner, but no helping it now. I found myself going down familiar corridors to where the engines were. My future sight warned me just as I was rounding a bend that I was about to run into someone but—I was just too tired. Maybe the strain of the day, or low-grade fever or any number of factors, but I just couldn't stop myself in time. I turned a corner and ran face first into a pirate.

In my attempt to slow down I had had bent over, slamming my chin into his forehead. We collapsed on top of each other, limbs entangling in a confusing mess. He recovered faster and got a hand around my throat as his other hand went for his belt knife. We ended up on the floor, me on my back and him above me. My leverage was terrible as my ass was on his leg somehow and he was using it to lift me up into his grip and choke me. I tried to pry his hand off my throat but I was stymied by his thick gloves. My claws cut them easily but they were thick enough that I wasn’t doing anything more than superficial damage. My other hand went to latch onto his wrist that was going for the knife.

We struggled in the hallway, grunting and gasping. I was doing the gasping as he was doing a very effective job of closing off my airway. I flailed about with my legs, trying to get some leverage, but he angled me towards the wall and pinned me against it with his abdomen.

I think I’m going to die.

Suddenly panicking, I let go of the hand around my throat and raked my claws across his throat. I was caught off guard, first by the amount of blood that poured out and the writhing sensation the Limbs of the Other Side made as they came in contact with the pirates blood. I could feel the Limbs, which usually reached up my arm just shy of my elbow, suddenly stretch and grow, covering my arm up to the bicep. As the blood covered my chest and arms, the Limbs on my legs began to grow as well.

Meanwhile, the pirates motions took on a frenzied edge. His slipped my grasp and pulled his knife, jabbing at me. I blocked with my forearm, the knife barely biting into the black clad Limb. I lifted my legs, planted both on the wall and shoved, sending the both of us away from it at an angle down the hall, only to slam into the opposite wall. The collision knocked the knife away and I cocked my arm back and slammed the claws of my other hand into his chest.

Again the Limbs writhed and covered more of my body, climbing up to kiss my shoulders. I made a mental note to be horrified later as I watched the light fade from the pirates eyes. I had enough to be horrified by right now.

I had just killed someone.