“Well,” I said to the room as I levered myself into a sitting position, my earlier rage largely forgotten. “That’s probably what passes for a magical hunting call.” A glance at my phone told me I had been out for about fifteen minutes.

I grabbed my book from where it had fallen and quickly sought out a mental protection spell I could quickly slap on a piece of velum. It took me another three minutes to get the spell down, and another minute to adhere it to the back of my neck with some adhesive I had left over from making Alice’s luck charm. The adhesive was pretty much a diluted resin which is probably not healthy to have on the skin but I didn’t want to experience whatever the fuck had knocked me out a second time if there was anything I could do about it.

I opened the door to the hall outside my cabin and poked my head out. No otherworldly monsters were in sight. In fact, there was no one in sight.

I slipped out of my cabin and down to the second deck that had the balcony circling the ship, keeping an eye open for any threats. I found many passengers passed out on the ground. As quickly as I could I moved some into the recovery position if they had fallen in a bad way. I tried to revive the first crewman I came across with no luck. No matter how much I slapped or shook the poor man, he would not rise. I have to assume something about my magical training or the changes I have made to my physiology made whatever washed across the ship have a lesser affect on me.

I heard a racket of metal on metal from below the balcony. My first impulse was to remain still but I overrode it and crept to the side, trying to see what was going on. Unfortunately the way the balcony railing was designed was specifically to keep people on this side of the railing, so I had to climb up a bit on it like I had chastised that kid for doing. (What was his name again? I can’t for the life of me remember.)

I slowly eased myself over the edge of the cruise ship and gaped at what I found attached to the side. A fucking battleship! A small one, but that was definitely a World War Two era warship tethered to the side of the cruise ship. A crew of some fifteen cruel looking men were busy fastening lines and opening a… port? A door-like opening in the side of the cruise ship. As I watched, more details about the battleship and the pirates. (They were unlawfully boarding a cruise ship, I am reasonably sure calling them pirates is both warranted and accurate.)

They were an eclectic lot, with no unifying thing among them except a rather mean cast to their features. They were men and a few women of many races. Some wore loose shirts, shorts and sandals, some went barefoot. A man near the prow was seated in a lawn chair, with said chair being surrounded by a very sophisticated spell form. He was dressed in a sharp dark purple three piece suit, which would have been like wearing an oven in this weather. The man seemed not at all bothered by the heat, however, his golden hair lightly moving in the gentle breeze of the two ships passing.

Another man exited the ship to join the man with the purple suit. He was a tall man, maybe as tall as I, but where I would charitably be called “wiry”, the new man was thick with muscle. His shoulders were so wide he had to pass through the doorway to the deck sideways to accommodate his bulk. His head was bald but he sported a well sculpted black beard. He wore a black vest over a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, coupled with black slacks and leather shoes. Though my vantage was about a hundred feet away, I could tell from his movements that he was a man used to inflicting violence. Once you dealt with as many murderers as I have, you begin to see certain patterns.

The ship itself was painted with several spell forms aside from the one the man was sitting in. Most I couldn’t begin to guess at the purpose of but a few I recognized as spells used to hide the presence of anything they came in contact with. I am capable of casting such a spell but I tended to prefer attention spells because they, in my experience, were more effective and produced the same result of being left alone. Some of the spells I could see where written in Latin, some in Greek and one in my preferred Elder Futhark. Other spells I could see…. Just looked sinister. You ever get a creepy vibe from a guy you met? I was getting similar vibes from a few of the spells I could see on the battleship. The spells writ on the barrels of the forward facing gun on the… fore deck? Were particularly malicious.

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The two well dressed men exchanged a few words. I strained my enhanced hearing but couldn’t pick up anything over the noise of the pirates and the waves. Maybe I should get closer?

My debate was cut short as a shout went up on the battleship and a gun belched automatic fire in my general direction. I screamed (I choose to remember it as a manly scream) and flung myself back, landing heavily on my ass and nearly biting through my tongue. Bullets tore into the ship, railing and ceiling where I had just vacated then cut off abruptly. I heard shouting from below but didn’t bother to stick around as I was already fleeing to my cabin.

“Jesus fucking shit Churchill you lying fuck,” I said as I rushed up the stairs.

I have been in combat before. I have fought things that compare with some of the most horrifying and sophisticate monsters Hollywood has dreamt up.

But I have never been shot at.

It was a new experience for me. I would describe it as “pants-shittingly terrifying” and “to be avoided at all costs.”

I slammed into my room, ran through the spell to summon the storage space for my book in record speed, tossed it in and closed it. At least if they killed me those assholes wouldn’t get a hold of my grimoire. I then dialed Alice’s room number from my room phone as I cast about for where I dropped my magic stick. I found it under the bed and snatched it up. Unsurprisingly she didn’t pick up, but the machine did ask if I wanted to leave a message.

“YES!” I said as I waved my stick around, trying to locate the luck charm I had made for Alice. Instead the stick pointed directly at the pirate vessel. Yeah, a magical ship of war probably would have a stronger aura than a good luck charm. That makes sense. I flunk the table leg at the wall in frustration, which stuck into the wall like with the force of the throw. Oops.

The beep finally came on the phone. “ALICE! If you somehow get this before you leave your room there are fucking MAGICAL PIRATES boarding the ship right now and THEY SHOT AT ME! I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO JUST GIVING YOU A HEADS UP!” I slammed the phone into the cradle and panicked for a few moments before deciding the ship had bigger things to worry about than my stupid disguise.

I kicked off my crocs and moved my mitts and socks down my limbs to engulf my feet and hands. One of the benefits that they give me is that though the socks are very thin, they protected my feet better than heavy duty work shoes and were much more mobile. The mitts went over my hands, making my skin look matte black up past the elbow. My nails narrowed and elongated into claws, on both my hands and feet. The first time I did this I had felt very cool and very bad ass. Right now I felt alone, under prepared and my balls were hiding somewhere behind my sternum.

I—

I needed to move.

While this room would provide some protection for a while, anyone familiar with basic warding would cotton on to the meager protection and tear them down. If they were after me then it would not be implausible to assume they could get or already had access to the guest list and knew my room number. Also, they might have a magical way of tracking me.

I grabbed another piece of vellum and rushed out spell I called “Incognito Mode” because the real name was in Dutch and I don’t speak Dutch. According to my high school English teacher I barely spoke Engli—Aw fuck.

In my haste I fucked up the spell. I only screamed a little in frustration and quickly got out another piece of parchment and began again, this time working with deliberateness tempering my haste and definitely not thinking about Mrs. Churchmeyer and her tight sweaters.

Incognito Mode, as you might guess from the name, makes tracking magic slide off me. There are ways to get around this, of course—namely having a piece of my body or blood. But if they had access to those I’d have much bigger problems than being tracked. You can do some very nasty things with a direct link to someone. But aside from them having a link to me, I have found with my own testing that this spell is incredibly sophisticated. I just wish I knew how it worked.

You see, I can piece together the spell forms from the diagrams and through some extensive googling got a rough translation of the symbols or incantations (depending on the method of casting) but the explanation of the meat and bones workings of the spell took up fifteen fucking chapters and Google translate doesn’t really hold up when talking about metaphysical subjects and words that aren’t really common in both Dutch and English.

This will be the first time I’ve used the spell against anything human, which I am trying (and failing(spectacularly)) to not worry about. I slowed down as I neared the end of the spell, making sure I didn’t mess up at the last instant. Once it was done I slathered it with the last of my glue and slapped it over my heart. At once the wards I had placed in my room stopped recognizing me as something to allow and I felt them trying to get me to not pay attention to the room I was in, which was incredibly annoying and headache inducing. This was a situation I had not anticipated and—

Shouting, from the corridor.

Fuck.