Caleb shook his head. “This kind of binding is sort of the same idea,” he said, “but a different principle. Think of it like the relationship of a magnet and a piece of steel. Drawn together like that, with this boat acting as a magnet being pulled to the ship. Except to make it work in the witches’ case, I needed this boat and the freighter to share something in common. They call it sympathetic magic.”
I thought it over for a second, but it didn’t make sense. “How do you make the two objects sympathetic?”
Alexander pulled off his coat and started rolling up his right sleeve.
“Oh no,” I said with dawning realization. “You didn’t.”
Caleb pulled the sleeve all the way up to his elbow, revealing a relatively fresh scar running across his inner arm near his elbow joint.
“A bit of blood magic,” he said. “I bound myself in blood to both of the ships.”
Marshall had stopped looking over the railing and came up to us, his face pale. I was pretty sure it wasn’t due to seasickness.
“And how does that work?” he asked.
“Lexi here isn’t the only artist,” Caleb said, pushing his sleeve back down over the scar. “I do a little painting myself. I mixed my blood with some seaworthy paint and coated the bow of this boat with it. I did the same with a small section of the freighter, too. So when I step on board this small craft, I drink a little something down, my connection to both ships snaps to, and voila! We’re under way.”
“Blood magic,” Stanis said from behind me, suddenly so close that I jumped. I hadn’t heard him join us, but his voice was practically in my ear now. “The work of necromancers. Dark work.”
Caleb hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. “Maybe several hundred years ago, sure, but don’t forget . . . magic has changed with the times. Yes, a lot of it has been lost to legend or locked away by men who thought it too great a power for the world to know—”
“Like Alexander,” I said.
“Yes,” Caleb said. “But the magic that has remained has been adapted. ‘Blood magic: not just for necromancers anymore!’”
Marshall’s eyes narrowed. “So let me get this straight: You willingly cut yourself, drained your blood, then painted two separate ships with it?”
Caleb nodded.
“There has got to be some kind of great alchemical insurance coverage out there,” Marshall said.
“Not as such, no,” Caleb admitted, “but given what Kejetan had been paying me, I would have considered maybe sacrificing a complete limb.”
“It is amazing the trust one criminal puts in another,” Stanis said, frustration oozing out in every word. “Once my father was done with you, your life would have been forfeit even before you betrayed him by joining in Alexandra’s cause.”
“Hey!” Rory said, stamping her pole arm on the deck of the ship. “It’s all our cause.”
“That it may be,” Stanis said, not looking away from Caleb, “but this human sullies himself with such darkness. Alexander would not have approved of such arcana.”
I stepped back, finding pain in Stanis’s words. Hearing his opinion of how my great-great-grandfather might have reacted—especially when it was contrary to my own feelings about Caleb—struck a nerve.
“I understand your concern,” I said. “However Caleb has worked this, it is working. This gets us to Kejetan and his followers. We’re going to stick with our plan. Okay?”
Silent nods came from everyone except the gargoyle. “Stanis?”
“As you wish,” he said, turning back to the bow of the ship.
I looked to the horizon, surprised to see the freighter less than half a mile away, already looming menacingly higher than our tiny boat.
With our craft being the David to its Goliath, the stark reality of our situation sunk in.
Kejetan’s floating homeland was a singular island on an empty sea. There was no shore in sight, only the distant lights of New York somewhere off in the fog behind us. We wouldn’t have to worry about innocent bystanders out here, but if we failed, there was no one to hear our cries for help, either.
Judging by the drumming in my chest, my heart was already opting for panic, but I tried to calm it, telling myself to focus.
“This can work,” I said, for my own reassurance more than anyone else’s. “If everyone does their part.” Our boat was angling in toward a small dock that rose and fell with the waterline, the side halfway up the ship marked with a dark circle that could only have been Caleb’s blood.
“Don’t head for that landing zone,” I said. “We need to board somewhere with cover, and I suspect there might be people watching the docking section. I know I would be if it were my ship.”
“Right,” Caleb said. He turned away from the freighter for a second, shaking himself to break his focus. It seemed to kill the connection to both ships as we fell into a drift. Caleb turned back around, and our small boat curved off its course, the sensation of being pulled by some sort of tractor beam now gone.
“You do have oars around here somewhere?” I asked, and started to look among all the cluttered tanks and buckets we had brought with us.
“Somewhere around here,” he said, joining in as he picked his way among the cargo nearest him.
“Allow me,” Stanis spoke up, once again perched on the very bow of the boat itself. He pushed his wings up and over the front of the boat, dipping them into the water on either side. The stoneskin membrane of his batlike wings worked as massive oars, propelling us forward and keeping us parallel to the ship.
My eyes searched the deck high above us for a good place to board, and when the familiar sight of multicolored cargo containers caught them, I pointed below where they were stacked.
“There,” I said.
Stanis corrected our course with his left wing, bringing us in at the spot, while Caleb moved up next to him at the bow. Caleb’s eyes searched the side of the ship while he squatted and hefted a massive wrap of chain in his arms. Once he had found what he was looking for, Caleb maneuvered past Stanis and secured the chain through a metal loop on the side of the freighter.
“Don’t want to have our only means of escape drift away, now, do we?” Caleb said as he walked back to me.
I nodded. “Ready, everyone?” I asked, trying to whisper with as much authority as I could.
“As ready as I suppose we can be,” Rory said, sliding her collapsed-down pole arm into the artist’s tube across her back. She slapped her hand on the large, steel pump canisters sitting between her and Marshall.
“Suit up,” I told them, then turned back around to Stanis. “We need all this equipment up on deck, out of sight.”
He nodded, grabbing several containers at once before leaping straight up into the air, pumping his wings with ferocity. In a second, he was gone into the night sky.
Everyone on the deck set themselves in motion. Marshall helped Rory strap one of the large canisters to her back before pulling on one of his own.
I consulted my notebook once again as I went over my spell modifications for the evening, laughing when I saw Caleb standing across from me in a mirror image, holding his own notebook. His eyes met mine, and the two of us both embraced the lightness of the moment and held on to it in silence as the last tranquil seconds of our night ticked away.
“Promise me no blood magic tonight, okay?” I asked, only half joking. “I don’t need you bleeding out in the middle of all this.”