"What…"
"Sshh!"
Mariana could not have managed a more catty hiss if she had been a feline. She was so sick and tired of people making such dumb decisions around her and putting her in danger.
Well, she had made her fair share of said dumb decisions, but that was beside the point! Marrow was being massively idiotic and she was not about to watch him ruin this whole operation with his whats and ohs and oh heavens.
"I am not feeling all right," Marrow said and dropped down on one knee.
"He is…" Daniel turned around.
His expression was so worried that it tipped Mariana off - there had to be something that had caused the pirate king to lose his focus.
Marrow threw up onto the yellow parts of the moss that had dried up near the roots of a tree. He was vomiting blood. It looked so bad that Mariana had this instinctive motherly pull that forced her out of her sphere of anger.
"Oh gods, are you sick? Talk to me, Mr. Marrow, tell me what it is!"
"Mariana, you remember the ones I told you about?" Daniel was breathing heavily now, anxiety scrunching up his handsome face into a deep frown of worry and - was that fear on his face?
"The ones that can destroy the…"
"The entire world as we know it."
Her jaw dropped. Her hands started to shake. She felt uneasy even being this close to a person who was currently affected by the ultimate abominations, whereas just a moment before she had felt nothing but concern towards Mr. Marrow.
He was now convulsing, foam coming from his nostrils and his mouth, his body was limp and then it tensed up, and became limp again, it went on and on and they had not taken the wisewoman with them, because she didn't even have a proper medicine bag.
"They are affecting him with their scream," Daniel said, helplessly watching. "They can do that to any living being within a hearing distance. There is no medicine that would help him right now. Once a person has been touched by them, they can just emit a sound and it will cause a rapid degeneration in the body of the victim."
Mariana could do nothing. She watched the man die before her own eyes.
While it had certainly not been personal before, it was now, and she wanted nothing more than to destroy every last one of those vile things.
It appeared like these things could affect people who had already been touched by the creatures, but why had Marrow not talked about it?
A horrible thought passed by in Mariana's mind - what if Dars was actually one of the abominable ones, only disguised, first as a human, much like the pirate king, and then as a ghost? But then…why was the horrible scream not affecting her at all, even though she had certainly been in contact with the ghost? This didn't sound like a feasible theory, and she abandoned it quickly, only to see that her crew was abandoning her and Daniel.
Marrow was not breathing anymore.
"They…they left us," she said, enraged that she had ever fooled herself into thinking that these men were anything but cowards.
"So they did, and I bet they will be taking the ship with them," Daniel said, sounding determined. "It doesn't matter. We will cross that bridge when we get to it."
"Do you think we could find Roinar? Or the abominable one?"
"Well…" Daniel sighed and got up from the patch of moss he had been kneeling on. "We can certainly find them. Whether we can save the dice, or the witch, or kill the abomination, that is another question. I don't think anyone has ever actually killed one. They are unfortunately tenacious."
Mariana thought about impossibilities. This did not sound like one. Or then…it could be that she was simply too brave.
"We should try to do that," she said. "Are they clever?"
"More clever than most demons."
"Subdogormic or superdogormic demons?"
"You are in the mood for asking questions today."
They walked towards the bubbling stream and decided to follow its course upriver. The scream had come from that direction, and here they were, a good girl and a demon, walking together into the heart of danger.
"It feels familiar to be with you like this," she confessed to her…was he her lover now?
"Aye. Just like we used to do things like this."
"Pistols empty. Unprepared."
"Well, sometimes loaded," he chuckled.
She pouted. "Help me romanticize the old times. Pretty please."
"There will be plenty of…"
He interrupted himself, raising a hand and bringing it so close to her that she could feel his warm skin.
She let her breathing slow down.
"Ah, what the hell," he said, bent closer to her and kissed her on the lips.
He was like having hot chocolate running in her veins, injected or absorbed into her bloodstream via his lips. The abominable one screamed again.
Daniel just kept on kissing her. She let herself be completely engulfed in him, his scent, his warmth, those rough hands that touched her back so sweetly. The inhuman roar from the woods came in bursts, but the pirate couple kept on kissing.
She felt her heart beating so fast that she thought she was about to die. That didn't matter. The stream was wetting their feet. That didn't matter, none of those little, poetic notions about the world outside their microuniverse mattered at all. This was her paradise. This was her glimpse of something so good that it didn't matter if she was a bit bad.
Then they broke the kiss off, gasping for air and tasting each other on their lips.
Wait a moment…
"I can hear your thoughts," Mariana said, panting. "Not all of them, mind you. Just…part of them."
"I can hear yours, too."
"It isn't supposed to be possible."
"I know, but it happened. What do they say about the three rules of witchcraft…" Daniel merely smirked, like breaking the very laws of nature was something he did casually and without much conscious thought.