The Sea Wolves (31 page)

“I'll paddle the boat around,” Jack said. “Later, when we've rested enough that I can bail water at the same time. And then I'll go hunting. I've hunted before. We'll make a fire on the beach, cook some meat, and there'll be plenty of fruit out there.”

As they walked, he thought of the time that lay ahead of them, and of his family, awaiting his return in San Francisco. Then there was his friend Merritt Sloper, who must surely now believe that Jack was dead, one of many victims of the pirate attack upon the
Umatilla
. He had responsibilities beyond the here and now that he should never let go. Lesya had
persuaded
him to forget; here, he had to remember.

The slope on this side was gentler, and Sabine confidently led the way until they were halfway down. She paused, head cocked, her right hand held out from her thigh and fingers spread. They caressed the air as if playing a piano, and then her shoulders slumped.

“This is where they died,” she said, pointing off between the low trees to their right. Farther out toward the sea, the land had fallen away from the ridge long ago to form a sheer cliff, softened now with plant growth but still ragged and sharp.

“Both of them?” Jack asked.

“Together.”

“Why?”

“I can put a hex on a living man, but I can't read the thoughts of the dead.” Sabine started forward again, his beautiful mystery.

What else can you do? he
wondered, and perhaps soon—when they had a fire lit and he'd brought the rest of their supplies from the boat—he would ask. But there was no rush.

They reached the beach and found the remains of the shelter built by the two doomed men. There was very little left—some cut branches, heavier logs buried in the sand, and the remains of a woven roof. But it was a start, and Jack relished the idea of some manual labor.

“Your turn to talk to me, Jack,” Sabine said. She lowered herself onto a log that might once have formed part of a wall, staring uncertainly out to sea.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“Nothing.” She waved her hand. “Tell me about Lesya.”

“You really want me to…” Even the thought of that mad forest spirit chilled his blood beneath the sinking sun.

“Jack! I feel like a …
freak
. I'm blessed with this”—she touched her face and body—“perpetual youth. But cursed at the same time with the
knowledge
of age and the staggering passage of time. You can have no idea what it's like living so long without knowing why, existing outside everyone and everything else without understanding what you really are. I've considered many explanations over the years—I'm a freak of nature, a demon. God, or the devil. But one thing I've
always
been is the only one of my kind.

“For a time, knowing his fascination with me, I wondered if Ghost might be able to understand the lonely yearning that comes of being unique. There are many other wolves, but none quite like him. And he sees the layers of the world in a fashion ordinary men simply cannot. But he has spent a lifetime killing all the empathy inside him, and I learned quickly that he could never truly know me. I believed no one ever would, until I found you.”

“Even though I'm an ordinary man?” Jack asked.

Sabine smiled. “There's nothing ordinary about you, Mr. London. And that's enough fishing for compliments.”

Jack laughed softly. “Well, you're right that there's no one like you.”

“I've never met anyone even
remotely
like me, though there have been pretenders.” She trailed off, looking out to sea once more.

“What happened to the pretenders?” Jack asked, not sure he really wanted to know.

“Time carried them away. So tell me about Lesya and why you think she might be like me.” She turned to stare at him. “And then tell me where she lives.”

On that hot beach where palm fronds touched the sand and azure waters washed lazily against the island, Jack London recounted his time in the frozen, haunted north. He told Sabine details that he had not yet found the courage to tell anyone else, even his good friend Merritt Sloper—about his time with Lesya in her cursed forest; his encounter with her mysterious father, Leshii, the tree spirit who had eventually saved Jack's life; Lesya's past victims preserved in the living wood of unnatural trees; and his final confrontation with the legendary Wendigo, the creature he had overcome to find and conquer the wildness within himself. Telling the tale was a catharsis, and by the time he had finished, it was dusk.

Sabine stared at him with an expression he had never seen in her eyes before. There was amazement and respect, but also a sense of longing that had nothing to do with Jack the man and everything to do with what he had lived through.

“You sound a little like me,” Sabine said, and Jack knew the source of the longing.

“No,” he replied. “I'm only a man.”

“There can be no ‘only' about you, Jack,” she replied. “Your story is unbelievable, and yet I believe every word.”

“You're only the second person I've told,” he said. “Probably the last. Anyone else would think me mad.”

“Perhaps,” Sabine said.

“She's not like you, you know.” Even mentioning Lesya had given Jack the heat of longing, and a chill of fear.

Sabine only glanced at him, a strange smile softening her face.

“I mean it,” Jack insisted. “She might have had”—he paused, searching for the word—“
talents
that most people could never understand. But she was insane. She told me that her father had mated with a human woman, so she was part human, part spirit. An unnatural thing. To say you're like her is like saying I am similar to—”

“At least she knew of her parents,” Sabine said. “I have no concept of ever being born.”

Her words hung in the air, floating like sparks. A silence fell between them, and Jack filled the time building a fire. When the flames took and he blew on the flickering kindling, Sabine's face caught the light, and he saw that she was watching him.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not fearing me.”

Her words had such sadness that he studied her more closely, and so he saw the moment when something gave way within her. Sabine sagged just a little, and she wiped tears from her eyes.

“Sabine?” Jack said, his heart aching for her.

“I'm so sorry,” she whispered, the words barely audible.

Jack felt a chill pass through him. “What are you talking about?”

A quiet sob racked her body, and then she inhaled sharply, getting control of herself. She glanced at him but could not hold the gaze. The corners of her mouth turned upward in a pained smile whose anguish it tortured him to see.

“It's my fault…,” she said, her voice breaking. “My fault you're here.”

“Of course it's not,” Jack said. “Yes, I wanted to get you off the
Larsen
. But even without my fear for your safety, I had to escape or Ghost would have killed me.”

“You misunderstand,” Sabine replied, wiping away tears as she glanced at him quickly and once more lowered her gaze. “It's my fault you were on the
Larsen
to begin with. My fault that Ghost attacked your ship.”

Jack exhaled, understanding at last. “It's all right. You were doing what you had to do to stay alive. You guided him to the
Umatilla
just as you had to so many other—”

Sabine threw up her hands, sorrow and truth spilling out of her. “I didn't guide him to your ship, Jack! I guided him to
you
!”

“What?” He could only stare. “You mean Ghost chose me somehow? Why?”

“Not Ghost,” she whispered. She shook her head, the weight of guilt heavy. At last she said,
“I
chose you, Jack. Searching for a target for the pirates' hunger and greed, I found your ship, but it was no better prey than half a dozen others. Except that I sensed something else on board … something familiar. Your time with Lesya, the natural talent she unlocked within you, I recognized it as the closest thing to the magic within me that I have ever encountered. I had to meet you. To observe you. And the only way to do that was to tell Ghost the
Umatilla
was ripe for the picking.”

Jack's mind spun with the implications. The hell he had endured as a part of Ghost's crew, the horrific slaughter of the prisoners that the sea wolves had taken from the
Umatilla …
none of it would have happened if not for Sabine.

Yes, it would have
, he thought.
But to someone else
.

“You must understand,” she said. “After so long alone, any chance to learn more, even the slimmest hope of an encounter with someone like me… I had to try.”

Jack shook his head. “No. You can't have known that I would fight. That I would survive the attack and end up on board the
Larsen
.”

“I could hope. And I could work subtle magic as well. The pelican on the deck of your ship, the bird that drew your attention and alerted you to the pirates' presence… I guided it there. A hex on the crew should they encounter you, just a small suggestion that they hold back the tiniest bit in attacking you, make you a prisoner instead of a victim. And then I could only hope that Ghost would sense something within you worth keeping alive. He may not even have known what he saw in you, not fully, but—”

“And if he had just torn out my throat or put me with the other prisoners for the full-moon slaughter?” Jack demanded, anger flaring within him despite the pain he felt at seeing her remorse.

Sabine looked up at him defiantly. “I would have fought him. No matter that it would have revealed my true talents, and risked him killing me and gaining my magic. I would have tried to protect you.”

It was Jack's turn to glance away. “Because you sense echoes of Lesya in me, and would have done anything to preserve your only connection to something that might be your kin.”

“At first,” Sabine admitted, her voice soft and ashamed. “But later, because I had fallen in love with you. The night we were locked together in the safe room—the night of the hunt—I saw the courage in you when you tried to get out of the room, to save them. And I saw your anguish when you knew you could not. You broke my heart that night, and at the same time, you filled it as it has never been filled in all my long memory.”

Jack had nothing more to say, and Sabine seemed to have finished her confession. They sat like that for a while, neither of them speaking, the silence broken only by the crash of surf and the wind in the trees. Sabine hugged herself against the breeze, her tears dry and her expression grim.

Eventually, without a word, Jack moved across to Sabine and took her in his arms. Sunset splashed across the island behind them and spread shadows onto the sea, and as stars began to appear, they saw a shooting star flaming overhead, casting a brief, stark wound across the night sky. Neither of them commented. All the words that had needed to be spoken had been said.

Sabine had said she loved him, and he believed her. And how could he blame her for what she had done, no matter what it had cost him? Loving her as he did, he would gladly endure it all over again so that she could have the answers she had sought for so long.

As the fire started to burn down, Jack realized that Sabine had fallen asleep on his shoulder. He remained awake, pondering what she had told him—those incredible histories she had seen, everything she had done, and the uncertainty that such long life had instilled within her—and by the time the island's night noises started to intrude, he had silently vowed to aid her in any way he could.

He lowered Sabine gently, placing his jacket across her shoulders against the night's chill, and went about feeding the fire. After his time in the north, he would always welcome such heat.

Then he sat back against the log Sabine lay propped against, and the flames made the night that much darker.

Jack started awake. In those brief moments between sleeping and waking, when a soul's wealth of memory floods in to fill the blanks, his surroundings startled him. He felt more adrift than he ever had at sea, and the sense of something missing was profound. And though between blinks he became whole again, the loss remained.

“Sabine,” he whispered. She had vanished. His jacket still lay across the fallen tree, settled as though she had disappeared from beneath it without actually moving. Did she have such abilities? He could not know. She had told him much, but such a long life could not possibly be revealed in one short day.

He stood and stretched stiffness from his limbs, looking both ways along the curving beach. There was no sign of Sabine, but fresh footprints led away from where they had camped for the night, trailing along the beach a short way before turning in to the trees. As he watched, a wave broke and washed over a stretch of footprints, removing more of their detail from the world. A few more waves and they would be erased. Sabine had not been gone for long.

A rush of enthusiasm filled Jack, flooding him with one of those moments of utter contentment that never seem to last long enough. All that was wrong left him for a while—Sabine's fears, his family's and friends' concern, Sabine's confessions and her determination to meet Lesya—and everything was right. He passed by the dead men's shelter, and behind it saw evidence that perhaps they had also been pirates. Rusted, dulled weapons were half hidden by undergrowth, and a collection of small barrels was stacked against the shelter's remaining wall.