“’Ware, skeletons!”

Mind befuddled by drink, stress and lack of sleep, it took a moment for Grim Jack Ransom to register what the lookout was saying, his scornful tongue-lashing dying unspoken as the first bony hand reached over the starboard rail of the Wave-Tamer, rusted cutlass in hand. “Wake up, you half-witted sea-dogs, we’re being boarded!” the pirate captain roared, punctuating his cry of warning with a pistol shot that blast the skeleton’s skull into fragments and sent it toppling back into the sea like a puppet with its strings cut. More skeletal figures began climbing up the sides of the ship, provoking harsh oaths from the terrified crew, and within moments, a full-scale battle was raging upon the Wave-Tamer’s main deck, the clash of ringing steel carrying into the night sky. If he needed any further evidence their voyage was cursed, this was it, and his rotten teeth bared back in a snarl, Ransom began laying into the undead horde with pistol and blade. Another man might have considered the choices that had led him to such a dismal state, but pride held the pirate in its iron grip, and she risked a glance back at the dark-skinned beauty shackled to the mainmast before throwing himself into the fray.

For it was thanks to her that everything had gone utterly wrong.

It had started out well enough. Wave-Tamer had set sail from Port Rampant week earlier, its sister ships Red Wake and Kraken joining their raid on some of the nearby islands, and over the next three days, they’d pillaged and plundered to their hearts’ content. Four separate settlements had been left in ruins, anything of value carried off into the holds of the attacking ships, and not a man amongst their crews had been killed or injured in the process.

Then they had found the temple, some ancient pagan site erected on a lonely stretch of coastline by a long dead civilization, its sole occupant the beautiful priestess who maintained it. The pirates were well-versed in the art of seizing and carrying off female captives onto their ships, and they’d paid no heed to the curses she’d thrown their way as she was stripped of her dark robes, her dusky, smooth skin utterly exposed to their leering stares and groping hands. As a final indignity, Ransom had ordered her chained to Wave-Tamer’s mainmast, her defiant curses finally stifled by a cleave gag drawn tight between her plump lips, and he’d set a course back home, content to indulge in her feminine charms once they’d safely returned to dock.

That had been three days ago, and since then, not an hour had passed without some fresh disaster. Before they’d even left sight of the now-ransacked temple, Kraken’s keel had been ripped away by an unseen reef, forcing the crew to abandon ship as the pirate vessel went to the bottom in record time. Every scrap of food on board Red Wake went rancid, exacerbating the plague of dissension and random clashes that had infected both of the surviving ships, and more than once Ransom was forced to put down crewmen brawling over who’d be the first to claim the bound and helpless priestess for themselves. And that was before that freak storm rolled in, splintering masts and battering hulls, only for the pirates to be left utterly, unnaturally becalmed in its wake. Mutterings of a curse had spread through the crew like pox in a brothel, and not even the harshest punishments seemed to quell its spread.

And now Ransom could no longer deny it, not with an army of the undead sweeping over his ship and hacking his crew to pieces, their best efforts only stemming the tide. Once more, he dared take his gaze from the melee to glance back at their prisoner, and at the twinkle of delight in her dark eyes, laid into the skeletons with even greater fury. Fate be damned, I’m not going down like this! And when I get out of this, this witch will pay for laying this curse upon us…