Shane Mashburn stretched his arms over his head, cracking his back and neck, looking around at the open water with a sigh. It was a calm night, or it had been before that weird wave of darkness overtook them a little while ago, leaving him shivering and disoriented at the helm for several minutes.
The stars twinkled brightly, obscured now and then by the big banks of clouds that rolled in like waves over these warm seas. The waves had picked up a little, rocking the boat in a lulling motion that made him yawn more than once.
Absently rubbing at a stray smear of blood off the cockpit console with the heel of his hand, he looked out onto the open deck below, admiring his new ship. He, Javi and Jean had commandeered it from the old owners two days before, and he felt it was much nicer than the tub of shit they'd started out with.
It had been his idea back on Fiji to stake out this remote stretch of ocean, to just sit back and wait for the lost and inexperienced— and invariably rich— captains of these big luxury yachts to get confused on some idiotic sightseeing detour to explore the thousands of little islands in the area. All they had to do was wait, work on their tans while they monitored radio traffic in the area. The local law enforcement was slow to respond to some rich idiot lost in usually calm waters, so he and his boys had hours to find and "rescue" the hapless sailors.
The previous owners of his new ship had been a nice family from Cape Cod. A braveheart father who he'd popped in the head with a bat in the middle of the night as he'd slept in the very chair where Shane now rested. The mom, she was hot enough. Not as tight as she could have been, but then she'd had the two kids, so he wasn't gonna hold that against her. The son, another fucking hero, had been taken out by Jean and his blades as he tried to rescue his poor, old mom. Dumbass.
Now the daughter, she was a keeper. Or at least she would have been had Javi not gone so hog wild with his fucking knives and sliced her up so much that she bled out while Jean was skull-fucking her. Shane smiled. At least he'd gotten to her first before Javi cut her hands off. She'd been the best pussy he'd had in months, eighteen, virgin, tight as a fist. She'd had the hottest scream as he thrust into her the first time, the gag in her mouth barely muffling her cries of agony when he had to slam into her dryness like fifteen times before he was in all the way. He sniffed his fingers, getting the faint whiff of the raspberry-scented shampoo from her long blonde waves.
The memory of her big blue eyes looking back up at him through a well of tears, pleading with him silently for mercy was enough to get him hard again just thinking about it. He was just reaching down to free his pounding dick, give himself some relief when the ship lurched hard at the stern, the bow coming clean off the sea before crashing back down in a spectacular spray of black water. Shane was thrown clean out of the chair, erection smashing painfully against the consol, head cracking hard against the window in front of him. When he recovered, shaking himself and dragging his bruised and aching body up using the chair, he just stood still, listening intently, eyes wide, heart pounding. It was like they took a hit from a giant cannonball, though the ship didn't seem to be taking on water. It was, in fact, eerily still; the air going dead calm like they were in the eye of a cyclone.
A muffled scream from below made him jump. He listened for a minute, eyes darting around in the darkness, turning to look cautiously down into the black pit of the hallway leading to the cabins below. Pleading, begging, more cries of agony and terror floated up from below.
Fucking Javi. Something smashes into the ship, and the little brown freak probably doesn't even notice. He was watching one of his damned snuff films again. Shane liked a good rape as much as the next guy, but that Javi was one sick fuck. Last week his crazy home videos, probably the one with the brat boy had woken the other two from a deep sleep. Shane had found Javi jacking off like mad at the recorded image of himself slicing open the kid's throat, volume turned up to the max.
The sound system on this tub was incredible, Shane had to admit, but the fucking sharks were starting to circle their bow. Freaky fish around here were like dogs, coming to the smell of blood and the sound of screams in minutes. He would have thought Jean would have told Javi to turn that shit down, but then again that crazy fucker was probably watching too.
All of a sudden, the screams ceased. Finally. He was going to tear that little asshole a new giant asshole.
"Javi!" he bellowed, rubbing his head as he tried to peer into the pitch black. "Javi! What the fuck! I was sleeping! Turn that shit off!"
The sharply accented retort Shane had been expecting didn't come. No sound emanated from the darkness.
"Javi!" he hollered, his face screwing up with concern. Fear lit through him for some reason he couldn't figure.
"Javi?" Quieter this time, voice wavering. "Jean? The fuck is going on down there?"
No response, just the gentle lap of waves against the bow. He knelt down, straining his eyes, squinting into the black abyss. He could hear a faint, very faint, rustle now. Like heavy fabric sliding against itself, but not that exactly. A strange metallic whisper.
He shrieked as something big and dark and menacing shot past him in a blur out of the maw below. He was bowled over backwards, soaring through the cabin and smacking the back of his head on the console once more.
Gagging, gasping for breath, he tumbled onto the deck, fighting his way to his feet once more. He uttered another hoarse shriek when he felt fire, looked down to see that his chest was deeply scored with four deep slash marks that cut him open form the bottom of his ribs on the right to his shoulder on the left, shredding the light tee he'd been wearing.
"Oh, God!" he garbled, staring in horror as blood welled from the razored cuts, staining his shirt.
"You think He'd be on your side even if there was a God?" a smooth, velvet smooth, chocolate smooth, gorgeous voice asked. He shot backwards, tripping over the chair and ending up on his ass once more, eyes frantic to find the speaker.
Seeing no one, he scrambled up, grasping tightly at the streaming slashes, but no amount of pressure was slowing the blood. Breath rasping, he stumbled forward, looking out the window. Starting violently, he ducked suddenly, then peeked just his eyes up until he could see them.
As his hand fumbled for the gun he knew was somewhere, he studied the deck below. Two men lounged causally on two of the soft lounge chairs. One wasn't much larger than Javi, blondish, with a weird white glow to his eyes. The other was a big guy, really long blue hair, blue glowing eyes, pretty in a masculine, Eighties Hair Band kind of way. Neither seemed concerned about their surroundings, simply laying back, soaking up the clear moonlight.
"Hair Band?" the same voice snickered. "Oh. I will never let him live that down."
Shane spun on his knees, hand catching the gun at the last minute. Perched in a low crouch improbably atop the narrow back of one of the captain's chairs, a beautiful young woman in pure white, bare feet, smiled at him.
Bringing the gun to bear on her, a slow smile creeping across his own face, Shane chambered a round. She seemed harmless enough. Strikingly pretty, her body hard to read in the low crouch, but promising. Big tits. Hair that would be a true pleasure to wrap his hands around and yank as he fucked her from behind.
Then he saw the blood dripping off the fingers of one hand. His blood. She followed his eyes, then her smile deepening, she extended a set of two inch talons from her bloodied fingertips. They were jet black, some kind of metal that shone like a dead calm ocean in deepest night. The blood from her fingers ran down their lengths, dripping delicately onto the seat below her. The gun dropped to the deck with a deafening clatter.
In her other hand, she loosely held Javi's knife, dripping blood from its tip as well. Idly, without taking her eyes from him, she held it in both hands, then with one claw on her bloody hand, carved a single symbol into the grip of the knife, the metal easily scarring the ivory. She repeated the elegant character on the steel blade, the silver-blue metal no match for that midnight sheen.
Then, with skill that put Javi's training to shame, she flicked the blade in his direction, smile never leaving her face. A slurping gasp caught in Shane's throat as he was thrown across the cabin, steel going through his shoulder, embedding into the bulkhead, trapping him like a pinned fly, feet dangling off the deck.
"What the hell are you, bitch?" he hissed, doing his best to look menacing as he tried to squirm free.
Her lovely mouth quirked into a frown, but she didn't reply. He screamed as a gigantic pair of red and black bat wings appeared behind her, opening to the limits of the suddenly cramped bridge. She only cocked her head to the side, seeming to be listening intently, her face purely angelic in its serenity.
Heartbeat. Shane realized she was listening to the frantic trip-hop beat his heart was generating.
"Are you an angel?" he asked, face going slack.
