Sean.
He flew into Zoe so fast, pitching himself from the trees, that she didn’t even have a split second to pull the trigger. She fell to the earth, and Jay, behind Sean, swept up her gun. Zoe began to toss and writhe and scream incoherently.
Sean kept her down.
Lew Sanderson walked out of the trail and approached the ghosts locked in combat on the sand. And he began to speak, too, some kind of an ancient dialect, his booming voice rising over Zoe’s desperate tirade and screams.
Then Lew’s words changed to Latin, and he lifted a cross, speaking the same words over and over. He reached into his pocket. From the sand, Vanessa stared at him, afraid that he had a gun, that he would begin to shoot needlessly at the mist…
But it wasn’t a gun. It was a vial of water, and he sprinkled it again and again….
Suddenly, a piercing scream of agony and terror erupted from the sand. Vanessa looked toward the sea. It seemed that her monsters had risen, but they were seaweed monsters of darkness and fire….
Black mist rose like fierce, roiling thunderclouds, seeming both unreal and with substance, a viscous mass that steadily came forward.
Dona Isabella stared at it, screaming in a rage. Words of protest tumbled from her mouth.
It seemed that thunder roared, silencing her.
She backed away.
But it did no good.
The darkness had come for her.
The black, roiling mass washed its way over the shoreline, an unstoppable army of oily shadows, somehow alive and furious, bearing red eyes that spoke of all the demons of hell.
Coming for Dona Isabella.
The mass enveloped her. She screamed and writhed, but to no avail. She became part of the mass, and it ripped her from shore, bearing her back to the water again.
Vanessa blinked. It was over; she was gone. Her heart flew to her throat because she didn’t see Bartholomew, either. All there was to be seen was Zoe, now suddenly silent, almost catatonic.
Lew turned to them. “She is gone,” he said simply.
Jay blinked. “Who is gone?” he whispered.
He didn’t know what he had seen. Now, as the waves lapped gently again, as the moon rode over the water, Vanessa wasn’t sure, either.
Lew Sanderson stooped down by Zoe. “I will take her. She will go to the Bahamian authorities,” he said. “And perhaps face charges elsewhere.”
Sean left Zoe to Lew.
He walked to Vanessa, caught her hand and drew her up into his arms. He was shaking.
“You know what I think?” he whispered.
“What?”
“I don’t need to think anymore. I know that I love you,” he said, and he drew her hard against him, still shaking as he held her there.
The remains of the Happy-Me were found the following week, and the Delphi was found two weeks later. Once in custody, Bill and Zoe seemed to have no problem talking, even though most of the law-enforcement officials they spilled their souls to thought they were crazy.
It was Dona Isabella. She taught them how to be pirates. She helped them slip aboard boats, kill the crew one by one and make them disappear into the ocean.
The film shoot had been so easy. They had made a point of switching places constantly, so that neither could really be accused. For instance, Zoe had made certain that Bill was working when she took down the Delphi, just as Bill had made sure that Zoe was seen at the time he lured Travis out to the sand during the making of the horror movie. Travis! Conceited oaf. He had died quickly and easily. And it was bizarre that the authorities had never found the machete that they had used to cut up the bodies—they had left it hidden in the pine forest on the island. They had sunk Jay’s boat—as they sank all the boats, stealing off them little by little. They weren’t bad people—they were chosen. They were chosen by Dona Isabella to help her rule the sea.
There were a dozen times when Vanessa wanted to turn to Sean and say, “Did that really happen? Did we see what we saw? Did an evil ghost walk the world just as easily as the pained spirits of those who had been wronged, or who sought to help others?”
She never spoke. Maybe they both knew that the world was composed of good and evil. As Bartholomew had suggested, good men were good men.
And evil men—and women—were evil.
Just how crazy had Zoe become?
And did it make them all a little mad?
They were questions that haunted Vanessa at first. But they weren’t about to stop her from living her life, from being with Sean. Barry healed quickly, and Marty was thrilled to walk around with a cane for a while. Liam came to before the authorities even arrived, furious with himself for having fallen prey to a pathetic little bastard like Bill Hinton.
But they had survived, and they had found a certain truth—if not the total truth. No one would really know what had happened on the pirate ship—and man might never really know what had caused hundreds of years of wild weather and strange occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle.