Cordelia was disgorged from the slippery innards of the Troublemakers’ giant flesh-eating flower. She sprawled on to the deck of the Trouble, sticky with nectar and caked in thick yellow pollen.

Around her, the barnacled boots of pirates thudded down as they swung aboard their ship. There were triumphant crows and jeers. A sea-bitten pirate with his beard on fire lurched forward.

‘Hello, missy!’ he taunted. ‘Welcome aboard the Trouble!’

Cordelia scrambled to her feet, sparks from the pirate’s beard peppering her skin. Villains leered from every direction, all jagged teeth and seaweed-matted hair, eyes glinting with wickedness. Cordelia glared at the circle of ferocious faces surrounding her. Her heart pounded and her belly clenched, but she summoned her courage like she was calling a creature from the deep.

‘You didn’t keep your side of the bargain!’ she growled. ‘Let me go!’

The Troublemakers erupted into harsh laughter.

The Trouble jerked forward with sudden speed and Cordelia fell to her knees. She shot through the pirates’ legs, scrambling on slippery hands and knees to see Little Bear listing in the water, mainsail aflame. Her father was still trapped in the rigging, struggling in the grip of the dark seaweed, unable to save himself.

‘FATHER! SAM! GOOSE!’

Vulture-like birds circled the ship. Cordelia recognized them from a picture in a book she had seen. Their shrug-shoulder wings and sharp red beaks were unmistakable: Sun Eaters. She cried out as the first one swooped.

‘NO!’

She readied to throw herself into the sea, determined to swim back and rescue them all, but she found herself being dragged backwards across the deck. She came to a stop at the pointed red toes of Thorn Lawless’s boots and looked up into the fierce face of the pirate queen, whose eyes blazed with fire.

‘Don’t try to escape,’ Thorn warned, her voice like thunder far out to sea. ‘Or I’ll throw you to the Sea Dragon!’

‘Let me get back to my ship!’ Cordelia demanded, scrambling to her feet. ‘NOW!’

Thorn leaned down so she was nose to nose with Cordelia. ‘You’re coming with us,’ she growled.

Cordelia dodged round the pirate queen, but she was immediately seized and pushed against a mast.

‘No!’ she wailed. ‘They need my help! Please!’

She fought hard against pirates far stronger than her. But her arms became sticky and slow. Someone was wrapping a Clinging Silk rope round her with quick, light hands, lashing her to the mast.

‘All hands to the sails!’ Thorn roared. ‘Sun’s setting!’

Cordelia struggled wildly as the pirates dispersed, the rope getting tighter. She glanced down to see that it was not a person tying her up but a hairy spider the size of a dinner plate, wrapping its glistening cord round and round her.

‘GET OFF ME!’ Cordelia screamed.

The spider scuttled away up the mast to crouch at the end of a yardarm, all eight eyes shining gold in the fast-approaching sunset. Cordelia desperately tried to tear herself free, but the clinging silk was impossibly strong.

‘LET ME GO!’ she yelled.

‘Quiet, Hatmaker!’ Thorn Lawless snapped. ‘Or that spider will web your mouth shut for you.’

Cordelia swallowed her screams, and they boiled in her belly. She dared not make a sound; she could only watch, helpless, as the ship rushed along. The Trouble was being towed by a massive sea creature, its slippery body straining through waves that were thick with weeds. The beast seemed to be black and shiny, like living tar, the water seething around it.

Cordelia was aware of the Troublemakers crouched in the rigging, could feel their eyes peering down at her. But her own eyes were drawn like a magnet to the chilling sight ahead. Between the sunset-drenched blaze of sky and sea, a jagged black mass crouched on the ocean.

‘The Island of Lost Souls,’ she whispered.

She knew that once she was there, she would be unfindable. Nobody else had seen the island; her father and friends couldn’t even see it on the map! They would never be able to reach it.

Her heart fluttered in her chest like a trapped bird and her frightened voice clawed up her throat, trying to escape in a scream. She fought it back down, struggling helplessly against the web that bound her.

The sun was sinking quickly now, like last hopes about to be drowned. The island was almost upon them. Wails were borne on the wind, crushed between the grinding waves; waterspouts twisted up from the seething sea like conjuring tricks, towering above the Trouble.

They surged past a rock that spiked through the water, black waves crashing against it. A ridge of ship-wrecker rocks curved away across the weed-choked sea. Beyond, the ridge of the island rose, like a giant craggy spine hunched against the sky.

A huge skeletal archway, dripping spikes, reared from the water, the sunset blazing through it as though it was a mouth breathing fire.

‘Lightpath!’ a voice cried in the rigging.

The ship surged along a molten-gold path cast on the black sea, speeding towards the archway.

The pirates all howled triumphantly as the Trouble passed beneath the enormous arch. Cordelia realized the white spikes dripping in a line from it were massive fangs.

They sailed into the yawning jaws of a monstrous skeleton.