Chapter 27

There were six of them, dark-winged, easily mistaken for moths from a distance.

Until, that is, they started screaming outrage from inside the barrel Cordelia had used for a trap.

“What are they saying?” Elizabeth inched a little closer to the barrel, then jumped backward when it gave an angry wobble.

“You don’t want to know,” Cordelia said. A common joke among monsterologists was that pixies had 567 words, and only three were appropriate for the dinner table.

Gregory was heartbroken when he returned and found the pixies already captured, and all the action over. But he cheered up when Cordelia asked him to help her with the transfer of the pixies into a birdcage Elizabeth had found in the captain’s berth, a sensitive operation that required precision and a strong tolerance of nibbled fingers.

Cordelia showed Gregory how to distinguish between the males and females by the color of the fur that grew all over their bodies, fine as silk. The males were much more vividly colored—in this case, blue and green. The females had tawny fur and beige-and-black-striped wings.

Gregory, it turned out, was a quick study. With no prompting, he had picked out the matron of the clan, identifiable by a secondary set of wings—plucked, no doubt, off the body of her predecessor—secured to her back by a chemical secretion that Cordelia’s father had never been able to replicate.

“Didn’t see the wings,” he said, when Cordelia congratulated him. “I just saw her shrilling all the rest of ’em around.”

Captain Wincombe and her skeleton crew—grown miserable after months of stumping around with nothing but solid land around them—agreed to set sail immediately, even though it was only an hour until midnight, and the weather was unfavorable. After they’d let out the sails and turned south toward Massachusetts, the crew got to work scrubbing the deck and chasing cobwebs out of the corners, cleaning out the berths, and driving the shadows from belowdecks with dozens of lanterns, smoking off their whale fat. Wincombe lashed the birdcage to an iron hook in the mess, narrowly avoiding a nip on the nose when she leaned in for a better view.

“Blow me from the ballast. Pixies.” Wincombe shook her head. “I thought pixies was just make-believe. Garden twiddle, pastel colors, you know.”

“You’re thinking of fairies,” Cordelia said, as the enraged pixies lunged for Wincombe, shrieking, gnashing their teeth. “And they’re totally different species. Pixies are related much more closely to bats, actually.”

Wincombe sniffed as if it didn’t surprise her. “Don’t like them, either,” she said.

She told them that the journey would take almost three full days, assuming there were no squalls. Cordelia simply prayed that would be quick enough. After a dinner of hardtack and oyster stew, Cordelia, Gregory, and Elizabeth settled down in one of the cabins. Icky curled up at Elizabeth’s feet and belched a quiet bass rhythm that underscored the slushing of the waves and the creaking of the ship as it rose and fell inside of them. Cabal, who’d made due with just a few drops of blood from the nearly empty pipette, snored loudly on his back. And the dragon turned lopsided circles in the air, testing out his wing, which was almost fully healed. His shadow turned circles with him, tripled in size across the ceiling.

It was surprisingly peaceful there, in the narrow room, with the wind singing in the sails and the waves rocking them to sleep and the creaking of the ancient wood.

Cordelia slept for nearly sixteen hours and dreamed of absolutely nothing.

The weather had held. The wind had turned strong. They would soon close in on Boston—and Cordelia’s thoughts turned to revenge.