Aruban Nights (Coastal Fury Book 19) Read online

  “We’ll be sure to be back before then,” I replied as I looked up at the boat. She was quite stunning, sleek and white with black accents along the sides. It was technically a yacht and a lot bigger than what we would have usually needed just to go for a dive, but since we needed something that could travel a long distance, the MJM fit the bill.

  “I’ll leave you to it.” He gave us one last smile before turning and walking slowly back toward the small building.

  “Let’s go,” I urged Holm almost giddily as I turned to step onto the boat.

  “You look excited,” Holm teased as he followed me on board. “You don’t even know if we’ll find anything. Wasn’t the X in the middle of the water? How are we supposed to figure out where that is exactly? It’s not like there’ll be a marker.”

  “Of course, I’m excited,” I replied as I set my diving gear down on the floor of the boat before walking over to the help to examine the controls. It was nothing I couldn’t handle. “And look more closely. There are coordinates.” I dug my phone out of my pocket and pulled up the image of the map before handing it over to him.

  “Really?” Holm exclaimed as he placed his things down before plopping down himself into one of the white leather chairs behind me. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Right here,” I replied as I stepped away from the boat controls to point out the tiny set of coordinates scrawled beneath the X.

  “That?” Holm asked as he squinted down at the phone screen. “Are you sure those are coordinates? Kind of just looks like a smudge to me.”

  “I’m sure,” I retorted as I turned back to the helm. “Well, mostly sure, anyway. I looked it up, and it matches the general area where the X is, near the northern Venezuelan peninsula. Just have some faith, would you?”

  “Sure, sure,” he replied as he leaned back against the seat, folding his arms behind his head. I ignored his skepticism as I pushed on the throttle and set off toward our goal.

  Holm and I took turns steering the boat for the next few hours. By the time we got to the general area marked on the map, it was nearly eleven in the morning, and the sun was high in the sky. If I used a pair of binoculars, I could just barely make out a small blotch in the distance that was the coast of Venezuela. To the naked eye, however, all I could see for miles around was clear, blue water.

  “So I’m assuming this is a shipwreck we’re looking for, right?” Holm asked as we changed into our dive suits. “I mean, I can’t imagine what else would be out here in the literal middle of nowhere.”

  “Probably,” I replied as I double and then triple-checked to make sure that all the gear was in good shape and functioning correctly. It was always incredibly important when one was using borrowed or unfamiliar gear, to make sure it was fully operational before you found yourself deep underwater where it would be too late to do anything about it if something went wrong. “Whoever marked it wrote ‘disaster’ next to it, so I assume something bad must have happened.”

  “Why would someone mark a shipwreck on a map?” Holm muttered as he likewise checked his gear. “There must be something pretty dang valuable on it.”

  “Or maybe the ship itself is valuable,” I suggested. “Maybe its captain managed to survive the wreck and wanted to come back for it at some point.”

  “Was that even possible a few centuries ago?” Holm asked as he sat down to get his fins on. “It’s hard enough to bring stuff up nowadays. I seriously doubt they had the technology to get anything off the ocean floor in the seventeen-hundreds.”

  “That’s a good point,” I conceded as I looked out over the water.

  “Just the fact that they managed to mark the coordinates is impressive enough,” Holm continued as he stood up and came to stand against the edge of the boat. “No GPS or Google Maps back then. Whoever made the map would have had to use a sextant, and that’s assuming that they did it correctly, and we aren’t about to go on a wild goose chase down there.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out.” I grinned at him before popping my regulator into my mouth. He did the same, and together, we fell backward, off the boat and down into the water below.

  The difference in temperature between the warm air above and the frigid water below the surface was shocking, as was the way that everything suddenly turned dark. Though some rays of light still managed to filter down into the water, our surroundings only got darker the deeper we swam.

  Nevertheless, I was immediately filled with a sense of contentment. I’d always loved diving. There was something immensely relaxing about swimming deep into the waters’ depths. When we were far enough down that we could no longer see by the thin rays of sunlight that managed to make it this far down, Holm and I turned on our flashlights.

  As we continued to swim further and further down, I began to feel less content and a lot more concerned. I didn’t see anything. That, on its own, didn’t necessarily mean that we weren’t going to find anything since it was possible that we just hadn’t come down in precisely the right spot. Nevertheless, anxious little thoughts began to needle their way into my mind. Maybe Holm’s remark about the mapmaker having made a mistake in marking the coordinates had been right. What if we were looking in entirely the wrong place?

  For about an hour, Holm and I continued to comb the ocean floor. We couldn’t stray too far from the boat for safety’s sake, but I didn’t want to give up and look elsewhere until we were completely sure that we hadn’t missed anything. I was about to give up and suggest that we should go back up to the boat and try a completely different spot when something finally caught my eye.

  I quickly whipped my flashlight back around to where I’d seen it. Whatever it was, it was big, far enough in the distance that I couldn’t make out what it was, but there was something there. I turned and flashed my light at Holm to get his attention before pointing toward the object in the distance. He nodded, and the two of us began to swim over to it.

  As we swam, I realized that the thing was a lot farther than I’d initially estimated it to be. Despite how long we swam, it didn’t seem like we were actually getting any closer. Of course, that meant that the thing was bigger than I thought, too, if I was able to see it from so far away. That, in turn, meant that it was almost certainly the shipwreck that we were looking for. There wasn’t much else that could be down here that big.

  As we got closer, my heart rate began to quicken as I realized that I was right. It was a ship, and a very old one, by the looks of it. What had once likely been quite the splendid vessel was now in ruins, its wooden hull badly damaged and deteriorating. Sea life had taken hold over the years, and now, the entire ship was covered in an assortment of underwater creatures and plants.

  It was pretty, in a way, but I couldn’t help but feel a pang of remorse as well. It was a shame that such a grand ship had met such a sorry fate here, all alone at the bottom of the ocean.

  While I stopped to examine it from afar, Holm ventured forward, likely eager to find whatever it was that had prompted the mapmaker to mark the shipwreck on a map. I followed after him, admittedly rather eager to find out myself. Just what kind of treasures had been lost when this ship had gone down so long ago?

  Half of the hull was just gone, either destroyed when the ship had sunk or simply eradicated by the passage of time. Regardless, it just made it all the easier for Holm and me to swim inside and have a look at what remained. I immediately realized that this had been a pirate ship because littered around the hold were crates and sacks filled with treasures.

  No gold and silver coins, but rather ordinary, expensive items that had obviously been pillaged. Silver candlesticks, dinnerware, pieces of jewelry, even lavish-looking dresses and other fancy clothes. They were all things that would most likely have fetched a pretty nice price back when they’d originally been stolen. Heck, they might have commanded a decent sum even today due to the fact that I would definitely consider them antiques had it not been for the fact that most of them were in awful condition.
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  I frowned behind my regulator as I examined the loot. Most of the metals were rusted and cracked, while the fabric items were tattered and falling apart, and that didn’t even include the things that literally had sea life growing on them.

  It was too bad. Whoever had made the map had obviously valued all of this stuff enough to want to keep a record of where it was, but it was obviously too late now. Still, just seeing these little pieces of history was fascinating, and I couldn’t bring myself to regret having made the dive. Even if we ended up going back empty-handed, it wasn’t every day that we got to have a glimpse into what the inside of an 18th-century pirate ship looked like.

  After spending a while examining everything, Holm waved his flashlight at me to get my attention. Once he had it, he pointed up with his finger to ask if I was ready to go back to the surface. I nodded in response. As cool as it had been to look around, I hadn’t actually found anything that I considered worth bringing back. Most of it would probably cost more in repairs and restorations than it would ultimately be worth.

  As we swam back out, I turned around to have one last look at the ship, and my flashlight illuminated something on the bow of the ship. As it did, I froze, my heart rate jumping to a frightening speed. My mind was reeling with what I had just seen, and I was almost afraid to look directly at it. I couldn’t just ignore it, though, and so I forced myself to turn toward it.

  For a second, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t possible, and yet, there it was. By now, Holm had noticed that I’d stopped moving, and he tapped me on the shoulder before putting his hands up in a questioning gesture. Of course, since we were underwater, I couldn’t answer. Even if we had been up on the surface, though, I’m not sure I would have been able to find the words to explain.

  I swallowed as I turned back to the bow of the ship. My throat felt tight, and I almost felt nauseous as I looked at the figurehead mounted at the front of the ship.

  The figurehead belonged to the Dragon’s Rogue.

  21

  Ethan

  I rushed toward the figurehead, brushing aside a tangle of ropes in my haste to get a better look at it. They crumbled apart beneath my hand, and I froze. If this really was the Rogue’s figurehead, then I needed to be a lot more careful in how I handled it. I didn’t want to accidentally damage it.

  There was no doubt in my mind about it either. This was the Rogue’s figurehead. It was incredibly unique, in the shape of a woman riding atop the body of a dragon. It was standard for figureheads to be carved in the shape of women. Superstitious sailors believed that the sight of a woman calmed an angry sea, but the dragon was definitely one-of-a-kind. Aside from the Rogue, it was incredibly rare to find dragon motifs on ships outside of Asia, where they were much more common. I’d seen enough renderings of the figurehead and read enough descriptions in the texts I’d managed to collect about the Rogue to be able to recognize it immediately.

  This was it.

  My first reaction was whole-hearted panic. I became so flustered at the thought that this was actually the Rogue, crumbling and decaying here in the middle of nowhere, that for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Regulators aren’t designed to handle hyperventilation, and panicking while on a dive was incredibly dangerous. Scared divers were known to suddenly rip their regulators out of their mouths in an attempt to breathe, only to end up drowning themselves in the process.

  A second later, I felt Holm’s hand on my shoulder. He was staring at me with a look of concern, and it was enough to ground me. I forced myself to take slow, calming breaths as I looked back at him.

  He slowly gave me a questioning thumbs-up sign in an attempt to ask if I was okay. I nodded, and he took his hand off my shoulder and backed away, shrugging and holding his hands up again to ask me what the heck was going on. I reluctantly turned back to the figurehead and pointed straight at the dragon before looking back at Holm.

  I could see him raise an eyebrow at me through his mask in confusion. I pointed again at the dragon and then watched as realization dawned on him, his eyes going wide as he looked back and forth between me and the figurehead with alarm. He looked as though he was watching a tennis match, and I would have thought it was funny if I wasn’t so distraught.

  Once I no longer felt like I was choking around my regulator, I forced myself to turn and swim back toward the main body of the ship. Now that I was past the initial shock and could think clearly, it occurred to me that this couldn’t be the Rogue.

  It was too small, for one thing. Though it had long since lost its sails, I could tell that it was short one mast and that the hull itself was shorter than the Rogue’s should be. With that in mind, I swam toward where the captain’s cabin would be. To my surprise, the door leading into it was still mostly intact. To my relief, it wasn’t red, like the Rogue’s.

  Of course, it was possible that the color had just faded or washed away, but coupled with the other discrepancies, I felt confident in saying that this was not the ship I had spent so long searching for.

  It’s not the Dragon’s Rogue, I chanted to myself like a mantra. I hadn’t just discovered my ancestor’s ship in a sorry and pathetic state off the coast of Venezuela, covered in coral and sea sponges. I turned to look at Holm, who had been following me around, probably to make sure I didn’t lose it again and panic and pointed up to the surface. He looked relieved as I nodded.

  We made our way back up together, slowly enough to avoid getting sick. After Holm’s bout with decompression sickness during our last case, we needed to be extra careful to avoid anything like that ever happening again.

  It felt like a lifetime later when we finally broke through the surface. I ripped my regulator out of my mouth immediately, drawing in large, fresh breaths of air. Despite having calmed down, my heart hadn’t stopped racing the entire time we’d been coming up, and it had taken all of my focus to maintain my breathing even and steady.

  “What the hell?!” Holm exclaimed as he, too, spat out his regulator. “I… What just happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied flatly as I started to swim back to the boat. I’d forgotten that we’d swum a fair distance away from it after we’d spotted the shipwreck in the distance. We swam side by side in silence, each one of us no doubt ruminating on what we’d just seen.

  By the time we got back to the boat, I felt a lot more at ease, though still extremely confused by what I’d seen. I pulled myself back onto the boat and fell back against the side of the boat, yanking off my fins as I did.

  “Okay,” Holm sighed as I sat down next to me to pull off his own fins. “You want to fill me in on why you suddenly lost it down there? You looked like you were about to hyperventilate.”

  “I was,” I replied as I unzipped the top half of my wetsuit. “I just… I was surprised.”

  “No kidding,” Holm scoffed. “I’ve never seen you act like that, Marston. It’s not like you to get worked up over stuff.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered as I thought back to my reaction down in the water. It really had been unlike me. I prided myself on being able to control my emotions, but even I was human. “The first thing that went through my mind was that this was actually the Rogue we’d just discovered, all broken and rotting away. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Yeah.” Hold frowned sympathetically at me. “So what exactly was that? Was it the Rogue or not?”

  “Not,” I replied resolutely. “Absolutely not. It was too small, and the shape wasn’t right, along with a few other things. That was the Rogue’s figurehead, though, which… just doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” Holm agreed as he slowly shook his head. “Do those things even come off? How did it end up on a completely different ship?”

  “They do come off,” I explained. “Though usually just for cleaning and maintenance, stuff like that. Sailors were really suspicious back in the day, pirates especially. There’s no way they would have gone out to sea without the figurehead. There’s no reason that it wouldn’t be wit
h the Rogue.”

  Unless something happened to the Rogue, my brain supplied traitorously. That, of course, was a possibility. It had been hundreds of years since it disappeared, after all. A lot could have happened in that amount of time. Suddenly my mind was reeling with all the awful possibilities. What if there wasn’t anything left for me to find of the Rogue, other than the bits and pieces that had turned up here and there up to now? Maybe the reason neither my grandfather nor I had been able to locate it was because there was nothing left to locate. What if the Dragon’s Rogue was no more, taken apart and scattered around the globe in pieces?

  “Maybe someone stole the Rogue from Grendel,” Holm suggested. “They might have stolen the figurehead and put it on their own ship. It is a pretty nice-looking sculpture. It’s probably worth a lot on its own.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I replied unconvincingly. It was an interesting notion, but one that didn’t actually make a lot of sense. If someone had stolen the Rogue, it would have made a lot more sense for them to just keep the whole ship, which was grander than the one down in the water.

  “Look, this doesn’t necessarily mean something bad,” Holm insisted in a clear attempt to cheer me up. I must have a pretty surly expression on my face if he could tell just how upset I was. “Look at it this way, you found a piece of the Rogue! That’s literally what you wanted, right? You can call Tessa and tell her about it later.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” I smiled at him. He was trying to be a good friend, but the truth was that I felt anything but elated about this discovery. This was no cannonball or a sack of coins. This was a major part of the ship that had, for some inexplicable reason, been ripped from the ship itself. Why? What did this mean for the Rogue?