Three Fates Read Free Page A

and out of consciousness. But it was better than drowning.
     
     
    IT WAS THE cold that brought him out of the faint. His body was racked with it, and every trickling breeze was a new agony. Hardly daring to move, he tugged at his sopping and ruined steward’s jacket. Bright pain had nausea rolling greasily in his belly. He ran an unsteady hand over his face and saw the wet wasn’t water, but blood.
    His laugh was wild and shaky. So what would it be, freezing or bleeding to death? Drowning might have been better, after all. It would be over that way. He slowly shed the jacket—something wrong with his shoulder, he thought absently—and used the ruined jacket to wipe the blood from his face.
    He didn’t hear so much shouting now. There were still some thin screams, some moans and prayers, but most of the passengers who’d made it as far as he had were dead. And silent.
    He watched a body float by. It took him a moment to recognize the face, as it was bone-white and covered with bloodless gashes.
    Wyley. Good Christ.
    For the first time since the nightmare had begun, he felt for the weight in his pocket. He felt the lump of what he’d stolen from the man currently staring up at the sky with blank blue eyes.
    “You won’t need it,” Felix said between chattering teeth, “but I swear before God if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have stolen from you in the last moments of your life. Seems like robbing a grave.”
    His long-lapsed religious training had him folding his hands in prayer. “If I end up dying here today, I’ll apologize in person if we end up on the same side of the gate. And if I live I take a vow to try to reform. No point in saying I’ll do it, but I’ll give doing an honest day’s work a try.”
    He passed out again, and woke to the sound of an engine. Dazed, numb, he managed to lift his head. Through his wavering vision, he saw a boat, and through the roaring in his ears, heard the shouts and voices of men.
    He tried to call out, but managed only a hacking cough. “I’m alive.” His voice was only a croak, whisked away by the breeze. “I’m still alive.”
    He didn’t feel the hands pull him onto the fishing trawler called Dan O’Connell. Was delirious with chills and pain when he was wrapped in a blanket, when hot tea was poured down his throat. He would remember nothing about his actual rescue, nor learn the names of the men whose arms had hauled him to safety. Nothing came clear to him until he woke, nearly twenty-four hours after the torpedo had struck the liner, in a narrow bed in a small room with sunlight streaming through a window.
    He would never forget the first sight that greeted him when his vision cleared.
    She was young and pretty, with eyes of misty blue and a scatter of gold freckles over her small nose and round cheeks. Her hair was fair and piled on top of her head in some sort of knot that seemed to be slipping. Her mouth bowed up when she glanced over at him, and she rose quickly from the chair where she’d been darning socks.
    “There you are. I wonder if you’ll stay with us this time around.”
    He heard Ireland in her voice, felt the strong hand lift his head. And he smelled a drift of lavender.
    “What . . .” The old, croaking sound of his voice appalled him. His throat felt scorched, his head stuffed with rags of dirty cotton.
    “Just take this first. It’s medicine the doctor left for you. You’ve pneumonia, he says, and a fair gash on your head that’s been stitched. Seems you tore something in your shoulder as well. But you’ve come through the worst, sir, and you rest easy for we’ll see you through.”
    “What . . . happened? The ship . . .”
    The pretty mouth went flat and hard. “The bloody Germans. ’Twas a U-boat torpedoed you. And they’ll writhe in hell for it, for the people they murdered. The babies they slaughtered.”
    Though a tear trickled down her cheek, she managed to slide the medicine into him competently. “You have to