“They are going to miss us,” she said.
“Oh,” I think I managed to say. Made my ham turn sour right there in front of me.
She was right.
For the first time since I learned how to jump from place-to-place, I had gotten myself into a position where I couldn’t just teleport out at will.
At least not for long.
She was right. We had to go back.
Those cruise liners had this thing about counting passengers. Annoying, but logical.
So after breakfast, we both grabbed a couple extra coats and I jumped us back to our suite on the ship.
The suite was dark.
The only light came from the big sliding doors leading out onto the decks that were coated with inches of ice and snow.
The pitching had mostly stopped, now only a gentle rolling.
A lot of the room had been tossed around, at least everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor or a wall, and our suitcases and bathroom stuff had ended up in a corner.
That pitching had gotten a lot more violent after we left, that much was clear.
And the power was out.
“No engines,” Patty said softly.
She was right, the rumble that was a normal background noise for our first five days wasn’t there.
Only deathly silence.
And outside the window I could see a mountain shoreline and some very large waves crashing against rocks the size of large office buildings.
Right at that moment I knew that a lot of people, thousands and thousands of people on this huge cruise ship, were in deep trouble.
“Stan,” I shouted upward as I always did when calling for my boss, the God of Poker. “Bring the team. We’ve got a problem.”
TWO
Normally Stan would have appeared within a moment of me calling him, but since I told him to bring the team, that took him two very long minutes before he and Screamer and The Smoke appeared.
Stan looked like he always did with tan slacks, a tan sweater, and his hair cut short. You could walk by him a hundred times and never notice him.
Screamer, who got his name from being able to make criminals scream by planting images in their brains, wore a light t-shirt and sweat-pants. He clearly had been working out when Stan got him.
The Smoke wore his normal plaid work shirt, a dark lumberman jacket, and a wide cowboy hat. He was part human and part wolf and could walk through walls, among other things.
“You guys have a party in here last night?” Screamer asked, looking around at the mess and broken furniture.
“Bad storm,” Patty said.
“No engines,” Stan said.
Everyone stood for a moment in the silence and listened.
Then The Smoke said, “This ship cannot be allowed to ground into the rocks.”
I wanted to say, “No kidding,” but I didn’t, since The Smoke seldom spoke a sentence that long.
He moved to the window and pointed to the side of the mountains that seemed to loom very, very close. “This area is the sacred land and waters of the Frigid Women. This ship should not be here.”
I glanced at Patty, who shrugged.
Stan looked just as puzzled.
“Who are they?” Screamer asked before I could.
“Very old beings,” Smoke said. “Sacred.”
He didn’t elaborate and I had a hunch getting any more information out of him would be almost impossible.
I turned and glanced at Stan.
“I’ll get Ben,” he said.
“We’ll check out the bridge.”
He nodded and vanished.
I took the four of us out of time, stopping the rocking of the ship around us, then jumped all four of us to the bridge of the ship.
Patty and I had taken a tour of it during our second day on board. The tour was something that came with the more expensive suites it seemed. The bridge showed us that we were riding on a very impressive computer-controlled ship. Before the storm it had been a very clean bridge and a very nice Captain Craig.
I loved the fact that I had the power to take myself and others around me out of time. It felt like I stopped time, but I really didn’t. I just moved us between moments of time.
When we appeared on the bridge, the six people there looked like they had had a very rough time. One had an arm in a sling and another had a bandage on the side of his head. When we had been here on tour the crew all had on clean white shirts and ties, even the two women. All wore matching black slacks and black dress shoes.
Now the shirts were opened, the ties gone, the sleeves of the crew rolled up, and they all had frozen expressions of worry and fear on their faces.
All four of us spread out looking at what we could see, and to be honest, it wasn’t much. Some sort of emergency generator somewhere had some of the instruments running. But darned if I could read any of them.
All I knew is that the mountainside with the huge rocks looked far, far too close.
A moment later Stan joined us with Ben, the newest member of our team. Ben had been the God of Lamplighters for a very long time, but as that job faded and so did he and his powers, he spent all his time reading.
And he remembered everything he had ever read.
I had added him to the team to help us with the history of the world and the gods. He seemed to know everything about all of them, which had come in handy a few times so far. I was hoping it would this time as well.
He glanced around at the bridge and the frozen crew, then looked out the window at the mountainside and stepped back like he was in shock.
“This is sacred water,” he said, turning to me, the look of fear on his face. “This ship can’t be here.”
“It was caught in a storm, blown here.”
“Not possible,” Ben said, shaking his head. “That is not possible. It could not have happened. Something or someone pushed it here.”
Right at that moment I had a hunch that the thousands of people on board were quickly becoming the least of our worries.
“We need to find out what happened,” I said.
“Bring the Captain into the time bubble with us,” Ben said.
I nodded and moved over to Captain Craig and pulled him into the time bubble with the rest of us. Screamer could clear his memory if we figured out what was going on and what had happened.
For a moment the Captain continued what he was doing with a phone, then stopped and glanced around at us and his frozen crew. “Oh, thank the heavens,” he said. “Great to see you, Poker Boy. I was hoping that since you happened to be on this cruise, you would be able to help out.”
I started to open my mouth, then just shut it and glanced at my boss, who only shrugged.
Captain Craig shook my hand, then walked over to Ben. “Great to see you healthy, my friend. I had heard you had joined Poker Boy’s team. My powers were blocked here and I couldn’t call for help. I was hoping someone would notice what was happening. I even sent a Steward to your suite, Poker Boy, but you were elsewhere.”
Ben hugged him back, then turned to me. “This is Captain Craig, the God of Passenger Ships.”
Ben did quick introductions of everyone, then asked the Captain directly, “What happened?”
“We were attacked,” he said. “Under the cover of a made-up storm, they knocked out our engines, blocked my powers, and drove the ship toward these waters.”
I was about to ask the first of about a dozen questions when Captain Craig turned to me. “No ship is allowed within fifty miles of these waters without one of my people on board. We are supposed to never allow this to happen.”
He shook his head and went on. “Whoever did this knew I was on board and wouldn’t be able to call for help from my people if they could get the ship blocked.”
So I asked the first question I had. “Who would want to do this?”
Suddenly the room got a lot, lot colder. It was as if we had all been shoved into a very big freezer. Frost formed everywhere on every surface.
“Qulupalik,” a woman’s voice behind me said and I spun around.
A woman with long, white hair, pure white skin, and not an ounce of clothing on stared at me. Her skin looked like it was almost translucent. She had a fine body, but wow, getting close to it might mean instant frostbite.
Laverne, Lady Luck herself, dressed in her normal business suit, appeared next to me and bowed slightly to the naked woman.
As she did that, the rest of us followed her lead. But after only a few seconds in her presence, I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t already frozen solid.
“It is an honor,” Lady Luck said. “You are saying that the Qulupalik have left their area?”
“I am,” the woman said.
“May I ask why they would do that,” Lady Luck said, “and use a human ship full of thousands of human lives to attack your sacred waters?”
“I do not know the answer to that,” the naked cold woman said. “But this ship must not be allowed to wreck on our shores. I will take it to the depths before I will allow that to happen.”
“I understand,” Lady Luck said, bowing. “If you allow us time to rescue this human ship, I will personally discover why the Qulupalik have launched this attack. And make sure it does not happen again.”
“A fair bargain,” the woman said and I realized her mouth was not moving at all. “You have until the sun vanishes behind the great peak.”
Then she vanished.
And the room warmed by fifty degrees and the frost on every surface, including my nose, started to melt almost instantly.
I glanced out the bridge window at the sun. “Two hours,” I said.
“One hour and fifty-two minutes,” Smoke said.
We were still between instants of time, so for us time was not passing. At least that much was good. We could figure this out between instants and then move the ship in real time.
I had no idea how to move an ocean liner this big, but I was sure hoping someone did.
THREE
I turned to Lady Luck at the same moment Stan stepped toward her. She put her finger to her lips before either of us could say a word, then transported us to my office floating above Las Vegas.
All of us, including the Captain.
Outside I could see a plane frozen in mid-flight, so I knew we were still between instants.
“Nice place,” Captain Craig said, glancing around at my office that invisibly floated over Las Vegas and was decorated only with a large diner booth in the center. It had windows all the way around and today it looked like a typical warm day in Las Vegas
This place was a replica of the diner where the team used to meet and it was comfortable to all of us.
“What are we up against?” Stan asked.
Lady Luck didn’t bother to go sit at the booth like she usually did. Instead she walked to the edge of my office and stared out over the city. Only Screamer slumped against one of the booth seats. None of us sat down, which was very strange for this group in this office.
“The Qulupalik are a sea-dwelling race,” Lady Luck said, “and have been mortal enemies for all time of the Frigid Women, also a water-dwelling race. Both are ancient races that would love nothing better than to have the other wiped out. They have been fighting since the time of the Titans and the Giants.”
Ben nodded. “During the time of Atlantis, the Gods negotiated a settlement between the two races and humans, who were hunting both of them for sport. Humans are not allowed to be near their territories and they are not allowed to attack each other.”
“So,” I said, trying to make some sort of sense of all this, “pushing a human ship into Frigid Women waters brings all parties back into the fight.”
“Perfectly calculated,” Lady Luck said, nodding. “The Qulupalik clearly did not hide their presence and they knew the Frigid Women would not allow a human ship with all the oil and debris to clutter their sacred waters and shoreline.”
“Yet, if a ship is lost in that area,” Patty said, “millions of humans will flock there looking for it.”
Lady Luck only nodded and Captain Craig was looking pale and saying nothing.
I was feeling sick to my stomach, and that wasn’t left over from a rocking ship or breakfast. But I still needed more information.
“How could the Qulupalik move a ship that size?” I asked.
“They are masters of the wind and waves,” Ben said. “They are the only beings capable of moving a ship that size.”
Oh, wow, did I not like the sound of that.
For a moment everyone remained silent.
A very long moment.
Finally Lady Luck said, “I’m going to go talk with the Fates. They negotiated the first agreement. They might have an idea.”
And she vanished.
I made sure we were still between moments of time so none of our deadline was passing. I had a hunch we were going to need that time to move the ship once we figured out a solution.