HEART'S REVENGE Excerpt: From Chapter 12

Standing on the catwalk at the top of the lighthouse, Ella tried to stay calm. If someone was coming up to them, they’d surely hear them creeping up on the unattached metal stairs. She was already putting together a cover story for the local authorities, something about how she’d needed to see the island at night, from the lighthouse. For her research. Mitch reached his arm around her, and she resisted at first, and then leaned into him.

“Someone’s messing with us,” he said. “We’ll just wait them out and then get the hell out of here.”

Ella hoped he was right. She listened hard for the creak of stairs, but there was nothing. Instead of being able to relax, though, she felt even more panicked. Her eyes kept returning to the strangely pulsing lights of Teach’s Hole Channel. She thought of Mitch’s stories about finding the shipwreck, as if the lights had led him to it, and his nightmare about the hand reaching up from the water and pulling him in, dragging him under the depths.

She looked away, trying to reassure herself that she was imagining all of this, when she saw the channel called Teach’s Hole. The flickering white lights had spread and transformed into a blood-red fire.

“Look,” she said. “Blackbeard’s channel is burning.”

When she squinted to try and see more clearly, she saw what may have been the outline of a burning ship. The ship was headed south, toward the inlet. The lights began to shift back to white.

“Blackbeard?” Mitch whispered.

And then the night went black as something blocked her vision. A cannon exploded in her ears as Mitch and Ella both pressed themselves back against the lighthouse, away from the shadow in front of them.

Ella tried to aim her flashlight onto the shadow, but all she could see was blackness. But it was blackness in the shape of a man. And the man was headless.

Oh no, she thought. Not again.

“Aye,” the shadow growled, the sound coming from somewhere inside the space where the man’s chest would have been. “ ‘Tis me again. An’ the two of ya been makin’ enough noise to wake the dead.”

Ella’s fingers went numb at the sound of that impossible voice. She dropped her flashlight, and it clattered down the side of the lighthouse and smashed onto the pumping house next to the tower.

“So tell me,” the shadow said, floating five feet next to the balcony where Ella and Mitch were cowering. “What do ye be needin’, on this night blacker’n my soul, from ol’ Teach?”

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