A/N: This was my contribution to the Sun Kissed fantasy anthology. Having fun with this so want to continue it here. Look forward to your thoughts! Beautiful cover by the talented Lucy Rhodes.
Captain Mad Mo and her ragtag band of scoundrels were the most fearsome crew of thieves, murderers and seducers to ever fly the open skies. In the five years The Siren and its company had terrorized the airspace above the Barbary Coast, they had never once been grounded by an enemy ship, though the same couldn't be said for their enemies. And between the lot of them, they had enough magical firepower to destroy an entire city.
Mad Mo did abide by a moral code of sorts, and she held her crew to it: they didn't kill unless they had to, they didn't steal from those who could ill afford it, and if one of her men got a girl with child, they'd do the right thing by her and make an offer. Oh, and if the crew ever dared lie or steal from Mad, she took a finger—sometimes two. A few of her more impressionable men believed she kept the fingers as mementos in the lockbox beside her bed in her private quarters. A little fear was a good reinforcement to the bonds of loyalty, Mad found, and she'd never bothered to dispel the rumor.
Only her First Mage and her Engineer knew the truth: that all of this raiding and marauding was a cover. Everything she'd done—who she'd become—was all for Pippa, and the blackguard who stole her from their family. She'd fly the skies for all eternity, burn cities to the ground—whatever it took to find her beloved baby sister.
Five years since Lady Morgan Strand became Mad Mo, pirate queen and rogue mage—five years of searching for any hint of her sister—and finally, finally she'd found a clue.
It was a French slaver ship, sleek and built for speed, but large enough to hold a dozen or more captives, in addition to the ship's crew. Lightning, Her First Mage, sensed it a mile off the coast of France, hiding behind the clouds. Mad recognized it at once. L'Etoile. The same airship that had carried away Pippa.
And yet, somehow, what should have been the biggest stroke of luck in five long years became an unmitigated disaster. Before she could organize a raid, The Siren was commandeered—and, in what would no doubt become a permanent source of humiliation for Mad, without using the slightest hint of magic.
She was still groggy when she woke up in unfamiliar surroundings, a hot, stuffy boiler room that smelled faintly of sawdust and burnt aether. The propulsion machinery and double-ended boilers were newer than The Siren's, and the carburetor was designed for a nonmage crew. Old, extraneous parts were strewn about the room, in varying states of rust and disrepair. She went to rub the grit from her eyes, only to find her hands bound and her arms tied around the back of the chair behind her. She tested the ropes. Too tight to wriggle her way out of.
Whoever her captors were, they were smart. If they'd stashed her anywhere else, she'd have burned the ropes away. But the boiler room was highly flammable; one burst of her magic and she'd incinerate the entire airship, herself included. Some fire mages had the precision to burn a single thread of rope, but Mad wasn't a fire mage. Her magic was ten times as hot, and twenty times deadlier.
She wasn't alone; her Enforcer was tied up to one of the exhaust blowers. His eyes were closed, his head drooping against his chest, which, Mad was relieved to see, rose and fell in even breaths. Idly, Mad wondered how they'd managed to bring him on board. He was a behemoth, so large The Siren's Engineer had to factor in his weight in making their flight calculations.
"Angus!" she hissed.
The big man stirred, raising his head slowly. His green eyes lit when he saw her. "You're alive. I thought they might've killed you."
"I'm not easy to kill, as you well know." The first time she'd met him, he'd tried to put a bullet through her. She'd melted his gun—and most of his right hand—before he'd had the chance. After he'd recovered some months later, he'd asked her for a job, bringing the head of the man who'd hired him to off her. Deep down, Mad had a soft heart, and she felt bad about his ruined hand. She'd offered to take him to a Body Mechanic, who could build him a new one made of aether-wrought metal, but he'd refused. Angus was from Fife, where the last witch trial had seen a mage burned at the stake less than fifty years ago. Magic made him uncomfortable. Instead, he wore a prosthetic that relied on gears and springs. He was still a damned good Enforcer, overseeing the security of The Siren with a literal iron fist.
"How did this happen?" she asked him.
"I-I-I do not know," Angus stuttered, pronouncing the words like a proper Scotsman. I doona noo. "Me 'n Wolfe were guarding the gangways, and we didn't see anything."
"Who was watching the wings?"
Angus' ruddy face flushed redder. " 'Twas supposed to be Smith and Luther."
"Supposed to be?"
He seemed to struggle with the answer. "Smith's been missing since this morning. I went to look for him as soon as I discovered he wasn't at his post. Couldn't find him anywhere, so I went to check the hangar. One of the gliders was missing."
Damn it, she'd liked Smith. He was new to The Siren, but seemed a good sort, if a bit overeager. He couldn't be more than twenty, with blond curly hair that made him look rather cherubic. And now she'd have to kill him. "Do you think he was a nose from the start?"
Angus shrugged his big shoulders. "Couldn't say. It's possible he was bribed when we were parked at Saint Tropez."
Mad made a face. "Let's hope it's the former." A spy she could respect, but not a traitor. "Did you see if our captors took anyone else from The Siren?"
Angus broke into a grin. "They got the Terrible Twosome."
Mad chuckled, despite the gravity of their situation and a throbbing headache. "Cheese and crust. Our captors are the ones in need of rescue." The twins were nothing alike: Jasper was a fire mage, with a matching temper, and James had a calm, cool disposition, bordering on cold, much like his ice magic. Instead of clashing, they balanced each other perfectly, their minds working together in devious ways. Nobody, not even Mad, was safe from their pranks.
She sobered quickly. "Did they get any of the others?"
Angus' lips thinned. "They got Lightning. Knew what he was too. Last I saw him he was covered head to toe in mud."
Mad was seldom shocked, but she was shocked now. Mud was one of the few things that could nullify a weather mage—a weakness that wasn't widely known outside the Magicians' Council. She had hoped they were dealing with simple slavers, but this cast serious doubt. "Our captors—did you see them?"
"They knocked me out before I could get a good look at them," he said, sounding disgusted with himself. "Last I remember is a hand covering my face and smelling something sweet—and then nothing till you woke me here."
She wrinkled her nose. "Chloroform." An effective tool for wiping out an entire airship's worth of deadly assassins and powerful mages. Her estimation of their captors grew. The attack on The Siren wasn't an opportunistic coup; it was carefully orchestrated. Which begged the question why. No one knew of the connection between Mad Mo and L'Etoile, apart from Lightning and Silver, her Engineer. She trusted them beyond any shadow of a doubt. The only other person who might be able to connect the dots between L'Etoile, Lady Philippa Strand and Mad Mo was Pippa herself. Her sister would never betray her.
"What do we do now, Captain?" Angus asked.
One of the first things Mad learned about captaining a pirate ship was never letting on when she didn't know the answer. The captain always knew what to do, no matter what the circumstance. "I have a plan," she assured him.
She did not. Not yet, anyway.
The heavy door to the boiler room swung open. Mad and Angus exchanged a silent look, alert and ready for anything—as much as anyone could be, trussed up like chickens.
Footsteps clanged along the catwalk above them. Mad cocked her head, listening carefully. Three men, by the sound of it. They were brave, if they knew anything about her magic. Either that, or they'd banked on her valuing her own life more than she wanted to destroy them.
The footsteps changed their tenor, softer as her captors climbed down a ladder. She could only see them in her peripheral vision; her chair faced the other direction.
Another lesson she'd learned early on in her captaincy: never let the enemy know when they've got you cornered. So she pasted on a bored expression and said with as much ennui as she could muster, "About time you showed up. Did you bring that bottle of wine I asked for?"
Her words had the intended effect: She could hear them muttering to one another, confused and suspicious. Did you speak with her already? No, did you? She smirked. If nothing else, she had provided herself with some amusement.
"If you chatterboxes are done, come around where I can see you," she said imperiously. They obeyed, as men always did when she used her captain's voice, but her amusement quickly faded.
The infamous Mad Mo and the crew of The Siren had been bested by a bunch of bloody schoolboys. Clean-shaven and fresh-faced, her captors even wore matching uniforms.
"Are you really Mad Mo?" one of them blurted, his voice cracking like a prepubescent adolescent in his excitement.
Mad squeezed her eyes shut. She'd never live this down. "In the flesh," she said wryly.
Another boy, tall and gawky with a prominent Adam's apple, elbowed the first. "Shut up, Hugo. We're not supposed to speak to her."
Someone else was pulling the strings, then. She shouldn't feel relieved, but her pride was a sensitive thing, and the idea of these young culver-heads outwitting her was more than she could bear. Mad made a show of pouting. "You're no fun. Hugo, you can come and talk to me whenever you'd like." The poor boy flushed scarlet.
The tall, gawky one glared at her. "We're here for him," he said, jabbing his finger at Angus.
Mad eyed all three of them up and down skeptically. "Good bloody luck with that." They looked like they could barely lift her, let alone a man of her Enforcer's stature.
The one who hadn't yet spoken, a smallish lad with thick black spectacles, walked toward Angus and knelt beside him, working on the complicated knot that tied him to the exhaust pipe. Angus was deceptively quick, and as soon as the boy finished untying him, he made a lunge for his neck...and was slammed back against the wall.
What in the bloody hell?
"I wouldn't try that again," the bespectacled boy said calmly. He dusted off his knees and rose to his feet. "You won't get anywhere near me with that hand of yours." He turned his attention to the exhaust pipe, which Angus had bent out of shape. He twisted his hand, and it straightened. Only then did he allow himself to take a shaky breath, his hand visibly trembling.
"Well done, Elias," the tall one said approvingly. "Hugo, you're up."
Hugo was a bit on the plump side, and when his face screwed up in concentration, he looked rather like a squished tomato. He raised his arm in front of him—and levitated Angus off the ground. Angus, who hated magic, went white and promptly fainted.
Sometime in the not so distant future, Mad would find this hilariously funny. But right now, she was worried. Hugo was a clearly a strong kinetic mage—a much sought-after form of aether control, and hard to come by.
"I suppose you're a bloody Illusionist," she said to the tall boy, referring to one of the rarest forms of aether manipulation.
To her surprise, he actually answered her. "No, ma'am. I'm a Null."
Her heart dropped into her stomach. Nulls didn't have any magic of their own; instead, they neutralized it, absorbing the aether into their bodies, where it was broken down and released back into the atmosphere harmlessly. The most powerful Nulls could neutralize any magic within a square mile. If she tried to use her magic, he'd just suck it right out of her. Putting her in the boiler room was just an extra precaution.
It had been a long, long time since Mad had been outgunned. Angus floated in the air like a damned butterfly and was still passed out cold. Clearly deciding she posed no threat, the boys ignored her, floating Angus to the boiler room door and scrambling up the ladder after him.
The door slammed shut behind them. She was alone, tied to a chair, her magic useless. For the first time in five years, Mad Mo, pirate queen and the world's only known aether amplifier, had been rendered utterly helpless.
***