Blow Me Down (38 page)

“Oh, my God, we have to get you to shore. We have to get a doctor—”

Corbin laughed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Mind over matter, sweetheart, remember? It’s not that grievous an injury. All right, ye scurvy lot—on yer bellies, yer hands behind ye.”

One or two looked like they thought about trying to fight him, but evidently they had seen him fight earlier—I found out later that he’d taken out eleven men on his own—and opted for the sane route of surrender.

“Shouldn’t we check on Bart?” I asked nervously, glancing toward the dark hold.

“Now, why would you want to do that?” Corbin cut a bit of line free, using it to bind the hands of the pirates.

“Well . . . to make sure you got him in the heart. He could be down there loading up more pistols or something, biding his time to blow us to bits. Or he could be escaping.”

“He’s not escaping. He’s dead.”

“But how do you know for sure? You were on your side, and although I’m sure your aim is really good, you can’t know for a fact that he’s dead unless you go down and check.”

Corbin laughed again. I put such an unreasonable act down to loss of blood. “Amy, my love, feel your face.”

“Oh, Corbin,” I said sadly, rushing to his side. “My poor darling. This is some sort of dementia or fever or maybe it’s shock from the bullet—”

“Amy,” he said again, taking my hand to kiss my knuckles. “Feel your face. Right here.”

He pressed my fingertips to my temples. Rather than encountering the side of my head, my fingers touched a long, hard, thin piece of plastic that led to my ear.

“The glasses,” I whispered, dropping my sword to use both hands on either side of my head. I felt along my face, tracing the outline of the virtual reality glasses. “I can feel the glasses.”

“Aye. That’s how I know Paul’s character is dead. His control on the game has been lifted.”

“We can leave?” I asked, a feeling of joy welling up inside me. “The button right here, on the corner—all I have to do is press that?”

“That’s all you have to do to exit the game,” he said, smiling at me. “Go ahead, love. I know how badly you want to leave.”

Tears blurred my vision as my fingers found the button on the rim of the glasses, but something stopped me from pressing it.

Corbin stood in front of me, love shining in his eyes, bloody, black with soot, sweaty and dirty and covered in grime.

I’ve never seen any man so handsome. “You’re leaving too, right?”

“No,” he said, nodding his head toward the town. The fire had reached the outskirts of it, and I knew without a doubt that we would not be able to save it. “There’s still Holder and the townspeople to see to. I’ll help with them, first, then leave the game and shut down the server so Paul can’t do anything until I can run some diagnostics and figure out what he’s programmed into it.”

I looked from him to the bound bodies of the pirates who lay trussed up before us on the deck. I wanted out of there, but it didn’t seem right to leave Corbin with everything.

“Sweetheart, go ahead and leave.” Corbin pulled me into a gentle embrace, his eyes as bright as mercury in the lantern light. His thumb brushed over my lower lip. “You know I’ll find you as soon as I get things taken care of here. I’m not about to let you go now.”

“Good, because if you did, I’d just have to hunt you down and challenge you to another duel,” I answered, brushing my lips against his. “I love you, Corbin.”

“Sweet words from such a bloodthirsty—and bloody—pirate,” he answered, giving me a proper kiss. “But ones I’ll hold you to. Go along, now. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

I smiled. “Oh, what’s another half hour or so? Let’s go find Holder and my people. We have an island to restore, and a new governor’s mansion to build. And I’m not about to let just anyone do that! A captain has to have some standards, you know.”

He swatted me on my behind as I sashayed past him, but I smiled, happy, relieved, and so madly in love, I couldn’t possibly imagine how anything could ruin my happiness.

Sometimes I show a distinct lack of foresight.

—Ibid, Act I

“Are you ready?” Corbin asked two days later.

I looked around at the people of the town as they bustled around with the full extent of Corbin’s crew and the men from Bart’s that we’d rounded up and put to work. Hammers pounded, saws bit into wood, and voices murmured a happy chorus as the rebuilding of the town was well under way.

“I guess. Although now that it’s come down to it, I feel almost sad about leaving.”

He grinned at me. “And here I thought you’d be so sick of the world that you’d never want to step virtual foot in it again.”

I waved at Bas as he trailed behind Sly Jez, carrying a basket for her. Bas grinned back. Bran squawked and flapped his stubby wing at me. Everything was just as it should be. “Well, I’m definitely ready to get back to real life, but I don’t want to lose these people forever. You’re sure you’ll be able to save them?”

“I think so. I hope so. I don’t know the full extent of Paul’s customized programming, but I’m fairly certain we can remove it without damaging the program data. I’m getting a bit nervous about leaving him running loose out there in the real world, though, so if you’re ready, I think it’s time to return to reality.”

“Okay,” I said, putting a hand on my temple. It was a familiar motion—I’d taken to making sure the frames of the VR glasses were still there, but there had been too much to be done to actually press the little button that was now under my fingers. I took a deep breath and had one last look at my town and people. “Ready.”

“On three?” Corbin smiled as he reached up for his own glasses. “One, two, thr—”

The world swirled into a black vortex of nothingness for a moment, then slowly a blurry blob of color resolved itself into a familiar-looking logo blinking apparently in midair.

“Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game.”

Beyond the logo, the dim outlines of Tara’s laptop and my desk resolved themselves to my returning vision.

I was home.

“So? What did you think? You’ve been playing long enough to have made officer—did you do it?”

My hand shook a little bit as I raised it up to pull off the glasses. My fingers were stiff and sore, as if I’d been gripping the arms of the chair.

“Mom? You okay?” A shadow at the perimeter of my vision moved and turned into the familiar form of my daughter. I was so happy to see her after my prolonged absence that I wanted to jump up and hug her. “You look funny. What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you didn’t like the game!”

“No,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I liked it. It’s got a lot of . . . promise.”

“Really?” she asked, her face suspicious. I gave an experimental stretch, gingerly moving my tight shoulders before I tried to get to my feet. “Well . . . good. So what did you do in game? You spent a long time there. It must have been a couple of weeks or something?”

My knees creaked and popped like an old lady’s as I got to my feet, my legs stiff from the hours of incapacitation. “What did I do?” I asked, creaking my way toward the hall and the downstairs bathroom. I paused at the door to give her a wry smile. “Not much. Just took over Bart’s crew and governorship of Turtle’s Back, helped expose and destroy a villain, fought in a blockade, killed a couple of men, and fell head over heels in love with Black Corbin. I’m going to take a long bath. I’ll tell you about it later, after I’ve had a lengthy soak.”

Needless to say, Tara wasn’t going to let me get away with an exit line like that. She followed me into the bathroom and sat on the counter while I slipped into the tub with a grateful sigh for indoor plumbing and hot-water tanks.

“Shoo,” I said, closing my eyes in ecstasy as the heat sank into my stiff limbs, wishing I’d had the foresight to bring in a bottle of merlot.

“Not until you tell me everything,” she said, making herself comfortable on the counter. “And I mean everything!”

In the end, I told her everything . . . well, almost everything. I left out details about the nights spent with Corbin. I had thought about skirting around the whole issue of my feelings for him, worried that she would not react well to the idea of her mother having an interest in anyone but her father, but she surprised me. In fact, she seemed to totally gloss over the point of my romantic feelings, and focused on those she felt were far more important.

“So, if you marry him, does that mean we’ll be rich? And I’ll get to try all his cool VR stuff first, before everyone else? I could be like a beta tester! Do I still have to go to school if we’re rich?”

I opened my eyes to glare at her. “Whoa, hold on there, missy! First of all, no one said anything about marriage.”

“You married him in the game,” she pointed out. “You slept with him, didn’t you? So that means you have to marry him.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that sleeping with someone by no means meant they had to get married, decided that wasn’t a message I particularly wanted her to be receiving, and changed my answer. “Yes, I married him in the game, but we haven’t talked about what we will be doing in real life. There hasn’t been any time to discuss that yet.”

“You said you loved him,” she said, a familiar stubborn look descending over her face.

“Yes, I did. And I do. But no decisions have been made about how we’ll proceed from here.”

She frowned, twisting a strand of her hair. “You mean that he may not be in love with you outside of the game?”

Her words hit me with the impact of a Mack truck. Despite the heat of the water, a cold chill swept over me. “No, I—I just meant—sometimes people—you don’t think he is that sort of person, do you?”

“I don’t know him, Mom,” she said with shrug. “I just had a couple of e-mails from him, that’s all. You know him better than me.”

“I only know him in the game,” I said slowly, a wave of doubt crashing down on me. I hated to think about it, I didn’t want to think about it, but what if Tara, in her innocence, had inadvertently hit upon a truth? Everything I knew about Corbin was from the dratted game—what if he was a different person outside of it? “Sometimes people use situations like that to role-play.”

“Yeah. I like to be a pirate. I get to be all the things I’m not really. It’s cool.”

I thought about that for a minute. “Corbin likes to role-play. He’s a very good pirate.”

“Well, that makes sense. He made the game.”

“Yes, he did,” I said, the words falling from my tongue like little drops of acid. “And I know absolutely nothing about what he’s like in real life, outside of his pirate persona. He could be totally different. He could . . . regret some things.”

She eyed me as I sat like a frozen block of horror in the tub. “You’ve got a horrible look on your face, like you’re going to be sick. You want me to leave so you can barf?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” I was too miserable to make up my mind. My stomach had balled itself up into a wad of unhappiness and doubt.

“I’ll go,” she said, hopping down off the counter. She stopped at the door to give me an enigmatic look. “You’re always telling me I’m being a drama queen, but you know what? Now you’re doing the same thing.”

I made an outraged noise. “I am not!”

She nodded her head at me. “Yes, you are, too. I mean, why would he be any different outside the game? You’re the same person, right?”

My blood froze.

“Mom?”

“Er . . . I suppose I am the same. Mostly the same. Oh, who am I fooling? I was brave and witty and sexy and all sorts of other things in the game that I’m not in reality.” I waved the loofah around in a pathetic gesture. “He’s going to take one look at me in real life and know that my brain lied to him about the sort of person I really am.”

She rolled her eyes. “Man, and you say I exaggerate.”

“This is different,” I said, sinking down into the water, well aware that I was behaving moronically. But I couldn’t stop myself. “I have never really met Corbin. So much of an attraction between people is a chemical thing. What if we don’t mesh well? What if I’m not exciting enough for him? What if—”

“Sheesh! Get over yourself already! Why don’t you just call him and ask if he still loves you and all that stuff?”

“It’s not that easy,” I said, flicking the water, cold at the thought of what I would do if the real-life Corbin wasn’t as madly in love with me as I was with him.

“Doctor Tara’s Love Counseling Shop is now closed,” she said, leaving the bathroom, her voice drifting into the bathroom as she went upstairs. “Call him up and tell him you want to see him. It’s only a little after midnight.”

I sank lower into the water and thought about what my smart-alecky—but sometimes wise-beyond-her-years (she got that from my side of the family)—daughter said, and by the time the water had chilled to the point where it matched the coldness inside me, I had come to a decision.

“It’s up to the man to call first,” I told Tara on the way to bed. She was lying on her stomach on her bed, watching the
Friday Night Late Late Movie.
She made a face at me. “There are some dating rules that are inviolable, and this is one of them. The guy calls first.”

“This is 2005, Mom, not 1905,” she quipped. “Call him.”

I closed the door on her and went to my own room, sitting in bed while the two halves of my psyche battled each other. After a half hour of dashing, daring Amy struggling with worried, confused Amy, I finally gave up and reached for the phone.

Only to realize I didn’t have Corbin’s phone number.

“Hell,” I said, then got out of bed and peeked around Tara’s door. She was still up, on her cell phone with one of her equally night-owl girlfriends while she painted her toe-nails a repulsive shade of purple.