CHAPTER 14: MOONLIGHT HORROR
The moonlight changed everything.
It streamed through cracks in the cave ceiling—natural fissures that had probably existed for centuries, allowing the Caribbean sky to touch this cursed place. Where that pale light fell, the pirates transformed.
Flesh stripped away. Bones exposed. Rot and ruin made visible.
Will made a sound—half gasp, half prayer. Beside me, Jack went very still.
But through my Curse Sight, I saw something worse.
The skeletal forms were horrifying enough in normal vision. Moonlight revealed what the curse did to their bodies—the decay they carried while unable to die, the wounds that couldn't heal, the corruption that consumed without killing.
But I could see their chains.
In the moonlight, the curse architecture blazed with intensity. Tarnished gold threads wrapped around each skeleton like binding ropes, emanating from their ribcages where hearts should have beaten. The threads pulsed with that same screaming frequency I'd sensed earlier—the sound of souls that couldn't rest.
They're suffering, I realized. Constantly. And they can't stop.
It should have horrified me. It did horrify me, somewhere beneath the analytical calm that had settled over my mind. But that calm was stronger.
I counted crewmen. Noted chain intensities. Observed which pirates had heavier debts, which had lighter. The information flowed through my supernatural vision like data on a screen, clinical and precise.
"Most men," Jack murmured beside me, "scream, vomit, or pray when they first see cursed men."
I tore my gaze from the skeletal horde. "What?"
"You're taking notes." His voice was barely a whisper, but the suspicion in it carried weight. "Looking at walking corpses like you're studying them for an examination."
My hands were trembling. I noticed that now—the physical fear my body felt even as my mind stayed cold. My fingers shook against the stone wall, and no amount of analytical calm could stop them.
"I process differently," I said. "Under stress."
"That's not processing." Jack's eyes caught moonlight, and for a moment they looked almost as empty as the skeletal crew's. "That's something else."
I didn't have an answer. Because he was right.
What am I becoming?
The thought flashed and vanished. No time for existential crisis. Elizabeth stood at the chest, Barbossa's knife at her palm, and the ritual was beginning.
"Blood to restore blood," Barbossa intoned. His voice echoed through the chamber with theatrical grandeur—a man who'd waited years for this moment, savoring every second. "The debt shall be repaid."
Elizabeth's face showed controlled terror. She was brave—that was clear. Brave enough to lie about her name, brave enough to face walking corpses without screaming. But she was also afraid, and she had every right to be.
The knife drew across her palm. Blood welled—red and ordinary in the moonlight.
Through my Curse Sight, I watched the chains react.
They strained. The golden threads connecting every cursed pirate to the chest went taut, vibrating with anticipation. The debt-counters flickered. Something was happening—the curse was responding to blood, to the ritual, to the accumulated weight of a decade's desperate hope.
Elizabeth's blood dripped onto a golden coin. The coin dropped into the chest.
The chains—
Held.
Nothing changed.
I watched as the curse architecture settled back into its patient configuration. The debt-counters remained unchanged. The golden threads relaxed from their straining tension, returning to the endless pulse of supernatural obligation.
The blood was wrong.
Barbossa stood frozen, staring at his skeletal hands. Still bone. Still cursed. Still damned.
"What is this?" His voice rose from theatrical to furious. He grabbed Elizabeth's wrist, yanking her toward him. "What trick is this?"
"I don't—I don't understand—"
"Turner blood!" Barbossa roared. "We needed Turner blood! Bootstrap Bill Turner's blood!"
Elizabeth's face went pale.
"I... I never said I was a Turner."
The silence that followed was worse than the screaming.
Barbossa's grip shifted from her wrist to her throat.
"Then what are you?"
Will moved before anyone could stop him.
He burst from cover with sword drawn, charging toward Elizabeth with the single-minded determination of a man who would die for love. The cursed crew reacted instantly—crossbows raised, swords drawn, skeletal hands reaching.
"Will, no!" Elizabeth's scream.
My precognition screamed at the same moment. Danger—multiple directions—crossbow bolt from the left—
I grabbed Jack and yanked him sideways. The bolt hissed past, close enough that I felt the wind of its passing.
"Bloody—" Jack started.
No time to explain. More bolts. More danger. Will was in the center of the chamber now, surrounded by cursed pirates who couldn't be killed.
"Hold!" Barbossa's command cut through the chaos. His crew froze mid-strike, weapons raised but waiting. "Hold, I said! Nobody kills anyone until I understand what's happening here!"
Will stood with his sword raised, Elizabeth behind him, facing a circle of undead pirates.
Jack raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.
"Captain Barbossa! Long time no see. You're looking... well preserved."
Barbossa's skeletal face turned toward us—toward the shadows where we'd been hiding. His empty eye sockets somehow conveyed fury.
"Jack Sparrow. Of course." He gestured with his knife. "Bring them. All of them."
The crew moved.
Fighting was pointless. I knew it, Jack knew it, even Will knew it. You couldn't kill men who were already dead. You couldn't wound creatures that felt no pain.
We surrendered.
Rough hands grabbed me—cold, some of them, bone without flesh. My knives were stripped away. The copper medallion stayed hidden under my shirt, overlooked in the search.
Rope burned around my wrists as they bound us. A small, ordinary pain among the supernatural horrors.
But my Curse Sight stayed active, and as they dragged us toward the treasure platform, I could see every chain, every debt, every link in the architecture of damnation.
Barbossa studied his new prisoners with hungry calculation. His skeletal gaze moved from Jack to Will to me to Elizabeth.
When it stopped on Will, something shifted.
"Turner blood," Barbossa murmured. "We need Turner blood."
His hollow eyes examined Will's face.
"You," he said slowly. "What's your name, boy?"
Will's jaw tightened. "Will Turner."
Barbossa's lipless mouth stretched into something that might have been a smile.
"Turner." He savored the word. "Any relation to a one William Turner? Called Bootstrap?"
The curse-chains in my vision pulsed with sudden, hungry intensity.
Will's face told the truth before his words could.
"He was my father."
Barbossa laughed—a sound like bones rattling in a grave.
The real blood had been found.
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