The Elementals: The Infernal Flames

Chapter 12 - A Pirates Life for Me

"Well, well, well..." crooned the somewhat intimidating man as he paced around his room, eyeing us up like he was a hungry grizzly bear, and we were an all you can eat buffet. "What to do with you?"

I was tempted to say, "not kill us, pretty please," but somehow, I figured that wouldn't end well. Instead, I fiddled a bit with my handcuffs and kept my trap shut. Not sure why I bothered to be honest, I guessed the cuffs would be dampened as soon as they were slapped on us and my sorry excuse of failing to summon a flame only hammered home the point. Then again, that might not be due to the cuffs.

I glanced to the chair on my right instead. Sheira sat bolt upright in her seat, wisely staying silent. Her braid had come loose in the scuffle, and there was a rip in her jeans from where she'd walked shins first into one of the satans' fun house walkways. I watched her eyes flicking around the room, desperately searching for a way out of this particular mess.

And what a mess it was. Just after hubris came along and bit us in the ass, the smugglers gently persuaded us off the boat with the stabby end of their harpoons which felt a bit like cheating to me. Who isn't going to listen to you when your punchline to an argument is 'suck it up or be skewered!'.

After getting prodded in the back one too many times for it to be an accident, we shuffled through the compound where seemingly everyone and their mother had showed up to glare at us from beneath those floppy fishermen's hats I used to think were hilarious when I was three (jeez, baby Nick had a weird sense of humour...you know what scratch that). All that was missing was a psychotic nun and a mad queen, and we were golden!

Somehow we made it through that unscathed and were then marched into a rickety shack that looked straight out of Evil Dead (or Cabin in the Woods, take your pick). In this terrifying local that was just one bone chandelier away from a horror movie, we were promptly shoved and locked into a room with two of the scariest looking dudes I'd ever laid eyes on.

Am I saying I would rather take on a screaming mad deadite right now? Why yes. Yes, I am.

The big guy, obviously the boss, was exactly what you're picturing. This big, beefy, sea weathered old man of the sea who, by my best guess, was probably in his forties despite looking not a day over a hundred, all crags and wrinkles in ancient leathery skin. He had this wiry dirty grey hair and matching beard that was clumped up with dried saltwater. The beard was the same colour as his battered trench coat, and everything he was wearing had been patched so many times I couldn't be sure if anything was the original material.

Wait a second...I know who he looks like! MR TWIT! That dude gave me nightmares when I was little. Don't know what it could have possibly been so scary about a dude who was fully prepared to eat four small children he found stuck in a tree. I guess we'll never know.

If we're going to stick with the Roald Dahl analogies and the boss looked like Mr Twit, then his second, another dude, was a dead ringer to dear old Grandma from George's Marvellous Medicine. He was short, scrawny, with a pointy face and a hairdo that looked like a dead rat. His personality wasn't far off either. From the five words we'd exchanged so far, the guy possessed what we in the business called a raging Napoleon complex.

Yet somehow, this rat-faced creep had a crocodile as his Beast (don't ask me, I have no idea). The boss had a raggedy seagull with mist rolling off its feathers, perched on his shoulder, staring daggers at his prisoners.

The boss leant back against his monster of a desk and eyed us up with a look that was twenty per cent curious, eighty per cent annoyed and a hundred per cent murderous.

Help.

"You break into my compound," he said slowly. His voice was raspy as a chain-smoker and creaky as a lifeboat in a hurricane. "You injure one of my men, and then you sneak around our private quarters like a pair of rats thinking you own the place. And that's not even touching on the fact that you tried to steal from us."