AN: Hey guys! I edited out the little errors from this chapter that I noticed when I reread it. I wrote it in a program that didn't have spellcheck, so I missed some spelling errors. :o)
Chapter One – Dread
Elizabeth Turner closed her eyes and leaned into the wind, smiling as it caressed her face and scattered her unbound hair. The past six months of her life had been a dream of happiness, a dream come into being, coalesced into flesh and blood. Into Will.
She opened her eyes and looked out at the sparkling cerulean waters of the Caribbean. Will. His shy charm, his loyalty, his bravery, and the way he looked at her, like she was an unfathomable treasure, dropped from the heavens. The encompassing love he saw in those earnest blue eyes sometimes caused her heart to squeeze with something akin to pain. Lately, she woke gasping some nights, with the choking feeling that no time remained for them, that Will would be snatched away and she left behind, bereft, with her empty arms outstretched in supplication. She would be sweating from terrible dreams that she couldn't for the life of her remember. In the dark, they would threaten to crush her...but she would settle next to her husband, one hand entwined in his and the other cradling the new life growing within her, and drift back into slumber.
Now, with the sun on her face and the bright freedom of the ocean surrounding her on all sides, the episodes she had been having for the last month seemed unreal and distant, and she dismissed them for the hundredth time as yet another of the emotional upheavals of her condition. She remembered the first month of her pregnancy with a wry smile, the alternating dramatic rages and maudlin weeping that had left will nonplussed and cautious. Now, as she was passing into her fourth month, the emotional pendulum had stopped swinging so far—and her nausea had also subsided, thank God—and all she felt was a pressing, irrational dread at 3 o'clock in the morning, banished by the reaching rays of the sun.
She heard the sound of booted feet on the deck behind her and turned her head to see Will. "So Mrs. Turner, what do you think? Does it pass your lofty standards?" He spoke of the medium-sized pleasure vessel they traveled on, a beautiful boat gleaming with new paint, her name in swooping letters on the side: The Lady Swann. They were taking a holiday on its maiden voyage, christening it with their blossoming love, which seemed to them to beautify everything it touched.
She grinned at him. "I think it'll do, Mr. Turner." She nudged him playfully, her eyes softening as she remembered the unveiling at Port Royal the previous evening, the surprise he had been so mysterious about for the past few weeks. Her birthday present. She almost hadn't wanted to look at it, so entranced was she by his face, excited anticipation and nervousness dancing across his handsome features. He had had to gently turn her chin with his finger, and she had gasped at the sight. It was red and white, sails snowy and graceful, decks polished to a gleaming chestnut. Now, as she stood at the rail with her husband's hand resting lightly around her waist, she felt tears prick the backs of her eyes anew at how much he loved to make her happy. She didn't deserve such unconditional regard—it was too much.
Suddenly, a shout went up from their captain. Turning quickly to where he stood, the Turners saw a ship flying across the water towards them, impossibly fast. A ship with huge black sails, and a billowing black flag with a skull and crossbones insignia.
Elizabeth felt a chill reach into her with icy fingers, unconsciously bringing up both hands to cover her slightly rounded abdomen. She and Will might be friends with Jack Sparrow and his ragtag band of buccaneers, but they were not ignorant of the threat of pirates on the open seas. And here they were, on a pleasure boat, dwarfed by the ominously massive pirate ship. Weaponless.
It was over almost before her mind could process what had happened. The black-sailed ship anchored next to the Lady Swann and fired cannonballs repeatedly into her graceful flanks. The beautiful boat splintered, and began to ride lower in the blue waters, a broken bird. Enraged at the destruction of the emblem of his love for Elizabeth, Will rashly drew his sword and advanced to where the pirates were lightly leaping onto the rapidly filling boat, body rigid with anger.
"Will!" Elizabeth cried out when she recognized his intent, cold with fear. "Will, no, it isn't worth sacrificing your life for!" He appeared not to hear her, apparently deaf with fury and the burning need to obliterate the threat to his family, however hopeless his chances of success.
Elizabeth's shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth in despair. He wasn't going to hear her, lost as he was in his own anguish. The tanned, dirty pirates were upon them in the next breath, the Turners' harmless captain motionless and bloody on the deck, Will fighting their leader, a dangerous-looking man with hair bleached almost silver by the sun and a large mole on his dark cheek. For a moment it seemed Will's superior swordsmanship would carry them through as he fended off one man, then two, but soon, all five of them converged on him, fighting dirty as pirates do. Elizabeth forgot to breathe as her fell unconscious to their feet, bleeding in three places. She looked on in desperation, mind blank with horror. That familiar dread rose up in her again, stronger than ever before, and she was sick with the dizzy certainty that she should have taken it seriously.
The blond pirate turned around then, seeing Elizabeth, and a smile twisted his cruel mouth. "Well then, what have we here? Quite a little tidbit, aren't ye lass?" She flinched at this reminder of the same word issuing mockingly from Barbosa's lips. She had the sinking feeling that the two were alike in more ways than one.
He advanced on her with danger in his dark eyes, taking in her beautiful face, her loose hair and her slim figure in chilling appraisal. His gaze stopped at her hands, which clutched her stomach with a desperate grasp now, and cocked an eyebrow. "What's this, Tidbit? Carryin 'is brat, are ye?" he said in a mockingly pleasant tone of voice. Stomach clenching with sudden foreboding, she watched him like a cornered mouse watching a cat, breath frozen in her throat. He laughed barkingly and turned away from her without another word and called to his crew members, who had been searching fruitlessly for valuables, to get back to the ship "and bring the Tidbit." The shattered Lady Swann was sinking rapidly under the combined weight of eight people.
The pirates' leader walked over to the Turners' captain, taking out a wicked-looking dagger, and casually slit the unconscious man's throat. Elizabeth fought the urge to retch, and stared in terror as he nimbly picked his way to where her husband lay. Just before he crouched down, Will stirred and opened his eyes, cloudy for a moment and then panicked, sitting up and looking for her. Their eyes met. "Elizabeth—" he gasped out. His body jerked as he was impaled on his own sword from behind, his life fading almost immediately and his gaze becoming empty. He slumped over.
The silver-haired pirate rose, taking the sword with him and admiring the craftsmanship of the dripping red blade. "Think I'll keep this," he murmured as if he was having afternoon tea with his mum. He glanced up at Elizabeth then with his cruel eyes, and seeing her expression smiled with too many teeth. But she barely noticed, her attention frozen on the boy she had loved since childhood, the man she had been married to for six short months, hunched over in a pool of bloody water. A violent rage rushed up inside her, blinding her staring eyes as they leaked tears down her pale cheeks.
She was jerked forward without warning, a rough hand on her arm. Someone threw her over to the pirate ship before she had time to react, where she landed hard on the deck. She stood slowly and turned to look at the Lady Swann as she filled completely with seawater. The bodies of Will and the captain were no longer visible. She watched, transfixed against her will, as her smashed birthday present sank and disappeared under the water, until there was only the sea, brilliant and beautiful and endless.