I heard a gasp slip out of my mouth. Jack circled an arm around my waist and I leaned in towards him. I just had to look at him for my racing heart to still. He was smart, he was sly, he was experienced and he could get out of anything. I knew this through experience. There had only ever been one situation he hadn't been able to slip away from. Only one thing he hadn't been able to outrun and only one thing that had beaten him. And I wasn't going to let that happen again. Not now and not ever. I looked into the darkness, searching for George. There was a scratch and then a flame sparked and fizzled into life. It flickered in the air, misshaping George's features and twisting them so that he didn't even look like himself anymore. He looked down at us in the silence from the top of the stairs. I tiled my head to look up at him. I felt compelled to say something.
"George…" It was as far as I could go. I didn't know what to say. The years that we had been friends flashed through my mind. We had had fun until everything had changed. I had changed, he had changed and now I had no idea who he was. I knew that somewhere inside him was the same person who had been with me through the lonely days when James was away and Elizabeth was busy either with her own family or later on with Will. It was that that was pulling me towards him. I still had ties to sever with him, bridges to burn. I couldn't finish that sentence because I didn't know how to. I thought about repeating what I had just written, but I couldn't remember any of it. The only words that could form in my mind were the ones Jack had written and I didn't think that would be at all appropriate.
"Isabel," he said coldly. "Where do you think you're going?"
"She's going home," Jack replied for me.
"This is her home," said George. I shook my head and my voice filled with such conviction that it came as a surprise even to me.
"No is it isn't. I have occupied this building, I have spent most of my waking and sleeping moments between these walls, but I have never really lived here. This place has never been my home. I belong on the Pearl, I belong with Jack."
George's laugh sent a cold shiver racing up and down my spine. "Not if he's dead you don't."
"You won't kill him," I said. I sounded more sure than I felt. My sweating palms and quickening heartbeat were testimony to that. I hoped that I was right, something in his eyes that made me think otherwise.
"Why wouldn't I?" he challenged.
"Because I know that if you care about me in the same way that I care about you you, then you wouldn't want to make me unhappy. I love Jack and if you kill him, there is no way I will stay with you."
"You will," he said. I prayed that his assumed certainty was as false as mine. "I will find you and bring you back."
"But you can't keep me. I'll just keep leaving; you might as well let us both go now." I said, trying to sound as reasonable, but feeling pretty desperate at the same time. "What would you do, you couldn't just lock me up."
"I could," he argued. "If that's what it takes. I need this. I need this promotion."
I shook my head at him. "You wouldn't…"
"I would. If you leave I will find you. I will find all of your little friends and I will kill them all. Stay and I may reconsider." His expression changed. I didn't like the change. "Now I think about it, I've just remembered that I brought this," He pulled out a gun. It glinted in the candle light. "What's to stop me from shooting him now?"
I tried to push Jack behind me. "Run," I whispered to him. "Get out of here."
"No without you," he said. And then he tugged me towards the door. We stumbled through it, ducking as a shot was fired blindly into the darkness. I heard it ping off something. I took that ping as a good sign. It meant that the bullet hadn't hit either of us. We ran into the dark. I kept a tight grip on his hand, making sure that he was still here, still with me. I didn't look back as we ran away from that prison of a house. I didn't want to know if we were being followed or chased. I didn't want to see if George was behind us. I pulled Jack into a dark and narrow street and we stopped.
"What are you doing?" he was breathing heavily. "We have to keep going! I've got a dingy moored on the beach- the docks were full."
"Go without me." I interrupted him.
"What?!"
"Go!" I shrieked louder than I meant to. "If you go now I can go back. He's going to kill you and everyone aboard the Pearl. I should stay."
"There's a way round it," he said. I shook my head.
"I don't want their blood on my hands!"
"It won't be," he said soothingly. "We can get out of this." I froze as there was a shout in the dark. The words were undistinguishable, but the voice was unmistakably George's. It was answered by another shout and then a few more. Jack took my hands in his. "I will kill him if I have to, but I'm not leaving here without you ever again, love."
I wasn't sure how I felt about Jack killing George. I knew that that would free both of us, but I didn't want to be responsible for the death of a friend. If it was someone I didn't know that James had married me off to, the idea wouldn't give me so much trouble, but George and I had a history. Admittedly it was a bad one towards the end, but that was not the way it had always been. I looked at Jack. "I love you," was all I said before we started running again. Jack's hand met mine in the air and our feet charged across the ground. We turned a corner and there it was. The sea.
I loved the sea.
It winked at me in the moonlight, teasing me with its perilous beauty. It didn't look calm and peaceful. It didn't seem to me to be lying dormant like it had for the past few months. It wasn't screaming for me anymore. It knew I was coming back and it babbled away happily, preparing to welcome me home. My feet skimmed over the cobbles, barely touching them. I was filled with such an adrenaline and euphoria I felt as if I was flying. It didn't matter that my heart was pumping painfully in my chest because that just meant that it was pumping my sea-enchanted blood around my body infecting every pore, every organ and every limb. The sea's spell was running through my veins. It had long ago got under my skin and seeped it's way into my heart, but as I had forced it to stay dormant for too long, not wanting to admit that, although it was not what I had been born as, pirate was in my blood.
Wind streamed through my fingers. It stung at my eyes and whipped around my body as if we were engaged in some kind of crazy dance. I could taste salt on my lips and feel my feet pounding on the ground. The gentle whispers and laughter of the sea were carried on the wind to my ear and dance around me. Waves broke on the shore, reaching up the sand to greet me, my heart leaped out to meet them. It hadn't quite got there before the sea pulled back, unsure as to whether or not I was finally going to answer their call. I was. I really was. Because no matter how treacherous the sea was I knew it was making one promise it could never, ever break. It was that promise I could taste and smell and hear above all other things. It was the promise of freedom. It rose up inside me the way a wave swells before it breaks. My feet were almost touching the sand. Just a few yards of street left.
It was then that the world began to shake beneath my feet.