Ciel thought that, all things considered, it was a very nice vacation.
That is, if one slightly omitted the details about reanimated corpses killing people on a sinking ship in the middle of a freezing sea with absolutely no one around to help for miles.
Ciel relayed all of this to Sebastian when the butler came around and asked him how he was doing.
"How the bloody hell do you think I'm doing?" he finished.
And in response to his rather riveting speech, the butler growled at him.
An honest-to-goodness growl. Not a human making a pathetic growling noise, but an animal-like growl—a very, very angry animal growl.
Sebastian was most assuredly not in a good mood. He couldn't find Eleanora and instead of looking for her, he had to run all the way to the front of the ship to save the young Master's precious gluteus, and when he had finally gotten there, his reward was a lecture.
He hadn't meant to growl—if his past self had known about it, he would have blushed in shame at behaving in a way not at all suitable for a Phantomhive butler. But he was under a lot of stress and panic and over half of his brain had been taken over his by demonic instincts, which were now telling him that if anyone bothers you, you give them a warning growl, and then you bite their face off.
Fortunately for Ciel, he recognized the danger signs and decided that the butler was not in a toying mood.
"Where's Eleanora?" he asked to quickly change the subject.
A flash of pain and fear swept over Sebastian's burning pink eyes.
"You mean you haven't found her yet?!"
Ciel also felt a surge of fear. Eleanora was a valuable asset to Phantomhive—not to mention, she was a good maid and an excellent conversationalist. He also realized that, should she die, she was the type to come back and haunt people from beyond the grave, which didn't sound very fun, especially when the ghost haunting you is a pissed-off woman with extensive knowledge of weaponry.
"Well, what are you going to do?" he asked.
For the first time since he had met Sebastian, he actually looked at a loss.
"I don't know," he said in such a small, quiet voice that Ciel almost started pitying him.
Then the ship lurched and he was snapped back to reality.
"Sebastian, you go and get Elizabeth on deck and into a lifeboat," he said, passing his fretting fiancée over to the butler.
Sebastian nodded and actually looked a bit relieved, as if glad that he could go back into his butler-role again.
"What will you do, my Lord?"
Ciel quickly checked his gun.
"Do you know if there's a…a storage shed for weapons? For…emergencies or something?"
"Yes, there's one down there a ways and then a right," Sebastian pointed. He had wanted to go and check there, too—just to see if Eleanora was there, or had been there…or…or…
His demonic instincts died down as he felt that he didn't really know exactly what to do. It was almost a new feeling—for centuries, he had always known just what to do. But now…
But he couldn't think about that now. He shook his head to clear out the dark thoughts while the young Master and the young lady were quickly parting, then he took Elizabeth up to the deck and didn't leave until she was safely on a lifeboat.
After seeing the lifeboat row away from the ship, he spent several minutes debating with himself on what to do. Normally, he would've been able to trace both Eleanora and the young Master by their contract seals, but with all this panic and confusion and muddling of souls, he could barely find the young Master, and even that was just because he already had a general idea of where he was supposed to be. Forget finding a needle in a haystack—finding Eleanora on this ship would be like finding a solitary strand of hair in a burning forest.
He sighed but still went back down into the ship, heading towards the third class, for the slight hope that he might at least see a sign of her—a hint that she was still alive.
Meanwhile, Ciel was having better luck than Sebastian. He had found a safe that contained ammunitions and artilleries, which normally would have been kept under strict lock and key, but someone had found a metal pipe and had forced it open.
Unfortunately, most of the safe had been cleaned out—there were hardly any guns or bullets left, but Ciel still managed to find several packs of bullets for his particular gun.
He reloaded the gun and turned to leave, when he suddenly paused and looked at the floor.
There was something glimmering in a spot of dried blood—disgusting, but the shiny thing still looked vaguely familiar.
He knelt down and picked it up to examine it further: a small, silver cross on a chain. He recognized it, however bloodstained—Eleanora always wore such a necklace. It was one of her few precious possessions.
The cross charm almost slid off of the chain before he caught it in time. He examined the breakage—he wasn't an expert, but based on all of the violence going around (and the twice-dead corpse lying a few feet away) he could only assume that one had attacked her and torn her necklace off.
For the first time in several hours, he had a strange feeling of desperate, rising hope. He had found Eleanora's necklace, which meant two things:
1) Eleanora had been here, which meant that she was still alive.
And,
2) She was armed, which meant that she could still defend herself, thus staying alive for longer (in theory, anyway)
Sebastian would be pleased.
He pocketed the necklace—she would be glad to have it back, if they both managed to survive this night—and then he went to go look for the idiot who had started this whole mess and his magical machine which would fix it all.