Tracked by Terror by Brad Strickland

like a part of him. “Well, anyway, we can’t sit out here all night,” he said to Betsy. “What are we going to do?”
    â€œRest a while and wait until dark,” she replied. “Won’t be long.”
    But it felt like hours and hours as the ship responded to the winds, the men trimming the sails sometimes within earshot but most of the time not. At last the light faded, the sky darkened and stars came out, and Betsy said, “Let’s go. Hold on to the book.”
    She was as sure-footed as a cat, and about as silent. They climbed over the rail, and she led the way through the darkness back toward the stern of the ship. Two men stood at the wheel, just behind the middle mast, talking about the weather. In the darkness a crouching Jarvey and Betsy slipped past without their noticing.
    At the stern rail, Betsy whispered, “Thought so. Here’s where we stay tonight.”
    A wooden lifeboat or longboat or something hung from two tall metal hooks. Betsy worked at the cords holding a canvas cover over the boat, tight as the head of a drum, until it grew loose enough for them to squirm underneath it and drop into the boat. The air trapped under the canvas felt humid and hot, stiflingly so, and Jarvey gasped as he crawled into the swinging boat. “Now what?” he asked. It was as dark as the bottom of a coal mine.
    â€œBoats like this generally have food and water stored in case the ship sinks,” she whispered. “Can you give us some light?”
    â€œHow?” he asked sarcastically.
    â€œYou’re the magician.”
    Jarvey clenched his jaw. No, as he had tried and tried to explain to Betsy, he wasn’t a magician, not really. Tantalus Midion, the evil master of Lunnon, had taunted him about that. True, people in his family were sometimes born with a talent for magic, just as they tended to be born with dark blue eyes and blond hair streaked with reddish tones. The magic missed some of them, though. Jarvey’s dad was as ordinary as a warm day in June, and though Betsy was a remote cousin of his, she couldn’t do magic either.
    And while it was true that magical things sometimes happened around Jarvey, he had no idea how to control them. But Betsy kept insisting that he should be able to perform magic. He growled, “Abracadabra, I want light. See? Nothing happened.”
    Betsy grumbled, “You’re not even trying.” Jarvey felt her fumbling with something and then she found his hand and thrust something into his grip. “Here, make one of those strange candles, like the ones in old Junius’s theater.”
    â€œWhat is this?” It felt like a short round piece of wood, not like wax.
    â€œDunno. It’s a wooden peg or something, felt it rolling around loose on the bottom of this boat. Turn it into a candle.”
    â€œI don’t know how!”
    Betsy was nothing if not stubborn, sometimes annoyingly so. “Try! You made that trapdoor slam shut! And you could make people not notice you back in Lunnon, when they were hunting you! Remember how those strange candles looked and felt. Then command that piece of wood to be just the same. Picture it. Imagine it.”
    â€œI might as well imagine a turkey dinner and a hot bath,” grumbled Jarvey. He tried, though. Holding the wooden peg, he visualized in his mind the candle he had taken from the sconce back in the theater. The candle had been lighter in weight, and the surface felt smooth and cool, not rough and splintery. The flame was a teardrop of cool yellow light. He tried to persuade himself that he was holding the candle at that moment.
    â€œYou got to say something, I think,” Betsy whispered. Jarvey took a deep breath, held it, and then said, “Let this be a candle.”
    He felt something, a twitch of power, or maybe the ship had just changed course. But the darkness didn’t lift.
    â€œYou want light,” Betsy said. “Not just a