The breakthrough in the archives changed the air between them. Fear remained, a cold, hard knot in Frankie’s stomach, but it no longer held the shapeless, free-floating dread of the unknown. It had a name now. Blackmane. And it had a history.

  Armed with the name of the ship and a specific year, they ceased fumbling in the dark like lost kids. They became hunters, following a fresh trail two centuries old.

  Their hunt led them away from the cold, sterile silence of the library basement and into the cluttered, dusty warmth of the Norchester Historical Society. A small, homey museum housed in one of the town’s oldest buildings, the place smelled of lemon polish and old wood. Mr. Henderson, a silver-haired curator with an infectious passion for the town’s past, ran the museum. He was thrilled at the young people’s interest.

  “The Crimson Thirst?” Mr. Henderson repeated, his eyes twinkling with academic curiosity. He remained oblivious to the true, monstrous nature of their research. To him, this quest represented just a fun historical puzzle. “What a wonderfully lurid name! I can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in our records. And you say it vanished around 1788?”

  “That’s what the log said,” Ted confirmed, trying to sound like a normal student on a history project and not like someone trying to hunt a vampire.

  “Fascinating!” the curator chirped. “A wild time on this coast. Pirates, privateers, smugglers… a lot of ships vanished. If this Blackmane character proved as nasty as the log says, other ships would have reported him. Let’s look at the manifests.”

  He led them to a back room, even more cluttered than the main museum. Tall wooden filing cabinets lined the room, each stuffed with original shipping manifests and depositions from the late 18th century.

  “The official records,” Mr. Henderson explained. “Copies went to the crown, of course, but the originals stayed here. You face a task like looking for a needle in a haystack, I’m afraid.”

  He left them to their work, humming to himself. The juxtaposition jarred them. This gentle man helped them unearth a horror he couldn’t imagine, all while humming a jaunty sea shanty.

  Frankie’s new senses burned, each nerve ending a live wire. The dust motes dancing in the shafts of grimy light from the windows no longer drifted but swirled with slow, deliberate menace, their silent dance a premonition. The relentless ticking of a grandfather clock in the next room didn't just sound; it hammered out a steady, rhythmic countdown to some unknown doom, each beat a physical blow. A strange, metallic tang, sharp as ozone before a storm, permeated the air, emanating from the brittle, yellowed papers that surrounded them. These records served not as documentation, but as dire warnings, their very presence a chilling whisper.

  They started digging. The work progressed slowly, painstakingly. They lifted the fragile documents from their folders, the elegant, spidery script a challenge to their 21st-century eyes.

  For an hour, they found nothing but the mundane details of a bygone era. Lists of cargo—rum, textiles, spices. Names of crewmen long dead. Reports of weather and tides.

  Familiar despair crept back into Frankie. But then, Dee Dee made a small, sharp sound.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “I’ve got something.”

  She spoke in a tense whisper. Frankie and Ted rushed to her side, crowding around the document she had spread carefully on the table.

  The document held a detailed report, a deposition filed by the owners of a merchant vessel named the St. Elmo. And it described a pirate attack. An attack that matched the date and location from the merchant captain’s log. An attack by a ship with no colors. An attack by a crew led by a monster named Blackmane.

  “This is it,” Ted breathed.

  But as they read, the grim satisfaction of finding the proof curdled into pure horror. The details in this report proved far more gruesome than the brief, panicked entry in the logbook.

  The manifest listed the stolen cargo, but an attached, multi-page deposition described the savage violence of the attack. Frankie scanned the elegant, looping script, her mind struggling to process the archaic words.

  “…the pirates did not simply rob our vessel; they fell upon the crew as if wolves among sheep…”

  “…they fought not with sword or with pistol, but with a horrifying strength and speed, tearing at our men with their bare hands…”

  A wave of nausea washed over Frankie. A strange, terrifying resonance echoed through her. As she read the words, a dark part of her, the part that now craved blood, remembered it. Not as a story. But as a sensation. The tearing, the screaming, the gushing warmth…

  She shook her head, trying to clear the monstrous echo from her mind.

  Ted pointed a shaking finger at the final, horrifying paragraph of the deposition. The ship’s surgeon had written it, his handwriting shaky and full of horrified disbelief.

  “The most grotesque aspect of this tragedy,” he read aloud, his voice barely a whisper, “concerns the state of the deceased. I have seen men killed in many brutal fashions, but never this. They did not merely slay them. They left the bodies… drained. Drained of all vital humors. As if husks, left discarded after some monstrous feast.”

  Drained of all vital humors.

  The archaic phrase hung in the silent, dusty room.

  “Exsanguination,” Ted murmured, the clinical, modern word sounding even more horrifying. “They drained them of their blood.”

  There it lay.

  The final, undeniable proof.

  Blackmane and his crew acted as more than just pirates. More than just murderers.

  Vampires.

  The historical document ceased to be a record. It became a two-hundred-year-old crime scene report. The truth of it, the reality of it, struck them like a physical blow. The creature in the chest, the thing whose curse now rewrote her DNA, belonged to an ancient, blood-drinking crew.

  “One more page,” Dee Dee said, her voice trembling as she carefully turned the brittle document over.

  The last page contained a simple list. The names of the crew of the St. Elmo. Beside most of the names stood a single, stark word, written in the same spidery script: Deceased.

  Frankie scanned the list of the dead, a roll call of ghosts. Johnathan Price… Deceased. William Abernathy… Deceased. Samuel Thorne… Deceased.

  So much death. So much pain.

  Her gaze fell to the bottom of the page. A small addendum, a final note, lay scrawled below the list of names, almost as an afterthought.

  It contained only six words.

  Six words that changed everything.

  The attack had one sole survivor.

  One survivor.

  Someone had seen it all. Someone had faced Blackmane and his crew of monsters and had lived to tell the tale. A witness. An answer. A key.

  With trembling fingers, Frankie read the last line of the document. The name of the survivor. A young cabin boy who had somehow, miraculously, escaped the slaughter.

  Her breath caught in her throat. The room tilted, the air sucked from her lungs.

  The survivor’s name: Henry Rivera.