The name echoed. Henry Rivera.

  It hung there in the dusty air of the museum’s back room, a name of silent, spidery ink on a brittle page. Frankie stared at it, her mind refusing to make the connection. Like seeing her reflection in a funhouse mirror—familiar, but twisted into something impossible and strange.

  Rivera.

  Just a name. A common name. A coincidence. It had to be. A crazy, chilling, impossible coincidence, but nothing more. Right?

  The silence in the room stretched thin, pulled taut by the three of them staring at the document. Ted frowned, his scientific mind calculating the odds, processing the anomaly. Dee Dee’s eyes widened, her writer’s brain already leaping ahead, connecting the dots of a story that grew more terrifying with every new word.

  Dee Dee spoke first. Her voice, a bare whisper, sliced through the silence like a razor.

  “Rivera…” she breathed, her gaze flickering from the ancient paper to Frankie’s face. “Frankie… that’s… that’s your name.”

  “A coincidence,” Frankie said immediately. The words came out too fast, too sharp, sounding like a lie even to her own ears. “It has to be.”

  “Is it?” Ted said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. He paled. “Rivera isn’t exactly Smith or Jones, but it’s not uncommon. There could have been dozens of Rivera families on the coast back then.”

  He tried for logic. He tried to build a wall of reason against the tide of impossible horror threatening to drown them. But the wall crumbled.

  Dee Dee, her eidetic memory for details clicking into place, shook her head. “Not in Norchester. Remember that big genealogy project we did for history class last year? I traced my family, the Matthews, back to the town’s founding. The Riveras weren’t one of the founding families. I remember looking it up for you, Frankie.”

  The blood in Frankie’s veins turned to ice water. She remembered her boredom with the project, letting Dee Dee do most of the work. Dee Dee had found the record. One Rivera family line in Norchester. It started with a single ancestor who settled here in the late 1700s. A sailor who had, according to family legend, survived a shipwreck.

  The air left Frankie’s lungs.

  “No,” she whispered. “It can’t be.”

  Ted, ever the stoner scientist, needed proof. His hands shook slightly as he pulled out his phone. The screen's sudden glow, an alien intrusion in the dusty, analog room, lit his face with a cold, blue light as his thumbs flew across the glass.

  “Town Hall archives… online genealogy records…” he muttered to himself, his voice tight with concentration. “Norchester settlement database… Rivera, H… birth, death… marriage…”

  He stopped typing. He went utterly still.

  “Ted?” Dee Dee prompted, her voice trembling.

  He lifted his head and looked at Frankie. The look in his eyes drove the final nail into the coffin of coincidence. His expression held pure, horrified certainty.

  “There was only one,” he said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “Only one Henry Rivera is recorded as settling in Norchester in the late eighteenth century. He was rescued at sea. He married a local girl, Sarah Perkins. He had four children.” Ted swallowed hard. “He started a lineage. Your lineage, Frankie. The line is direct. Unbroken. From him… to you.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The phone in Ted’s hand might as well have been a loaded gun. And he had just pulled the trigger.

  The revelation arrived not as a slow, dawning realization, but as a physical blow. It hit Frankie with the force of a rogue wave, knocking the breath from her lungs, sending her world tumbling end over end in a chaotic, churning vortex.

  Not random.

  The thought slammed into her.

  The cove. The chest. The creature. The bite.

  Nothing random about it.

  She hadn’t just stumbled into this story. A story had waited for her. A story written in her bloodline, passed down from generation to generation like some monstrous, unspoken inheritance.

  Henry Rivera. Her ancestor. He had faced that… thing. He had survived the slaughter. And somehow, his survival had marked his entire family, his entire lineage, for the next two hundred years.

  The sickness flowing through her veins amounted to more than an infection. A legacy.

  The creature in the chest… it hadn’t just attacked her. It had waited for her. For a Rivera. For the descendant of the boy who had gotten away.

  Why? Revenge? The chest was a trap, left behind centuries ago, waiting for someone with the right name, the right blood, to come along and open it?

  She stumbled back, away from the document, away from the name that now branded her soul. She bumped into a filing cabinet, the old wood rattling.

  “Frankie?” Dee Dee said, reaching for her.

  Frankie flinched away. “Don’t.”

  She looked at her own hands. Her surfer’s hands, calloused and capable. But now they appeared alien. These hands belonged to a Rivera. The hands of a girl, heir to a supernatural war she never knew existed.

  A chilling thought, cold and sharp as a shard of ice, pierced through the chaos in her mind.

  A thought that raised the hair on her arms.

  The creature didn’t just bite me.

  It recognized me.

  On some deep, primal, predatory level, when that winged nightmare burst from its prison, it had looked at her and it had known. It had smelled her blood, the blood of its old enemy’s descendant, and it had struck. Not with mindless panic. But with an ancient, patient purpose.

  The bite meant more than an attack. A claim.

  The realization settled over her, heavy and suffocating as a tombstone.

  Not over. Just the beginning.

  Blackmane, the monster from the sea, existed as more than a ghost from a history book. He lived. Still alive. And he knew her. He knew her name. He knew where she lived.

  And if he waited for her…

  He might come for her.

  He might come to finish the job.