The newspaper lay on the kitchen table, its headline a monument to ignorance. BIZARRE ANIMAL ATTACK. The lie, so blatant, so infuriating, made Frankie’s blood boil. Or maybe that was just the curse. The distinction blurred with each passing day.

  They were losing. Blackmane fed, grew bolder, and the so-called authorities actively helped him cover his tracks. Their training in the cannery, Frankie’s newfound control over her predatory instincts… it all felt like children playing with toy soldiers while a real war raged just outside their door.

  That evening, as she sat in her room, the weight of their failures pressing down on her, a new thought formed. It started as a tiny spark, a flicker of logic in the swirling darkness of her fear.

  Henry Rivera.

  They had learned his name, traced his life on paper. They knew he survived, had a family, lived, and died in this town. But the priest’s diary had given them the most important clue: Henry did not just survive. He fought back. He had caged a great evil. He had dedicated his life to standing guard.

  A man like that… a man with that kind of secret, that kind of burden… he would not just die and leave it at that. He would not leave his family, his descendants, unprotected.

  He would have had a contingency plan.

  He would have left more than just a few cryptic entries in a priest’s diary. He would have left instructions. A warning. A weapon.

  He would have left a journal.

  The thought struck with a jolt of pure, electric certainty. So obvious, she did not know how they had missed it. They had looked for Henry in the town’s records. They should have been looking for him in their own house.

  She found her mother in the living room, trying to watch a movie, though her eyes kept flicking nervously toward Frankie’s closed bedroom door. The secrets Frankie kept formed a chasm between them, a silence that grew wider and deeper every day. A pang of guilt struck Frankie. Her mom was just worried about her sick, withdrawn daughter. Little did she know, her daughter was a newly turned vampire bracing for war with a ghost pirate.

  “Mom?” Frankie said, her voice softer than she intended.

  Maka muted the TV, her face a mixture of hope and worry. “Frankie! You’re feeling better? Can I get you something? Some soup?”

  “I’m okay, Mom.” Another lie. They piled up. “Actually, I was wondering… could you help me with something?”

  She explained her idea, dressing it in the plausible clothes of a personal project. She told her mom she had gotten interested in the family history they had uncovered at the Town Hall, in the story of their ancestor, Henry the sailor. She wanted to see if there were any old family heirlooms, anything he might have left behind.

  A weak story, but her mother, so desperate for any sign of her daughter’s return to normalcy, to anything other than hiding in her dark room, latched onto it.

  “Of course, honey!” Maka said, her face brightening. “That’s a wonderful idea. Most of the really old family stuff is in the attic. I haven’t been up there in years. Who knows what we’ll find!”

  The attic. The word itself sounded dusty and full of ghosts.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The pull-down staircase, a skeletal contraption of creaking wood, groaned in protest as Maka pulled the cord. It unfolded with a rattling shower of dust, desiccated insects, and tiny, brittle fragments of what might have once been wallpaper. A wave of hot, stagnant air, thick and oppressive, washed over them, carrying the acrid scent of ancient, unbreathing wood, the cloying sweetness of mothballs, and the subtle, metallic tang of slow decay. It was the scent of forgotten memories, turning to dust.

  They climbed the rickety stairs and entered another world. The only sound was the soft creak of the floorboards under their weight and the faint, frantic scratching of a mouse in the walls, a tiny, living secret in a house of the dead.

  The attic served as a repository for generations of Rivera family clutter. A graveyard of abandoned hobbies, outgrown clothes, and obsolete technology. Light from a single, bare bulb hanging from a rafter cast long, spooky shadows, illuminating the landscape of boxes, old furniture draped in white sheets like slumbering ghosts, and stacks of old magazines.

  “Well,” Maka said, her hands on her hips. “Where do we start?”

  For the next hour, they sifted through the past. A strange, bittersweet journey. Frankie found her baby clothes, a box of her father’s old vinyl records, and her abandoned seventh-grade science fair project. Her mom unearthed her wedding dress, preserved in a long cardboard box, and old photo albums filled with smiling, black-and-white strangers with Rivera's eyes.

  A pang of guilt struck Frankie. Her mother enjoyed this trip down memory lane. She thought her daughter was finally taking an interest in her heritage. But Frankie was actually on a desperate scavenger hunt for a supernatural weapon.

  Just as they were about to give up, convinced that anything truly valuable or important lost or thrown away generations ago, Maka pointed to a large, heavy object tucked away in the far corner of the attic, almost completely hidden under an old, canvas tarp.

  “I’d almost forgotten about that,” she said. “Your great-great-grandfather, William—he was Henry’s grandson—was a sailor, too. He insisted on keeping his old sea chest. Said it was bad luck to get rid of a sailor’s chest.”

  Frankie’s blood ran cold.

  Sea chest.

  She walked toward it, her heart beginning to pound a heavy rhythm against her ribs. She reached out and pulled back the dusty, stiff canvas tarp.

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  Not the same chest. Not the massive, salt-encrusted, iron-bound monstrosity from the cove. This one was smaller, more personal, its wood a dark, rich mahogany, its brass fittings green with age but still intact. Beautifully made, a practical, personal object meant to hold a man’s life on long voyages.

  But it was of the same dark wood. The same ancient design. A brother to the chest from the cove.

  Henry Rivera’s sea chest. Passed down, from father to son, for two hundred years, waiting.

  “Can we… can we open it?” Frankie asked, her voice a dry whisper.

  “I don’t see why not,” Maka said, digging through a coffee can full of old skeleton keys. “The lock is probably rusted shut, though.”

  But it was not. The third key Maka tried slid into the brass lock and turned with a soft, satisfying click.

  With trembling hands, Frankie lifted the heavy lid.

  The air that wafted out did not smell of monsters or ancient evils. It smelled of cedar, salt, and old canvas.

  Everything inside remained tidily packed away. A set of old, heavy sailors’ clothes, folded with care. A coiled length of rope. A worn, leather pouch full of strange, foreign-looking coins. A heavy, brass sextant, its lenses cloudy with age.

  And nestled amongst it all, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth to protect it from the damp, was what she had been searching for.

  A thick, leather-bound book.

  A journal with pages warped and curled at the edges, the ink on some of them smeared and bled into brown, meaningless splotches from old water damage.

  But it was here. It was real.

  Henry Rivera’s journal.

  As Frankie’s fingers brushed against the cool, solid leather of the book, a shiver ran down her spine. A profound sense of certainty settled in her bones; this was it. The contingency plan. The warning. The weapon. The instruction manual for the war they were about to fight.

  She held the key to everything.