Henry Rivera’s journal was a godsend. And a nightmare.

  A thick book, its secrets guarded by layers of decay. Salt water had been a merciless enemy. Entire pages fused into a solid, brittle block. The ink on others had bled into meaningless, brown Rorschach blots. The leather cover, stiff and cracked, smelled of the dark, forgotten places of the sea.

  But some pages remained legible. Barely. Filled with a chaotic, desperate scrawl, a mixture of archaic, 18th-century Spanish and nautical English slang, the text was nearly impenetrable. Not a neat, organized account. The frantic, terrified testimony of a man who had seen hell and tried to draw a map before it consumed him.

  For anyone else, a hopeless relic.

  But the teens had a secret weapon of their own.

  They had Dee Dee.

  In the cold, echoing gloom of the cannery, under the bare, swinging bulb of a single work light, Dee Dee became a different person. The quirky, free-spirited artist vanished, replaced by a scholar of ferocious intensity. She immersed herself in translating the fragile, fragmented document, her face a mask of pure concentration.

  They had set up a command center on a large, rusted metal table. Ted bought a Spanish-English dictionary from the library, along with several dense historical glossaries of nautical terms. But their greatest asset was Dee Dee’s strange, uncanny gift for language. She was not just translating words; she was translating a ghost.

  For days, the cannery was their world, a cold bubble smelling of rust and old coffee. They subsisted on stale granola bars and the adrenaline of discovery, the only warmth coming from the harsh glare of the single work light. Dee Dee would stare at a single, water-stained phrase for an hour, her brow furrowed, whispering the strange words to herself, trying to feel their shape, their meaning.

  Frankie, Ted, and Damon could only watch, their anxiety a silent, thrumming presence in the cold air. They were helpless, waiting for their friend to pull answers from the wreckage of the past.

  Bit by bit, she pieced it together.

  The journal was their Vampire 101, a firsthand field guide to the monster in their midst.

  “Son demonios,” Dee Dee read aloud, her voice a low, grim monotone. “He calls them demons. ‘They do not tire. The sun is their enemy, a fire that boils their skin, but the night is their kingdom. They possess the strength of ten men, the speed of a striking snake.’”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Henry described the crew’s weaknesses, discovered through bloody, terrifying trial and error. “Fire. They fear it as all creatures do. But it is not enough to kill them. It only angers them. A stake through the heart… it is not a myth. It works. But their hearts are not so easily found.”

  He wrote of their hypnotic influence over weaker minds, a power Blackmane used to control his crew and to lure victims. “He speaks to you inside your thoughts. A serpent’s whisper that promises power, but delivers only chains.”

  Frankie shuddered, clutching the seashell bracelet on her wrist. She knew that serpent’s whisper.

  The journal confirmed their horrifying discovery from the Historical Society. “They do not kill to plunder,” Dee Dee translated, her voice trembling slightly. “They kill to feed. They leave behind only husks. Empty vessels drained of the very spark of life.”

  But the journal also contained Henry’s own story. The story of his harrowing survival. He described the attack on the St. Elmo in horrifying, fragmented detail. And he revealed how he had trapped the monster.

  Not divine intervention, as he’d led the priest to believe. A strategy.

  “I watched him from the rigging,” Dee Dee read, her eyes wide. “I saw that he never strayed far from his own cursed vessel. His power, his very life, seemed tied to its foul timbers. The ship is not just his transport. It is his heart. His anchor in this world.”

  Henry, a boy of only eighteen at the time, had planned a desperate, suicidal plan. During the chaos of a brutal storm, as The Crimson Thirst pursued another vessel, he had slipped away in a small dinghy. Under the cover of the hurricane-force winds and churning seas, he had guided his tiny boat to the entrance of the sea cave—a place he knew from his youthful explorations of the Norchester coast. He scuttled Blackmane’s ship, not by sinking it in the open ocean, but by trapping it, by running it aground inside the cave, where its demonic captain would be imprisoned forever. Or so he had hoped.

  The journal was also filled with cryptic, terrifying warnings. He wrote of the curse he had inadvertently created.

  “By trapping him, I have tied him to this bay,” one passage read, the ink smeared and difficult to read. “But I have also tied him… to my own blood. It is a curse. A bond. His prison is my family’s burden. He can sense us. He will always sense us.”

  The words sent a cold spike of fear through Frankie’s heart. He can sense us.

  The translation was a race against time. Every new piece of information was both a victory and a harbinger of a greater doom. With each page Dee Dee deciphered, the portrait of their enemy became clearer, and the scale of their task became more impossibly huge.

  The work took its toll. They were all exhausted, running on coffee and adrenaline. Dee Dee’s eyes were permanently shadowed with fatigue.

  On the third night of the translation, as the rain from another storm lashed against the metal walls of the cannery, Dee Dee went still.

  She had been staring at the final, legible page of the journal for a long time, her lips moving silently, her brow furrowed in intense concentration.

  “What is it?” Damon asked, breaking the long silence.

  Dee Dee’s hand, which had been tracing the last lines, suddenly recoiled from the page as if the ink itself had burned her. Her face was as pale as bone in the harsh light of the work lamp.

  “Guys” she said, her voice choked, horrified whisper. “I think I know what he’s planning.”

  She finally lifted her head, her eyes wide with a terror that dwarfed anything they had felt before. “I know what he needs from Frankie to do it.”