They left the Historical Society in a daze, the heavy wooden door closing behind them with the sound of a coffin lid shutting. The weight of Frankie’s ancestry became a physical thing, a leaden cloak draping her shoulders. No longer just a girl with a monstrous secret, she now stood as a target. A legacy. The last chapter in a horror story her great-great-great-something-grandfather started centuries ago.

  They walked toward the beach, not with a destination, but because the ocean alone made sense. It served as their church, their sanctuary. But the sanctuary now offered no comfort. The grey afternoon sky mirrored their somber mood, and the waves that crashed on the shore sounded not soothing, but hungry.

  “So, Blackmane isn’t just some random monster,” Ted said, kicking at a clump of seaweed. He tried to summarize, to put the sprawling, impossible horror into a neat little box of facts. His brain worked that way. “He’s a specific monster who holds a specific grudge against your specific family.”

  “That about sums it up,” Frankie muttered, pulling her hoodie tighter around herself. The mild afternoon air offered no warmth for the chill that sank to her bones.

  “A blood curse,” Dee Dee said, her voice full of horrified awe. “Like something from one of my books. He waited. He bided his time. He needs a Rivera to break the curse, or to get revenge, or… something.”

  “But why now?” Frankie asked that tormented her. “Why me?”

  “Maybe the chest just washed up now,” Ted offered. “A storm, a shift in the currents… after two hundred years, the prison got weak.”

  Or maybe, a dark part of her mind whispered, he knew your presence. He sensed you. The thought proved too terrifying to say out loud.

  They walked along the shoreline, lost in grim thoughts, the damp sand swallowing the sound of their footsteps. So preoccupied with the ghosts of the past, they missed the monsters of the present until it became too late.

  They emerged from the dunes like vultures.

  Jax and the Jetty Crew.

  Frankie’s body tensed instantly. On any other day, a run-in with the Jetty Crew meant verbal abuse, maybe a bit of shoving. An ugly, mundane kind of threat.

  But something had changed.

  Terribly.

  Jax himself… appeared different. The last time she saw him, he presented as a swaggering, brutish bully. Now, a transformation had taken him. His skin, usually ruddy from the sun and cheap beer, showed an unnatural, waxy pallor in the flat, grey light of the overcast day. A coiled, predatory grace replaced his usual stillness, a grace that had no place in his frame. He moved with a horrifying speed, closing the distance between them not with a clumsy, human swagger, but with a silent, fluid motion, both too fast and too quiet.

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  “Well, well, well,” Jax drawled, his voice a familiar, menacing rumble. “Look what the tide washed in. The three little mice.”

  But as he spoke, something else registered. His eyes. His once-dull eyes, full of a simple, brutish aggression, now held a sharp malice that did not belong to him. An ancient, cunning light shone out of a young, stupid face.

  And the cadence of his speech sounded wrong. Stilted. As if he translated a foreign language in his head.

  “Ye be trespassin’ on ground that ain’t for ye,” he said.

  The archaic phrase hung in the air, a discordant note in his usual vocabulary of grunts and four-letter words. Ye be? Since when did Jax talk like a pirate from a bad movie?

  Ted and Dee Dee stood frozen, their faces pale, a silent scream trapped in their throats. A profound, fundamental wrongness, chilling them to the bone, gripped them. More than just Jax, the high school dropout who ran a gang of petty thugs, this was something far more sinister, something that promised to unravel the very fabric of their reality.

  This was a puppet. A puppet whose strings were pulled from an ancient, very malevolent hand.

  Jax took another step forward, his gaze locking onto Frankie. It lingered on her neck for just a second, and his lips curled into a slow, cruel, and unnervingly familiar smile.

  A sound rumbled deep in Frankie’s chest. A low, guttural growl. The involuntary, animalistic response shocked even her. The monster inside her, the sick, hungry thing she had fought, reacted to another predator. It recognized one of its own.

  The other members of the Jetty Crew just snickered nervously, shifting on their feet. Still just dumb kids, followers. They remained unchanged. Not yet. They provided the stage dressing for their transformed leader.

  “What do you want, Jax?” Ted asked, his voice shaking slightly but aiming for a brave, steady tone.

  Jax’s smile widened, but it didn’t reach his cold, intelligent eyes. He ignored Ted completely. His focus remained entirely on Frankie.

  “The Captain wants you to stop digging,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, menacing hiss. “Stop digging into things that should remain buried in the deep.”

  The Captain.

  The title hit them like a physical blow. Captain Blackmane.

  Confirmation. Horrifying, undeniable confirmation.

  So focused on the history of the threat, on the books and the archives, they had failed to realize the most important thing. Blackmane existed as more than a ghost from the past. More than a prisoner in a watery prison.

  He possessed a servant on the outside. A pawn. A foothold in their world.

  The hunt had not yet begun. It was already underway. And they did not play the hunters.

  They played the prey.

  Jax leaned in closer to Frankie, his breath a cold, fetid, reeking of stale blood and decay, a stench that clung to the back of the throat like a physical thing. “The Captain sends his regards,” he hissed, his voice a strange, layered thing—part local bully, part ancient monster.

  Then, as silently and as quickly as he appeared, he turned. He and his crew melted back into the dunes, their harsh, ugly laughter quickly swallowed by the roar of the surf.

  They vanished.

  Frankie, Ted, and Dee Dee stood alone on the empty, windswept beach, their blood running cold. The world had just tilted on its axis. The threat existed no longer as a story in a book. It lived here. It lived now. It wore a face they knew. And it had just delivered a message.

  Stop digging.

  Or you’ll be the next thing buried.