Read Chapter 10: The First Ghost

The wind had died with the dawn, leaving the sea flat and gray as hammered lead. The storm had passed, but the air still tasted of ozone and brine, and the Sea Serpent's deck was slick with residual spray. Mack stood at the rail, watching the water's surface for the hundredth time, the green glow of the first coin burning against his chest like a low-grade fever.

"Visibility's good," Liam said, coming up beside him with a tank slung over one shoulder. He was the youngest of the crew, twenty-six, with the eager restlessness of a man who'd never learned to fear the deep. "Sixty feet, maybe more. We can get down and back before the current shifts."

Mack didn't answer. He was thinking about the journal's last page, about the package in Blackwood's cabin that had never reached its admiral. About the ritual that would break the curse—if he could get that package into the right hands.

"Cap'n?" Liam's voice pulled him back. "You hearing me?"

"Yeah." Mack rubbed the back of his neck. "You, me, and Rosa. We go down, locate the cabin, retrieve the package. Abigail watches comms topside."

Liam snorted. "The witch doctor's daughter gets the easy job again."

"She knows the wreck better than anyone alive." Mack didn't add that Rosa was also the only one who'd successfully broken the possession. Some truths were better left unsaid among the crew.

Forty minutes later, Mack broke the surface tension of the water and let gravity take him. The descent was always the same—a slow slide into blue silence, the world above shrinking to a pale coin of light, then vanishing altogether as the wreck bloomed out of the murk below. The Santa Catalina lay on her side, her masts long since rotted away, her hull draped in coral and anemones like a bride in funeral weeds. Mack kicked toward the gaping wound in her stern where the captain's cabin had been.

Rosa swam ahead, her movements fluid and practiced. She'd insisted on leading the way, claiming she knew the cabin's layout from her father's old dive charts. Mack didn't argue. The journal said the package was in a brass strongbox bolted to the captain's desk. If it was still there after two centuries, this whole nightmare could end in an afternoon.

They entered through a collapsed section of the hull, silt puffing up around their fins as they descended into the cabin. The desk lay overturned, pinned beneath a fallen beam. Its surface was encrusted with barnacles, but Mack could see the strongbox—stained green with copper oxide, heavy and solid, lashed to the desk's frame with chain that had rusted into a single mass.

He gestured to Rosa. She swam to steady the beam while Liam worked a pry bar against the chains. Mack hovered nearby, watching the sediment dance in his flashlight beam, trying not to think about the weight of thirty coins back on the ship, or the two enforcers Reyes had left to watch them.

It was the package inside the strongbox that answered the mysteries, the map and letters that told of the final voyage's true purpose. Mack steadied himself as Liam worked, the sound of metal on metal a dull grinding through the water.

The chains snapped. Liam kicked back as the strongbox floated free, buoyant despite its age. Rosa grabbed it, nodded once, and they began their ascent.

They were halfway up when Mack felt it—a cold that didn't belong to the water, a pressure against his skull like the onset of a migraine. He turned, beam sweeping through the murk, and saw nothing. But Liam's flashlight flickered, then died. The young diver went rigid in the water, arms outstretched, his regulator slipping from his mouth.

Mack lunged for him, grabbing his harness and hauling him toward the surface. Rosa was already moving, her own light cutting through the gloom. Something moved at the edge of Mack's vision—a shape, long and dark, trailing tatters like a sail in mourning. Then it was gone.

They breached hard, the sky a shock after the dim green world below. Mack stripped off his mask and turned Liam over. The young man's eyes were open but unfocused, staring at nothing, his lips moving soundlessly. There was no blood, no sign of a reef cut or equipment failure. Just a man who'd been fine one second and gone the next.

"Get him on deck!" Mack shouted, already swimming for the ladder. Hands reached down, hauled Liam over the rail. He flopped onto the planking like a fish, and Mack rolled him onto his back, pressing his ear to Liam's chest.

Nothing.

Alvarado, one of Reyes's men, knelt beside him with a compact medical kit. "Move," he said flatly. Mack shifted, watching as the man checked for a pulse, tilted Liam's head, and began compressions. But even from where he stood, Mack could see it was too late. Liam's skin was already taking on a blue undertone, his muscles slack with the unmistakable looseness of death.

Rosa climbed aboard, shedding her gear in silence. She stood over Liam's body for a long moment, then looked at Mack with an expression he couldn't read—something between grief and accusation.

"I saw something," he said, his voice rough. "In the water."

"Not something," Rosa said quietly. "Someone. He was at the wreck. He touched Liam." She turned away, missing Mack's shock, and walked toward the galley without another word.

The crew went quiet after that. Someone covered Liam's body with a tarp. Luis and Alvarado stood by the mast, conferring in low tones. Mack retreated to the bridge, the strongbox heavy under his arm, and locked the door behind him. His hands were shaking as he pried it open. Inside, wrapped in oiled canvas sealed with wax, were the letters and charts the journal had promised. He'd get to them. He needed to, desperately.

But first, he needed a moment. The thirty coins he'd already raised, the ones Reyes had taken, the dead diver in his deck, all of it was a cycle of debt and curse and ghosts, and he couldn't see the way out.

He fell asleep at the desk, too exhausted for dreams. When he woke, it was dark. The only light came from the first coin in his pocket, glowing green through his shirt, casting the room in an alien hue. He must have left the strongbox unlocked. It sat on the desk before him, leather straps hanging loose.

Then he saw the figure in the corner.

Liam stood there, dripping water that pooled and spread across the deck planks without ever seeming to evaporate. His wet suit was intact, but his face was pale as milk, and his eyes were pits of darkness—no whites, no iris, just blackness like twin gun barrels.

"You should not have taken the box," Liam said, but the voice wasn't his. It was older, rougher, salt-cracked with centuries of command. "You will give it back, and you will give back the gold, or you will join the watch."

Mack's breath caught. "Liam—"

"Liam is gone. He saw the truths of the deep, and he has joined the ones who wait." The thing wearing Liam's face tilted its head, and water spilled from its hair. "Thirteen souls the Santa Catalina carries. Thirteen kin to those lost in the sea. You will find the deliverer, or you will count your crew among them."

The green light in Mack's pocket flared. The ghost—if it was a ghost—took a step forward. "You have been marked, diver. The captain's coin burns in your blood. Complete the voyage, or join the watch beneath the waves."

It dissolved then, leaving only a puddle of seawater and a cold that lingered in the bones. Mack stared at the empty corner for a long moment, his heart pounding. The letters lay scattered on the desk. He couldn't un-see Liam's face, couldn't unhear the pirate dialect spoken through a dead friend's lips.

He gathered the charts and began to read by the green glow of the coin. Abigail would need to see them anyway. There was an island off the Carolinas—he could see it there on the chart, a circle drawn in faded brown ink, with a symbol that made his stomach drop.

And then he saw Reyes's enforcer standing in the open door, watching him.

"Reyes will want to know about the dead man," Alvarado said. "And he will want to know what you brought up from the wreck."

Mack's hand closed around the green coin. The ghost's words echoed in his skull. He could kill the man. He could hide his body— the sea took its secrets. But he couldn't kill what would follow. That wasn't a debt he'd ever be able to pay.

"I'll tell him myself," Mack said, the lie sour as copper. "But it comes with a story. I need you to listen before you judge."

Alvarado's eyes flicked to the puddle on the deck. For the first time, the enforcer looked unsure.

"Then tell it fast," Alvarado said. "Captain."