Read Chapter 7: The Haunted Hoard

The sea turned mean just after midnight.

Mack felt it in his bones before the first wave hit the hull—a deep, resonant pressure change that made his ears pop in the cabin. He'd been counting coins again, thirty of them laid out on his bunk in neat rows of ten, their dull gold gleam almost accusing in the lantern light. Thirty thousand dollars, give or take, assuming the assay came back clean. Enough to make a real dent in the debts. Enough to maybe breathe again.

The Sea Serpent lurched, and the coins slid across the blanket in a scatter of clinks. Mack scrambled to gather them, shoving them into the canvas sack he'd been using, his fingers clumsy with the sudden pitch of the deck.

"Storm's here," Tomas shouted through the cabin door, pounding twice. "We need to batten down. Where's Pete?"

Mack shoved the sack under his bunk. "Deck check, I thought. He said he was doing a deck check."

"He went out forty minutes ago."

The words landed wrong. Forty minutes in this swell, on a deck that was already slick with spray—Pete knew better. The man had been crewing salvage vessels since Mack was in diapers. He didn't disappear during a storm check.

Mack yanked on his oilskin and burst into the wheelhouse. Rain hammered the glass in sheets, the wind a constant shriek through the rigging. Abigail stood braced at the chart table, her face pale in the instrument glow, wet hair plastered to her skull. Rosa was at the helm, hands white on the wheel, eyes fixed on the black chaos beyond the bow.

"Radar's clean," Rosa said without turning. "No Cruz within twenty miles. But I can't see a damn thing out there."

"Pete's still out," Mack said.

"I know. I've been calling—radio, horn. Nothing."

Mack had a sinking feeling that had nothing to do with the storm. Thirty coins. Thirty whispers in his skull, a chorus he'd been trying to ignore all evening, murmuring promises in a language his brain kept trying to translate and failing. He'd told himself it was fatigue. Pressure sickness from the dives. Hallucinations from nitrogen narcosis that hadn't fully cleared.

He'd told himself a lot of things.

"I'm going out," he said.

"Mack—" Abigail started.

"He's been out there forty minutes. I'm going out."

He didn't wait for argument. The deck hit him like a wall of salt and cold, the wind trying to peel the skin off his face. Waves crashed over the gunwales, waist-deep and furious. He worked his way aft along the safety line, calling Pete's name into the teeth of the gale, getting nothing back but spray.

The hold hatch was open.

It shouldn't have been open. Mack had dogged it himself after the last dive, securing the equipment below. The hatch cover stood ajar, swinging on its hinges, and a faint light leaked up from the darkness beneath.

Mack's stomach turned over.

He dropped through the hatch, landing hard on the steel deck plates. The hold smelled of diesel and wet rope and something else—something old and mineral, like the air that hit you when you cracked a tomb that had been sealed too long. The emergency lantern in the corner threw long shadows across the crates and coiled lines.

Pete stood at the far end of the hold.

He had the canvas sack. Mack's canvas sack, the one he'd shoved under his bunk. Pete had opened it, and the thirty coins were scattered across a wooden crate in a rough circle, and Pete was standing over them with his back to Mack, his shoulders moving in a slow, rhythmic sway.

"Pete."

No response. The swaying continued.

Mack took a step forward. "Pete. What are you doing with those?"

Pete turned.

His eyes were wrong. That was the first thing Mack noticed—the pupils had blown wide, nearly swallowing the irises, so his face looked like a mask with two black holes bored into it. His mouth moved, but the words that came out were not Pete's. They were older, rougher, seasoned with two centuries of salt and rot.

"...the captain's share be taken," Pete said, in a voice that scratched like rust. "The captain's share be bloody well taken, and the crew be owed."

"Pete, you're not making sense."

"NAY, I SPEAK TRUE." The voice cracked through the hold, louder than the storm outside. Pete's body jerked, his head twitching at an angle that made Mack's spine crawl. "The gold be blood-bought. The gold be earned in iron and fire. And ye who takes the captain's share be the captain now. And the captain must pay."

The coin in Mack's pocket—the first one, the one he'd taken on that initial dive—burned against his thigh. The whispers rose in his skull, louder than they'd ever been, an entire crew of voices drowning in green water, all of them demanding the same thing.

*Pay. Pay. Pay the blood price.*

Pete lunged.

Mack barely got his arms up in time. Pete's weight slammed into him, driving him backward into a steel bulkhead, the breath leaving his lungs in an explosion of pain. Pete's hands were around his throat—Pete's hands, calloused and familiar, but the strength in them was not human. Mack clawed at Pete's wrists, but the grip didn't budge.

"Pete—stop—listen to me—"

"THE CAPTAIN PAYS." Pete's face was inches from his, and Mack could see the gold reflected in those ruined black eyes. "THE CAPTAIN PAYS IN BLOOD. THAT BE THE LAW OF THE SEA."

The hold door slammed open above them. Rosa came down the ladder with a speed Mack wouldn't have thought possible, her rain-slicked coat streaming water, and behind her, Abigail with the flare gun from the wheelhouse raised in shaking hands.

Rosa didn't hesitate. She crossed the hold in three strides, grabbed Pete by the back of his collar, and yanked him off Mack with a strength that didn't match her thin frame. Pete spun, snarling, and Rosa's palm connected with his forehead in a flat, forceful slap—a gesture that looked almost ceremonial.

"*Rompe el lazo*," she said, her voice hard and sharp. "Break the hold, spirit. You are not welcome here."

Pete went rigid. His mouth opened, and from it came a sound that wasn't a word—a high, keening wail that made the lantern flicker and the coins on the crate vibrate. Then his eyes rolled back, and he crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.

Silence. Just the storm hammering the hull and Pete's ragged, shallow breathing.

Mack pulled himself up, his throat raw, his vision swimming. Abigail lowered the flare gun, her face ashen.

"What the hell," she whispered, "was that?"

Rosa knelt beside Pete, pressing fingers to his neck. "He's alive. Exhausted, but alive." She looked up at Mack, and her dark eyes were older than the sea. "You took more coins."

"I took thirty," Mack said. His voice came out rough and broken. "Thirty coins. I thought—I thought if I could just take enough to clear the debt, I could stop. I could figure it out on the surface."

Rosa stood. Her gaze swept to the scattered gold, and her lips thinned.

"The curse is not patient, Marcus. Every coin you take feeds it. Gives it strength. Gives it purchase." She gestured to Pete's unconscious form. "You saw what it does. Your crewmate was not himself. He was a vessel—a tool for the dead to use. And the dead," she said, echoing her earlier warning, "do not pay. They collect."

Mack stared at the gold. Thirty coins in a rough circle on a crate, gleaming in the lantern light like thirty tiny suns. Each one worth a thousand dollars. Each one a thousand pounds of chain around his soul.

"The whispers," Mack said. "They've been telling me to take more. To take all of them. They said—" He swallowed. "They said the captain needs to be paid."

Rosa and Abigail exchanged a look Mack couldn't read.

"You have to stop," Abigail said quietly. "You have to stop taking coins until we understand what we're dealing with. Whatever ritual Blackwood intended, whatever final voyage you're supposed to complete—we can't figure it out if you're feeding the thing that's hunting us."

Mack looked down at Pete. At his friend, who had tried to kill him with hands that weren't his own. At the crew that would never trust him the same way again.

The coin in his pocket pulsed, warm against his thigh, in time with his heartbeat.

"I stop," Mack said. "I stop taking coins. But we're still sitting on a reef in the middle of a storm, with thirty pieces of haunted gold in the hold and a dead captain's ghost telling me I owe him something I don't understand." He met Rosa's eyes. "Tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do next."

Rosa said nothing. But her gaze drifted, almost involuntarily, to the coin in Mack's pocket—and the faint, green glow that pulsed beneath the canvas of his shirt.