Read Chapter 8: The Captain's Journal

The water was wrong. Mack felt it the moment he rolled backward off the dive platform—a subtle wrongness that had nothing to do with the storm still dying on the horizon. The Devil's Trench had been a black wound in the ocean floor two days ago, but now the current pushed against his fins with perverse intent, as if the sea itself didn't want him here.

He'd told them he was checking mooring lines. A half-truth that tasted like ash in his mouth.

The descent took forever. Each kick of his fins sent silt spiraling in lazy galaxies around him, and the distant groan of the Santa Catalina's hull reached him through the water like a wounded animal's sigh. Mack clicked on his dive light and swept the beam across the wreck's exposed ribs, still surprised by how intact she was, how hungry she seemed to swallow the light whole.

Abigail's voice crackled in his ear. "Mack, I've got something on sonar near the bow—a secondary structure. Metallic. Not part of the ship."

He shouldn't have answered. Communication discipline was for crews that trusted each other. But he thumbed his comm anyway. "Copy. Checking."

The structure was a chest, but not like the one in the main hold. This was smaller, iron-banded, wedged under what remained of the Santa Catalina's forecastle. Mack's heart hammered as he worked it free, the metal groaning with a sound like a dying man's protest. He surfaced with it cradled against his chest, ignoring the whispers that flickered at the edges of his hearing—the chorus of voices suggesting he go back down, take more, take everything, the gold was *his*.

"That's not what I asked you to retrieve," Abigail said when she saw the dripping iron box on the deck.

"I found something better."

They opened it in the galley while the sky bruised toward evening. Tomas stood guard at the door, his hand resting on the wrench he'd taken to carrying since Pete's attack. Pete himself sat in the corner, pale and quiet, watching Mack with eyes that were a little too still.

The chest's interior was lined with waxed canvas. Inside, a leather-bound journal with brass corners, swollen from seawater but intact. Abigail's hands trembled as she opened it, the pages crackling like dry leaves despite their moisture.

"Blackwood's hand," she breathed. "This is his log."

Mack leaned over her shoulder. The ink had faded to rust, but the entries were legible enough. Charts, coordinates, weather observations—the meticulous record of a man who trusted no one and wrote everything down. Abigail flipped through the pages, translating the older English with practiced ease.

"August third, 1717. Made port at Havana. The package remains in my charge, sealed as ordered. My first mate grows curious. I do not trust his questions."

She turned more pages. "September. He's describing the Santa Catalina's route—eastward, toward the Atlantic proper. He was to rendezvous with an Admiral Cheney's squadron off the Azores. The package was for him."

"Package?" Mack's throat tightened. "What package?"

"Governor-General Rodriguez of Santo Domingo entrusted Blackwood with a sealed strongbox containing—" Abigail paused, her face going pale. "Letters. Letters that would implicate half the colonial governors in defrauding the Crown's treasury."

Tomas shifted by the door. "So he was a courier. What's a courier doing with three hundred years of curses and dead men?"

Abigail's fingers found a later entry. "Listen to this. November second. We have been blown far off course by a storm that seemed to come from nowhere. My crew speaks in whispers of dead sailors sighted among the waves. I have begun to fear that we carry more than letters in the strongbox. I opened it tonight against my orders—"

She stopped.

"What?" Mack pressed. "What was in it?"

"Gold. A king's ransom in gold coins. But beneath the false bottom, there was a smaller chest of black iron, sealed with wax that bore—" She looked up, her eyes wide. "It bore the mark of the Inquisition's secret court. The tribunal that hunted heretics and bound demons to holy relics."

Pete spoke for the first time. His voice was rough, scraped raw by whatever had lived in him for those hours. "That's not gold in your pocket, is it, Mack? That's a cage."

The words hung in the stale galley air. Mack’s hand moved instinctively to the coin still in his shirt—the first one, the one that pulsed with a faint green light even now. He could feel it humming against his skin like a second heartbeat.

"Blackwood turned back," Abigail continued, her voice hushed. "He realized the treasure was the bait and the trap both. He tried to return to Santo Domingo, to give the chest back, but the storms wouldn't let him. Every course he set, the sea pushed him deeper into the Devil's Trench. He writes—" She squinted at the cramped script. "I am no longer captain of my own ship. The dead are sailing her for their own purposes. They are collecting souls."

Mack remembered the whisper from the first dive. *Blood releases the lock.* He thought of the thirty coins in the hold, of Pete's vacant stare as the ghost had spoken through him, of his sister Maria's face in the water the day she'd disappeared.

"Keep reading," he said. "Is there anything about how to break it?"

Abigail turned page after page. The entries grew shorter, more frantic—paragraphs dissolving into scratched single lines. *They know the package eluded me. They know I am not resigned. God preserve my soul for what I must do.*

"The last page." Abigail's voice cracked. "He's describing a ritual. He says—'The only way to loosen the bonds is to finish what was begun. Deliver the cargo to its destination and the curse will follow it into the sea. Without delivery, the curse grows like a vine, feeding on any soul that touches its fruit.'"

"Fruit." Mack laughed, but there was no humor in it. "He means the coins."

"Yes." Abigail shut the journal with a slap of wet leather. "Where's the package, Mack? If the strongbox that carried the letters was salvaged, it wasn't in the main hold. I didn't see it aboard this wreck."

Mack's mind raced through every dive, every corner of the Santa Catalina he'd explored. There had been a compartment aft—sealed tight, locked with a padlock that had rusted to uselessness. He'd assumed it was ballast. He'd never opened it.

"It's still down there," he said slowly. "In the stern. I need to go back."

Pete stood, swaying slightly, still weak. "Mack, look at me. You bring that box up and you're signing a death warrant for everyone on this boat. You bring those letters to an admiral that died three hundred years ago, what happens? You think there's a post office in the deep Atlantic for dead men's mail?"

"There has to be *something*," Mack snapped. "I can't drown these. I can't spend them. I can't throw them overboard without—" He stopped.

Without what? He hadn't tried. Not really. The thought of letting the gold slip from his fingers had seized his hand every time, wrapped it in reluctance like iron bands. He'd believed he was making a choice, but standing here, watching the green glow bleed through his shirtsleeve, he understood the truth.

He'd never been the one deciding.

"There's a location in the journal," Abigail said quietly. "Admiral Cheney's fleet was patrolling between the Azores and Bermuda when the Santa Catalina was supposed to rendezvous with them. If the curse kept Blackwood from reaching that point, maybe the delivery point isn't the men—it's the place."

Tomas stepped forward. "So we sail to the middle of the Atlantic and throw a box of cursed gold into the water?"

"We sail to the middle of the Atlantic and *complete the voyage*," Abigail corrected. "That's the ritual. You finish what the Santa Catalina started. You let the sea take the cargo where it was always meant to go."

Mack looked down at the journal in Abigail's hands, at the last entry Blackwood had ever written—the ink smeared, the letters slanting wildly in a hand that had lost all control.

*I cast the package overboard tonight. I will not let the dead use me as their messenger.*

The words stopped Mack cold. Blackwood had thrown the package into the sea. He'd completed his escape, destroyed the cargo—and the curse had followed him anyway. The journal had been written before his death, but the wreck proved he'd never gotten free.

"He dumped it," Mack said, throat dry. "The journal says he threw the package overboard. If he did that and still ended up cursed and dead on the bottom of the Devil's Trench, then the ritual's a lie. There's no way to complete a voyage that was already abandoned."

Abigail was staring at the page. Slowly, she traced her finger over a line of text Mack hadn't seen.

"Not abandoned," she read. "The ink is smeared here but the words are—he says 'the strongbox itself was taken from me in the night. My first mate knows what I carry.' He didn't throw it away, Mack. Someone stole it. His first mate, Leticia de la Vega."

Her voice dropped.

"He writes her name in full, and then beneath it: *The package sails on without me. I know where she will take it.*"

Mack's gaze snapped to the journal's margins, where careful notes gave way to a single latitude and longitude marked in a hand that was not Blackwood's.

"She sailed the second ship," Abigail said, wonder cutting through her fear. "The first mate abandoned the Santa Catalina with the package and her own crew. She was going to complete the delivery herself."

The whispers began again in Mack's head—or maybe they'd never stopped. The chorus of dead voices had gone quiet for a moment, and now they swelled with something close to anticipation.

*Find the Sea-Spirit,* they seemed to say. *Find what was lost.*

Mack looked at the green glow through his shirt, at the thirty coins below deck that were hunger and prison and hope all at once.

"Rosa," he called, striding toward the galley door. "Get me the charts for the Atlantic crossing. And that diving gear you said wasn't ready. We're sailing deep water, and we need a new wreck."

Tomas's brow furrowed. "A new wreck? Whose?"

Mack stopped in the doorway, looked back at the journal in Abigail's hands.

"One that's been sailing without a captain for three hundred years. The Sea-Spirit. Blackwood's first mate is the one who's been whispering to us all along."

The green coin pulsed against his chest, warm as blood.