Read Chapter 9: A Growing Threat

Pete came awake in a single violent gasp, his body arching off the bunk. Rosa held his shoulders down, her dark eyes fixed on his dilated pupils as they constricted and moved again, tracking something only he could see.

"Easy," she said, low and steady. "You're back. You're on the Sea Serpent."

Pete's mouth worked for a moment before sound came out. "I saw her. On the deck. Standing right there in the rain."

Mack stood at the foot of the bunk, arms crossed, a cold knot tightening in his chest. "Saw who?"

"My sister." Pete's voice cracked. "Maria. She was there. Clear as I'm seeing you now. She was wearing that blue dress our mother buried her in—"

"Your sister's dead." Mack said it flat, not as a question.

"Five years," Pete whispered. "Drowned off San Juan. They never found the body." His fingers clutched the blanket. "She was pointing at me. At the water. Like she wanted me to go with her."

Mack felt the deck shift under him, or maybe that was his own center of gravity giving way. Maria. His own Maria. The vision he'd seen during the third dive—his sister's face in the dark water, reaching for him—and now Pete had seen his own dead sister. The ghosts weren't picking crew members at random. They were finding them by what they'd lost.

No. Not lost. Taken.

He pushed off the thought before it could root. "You need to rest."

"I need to tell you what I saw when I was—" Pete shuddered. "When I wasn't me. I was on the Santa Catalina. Standing at the wheel. There was a captain, but he wasn't in command. He was screaming at something he couldn't see. And there was this box, iron bands, strapped to the mast. Blood on the lid. Not dried. Fresh."

Rosa exchanged a look with Mack, quick and sharp. She knew something. He'd suspected it since she broke the possession with two words and a touch; no deckhand from a charter outfit ever moved that sure. Now he was certain.

"Whatever's on that wreck," Pete said, "it wants to finish something. And it will use whatever bodies it has to make that happen."

The shout came from topside, followed by Abigail's muffled voice through the companionway hatch. "Mack! You need to see this."

He climbed up into a clearing sky, sea-bruised and surging from the storm's passage, and saw what Abigail was pointing at: a cigarette boat cutting across the swells at speed, hull white as bone, twin engines howling. It belonged to no one he'd ever anchored beside in these waters.

Reyes.

Mack's gut went cold. He'd owed the man fifty grand for eighteen months, fed him partial payments and excuses. The storm had delayed nothing for Reyes; if anything, it had given him cover to close in unseen.

Abigail was at his elbow. "That's not Coast Guard. That's not anyone good."

"No. It's not."

The boat pulled alongside forty minutes later, crewed by three men in identical dark polos who could have been stamped from the same mold. Reyes came up over the gunwale first, broad-shouldered and silver-templed, wearing a cream-colored linen suit that had never seen a hard day's work. He smiled like an uncle at a wedding.

"Mack. You look terrible."

"Reyes. You're far from your usual haunts."

"Business is portable." He stepped onto the deck and looked around at the crew, doing the math in his head—head count, gear, damage from the storm. Mack saw him file it all away. "You're overdue. I don't like being overdue."

"I've got most of it."

"Most of it is a bank transfer I can wait on." Reyes's smile never moved, but his voice shed its warmth. "Cash on deck is what we agreed. Cash, Mack. Not promises. Not 'next month.' Cash."

Mack had thirty gold coins in a duffel in the hold. He could sell them in port for perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand if he moved them carefully through two or three brokers. He'd planned to string Reyes along for another month, take the rest of the treasure at leisure, pay off the debt and still have enough to vanish. But the storm had changed things. Pete's possession had changed things. The growing pressure of the curse was a weight he could feel pressing on the inside of his skull at every moment.

He made a decision he knew he'd regret.

"Wait here."

He dropped into the hold, shoved aside a crate of recovered brass fittings, and hauled out the canvas duffel. The weight of the coins pulled at his arms—and at something deeper. The whispers rose the moment his fingers touched the bag's straps.

Take it all. Take everything. He is not your master.

Mack gritted his teeth, hauled the bag onto deck, and swung it at Reyes's feet. The bag fell open, spilling gold coin into a heap. Spanish gold, heavy and old, glinting in the recovered sunlight.

Reyes's eyes went wide, then greedy, then flat. He crouched and picked up one coin, bit it, scraped a thumbnail across the face. "Where'd you find this?"

"Deep wreck. Unregistered." Mack had rehearsed this line an hour ago, back when he still thought selling the coins was his only problem. "Spanish treasure ship. I've got more leads in the same trench."

"Most of it," Reyes said slowly, "was not supposed to be sixty percent of what you owe. This is maybe thirty-five. Forty if the weight is true." He dropped the coin back into the bag and straightened, brushing his hands together as if they'd been dirtied. "We had an agreement."

"I'm giving you everything I've got."

"You're giving me what you've got today." Reyes looked past Mack at the crew, at the deck gear piled near the rail, the decompression tanks staged for another dive. "But you've got capacity to get more. So here's the deal, Mack, and it's the last one I'll offer: You get me a full load—and I'm talking twice what I see here, not once—within the week. You bring it to the fishing port at Südfortune. You don't call, you don't text, you don't send a messenger. You show up with the gold, and we're clean."

"And if I don't?"

Reyes looked at him with something that could have been sorrow or could have been professional loneliness. "Then I make calls. You know the kind of calls I can make. Salvage permits revoked—we both know this permit's a ghost anyway. Insurance flagged. Back taxes. Maritime violations. Disturbing a sovereign wreck without authorization. You'll be arrested before you reach port, Mack. Every asset you own will go to auction. Every dive you've ever logged will be reexamined by people who are very good at finding irregularities."

Mack had risked his life in deep caves, in military operations gone wrong, in waters where equipment failure meant a slow death. None of it had ever gripped him the way this threat did. Because Reyes wasn't threatening his life. He was threatening the one thing Mack couldn't let go: his freedom to dive, to search, to find.

"One week," Mack said.

Reyes's smile returned, kinder now, which was somehow worse. "I'll take that. And don't do anything stupid, like trying to dump a bag of Spanish gold on the market without it passing through someone I know." He kicked the duffel closed and looked at his men. "Luis. Alvarado. Stay on the Sea Serpent. Watch our investment."

The two thugs took flank positions near the helm without a word.

"You're putting your men on my boat?"

"You're putting my money in your hold. It's only fair." Reyes climbed back over the gunwale, landed in the cigarette boat with an ease that belied his age, and was gone in a scream of engines that faded into the distance.

Mack stood at the rail long after the wake had dissolved, watching the horizon where Reyes had disappeared. Behind him, he heard the crew start to talk in low voices. He knew what they were saying. He felt their stares like splinters.

He turned to go back below when he saw it: on the bridge wing, for just a moment, a dark shape against the sky. Tall. Hat-brimmed. Watching him.

Blackwood.

Mack blinked, and it was gone.

But the deck where it had stood was wet, out of place on the dried boards—a patch of seawater in the shape of two boot-prints, perfectly fresh.

The ghost was on the ship now. Not the wreck. The ship.

And Mack had just promised to raise every piece of the curse's hoard within the week.