That night, Frankie didn’t fall asleep. She dragged under.

  Sleep had become a thing to be feared. Ever since the bite, her dreams had been a chaotic fever of twisting shapes and monstrous whispers. But this differed. This was no dream. It plunged.

  One moment, she lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, the useless kraken coin cold on her nightstand. Next, the world dissolved. She fell, not through the air, but through time, through consciousness, pulled down into a black, watery abyss by the sickness that lived in her blood.

  She landed in a place that had no light.

  No up or down. No north or south. Only darkness. An oppressive, absolute darkness so complete it felt like a physical substance, like being buried alive in wet, black velvet. It pressed in on all sides, thick and suffocating.

  And the pressure.

  Oh, the pressure. An immense, crushing weight, the weight of the entire ocean bearing down on every square inch of her—no, not her of this consciousness she now inhabited. A constant, grinding agony, the feeling of being squeezed by a giant’s fist for an eternity.

  Not her body, not her memories. A trespasser, a tiny flicker of her panicked self, trapped inside the mind of the creature from the chest.

  And it had been here for a very long time.

  Centuries passed slowly. Not as a thought, but as a physical sensation, like silt settling on the ocean floor. Seasons bled into decades, decades into centuries, all in the same unchanging, crushing blackness. The solitude, a living thing, a monster in its own right, profound and total, scraped away everything but the raw, screaming core of what the creature embodied.

  Thirst.

  A thirst unlike anything a human could comprehend. Not the simple, physical need for water, but a spiritual agony. A physical torment. A hollow, ravenous void in the center of its being, growing larger and deeper with every passing year. The thirst, its only companion in the dark, the only thing reminding it of life. A fire that could not be extinguished, a pain that could not be soothed, a need so powerful it had become the creature’s entire identity.

  Thirst. Thirst. Thirst.

  A silent scream echoed endlessly in the crushing, watery prison.

  And through the slow, black agony of the centuries, came the memories. They weren’t gentle recollections. They were violent, chaotic flashes of a life that had been lived in blood and fear.

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  A flash of splintering wood against rock. The sickening crunch of a ship’s hull giving way. The smell of tar and terror.

  A flash of a man’s face, wide-eyed and screaming, his mouth a perfect O of horror. The face is so close. So wonderfully, beautifully close.

  A flash of warmth. A gushing, glorious warmth floods a starving mouth. The coppery, metallic taste of life itself, so rich, so exquisite. The only thing that could quiet the thirst, if only for a moment.

  A flash of red sails against a stormy grey sky. A flag that bears no colors, only a promise of swift, merciless death.

  These memories were not Frankie’s. They belonged to a pirate. A monster. A predator that had hunted the seas, its existence a whirlwind of pure, predatory impulse. She felt it all . The rage. The power. The savage joy of the hunt.

  And then, the rage of its imprisonment.

  A burning, volcanic hatred consumed her for the ones who had trapped it. A hatred that had festered in the darkness for hundreds of years, becoming a pure, diamond-hard weapon. A singular, obsessive desire, burning brighter than the thirst itself, drove him: the desire to be free. To rise from the depths. To feel the wind again. To hunt again.

  To kill the descendants of the man who had put him here.

  Ancient, violent emotion, a torrent, overwhelmed him. It threatened to drown her, to erase the tiny, terrified flicker of Frankie Rivera and replace her with this creature of rage and thirst. Her own identity slipped, her memories—of the sun, of the waves, of Ted’s logic and Dee Dee’s laughter—being washed away by this red tide of hatred.

  No.

  She thought it. A tiny, defiant spark in the overwhelming darkness.

  No!

  She fought back. She didn’t know how. She pitted her will—seventeen years of life, love, and sunlight—against centuries of predatory rage. She clung to her mother’s smile, focused on her surfboard carving a perfect wave, and held onto her friends’ faces.

  Pushing back against a hurricane. The creature’s consciousness roared, furious at her intrusion, at her defiance. It tried to crush her, to absorb her, to make her another screaming voice in its eternal chorus of hunger.

  Frankie screamed.

  A real scream, torn from her own throat, in her bed, in her world.

  She jolted awake, bolting upright. Her bedroom lay dark, a familiar, gentle darkness, not the absolute black of the abyss. The only pressure, the weight of her sweat-soaked blankets.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs, trying to escape her chest. The nightmare over, its echo still lingered. The rage. The hatred. And the thirst. Oh god, the thirst. She still had it, a hollow ache deep inside her.

  The dream had been a violation, a horrifying glimpse into the soul of the monster that had infected her.

  But it had given her something.

  In the final, chaotic moments of the battle, as she tore from the creature’s mind, a word clawed from the depths of its subconscious. A name she had never heard before, but now knew with a terrifying, intimate certainty.

  It hung in the silent air of her bedroom, a name torn from a nightmare. A name she had screamed as she woke up.

  “The Crimson Thirst.”