The single work light hanging over the table flickered, casting their shadows long and monstrous against the rusting walls of the cannery. The storm outside raged, the wind howling and the rain lashing against the thin metal roof like a thousand frantic fists. The world outside tried to warn them.

  But the real storm raged inside, in the dead, suffocating silence that had fallen over the table.

  Dee Dee’s face, a pale, bloodless mask in the harsh light, remained fixed on the final, water-stained page of Henry Rivera’s journal. Her eyes no longer just read words. They saw a vision of a future so horrible it had stolen the air from her lungs.

  “Dee Dee?” Frankie’s voice came as a raw whisper. “What does he need from me?”

  Dee Dee finally looked up, her gaze moving from one terrified face to the next. “Your blood,” she said, her voice a choked, hollow sound. “He needs your blood.”

  She took a shaky breath, her finger tracing the faded, spidery script. “Henry’s curse… it wasn’t perfect. He trapped Blackmane in the chest after he trapped the ship inside the cave, binding Blackmane to the bay. It weakened Blackmane, but there’s a loophole.”

  She paused, swallowing hard. “A loophole in the magic. A single, arcane condition for him to break the curse completely.”

  “What is it?” Ted pressed, his voice tight with impatience.

  “It’s a ritual,” Dee Dee explained, her eyes returning to the journal. “To regain his full power, to sever his ties to this bay and walk freely in the world again, he needs the blood of a descendant from the person who cursed him.”

  The words landed like stones in the silent room. Not just a grudge. Not just revenge. Frankie was an ingredient. A key.

  “But it’s not just any time,” Dee Dee continued, her voice dropping even lower. “The blood has to be offered… or taken… during a very specific celestial event.”

  She looked at Frankie, her eyes full of a new, dawning horror.

  “A total lunar eclipse.”

  A confused silence fell. “A lunar eclipse?” Damon repeated, frowning. “What does the moon have to do with anything?”

  “It’s a key,” Dee Dee explained, her words tumbling out faster now as she translated the frantic, last passages of the journal. “Henry writes the curse is tied to the tides, to the moon, to the natural cycles of the sea. But a total lunar eclipse—a Blood Moon—is a moment when the natural world is thrown out of balance. The magical energies of the curse are at their absolute weakest. It’s a moment of cosmic vulnerability. The ritual, performed at the apex of the eclipse, won’t just free Blackmane from the bay…”

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  She hesitated, her face contorting with a fresh wave of terror.

  “It will transform him,” she whispered. “It will amplify his power. He won’t just be a vampire. He’ll be something more. A true master of the night. No longer weakened by the sun. No longer bound by the rules of Henry’s curse. He won’t just be free. He’ll be… perfected.”

  An apocalypse in a bottle. And Frankie’s blood was the cork.

  The sheer, cosmic horror of it was suffocating. They were not just fighting to save their friend or their town. They were fighting to keep a god-tier monster from being unleashed upon the entire world.

  It was Ted, the scientist, the pragmatist, who broke the spell. His mind, reeling from the supernatural madness, latched onto the only part of the equation he could verify.

  “A lunar eclipse,” he muttered, fumbling in his pocket for his phone. His hands shook so badly he almost dropped it.

  “What are you doing?” Frankie asked, her voice hollow.

  “I’m checking,” Ted said, his thumbs flying across the screen, the phone’s cold, blue light illuminating his terrified face. “There’s no way… It’s a rare event. We have time. We have to have time.”

  He typed frantically into the search bar: next total lunar eclipse visible in Norchester Bay.

  The search results loaded instantly.

  He stared at the screen. The color drained from his face, leaving it a sickly, greyish white. He looked as if he had just seen a ghost.

  “Ted?” Dee Dee prompted, her voice trembling. “When is it?”

  Ted lifted his head slowly, his eyes wide with a despair so profound it looked like madness. He could not seem to form words. He just turned the phone around for them to see.

  On the screen, a NASA webpage displayed the answer in cold, hard, scientific fact.

  Next Total Lunar Eclipse Visible from North America: June 30, 2025.

  Frankie’s blood ran cold. She looked at her phone. At the date.

  June 28, 2025.

  Two days.

  The timeline had not just sped up. It had collapsed. Weeks, months of planning, of training… all of it was gone. They had two days until the end of the world.

  The weight of the revelation was crushing, a physical pressure that stole the air from the room. They had been playing a child’s game, finding clues, setting up a secret base, thinking they were in control. But Blackmane had not been playing. He had been waiting. Waiting for the stars to align. Waiting for the last piece of his centuries-old plan to fall into place.

  They had not been playing checkers while he played chess. They had not even been on the same board.

  “What do we do?” Dee Dee whispered, the question a ragged admission of utter, hopeless defeat.

  They had no plan. No army. No time.

  They stood there in the dim light of the cannery, the rain hammering on the roof like the drums of a coming war, the fragmented pieces of the puzzle snapping together into a single, terrifying, complete picture of their doom.

  They were lost.

  Then they heard a sound. Not the rain. Not the wind. The sharp, sudden, unmistakable sound of shattering glass from the floor above them.