The sensory overload at the surf competition provided a brutal lesson. Frankie existed as a creature of the shadows now, whether or not she liked it. The bright, loud, sun-drenched world of her old life became a minefield, and she had barely escaped alive.

  After her panicked retreat from the beach, she officially dropped out of the competition, citing a sudden, vicious migraine. The lie felt flimsy, but it represented the best she could do. It earned her confused looks from her teammates and a smug, knowing smirk from Tasia, but it got her home. Back to the dim, quiet sanctuary of her bedroom.

  Her friends convened that evening, the mood grim. The chaotic, uncontrolled power Frankie displayed on the water, followed by her breakdown on the beach, made one thing terrifyingly clear: time ran short. The monster inside her wasn't just a passive curse; it grew, learned, and fought for control.

  “We can’t just react anymore,” Ted said, his voice low and serious. He paced back and forth in Frankie’s room, a caged tiger of anxious energy. “We have to get ahead of this. We have to figure out what Blackmane wants. And the only lead we have is Henry Rivera.”

  He was right. The failed investigation at the library, the dead ends online—all that happened before they knew the most important piece of the puzzle. The connection wasn't just historical; it was biological. It pulsed in Frankie’s blood.

  Their new line of inquiry led them away from the public, curated history of the library and the Historical Society, and into the guts of the town itself. It led them to the Norchester Town Hall.

  A grim, granite building that looked more like a fortress than a municipal center, it housed the town's official archives, a place no teenager would ever go unless forced to for a school project. Perfect.

  The archives lived in the basement. Of course. A dusty, neglected room, filled with rows of metal shelves groaning under the weight of decaying cardboard boxes. The air hung thick with the smell of mildew and forgotten time, a scent that made Frankie’s stomach clench. It smelled like secrets.

  A bored-looking clerk with a faded anchor tattoo on his forearm barely looked up from his crossword puzzle as he signed them in. “Try not to get lost,” he grunted, waving a vague hand at the stacks. “And whatever you do, don’t sneeze. The whole place might turn to dust.”

  They found themselves alone in the tomb.

  “Okay,” Ted said, rubbing his hands together with a determined, if nervous, energy. “We know Henry Rivera settled here after the attack in 1788. We need to find him. Property deeds, birth certificates, census records… we trace his life.”

  A hunt for a ghost on paper begun. The work proved tedious, frustrating, and filthy. Their fingers soon became smudged with ink and a fine, grey grime from the decaying boxes. Only the faint sound of rustling old paper and a persistent fluorescent hum disturbed the otherwise complete silence, the latter a dull drone that hammered against Frankie’s head.

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  They started with property deeds, massive, leather-bound books containing hand-drawn maps of every parcel of land in Norchester. After an hour of sifting through the elegant, spidery script, Dee Dee found him.

  “Got him!” she whispered, her voice sharp in the silence.

  They huddled around the book. There it was: Henry Rivera. Purchase of land, two acres, coastal property, 1791. The signature at the bottom of the page was a confident, looping scrawl. Frankie stared at it, a shiver tracing its way down her spine. Her ancestor's signature. The man who faced the monster.

  “He stayed by the sea,” Frankie murmured. It was not a question.

  “Looks like it,” Ted said, tracing the plot of land on the map with his finger. “Right on the northern edge of the bay. Not far from… from the coves.”

  He wasn't just living by the ocean he loved. He stood guard.

  The paper trail mapped a life. They found the record of his marriage to Sarah Perkins in 1793. They found the birth certificates of his four children, their names recorded in the same elegant script. They followed the slow, steady expansion of the Rivera family in Norchester over generations, a clear, unbroken line stretching from the lone survivor of a pirate massacre directly to the birth certificate of Maka Rivera, and then, finally, to one bearing the name Francesca Rivera.

  Frankie held her own birth certificate, the modern, typewritten document looking alien and flimsy compared to the ancient records surrounding it. The line felt real. Irrefutable. A chain stretching through two centuries, linking her directly to the man who trapped Blackmane.

  The discovery sobered them, but it offered no answers. It only deepened the mystery. Henry had survived, had a family, and lived a life. But what kind of life? Haunted? Did he know the monster still waited out there?

  As they packed up to leave, their search having yielded a family tree but no real clues, Dee Dee noticed something they had overlooked. In the far corner of the archives, shoved behind a stack of more modern tax records, sat a set of boxes that looked even older and more neglected than the others. The faded label on the side remained legible: Parish Records, St. Jude’s Church. Pre-1900. Stored post-fire.

  “The old church on the hill,” Dee Dee mused. “It burned down a long time ago. I guess they stored all the surviving records here.”

  “Probably just baptismal logs and donation ledgers,” Ted said, already turning to leave. The long and frustrating day had taken its toll.

  But Dee Dee, with a writer’s curiosity for forgotten things, already pulled one box down. The cardboard felt soft and crumbly with age. On a whim, she lifted the lid.

  And inside, nestled between thick, dusty ledgers, lay something else entirely.

  A small, leather-bound book.

  Not a record book. Personal. The leather, worn smooth, the corners soft with age. No title on the cover. A diary.

  Dee Dee opened it. The pages, yellow and brittle, held an elegant and faded script.

  “What is it?” Frankie asked.

  Dee Dee remained silent for a moment. She read, her eyes wide.

  “It’s a diary,” she finally whispered, her voice full of a sudden, breathless excitement. “It belonged to the priest. Father Michael. From the early 1800s.”

  She looked up at them, and in her eyes, Frankie saw they had just stumbled off the main road of their investigation and onto a dark, hidden path.

  A path that might lead them straight to the heart of the mystery.