She was good to her word, the vampire, and we made it back to the open ocean without encountering anymore thralls. We did struggle to put together a sea-worthy skiff to get us back to our own ship, but with a little elbow grease and a fair amount of magic, I was able to pull something together that could cross a few hundred meters of calm water without major issues.

  Francis glanced warily at the water the whole way, no doubt recalling his friend’s fate, and I grit my teeth and tried not to notice the woman in front flinch every time water splashed over the side of the craft.

  It was an ironclad rule that had kept Cerevis safe for generations; vampires hate the open ocean. They couldn’t handle the brine for some reason only the gods knew, and that was all that had prevented a total apocalypse all those years ago.

  The reminder that we rowed next to a gods-damned - in the literal sense this time - vampire, was unwelcome, and the fact that she were watched closely by a vampire-hunter was not particularly reassuring given his recent decision.

  She was swiftly locked in the hold after we made it back to our ship, and Lucien took great care in explaining to Julius – and the sailors and soldiers more broadly – how the prison was entirely made of reinforced iron, heavy and unyielding, with gaps no larger than a closed fist at each face. There would be no slipping away during the night for this vampire, he assured us.

  Just as well, since sailors were a suspicious and mistrustful bunch. It was why they made such great recruits to a pirate crew, from a captain’s perspective at least. Once they found a man to lead them that didn’t kill them in the first raid, they were inclined to trust them.

  I thought back to my old crew, and how I had kept my helm for nigh on a decade by becoming a lucky charm myself. ‘Old Skipper’s at the helm, best not worry’, ‘if the stars are shining or Blackheart’s sailing – all will be well’, ‘Never bet against the Storm-Bringer’ and my personal favourite; ‘never fuck with Old Cannon-Hand on a dry night’.

  The crew didn’t like it – they were sailors, after all, and Lucien, and even Julius, had no rapport with them. But the presence of a dozen heavily armed Cerevis navymen kept them in line, and they did nothing more than grumble as I steered the ship away from the downed galleon.

  “Where are you taking us, Radagan?” Julius had demanded, as we travelled past the island full of teeth that had snared the larger vessel to our starboard.

  “We can’t simply sail back through the Misted Straights as we are. We must loop around the island and come at it from the west, with the tide. I’ll be taking us to the far side where we can drop anchor and wait out the night.”

  “I don’t think it is your place to-” he began, but was silenced by Lucien, as the wytch-hunter brushed past him.

  “Leave it, Julius. Listen to the man - we brought him along for a reason, and he has proved his worth thus far. Besides, our collective deaths serve him naught, correct?” he looked at me then, and I nodded graciously.

  Julius grumbled, but made no further issue of it, and I did as I had said. He had confiscated my weapons again and once more sheathed my wrists in magicked iron, after all.

  We nestled in the lee of a small island, hunkering behind its little hump of rock to protect us from the howling wind throughout the night.

  When the rosy fingers of dawn greeted us again, two men had died.

  Francis had slipped from his bed in the morning, and wobbled up to a sailor, biting him in the neck in front of the entire crew. They’d both been tipped overboard immediately, but the after-effects were not so easily left behind as the two bodies falling beneath the waves in our wake.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The vampire in the hold had been interrogated, but she hadn’t left – how could she, after all, trapped by hardened iron as she was? Lucien had been convinced and wrote it off as simply a result of our earlier adventure in the shipwreck. The soldier had clearly been bitten without our notice and hid the infection until he became thralled in the night, or so Lucien had declared.

  I still harboured suspicions of the vampire, but I wasn’t the capital-sanctioned expert in this matter and so my word was ignored, unsurprisingly. The wytch-hunter insisted on examining me but found nothing unusual with his magic. I had worried that he might notice the blooming power within me, but his magic was made for hunting creatures of the dark, and while my own heart might be black as pitch, that was for reasons mundane rather than magical.

  Once the tides aligned, we sailed around the island and back into the Misted Straits. I steered us at an angle to reefs that coiled beneath the waves, home to varied life and hoping no doubt to add us to their strange topography. The wind hit us, and we began to veer off course.

  I made a great show of straining at the wheel, becoming increasingly panicked until I shouted at Julius. “The wind’s too strong, we need to tamp down these sails and lean hard to starboard. Get me the strongest sailor on this ship!”

  He didn’t react at first, so I unleashed my captain’s bellow, and that shocked him awake. “Fucking move it, boy!” I screamed.

  Lucien burst from the aftcastle once more, eyes wild and looking for the source of the commotion. He quickly grasped the dilemma as I shouted some more sailing-themed nonsense at him, and he gestured to Julius to see it done. It didn’t need to make sense, for I knew neither of them had the wits or knowledge to know port from starboard, let alone the intricacies of steering through the shallow waters. There was a clear hierarchy on the ship, and I was glad to see it still held. While it was still to my advantage, at least.

  The big man I'd seen brain one of the fish thieves with an oar the day prior stomped up to me, looking for a command to save him from the existential crisis of having to think for himself. I obliged, asking him to furl in the rounded sail, turning it into a flatter shape that could see us through the harsh wind.

  He needed to heave on a rope with the strength of three men, and my power would allow him to do so. It wasn’t until he was pulling on the rope itself, high up the mast and feeling the razor whip of the cold wind against his exposed flesh that I offered him the deal. The threat of death has a funny way of making men more pliable, I had always found.

  I could see that he accepted from the way the sail was cinched under the force of his empowered might, to say nothing of the dull voice I heard echo its assent in my head.

  I had no further opportunity to recruit from there, for while I had played up the danger to convince Julius and Lucien to lend me more men, we were still attempting a dangerous crossing, and it took almost all of my focus for the next several hours to see us safely through the straights once more.

  I woke deep into the night, neck prickling, and decided to trust whatever base instinct had alerted me to danger. I rolled out of the hammock and stumbled up from the bilge towards the crew-deck. The ladder was frustrating to navigate with my heavy manacles, but I felt a creeping sense of dread in the back of my mind and knew that we were on the cusp of something.

  A quiet shuffle and a muffled thump sounded from above, and I pulled myself up onto the level above with a rattle of iron chains and a grunt of exertion. As I turned to the source of that noise, my eyes widened.

  I’m not a young man, and I’ve seen a lot during my time on the seas. Two years in a Cerevisian prison cell have shown me even further depravity, magic and an iron-hard will the only things that kept me sane throughout that confinement.

  But the sight I saw there in that ship would stay with me, I knew. A dread creature, that all raised in Cerevis are taught to fear from an early age, perched over the twitching form of a sailor in his bunk.

  Our history classes focused on them, our institutions echoed their presence with trite phrases; ‘spurn the wytch, slay the vampire’. Even our buildings were covered in guilt carvings depicting their vanquishing. I may have been a man of the seas, but I was also a child of Cerevis, and that culture was deeply ingrained, despite my best efforts to purge it.

  So when the vampire turned to me, blood running in rivulets from its distended mouth and eyes gleaming with wytchlight in the gloom, my first instinct was not that of the dreaded pirate captain I had once been. It was instead of a scared little boy confronted with the evils of a complex world.

  I screamed.