We passed through the soldier’s quarters, and then the sailor’s quarters beneath it. When we stepped off the ladder connecting the sailor’s quarters to the bilge below, I felt the familiar prickling in the back of my neck of danger sharpening its claws.

  A captain faces many dangers on the high seas, and doubly so for a pirate captain. Balancing a crew of black-hearted killers is easier said than done, and you can’t have your guard up the whole while. Eventually you have to relax, and your crew has to see that even when you are vulnerable, even when somebody could reach across the table and slit your throat…nobody does.

  The successful captains develop a sense for the moments when their guard must be dropped, and the moments where it must remain high and ready. Despite what my manacles and tattered rags might tell you, I had been a very successful captain once.

  Lucien planned to kill me here, beneath the creaking wooden beams and tangled knots of ropes. I couldn’t say why or how, but I knew with certainty that my life was close to ending. It would be far from the first time, so I followed along obediently, even as my mind whirled through possibilities.

  Time moved too fast for me though, as it often does for the old, and we soon ducked beneath a pile of cargo lashed to the ceiling and came upon the vampire. I felt the tip of a thin fencing steel kiss my neck, and stopped abruptly.

  Lucien walked around me in a slow circle, taking care to stay out of reach and keep the cage between us once his blade retreated, though I saw the purple glimmer of his pistol tracking me as he moved. I was considering whether I could survive a single shot from it when he spoke.

  “You were right, Radagan. She needs to die.”

  I frowned, but my confusion was undercut by the vampire beginning to loudly beg for her life. “No, sir! Please, don’t kill me. I just want to see my father one last time. You must understand, sir! I haven’t left this cage, I swear it.”

  It was an impassioned plea, but I ignored her gestures in favour of the darkness I saw glimmering within Lucien’s eyes. I recognised that look, and marvelled at how I’d missed it before. He had never been enraptured by this vampire, had never been taken in like the young fool I had suspected him to be. No, he was a darker kind of man; a true killer, sure as the salt sprays the deck.

  Takes one to know one, after all, and he’d had me pegged from the very beginning.

  “Why did you bring her here?” I asked, cutting through the frantic words still tumbling from the vampire’s mouth.

  Lucien Lucksworth smiled indulgently as he twirled one side of his waxed mustachio. “I need a trophy,” he said simply. “The High Omnissary tasked my guild personally with this mission, Radagan. You have to understand what that would mean if I were to return empty handed.”

  “But she’s not the killer. She was just a thrall,” I protested, and he scoffed.

  “And that does not matter to the thousands in the capital that will cheer for her death. You strike me as very na?ve for a pirate captain, Radagan.”

  “Then what’s the bloody the point of all of this!?” I asked, gesturing at the cage and the vampire within, frustration straining my voice. “Why not just a pick a random man from the dungeons and murder them to sate the citizen’s bloodlust and purge the nobility’s fear? Why put on this whole show of heading to the Howling Peninsula in the first place?”

  I glanced to the woman – the thing – in the cell, and shivered. She had stopped begging now, clearly having seen the futility in appealing to the conscience of a man that had none. She now stood painfully still. Unnaturally so, no movement in her chest and ribcage, no twitch of her eyes or lips. Dead. Like a fish in the bucket that was long past flopping, she stared with empty eyes at Lucien as the vampire-hunter talked.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “There is little point in explaining the politics to you, my dear Radagan,” he said, with more of that effortless superiority that had been present when I first met the man two days ago now filling his voice once more. “Just get in the cage.”

  “You must be mad.” I stated flatly, looking from his cruel smile to the dead face of the dead woman before me. I noticed for the second time a little concentric ring of needle-point marks on the back of her hand. It had slipped my mind in the intervening chaos of our voyage since the shipwreck, but I had noticed the similar marks on the body of the prime vampire that had turned her as well.

  “I need a vampire to present to the High Omnnissary, and this one is too dangerous to be left alive. Get in,” he said simply.

  I winced. He no longer needed me to steer them home – we had left the dangerous waters behind and were only a day or so from the coast now. I reached for any other excuse but came up wanting.

  “Why would I agree to this?” I asked. “I know a full-blood is beyond me, I’m no fool.”

  Lucien hummed to himself. “Because I will grant you a quick death. You swallow this potion,” he said as he withdrew a small bottle from beneath his coat, “get in the cage and endure a little love-bite from our friend here, and then you sit in a cage for a couple of days before burning to death in front of a crowd in the capital.”

  “That doesn’t sound quick,” I remarked, and he laughed.

  “Oh, my dear friend, but it is in comparison. The other option is to rot in a cell for another decade before your bones give up from disuse, or perhaps I cash in a favour with the inquisitors and they pay you a few visits while you serve your sentence? My guild has close ties to the clergy, after all.”

  He let that sink in for a few moments before gesturing to the cell with his pistol. “Get in.”

  “I don’t-” I started to say, but the heavy iron key hit me in the leg a moment later, and I mechanically bent down to pick it up from the floor, mind racing all the while.

  This undead creature in the cell, the original vampire prime that had supposedly murdered so many high-born in the capital, and the exsanguinated boy in the skiff…My father’s words rang in my mind; If ‘dead men tell the best tales’, then what yarn were the undead spinning?

  “Chop chop, Radagan,” the oily hunter remarked cheerfully. “Down the hatch,” he said while throwing a potion my way. “Can’t have you taking over control of all the potential thralls she may have left running around the ship, after all.”

  I grimaced, catching the bottle without looking, my eyes now fixed on the creature in the cage. The bars were spaced closely together, gaps no bigger than a clenched fist through which one could squeeze. A clenched fist…or the beak of a certain-

  I met the gaze of the vampire, seeing her dead eyes take me in, noticing her slim build contrasted with the voluminous sleeves and rumpled dress. Plenty of spare fabric, plenty of space. My eyes widened, and I turned sideways to present a smaller target, back leg sliding out, sinking down into a half-crouch as I did so. It had been many years since I’d fought this way, but I had worn a heavy cutlass on the high seas for a reason.

  “He means to kill you,” I said. “Now is the last chance you’ll have. This potion,” I waved it in one hand in front of the vampire thrall’s face, “will cut-off your connection to any thralls you control. That includes her,” I said with a gesture at the woman in the cage.

  “What are you-” Lucien asked, starting towards me with his fencing steel raised high.

  Something leapt from the thrall’s sleeve onto the side of the cage.

  It was fast and strangely fluid, and burrowed its way through the gap in an instant, but I had already turned and started running. I heard Lucien’s startled cry behind me, and then a wet smacking sound.

  A curse followed immediately after, and then a scream. It didn’t take long for the screaming to stop, though I was too busy scampering up the ladder from bilge to sleeping quarters to notice. I cursed myself as I ran. How could I have missed it? At what point while rotting beneath the capital had I lost faith in my own instincts?

  I had lived my life on the sea, and I knew well enough the marks left on flesh from a deep-crawler. I also knew of their intelligence. It was an alien kind, but they were intelligent, nonetheless. I could only hope that everything true of the vampires turned from humans held true for these spawn, too, or Cerevis was doomed.

  The clanging and bumping behind me was a potent reminder that the fate of Cerevis was not my greatest concern though. I sprinted on, heading for the deck, and the open sky above.