Page 22 of Ghoul Me, Maybe
Lyle laughs. “You’reafraidof it?”
“I spent a century drying out beside a wreck. Forgive me if indoor plumbing feels like sorcery.”
He slaps the sink. “Everything’s sorcery until you learn how it works.”
I lean in and touch the water.
It’s warm.
Clean.
Gods, I miss being alive.
“You okay, Captain?” Lyle asks, suddenly serious.
“I don’t know.”
He nods like that makes sense.
“I’m not here to stay,” I say.
“None of us are. But while you’re here… maybe stir up some dust.”
I glance out the window.
Lowtide Bluffs is sleeping.
But the relic’s awake.
And so am I.
CHAPTER 9
SIENNA
Idon’t know what compels me to go back to the harbor at sunrise. Maybe it’s the coin. Maybe it’s the photo. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m running on thirty-six hours of bad sleep and spite.
The fishermen are already out. Their boats slice through the morning mist like blades through cream, nets trailing behind like ghost stories waiting to happen. I nod at a few of them—they don’t nod back. Lowtide Bluffs never forgets.
The statue near the docks has always creeped me out. It’s this weatherworn thing carved from dark granite, shaped like a hooded sailor holding a compass to the sky. The face is too smooth, the expression too blank, and the whole thing looks like it’s waiting to come alive and lecture me about nautical safety.
Dad used to mutter to it like it was a confessional.
I never thought to check it before.
There’s something in the way the moss grows at its base. A faint outline—square, precise. Hidden in plain sight like a secret compartment waiting for the right level of obsession to pry it open.
I kneel and run my fingers along the seam. The stone shifts under my palm, groaning with age. Inside, wrapped in waxedcloth and just barely not falling apart, is a folded scrap of parchment. Damp, stained, and pulsing with old magic.
“Okay,” I whisper, glancing around. No one’s watching.
I sit on the edge of the dock and unwrap it.
The handwriting hits me like a gut punch. It’s jagged but deliberate. Ink faded to a tired brown, corners torn like it survived something that didn’t.
March 12th
They don’t know I saw them. Kerren and Dace whispering under deck, fingers too twitchy to be just superstition. The object—whatever that bastard Greaves paid me to carry—it’s humming louder now. I’ve ordered it sealed in the hold, but the crew’s eyes change every time they pass it. Like it’s calling them. It was never meant to touch land. The moment it does, it wakes. And we all burn.
