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.Now they were just being used to throw as much light as possible.Thick, greasy smoke filled the air.Cade held his torch in one hand and a double-flue iron in the other.The crew—down to sixteen, with Samuel’s abrupt exit—seemed calm.Even confident.The night was falling fast, but now they were taking arms against the invader.Perhaps they were going to die.But this way, they would die like men, on their feet, rather than like cattle selected from the herd and slaughtered.Then the captain announced he’d be leaving.He would take one of the whaleboats under full sail and head for Georges Island in Boston Harbor, and the military fort there.He would return to the ship with soldiers and guns.They were less than a day away.It was the best plan, he said.The men said nothing, because the captain had his gun drawn.He didn’t put it back in his belt until he was well away from the Charlotte.From the rail of the ship, they all watched him go.Adams decided that they should search the ship.They lashed the wheel into place, on course for Georges Island, and split up.As newer men on the crew, William, Cade and Jonas often got the worst jobs.This was no different.They were sent into the hold, to find whatever was hiding there.THE HOLD HAD NEVER seemed quite so big before.He should have been able to search it alone.Three of them should have been able to find anything in there.But the silence yawned around Cade like a chasm, and his lantern barely seemed to touch the dark.He gripped the harpoon iron tight in his right hand and took another step forward.He heard something, like a sigh, and spun around a stack of barrels.The thing was still feeding on Jonas.In that half-second while it was occupied, Cade got a glimpse of what had stalked them for days.It was taller than Cade, even hunched over.Its body seemed distorted, its head too long for its neck, its elbows bent the wrong way.Cade’s eyes fixed on the long, tapered claws at the end of its arms, the ones that held Jonas.Cade didn’t have much of an imagination back then.He never had time for it, with the hours of labor and the struggle just to stay fed.But he had the first and only flash of intuition in his life looking at those claws.He remembered the sound of something digging into the hull, as if it were clawing its way from the water and onto the boat.He realized that’s exactly what had happened.The creature had never been on the boat.But where else would a thing that hated daylight hide? A thing that didn’t need to breathe? It had latched to the underside of the ship, waiting for them to reach the open sea.Until it was too late to turn back.Every sunrise, it went back down under the waterline, safe from the sun, until it got hungry again.Cade was trembling.The creature’s claws worked Jonas’s chest like a bellows, pumping every last drop of blood out of the wound on his neck.It was the teeth that snapped Cade from his paralysis—revulsion at those long, needlelike fangs.Pure reflex took over.Cade remembered the harpoon iron in his hand, and screamed as he launched himself at the vampire.He didn’t even see Jonas after that, his friend’s body hanging on those strangely bent arms like meat on a rack.He just slashed blindly at the thing holding him.The vampire plucked him from the air and held him at arm’s length while it finished draining Jonas.It had known he was there the whole time.He was no threat.Cade struggled.He hacked wildly with the iron.The blade struck something.Then the vampire was gone.It moved too fast for him to see.Jonas sat on the floor, a great cavity carved out where his neck once met his shoulders.His eyes still seemed to plead with Cade.Cade no longer cared.His mind finally caught up with his body, and he wanted nothing more than to run.It was already too late.There was a whisper near him, and he was flying across the hold.He hit a barrel hard enough to crack it open.Another slight whisper in the air, and he was flying again.This time he landed on the rough planks face-first.The blade was gone.Dimly, he realized he was bleeding, two bloody gashes up and down his chest.The thing was right on top of him now.He felt himself lifted again, but only to its mouth.The breath on his neck was cool and rank, the smell of an open sewer in the rain.His head tipped back far enough to see that the thing had been scratched slightly across one side of its distorted face.A thin trickle of blood ran from the scratch, hung at the edge of its jaw—and then dripped onto Cade.He hadn’t even hurt it.But he could feel its rage, like the heat off a stove.Somehow, he knew it was the indignity of being touched that sparked the creature’s anger.It toyed with him, rather than simply gutting him.All those thoughts were retreating into the distance, getting further and further away.He knew not much time had passed, but his legs and arms were numb.He felt cold.Two things saved him.First, another light: far off, maybe a million miles away.Some last part of him knew it was William, coming back for him.He was running as fast as he could, but it was all so slow to Cade.The vampire had to shift, slightly, to meet William’s attack.Then, the second thing: the ship ran aground on the rocks near Georges Island.The entire hold jerked and shuddered, and the thing at his neck was thrown away by the impact.He landed somewhere in a corner, the sounds of the ship’s timbers groaning under the insult of the crash.He tried to get his feet under him again.Couldn’t.The darkness took him then.He thought he was dead.Some small part of him was glad, because it meant he would no longer have to live in a world where things like that existed.He had never been so wrong.EVERYTHING HURT.The whole world was the edge of a razor blade, slashing at Cade, as he opened his eyes
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