As they started walking, Max said, “Etienne is responsible for bringing us back from the brink of insanity, from the edge of something so crude and so heinous, it turns my stomach whenever I think of it. He was also responsible for getting us back home.”

“How?”

“His idea was to head back to the port where we first landed. We were at the southern tip of the country by that time, so following the eastern coastline, we headed north. We’d only been walking for a week or so before we came upon a natural harbor, and as luck would have it, there were five sailing ships nestled in its waters. Some of the crew had gathered around a fire on the beach, so we commandeered one of their rowboats, made our way out to one of the ships, and stowed away in its hold for what we thought would be a fairly short voyage.”

“It wasn’t?”

Max smiled. “The ship we boarded was the Victoria.”

Bennett’s mouth dropped open, and she stopped in her tracks. “The Victoria? As in Magellan’s ship?”

“One of them.”

“But that ship sailed the globe.”

“Yes, it did, and we spent nearly two years on her,” Max said before starting to walk again. “Historians will tell you that once she returned to Spain, arriving back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September of 1522, only eighteen of the original two-hundred plus crew of Magellan’s fleet survived. The others were supposedly lost to mutiny, shipwreck, or disease, but that isn’t entirely true. When the Victoria sailed from what’s now known as Port St. Julian, there were just over forty men on the boat, not including the eight vampires hiding in her hold.”

“You killed the rest?”

“Yes. We tried to temper our thirst as much as possible, but even a tamed beast can revert to its true self at times, and we did. And that’s when we discovered we could turn others into beings like us.”

“How?”

“Late one night, Simeon left the hold to quench his hunger, but as he emerged, a deckhand appeared out of nowhere. There was a struggle, and to silence the man, Simeon took what he needed before the sailor could cry out. Normally, our victims would faint either from fear or blood loss, but this man was stronger than others, so when he began to fight, Simeon broke his neck. He dragged him back into the hold until we could find a safe time to toss the body overboard, and a few hours later, the man awoke. We were stunned and a bit scared, I think. He was confused and jabbering, mumbling in his language much too loudly for our liking, so we took off his head, and that, as they say, was that. We disposed of his body and remained vigilant until we reached port.”

“What happened when you returned to Spain?”