I dared glance down beneath us and was surprised to see the mutants hadn’t followed us. Then I realized why. Kailyn and Lucas had distracted them. They had created a billowing ceiling of flames over the mutants, blinding them completely from looking up toward us, and likely burning them to a crisp if they didn’t escape back down the passageway fast enough. I figured the combined power of two full fae blasting down on them at once would be enough to seriously injure them.
My father kept flying higher with me, his grip only tightening around my waist, until we had flown so high into the night sky that the mutants’ screeching became distant. A cool wind whipped against us. I gazed behind us, toward the lake. The beautiful, seemingly endless lake. The lake that had been so utterly unattainable to us.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I rasped. “I’m so sorry.” Now that I’d reunited with him, all the guilt for having left and gotten myself into such a mess resurfaced. It tore me apart to imagine how worried sick I must’ve made him and my mother.
“We need to get you back home,” he said, planting a firm kiss against my forehead.
I wanted to ask how he’d managed to find me in the first place, but something much more urgent was tugging at me. My eyes returned to the crematorium beneath us. Orlando. He’s still down there. Maybe even Maura too, if she got taken inside.
“Dad,” I broached, nodding down toward the large building, “I have at least one friend trapped in there.”
“Friend?” he asked, moving his head backward so that he could look me in the eye. He was frowning.
Well, “friend” might’ve been too strong a word, especially since I had no idea whether Orlando might’ve been on the verge of ratting me out to the hunters before one stabbed him with a syringe. And Maura had been more than willing to hand me over to the IBSI at the first opportunity. Still, in this city of nightmares and desolation, without those two, I highly doubted that I would still be alive. Heck, I never would’ve made it out of that sewage tunnel that the Bloodless had chased me down soon after I’d woken up here.
And they had saved me from a lot of crap since then, too.
“They’re siblings,” I replied. “A brother and a sister. I wouldn’t be here with you now if it weren’t for them. They helped me survive. I know for a fact that the brother, Orlando, was taken down there, I saw it with my own eyes. And I think the sister, Maura, might be there too.”
“Down in that?” my father asked, still confused. “What is that, exactly?”
“A crematorium,” I replied, though that hardly served to clear his confusion. I was still confused myself as to why they were dragging living people into it. “Orlando and Maura said that’s what it is. But th-they’re taking people in there alive. I don’t know what they’re doing with them, but what else would they do to them in a crematorium other than…”
My father exhaled as my voice trailed off. “So you’d like me to go look for your friends?”
No, I really didn’t want that. I didn’t want my father to let go of me now that he had found me. But I owed it to those siblings. Besides, as a fae, it shouldn’t be too difficult a task for my father to pull off. He could thin himself at will and go undetected by the IBSI… Hopefully he wouldn’t be too late.
“I would,” I said, my voice strained.
“What do they look like?” he asked.
I described them to him as best as I could. Maura was short, but for all I knew there could be lots of other short young women down there, too. God knew how many people they’d hoarded. The fact that all inmates on this side of the city had shaven heads made my father’s task more difficult; it caused them all to look more indistinguishable. More uniform. Orlando was easier to describe than his sister because of his injured shoulder.
“Okay,” my father said, his voice deep. “Once Kailyn and Lucas get back up here, one of them will take you back to The Shade. I think Kailyn should do that, and I’ll ask Lucas to accompany me down into the crematorium.”
“Thank you,” I said, even as I felt another twinge of guilt. After all the trouble I’d caused, it felt like the last thing I ought to be doing was causing more potential trouble for my father.
We didn’t have to wait long for Lucas and Kailyn to return. They finished chasing off the mutants quickly and hurtled back up toward us.
“Hello,” Lucas said, eyeing me. He reached out a hand and mussed my already thoroughly mussed and matted hair. “You look like you’ve been having fun.”
I coughed out a dry half-laugh. “Yeah,” I managed weakly.
“Lucas,” my father said, turning to my great-uncle, “I’m not finished here yet. I need to go down to search that large building—a crematorium. There are two young people I need to look for. Will you come with me?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, all right. Which two young people?”
“More on that in a minute,” my father replied. He faced Kailyn and addressed her. “I need you to return Grace to The Shade right now. God knows what injuries she’s sustained while she’s been here. Take her to the hospital and have her seen immediately.”
“Right,” Kailyn said, her jaw setting. My father transferred me to Kailyn’s open arms, and I clung on to her like a monkey.
I cast one last glance at my father.
“Thank you, Dad,” I said. “And please, be careful.”
He nodded, offering me a small smile, before turning to Lucas to continue conversing with him.
Then Kailyn drew us away from the two and began hurtling away with me, back toward the heart of the city. She traveled with such speed that I struggled to keep my eyes open. Which wasn’t a bad thing. I closed my eyes on the dead city and all its horrors slipping away beneath us, and nestled my forehead against the crook of Kailyn’s neck.
Home.
I’m going home.
Ben
After witnessing Atticus’ conversation in his office, we discovered the river running right by the IBSI’s compound. From there, we began soaring over the ruined city, scouring the roads for signs of the hunters’ presence. The hunters were like bloodhounds. I figured that it wouldn’t take them long to locate Grace, and heading in the direction they were heading seemed like the best strategy.
The majority of hunter activity had appeared to be along the coast. We traveled there and continued searching until explosions caught our attention further up the shore, and we were pulled in that direction immediately. Then I heard Grace yelling. And I found my baby girl.
Truth be told, I didn’t need a lot of convincing from my daughter to venture down to the crematorium. Ever since I’d glimpsed Atticus’ laptop screen, those eight words had been etched at the back of my mind.
“Fight for Open Education on the Bloodless Antidote.”
What, exactly, did that mean? Now that we had found Grace, she was safe with Kailyn, and I knew that she would soon reach The Shade, my mind had room to mull over this question thoroughly.
Besides, we had come all this way, and now that I was here, I wanted to sniff around a bit more and try to piece together some clues.
Lucas and I thinned ourselves and then descended on the giant crematorium. Passing the smoking chimneys, we needed to decide from which direction to first enter the building. Lucas figured that the front was as good as any place to start, and so we dipped down to the parking lot, which was still blazing. We moved through the heavy metal entrance—above which was fixed an old, rickety sign, “Lakeside Crematorium”—and emerged in the interior of the building.
The entrance chamber was an oblong, stark white room lit by fluorescent ceiling strips. It contained not a single piece of furniture; its only purpose seemed to be to lead to the next room, which was guarded by a steel door that looked as sturdy as the main entrance.
Passing through this one and arriving on the other side, Lucas and I stopped short. We gaped.
This… this wasn’t a crematorium. Perhaps the building had once been used as such, but now… it was some kind of colossal, multi-layered laborato
ry. It was built like an atrium, with a concave ceiling that extended high overhead. Including the ground floor that sprawled out in front of us, I counted ten levels altogether. Countless hunters dressed in black uniforms milled about the aisles, and each level was jam-packed with rows of stainless-steel tables and filled with chemistry apparatus—except the top two floors. Those platforms appeared to consist of… cages. At least, based on what we could see of them from here.
Lucas and I moved upward and landed on the ninth level. We found ourselves gazing around at a maze of cages filled with Bloodless. I had no idea what the cages were made of, but they must have been strong to withstand the way many of them were ripping at the bars.
There were only a few hunters we could spot up here, moving among the rows of cells.
“I wonder why on earth they’re keeping them caged up in here,” Lucas muttered beneath his breath. “There are more than enough of these things outside.”
We continued scoping out the floor until we came full circle on ourselves. We barely spotted a single one of the hundreds of cages that did not contain a Bloodless.
“Let’s check the floor above us,” I whispered.
We floated upward, landing on yet another level filled with cages. But these were not filled with Bloodless. These were occupied by pale, sickly-looking people. My immediate instinct was to label them as half-bloods, but I wasn’t so sure. Somehow, they looked more ill than the conventional half-blood—like River used to look.
Although their heads were mostly shaven, their hair was very thin, with barely enough body to cover the white of their scalps. Their skin was so thin it showed an unhealthy number of veins. And they were very, very pale.
What are these hunters playing at?
“Look over there… the back of this row,” Lucas whispered.
Having been looking down the row to our left, I turned and looked to our right, and saw it. About twenty of the same type of pale humans, all lined up in a row next to each other. They sat upright, their backs against the wall. Surrounding them was a scattering of brown fabric bags and a trio of hunters. The reason for the hostages’ rigidness became clear. The hunters were armed and were aiming their guns threateningly at them.
Lucas and I froze and watched as one of the IBSI members stooped down and grabbed the arm of one of the men—a middle-aged man with a harsh, triangular jaw and scars marring almost every inch of his face.
“You’ll be coming with me,” the hunter said in a low voice.
He pulled the man up and stood him against one of the cages. Then he returned to the cluster and picked out another person—a woman this time, perhaps in her late twenties. I reminded myself of the reason I was down here in the first place—to reclaim Grace’s friends—and became immediately alert to verify that the woman was not Maura. It seemed that she wasn’t. This woman was tall, I estimated about five foot ten. Besides, she had light hair, not dark like Maura was supposed to have.
The hunter then stooped for a third person—another middle-aged man. Once he had them all lined up in a row, he nudged their backs, indicating that they move forward… toward us.
Even though we had thinned ourselves, we backed up anyway and let them pass. The hunters remaining withdrew syringes from a bag hanging on the outside of one of the cages before they began forcibly sedating each one of the crowd. The drug was practically instantaneous. Only seconds after the needle had sunk through their flesh, their heads lolled and they slid into a lying position on the floor.
We waited for the two hunters to leave the group of unconscious people before approaching. I examined each of them carefully. Then, right at the back of the group, I spotted a young man with a bloody, injured shoulder. There was a large man in front of him who must’ve been blocking my view of him before now.
This youth fit the description. He had to be Orlando.
I quickly looked around us to verify that there were no more hunters nearby. On spotting none, I addressed my uncle. “Okay, this is one of them. Now let’s search the rest of this level to see if we can find his sister.”
I double-checked that I hadn’t missed Maura among this cluster of bodies, and on seeing that I hadn’t, we began moving strategically along the rows of cells in search of the girl. We didn’t spot her in any of them. We came across a few shortish women, but none of them looked even remotely similar to Orlando.
If Maura wasn’t up here, among the other people of her kind, I couldn’t think where she would be. Perhaps she hadn’t been brought to this so-called crematorium after all and Grace had been mistaken.
We headed back to Orlando.
“So it looks like we’re going to have to forget about the girl,” I whispered to Lucas. “She doesn’t seem to be in here. At least we found this guy… Now we need to think about the best way to get him out.”
“Well,” Lucas replied, “we’ll just make a run for it. Scoop him up and head to the exit—we’ll be out before any of them realize what happened.”
“Right,” I agreed.
Lucas and I solidified ourselves and swiftly picked Orlando up. We dashed toward the edge of the floor, but just before we dove over the edge, bone-chilling screaming made us stop short in our tracks. It was the screaming of a man.
“What the…” Lucas breathed.
It sounded like it was coming from directly beneath us, an estimation that seemed to be confirmed when a second noise pierced through the atrium. Screeching. The screeching of Bloodless. What is going on?
I shifted Orlando’s weight to Lucas. “Take Orlando and get out of here. I’m going to thin myself and check out what the heck is going on down there.”
I was glad when Lucas didn’t argue—I’d thought he might want to come with me too. Juggling Orlando’s full weight, which frankly wasn’t much due to his light build, Lucas bolted with Orlando over the floor’s barrier and hurtled toward the exit. As Lucas had predicted, by the time the hunters had been alerted to his and Orlando’s forms darting through the air, he had already reached the first exit. Satisfied that Lucas needed no help from me, I reassumed my subtle form and lowered myself to the level beneath—the Bloodless’ level.
The hunters who’d left the upper level were standing outside one of the cages in a corner. I moved closer and witnessed the source of the scream and the screech. The scar-faced man had been locked inside the cage. He was crammed up against its wall on the floor while a Bloodless crawled over him and tore into his neck. I zoomed closer, barely even breathing as I gaped.
The man was already beginning to shake and tremble—the first signs of turning into one of those dreaded creatures. One of the hunters was gripping a long, extendable syringe. As the man’s trembling intensified, the hunter dug the needle through the bars of the cage and caught his neck on the side that the Bloodless wasn’t occupying. The hunter pulled a small lever at the side of the spearlike syringe and drew out what looked like a couple hundred milliliters’ worth of blood. He pulled the syringe back through the bars and held it upright. After several minutes, the Bloodless voluntarily climbed off the man, who was now vibrating so violently his limbs lifted off the floor, like he was being jolted with volts of electricity. The Bloodless rose to its feet… and that was when it struck me how short it was.
I looked closer still, trying to make out the distinctive facial features this noseless monster had once had. It was incredibly difficult but… as my eyes lowered to its chest, I could make out an ever so slight bump of breasts. This indicated that the Bloodless was only newly turned, for after a while, Bloodless’ fat deposits wasted away completely and they tended to look androgynous.
I stopped breathing for a moment as a chilling thought crept into my mind.
Could this Bloodless be Maura?
Having never seen her, and only having Grace’s vague description to go by, there was no way I could say for certain. All I knew was that I hadn’t been able to find the girl even though Grace had suspected that she had been brought down here, this Bloodless was the
right height, and she was clearly newly turned.
But whether she was or was not Maura, there was nothing I could do now. She was gone either way.
I shuddered internally, witnessing the Bloodless extend her tongue to lick away the streams of blood spilling from either side of her mouth.
And I once again questioned myself:
What are these hunters doing?
Grace
I kept my eyes closed for most of the journey back to The Shade. I didn’t want to open them again until we’d arrived, safe within the island.
Visions of that city still haunted me. Its darkness, its hopelessness. I could still practically feel its chill in my bones, even as we crossed the ocean toward warmer weather.
I kept thinking about Orlando and his sister. If they were still alive, I was sure that my father and great-uncle would find them. And then they would come back to The Shade, and I would have finally fulfilled my promise to them… even if they had failed to help me reach a phone in the end.
“Well, looks like we’re here,” Kailyn said cheerfully, causing my eyelids to shoot open. Gazing at the waves churning beneath us, I caught sight of the familiar rock formation outside The Shade’s boundary. We were nearing the island’s port.
Kailyn hovered with me over the invisible barrier and we moved closer to where she estimated the mainland was. Then we began yelling down for somebody to let us in. It was Corrine who emerged, Arwen following close behind her. I had never seen either of them look so relieved as they rushed toward us in the air.
Corrine wrapped her arms around me as I clung to Kailyn and pressed a deep kiss against my cheek.
“Thank God you’re all right, Grace. You wouldn’t believe the earful I’ve given Arwen for taking you to Hawaii. I mean, dammit, Grace, what were you thinking? You went venturing out to practically the exact spot where your father and aunt first got into trouble—”