I reached a stretch of jungle that bordered the beach and drew myself in among the trees. I collapsed in the undergrowth, wheezing and panting.
The ground beneath me quickly became wet from my blood, but I felt too weak now to get up and move to a dry patch. I just sat where I was, my head lowered and resting on my two front paws. Images of the past two weeks flashed in my mind. Before the night of my family’s murder, but mostly after. Mostly images of Victoria…
My brain felt like it was slowly shutting down, less wired to the agony in my leg. My senses were calming.
Maybe the pain is leaving me after all.
Or maybe… I am leaving the pain.
Derek
We spent many days being led by the werewolves on a search through The Woodlands.
They first took us to the northernmost tip of the land, where we split into three groups, making sure that there were adequate dragons, witches and jinn among each. Then we embarked on a hunt for more IBSI men. We discovered countless other wolf packs along the way, who agreed to join our search party. And together we discovered several more bases of hunters, although none of them were as well set up as the first one we had destroyed. These were all makeshift bases, set up within the raided lairs of werewolves. We stormed all of them, eradicating every hunter present. Once we reached the southernmost tip of The Woodlands, we were fairly confident that we had disinfected this realm of the tyrants.
Now the matter remained of Bastien’s traitorous cousin and uncle. We had decided to leave that until last. Although this was a job that the werewolves had already agreed to undertake alone, still, we accompanied them to the Blackhalls’ mountain just in case some other hunters had taken shelter there with them. A group of fifty werewolves swept through the mountain like a raging tsunami. The execution of Detrius and his uncle took place in the grand court itself, where they had been sitting at the time we had stormed in. Detrius never knew what hit him. One minute he had been sitting aloft on his throne, the next he was on the floor, his crown ripped from his head and daggers raining down into his chest. They were no less merciful to the uncle, even though he was blind.
As for the rest of the mountain castle’s inhabitants, the only people we knew for certain were allied with the hunters were Detrius and his uncle. Thus, unlike the IBSI, the werewolves were noble enough to decide that the best course of action would be to hold an investigation to discover who was innocent and who was not… rather than go on a rampage slaughtering them all. Children, of course, would be excluded.
As the werewolves began their interrogations, it was time for me and my people to leave. But before we did, the chieftains of every werewolf tribe insisted on thanking us personally.
“I speak for all of us when I say that you have our allegiance and loyalty for life,” one said—a recent recruit whose name I didn’t know. “Whatever you need us for, and whenever you need us, do not hesitate to ask.”
Every other chieftain nodded in agreement, calling out similar expressions of gratitude.
During our sweeping search through The Woodlands, we had gathered with us almost every single tribe according to the Cuthral leader—at least, every tribe that had survived the hunters’ assaults. The chieftains surrounding me had grown from about forty to almost two hundred.
Thus I found myself standing before the rulers of The Woodlands’ population. Here they were, bowing to us and offering their unconditional allegiance.
An idea struck me like a flash of lightning.
My, my, my… we might really have something here. Something quite extraordinary.
Before taking our leave, I made sure to look all the leaders firmly in the eye, and say, “I will be taking you up on that offer.”
Sofia
As our dragons shifted back into their beastly forms outside the Blackhalls’ mountain, I thought about our next step. Our plan was to return to the ogres’ kingdom, where we had yet more hunters to deal with. We had spotted one base already just by coincidence as we had been flying past. I wondered how many others they might have erected there.
But before we began that task, we needed to return through the portal to our base. Our chopper-cum-tank, Nightshade. We had to replenish our supplies, refresh ourselves and rest a while before tackling the IBSI again. The past few days had been long and tiring, even for a vampire.
Derek and I climbed atop Ridan. Derek sat behind his neck, while I sat behind Derek. I wrapped my arms around my husband’s waist and pressed my cheek against his back as we lifted into the air.
Derek was in a quiet mood. Contemplative. I thought back on the last words he had exchanged with the werewolves. He’d told them he would definitely be calling upon their help. I still wasn’t sure exactly what he’d meant by it.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, planting a kiss between his shoulder blades.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“What are you thinking?”
He let out a long, slow breath before he replied, “I’m thinking about why the IBSI is even needed in the first place. It’s because we are too small, too insignificant, in the face of Earth’s problems.” He cast a fleeting glance over his shoulder back in the direction of The Woodlands. “But just like that, we rallied an entire population of supernaturals willing to lay down their lives to help us…”
My pulse quickened as I sensed where Derek’s thoughts were leading.
“What if we managed to do that with more populations? More races?” he went on, passion rising in his voice. He twisted on the dragon’s back so that his piercing, electric-blue eyes could look directly into mine. “What if we could make the IBSI obsolete? What if we formed a cyclopean, supernatural army that was willing to become the guardians the hunters are supposed to be?”
I drew in a breath as his words sank in. Despite the overwhelming influx of supernaturals in the human realm, most remained in their home realms in the supernatural dimension. Most were not troublemakers. They were just normal citizens, keeping to themselves in their own lives and their own countries. In exchange for our freeing their realms from the hunters, if they could agree to take responsibility for their countrymen and women who’d come to cause trouble on Earth and work to quell them… it was an absolutely brilliant idea. If enough of them came through, surely they could overpower the troublemakers.
“Derek,” I breathed. “That would be… a miracle.”
“Not such a miracle,” Derek replied. “Gaining those werewolves’ loyalty was hard work, but straightforward enough.”
I nodded. Truth be told, I was taken aback by how sincerely the werewolves had offered their help and how quickly they’d been able to overcome their differences when it came to the safety of their home country.
“Granted, not all creatures are as noble,” Derek went on. “Some species like the merfolk just seem to be nasty and bad-tempered by nature. I doubt species of their temperament would agree to any of this even if we swooped down and saved their necks, but then again, desperation has a way of changing one’s nature.”
“Derek.” Vivienne spoke up from the back of the dragon behind us. “You are onto something, brother.” Her face had brightened with excitement.
Of course, although Derek and I had been having a one-on-one conversation, we were flying close to everyone else—most of whom had a heightened sense of hearing. Everybody had overheard and was looking at us with a similar expression to that in Vivienne’s eyes.
“It will not be easy, of course,” Derek emphasized. “God knows how many obstacles we will meet along the way. I must think on it more in the days to come—we must all think on it carefully, before submitting a proposal to the werewolves. We need to consider all the possible pitfalls, especially involving the IBSI, now that we have declared outright war with them.”
The IBSI. Something told me that whatever obstacles lay ahead of us, that organization would be the cause of many. I could not believe that they would just stop their immoral activities and encroachment. Even after the massacre we
had just executed. There were too many of them. And whatever man or woman was truly in charge of the IBSI—for that remained a mystery to us to this day—had a heart of stone and blood of molten steel.
But if we played our cards right, and rallied an army of epic proportions, we could do this. I know we can do this. A world where the IBSI was no longer needed, where they had no more work to perform, no excuse whatsoever to continue going about their activities, would be a much happier one. But more importantly, the hunters had proven themselves incapable of actually solving Earth’s problems—if anything they were bent on aggravating them by beginning to disturb innocent supernaturals minding their own business in their own territories. If we forged enough alliances, we could potentially solve the crisis.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so excited. All of us were, our eyes bright and starry, infused with optimism. The journey passed in no time as we mulled over the idea and imagined an Earth in which peace reigned. Harmony. Cooperation. We would no longer be a society ruled by fear or boundaries.
Before we knew it, the ogres’ kingdom had come into view, and we were nearing its shores. As the dragons circled, searching for the stretch of beach where the portal was located, Micah called out, “Look down there.”
Our eyes shot toward where he was pointing. With my vampire vision, even from this distance, I was able to make it out clearly. A stripe of dark reddish-brown trailing from the waves to a patch of bushes and trees.
My first assumption was that it was blood. Perhaps the ogres had caught some monster and dragged it across the sand back to the kingdom to eat.
But Micah said, “While we’re here, do you think we should see what it is? It wasn’t there when we passed by this way on our journey to The Woodlands.”
I exchanged glances with Derek, then shrugged. I did not see any particular reason to go and check it out—this was the ogres’ stomping ground after all, where bloodshed was a part of their everyday life. But since we were planning on taking a break anyway before storming the IBSI again, we were in no particular hurry. And Micah obviously had some interest in it. Derek agreed, and the dragons descended.
We all remained seated on the fire-breathers, while Micah leapt down and approached the trail of blood. He sniffed it and his brows furrowed. “Familiar,” he murmured, before he began following the trail toward the shrubbery that lined the beach.
He sped up to a run and disappeared from view behind a bush.
“Micah?” Rose called, after a minute had passed in his absence. “What are you doing?”
When he emerged about another minute later, we all gasped in unison—Vivienne loudest. For flung over his shoulders was a wounded, unconscious man. Bastien.
Grace
The time I had spent with Lawrence had been full of surprises.
But I never would have predicted what happened later that night.
Not because there had been no foreshadowing of it—indeed, there had been, thanks to the hunter’s warning—but because I had pushed the possibility to the back of my mind. I’d forced myself to brush it aside, discard it, forget about it.
But at about 2AM, after Lawrence and I had fallen asleep in each other’s arms, the hunter’s words came back to haunt me, blasting through our peace like a fog horn.
I was awoken by the feeling of Lawrence shaking. When I opened my eyes, he had let go of me and was lying flat on his back, face panned to the ceiling. His expression was contorted in silent pain, his eyes squinting shut. His whole body was shaking, and I had never heard his breathing so erratic. He was in the midst of some kind of fit.
I shot upright and yelled for Shayla. I rushed out of the room and burst into the witch’s, hurtling to her bed. I gripped her shoulders and violently shook her awake.
“Lawrence!” I yelled. “It’s Lawrence!”
“What?” she gasped, half asleep.
I dragged her from her bed and hurried back to the second bedroom. During the few moments that I’d left Lawrence, his shaking had increased tenfold.
“Oh, dear,” Shayla breathed, her jaw dropping, face lighting up in panic.
She performed various spells to try to calm him down, but he wouldn’t stop shaking and now his throat seemed so choked up that it was practically clogged. He was barely even breathing at all.
“Grab our stuff!” Shayla ordered me. “We’ve got to return to the hospital!”
My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t even pack. I just grabbed whatever was nearest me, along with Shayla’s suitcase and the wheelchair. Then the witch gripped hold of the back of my neck and vanished the three of us from the castle.
Even as we spun through the air, countless questions circled around and around in my mind. What’s going on with him? What happened during the night? I even found myself wondering whether it was something that I’d done by mistake. What tore up my heart completely was that we were leaving that graveyard. He had been so excited to return there in the morning. And I had no idea what was going to happen now—when, or if, he would be able to return.
Worry was eating away at me as we reappeared outside Lawrence’s hospital room. Shayla bundled him inside.
“Go and fetch whatever witches or jinn are around!”
With that, she slammed the door behind her, locking me out. I wanted nothing more than to stay in the room with her. With Lawrence. But of course, I acquiesced, and raced to the phone in the hallway. I dialed down to the apothecary, which was where the witches and jinn usually were if they were at the hospital. Thankfully, five witches and two jinn were down there, and they came hurrying up. I directed them to Lawrence’s room and they hurried inside, crowding around the bed so much that I couldn’t even see what was going on. But although I couldn’t see, I could hear. And that was enough to cause the hairs on my body to stand on end.
Lawrence’s breathing was becoming more like… rattling.
“What is going on with him?” I stammered. I hated to be a distraction but I simply couldn’t help myself. Nobody answered me as they moved around his bed.
Shayla emerged from the group and came to me. Gripping my hand, she took me to the door and said, “Grace, wait out here, okay? There’s nothing more you can do right now. We are doing all that we can for him.”
She closed the door on me again. Dammit. Tears of panic brimmed in my eyes as I gazed desperately at the door, wishing that I had X-ray vision. What on earth did Shayla expect me to do? Where was I supposed to go now? Lawrence had become my life the past few weeks. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t stand. I shuffled up and down just outside the door for God knew how long. I lost all sense of time.
Then a familiar voice called to me from the other end of the corridor.
“Grace?”
I whirled to see my mother striding toward me, my father at her side, my grandparents Derek and Sofia behind them. Micah also accompanied them, carrying what appeared to be a wounded, unconscious Bastien. Micah took the werewolf into one of the spare rooms while my family continued approaching me. They all looked surprised to see me, and their eyes widened even further as they realized the state that I was in.
My mother reached me and clutched my hands. Her turquoise eyes roamed my face, her dark brows knotting. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” she asked.
Oh, God. My throat choked up just at the thought of explaining it all. Where do I even begin? I looked helplessly from my mother to my father, then to my grandparents, who were eyeing me with equal concern.
I was surprised that they were back so soon—I had expected them to be gone longer, given that they had also planned to visit the ogres’ realm while they were in the supernatural dimension. Perhaps the journey had been cut short for some reason. In my anxiety, I couldn’t even bring myself to ask what had been going on with them. My mind was too rooted to the present. To this hospital. To Lawrence’s room.
“What’s been happening?” my father pressed, kissing the side of my head.
 
; “Lawrence,” I managed.
“Who’s Lawrence?” my grandfather asked.
“The boy we rescued… E-Everything’s gone wrong with him!”
At this, I could no longer hold back the tears. My mom gathered me in her arms and took me to sit down on a bench in the hallway.
Please be okay, Lawrence. Please be okay.
I managed to compose myself enough to speak. I filled my family in briefly on what had happened since Shayla and I had parted ways with them, even as question after question continued to assault me. What is so different about Lawrence that the jinn and witches are finding so hard to treat? They’d had so little luck in treating him until this point, would they even be able to treat him now?
I didn’t miss how taken aback my parents looked at how strongly I was reacting to Lawrence’s plight—the plight of a man who, only a short while ago, had been a complete and utter stranger to me.
In truth, I was confused myself. But everything was confusing to me in that moment. Everything was a mystery. Everything was…
My heart jolted as the door to Lawrence’s room opened. Shayla emerged, her hair disheveled, her face ashen. I ran to her as she approached us.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“We’ve managed to stabilize him,” she replied. “He’s breathing somewhat normally again. He’s stopped shaking but…”
I held my breath.
“He’s become completely paralyzed. He can no longer even move his arms. He came to briefly, and all motion in the upper portion of his body has gone.”
It felt like somebody had just punched me in the gut.