He covered his face with his hands, rubbing his temples, even as he let out a low groan. “I would rather die than return to them.”
Although that was what I’d expected he would say, I didn’t voice my agreement. He needed to make this decision without any interference on my part.
He raised his head and gazed out again at the choppers, buzzing around in the sky like angry black hornets. He shook his head, shuddering. His brown eyes darkened. “I don’t want to go back to them.”
He might’ve lost his memory, but deep down I believed he must have still been conscious of the trauma they had put him through.
“For all I know,” he went on, “they could wipe my brain all over again. Lock me back in some tiny, airtight bunker for God knows how long.”
As more explosions were let off, I said, “Are you sure about this? Don’t feel you have to rush to make a decision. These hunters might be causing a disturbance, but they can’t get inside. No matter how hard they try. You have time to think about this.”
He took another moment to think, but then met my eyes, his mouth set in a thin hard line, his expression resolute. “I would rather assume that they are lying than take the risk that they are not.”
I held his gaze for several moments longer, trying to verify whether I really saw true conviction in them. I did. He had made up his mind. “Okay.” I nodded. “I’ll go and tell Shayla your decision.” I was about to rush out again but I held back to give his hand a gentle squeeze. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of this.”
Then I turned on my heel and returned to the veranda before resuming my seat on Lethe’s back.
As he carried me back to the Port, I tried to fill my mind with only positive thoughts. I tried to reason with myself. We were seeing small signs of improvement in Josh, like his being able to hold in solid food, and his stamina slowly rebuilding. If the hunter really was telling the truth, how would that be possible? Wouldn’t he only be getting worse?
Descending on the crowd that was waiting for us, I informed Shayla, “He doesn’t want to be handed back. He is staying with us.”
She nodded, not looking in the least bit surprised. Then she fixed her eyes on the hunters, her jaw setting in a grimace. “Then it’s time to give these bastards an ass-kicking… Shade- style.”
Grace
Neither Lethe nor I were needed for this task. This was a job for the fire dragons. I doubted even the jinn and witches would be required for this.
The fire-breathers burst through The Shade’s boundary, unleashing an unholy storm of flames. It engulfed the choppers completely, as well as every patch of sky within sight. It had become a sky of fire.
Shouts abounded, along with the firing of bullets and the dropping of more explosives, but from what I could make out through the blaze, the fire dragons were already above them and had blinded the hunters far too much with their fire to make their aim anywhere near accurate. Besides, the dragons’ scales were so tough, they were practically magical. They could withstand the spells of witches, which in their own way were just as powerful as these explosions the IBSI were raining down on us.
After five minutes of chaos, the dragons relinquished their flames just a little bit. The helicopters that had survived were rapidly fleeing the area. The dragons didn’t bother chasing after those who had escaped, but they did burn all who remained within easy reach to cinders. Several aircraft crashed down against the roof of the island’s barrier, along with the limp bodies of men. The dragons swept down, clasping the wreckage and the bodies within their claws, and flung them miles away, into the ocean.
As my hands trembled, I realized how in shock I was. It was not even so much their sudden arrival, nor what they had said about Josh. I just could not get over the fact that they had been so ready and willing to walk right into such danger. They knew how deadly our security was. They knew we were equipped with an army of dragons, jinn and witches who could take them down from the sky. And yet they had come to aggravate us anyway.
We didn’t know exactly what they had done to Josh, but whatever it was, their actions confirmed to me that we were definitely right to keep him here. The fact that they were willing to risk the lives of God knew how many dozens of men for the sake of one young man who was supposedly at death’s door spoke volumes. They were desperate to get him back. And if they were desperate enough to launch such a fatal attack, they were certainly desperate enough to fabricate wild lies.
And that was what we had to believe the hunter’s statement about Josh was. Nothing but a lie.
Once the fire-breathers’ business was done, the witches allowed the dragons back into the island. They soared down and dumped themselves into the ocean, mists of steam releasing from their bodies.
Lethe descended to the ground with me, along with Shayla and the other witches who had been hovering in the air to witness the scene up close.
“All right,” Shayla called out to everyone—there really was quite a large crowd by now. Vampires, werewolves, humans, even Brett and Bella had trundled out of their caves. “Nothing to see here anymore.” Then she took my hand. “Let’s go to Josh. The first thing I want to do now is get that tracker out of him. Should have done that the day we brought him here.”
“Good idea,” I agreed.
She vanished the two of us and we reappeared on my veranda. As we entered the apartment, we found Josh still sitting by the window. He would’ve witnessed the entire battle from this height.
“They’re gone,” Shayla said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Now, I would like to take you back to the hospital.”
Grace
Returning to Meadow Hospital, Shayla took Josh to the X-ray room. A full-body X-ray, she said, would be the fastest way to determine where the tracker lay. She entered the room with him and closed the door behind her, leaving me to wait nervously outside. I hoped that the tracker wasn’t lodged someplace horribly intrusive.
I wasn’t left to wait long. Shayla emerged about a quarter of an hour later and allowed me inside. My heart lifted at the look of relief on her face.
“This should be an easy job,” she said. “They put it in his right heel. Just a minor surgery is required…” I read the rest of her thoughts. Since Josh couldn’t feel anything in his legs anyway, there shouldn’t be any pain.
We took Josh to the surgery room, helped him out of his chair and laid him flat on the operating table. Shayla decided to give him a mild anesthetic anyway, just in case. Beginning the procedure, she dug into the back of his heel and within a couple of minutes she had pulled out a long, thin, metal tracking device. It was so slim and small, it could have been mistaken for a needle.
Shayla destroyed it before healing his foot. Then she allowed Josh to slowly sit up.
“You feeling all right?” Shayla asked.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“You are now tracker-free,” I informed him.
The witch helped him back into his wheelchair and we returned him to his bedroom. He didn’t want to lie down, so instead we positioned his chair near the window, where he could look out at the sunflower meadow. Shayla drew up a chair opposite him, indicating that I do the same. Then, clearing her throat, she began, “Now that we’ve got the tracker out of the way, we really, really need to try to find out who you are. Why those hunters want you so much.” She paused, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ve been thinking that, even though our first attempts failed, I, my fellow witches and the island’s jinn should keep trying. Different potions, different methods of magic, perhaps even the same ones repeatedly could get through to you. Would you be all right with that?”
He met her eyes, his expression dead serious. “I’ll drink any damn thing you feed me. Trust me when I say that I want to discover my identity more than you.”
“Good,” the witch said, rising to her feet and clasping her hands together. “So it’s back to the drawing board for me. I’m going to call a meeting with both witches and jinn. I think you can exp
ect us to start with our various procedures within the day.” Shayla turned to address me. “I suspect that this will be a process that lasts several days. We should experiment with Josh as much as we possibly can, even though it may be overwhelming—we must get to the bottom of this.”
I couldn’t help but sense a deeper meaning to her words, a more chilling meaning. I sensed, more than burning curiosity to find out about his background, an underlying fear that I still had myself—that there could be something fatally wrong with him.
But whether that was or wasn’t the case, either way, we needed to unravel Josh’s mystery.
“So,” Shayla went on, “you will still have free periods together, of course, in between our calls. But I don’t want you to be gone too long at one time. Always take a phone with you and keep it switched on, because we could need him back at the hospital at a moment’s notice if one of us thought we were on to something.”
“Okay,” I said.
And so passed the next few days. Basically they became a constant bombardment of appointments with various jinn and witches—not just Shayla and Safi—and crazy numbers of potions swallowed, along with other magical procedures that were quite mystical to me. In between the appointments, I managed to take Josh to his new gym every morning, where his routines were gradually becoming more daring. After about a week, I noticed a pronounced difference in his arm muscles. Slowly, they were starting to take shape again. His appetite also remained steady, and he was able to continue eating solid foods.
In addition to his exercise routine, I took every opportunity that came my way to take him out for explorations around the island. We made it a habit to visit Sun Beach for at least half an hour in the mornings, and I showed him other parts of the island that he had not seen before. For some reason, he was particularly drawn to the lake, even more than Sun Beach. I didn’t offer to cook for him myself again after the omelets, but instead took him to my grandmother’s house for meals. She was delighted to meet Josh, and she was always happy to have guests for lunch.
I continued to take notes in my trusty polka-dot notebook, although the things that I picked up on were few and far between. He continued to be curious and ask questions about The Shade and the world around us, but I was able to learn very little more about him. Whenever I was around him, I found myself mostly answering questions, as well as broadening his knowledge on the supernatural dimension, until after the ninth day there really wasn’t much more I could tell him about the world that I hadn’t already. After all, my own knowledge of the outside world was fairly limited. I knew about it mostly from tales of my parents and other family members, because I had only recently joined the League and started going out on missions.
To my and Josh’s heavy disappointment, throughout these nine days, neither the witches nor the jinn had any luck with a cure. Though I couldn’t honestly say that this came as a surprise to me. I had been hoping against hope that if we just threw enough at him, we would reach a breakthrough. But it just wasn’t happening.
After Josh was in bed one evening, Shayla called me in for a joint meeting with the witches and the jinn, where they explained to me their failures.
“Nothing any of us have tried has worked, nor has shown even the slightest sign of working,” Shayla said, her round face glum.
“I think we just have to accept that the types of external cures we’ve been trying aren’t going to bring back his memory,” Safi said, looking hardly less disappointed than Shayla.
“It’s like his head is made of wood,” another Nasiri complained.
“So what?” I said, gazing around at each of their hopeless faces. “We’re going to admit defeat?”
Nobody responded except Shayla, who simply shrugged. “Unless one of us has a break through. But all of us have worked pretty much nonstop for the past nine days. Working for another nine days isn’t going to make a difference. We are no further than when we started.”
I blew out a sigh, slumping back in my chair. Safi’s words played over in my head. An external cure. Meaning a forced cure, induced by some sort of magic. It was endlessly frustrating. I knew that Josh held memories. More memories than he was revealing. He was not as far gone as I had initially thought—I’d seen for myself how some things were instinctive to him. Which meant that he remembered them. It was just a matter of figuring out how to bring them to the surface. I was sure of it.
In any case, everyone around me was clueless, and sitting here in this meeting any longer didn’t feel like it would bring us any closer to a solution. Since it was late anyway, I stood up and bade them good night. I went straight home and headed to my bedroom, where I pulled out my laptop. I stayed up for hours scouring the web for any mention of a missing Brit named Josh. My search proved fruitless. I found a man of the same name—a couple actually—but their pictures weren’t of our Josh.
I flopped into bed, but did not sleep. I lay awake, tossing and turning.
If only those two oracles were still alive…
Perhaps it was because I was younger and more naïve, possessing not even a fraction of the knowledge that those witches and jinn had. But one of the many things that my father had instilled in me was determination. Doggedness. Even in the face of the seemingly impossible.
I wished that he was here now. I distracted myself momentarily by wondering what was going on with the League. Although they had been gone a long time now, I was not really worried. They had a big task to complete, after all—scouring the entirety of The Woodlands to rid it of hunters.
Thoughts of Josh once again filled my mind. Since I was clearly not going to fall asleep anytime soon, I switched on my bedside lamp and dove my hand into the backpack I had hung at the end of my bed. I withdrew my notebook, lay back again, and began paging through my notes.
After scanning all of my comments, it was clear that we only had two strong pieces of information. Firstly, his accent, and secondly, his inbuilt instinct for physical training. From the moment I’d first seen his build, I’d thought that he must’ve been some kind of athlete or fighter. Coupling this with the fact that he had been caught by the hunters… I paused in my train of thought.
What if he wasn't actually caught, per se?
The idea hit me like a sock in the gut.
What if he had been a hunter himself?
That would certainly explain a lot of things. His build, for one, and also the fact that they were able to catch him in the first place. If he’d been one of the hunters, he would’ve been an easy target. What if he was originally from one of the IBSI’s UK bases?
So many what-ifs crowded my brain that I struggled to contain them all. And the idea that Josh could have been a hunter chilled me. I’d developed an inbuilt hatred for all members of the IBSI. Then again, even if he had been one, for them to have handled him like this, he couldn’t have gotten along with the rest of them. He must have been opposed to them in some way or other to have been treated the way he had been. I couldn’t imagine what person in their right mind would have been willing to go through such torture. And now that he had woken up from his stupor, he had an inbuilt desire to avoid them at all costs. If he truly had volunteered himself for whatever procedure they were performing on him, why would he be so averse to being taken back by them? No. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that he had cooperated with them. He must have been taken by force.
But how do I verify any of these ideas for a fact?
Am I not just back to square one, speculating and musing?
I recalled how his knowledge had come to the surface when faced with me using that exercise machine incorrectly. It had sparked some memory deep within him. A familiar situation. In his previous life, he had been around gym equipment… Just as he must have been around England for at least some period of his existence.
What if we took him to a familiar setting?
What if we took him to England? And more specifically, the IBSI’s headquarters?
I immediately saw a glaring problem wit
h that. I did not know how many bases the IBSI had in the United Kingdom. How would we know which one he had been a part of? I supposed that the headquarters would be a good place to start… But that could lead us on a wild goose chase if it was not the right one.
Not to mention the risks taking him there would pose. Especially since we would need to get close enough in order for him to recognize the setting… How close exactly?
It was not so easy for us to enter IBSI’s headquarters. Fae were the only species we knew for certain could bypass their hyper-sensitive alarm systems—and only those who were fully fae, at that. I would not be able to get away with it, being half human and unable to transform into a subtle state like my father could.
Still, nobody seemed to have any other ideas regarding how we could move forward with Josh. There would be no harm in suggesting it to Shayla and seeing what she said. We could go to wherever the headquarters were—I believed they were in London, though I would need to verify that with the witch—and then play things by ear. Who knew? Maybe simply taking him to his home country would draw back a whole slew of memories, and we might not even need to approach IBSI’s territory. That would really be best…
Grace
Early the next morning, I found myself sitting in Shayla’s kitchen while she threw together a quick breakfast for herself.
“So is that where IBSI’s headquarters is in England?” I asked her. “London?”
“As far as I know,” she said. “At least, that’s where they used to be.”
“Then what do you think?” I asked, quirking a brow.
She took a seat at the table opposite me, a serious expression on her face as she munched on a bowl of granola.
“I think your logic is sound,” she said after a pause. “Taking him to his home country could very well be the trigger that we need, since it seems that whatever memories are buried within him have to surface naturally, rather than being forced by our artificial means… But—assuming that he really was a hunter, which is a rather big assumption—as you say, depending on how close we have to take him to hunter headquarters, this plan could come with a lot of risks.” She paused for a swig of orange juice. “That said, I don’t see any harm in taking him back to England and seeing what happens. We might not need to make it as far as their headquarters. We could check into a hotel somewhere, I suppose… But we would obviously need to keep a low profile. We can’t have anyone recognizing him.”