“You’ve made the right decision, Lawrence,” my father replied.
I bit down on my lip as I gazed up at Lawrence, my heart singing with gratitude. He left my father’s side and bent down, until his face was level with mine. He reached out to brush his fingers against my cheek again, and then felt my forehead. Worry marred his face.
“And I know that you need an answer soon,” he said in a softer voice, as though his words were only meant for me to hear.
“But be careful, Lawrence,” I whispered back. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He raised his brows. “Says the girl who risked her life, many times over, to uncover my mother’s secret? Surely I owe you this much, even leaving aside the care you gave me on your island.”
“But if you get caught—” I began.
He nodded, his eyes intense and dead serious as they bored into mine. “I think by now, I can make an educated guess about what will happen if I get caught.”
I nodded back at him. “Right,” I managed, pursing my lips.
We held each other’s gazes for a moment longer before he slowly returned to his full height.
“I’ll begin the moment you leave.” He addressed my father.
My father nodded, then turned his focus on me. He stooped down and picked me up, carrying me in his arms. “Then we shall leave now,” he said. “There are a number of tasks we need to carry out ourselves, like reclaiming those trees and bringing them to The Shade for safety… How will you let us know of your findings, Lawrence? It would be too risky for you to make contact via telephone or other electronic means, in case anybody within the IBSI found out or had you monitored.”
“Oh, of course,” Lawrence said. “I’ll have to find a way to visit in person.”
“If you suspect you’ll leave Aviary as soon as tomorrow due to your father’s change of plans and this release of gas,” I said, “where will you go? Will you return to Chicago?”
“Most likely,” Lawrence said, “at least initially… But I need to think things through before I can give any definite answers.”
“But you know where The Shade is, right?” I asked anxiously. Nothing would be worse than to have him discover the cure only to not reach us in time due to having no clear information about our island’s exact location.
“That kind of information won’t be difficult to gain from the IBSI,” my father responded. “They know very well where our island is. They just can’t get inside it.”
“Right,” Lawrence said, gritting his teeth. “Finding the island is the least of my worries.”
We all fell quiet again. Then my father exchanged glances with Horatio. I sensed that the jinni was seconds from vanishing us away from here… but something leapt up inside me as I fixed my eyes on Lawrence for what could be the last time.
“Wait,” I breathed, clutching my father’s arms and lowering myself to the floor.
“Wait for what?” my father asked. “Grace, we all need to get a move on.”
“I know,” I whispered, taking a step closer to Lawrence as he stood rooted to the spot, staring at me. “I just… I just need you to wait… a few moments more.”
I stopped a couple of inches in front of Lawrence, my head tilted up to his face.
I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I wasn’t sure why I had told my father and Horatio to wait, when all we needed was to leave and for Lawrence to start work as soon as he possibly could. I was fading away by the hour, for God’s sake.
But something inside me just… couldn’t stand to leave yet. Not quite yet…
My mouth feeling dry again, my hands seemed to move of their own accord as they reached to clutch Lawrence’s. I raised his hands gently to my lips and placed a soft kiss on each one.
Lawrence’s mouth parted. I wondered if he felt as short of breath as I did in that moment.
I was becoming less and less aware of my father and Horatio’s presence behind us as I raised my arms and rested them over Lawrence’s shoulders. I pulled myself closer against him, burying my head against the crook of his neck. His hands lowered chastely to my waist.
I closed my eyes as I embraced him, trying to shut out the rest of the world completely, all my worries, all my fears. I fought to focus only on this very moment, while I had Lawrence in my arms. While his strength and warmth surrounded me. While my limbs relaxed into him and our hearts beat as one.
As I treasured Lawrence’s embrace, for some reason it was Orlando’s words that echoed in my mind. The words he had spoken seconds before he had leaned forward and kissed me.
“I have to live in the now.”
Holding Lawrence, I suddenly understood exactly how Orlando had been feeling then. I experienced his same train of thought. I felt the same urge, the same impulse… the same abandon that he must have felt toward me to have claimed what he did.
Who knows if I will even be alive tomorrow? Who knows if Lawrence will be? He might not last longer than a few hours as a double agent. The IBSI must have measures in place to weed out such rogues.
I raised my head from Lawrence’s chest and took in his face. It bore an expression of mild confusion, yet also steadiness. Stillness. As though he, too, had managed to withdraw his mind from all other places and make himself present nowhere else but in this moment with me. I wanted to lose myself in the calmness of his irises. But then he distracted me by allowing his gaze to wander momentarily to my lips.
That small movement on Lawrence’s part—a betrayal that his thoughts were reflecting my own—became my undoing. Confidence surged within me. I fixed my gaze on his lips, his firm, yet soft lips, leaving him with no doubt as to my state of mind. Then I closed my eyes and instinct took over the rest. My lips moved to his first. They wandered from one corner of his mouth to the other, exploring its contours and leaving behind a trail of soft almost-kisses. Our breathing an uneven symphony, our mouths centered and touched. Then our lips closed together, as if they had been molded to each other’s shape. I kissed him the way I had wanted to deep down that night in the old derelict hotel. It was how I’d always imagined a first kiss should be. Like a thousand fireworks erupting in my chest at once. Like my heart might explode from the speed at which it raced. Like I could take on an army of Bloodless. Like I would never feel afraid of anything again… Like all was right with the world in this moment. This perfect moment.
When our lips unlocked, my vision felt hazy, my brain intoxicated. I couldn’t think of anything but the desire to lean in and feel his lips against mine again. From the glassy look in Lawrence’s eyes, I knew that he was buzzing with the same passion, the urge to taste me once more.
And we would have succumbed to our longing.
But reality knocked on our door too soon.
Lawrence
“Grace.” Her father’s voice broke through our halo. “We’ve got to leave.”
I was feeling heady as I gazed down at Grace through hooded eyelids. Even now, in her ill state, she looked beautiful to me. Her light still shone through those turquoise irises of hers.
I hadn’t been expecting any of this. I’d been expecting her to vanish with her father and the jinni the moment after her father picked her up. My heart had hammered like a drum as she approached me. As she wrapped her arms around my neck, I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. Then things spiraled out of control; I was barely aware of the fact I was kissing a girl whose father stood a few feet behind her. After her lips pressed against mine, my entire body responded to that kiss. I was lost to her.
I had never gotten close to a girl before. All dealings with the opposite sex had been perfunctory. They had never been a priority in my schedule, in my strict routine. But this girl… She was something special.
When her father beckoned her away from me, I didn’t want to let go of her waist. I wanted to raise my hands and run my fingers through her hair. Brush my thumbs against her cheeks. Dip down to feel her lips against mine again.
But she had to leave. She had to leave th
is place, and she had to leave me. We both had our own separate obstacles before us now. I had to somehow uncover a decade-old mystery, while she had to somehow survive until I managed it.
The jinni took Grace’s backpack and notebook, while her father picked her up again. Her eyes, their corners moistened, remained on me.
“Good luck, Lawrence,” she breathed. Her lips, flushed from my kiss, trembled slightly.
“Good luck,” I managed, my voice as rough as a smoker’s. I could barely even bring myself to glance at her father during these last precious moments…
Then she disappeared. She, her father and the jinni. I was left standing alone in the small box room. I stared out of the window at the smoke-choked jungle. Hollowness began seeping into me, the euphoria of Grace’s kiss slowly ebbing away, my breathing returning to normal, my heart resuming its normal pace. The only evidence that Grace had been here was the damp sheets and the empty water bottles.
I tried to pry my thoughts away from Grace. I had to if I wanted to regain a semblance of concentration.
Everything she and her father had told me during their visit replayed in my mind.
Could my father really have killed my mother? His own wife?
Could he have lied to me for all these years?
What else had he lied to me about? Why did I still have a blank space in my memory? What had actually happened during that period of time from the day of my graduation until I woke up in The Shade? Had I really volunteered for the drug trial?
I wished that I could just talk to my father, look him in the eye and ask him my questions man to man. But of course, I couldn’t do that. As much as I was fighting against it, too large a part of me suspected that he was guilty of everything Grace said he was.
I couldn’t say anything. I had to act the same as when he’d left me earlier that evening. I had to pretend that nothing was wrong, that there wasn’t a storm within me, ripping me apart. And I had to remain his obedient son, his puppet… at least until I had discovered all I needed to know.
Time and distance had forged a gap between my father and me ever since my mother had died. Now, after I’d been woken up from the experiment that I had apparently volunteered for, he felt like a stranger to me. Although, as he had promised all those years ago, we had started working closely together, I still felt miles apart from him. Further away than I had in my childhood, when he’d been on the other side of the globe for months at a time. He was a stranger. Disconnected. Unpredictable.
If he had it in him to assassinate his wife, what would stop him from doing the same to his son?
I staggered backward, the backs of my legs hitting the bed post. I sank down on the mattress.
I had no idea how this was going to play out. How long I would even survive after embarking on this dangerous course… I could only recall Benjamin Novak’s last words as I sat there in the darkness.
If I don’t uncover and expose the truth, nobody will.
Ben
I felt shaken after witnessing my daughter and Lawrence kiss. I hadn’t known they had grown so close. I’d thought all they’d shared was friendship… though those were famous last words.
As we traveled among the treetops, away from the IBSI’s temporary setup in Aviary city, I put off asking Horatio to vanish us the rest of the way back to the portal. I wanted to see if we could spot, and hopefully sabotage, hunters setting off more gas.
As we soared, protected by the vacuum Horatio had reset around us, I glanced down at my daughter. Her head rested against my shoulder, her eyes unfocused.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly, even though it was a stupid and probably insensitive question. There was very little that could possibly be “okay” about my daughter right now. I just wanted her to say something. She was being disconcertingly quiet.
“Mm,” she murmured, her eyes still averted from mine.
I refocused my own attention on where it ought to be, tracing the ground beneath us.
I had told my father that we wouldn’t be gone long. I realized now that we had been gone longer than I had intended. I had to pray that our visit to Lawrence would prove fruitful.
I sensed goodness in Lawrence’s eyes the way I didn’t in his father’s. Perhaps he took after his mother more. I sensed honesty and determination, a desire to do what was right. Qualities he would need if he was to stand a chance of succeeding.
I had no way of knowing how strongly he felt for my daughter, how much emotion had been packed behind his kiss. But he knew that there was more hanging in the balance than Grace’s life. We had turned his life upside down with the revelation of his mother’s murder—assuming he believed it. There was no way he could simply continue living his life like before, cooperating with his father. Unless he was a cold-hearted bastard after all.
Leaving aside Grace, that alone should ensure that he did his best to get to the bottom of this mystery. We just had to hope that his best would be enough.
We soon arrived back in the area surrounding the portal without having spotted any hunters along the way. The gas had become thick in this area by now, too.
On reaching the tree where we’d left our group, to our dismay, it was empty.
The three of us exchanged glances. There was deep concern in Horatio’s eyes, but I tried not to immediately assume the worst. “Maybe they had to shift away from this smoke,” I said. We still didn’t know how toxic it was for normal, physical beings. I hadn’t given Grace a chance to find out because I had asked Horatio to put up protection around us before she’d had a chance to breathe much in.
“Where would they have gone?” Grace croaked.
“I wonder if they could be taking shelter on the other side of the portal,” Horatio suggested.
“Then we should check,” I said.
The three of us piled in through the portal, letting the vacuum suck us down in a spiral at breakneck speed through the star-strewn abyss. I got the same feeling of déjà vu each time I traveled through one of these things, and found myself gazing beyond the misty tunnel wall, wondering if I might ever spot another fae. I still wasn’t sure what happened to the one who’d given me my body. Sherus, his name was. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been preparing for a clash with the ghouls atop a snowy mountain in Canada. We weren’t sure of the outcome of the battle; I hadn’t heard from or come across him—or thankfully any of those wretched ghouls—since.
We arrived on the other side, shooting out into the forested area that bordered the IBSI’s Bermuda base.
“Ben!” a female voice hissed barely a few seconds after we had emerged.
Safi rushed toward us through the trees.
Safi? What on earth…
“Where are Lucas and Kailyn?” the jinni asked before I could even open my mouth. “They found you?”
“Huh? What are you talking about? I haven’t seen Lucas and Kailyn.”
She cussed beneath her breath, flapping her arms by her sides. Safi was older than Aisha, and more mature in many ways, but her mannerisms reminded me of her on occasion. “Lucas came to fetch us from The Shade,” she began to explain hurriedly. “He fetched a whole group of us. Jinn, vamps, wolves, the usual motley crew. But we didn’t last more than a few minutes on the other end. The green smoke paralyzed everyone except for the fae and jinn. And then we found a bunch of your group passed out. River, your mom, sister, Caleb, all of them. We took them all back through the portal on Lucas’ suggestion. And we ended up just taking them back to The Shade where they could recover more comfortably. You, Grace, Horatio and Derek weren’t among them, though. So Lucas and Kailyn stayed back to look for you. The reason I’m still here is because I stayed back to keep an eye on this end of the gate.”
She’d been speaking so fast, it took a few seconds for everything she’d said to register in my brain.
Tensing my jaw, I settled Grace on the ground and held her shoulders. “I’m returning to Aviary to help with the search. Safi will take you back to The Shade… won’t
you, Safi?”
Safi nodded. “All right.”
To my relief, Grace didn’t argue. She nodded, docile. I supposed she had realized that she had done all that she could. She’d spoken to Lawrence and she would have to have faith that he would pull through.
Grace climbed onto Safi’s back and the jinni vanished with her, leaving Horatio and me to return through the portal.
As we sped back through the vacuum, I couldn’t stop the fear from gripping me. My father. Why hadn’t he been found among the rest of the group?
Where on earth could he have gotten to?
Lucas
“Ugh. Where the hell are they?” I hissed to Kailyn. My nerves were fraying and this blasted jungle heat was doing nothing to help my temperament. As capable as I was of wielding fire, I couldn’t stand this level of humidity. And it wasn’t like we could thin ourselves either. We needed to stay at least somewhat visible to make it possible for one of the missing to spot us.
We had been searching for miles through these jungles, looking for Ben, Grace, Horatio and my brother, all the while witnessing the leaves of the trees surrounding us wither before our very eyes—the smoke seemed to be affecting all green plant life, not just the peach-colored trees.
It felt like we would be searching for a hundred miles more before we ever found them. It was like they had just… vanished.
“Maybe we should return to the portal,” Kailyn muttered, wiping a sheen of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “It’s possible that they found their way back and have already returned to Bermuda.”
I supposed that was a possibility. In any case, I was out of ideas and patience. “All right,” I said, exhaling in frustration. “Let’s head back.”
We turned back on ourselves and whizzed through the toxic fog. But we didn’t make it as far as the portal. We crossed paths with Ben and Horatio as we reached the clearing where the IBSI kept their machinery. Now, I could hardly make out the machinery through the smog.