We watched as he worked his way systematically through the vehicles until he reached the final row. Then our attention was drawn to the illuminated caravan, whose front door had just swung open. A tall, slim man stepped out, wearing pants and a vest. He was talking loudly into a phone. It took me but a few seconds to realize who it was; I should recognize his gravelly voice anywhere by now.
Atticus Conway.
Grace
“Yes, I know it’s late.” Atticus spoke into the phone as he lit up a cigarette and pressed it to his lips. “But I only just arrived and I need you to give me a briefing… Mm. Mm. Yes, but we have already deduced the tree count isn’t large. What is the estimate?”
“To hell with staying undercover,” my father hissed behind me.
Before any of us could do or say anything, my father had shot away from our group and went hurtling toward Atticus. He moved so swiftly that Atticus didn’t even realize he was upon him until it was too late. The phone and cigarette slipped from his grip as my father’s hand closed around his mouth. My father wrestled him to the ground, stifling his grunts by pressing his face into the damp soil. Lucas and Horatio rushed over to help, Lucas disarmed Atticus while Horatio froze and silenced him with his powers.
Then the jinni levitated Atticus in the air and brought him floating back to us while my father and Lucas searched the caravan. Apparently finding it empty, they returned in a matter of seconds. We all gathered around the floating Atticus, whose face was a picture of fury.
“Let’s get away from this clearing. Up to the trees,” my father whispered.
Horatio transported us up to the treetops. He floated Atticus with his back against a thick trunk, facing forward.
“He needs to be able to speak,” my grandfather said to Horatio. The jinni removed his charm. Atticus gasped for breath, his posture still rigid.
My father approached within a foot from Atticus and glowered at him. “What are you people doing here?” he demanded.
Atticus merely glared daggers at my father.
My father’s hand closed around Atticus’s throat. “What is the Bloodless antidote you are trying to keep hidden?” He pressed down against Atticus’ Adam’s apple.
The hunter kept his lips tightly sealed. Strangely, he didn’t look even the slightest bit afraid.
“You’ll kill me before you ever get me to talk,” Atticus said coarsely, and somehow, I actually did believe him. Atticus didn’t strike me as the type of man you could bargain with, or get through to, no matter how much you threatened him. His eyes glinted steely, uncompromising.
“We’ll see about that,” my father murmured. He turned to Horatio. “We should go further away still. But first we need to search him for a tracker. Silence him again in the meantime.”
Horatio stole Atticus’s voice again while laying the hunter flat on the ground. My father and grandfather searched him thoroughly, confiscating any weapons from his pockets and secret compartments in his clothing. They didn’t spot a tracker in their efforts, though there was always the possibility that Atticus had one inserted internally for security. That would be too intrusive of an undertaking to take on now—and besides, even if his IBSI colleagues did come after him, with Horatio’s help it shouldn’t be too difficult to repel them.
The jinni returned us to the cave. They positioned Atticus at the cave’s furthest wall before Horatio returned his voice. The jinni also lifted his freezing charm, allowing him to hold his own weight. My father resumed his interrogation. Atticus refused to utter a word. In spite of the threats, even in spite of a knife being held to his throat, he wouldn’t reveal anything.
“Even if you kill me,” Atticus informed us, “you will have accomplished nothing. Rest assured I’ve made certain of that.”
I supposed by that he meant he had people who were second and third and fourth in command who could step up at a moment’s notice.
My father backed away from Atticus and marched outside of the cave. We followed him.
“He’s not responding to threats,” he whispered to my grandfather. “So the only way to see if he really is bluffing that he won’t reveal anything is to start inflicting physical damage to him.”
As vile of a person that Atticus was, my father still looked conflicted over the idea. Torture was a method that the IBSI readily used to pry information from people, but it was something that we in The Shade had always tried to avoid at all costs, even with our greatest enemies. We didn’t want to stoop to the level of the IBSI, but it seemed that in this case, we would have no choice.
“Wait.” I spoke up abruptly, finding my voice. “I-I want to speak to him first.”
Everyone followed me as I returned to the cave and approached Atticus. I was keenly aware of the irony of the situation, of how our roles had reversed. The last time I’d come face-to-face with Atticus, he had been the one calling the shots and interrogating me.
I gritted my teeth and glared at the man. “What did you do to Lawrence?”
He barely even deigned to look at me as I arrived before him. His focus fixed firmly on the ceiling of the cave.
Anger boiled within me. I dropped my voice to a quieter, more menacing tone. “And what did you do to Georgina?”
At this, his mask broke. A flash of surprise crossed his face, and a definite disturbance.
“I know you killed her,” I went on. “Her death was no accident. You had her assassinated.” Of course, I didn’t have solid evidence of this, but that didn’t matter now. My only objective was to shake him. “I wonder what the world would think of the IBSI, if they really knew the truth about who runs it…”
He regained composure and refocused his eyes on the ceiling, determined even now not to waver.
Still, I pushed on regardless. “And I wonder even more how they would react if they knew that the IBSI was sitting on a cure for the Bloodless, and deliberately suppressing it. You people might control the media, but the truth always slips out in the end. Always… So I suggest you start talking, and we might agree to make this a little less painful for you.”
As his eyelids flickered, in spite of his efforts to maintain a poker face, I could see that my words had shaken him. We had discovered more than he thought.
But after a whole minute, he still hadn’t spoken. I sank back in disappointment. It seemed that he really would rather die than give us the satisfaction of drawing a single answer from his lips. All this meant was that we were going to have to resort to torture…
Releasing an exasperated sigh, I stepped back, allowing my father to step forward. He was holding a knife in one hand, a gun in the other. The way my father’s hands shook, I actually did believe that he was angry and desperate enough right now to murder the man. Desperation could drive even the most levelheaded of people to violence. Atticus should know.
My father began by grabbing Atticus’ palm. I flinched as he sliced a gash across it, drawing blood. The first assertion that he meant business. “You know, Mr. Conway,” my father said, “I have a lot to resent you for.” He grabbed his second palm and etched another cut. I was flinching more than Atticus. Atticus’ face had become stony again. “For the way you treated my daughter. For the way you’ve treated the rest of our League. For the way you’ve cheated the entire world with your lies. It would be my honor and pleasure to end your life right now.”
My father made a third cut into Atticus, at the base of his throat. Deep enough to draw a stream of blood, but not deep enough to damage a vital artery. I could no longer watch at this point.
I hated witnessing my father doing this. This wasn’t like him. This wasn’t like any of us.
“I’ll give you twenty seconds to reconsider.” My father’s gun clicked. “Twenty seconds before this bullet will lodge in your brain.”
“We will find out the details about the antidote, Atticus,” my grandfather Derek implored. “Whether or not you speak, we will uncover it. In fact, we have our witches experimenting with the trees you have been felling as
we speak. It might as well be—”
A screech pierced the night. It had emanated from outside of the cave.
We whirled to glimpse… mutants—five giant mutants, larger than I’d ever seen—landing with a heavy thump on the cliffside. Lithe men in black rode atop the beasts. I could only assume they had located us via a tracker installed beneath Atticus’s skin, something we had already suspected he might have.
The mutants breathed out fire, which came rolling toward us at the back of the cave. The jinni manifested torrents of water to extinguish the blaze before it could reach us. The mutants continued to encroach. Horatio moved forward and billowed fire of his own, causing them to stall and stagger. As Horatio narrowed his eyes in focus, on the verge of creating a more deadly blast this time, the light from the flames flickered across the face of the hunter who rode the leading mutant.
An all too familiar face. A brown-eyed face.
Lawrence.
Grace
A hundred questions blasted through my brain as I caught sight of Lawrence’s face. My mind felt blown to smithereens. But more than anything, urgency gripped me. Before Horatio could unleash another curse, I bellowed, “Wait, Horatio! Don’t!”
My abrupt plea came so unexpectedly to everyone that they became momentarily distracted from guarding Atticus. The hunter, sensing his opportunity, shot toward the mutants with such speed that none of our reflexes were fast enough. Within a split second, the mutant Lawrence sat upon had grabbed Atticus by the torso and with supernatural speed, the mutants immediately withdrew from the cave, as if they had been sucked out by an almighty vacuum.
My father, cursing, was on the verge of taking to the sky with Lucas and Horatio, but I caught hold of his hand before he could shoot off.
“Lawrence!” I panted. “One of those men was Lawrence!”
Everybody stared at me in disbelief.
“Grace, are you sure?” my mother breathed.
“Yes, I’m sure!” Lawrence had been on my mind so much since he’d left our island—probably more than was healthy—there was no way I had mistaken someone else for him. I could’ve sworn that he’d even met my eyes for just a second, but I hadn’t detected even the slightest spark of recognition. His eyes had swept over me, as they had swept over all of us, in a steely gaze that reminded me uncannily of his father. Then he had swiped Atticus and fled.
But what on earth was Lawrence doing here? The last time I’d seen him on the television, he had looked so lost, so faded. A completely different person than the fiercely focused man I’d witnessed just now riding atop that mutant.
And why didn’t he recognize me? He must have had his memory wiped again. It cut me to the core to think that all the time we’d spent together in The Shade would be forgotten to him.
My father shrugged me off. “I can’t let Atticus get away!”
Still, I held onto him. “Atticus is useless for information,” I reminded him urgently. “Absolutely useless! You saw it in his eyes. He would’ve died rather than give up his secrets. The only thing you’ll gain by bringing him back is becoming his murderer.”
“Then Lawrence,” my father said. “If you truly think that was him, he must know something. I doubt he’s as strong-willed as his father.”
As much as I was desperate for a cure, I didn’t know that I could stand to see my father torturing Lawrence the way he had Atticus. Even if Lawrence didn’t remember me… I remembered him. Hot tears prickled the corners of my eyes. Damn, I remember him.
My father exhaled in aggravation as the mutants disappeared into the trees. He began pacing up and down. “Well,” he seethed, “we’ve done one thing for sure: blown our cover. Now they know that members of The Shadow League are here, and they know we know there’s something special about the trees, and now…”
Now I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been Lawrence on the other end of the phone Atticus had been holding when we’d first spotted him. Based on the snippet of conversation we’d heard, it sounded like it was Lawrence managing this whole Aviary operation, the way Atticus had asked him for a briefing. Could he really be? Horror filled me at the thought that Lawrence could be just as evil as his father. Maybe forgetting who he was before had been a good thing, and not something we should have ever tried to counteract…
“Lucas, I think we’re going to have to resort to your idea.”
My consciousness surfaced back to the present at my father’s words.
My grandfather Derek locked eyes with his brother Lucas. “Are you up for returning to The Shade and gathering an army?” Derek asked. “Only one of us needs to go, but it has to be someone who can travel fast, which means either Ben, Horatio or you. But it would be wiser to keep Horatio here with us for protection.”
“You’re going to launch a full-on attack?” I choked.
“Grace,” my father said, clutching my forearm. “We’ve got to stop them destroying these trees as soon as superhumanly possible. For all we know, Atticus could already be scheming to bomb this whole place and eradicate these trees within the next few hours. You heard him mention ‘the tree count isn’t large’ on the phone, didn’t you? What else could he be referring to but the poisonous trees? We’ve no choice but to rid Aviary of these hunters… and wreck as few trees as possible in the process.”
“What about Atticus’ laptop?” I stammered. I was hardly thinking straight. I just wanted to divert our attention to anything other than all-out war. “If he’s here now, he might’ve brought it with him, with those files.”
“I can guarantee you that anything he might have had on his laptop will be wiped the second he gets the chance,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “And by the way, we checked the caravan. There was no laptop there. If he’d brought it with him, it should have been there, since he mentioned on the phone that he’d only just arrived in Aviary.” Lucas’ voice trailed off as his eyes trained on the distance, where the mutants had dipped out of view. “It looks like they are headed toward Aviary city now.”
“We have to act quickly,” my grandfather said. “Lucas”—he nodded grimly to his brother—“go. You know what to do.”
Lucas nodded back, then sped away in the direction of the portal.
More bloodshed, I thought weakly. I had been hoping against hope that all this would not end in more bloodshed. But with the IBSI involved, how could I really expect anything different?
Grace
At least the machinery had been meddled with, which would make it difficult for the IBSI to transport any explosives to get them where they needed them—assuming they did hold explosives here to begin with.
In spite of our hideout having been discovered, Horatio suggested we stay in the same cave and wait for Lucas, to avoid delays in him and our new recruits finding us. We shouldn’t be waiting long anyway, given Lucas’ supernatural speed.
But then my grandma Sofia countered, “Hopefully the IBSI doesn’t have any witches hanging around nearby who might close the portal in the meantime. That would delay things for us a lot.”
“That’s a good point,” Derek replied. “Maybe we should set up closer to the gate then, to keep an eye on it. Horatio?”
“Hm,” Horatio said, stroking his jaw. “Yes. That might be a better idea. Then we’ll have to stay alert for the others returning through it, so we don’t miss each other.”
Horatio transported us away from the cave and landed us in the treetops, almost directly above the portal. We tried to settle down and make ourselves somewhat comfortable as we waited, but I could hardly sit still for a moment.
Only a couple of hours ago, it had been Orlando occupying my mind, and I’d found it almost impossible to pry my thoughts from his kiss. Now, all that was practically forgotten. I was barely even aware of his presence a few feet away from me on the branch. Everyone surrounding me in the tree became invisible to me as those few seconds of my reunion with Lawrence played over and over in my mind like a broken record.
As lost as Lawrence seemed to m
e, I couldn’t shake the doubt that he might not be like his father. That the Lawrence I had spent time with in The Shade had been genuine. That he was not inherently evil, and if I could somehow get him to realize the harm the IBSI had perpetrated, the real truth about the organization and his father’s almost definite murder of his mother, I might get him to see the light, no matter how vigorously his mind had been programmed.
But if I was going to attempt this at all, I needed to find him before Lucas returned with an army… before the dragons arrived. I knew the chaos that would ensue. I would have no control over who got killed. Lawrence could easily be among the casualties.
“Are you okay?” A husky whisper came from my right. Orlando.
I focused my gaze on him. It was the first time I had looked him in the eye since he’d kissed me. I nodded slowly, even though the truth couldn’t be further.
He inched closer to me, looking genuinely apologetic. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay?” he breathed. “I took things too far. Way too far. I just thought for a moment… you were thinking the same thing and, hell, it’s been so damn long since I kissed a girl. And I… I’ve never kissed a girl quite like you.”
He glanced away, sealing his lips.
Now was not the time for Orlando to be talking to me about this. I was too overwhelmed with anxiety to focus on his words.
“It’s okay, Orlando,” I murmured. I cast my attention firmly away from him—to Horatio, who sat on the other end of the branch. The jinni’s head was panned downward as he kept a close eye on the portal. Orlando took the hint and backed away, giving me some much-appreciated space.