This was exactly my father’s plan. I could practically see the wheels turning in his head as I imagined him flying back toward base.
I had to stall the news channels going down, and I had to get these people to give TSL a chance. A real chance—a chance that they should’ve been given decades ago.
When the man hesitated, I pressed, my eyes boring into him, “Please, even a few hours.”
I feared that hours wouldn’t be enough, but it was better than the government pulling the plug on the news channels now.
I breathed out in relief as the man replied in a cracking voice, “I need to make some calls.”
With that, he turned and strode into the cockpit, closing the door firmly behind him.
I looked to the men surrounding me, and their guns. “You can lower them,” I informed them. “I promise you that I’m not here for trouble. I, and all of TSL… we are on your side, despite what the IBSI might have led you to believe about us. We’re not just meddlesome rebels.” It both struck and warmed me as I realized how natural it felt to me to refer to the TSL as we. The Shade and its people had been a part of my life for such a short span of time and yet I felt more at home on that island with them than I’d ever felt anywhere else in my life.
I sat down in an empty seat, clasping my hands together, elbows resting on my knees. The wait was excruciating. I couldn’t hear what was being said because the door to the pilot’s compartment was thick and bulletproof—apparently soundproof too.
Finally, the man emerged. His forehead was wrinkled with worry as he laid his eyes on me and said, “We will delay granting your father’s request by two hours. You had better show us what you’re capable of within that time, because I can assure you that you won’t be given another chance if you fail.”
As relieved as I was, I was also terrified. I gazed out of the window over the residential area that we were beginning to cross. I could make out the imposing forms of the dragons, and the smaller forms of the rest of TSL still darting about the streets.
Derek… you had better hurry the heck up.
Grace
Orlando, Field and his friends, my mother and I were sitting in Orlando’s bedroom, gaping at the screen of my open laptop. Field was in a daze, as were his companions; the Bloodless seemed a fairly new species to them, which was ironic considering their blood was one of the keys to combating them.
The screen displayed a scene of utter desolation, a scene that belonged in my darkest nightmares of the time that Orlando and I had spent in Bloodless Chicago. It was a time that I’d been trying to purge from my brain, but watching the reporters stream footage from New York City brought it all flooding back. My skin broke out in goosebumps.
Waves of Bloodless washed through the city, spilling into homes and digging their fangs into all they passed. Men, women, families, none were spared.
“Oh, God,” I choked. “What is happening? Where are our people?”
My question was answered as we switched to a broadcast that was covering Chicago. Here, at least, was a more hopeful scene. I spotted a few of our witches in the clips as they cast freezing spells upon swathes of the monsters. Then more of our army would hurry over to administer injections of antidote. They appeared to be making more progress than I’d expected.
But this was only one city. New York was still a complete mess.
I groaned. “What’s going to—?”
“Hey, there’s your dad,” my mother said, excitement lighting up her worried voice. Yes. There he was. His dark hair rippling in the night breeze, he was in a semi-subtle state, his feet on the ground. He was luring a group of Bloodless toward a group of jinn at the end of his street. They stunned the monsters before they stooped over them with the antidote.
“We need more people out there,” I said, gripping the sheets of my bed. “We need tons more people.” I wished I could help in even some small, indirect way. It was endlessly frustrating sitting here helpless in bed.
And when was the next city going to fall? Would the IBSI keep withdrawing? What if they withdrew from everywhere?
Before I could sink deeper into worry about how far the IBSI was willing to go to make their point, there was a knock at our door.
It was Shayla. I would’ve leapt from the bed in surprise to greet her if I had been strong enough.
But she hardly had eyes for me, or for my mother. Her focus went straight to Orlando. “Honey,” she said, “Come with me.”
Orlando looked utterly confused as he stared back at the witch. He glanced at me, but I shared his confusion. Then he slipped himself off the bed, into a wheelchair—he, like me, was still shaky after taking the antidote—and wheeled out of the room after the witch.
My mom helped me into my own chair and we hurried after him. The witch led us to the end of the corridor before stopping outside a door. Gripping the handle, she pushed it open. Orlando, entering first, gasped. As my mother and I arrived inside next to him, I realized why. My jaw dropped.
Lying on the bed, bald, emaciated and pale, was his sister Maura.
Orlando broke down. His hands slipped on the wheels of his chair in his urgency to push himself to her.
“Orlando!” Maura rasped, apparently too weak to raise herself to hug him. Shayla helped him perch on the edge of the bed so he could take his sister in his arms and hold her. His back began to heave as he wept against her.
Shayla, my mom and I backed out of the room, giving the siblings some privacy.
“How on earth did you find her?” I asked the witch.
“I didn’t,” Shayla replied. “Corrine and Ben returned with her and two other turned humans. They told me to bring the trio back to The Shade. We’ve been back for a while, actually. It only just occurred to me how familiar the girl was… It struck me that she looked like Orlando, and then I remembered Orlando’s missing sister. She was in and out of consciousness but as soon as I mentioned her brother’s name she woke right up.”
A smile spread across my face, tears moistening the corners of my eyes. I might not be able to give Orlando the affection he wanted—and probably deserved—from me, but at least he’d found his sister. At least Maura was back. And cured now. They both were cured. No longer watching the hours go by, wondering when their last would come.
And I hope, if and when all this is over, he’ll find the spark he seeks in me in some other Shade girl’s eyes.
Ben
As much progress as we were beginning to make in Chicago, we were also suffering major setbacks—something that the recently-arrived helicopters filled with press reporters flashing lights and cameras were capturing every minute of. These Bloodless were pesky creatures. Just when we thought we had cleared an area and we moved on to the next, more would spring out from corners. We even had a fiasco where a group of missed Bloodless dug into a pile of turning ones we had separated, which overwhelmed the turning and caused them to start returning to their prior monstrous forms.
The reporters were distracting with all the noise they brought with them—there was enough noise being created by our team as we tried to coordinate our efforts—but I knew that their presence was important.
This was TSL’s time to prove itself. And although we had barely even started yet, we had to make a good impression.
It worried me, however, that we were running out of antidote. I sent Safi back to The Shade to get some more—hoping that Dr. Finnegan and her assistants would have had time by now to create a vat more of the stuff. She had already discovered how to make the ingredients—particularly the Hawk boys’ blood—stretch; now we needed to mass-produce the antidote as quickly as possible.
As I spotted yet another pocket of undiscovered Bloodless clambering up the side of the building, I went hurrying after them. Come here, you buggers. But as I reached the roof, I was distracted by a particularly low-hanging helicopter. A blue helicopter. It touched down on the building directly opposite me, and a man stepped out. A man whom I quickly realized was Lawrence. He exchanged
a few words with whoever was in the belly of the aircraft before it lifted back up into the air.
“Hey, Lawrence!” I yelled, even as I lost sight of the Bloodless. I’d track them down again soon enough. I was too confused by Lawrence’s sudden appearance. I hadn’t even known that he’d been absent; I’d thought he might have been helping out in a different street.
I soared over and landed in front of him. His lips were pursed, a storm of worry behind his brown eyes.
“What’s going on? Where have you been?”
“We have two hours,” he said hoarsely.
“What?”
As he recounted to me the meeting that had taken place between his father and a government official—whom I suspected might have been our old contact, Fowler—I understood why Lawrence was looking so ashen.
Two hours was no time at all. But it was what we’d been given, and as Lawrence said, it was better than nothing at all.
“I know where my father is,” he said, clutching my shoulder. “He’s headed back to the IBSI’s base. He’ll be waiting for the official to make good on his word before resuming instructions to his men. My guess is that he’ll be in his office. If he realizes that the official has stalled in shutting down the news channels, he might cause destruction in yet another city out of frustration. I suggest you and maybe another fae go to him now and try to isolate him, if only to stop him from ordering more chaos. At least for the next two hours.”
I cast my gaze toward the direction of the IBSI’s base and nodded. “All right,” I murmured. “I’ll pay your father another visit.”
Atticus
I sighed as I took a seat in my office chair and flipped open my laptop. As I surfed the web, it was clear that the old man had not yet fulfilled his end of the deal. I drummed my fingers on the table surface.
He should’ve given the order as soon as he climbed back into the helicopter, as he had mentioned that he would…
My hand reached into my pocket. I pulled out my phone and set it down in front of me, my fingers turning it in circles.
I realized that I should’ve set a time limit in our negotiation, otherwise they could dawdle. I composed a text message, stating that I needed to see some progress on their end of the deal within the next half hour, or I might reconsider my promise.
If they failed for whatever reason to uphold their part of our agreement, I would let down the borders of Los Angeles next. Then, perhaps, Washington. I wanted them to realize just how dependent on us they were. The world had taken us for granted all these years, assuming that we would always be there to serve and protect them. Hence the public believed they could get away with insulting us, calling us cheats and frauds.
My actions would soon clear up those insults, and no doubt the government would be quick to fulfill their promises.
I stared at my phone screen in wait for their reply. Come on, Fowler. What are you playing at?
A response came thirteen minutes later. Thirteen minutes.
“We are working on it.”
Something strange was going on. Prior to our meeting, Fowler had been harassing me with messages every other minute, asking me what the heck was going on and requesting an urgent meeting. It was strange that he should become so lax.
My nostrils flared as I breathed in. Something isn’t right.
I waited another five minutes before checking the web again. All of the portals Fowler had promised would be suspended were still active. They were buzzing and alive as ever. I switched on my television. Every single news channel here was also blaring full blast—each of them covering the situation with the Bloodless and… I squinted as I caught sight of familiar faces among the ravaged Chicago streets. TSL. Their members were here already, attempting to pick up the pieces.
I rose to my feet and began tensely pacing up and down. I would wait ten more minutes before making the call to LA. Ten. More. Minutes. And then I would verify whose loyalties lay where.
I watched the minutes go by tensely. When there was no sign of any improvement after twelve minutes, I’d had enough.
I dialed the number of my commander-in-chief in LA and pressed the speaker to my ear. But I barely heard the second ring. A heavy book came hurtling toward me from the other side of the room. It crashed into my hand, its sharp edge grazing the side of my cheek and causing the phone to clatter to the floor.
My eyes shot to the other side of the room — where the book had hurtled from — to find two phantom-like creatures drifting toward me. I recognized one enough to know his name. Benjamin Novak. TSL’s cofounder. And then there was a female fae with curly blonde hair.
Before I could draw my gun, the fae had hurtled toward me with extreme speed. His hands clamped around my throat, and we went zooming backward, my back hitting the glass bookshelves behind me and causing them to topple to the floor.
“Smash the camera, Kailyn,” Benjamin hissed over his shoulder to the woman. I strained to see the woman rising up toward the CCTV camera positioned in one corner of the ceiling. She broke the lens with a book.
Benjamin wrestled with me on the ground. He managed to flip me over on my stomach before gripping my arms from behind and pinning me in a firm hold.
Damn fae. They and jinn were two creatures who had still managed to evade our security measures to this day.
He pressed his weight down on me, squashing the side of my face against the floor.
“What were you just planning to do?” he asked, his voice a hiss in my ear.
“Release our boundaries in LA,” I spat back. “What’s it to you what we do or do not do anymore? You’re so confident that you can solve this situation on your own.”
His grip around my wrists tightened.
“Make sure his phone is dead,” Benjamin hissed to the woman.
She did so, before chucking my phone in the trash can. The sight made me wince. My phone was, arguably, the most valuable possession I owned. But it wasn’t irreplaceable—just like I wasn’t.
“May I ask what you hope to accomplish by taking me prisoner?” I asked them calmly. “You won’t stop anything. As I’m sure I mentioned to you before, my disappearance won’t make an awful lot of difference to the IBSI. I have people and measures in place to ensure that it endures long, long after I pass. If anything, your holding me here will quicken the release of the third city.”
Benjamin didn’t answer, though I sensed my words had knocked his confidence. His grip loosened just a touch—not enough to give me leeway to squirm out, but enough for me to be able to breathe more freely.
“Well?” I prompted.
That was the good thing about serving a cause you believed in. It made you fearless. I wasn’t afraid of death, or of pain, while pursuing the path I deemed right. I would rather die in glory than live in compromise. And there were others like me, too. Others I had personally hand-picked and trained over the years, who shared my vision. I trusted they would continue where I left off, even if something did happen to me. Take, for example, Bernard in LA. After receiving my call and being cut off, he would suspect something. He was following the news and the developments with Fowler; I had been keeping him informed. He would have the sense to pull the trigger on LA soon enough, and then other cities, if I still hadn’t managed to regain control over myself and a phone by that time.
“You won’t get away with this, Atticus.” Benjamin’s low voice came in my ear. “I assure you, neither you nor any of your men will get away with this. We will take your place, and you will fade into insignificance… It’s only a matter of time.”
Empty threats by a desperate man. Hardly words I was going to take seriously. And yet, as Benjamin raised me from the floor and made me stand on my feet, still gripping me and preventing me from reaching for a weapon, I sensed a determination in him that made me think twice. His confidence unsettled me. He seemed to fully believe that his words were no joke, even in the face of overwhelming destruction—destruction which, in all truth, even we would have a tough time sett
ing right again.
What is he thinking?
Does he truly believe The Shadow League could replace the IBSI?
Ben
I had grown tired of Atticus’s taunts, as well as wrestling him to keep him constrained. I removed Atticus’s shirt and bound it tightly around his wrists, to serve as makeshift handcuffs. I confiscated any weapons he had on his person and threw them to Kailyn, who placed them on a shelf on the opposite end of the room—except for his gun, which she held aimed at Atticus.
I sat him down in his office chair and approached his laptop.
Only days ago, my first instinct at the sight of his open laptop would be to search it for the Bloodless antidote. It was a relief to have finally cracked that mystery. Now, I pulled up his web browser to see that he had been searching the internet—for news channels that were still showing no signs of closing down. I glanced at the television opposite us. It was displaying coverage of TSL’s activities in Chicago. As more footage flashed of New York, my stomach churned. We had barely scratched the surface of the destruction. And we had only two hours before the IBSI got their way, and everyone as good as accepted that they and their methods—however backhanded and duplicitous—were the only solution to Earth’s problems.