A Twist of Fates

  “Benjamin Novak. Cofounder of The Shadow League. I’ve come to offer you sanctuary on our island. You and your child.”

  I heard her exhale sharply. “What do you want from me?”

  I clutched the handle again and pushed, testing my leeway. She wasn’t pressing so hard now. I eased it forward, and she let me push it open wide.

  Her face was pale, her thin hair clinging to her sweaty forehead.

  “Come with me now,” I said, gazing at her steadily. “There might be other guards around.”

  She still looked distrusting, but she would’ve been a fool to delay our leaving any longer. If she stayed here, she knew what her fate would be. For her and her son’s sake, she had to trust me. She moved over to a bed in one corner of the room and gathered a sleeping boy into her arms whom I guessed to be about four years old. He unglued his eyelids and murmured an inaudible question.

  She hushed him before hurrying to my side.

  “How do we get out of here?” she asked.

  I took the boy from her and propped him against my chest as I directed her to climb onto my back. Then I soared back through the apartment with them, closing the front door firmly on the way out. I hadn’t inflicted too much damage on the men. They would wake up in an hour or so and wonder where on earth she had gone. They’d be in for some serious chastisement too, no doubt.

  The young boy gazed at the rapidly distancing ground beneath us with wide eyes and parted lips. I was sure that he thought he was still sleeping. The doctor’s grip around my neck tightened, so hard it was almost strangling.

  Spotting Ibrahim and my father in the sky, we joined them. They both looked as relieved as I felt to have found the woman.

  “Ibrahim,” I said. “Please transport us back to The Shade.”

  We headed to a room at the base of the hospital, where we could talk in quiet. I did not want to expose Dr. Finnegan to too many strangers at once. We needed her to feel as comfortable as possible so she could give us all the information we needed.

  “I still don’t understand what you’re doing with me—”

  “I’ll tell you exactly why we brought you here,” I said, seating her and her boy in a chair. “My daughter has been infected by Bloodless venom. She has already turned into a Bloodless. We need the cure… I know that you know what it is. You started giving it to Lawrence.”

  Her breath hitched. “They almost killed me for giving out that information. How do I know you will keep me and my son safe?”

  “I promise,” I told her, “if you help us cure my daughter, you will be able to stay on our island as long as you want… free of charge,” I added. Of course, everyone who joined The Shade paid no rent—although they were expected to contribute their fair share to the upkeep of the island—but I was aware that this was a novel concept to the outside world.

  Recalling the four unopened tubes I’d left up in Grace’s room, I said, “Wait here. Let me show you what we have already.” Placing the first four ingredients in front of her nose should make it easier for her to simply slip us the fifth one.

  I left my father and Ibrahim with her and her son and hurried upstairs to Grace’s floor. My gut was churning before I even entered. My daughter was as we had left her, curled up and snarling in the center of the cage created for her by Corrine, looking more agitated than ever.

  River rushed to me, gripping my arms. “What’s happening?”

  “I’ll explain,” I said, breathless. “But first, those tubes…” My eyes shot to the bedside table where I’d left them. To my horror, they were gone. “Where are they?” I demanded of the room.

  “Corrine took them,” my mother said.

  Leaving everyone with their questions tingling on their tongues, I hurtled to the Sanctuary.

  I couldn’t wait to knock. I just hurried through the door and yelled for the witch. “Corrine! You here?”

  A door opened to my right, and Corrine stepped out.

  “The tubes!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, I have them. Come in,” she said, beckoning me inside her spell room.

  “Thank God,” I breathed as she removed the tubes from a drawer and set them on the counter. “What are you doing with them?”

  “Well,” she said, “I was trying to figure out what’s actually in them. I hoped that the missing ingredient might possibly be from the trees we hijacked.”

  “Well?” I urged.

  “Unfortunately, it looks like one of the tubes already contains some kind of extract from the trees—the orange one… Which has left me supposing that the last ingredient must be something else.”

  Great. If only things had been as simple as Corrine had hoped they might be.

  “Okay,” I said, sweeping up the tubes in my hands. “At least we found the scientist. We’re in the hospital, in the room opposite the dining hall.”

  Corrine accompanied me back to the hospital. We entered the room and I hurried to Dr. Finnegan and showed her the tubes.

  “These were the very ingredients that you recommended Lawrence pick up, right? And there was supposed to be one more ingredient? Yes?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. There’s a fifth ingredient. The black-capped tube is the fifth one.”

  Black-capped tube.

  “Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “Then I need to hurry back to the lab and look for it. Then it’ll just be as simple as mixing them all up and feeding the mix to my daughter?”

  “As far as my knowledge goes… Though I can assure you almost one hundred percent that those ingredients will no longer be there in the lab. Not after they found out I had given the cure to Lawrence. And they obviously suspect now that you were in cahoots with him.”

  Dammit. The IBSI had a history of making important things vanish. I felt a wave of déjà vu. Only recently, I had hurtled back to Chicago in search of Atticus’s laptop for the FOEBA files, only to be unable to find them, and now I would be embarking on yet another wild goose chase for the black-topped vial.

  “Well, even if they have moved it, you know what it actually is, right? What is that ingredient? We already have the four, we just need that final one!”

  The scientist swallowed. “I do know,” she began, eyeing me furtively. “But procuring it was, and would be, extremely difficult. And I mean extremely. I suggest that, before we talk further on this matter, you head back to Chicago and check that they have indeed removed them. Search everywhere—not just in the lab. Check the whole base as thoroughly as you can…” Her lips pursed, her eyes radiating a sense of foreboding. “Do everything you can to find it.”

  Unsettled, I was about to turn to Ibrahim and take the doctor’s advice, but I couldn’t leave without asking one last question. “What was in the red tube?”

  “The red tube,” she muttered, knotting her brows. “Why do you ask?”

  I briefly explained what had happened—or at least, what I had pieced together regarding Atticus sabotaging the treatment and giving his son a faulty ingredient.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, her arms wrapping more tightly around her son. “That was concentrated Bloodless venom.”

  My heart hit my stomach. It was no wonder Grace’s transformation had completed so rapidly. Bloodless venom. I fed my daughter Bloodless venom.

  Lawrence

  After my father vanished from the screen and it went blank, I was left alone in that small interrogation room for hours. In some ways, the waiting was more torturous than physical pain. I worried about what was happening to Grace right now. What it was, exactly, her father had likely already fed her by now. And what her reaction would be to it. Whatever happened, it was all my fault. I owed Grace my life—my life and my sanity. If it hadn’t been for her waking me up, slapping me out of my brainwashing, I would still be living a lie.

  The guilt was crushing.

  All the while, the words my father had spoken to me swirled in the back of my mind. The justification he had given for his actions had been uttered with such conviction that I even foun
d myself wondering for more than a few minutes whether his sentiments were really genuine. But if they were, I didn’t understand why he couldn’t make peace with The Shade. If they were both ultimately working for the same thing, the good of greater mankind, why couldn’t he at least hold a meeting with them? Even if they differed in opinion, an open forum would help to establish at least a semblance of understanding between the two parties. And, hopefully, end the intense animosity.

  It was his outright refusal to even give them the time of day—when The Shade and its people were clearly a valuable asset to anybody—that made me sink back into suspicion. Although he pontificated about noble ideas such as working for the “greater good” of the Earth, I feared they were nothing but empty words, and that at the end of the day, his need for power and control would always win out.

  After hours of being strapped to that chair, I was fed up of trying to understand my father’s mind. As logical and rational as he could make himself out to be, it was still a jumbled puzzle.

  All I knew was that, even if I assumed the best in him—that he had Earth’s best interests at heart—his way of going about this “greater good” was something I simply couldn’t agree with.

  Despite what he’d said about The Shade and its leaders, I was sure that they had a long-term vision in mind. And it was theirs I wanted to align myself with, if I ever got out of this damn room.

  My skin beneath the straps felt red raw after hours of trying to break my bonds. I had no idea what this material was made of, but it was clearly constructed with supernaturals in mind.

  I quit yelling after the first hour or so, because my throat became hoarse. I had no idea how long ago I had last had a drink of water—heck, how long ago I’d left the lab. It was as though time stood still in this room. There was no clock. Nothing but blank walls. It terrified me to think that days could have slipped away.

  God. I’ve got to get out of here.

  I cannot go the way of my mother.

  The only thing I had to comfort myself with was the fact that my father had not killed me yet. If he truly wanted to eliminate me as a threat, surely, that would be the first thing he’d do. Why would he prolong my demise? My father was a man of quick decisions. He should’ve made up his mind by now.

  But, assuming he still wanted me alive, why exactly was he keeping me in this room?

  I glanced around the four corners of the ceiling, eyeing the tiny black dots fixed in the center of each. Cameras, of course.

  Maybe my father was watching me at this very moment. The thought chilled me. Maybe he, or whoever he’d put in charge of monitoring me, was waiting for me to do something. Calm down? Sleep?

  Since my father had ceased communication with me, I had tried everything else in this room but closing my eyes. So as much as I wanted to keep them wide open, I let them settle and let my head loll gradually. Maybe now at least, if they thought I had drifted off into one of my deep slumbers, someone might feel generous enough to come in and place a bottle of water by my feet. I might be tougher and steadier than a regular human, and be able to survive longer periods without seeing to basic bodily functions, but I still felt the urge to drink. The pain of deprivation was still there.

  I imagined the hands of a clock ticking on the backs of my eyelids. Maybe ten minutes passed, then twenty and then half an hour, before, finally, the clicking of the door disrupted the maddening silence.

  I still dared not open my eyes. I tried to keep my body relaxed, as relaxed as it could be in this rigid chair. I focused on deepening my breathing.

  With a dull thud, something was placed on the floor by my right foot. Still, I kept my eyelids glued. I was afraid that the moment I opened them, whoever had ventured inside would leave.

  I tried to detect who it was by scent, but this person had no particular odor—at least not one that I could place—which led me to the conclusion that it likely wasn’t my father. He always wore a distinctive cologne.

  The footsteps moved back a couple of feet and stopped again. I heard another click—not the click of the door. It was too soft for that. It was like the click of… a camera? It clicked again, and again, and then a fourth time, before I could no longer keep my eyes closed. Who on earth would come in here to take pictures of me?

  The moment I opened my eyes, the clicking stopped and I found myself staring up at a man I didn’t even recognize—a lanky ginger-haired man. The harsh white lighting made him look gaunt, pale, almost like a ghost. He wore a black uniform, clearly an IBSI employee.

  “What are you doing?” escaped my lips.

  He stowed the camera in his pocket and darted out of the room. The door closed with a chilling click.

  What the…

  I glanced down at the object the man had placed at my feet. My jaw slackened. It wasn’t a bottle of water, as I had hoped and expected.

  It was… a bouquet of flowers. Crisp white lilies adorned with black ribbon. This was some kind of sick joke.

  Flowers? Why would my father send me flowers?

  What is going on?

  Bastien

  After I managed to escape Yuraya’s advances on the deck and put her to sleep with the special plant I’d gathered from The Woodlands, I spent the journey standing at the bow of the ship with Cecil.

  He knew far more about navigating ships than I did, of course—especially those drawn by dolphins—and he also had knowledge of how to reach The Dunes.

  As the hours passed, day turning into night, I headed down to the lower decks several times to check that Yuraya was still under the influence. When I sensed that she might be drawing too close to consciousness, I would chew up some more of the plant and drop its juice into her mouth, which soon knocked her out again.

  We could probably keep her for days in this state. And that might be exactly what we had to do, if things didn’t go according to plan.

  I needed to reach the realm of the jinn—The Dunes—and beg a favor of them. Based on what Victoria had told me, jinn were stronger and more powerful than witches. I needed the jinn to turn me, permanently alter me somehow, into something that even my parents would reject. Something that would cause shame and embarrassment to their fine lineage, a being they would want to forget even existed.

  They were so wrapped up in their traditions. Now I had to attempt to use that to my full advantage.

  I thought of Rona, still hiding in that old boat by The Woodlands’ shore. Hopefully she would survive while I was gone. Hopefully the Mortclaws would not find her. Even though I had discovered that she was not related to me by blood, I still felt a responsibility for her. She had no one now that her family had been slaughtered by mine.

  I was both relieved and anxious when Cecil finally announced that we were drawing close to our destination. He pointed to the distant outline of low, flat, blackish land.

  “That is the shore of The Dunes,” Cecil said wearily. “It’s nothing but dry desert… I really, really hope you know what you’re doing, Bastien.”

  I wished that I could assure my old friend that I did, but of course, that would’ve been a lie.

  All I knew was that this was what I had to do. Things had spiraled so out of control with my family—with my mother—that these were the lengths I was having to resort to.

  I still didn’t even have an inkling as to how exactly I would request to be transformed—I needed to speak to a jinni, explain my situation and ask for their advice. I also had to hope that they weren’t too hostile toward strangers. Would they help a stranger—an intruder at that—on their land? Would they give him the time of day, even if he begged?

  Only time would tell.

  My transformation had to be drastic… though I hoped not too drastic that Victoria would stop loving me.

  We seemed to cross the last stretch of ocean disproportionately fast, as though the universe sensed my nerves and sped me faster toward my fate.

  As we arrived in shallow water, I expected a sweltering heat to hit me, even with the ocean br
eeze. But it was actually rather chilly, I supposed because it was night time, and I shivered involuntarily.

  “The desert is a place of extremes,” Cecil explained, noting my reaction to the sudden change in temperature.

  I informed Cecil that I would return as soon as I could. I also warned him in no uncertain terms that he must keep an eye on the Mortclaw downstairs—keep feeding her the mashed-up plant, even if he thought he might be overdoing it. If there was one thing I’d learned over the past week, it was that there was no underestimating the Mortclaws.

  Leaping from the ship, I landed on the shore and hurried onto the black sand. I cast one final glance backward, waving at Cecil—who waved nervously back—before turning and running into the desert.

  I was still a man. I considered turning into a werewolf, but since jinn also had the appearance of men and women, I decided to remain as I was. Perhaps it would make dealings easier with them.

  I ran and ran, until the ocean was long out of sight. I traveled up and down steep dunes, gazing around at the desolate landscape and wondering where in this place I could find the jinn.

  I began to shout out into the night. “Help! I need help! I have come seeking a jinni! Please, someone, reveal yourself!”

  As I traveled, I found myself crossing a number of strange, eerie creatures that lurked in the dark. Lots of snakes, poisonous-looking beetles, and strange hopping creatures that I struggled to even describe. Two long legs. Thin arms that extended into flat, webbed hands. Their heads had bizarre frills attached to their sides. They looked somewhat like lizards and yet they were quite different. My shouting drew a pack of them close to me. They tried to launch at me while flailing horrifyingly long, white tongues, but I was able to outrun them and shake them off my trail.

  I continued my venture throughout the night until finally, as the first signs of dawn lit up the horizon, my wish was granted.

  A jinni manifested before me, a man with ebony skin, a broad chest, and a proud face. He looked down at me, quirking a brow.