A Shade of Vampire 27: A Web of Lies

by Bella Forrest

I couldn’t bring myself to fully agree with Shayla’s latter statement. Lawrence was eighteen—or so he believed—which meant that he was technically an adult. Lawrence was his own responsibility. He just couldn’t act on that responsibility due to his condition, and so it had passed on to his father.

  Anyway, all this is beside the point at this stage.

  I clasped my hands together. “Shayla,” I said, “the reason I’m here is because… I want to go back to that graveyard. I want to look around, just to see if we can glean any clues at all as to why Lawrence wanted to return there so badly. What was so special about it.”

  The witch frowned. “Well, I’m not sure what the point would be. What good will it do? Lawrence is gone already—he will already be back in Chicago with the IBSI. Hopefully he might even be cured by now,” she added.

  I heaved a sigh before I began to clarify my desire to return. My need for at least some small semblance of closure.

  After my explanation, to my relief, the witch’s eyes were filled with understanding. She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Okay, hun. When you explain it like that, I guess I’d also like to go. We both put so much effort into that boy, after all… I’ll take you.”

  Shayla and I shared a light breakfast together before she left me to wash and dress. She took a total of ten minutes and then returned with two warm coats. Grateful, I took one from her and slipped it on while she pulled on the other. Then she vanished us from The Shade.

  We reappeared directly outside the IBSI’s Clyderly base this time. I was quite impressed by her accuracy. We didn’t have the long drawn-out search we’d had to endure when coming here with Lawrence, because the location was fresh in her mind.

  I gazed around at the high fence surrounding the main IBSI compound—filled with oblong brown buildings that shone with tinted glass—which sprawled over several mountaintops. Shayla made the two of us invisible so as to not risk being spotted. Then we headed for the frosty graveyard, situated on a plateau further down the mountainside.

  Before leaving my treehouse for Shayla’s this morning, I’d been sure to put on thick boots, so my feet were not nearly as cold as last time. As I gazed around the yard, there were possibly close to two hundred tombstones here. It was situated very close to the hunters’ base. Did it belong to the IBSI, in honor of their fallen? Or was it just a coincidence that they had set up nearby?

  I approached the nearest grave and began brushing away the snow from the headstone with the sleeve of my coat. I was grateful when Shayla used her magic to quickly clear the rest so that I wouldn’t get the arm of my coat soaking wet.

  Beneath the ice was gray stone, slightly greenish with age. It was plain, except for an unfamiliar name: “Josefine Summer Maddox”. And “In loving memory of,” was etched above it, with two dates at the base of the stone.

  “Five years ago… and only twenty-three,” Shayla said sadly.

  I moved to the next stone and asked Shayla to clear it. Another name. Another young person.

  We made our way through the graveyard as strategically as possible, with Shayla clearing away one name after the other. I was taken aback by how many of them were young. Most of them, in fact, were under the age of twenty-five. I supposed that most of the IBSI’s members—at least the ones who engaged in combat—were young, so it made sense. It was just rather shocking seeing so many all in one place.

  In spite of my boots, my feet were numb by the time we reached halfway through the graveyard. We still had no inkling as to what was so special about the place.

  Shayla drew in a breath, rubbing her hands together and manifesting a ball of fire between her palms. She held it out to me and I scooped up a flame, molding it in my own hands with my fae powers and warming myself.

  I followed Shayla’s gaze over the sea of graves. “Do you really want to check all of them?” she asked, a tad reluctantly.

  “We might as well while we’re here,” I said.

  “Okay,” she replied. “I agree.”

  We warmed ourselves a little more with the fire before she extinguished hers and I dropped mine to the snow, where it hissed and fizzled out.

  We continued walking carefully through the yard so we didn’t miss any graves. As we reached about three-quarters of the way through, and Shayla cleared snow from the stone of a grave beneath one of the few bare skeleton trees, we both gasped in unison as the writing emerged.

  “Much missed by son and husband:

  Georgina Susanna Conway.”

  I stared at the faded words, barely believing my eyes. And when Shayla dipped down and uncovered numbers, my jaw dropped even further.

  “So Georgina died thirteen years ago,” Shayla breathed.

  That this tombstone was older than a decade was evident by the state it was in. It was one of the grimiest we’d come across thus far.

  But the birth date was faded. All we could see was the death date.

  Georgina Susanna Conway… “Conway,” I repeated. “‘Much missed by son and husband…’” My immediate instinct on reading the words was to assume that this was Lawrence’s mother. But… Atticus had told us that she had only died, like, a week ago or something.

  “Maybe this is Lawrence’s grandmother,” Shayla said.

  “Perhaps,” I replied, although… son and husband. It was of course possible that the only people closest to his grandmother were her son and husband… I really wished that there had been a birthdate on the stone. It was impossible for us to say whether this woman could have even theoretically been Atticus’s wife.

  “Well, either it’s Granny, or some aunt or other relative,” Shayla said. “Unless Atticus was lying about his wife. But why would he lie about something like that?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t imagine any reason he would lie about it. What would be the point?” Still, a small doubt niggled at the back of my mind.

  Shayla and I remained standing in front of the grave for several minutes longer. Then we moved along and continued checking the other gravestones.

  By the time we had finished uncovering all the names, Georgina Conway’s was still the only one of relevance to us.

  Shayla turned on me, her eyes widening. “Well? Satisfied now?”

  I swallowed back the lump in my throat. I could hardly say that I was satisfied. But there was nothing more to be done here. And there was something that I definitely planned to do, once we returned to The Shade…

  Grace

  After Shayla returned us to the Port, I thanked the witch for taking me before returning to my family’s penthouse. I headed straight for my room and flipped open my laptop. “Georgina Susanna Conway.” I breathed the words as I typed them into the search box, wondering how many women could share that name. It turned out not many. At all.

  Only a handful of hits appeared in the text search results, but I switched tabs to scan the image results first. I figured that would be the quickest way to recognize the right person—assuming that she bore any kind of resemblance to Atticus or Lawrence. But in the images section, there were no actual photos of people… except of one young woman without the surname—just a “Georgina Susanna”—who was, ahem, a model.

  The rest of the image hits were scans of various documents that involved the full name. I began to look at each one closely. There were newspaper cuttings about a Georgina Susanna Conway who’d driven to her death off the side of a mountain one snowy night near Edinburgh thirteen years ago. She had been twenty-nine years old, leaving behind a five-year-old son, who remained unnamed, and her husband of seven years, also left unnamed due to matters of “privacy”.

  I sank back in my chair, letting the implications of this information sink in. The math fit. Lawrence had been sure that he was eighteen years old now. That meant that Georgina Susanna Conway was Lawrence’s mother. Not his aunt or grandmother, as Shayla had been quick to presume.

  Atticus’s wife.

  Which meant that Atticus had been lying about his wife dying of cancer. What kind of man woul
d lie about something like that? And why? Why would he lie to us? What was the actual point?

  Uneasiness filled me. We had just let Lawrence go with him. What if he had been lying about other things, too? That he was Lawrence’s father, at least I was certain of. But strangely, that didn’t make me much more comfortable about the situation.

  I reached into the drawer of my desk instinctively for my notebook, only to remember that it was still packed in my suitcase. Opening the bag, I pulled it out. As my eyes fell on its pink polka-dot cover, I felt a sharp twinge in my chest. I recalled the night it’d been in Lawrence’s hands.

  Swallowing hard, I sat back down and picked up the pen before turning to a blank page.

  “Georgina Susanna Conway,” I wrote in all-caps at the top. “Died thirteen years ago, near Edinburgh, Scotland. Twenty-nine years old. Lawrence was five at the time. Atticus’s age, unknown.”

  I rubbed my right temple.

  What does all this mean? Does it even mean anything at all? Maybe Atticus had some reason to lie to us about his wife. Perhaps he’d thought that he would garner sympathy from us if he told us that his wife had recently died and that she had been the reason behind Lawrence volunteering for the IBSI in the first place…

  My train of thought shifted direction. Now that I knew Atticus was a liar, I began to question every single thing about the interaction we’d had with him. He’d said that Lawrence had volunteered in order to earn money for his mother’s treatment. Now that I knew that was false, what had driven Lawrence to volunteer in the first place? And had it even been voluntary?

  I shuddered. I didn’t like where my thoughts were going. But it was too late to stop wondering now. Doubts assailed me as I glanced down at my notebook again, my eyes running over the name of Lawrence’s late mother.

  Turning to my laptop, I scoured the web for any mention of a “Lawrence Conway” or an “Atticus Conway”. I typed in all possible keyword combinations I could think of, linking them to Chicago and even the IBSI. All I found was a handful of Lawrence Conways and one Atticus Conway who weren’t linked to the IBSI or Chicago; none of them fit the description. None of them were who I was looking for.

  It seemed that the only straw I had to cling to was Lawrence’s mother. Which meant that I had to try to find out more about her. As much as I possibly could.

  Why had she been buried in that graveyard next to the IBSI’s Clyderly base? She must’ve had some connection with the organization. Perhaps she had been a hunter herself, even though Atticus had denied a formal connection between his family and the IBSI.

  I finished scanning all of the newspaper cuttings. Most of them were from local papers, reporting the same, short story… But then I struck gold. In the text search result, I found an obituary posted on a news site that mentioned the names of Georgina’s parents: “Born to Spencer and Angela Hulse, of Bristol, where she had spent the last week before her accident…”

  Bristol. Where is that? A quick search told me that it was a city in the southwest of England.

  Next, I typed the names of Georgina’s parents, followed by the city. It didn’t take me long to locate them. I found them via an advertisement for a pub called the Old Fox. Apparently, they were the owners. I researched further to find out if the pub was still open—it seemed to be. I found a dinky website for it, listing the opening times as well as the exact address.

  I leaned back in my chair, letting out a breath as I stared at the address. I tapped my pen against the edge of the table.

  Am I really going to go further with this?

  Grace

  I found myself running the familiar route to Shayla and Eli’s penthouse. Shayla wasn’t at home, and neither was Eli, of course—he’d gone with the League to the ogres’ realm.

  I headed for the hospital, to the apothecary, where she usually hung out if she wasn’t busy with a patient. I found her bending over a test tube.

  I approached her cautiously, arriving at her side and drumming my knuckles against the table.

  She glanced up at me, raising a brow. “What’s up, Grace?”

  I hesitated a little before answering. “I’ve been doing some more thinking about Georgina,” I said. “But more than thinking, I’ve been doing some research.”

  “Oh?”

  I explained to her what I’d found out—that Atticus had been lying to us. At this, she stood back from whatever concoction she was brewing and gave me her full attention.

  “So what are you thinking exactly?” she asked.

  “I would like to go and visit Georgina’s parents. The obituary said that she spent the last week of her life there before the accident and… I would just like to ask them some questions about Atticus. And about Lawrence.”

  She heaved a sigh. I couldn’t miss the reluctance in her eyes. “Grace, I can’t help but think that we’re prying a little too much into this family. Lawrence is back with his father. I don’t think it’s any of our business what happens next, and I’m sure the boy is in a better condition now than when he was here… dying.”

  I found that hard to swallow. Just because a person was family didn’t mean that they had one’s best interests in mind. My great-grandmother on my father’s side, Camilla, was a prime example of that. As well as, for that matter, my great-grandfather Gregor. Come to think of it, my family on my father’s side is pretty messed up in general.

  When I persisted, Shayla said, “Okay, I understand you want to go. But I can’t take you this time, Grace. I’m sorry. I’ve just got too much going on here. I can’t go gallivanting around. Go and ask Arwen to take you.”

  I frowned. “Arwen? She’s here? I thought she left with the others.”

  Shayla shook her head. “You know how much ogres creep her out.”

  I smirked to myself. That was true. She had a phobia of ogres—since she’d been a kid she’d been terrified of stories about them, and always went out of her way to avoid Bella and Brett, even though they were, at heart, really more like teddy bears than ogres. Though it was certainly true that most ogres weren’t like Brett and Bella.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask her.”

  With that, I left Shayla to get on with her potion, while I raced to the Sanctuary. In theory, Arwen should be at school today, but I knew that girl. More than likely, she would use “recovery” from her trip to The Woodlands as an excuse to skip a day of school before starting again tomorrow.

  I was right in that guess. When I arrived outside the door and knocked, she emerged in the doorway less than a minute later. She was wearing pajamas and fluffy white slippers, her curly rich brown hair trailing down her shoulders.

  Her face immediately took on a scowl when she laid eyes on me, though it wasn’t a real scowl. There was a smile behind her eyes.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still in a huff with me and Heath,” I said.

  “That was a really crappy thing to do,” she replied.

  I rolled my eyes, even as I invited myself inside and closed the door behind me. I wasn’t in the mood to start bantering about her and her lover boy Brock. I had much heavier thoughts weighing down my mind.

  “Arwen,” I began, “seeing as you’ve obviously taken the day off school, I guess you don’t have much to do.” I didn’t give her a chance to confirm or deny as I steamrolled on. “I would be really grateful to you if you could take me to Bristol, in England.”

  She furrowed her brows. “Why do you want to go there?”

  I groaned internally. It was such a long story to tell given that she probably hadn’t heard anything about the Lawrence saga yet, other than perhaps that he’d left the island. But I sat down with her and started from the beginning, from the time I’d met Lawrence to everything that had happened while I was with him and all that I had discovered since. By the time I was finished, her jaw hung open.

  “Of course I’ll take you,” she said. “I don’t know how to get there, though… But I’ll check my mom’s maps.”

  She gripped my hand a
nd pulled me out of the living room where we had been sitting and into her mother’s study. It was so crowded with books, there was hardly room for anything else. Arwen moved to one of the teakwood cabinets and drew open the glass doors. She took down a huge pile of world maps from one of the shelves and laid them down on Corrine’s desk. She found one of England, and I helped her pinpoint the city.

  I reached into my backpack that I had brought with me from home and pulled out my trusty notebook and a pen. I turned to the page where I had noted down the address of the pub.

  Once Arwen had studied the map for several more minutes and seemed fairly confident about where we were heading, she looked up at me. “Okay,” she said, resolute. “I'll get dressed, and then… we'll go, girl.”

  Grace

  Arwen naturally wasn’t as experienced a traveler as Shayla, but since we weren’t trying to locate a place in the middle of nowhere, we located the pub fairly easily. The sky was gray and rainy as we found ourselves standing outside a small cozy-looking pub with old-fashioned single-glazed windows. We stepped inside to find it mostly empty. A young brunette stood behind the bar, sifting through a pile of bills.

  “Excuse me,” I said, clearing my throat.

  She glanced up at us, her eyes widening. I guessed Arwen and I were rather a strange pair to arrive at the pub. Arwen especially looked out of place. Although as a witch, she was practically indistinguishable from a human, she looked rather otherworldly with her exotic features.

  “I’m here to see Mr. and Mrs. Hulse,” I said.

  “I’m Emily, the manager,” she said. “May I ask why you’d like to see the owners?”

  I glanced around the pub uncomfortably. “It’s a rather, uh, personal issue. I don’t mean to take up much of their time but… it really is quite important that I speak to them.”

  Emily eyed the two of us a moment longer before saying, “All right. They live in the flat upstairs. I’ll call up and ask.”