I realized as I watched the jinni how dry my throat was feeling. I reached into my backpack and grabbed my water. I downed the whole bottle in a matter of minutes, but still, the uncomfortable scratchy feeling at the back of my mouth didn’t subside. Not in the least.
I looked toward my mother and was about to ask her for some more water when my throat closed up. I began to choke.
Oh, no. No. Not again.
I began hacking as though I was trying to cough my organs out, and then came blood. Drops of blood, raining from my mouth onto my knees and open palms. As I continued coughing, I was expelling far too much blood for comfort.
Oh, God. I’m getting worse.
Orlando and my parents, who were nearest to me, hurried to stabilize me on the branch so that I would not slip as tremors claimed my body again. They lasted longer than ever before, each one more powerful, more violent. My skull banged against the branch. My teeth chattered. My extremities felt like ice cubes and tingled like they were being punctured by needles.
When the fit subsided, and I attempted to sit up slowly—Orlando and my parents still gripping hold of me to keep me steady—I already knew that it had not left me the same person.
I knew instantly from the look on Orlando’s and my parents’ faces.
“What is it?” I demanded in a panic.
Their eyes were roaming the length of me.
I glanced down at my hands and realized just how much paler they looked all of a sudden. Paler and more… veiny. I twisted my hands so that my wrists were visible. Blue veins jutted out so far my arms had become practically unrecognizable. These are not my wrists.
“Hand me a mirror,” I stammered to my mother, even as I feared I would regret it.
“Grace,” she gasped.
“Please! Just hand one to me,” I begged.
She dipped into her backpack and rummaged. “Oh, I handed my travel mirror to you earlier, darling,” she said. “You never gave it back.”
Dammit. I must’ve left it back at the cave.
My aunt Rose’s concerned face appeared within my view. Her expression was a mirror of the others’.
“I have a mirror, but—” Rose said.
“Then let me see myself!” I cried, too loudly.
Rose searched her bag and pulled out a foldable mirror. Trembling, I pried it open and stared at myself. As I had feared, the tone of my face had changed drastically, just like the rest of my body. And it was as if my skin had thinned. Blue veins were also visible where there had been no trace of them before, especially near my temples.
I clapped the mirror shut and flung it back to my aunt, terrified of my reflection. My father’s hand closed around my shoulder. “Grace, it’s time to take you back to The Shade. We are just asking for trouble dragging you around with—”
“No,” I insisted. “That won’t solve anything! I would turn there just as I am now! No,” I repeated, in a quieter though no less desperate tone, “That’s not what I need… I need to get through to Lawrence.”
Lawrence
I was feeling beyond confused as I carried my father back with me and my colleagues to Aviary city.
What had just happened?
Who were those people who had taken my father hostage?
One moment I had been on the phone to my father, filling him in on the progress we’d made and the remaining estimated tree count, and the next I’d heard him grunt, followed by the thump of the phone hitting the ground.
I’d set out with an emergency search party immediately, though it wasn’t difficult to find him. As was mandatory for all IBSI members recruited to work on the new construction site in Aviary, as soon as we arrived in this land, we had to hook ourselves up to a central tracing system based in one of the technology caravan units in the center of the main clearing ground. For such a large project as this, it was mandatory that I had the means to know where everyone was, to manage our resources and ensure that everybody was working together as efficiently as possible… In all honesty, I was surprised that my father had given me such a prominent role so soon after my successful drug trial. I found the attention he was showing me now rather difficult to get used to, though it certainly was not unwelcome. I had been all but estranged from him while growing up. After my mother’s accident, I’d rarely seen him. It was understandable, of course. He had arguably the most demanding job in the world.
Now, he thought I was up to managing the IBSI’s activities in Aviary. He assured me that I was a fast learner and would easily fill in the gaps in my knowledge while on the job.
So far, he was right—it hadn’t been difficult to slip into this role, even if I did find myself asking several times a day what exactly I was doing in this position of authority.
We arrived at our temporary base among the treetops in old Aviary city. We had cleared away the medieval treehouses that been perched among the branches and replaced them with glass box-like constructions with interconnecting walkways. There were over a hundred rooms in this sprawling architecture, and that was with some workers sharing a room. My father and I parted ways with the other men, and landed directly on top of one of the walkways with the mutant. The creature set my father down before I slid off myself. I gave the mutant a nod, indicating that I had finished with him for now and he ought to rejoin the others.
Riding these… things was a skill I had not forgotten. There were many others that I remembered, too. It was only a period of a couple of months that had been completely erased from my memory during the drug procedure—and my father said that I was lucky, since two months was a very short period. Much less than expected. He said that, before I’d gone in, they had predicted I might even lose up to a year of my life.
My last memory was my graduation day from Creston Academy, an elite training center for future IBSI members. I recalled all the training that led up to my graduation, and then on the actual day, I remembered the elation I’d felt as I’d been getting ready to attend the ceremony. More than anything, I recalled imagining my father being present among the crowds. I wished that I could remember him actually being there, but my memory cut short after that and returned only after waking up from the drug-induced coma to be informed that my transformation was complete. I didn’t remember the day I’d discovered that my father was looking for volunteers for a drug trial, or his initial reluctance to allow me to volunteer, or his eventual agreement when I had insisted. I’d had to rely on my father to fill in these gaps for me.
We climbed through a glass trap door in the roof of the walkway and emerged in a communal kitchen.
“Who were those people?” I asked. “They looked like supernaturals.”
“You know,” my father said, looking irritated as he leapt up and yanked the trap door shut above us, “I’ve told you about them before. They’re rogue agents, from that little island in the Pacific. They’ve been seething ever since they got dropped from their official roles. Blaming us for their incompetence, they take every opportunity to sabotage our work. They were the instigators of the massacres that took place in The Woodlands and The Trunchlands—didn’t I mention that?”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “You did.”
He retrieved a first aid kit from one of the shelves. I watched him sterilize and bandage his wounds.
“Why do they bother?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Seems a stupid amount of effort to follow us around.”
He turned his back on me and reached into his right pocket, drawing out a pack of supplements. “As I said, they are bitter,” he said, popping a round green pill into his mouth—the same pill I took mornings and evenings, along with a plethora of others. He heaved a sigh. “Basically, they’ve somehow gotten it into their heads that we shouldn’t be felling these poisonous trees. They don’t understand that we need to create space here. The base that we’ll build in the coming months will prove to be invaluable to our defense strategy, as we’ve discussed.”
I nodded, reaching for a bottle of water. Although I had not grippe
d it hard, the plastic dented beneath my touch, and I had to remind myself to ease up a little. I still was not close to being used to this new body I’d woken up in. My father told me that certain aspects of my strength had the potential to rival even that of a vampire when I was on the right cocktail of supplements. My father was to undergo the same procedure as myself soon, as were a dozen other IBSI members. The rigid regimen of supplements he was taking every day was preparation for this.
As I swallowed down my water, I thought back to something else in that cave that I’d found odd—that young woman who’d yelled out for the magic-wielder to stop.
But my father didn’t appear to be in any mood to continue discussing the matter.
“So what’s going to happen now?” I asked him, frowning. He leaned against the counter and rubbed his temples. “Are we just going to allow them to roam freely around Aviary and continue causing us trouble? What if there are more of them than those we found in that cave? And what if there are more dangerous League members, like dragons?”
My father nodded, lowering his hands again to his sides and holding my gaze. “You’re right, Lawrence. We can’t have them meddling, and we definitely can’t have a repeat of the slaughter they carried out in The Woodlands or The Trunchlands. And we won’t have either…” My father tightened his belt around his waist before concluding, “I’ll keep you informed.”
I raised my brows. “Well, what are you planning to do?”
“Leave it to me,” he said shortly. “You just get some sleep, it’s been a long day. And stay inside. You won’t want to be stepping out for a while… You’ll soon realize why.”
I frowned as my father left the room. What is he planning?
I helped myself to a protein shake. Gulping it down, I gazed out through the glass into the dark treetops surrounding us. They swayed to a breeze I couldn’t hear, the occasional shaft of moonlight spilling down to illuminate their broad, tapered leaves.
There were times when I felt that the things my father told me were only the tip of the iceberg. Times I wished that his explanations were more detailed… but this was the way he was. A busy man who wasn’t accustomed to stopping to explain. I was used to that. I’d had my whole childhood to get used to that.
I wasn’t wondering long what he had planned, however. After finishing my shake and returning along the walkways to my room, I glanced out of the window again and noticed a thick smoke with a greenish tinge had descended outside the glass. So thick that I could hardly see through it.
I dropped to my mattress, staring at the mist billowing around the glass construction. I knew what this was.
I just hadn’t been expecting us to use it so soon.
Lucas
I traveled back to The Shade with speed and focus. Hardly any time was wasted in getting lost over the ocean. Over the past couple of decades, I had traveled the waters surrounding The Shade and America so much that I knew the landmarks like the back of my hand… well, almost.
Since I didn’t have automatic permission to enter The Shade—only witches and a select number of jinni had that—I was forced to yell my throat hoarse for someone to come and let me in.
It was Corrine who arrived. Perfunctory at first on eyeing me, as always, she performed a routine check to verify that I was not an imposter before asking, “What is going on, Lucas?”
“I need to gather an army,” I replied grimly, soaring with her through the redwoods and touching down on the forest ground.
I proceeded to explain to her what had happened since Ibrahim left our company—which wasn’t long ago. Corrine informed me that it’d taken the witches and jinn a while to respond to my yelling because they’d all been so wrapped up with the tree specimens Ibrahim had brought back.
“So far, we haven’t made any breakthroughs,” she confirmed. “But we haven’t had much time.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m going to need to borrow a few witches to help us chase the hunters out of Aviary. I will also need dragons, wolves, more jinn, and anybody else who is able and capable.”
Corrine agreed to gather the witches and jinn, while I headed off to gather the rest of the League. I informed them that if they were willing to embark on this mission, they needed to gather by the Port within half an hour. I deliberately left out my son, Jeramiah, however. Derek rebuked me for it on occasion, but I tried to keep him out of the League’s activities as much as I possibly could. It had taken me decades to be reunited with that boy, and I wasn’t as tolerant about watching him ride into danger as the other parents of the island were… even though he was a fully grown adult.
Yuri, Kiev and a couple of the dragons helped me gather weapons and explosives from the Armory, and then all we could do was wait for the rest to arrive before the deadline.
I was about as good at waiting as I was at cooking—always had been that way. I found myself pacing up and down, leaving the clearing and heading to the beach to try to distract myself by watching the waves.
I mulled over question after question relating to the IBSI and the so-called antidote. I hoped that, for Grace’s sake, we weren’t barking up the wrong tree… so to speak.
I glanced back again at the Port after a couple of minutes and was pleased to see more League members had gathered by now. I was about to return to speak to the newest arrivals when a feminine voice called behind me.
“Monsieur Novak.”
I turned on my heel to find myself gazing down into a pair of pretty hazel eyes. A delicate face, framed by locks of blonde-streaked brown hair. It took a few seconds for it to register in my brain that this was Marion, the young woman I had saved along with her baby back in The Trunchlands. She looked so different now than when I had last seen her. She had a healthy glow to her cheeks. Her hair was clean and combed in soft curls. The witches must have also managed to make her put on a few pounds, because her previously emaciated form had become distinctly curved beneath a light yellow dress.
The vision of her caused me to temporarily abandon my resolve to greet the new recruits, and I found myself standing before her and staring. “Uh, hello,” spilled from my lips. “I mean, bonjour.”
She smiled broadly. A smile that emphasized the delicate apples of her cheeks… and even a small splash of freckles across her nose, now that her skin was bright and clean.
“How is your, uh, enfant?” I asked. Damn. My French ought to be better than this.
“Avril is happy,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “She… sleeping in hospital. With nurse.”
“Oh, good,” I said. My chest tensed as she continued gazing up at me.
“Monsieur Novak—” she began again.
“Please, call me Lucas.”
She smiled coyly. “Lucas.” My name coming from her lips sent an odd tingle down my spine. “I thank you again for helping me and my baby.”
“Oh, that’s… really no problem.”
“Hey, Lucas!” Kiev yelled. “Everyone’s arrived.”
As selfish as it was, I realized a small part of me had actually been hoping that some League members would arrive a little later. I returned my eyes to Marion’s bright face. I let out a breath. “I’m sorry, Marion. I need to go.”
“Where do you go?” she asked curiously.
“To battle.”
She raised her brows. “Battle?”
“You know… War. Fight.” I balled up my fists and held them up in a stupid gesture of combat.
Understanding dawned on her face. “Oh. You are… warrior.”
I couldn’t stop a small smile from cracking my lips. “Well, yes… I guess you could say I’m a warrior—”
“Lucas!” Kiev roared. “What the hell are you doing? Get over here!”
“I have to go,” I told Marion apologetically.
“Mais oui! Of course! Be careful… Lucas.”
That shiver again.
I lowered my head slightly in a bow. Meeting her wide eyes once more, I turned on my heels. But before I could take a step,
her hand reached out and closed around mine. The next thing I knew, I was being tugged downward, and her heart-shaped lips were pressing against my right cheek. Her kiss was both soft and firm, and infused with passion.
Then she pulled away just as suddenly, her cheeks flushed… As I knew mine were.
“Adieu,” she whispered breathlessly.
“A-Adieu,” I managed.
I finally tore myself away from Marion and sped back toward Kiev, who had by now descended from the jetty and appeared to be on his way to physically grab me. Though my right cheek remained tingling far longer than it should have.
Ben
I stared down at my daughter’s pale, sweaty face as she begged me, “Please. I need to speak to Lawrence.”
I could hardly bear to glance at River. Neither of us had ever experienced as much pain as this before—to witness our daughter turning before our very eyes while we watched helplessly.
But we had to hold it together. Neither of us could crack in front of Grace. I swallowed hard and set my focus firmly on my daughter.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go find him.”
“Thank you,” she breathed, settling her head back down against the branch.
I was doubtful that a talk with Lawrence would gain us anything, even if I did manage to arrange it. He appeared to have been completely reprogrammed—an ally of the IBSI, no longer the confused boy who’d woken up in The Shade and developed a friendship with my daughter. But I couldn’t deny Grace’s request. Not at a time like this. After kissing her forehead and exchanging a fleeting glance with my wife, I left the group on the branch, even as I prayed that Grace would not undergo another fit while I was gone.
I hurried toward Aviary city. Along the route, I couldn’t help but notice the peachy, poisonous trees growing sparser and sparser, until I couldn’t spot a single one and they gave way to another species of tree entirely.
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