“I’ll tell you if you let me sit up,” I said. “You’re killing my hands.”
Paul coughed out a dry laugh. “You seriously think we’re stupid, don’t you?”
“Why, yes,” I admitted. “As I said already, I do think you’re stupid. Downright moronic, in fact, for believing what the IBSI told you.”
Paul moved to hurt me again but Tim got in his way.
“We’ve confiscated the matches and lighters, and you searched her.” Tim addressed Paul. “She has no way to spark up a fire.” I heard the clicking of a gun, then I felt a barrel press against the back of my neck. I reminded myself again that they couldn’t kill me. If they did, they would risk ruining their chances of treatment and release.
“I’m holding a gun,” Tim informed me, like I hadn’t already noticed. “One wrong move, and it’s goodbye to you, sweetie.”
I nodded.
Slowly, Tim’s boots lifted from my wrists. I drew my hands toward me and cradled them to my chest. Pain shot through my wrists and arms as I tried to move my fingers. My pinky wouldn’t move at all. I was sure that Tim had broken it.
I sat upright gradually, taking my time so as to not cause them alarm. Now I could face the men properly. Paul remained right next to me, barely a foot away, his eyes digging into mine, while Tim remained standing with the other man—both of whom were now pointing guns at me.
I dropped my hands discreetly into the water.
“Now you have a minute to tell us your secret before we leave,” Paul said. “So you’d better hurry up.”
I drew in a breath even as I gained a feel for the puddle water. “Well,” I began, wetting my lower lip thoughtfully, “it’s kind of a conspiracy they’ve got going on. And the reason you’re all here has to do with why they want me in the first place. I know something that could bring this whole operation down. I know the secret of why you’re here—” As I babbled non-information, I tried to estimate how many liters of water were within my proximity. More than four hundred, I was sure. I only needed a few seconds of distraction. My backpack lay only a few feet away…
I continued to beat around the bush with the men, dragging out revealing what the actual “secret” was, until finally, as I sensed that Paul was on the verge of just grabbing me and escorting me to whoever Martin was, I gathered the courage to make my move. I caused all the surrounding water to burst up at once. A thick wall of water crashed into the men and smacked them in the face, causing the guns to drop from their hands as they staggered back.
Not missing a beat, I hurled myself toward my backpack and shot a hand inside to rummage for one of my spare lighters. But the lighters had been removed. Heck, there weren’t even any matchboxes left. One of the guys must have emptied it and taken them for themselves, stuffed them into one of their own backpacks, while I’d been face down on the concrete. My hand, however, did brush against a gun.
The shock of my mini-tsunami wore off quickly. As Tim and the other man, who still remained nameless to me, leapt for the guns they had dropped and Paul reached for a gun in his belt, I already knew what was going to happen next. They were going to take me down however they could. Shoot me in the legs. Paralyze me, so they could escort me to my doom.
My brain numb with panic, I did the only thing that I could think to do. I slid out the gun in my hands from the backpack and started firing at all three men in rapid succession. None of them could respond fast enough. And a few moments later, all three of them collapsed. Motionless.
I stopped breathing as I stared at the three men. The three… bodies. No. I hadn’t meant to kill them. I really hadn’t. I’d only meant to hurt them, paralyze them before they could paralyze me.
But, although I’d used a gun before in training, I had never used it before in real combat. And in my moment of panic, I hadn’t been aiming the way I’d been taught to aim. Raw survival instinct had clouded my judgment and I’d just… fired. Fired. Fired. Anywhere and everywhere.
The gun slipped from my trembling hands as I approached the bodies.
Three lives. I’d just claimed three lives.
It took several moments of gazing at the men for the reality to sink in. As I realized what I’d done. What I was now.
My innocence was lost.
I’d become a murderer. Just like them.
Ben
To my surprise, the tracker that Shayla had given Corrine to locate Arwen and her accompanying witches led us to the outskirts of the IBSI’s base in Chicago. We spotted the witches lurking near the headquarters’ borders, talking with one another behind a large cluster of bushes. Corrine immediately hurtled toward her daughter and gripped her by the shoulders.
“Arwen!” she hissed.
The young witch’s eyes bulged in alarm to see her mother.
“Mom,” she gasped.
“What in the name of The Sanctuary were you thinking in taking Grace to Hawaii?” Corrine shook her none too gently. “You betrayed me, and you betrayed your father. We trusted you with the security of our island! You went and abused your privileges in the worst—”
“What’s happening?” I demanded, cutting through Corrine’s chastisement. She would have ample time for that later, no doubt. “Where is my daughter? You think she’s here?”
Arwen, glassy-eyed and red-cheeked, tore her gaze away from her mother and fixed it on me. “Yes,” she murmured.
“What makes you think that?”
“We went to Hawaii first. Breached their base and set off their alarms in the process, but we managed to extract information from one of the workers in the air base they have there. We asked him for a recent list of destinations and he told us there had only been one flight that day—a chopper chartered for Chicago.”
Right. I grimaced, turning my eyes on the high, electrified fences. I turned to Lucas and Kailyn, who were looking at me, waiting for my go-ahead. I nodded. “Let’s go inside.”
We thinned ourselves and sank through the fence, emerging on the other side in a small courtyard. We moved into the nearest building and found ourselves inside a reception area.
Now think. If Grace is really in this place, where would they have taken her?
I spotted a wide map display fixed to the wall near the reception desk. We moved to it and examined it. I scanned past the residential area which seemed to occupy the first five buildings of the compound, and stopped on a building marked “Laboratories”. The hunters could have brought my daughter here to experiment on her. She was a fae, after all. And fae were creatures the IBSI still knew very little about, for they rarely had the opportunity to encounter one, much less catch one. Grace, being only half fae and unable to thin herself in order to escape, would be the perfect test subject. They could be performing experiments on her right at this moment, perhaps even taking something from her, just as I suspected they had taken something from River…
Even after all these years, we still weren’t sure what exactly the IBSI had done to my wife—though I suspected they’d collected a sample of her eggs. I suspected that they had been used to lay the foundation stones of their drug development today. Since River had been half supernatural, and they were also essentially attempting to become half supernatural with whatever concoction they were brewing up for their men, perhaps her DNA had come in useful in their preliminary research. I could only speculate about what they’d done to River, but I didn’t even want to consider what they might do to Grace.
“So where do we go?” Kailyn asked beneath her breath.
My eyes passed the laboratory and continued roaming the map. Then something else caught my eye—an area located on the fifth floor of the building about six blocks away from us, entitled “Interrogation Quarters.”
I shuddered to think that my Grace could have been taken there too. “Okay,” I breathed. “Let’s search the lab first, and if we don’t find her there, we’ll head to the Interrogation Quarters. We should stick together and not wander off,” I added, mostly to my uncle. He had a habit of taking d
etours at the most inconvenient of times. I was sure that it was subconscious; he just didn’t like to be put in a straitjacket or follow a rigid path.
We zoomed through the headquarters and reached the lab. It was enormous, consisting of numerous floors and departments. We searched the entirety of it, but did not find my daughter. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed about that. Next, we headed to the interrogation area, which consisted of fifteen different rooms containing tinted glass windows. All were completely empty.
I drew in a breath, hoping that Arwen had not been lied to by the guy she had questioned back in Hawaii. I hated to consider the possibility that Grace might not even be here, but somewhere else entirely. Somewhere completely unknown.
“We need to consult a map again,” I said. I began leading us back to the reception but along the way, we came across another map in one of the hallways.
“Hmm,” I murmured, scanning the compound.
“What about the Restricted Access building?” Lucas suggested.
I frowned. Restricted Access. Where was that? Ah, yes. I spotted it. Right on the other side of the compound—on the top floor of the very last building, it seemed.
“Let’s go there, then,” I said.
As we hurried toward the back of the compound, I had no idea what to expect. Maybe some kind of secret lab, where they developed their most confidential drugs, that wasn’t open to just any old IBSI member?
To my surprise, the Restricted Access floor of the final building appeared to be a residential area. We found ourselves arriving at the end of a long red-carpeted hallway that resembled a hotel’s. The lighting was warm and inviting, and there were oil paintings on the walls. On either side of us were dark mahogany wood doors… and there were names engraved on each one. Maybe these were apartments where all the HQ’s big shots resided. Because there were many other apartment blocks that we had already passed, closer to the entrance of the compound, that had not been restricted access.
We passed the first door on our right —“Oliver Hyatt” was the name etched on the front of it. I had never heard of the name. The door on our left was engraved with yet another unknown name. We passed by three more doors, upon which were marked more meaningless names, until we reached the seventh and final door along this end of the corridor.
“Atticus Conway” was the name on this one.
Atticus Conway. I froze. That wasn’t exactly a common name. That… that was Lawrence’s father? The same man who had come to The Shade to reclaim him. The same man who had sworn that he had no connection whatsoever with the IBSI. My pulse raced, doubts and suspicions crowding my mind. If this was him, and he had an apartment up here in the restricted access area, he was obviously some kind of leader. Could he have something to do with my daughter being brought here?
I took a deep breath before stepping through Atticus’ closed door with Lucas and Kailyn.
We emerged in an apartment that looked like it belonged in a five-star hotel. No expense had been spared in its furnishings and decor, and it was immaculately clean. The marble-floor of the foyer we had just stepped into looked fit to eat a meal off of.
As we moved deeper into the apartment, we looked left and right, gazing into the spacious rooms. And then I heard a voice. A muffled voice, coming from somewhere in the back of the apartment. We hurried forward, spilling through several closed doorways. We moved through a dining room and a sitting room before arriving in a room lined with towering bookcases. A library. But the voice was coming from deeper still in the apartment. Perhaps there was a hidden doorway in this library somewhere, but it didn’t matter to us because we could pass through walls. We sank into a shelf of books, through the concrete wall, and when we appeared on the other side, we were in an office.
And there sat Atticus—in front of a luxuriously wide wooden desk, sitting upright in a swivel chair, a phone pressed to his right ear. From where we stood, we could only see the back of his dusty blonde hair. He wore a light black pullover, thin enough for us to see the muscles in his back tensing as he leaned on the edge of his seat.
“Yes, I know, Brian,” he was saying, his voice as tight as his posture. “But that doesn’t change anything. We have to know for sure.” He paused, listening impatiently to whoever Brian was on the other end of the phone. He exhaled. “Yes. We have the copy—but dammit, did you not read the note? There are obviously other backups.”
Note? Backups?
I moved closer and realized that his broad frame had been blocking a laptop from our view. The computer sat in front of him on the desk. I gazed over his shoulder at the screen. A page with a black background was pulled up, filled with mostly tiny white text. As my eyes roamed the omnibar at the top of the browser, the page was some kind of local file on his computer, rather than online.
At the top of the page was a title—the largest font on the page—in bold white letters:
“Fight for Open Education on the Bloodless Antidote.”
I gaped at the words.
Bloodless antidote?
What?
There’s an antidote?
In all our witches’ and jinn’s years of trying, they’d never been able to find a cure for the Bloodless infection. Had these hunters found one? If they had, then this would be one of the rare occurrences in history that science had trumped magic.
I moved closer to the screen to read the tiny text further down the page, but Brian must have said something inflammatory on the other end of the phone to Atticus. Just as I made the attempt, Atticus slammed the laptop shut before I could even make out the first sentence.
“No!” he insisted. “No. No. No. We don’t have that sort of time. I have already sent troops out to look for the girl. Yes, yes, they searched the river already. No, she wasn’t there. Her body was nowhere for miles. She must have climbed out and now she’s out there somewhere. We’ll find her soon enough but, look, this isn’t relevant to what you are supposed to be doing for me. You need to…”
Atticus’ voice trailed off in my brain as I remained fixed on fragments of the previous sentences he had spoken.
“Already sent troops out to look for the girl. Climbed out. Out there somewhere.”
That had to be my Grace. She’d found a way to escape. I couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride, even as my mind surged with worry. Where somewhere? What river?
As much as I was burning to know what the heck I had just read on that webpage, my fatherly instinct simply wouldn’t allow me to stand still here a moment longer. Lucas and Kailyn understood my intention. The three of us immediately raced out of the office, into the library and back through the apartment.
Returning to the corridor outside, I whispered to my companions, “The river. We need to locate the river.”
Grace
Run, Grace. Run.
I couldn’t stay here any longer. I had to move. I had to get somewhere safe, where I wouldn’t be found. But I had to find Orlando too.
Taking in the harrowing sight of my own doing one last time—the three men lying dead in pools of their own blood—I grabbed the backpack they had confiscated from me, along with one of theirs. After verifying that it contained a lighter, I headed off down the alleyway. I sparked up a flame in my palms, hoping to draw comfort from its familiar warmth. But I was still shaking, shaking as though I was freezing cold.
What could I have done differently? I wondered to myself as I hurried down the street. I had done what I could in my situation. I had done what I could to survive. And yet—Isn’t that what many murderers tell themselves?
But I couldn’t allow my mind to get bogged down with such futile thoughts now. I had done what I had done. And now I had to fight to stay alert if I wanted to stand any chance of pulling through this nightmare alive.
The alleyway wound left abruptly, leading me right back to the main street where we had first stumbled into trouble with the gang. It had been abandoned now, likely due to the Bloodless sweeping down it—the criminals who
had been on my tail had either been killed, turned, or fled for safety. But once the IBSI got wind from one of the escaped criminals that I had been located, this road would become a whole lot more crowded.
Where is Orlando?
He had still been standing at the end of this road when I had last seen him. He had been injured, but standing. Would he have continued onward to find his sister? Dammit. Where is he now?
As I arrived at the end of the road, the exact spot where we had been stopped by the criminals, I gazed down at the ground and spotted Orlando’s blood where he had been standing. The blood trailed to my right, taking a turn at the end of the road. Christ, he had been bleeding a lot. The drips led me down a boulevard—all the way along it—and when I reached the end, to my surprise, the drips wound right again. If he had been trying to follow Maura’s direction, he should’ve turned left. Right… that was back toward where I had run.
Had he meant to come after me to help me? Why else would he have turned this way? Unless he had become delirious from the blood loss and lost his sense of direction. His blood trail led me down yet another road and then into another maze of alleyways until it stopped at the foot of a wide trashcan, leaning against a tall building. Venturing around its corner, I gasped as I caught sight of Orlando, collapsed in a heap. His eyes were closed, his upper right arm still bleeding freely. He had carried the wheel all this way; it lay a few feet away from him, along with the abandoned remote.
I dropped down to him and felt his pulse. He was alive, at least, though his breathing was shallow and uneven. It sank in how insanely lucky he was that Bloodless had not yet followed his trail of blood and smoked him out. That could still happen at any moment, of course.
I dove into my backpack and pulled out the spare set of pants the siblings had packed for me. I wrapped it tightly around his wound, attempting with all my might to stem the blood flow. Then I summoned water from a nearby puddle and splashed it against his face.
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