She sat down rigidly in a wooden chair.
“I know that you killed my husband,” she said quietly. Her eyes were rheumy, her upper lip stiff, as though she was trying to prevent it from trembling.
I merely nodded. Although I didn’t like to cause anyone pain, I wasn’t planning to apologize for killing Thornton. He had been responsible for ending more innocent lives than I could count. He’d had it coming, unfortunately.
She inhaled before continuing. “He would’ve welcomed death, in truth,” she said, her voice uneven.
When I recalled his final seconds, her words made sense. There had been practically no fear in his eyes, hardly even pain. Just a kind of strange, almost maniacal bitterness.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because he was trapped,” she replied, glancing down at her trembling hands. “He was trapped in a life he despised. He regretted working his way up the ranks of the IBSI. The higher you climb, the higher the stakes… and, often, the more disillusioned you become with the whole system. You might not believe it, but the reason my husband joined the IBSI was because he thought it was the right thing to do with his life. He thought that was how he would be able to make a contribution. Do something he could think back on and be proud of on his deathbed… Over the years, he realized this was not the case. The more he got to know the management of the organization, the more jaded he became. His job became just like any other job—perfunctory, a chore. Though it becomes something quite different than a chore when your daily work requires you to make decisions that can steal hundreds of lives.”
I stared into her eyes, wondering why she was telling me all of this. Before I could ask, she went on, “My husband wanted out of the whole system. But he got in too deep. It would’ve been too dangerous for him if he’d wanted to withdraw—and so he remained, for my sake and our daughters’ sakes… Before he left for his last excursion to the supernatural dimension, it was almost like he had a sixth sense that he might not return. Before he departed, he told me that he had left me a letter on my laptop. A letter within a file that I was only to open in the event of his death. The file would self-destruct within ten minutes of opening… I opened the letter yesterday.” She coughed bitterly. “Yes, it’s taken that long for the IBSI to inform me,” she added, “with the excuse that communication between the realms is not something they have mastered yet… I read it. He explained to me what I have told you. In all the years we had been married, while he was involved with the IBSI, I sensed that something wasn’t right with him, but it was only after reading the letter that I realized—” Her voice choked up. She withdrew a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed her nose. “He was desperately unhappy and he desperately, desperately wished for a change. He lost all faith in the IBSI. They were simply after power, and although he was guilty of letting his status go to his head at times, he’d grown tired of it. He saw no light at the end of the tunnel. There wasn’t even a goal. Control was the only thing the IBSI was after, no matter how they got it. And that was the organization that he sold his soul to.”
Her voice trailed off. She poured herself a glass of water and downed it.
Thornton’s last words made sense to me now. He’d goaded us that our attempts to find a solution to Earth’s problems would never be fruitful. Because the IBSI did not want a solution. They wanted to continue creating problems so that they would be required.
“Despite what you might think,” she managed, “many IBSI members join for the right reason, even if they get corrupted later on. I know there must be others like my husband, others within the organization who have become disillusioned, and who desperately want out… They feel trapped, like he did. But they know there is no way to retire without fearing they and their family will be monitored for the rest of their lives… The mortality rate of ex-IBSI managers is frighteningly high… I suspect sometimes they’re knocked off even without a reason. Just to be safe. I fear for my life and the lives of my daughters, though we weren’t even actively involved. That’s why we left Australia.”
“Can you name others who wish to get out?” I asked.
Mrs. Thornton shook her head, although something told me that she did have names in mind, but simply didn’t feel comfortable outing them to us.
I frowned at her. “Then why are you telling us any of this? What’s the point?”
She looked directly at me, holding the gaze of her husband’s murderer. Her voice was pleading as she replied, “Because there is nobody else. Your League is our only hope.”
Corrine
I was used to stress. We all were. Heck, a day without stress almost felt incomplete. But this whole Grace as a vampire-zombie nightmare really was taking the cake.
After Ben, Derek and my husband left, I snatched up the four unused test tubes—their caps color-coded purple, green, orange and blue—that Ben had brought back from Chicago. Ben had suspected that these four tubes held genuine ingredients for the antidote, and that it had been the fifth, red capped one that was the culprit. I hated to think what could have been in that to make Grace’s turning complete so suddenly.
While we had dealt with the trees, to me, the next logical step was to examine these first four ingredients. I’d try to figure out what they were. If Ibrahim and Derek were unsuccessful in tracking down the doctor and finding out the fifth ingredient, if I was able to spot a pattern in the first four, maybe, just maybe, I would be able to take a guess as to what the fifth one was.
I vanished myself to my spell room in the Sanctuary and laid each of the tubes on the table. I stared down at the colors, swishing the liquid within them a little. The liquid in the purple tube had a grayish hue, while the liquid in the orange had an… orange hue. The other two bottles were all but transparent.
I had to be careful not to drop or damage any of them while I opened and examined them. These were the last set we had.
I unscrewed each of the caps and sniffed the liquid. They all emitted quite a distinct smell—and one in particular was familiar. The liquid in the green tube. It gave off the same nutty, sweetish odor as the trees we had brought back from Aviary. This disappointed me greatly. In the back of my mind, I had been daring to hope that maybe the missing ingredient was derived from the trees we had hijacked. We had a whole cargo ship full of them, waiting by the Port. I could have mixed up an extract with these four tubes and tried to feed it to Grace. After all, she was already a Bloodless. She could hardly get worse. Could she?
I poured out the tiniest drop of each of the liquids onto a palette and replaced the caps on the tubes before proceeding to examine them closely. After half an hour, I began to spot something common in each of them and came to an interesting conclusion, but wanted to get a second opinion from Shayla. I fetched her from the hospital and brought her back to my spell room.
“Interesting,” she murmured, bending over the tubes after ten minutes of inspection. “All of these appear to be plant-based.”
“It is strange, isn’t it,” I said. I’d thought I might have been mistaken.
“As you say, one of them is definitely from the trees we brought back… but the others… Hm.”
Their scents were not like any plant I’d come across on Earth before. I could well believe that they had also come from Aviary. “What do you think?” I wondered aloud.
“It’s possible they’re from Aviary.” Shayla shrugged.
During the League’s excursion there, everybody’s focus had been on the trees—because they had seen the IBSI loading them onto a cargo ship. Then, of course, the IBSI had gassed the area where the trees grew. But it was possible that there were other types of plants that had also been retrieved from Aviary. Maybe even from a different part of the land. If my speculation was correct, we had to hope that either those plants were in ample supply in Aviary and had not been damaged like the big broad-leaved trees, or that the IBSI had a huge stash that we could eventually find and steal.
But it was one step at a time for now. We had
to fix Grace first before thinking about expanding to anyone else.
“Well,” I sighed, realizing that there wasn’t an awful lot more I could experiment with on my own. We needed the missing ingredient. It could be any number of things and I wasn’t going to make any headway just standing here staring at the tubes. I put the tubes safely in a drawer before muttering to Shayla, “We’ve got to pray that Ben, Derek and Ibrahim hit a stroke of luck.”
Derek
I didn’t take Mrs. Thornton’s words lightly, but I was still wondering what we could actually do with the information she was giving us. She had told us that there were people in high places within the IBSI who were not happy with their jobs and what they felt forced to do on a daily basis, while living in constant fear of taking a wrong step and being targeted for assassination—both them and their families.
If Atticus had murdered his own wife, what mercy would he show to others who weren’t even related to him?
Ben voiced my thoughts. “I repeat my father’s question,” he said, visibly agitated. “What can we actually do with this information? If you want things to change, you need to help us change them.”
“It is not my place to name people, especially when nobody has told me outright,” she replied, her grip around her glass tightening. “But I will tell you this: if the League could make a statement, expose the IBSI to the public in such a way that not even the most brainwashed civilians could turn a blind eye, it would give IBSI members who are on the fence a powerful force with whom they could align without fearing for their safety. I’m certain many would jump. Hell, even my husband would’ve swallowed his pride and jumped, if he saw a way out for himself and us. I’m sure of it.” Her voice dropped. “This world needs a new guardian.”
Ben, Ibrahim and I exchanged glances. It was clear that this was all she was willing to say. I guessed that was understandable. She had just lost her husband and now she was alone in the world with her two daughters.
“Okay,” I said, clenching my jaw. “I understand. Although any further information you could give us on these potential supporters would be extremely useful, I appreciate your courage in contacting me in the first place—”
“But there is something that we need you—desperately—to help us with,” Ben cut in, before I could go on to ask the question myself. “Do you know anything about FOEBA?”
She frowned, then shook her head. If she was unwilling to out the frustrated members of the IBSI to us, she would hardly be willing to spill the beans about FOEBA. Though, from the genuine look of confusion on her face, I believed that she was telling the truth.
“Do you know Dr. Finnegan?” Ben pressed.
“Finnegan,” Mrs. Thornton repeated, a spark of recognition flaring in her eyes. “Yes… The name rings a bell. My husband knew her… And—ah, yes—I’m quite sure she even came over for dinner with her family a few years ago.”
“Do you know where she lives?” Ben asked.
At this, Mrs. Thornton faltered.
“Please, Mrs. Thornton,” Ben said, leaning forward, his intensity boring into her. “I have a daughter, about the same age as yours. Unless you can help me find the scientist, I’m going to lose her.”
She swallowed and nodded weakly. “Okay. J-Just please, don’t let anybody know I’ve told you anything or that you came here at all.”
“Of course not!” Ben reassured her.
“Okay,” she said again, still appearing nervous. “The last I knew, Dr. Finnegan was living on the outskirts of Chicago with her family. There is a high-security housing compound there, which is home to the Chicago base’s most highly paid scientists… I don’t see why she would’ve moved.”
“Do you have the address?” Ben asked.
She fetched a notebook and a pen from a cupboard and scribbled down an address. A clearly incomplete address. “I don’t know the door number,” she said, “or the block number. I’m sorry. You’ll have to figure those out. I’ve never visited her, I’m just aware of the site’s location.”
“Thank you,” Ben said, his eyes positively glistening with gratitude.
The three of us rose to our feet, and, after bidding each other good luck, Ibrahim vanished us away from New Zealand.
We reappeared in the sky, hovering several feet above the roof of a six-story building. It was a swanky apartment block, with shiny tinted glass windows and steel-paneled balconies.
There were seven such blocks in total scattered beneath us, enclosed by a high wall spiked with barbed—and probably electrified—wire. It made me wonder just how many scientists worked in the IBSI’s Chicago base, and how many for the organization as a whole.
We had never gotten wind of this compound in all the years of the League’s operation. I guessed the IBSI had kept it a secret—so many important people in one place wasn’t something you would want to broadcast. In fact, I was surprised the IBSI allowed them to reside so close to each other. It seemed that practicality had trumped security in this particular decision… although the compound itself appeared exceedingly well protected. Aside from the walls, I was sure there were alarms stationed around the place. And there were guards positioned outside the main entrances, along with a dozen or so mutants patrolling the borders. In the center was a helicopter pad.
Beyond the high walls was nothing but miles of dry wasteland, populated by the occasional group of scrounging Bloodless. In the far distance I could make out the outline of the city.
Ibrahim had not dared descend too close to any of the buildings, due to the potential alarm system—which we knew could pick up on vampires and witches, but luckily, to our knowledge, they could not detect fae.
Ben would have to go searching for the doctor alone, just to be safe. If either Ibrahim or I set off an alarm, it would be disastrous. Everybody would be put on guard, and it would become a hundred times more difficult to access the scientist as everyone went into emergency mode.
So I remained in the air with Ibrahim, watching the compound from a bird’s eye view while Ben soared downward.
Ben
Dr. Finnegan.
Please, be here.
Jennifer Thornton apparently hadn’t had contact with the scientist for years. Dr. Finnegan had better not have relocated during that time.
I tried to move through the buildings logically to make sure that I left no apartment unsearched. I started with the block closest to the main entrance and worked my way through from bottom to top. I had been worried about how I would even find the doctor when I had no idea what she looked like. But outside each apartment, next to the number, was a helpful surname. Most of the apartments were inhabited by families, who were asleep in their beds. It was strange to think what kind of life a child would lead in this compound, growing up with this desolate landscape surrounding them. In the compound itself, efforts had been made to keep it green and pretty—there was a small park in the center with an artificial pond and fish, though it was a false oasis. But soon as they returned to their apartments, the real world shattered the illusion.
I couldn’t imagine that they lived here full-time. Perhaps they had homes elsewhere, in other parts of the world that were less ravaged by Bloodless and supernaturals. Other parts of the world where the IBSI had less of a hold. It was hardly a coincidence that the country with the fastest rate of Bloodless infection was the United States. The bastards were deliberately keeping them at large.
I found Dr. Finnegan’s apartment on the second floor of the third block. The surname was pinned outside the door which, strangely, was ajar. Who leaves their door open at night?
I moved inside in my subtle form so that I would not make any sound and stood at the end of a dark hallway. The door at the end was also slightly open, and through the crack spilled dim orange light. I heard murmuring. The murmuring of a woman. And sobbing?
I hurried ahead, through the door, and arrived in a sitting room. A middle-aged woman in sky-blue pajamas was kneeling on the ground in front of two men in black unifor
m. IBSI security. They held guns aimed at her, even as she pleaded, “Look, I told you why I did it! It was Atticus’ son who called for the information. It was to save my boss! What else was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to follow the protocol,” one of the men said coldly. “I’m sure you remember the oath you took before joining the lab team.”
“Y-Yes. Of course.”
“What was it?” the second man asked. It was sickening how goading his tone was as he towered over the desperate woman.
“Never breathe a word of the antidote, under any circumstances,” she whispered.
“Then I’m sorry, Doctor…”
She threw herself backward against the sofa and scrambled to get up. “Please. My child. He’s asleep. I’m the only one he has.”
“We’ll take care of him,” a guard assured her.
As the two men stepped forward to grab her, I let my instincts take over. Assuming my physical form, I grabbed the nearest objects to me, two identical glass vases. Holding them aloft, I brought them crashing down against the back of the two men’s skulls in quick succession. They jerked forward, losing balance.
One of them had been knocked out by that blow alone, while the other was a little hardier. I was sure that he was seeing stars. Before he could fire his gun, I snatched it and smacked the butt against his forehead. That caused him to join his colleague in unconsciousness on the floor.
The doctor let out a whimper as I turned on her. She darted for the door and ran through a doorway, slamming it shut in my face as I followed her. She had entered her child’s bedroom, I assumed.
I clutched the doorknob and pushed. She was pressing her weight against the door. Although it would’ve been easy for me to force it open, I didn’t want to frighten her any more than she already was.
“Doctor,” I hissed. “I’m a friend of Lawrence. I’ve come to get you out of here.”
A Shade of Vampire 31: A Twist of Fates Page 2
