A Shade of Vampire 30

by Bella Forrest

I hung up. Something told me that he probably wouldn’t even notice that I was gone. He was too busy with his own affairs.

  I changed into a thick pair of pants, then donned a heavy jacket and a belt. Moving to the entrance hallway, I retrieved three guns from a cabinet and holstered them at my waist.

  Then I headed out of my apartment. On receiving my voicemail, my father would assume that I was practicing somewhere in the IBSI facility. He wouldn’t know where I had really gone. But I didn’t plan to be gone long. I couldn’t afford to get caught.

  I left the residential block and sped up to a jog. I would run, but I did not want to attract undue attention from passersby.

  I headed to the compound at the far end of the perimeter where our mutants were kept. It was a wide dirt enclosure. I searched for one of the creatures I had ridden before—the one that I had trained on. Jez, he was nicknamed by my trainer. He was one of the older creatures, more subdued and easier to control. I found him toward the back, tearing up the ground with his sharp talons. His severe birdlike face turned to me as I let out a sharp whistle.

  He eyed me for a few moments before ruffling his wings and padding over to me. I held out my hand cautiously, allowing him to sniff me. Once he nudged his head against my wrist, I was confident that he was comfortable enough in my presence for me to unchain him. I climbed onto his back. Digging my heels gently into his sides, I encouraged him to take flight.

  He was already wearing reins from the last hunter who had ridden him—not that I needed them. I’d been trained to ride mutants without any saddle or reins. That was the way that most hunters were trained because mutants did not like to have objects wrapped around or constraining them.

  Once we were in the air, high enough to soar over the wall that bordered the IBSI’s base, I urged Jez over it. A dark, murky river flowed immediately beneath us. And beyond that was the gray dilapidated city. I needed to head straight for the shore of Lake Michigan, where the lab was located.

  The landscape slipping away beneath me was a scene of horror. I could only imagine the fear and suffering Grace must’ve gone through in traipsing across it, all the while with the uncertainty of what was happening to her body after being bitten by two Bloodless. It must’ve been a living hell. A nightmare she couldn’t escape from. Just beholding the city from a bird’s eye view—the peeling buildings, the hulking shadows roaming the streets, the corpses littering the roads—was enough to give me shudders.

  With the mutant’s supernatural speed, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves circling over the crematorium-turned-lab.

  We could not be seen—that much was absolutely critical. I guided the mutant to touch down in the center of the roof, where I motioned to him to wait for me. He obediently folded his legs and sat down, gazing at me with beady eyes. Feeling confident to turn my back on him, I crept to the edge of the roof and gazed down at the immediate area surrounding the building, within the walls. The ground was scorched, the parking lot still filled with decimated vehicles—relics of Grace’s misadventures here. It seemed the IBSI had not gotten round to clearing it up yet.

  I crawled closer to the front of the building, where the main entrance was. Arriving as near to the edge as I dared, I knelt down, planting both my hands on the tiles to gain a steady stance. And now began the wait. I needed to gain a sense of who worked here. Who came in and out. Who appeared to be calling the shots, and who were merely obedient assistants.

  It took an uncomfortable amount of time for the first signs of life to show around me. But eventually gravel crunched, a deep engine rumbling from outside the compound’s gates. Keeping myself flat, I could just about make out the road from here.

  A tank was approaching. It stopped outside the gates, which swung slowly open. The vehicle moved inside, the doors closing again behind it. Then came the clatter of the doors opening directly beneath me—the main doors to the lab. Three men stepped out wearing white coats. They crossed the yard and approached the tank, whose doors also opened. A woman and a man slid out of the driver’s compartment at the front.

  The man who led the trio out of the lab—the tallest and apparently oldest with salt and pepper hair—spoke up in a gruff voice. “How many?”

  “Ten,” the woman replied.

  The man breathed out in apparent frustration. “I asked for double.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What went wrong?” he pressed.

  “We didn’t receive the order in time,” she replied. “But we can go back.”

  The man blew out again. “No. Don’t bother. Let’s just bring what you’ve got inside.”

  All five of them moved to the back of the tank. They opened up a back door and began to drag out bound men and women who had sacks over their heads… and were definitely not dead. More convicts like Orlando to experiment on, apparently.

  They carried the convicts into the lab, and closed the door behind them. The main doors bolted with a final click.

  At least I had pinpointed one of the showrunners. I needed to try to make him my first target…

  It was nerve-racking waiting on that roof with Jez. He had to remain just as quiet as me, which was a lot to expect from an animal. I became all the more grateful that he had been available in the pen and I hadn’t been forced to pick one of the younger, rowdier mutants.

  More people moved in and out of the doors, but I held out for the older man. He had the voice of a heavy smoker. I suspected he would come out for a puff sooner rather than later. I kept an eye on my watch as the minutes went by. I was waiting exactly twenty-six minutes before luck went my way. The man strode out of the main door with a packet of cigarettes. As he stopped on the doorstep and lit up, I immediately sprang into action.

  I leapt to my feet and, backing away from the edge of the roof, approached Jez. We had very little time.

  I climbed onto his back and coaxed him into the air. We soared away from the compound and across the street parallel to it. I was looking for a Bloodless. Any Bloodless would do, but a smaller one would be preferable. I only had to wait until the third street to spot a group. Jez’s keen senses had noticed them too. As we took a dive, I tried to navigate him toward the smallest one, but his claws ended up grabbing the tallest. The Bloodless thrashed and writhed in Jez’s talons as we took to the air again, but the mutant held it expertly in its grasp—he had been trained to deal with these monsters since his birth. Jez kept it a safe distance away from me, quelling its attempts to lash out at me. I guided Jez immediately back to the lab.

  We soared over the roof of the large building and the second we arrived over the front yard where the man was still smoking, I nudged the mutant’s back legs with the edges of my boots, causing him to drop the Bloodless. It went hurtling to the ground and landed five feet in front of the shellshocked man.

  I instantly pulled Jez back. We touched down on the roof so that we wouldn’t be spotted while the Bloodless took a few seconds to recover from the fall and realize it stood before a meal of fresh, pumping hot blood. It lurched forward and pinned the man to the ground before he could even yell. Its fangs sank deep into the man’s neck. He let out a stifled cry, causing hunters to rush out from the building. The atmosphere erupted in shouts, curses and commands, even as bullets exploded. They fired at the Bloodless relentlessly until it became so battered it was forced to withdraw from the man.

  It rose and staggered back, even as hunters continued to pound it with bullets. Then a bizarre-looking machine—a flying spinning wheel, spiked with blades—came zooming out of the main doors and attacked the Bloodless. It sliced it to shreds in a matter of seconds.

  “Holy hell!” one of the hunters yelled. “How did that thing get in here?”

  Their faces panned to the sky, as if suspecting that it must’ve dropped from the clouds. Jez and I kept hidden before they refocused their attention quickly on the matter at hand.

  “Come on!” a woman hissed. “Fetch a syringe! We need to freeze the turning.”

 
More hunters came hurrying out, and then one jabbed a needle into the man’s neck. Then they picked him up and carried him into the laboratory, out of sight.

  Freeze the turning.

  The words inspired hope in my heart. If they could freeze the turning, surely they could cure it too. Perhaps freezing was the first step in treating it.

  I had been holding out hope that I would hear them talk of a cure specifically—perhaps even administer it outside within my view—but this was better than nothing.

  But I was still left with the same damn question: what is the cure? It was aggravating to think that they might be whipping up the antidote right now, inside. There were no windows in this building. And of course, I couldn’t go in without blowing my cover.

  I launched with Jez away from the roof of the lab to somewhere more secluded—the top of a skyscraper. Sliding off him, I sat down on the edge of the roof and stared out toward the crematorium in the distance, as well as the lake beyond.

  Slowly, another idea trickled through my mind. An idea that I was sure was the most insane I’d ever had.

  Lawrence

  I need to get bitten myself.

  That’s the only way I can witness the antidote firsthand.

  If they would administer the “freezing” and then the cure to that scientist, I was sure that they would administer it to me to save my life. If my father was around, would he object? Would he rather me turn than know of its existence? He had no reason to suspect that I was a threat to its secrecy, like my mother was. But maybe he would fear this apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Maybe he would still object. Or maybe he wouldn’t. But the trick was to not have him around. To create an emergency situation where the scientists in that lab had to make a judgment call. Treat me, or watch me turn.

  A chill ran down my spine. The thought of voluntarily getting mauled by one of those things was utterly terrifying. Willingly subjecting myself to their razor-sharp fangs…

  But at this point in the game, there was no way to move forward without taking risks. Big risks. I had to make sacrifices if I ever wanted to reach Grace in time.

  I sped with the mutant back to the IBSI’s headquarters. After securing Jez back in the pen, I hurried back to my room. I suspected that my father was still in his office. Maybe he had not even received my voicemail yet. As planned, I had not been gone long.

  Now, I needed to think. Think harder than I ever had before. In order for me to stand a chance of succeeding in this, I had to plan it through carefully. The setup had to be exactly right—a single mistake could send it all crashing down and in the worst case, I’d end up, ironically, exactly like Grace. Only my turning would be far more swift. I was not half fae.

  I spent the next half hour pacing up and down my apartment, even grabbing a sheet of paper and a pen to organize my thoughts. Once I felt at least semi-confident that I had a working scheme, I tore up and flushed the paper before leaving my apartment again and knocking on my father’s door.

  When he answered, he was not on the phone.

  “Come eat with me,” he said. “You hungry? How did the shooting go?”

  “Not hungry, thanks. Shooting went okay.”

  I should’ve been hungry by now—and I would be on a normal day, had I not had so much weighing down my mind. Ever since I’d woken up from the coma, I had been eating like a pig.

  We headed to his dining room. He pulled up his chair and continued to dig into his meal, while I sat next to him, pouring myself a glass of water.

  “I’m getting tired of the same old shooting environments within the compound,” I told him. “I need new challenges. I would like to venture out to the other side of the wall—into Bloodless territory—to gain more experience in a real-life situation.”

  He stopped chewing for a moment, his gaze passing over my face. Then, to my surprise, he merely shrugged. “All right,” he said. “If you want… How will you get over there?”

  “I guess I’ll take a mutant,” I said casually.

  He shrugged again, busying himself with his food.

  Well, this part had been easier than I’d thought it might be. Apparently he thought challenging myself was a good idea.

  The only reason that I was asking for “permission” in the first place was to keep his trust. Because of what I had planned once I returned to that part of the city, he would, sooner or later, find out that I’d been there.

  I sat with him for a couple more minutes, just to make my leave less abrupt, before rising to my feet.

  “You should be back before dark, though,” he said. “And don’t go venturing too far. Stay near the border.”

  Oops. That was a request that I couldn’t exactly acquiesce to. I would have to tell him that I’d gotten carried away and lost track of how far I was going…

  I left the apartment and returned to my own to pick up two sharp knives, which I strapped to my belt along with the guns, before heading out of the building. I returned to the mutants’ compound and located Jez.

  “Hello again,” I murmured, as I climbed aboard him and we lifted into the sky.

  My nerves built up within me as we soared over the IBSI’s walls and sped toward the lab. We had some time to kill. It would look too fishy if I headed right for the lab after my father had specifically advised I stay close to base. I had to make it look like I’d started out close but gotten carried away.

  We wandered for about an hour, me letting off the occasional gunshot, until finally it was time to get down to business.

  We flew to the lab compound and landed on the road outside. Wiping a sheen of sweat from my brow, I glanced up and down the road, scanning for any Bloodless that might be around. The best thing would be to wait for one to come roaming this way naturally. In spite of the danger the IBSI posed to them, one would have thought that, being animalistic creatures, it would be hard to avoid the temptation of hanging out near an area where there was a constant presence of warm human blood.

  I led Jez beneath the entrance of an old warehouse. There we waited, half cast in shadow.

  We weren’t waiting long. I soon caught sight of a group of three Bloodless heading our way. I supposed I’d been standing still for long enough to attract their supernatural senses to me.

  My breathing came hard and fast. Wow. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I felt even crazier than Grace.

  Their dark eyes flashed beneath the streetlights and settled eerily on me. I could see the sides of their shriveled mouths glistening—saliva.

  Jez immediately made to launch at them, but I held him back. He needed to take out two of them, but one I needed to keep for myself. Jez’s penchant for the large Bloodless would work in my favor this time. Of the three Bloodless loping our way, one was noticeably shorter than the others; in fact, it might have even been a female. Once I gave the mutant the go-ahead, he would shoot straight for the larger ones.

  A few seconds before they were upon us, I slapped Jez’s back. He rushed forward and dug his left talon into the tallest, leading Bloodless, while he gripped the second in his right. He was about to snap at the short female with his beak, but I drew her away in time. I began to dart down the street toward the gate of the compound, yelling at the top of my lungs:

  “Help! Help!”

  It was hardly difficult to infuse panic into my tone.

  I could run fast, so fast it made me feel dizzy at times, which meant that I at least had some time to play around a bit and wait for exactly the right moment…

  The door to the lab creaked open.

  Now. This was it.

  I stopped playing chase with the Bloodless and flung myself against the gates protecting the lab. A woman with a gun was rushing toward me, but before she reached me, cold hands gripped my shoulders hard. A clammy body pressed against the back of me, hauling itself upward, and then an icy wet mouth found its spot in the tender flesh of my neck. I felt two sharp punctures, painful like knives, which quickly dug deeper into my flesh and began to suck. The Bloodles
s’ mouth made a stomach-churning slurping sound close to my ear as she began to drink from me.

  The hunter moving toward me stalled momentarily in shock before yelling at the top of her lungs, “Another attack! Enforcements here now!” She added in an undertone, “Jeez, two in the space of a few hours.”

  I had never seen this hunter before. I wondered if she even knew who I was.

  I guessed she must have immediately assumed I was not a convict, that I was not from around these parts, due to the way I was dressed. Otherwise she should have no reason to concern herself over the loss of an inmate’s life. At least from the brief summary Grace had given me of this place, unless you were an IBSI member, it was a dog-eat-dog world. Every man for his own.

  She moved closer and began firing a gun at the Bloodless. She reached the gates, her bullets whizzing past my ear. More hunters arrived quickly, even as my pain intensified. My body felt like it might go into shock from the horrifyingly foreign sensation of the Bloodless’ teeth beneath my flesh.

  They opened the gates, causing the Bloodless to pause sucking momentarily. Then it pulled its teeth out of me and leapt toward one of them, greedy for another neck before it had even finished with the first one.

  The strange flying blade machine had been brought out again, and as I looked up in a daze, it whizzed over me, toward the Bloodless.

  I was surprised when the Bloodless, on spotting the wheel, instantly backed away. Heck, she turned on her heel and fled in the opposite direction. I was sure that was the first time I’d ever witnessed a Bloodless flee—usually when it came to human blood, even in the face of danger, they couldn’t help but still walk right into it.

  I didn’t have much time to ponder the matter, however, as faces appeared above me. The hunters gathered around me. They gripped different parts of my body, picked me up and hurried me across the yard and into the lab.

  “Thank God it’s just Lawrence,” one of them said, with an audible sigh of relief.

  I furrowed my brows. Just Lawrence? What was that supposed to mean?