No. No. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening! We’re so close!
I glanced frantically at Ben, who had followed me in confusion.
I shoved the colored tubes into his hands. “Keep these safe,” I hissed to him, even though he hardly needed to be told that—and could barely hear me anyway over the ruckus. I figured it would be wise to hand him my phone, too, for safekeeping.
Had my father sounded the alarm? In his desperation, had he managed to crawl to an alarm trigger? Perhaps he’d thought that I had run for my life to escape the Bloodless. Just abandoned him.
I raced back to the elevator and returned to the third floor. As I sprinted to where I’d left my father… he was no longer there. The spot where he’d been lying and writhing was empty.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the alarm stopped shrieking.
“Lawrence!” My father’s strangled call came from my right.
I whipped around to see his silhouette in the dimness at the end of the row of cages, hunched over in a chair. He sat next to a metal lab table lining the wall.
“Dad?” I called, squinting even as I began hurtling to him.
He was clutching a syringe in his hands, a syringe which was tinged with blood. His left hand was pressing down against his wrist, which I realized he had pierced with the needle.
He had stopped shaking, but still looked deathly sick and weak, like it was a struggle just to sit up straight. His face was shining with sweat as he gazed up at me.
“Lawrence,” he said, gasping for breath. “I need your help. I managed to freeze the turning—but it won’t last forever. An hour or so. I sounded the alarm for help, but there’s no guarantee when help will be able to get here. I need you to administer me a formula. Downstairs, in the fifth aisle, at the end, beneath the table on your left, you’ll find some drawers. Open the bottom one and you’ll find some tubes with colored labels. Inside are liquids. You need to pick out a purple, a green, an orange, a blue, and a red. The liquids are already measured. You just have to pour them into a glass tube and bring it to me.”
I could hardly believe my luck. My call with the doctor had been cut short, but here was my father now, semi-delirious with pain and panic, telling me the exact ingredients we needed.
“Okay,” I whispered, trying to still look nervous and anxious even as my chest soared with relief. “Wait here,” I told him. “You’ll be safe. I managed to finish off the rest of the Bloodless.”
“Hurry!” he wheezed.
He didn’t need to tell me again. I darted away from him, back to the elevator and punched the ground-floor button. When the doors dinged open, Ben was waiting just outside, anxiously, still clutching the test tubes.
“I’ve got the cure,” I hardly dared to breathe. “I’ve got it!”
Purple. Green. Orange. Blue. Red.
I repeated the combination over and over in my head like a prayer. Though there was no way I would forget it. My ears had become sharp as a vampire’s the second I realized what my father was about to spill.
Grabbing Ben’s arm, I pulled him back over to the chest of drawers we had been unceremoniously torn away from. Opening the bottom drawer again, I picked out three of each color and laid them on the table.
I gave two of each to Ben and whispered, “Take these back to The Shade, a single tube of each color makes up one dose. I’m giving you two of each just in case one breaks…” He also still had the incomplete set of tubes I’d given him before. Though I was sure that Ben would sooner lose a limb than let one of those bottles be smashed. I had to hope that nobody noticed so many were missing, when I was only supposed to have mixed up one formula for my father. If somebody questioned about it, I’d have to say I was in such a panic that I dropped a bunch, or something…
Ben looked like he could hardly believe what I was saying. His face lit up with the same relief I felt inside. He carefully stowed the tubes into his pockets.
“Thank God,” he whispered. He gripped my shoulder. “Take care of yourself. Try to find a way back to us as soon as you can.”
I nodded. Then he zoomed away toward the fire exit. Opening it carefully, he slipped out and closed it just as quietly behind him.
I let out a long sigh of relief as I gathered up the small test tubes. Snatching up a large empty tube which had been turned upside down to dry on a rack, I made sure it was completely devoid of water before pouring each of the colored liquids into it. I sloshed them about within the cylinder until they were thoroughly mixed. Then I hurried back up to the third level.
My father was sitting where I had left him in the chair. His head leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed. His breathing was sharp and erratic, his arms slumped in exhaustion.
“Dad,” I called, hurrying to him with the mixture. “Here. I’ve got it!”
He still didn’t stir. I wondered if he’d fallen into some kind of coma. I grabbed his arm and shook him to see if my touch would make any difference. It did.
But not in the way I expected.
The second my fingers closed around his shoulder, his right hand shot upward, sending the full glass tube flying out of my hands and shattering to the floor. The next thing I knew, something sharp had pierced the side of my neck. Something thin, long, and sharp.
A syringe.
I could no longer command my limbs. I lost all feeling in them. As I sank to the ground and my father loomed over me, in my last moments of consciousness, I was staring up into his eyes, darkened and possessed.
Ben
After the alarms suddenly started blaring in the laboratory, things became confusing to me, to say the least. One moment Lawrence had been rummaging through a drawer, picking out tubes, and the next, he sprang away and lurched for the toilets. I assumed that he’d been unable to hear what the doctor was saying on the line—unable to hear the rest of the ingredients that would make up the cure. But then when he raced upstairs and returned to retrieve a full set of tubes from the drawer while reassuring me that I now had everything I needed to administer a cure—I could only assume that he had managed to catch everything she had said after all. Or perhaps he’d managed to resume the call while he was upstairs… I hadn’t been sure of his purpose in rushing up the elevator; I’d guessed it was to switch off the alarm, because it had stopped screaming soon after he’d left.
Whatever the case, I hadn’t had time to ask him about logistics. I had even forgotten to return his phone to him; I still felt its weight at the bottom of my left pocket. As soon as I realized he had the answer, I had to get out of the lab and begin my race back to The Shade. My race against time and all odds.
As much as my heart swelled with relief at the feeling of the small tubes clustered in my pockets, I couldn’t shake the fear still pooled in the pit of my stomach. It had been hours since I had left Grace. And hours, in Grace’s time, was like an eternity.
She’s got to still be all right. I’ve got to reach her in time. It would be a cruel twist of fate indeed for me to reach her just an hour, or maybe even moments, after she had turned.
But now, even in the worst-case scenario of reaching her too late, I comforted myself that it wouldn’t be the end of the world. We had the cure now. Even if I was forced to witness my sweet, innocent daughter as one of those monsters, it wouldn’t be for long.
As I hurtled over the ocean toward The Shade, even my supernatural speed was painfully slow. It was at times like this when I would have given anything to be a warlock, to be able to vanish myself halfway across the world in a matter of seconds.
I focused my mind on my daughter, visualizing her still in bed the way I had left her.
When I finally approached the borders of the island, I bellowed for someone to let me in. Thankfully, they didn’t keep me waiting long. It was Shayla who came to me. Her face was gray and lined with worry, though her eyes brightened a touch on seeing me.
“Grace hasn’t turned yet, has she?” were the first words to slip from my lips.
“No,” Shayla said. “But she’s much worse than when you left her.”
My throat tightened. Much worse than when I left her. God. This was going to be harrowing.
“I’ve got the cure!” I said. I dug my hands into my pockets and brought out the small tubes.
Shayla gasped, staring at the objects. She quickly performed the standard test for all arrivals at The Shade to ensure that I was not an intruder in disguise. Then she magicked me directly to the hospital, right outside my daughter’s room.
I was actually grateful that she did not take me straight inside. I had a few seconds to steel myself for what I was about to witness before knocking.
“Come in!” River’s strained voice called.
I burst inside. I was unable to immediately see my daughter. She was surrounded by my wife and family. River leapt to her feet, desperate hope flashing in her eyes.
“I’ve got the cure,” I told her. “I’ve got it.”
She broke down in tears. “Oh, God, Ben! You angel!”
“Lawrence is the one you need to thank,” I murmured, hurrying over to my daughter’s bedside.
My stomach churned at the state of her. She was curled up in a fetal position, her bald head tucked between her arms. Her body had wasted away in the hours since I’d seen her last; she was as emaciated as a corpse. She was holding on by a thread, poor thing.
“I need a cup,” I said hurriedly. River shoved a hospital glass my way. I dried it with the nearest thing to me—the end of one of the bedsheets—before sweeping to one of the bedside tables and laying down the tubes. My parents, who had been sitting around it, got up and moved away to grant me some space. I unscrewed each of the tubes one by one and tipped them into the glass, careful not to waste a single drop. There was hardly any liquid in them to begin with. Then I shook the glass in circles, making sure that it was thoroughly mixed.
“Baby,” I whispered, my throat choking up as I placed a hand on my child’s fragile shoulder.
She stirred and lifted her head slowly to face me. Her face was almost unrecognizable. I could hardly bring myself to look at it. It was so bony, the skin so stretched, and her nose was starting to disfigure.
“Here,” I managed, helping her to sit upright.
Her body quivering, she appeared to be in a daze of pain. I wasn’t even sure if she could hear what I was saying. But she gripped the glass as I pressed it to her lips. Then she began to drink in small drops, until she’d finished the glass.
A chill silence descended on the room as we all watched her like a hawk, hope and expectancy pulsing through all of our veins. Nothing happened for the first minute, except for a belch escaping from her cracked lips.
And then something happened.
But it wasn’t what any of us had been expecting.
It wasn’t what any of us had been expecting at all.
Her quivering turned to violent shaking and then, like a horror movie I couldn’t pause, her body began to morph rapidly. Her eyes narrowed and blackened, and her nose completed its recession in a matter of five shocking seconds. Before my mind could even crawl out of its denial, she sprang to her feet on the bed. Her eyes trained on each of us surrounding her, and then she leapt at the closest person to her—River.
Though I was still reeling in horror and disbelief, my instincts took over. I shot toward River, scooping her out of the way and soaring up to the ceiling before Grace could touch her. River was quivering like a rabbit in my arms, her gaze frozen on our daughter beneath us.
“Get out!” I bellowed, even as my voice cracked. “Get out!”
I dashed with River to the exit and set her down as everyone else raced after us. Grace hurtled just as fast, but before she could reach out to try to grab someone else, I swept toward her and caught her by her waist, swooping her backward and pinning her to the bed.
She wasn’t a danger to me—at least, her venom wasn’t. I had to watch out for her claws, but otherwise I was the only one who could risk restraining her.
“What the heck is going on?” my uncle Lucas called from outside.
He came zooming through the door a second later and stalled, gaping at me struggling with my daughter.
A slew of curses escaped his lips as he approached the bed. “Wh-What happened? You didn’t get the antidote?”
I couldn’t even conceive of bringing myself to talk in this moment. My emotions were wild, my mind out of control. Disappointment was pulverizing me to dust, terror ripping me apart.
And above all, a devastating guilt was crashing down upon me as the question wormed through my brain:
What have I just done?
Lawrence
I woke up to the feeling of something tight binding my wrists, chest and waist. My heavy eyelids unglued. My vision cleared. I was in the center of a small square room with stark white walls and a wide blank screen directly in front of me. I was strapped to a heavy metal chair that was nailed to the floor.
As my memory slowly returned to me, my heartbeat quickened.
Where am I?
I played back the last hour in my head before my unconsciousness. My father’s suggestion that we take a trip to the laboratory. Ben letting loose a cage of Bloodless. The struggle that had ensued, my father getting bitten… My call with the doctor, and then the alarm. Every subsequent event shot through my mind in a flurry while I tried to piece together what exactly had just happened. Why my father had stabbed me with a needle. Why I was sitting here now.
My mind came up with a single answer:
Ben.
Somewhere along the line, even in his agony, my father must have noticed Ben. I had feared that he might have a couple of times during all the craziness, but had pinned my hope on him being too distracted to notice. But he must’ve seen him. He must have, or else… Nothing else would explain his behavior. He had spotted and recognized Ben from The Shade. And he had realized that I was working with him. Then… then… my muddled brain struggled to piece together what it meant. Or rather, struggled to accept what it meant.
I had been unable to obtain the full recipe for the antidote direct from Dr. Finnegan’s mouth. The last ingredient I had gotten from my father and, at that time, he must’ve already known about Ben, because Ben had not returned to the third floor after I had come down to speak to the doctor.
Which meant… the recipe that my father had given me for the antidote. The formula that he had so blithely shattered on the floor. Was that not the real cure then? Was that last ingredient fake?
Even as it made every fiber of my being tense with fear, I could not bring myself to believe that he would have told me the truth. That he would’ve given me the full, genuine recipe.
The blood drained from my face.
What was in that red-colored tube? My father’s only addition to the doctor’s lineup of bottles…
Would it cause harm? Or would it just render the formula incomplete and useless?
Oh, God, Grace. Please be all right. Please be all right.
If something happened to her, it would be all my fault. I had assured her father that I had given him the cure. That everything would be fine, if he just fed it to her.
Then anger welled within me that she and I were even in this position in the first place. That we’d ever had to go to such lengths simply to do what was right. We had done nothing wrong or illegal. Why is this so damn hard?
I strained against the chair, mustering all the power that my body possessed, but I could not break free from it. It held me fast, and I could hardly even budge an inch on the seat.
“Let me out!” I shouted, my voice bouncing off the walls.
Where had he taken me? What was he planning to do with me now? Now that my father had obviously discovered that I was aware of the existence of the cure, he must’ve suspected that I knew about FOEBA, maybe also the mystery surrounding my mother’s death.
How did he live with himself?
What is going through that brain of his?
Was h
e planning to kill me too? If he had been, why had he not done it already? Why bring me here and wait for me to wake up? Was I nothing but a risk now? A risk to all that he had worked for his entire life?
I yelled again, trying to attract someone’s—anyone’s—attention. Whatever was about to happen, I did not want to wait for it. I wanted to look my fate in the eyes now. Nothing was worse than drawn-out ignorance.
Still, I could hear no footsteps. But after I shouted for the third time, the screen in front of me suddenly flickered and flashed on. I found myself staring at the backdrop of my father’s Chicago office. His laptop was open on his desk, but he was not sitting behind it.
Dad? I was about to call, but I could hardly use that name for him anymore. I didn’t know what he was to me now, but Dad no longer seemed like the right word.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
The screen jolted slightly, as if somebody was adjusting the camera, then Atticus finally came into view. He had changed clothes since the last time I had seen him. I wondered how much time had passed since I’d been knocked out. Hours? Even days?
God knew.
He eyed the camera stoically while sitting back in his swivel chair. There was still a touch of uncharacteristic paleness to his face, but otherwise, he looked recovered from the incident in the laboratory.
“What are you doing?” I repeated.
Swallowing, he clasped his hands together in front of him on the desk, gazing steadily at me. His cold gray eyes seemed to pierce through the screen and touch me.
“Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence,” he said slowly. He ran his tongue along his lower lip, before breathing in deeply through his nose. “I’ll be honest. I have not been sure what to do with you.”
I waited with bated breath, unsure of how much, if any, information I should bother revealing up front. I was sure that he already suspected everything, but that was still not a reason to tell him more than I absolutely needed to. It was wiser to hear from his mouth everything he thought I knew.
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