But they seemed to approve of me in the end—or at least, Victoria’s mother did. And for that I could only be grateful. Victoria and I had enough trouble from my side of the family to start receiving more from hers.
As we traveled back to the supernatural dimension from Earth, and then back to where we had left Mona outside Blackhall Mountain, my chest felt lighter than it had for a long, long time. In spite of the loss of Blackhall lives, and the fact that we still had my family to deal with, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we might finally be nearing the end of the tunnel.
After all, Victoria and I were bonded already, and no matter what physical distance might be put between us, our hearts would remain as one.
Mona was waiting exactly where we had left her, a few feet in front of the line of frozen Mortclaws. She looked relieved to see us. I imagined it must be quite intimidating to be standing here alone guarding these beasts, even if she was a powerful witch.
Brock offloaded the backpack, which looked like it weighed a ton, and placed it gently on the floor in front of his mother.
“Thanks, Brock,” she said, “and I’m glad you didn’t take too long.” She bent over the bag, unzipped it, and began rummaging through it. She murmured inaudibly as she dove deeper.
“Where do you plan to begin your experimentation?” I asked her. “I could take you to a room in the mountain.”
“Yes,” she said, “Good idea. Let’s do that.”
And so I led them into the mountain, to an empty chamber on the ground level which held a table and a few chairs. Mourning was underway now among the wolves, and most of them would be locked away.
Mona placed the bag on the floor, leaning it against one of the table legs before she began to offload its contents. I assumed that if she needed fire, she could manifest that on her own.
She retrieved the vial and placed it in front of her before lining up an array of glass bottles filled with multicolored and multi-textured ingredients, along with a mixing bowl.
“I’d like Brock to stay with me, but you two don’t have to hang around here while I figure this out,” she said. “I’ve no idea how long it will take.”
I exchanged glances with Victoria. She shrugged.
“All right,” I said.
“We will check in on you in a short while,” Victoria added.
I looped her arm through mine and we headed out of the chamber and up through the mountain. I wanted to visit my quarters. We didn’t pass a single wolf on the way as we climbed to the top floor. We moved through the apartment until we reached my bedroom, where we gazed out of the window at the rolling meadow below. She slipped her arms around me and leaned her head against my chest. I wondered what was going through her mind as she heaved a soft sigh.
I was contemplating my parents, naturally. Assuming that Mona managed to find a way to remove their brutality and unfair advantage over other werewolves, I wondered what would happen next. I was still officially the leader of the Blackhall tribe. They were still relying on me and yet, after everything, I didn’t think that I could bring myself to uphold those duties here anymore. The Woodlands had brought only bad luck for Victoria and me so far, and now that we were married, I couldn’t subject my wife to a long-distance relationship. If we survived this, I wanted to return to The Shade with her. Which meant that somebody among the Blackhalls was going to have to take up my post…
“Oh, what about Rona?” Victoria asked suddenly.
I felt a slight panic. Rona! I’d almost forgotten about her. She was still waiting for me in that old boat by the shore. I needed to go and retrieve her. Though she had been waiting so long already, I figured it was best to just wait a while longer to see what ended up happening with the Mortclaws. Then Victoria and I could go together to let her know the situation.
If Victoria hadn’t mentioned her name exactly when she had, while I’d been in the middle of contemplating the future of the Blackhall tribe, it might never have even occurred to me that, of all the wolves who could possibly take up position as leader among the Blackhalls, Rona might just be the perfect candidate.
The Northstones were extinct now; she had nobody, and once she finally got out of that boat and returned to live on land, she would find herself all alone, with very few allies.
Yet she was the daughter of the two Northstone leaders. Leadership must run in her blood. Although I, too, was the son of leaders, it didn’t come as naturally to me to command and lead. I suspected that Rona would do a good job in my place, and most importantly, I trusted that she would be a better woman than Brucella ever was. It seemed that she had taken after her father, Sergius, more than her mother and he had always been a decent man.
Victoria was probably also wondering what was going to happen to the Blackhall pack—whether I would still insist on staying to uphold my duties—but I held back on mentioning my idea about Rona just yet. I wanted to talk to Rona about it first, to see what her response would be, before raising Victoria’s hopes for a solution.
“We’ll go and find Rona soon—let’s just wait a little longer and see how things play out with Mona,” I replied, a little belatedly.
Then I’d have to hope that the Blackhalls would accept her as their leader…
Victoria and I waited together in my apartment for the next hour. We moved to the windows in my sitting room (whose windows had been fixed since Sendira smashed through them), which afforded us a view of the Mortclaws. I thought it might be interesting to watch them for a while, while Mona was working on her spell; perhaps we’d even start noticing some visible changes in them if she was on the right track. After a while, Victoria pulled me back to a wide, comfortable chair. She sat beside me and, her arms draping round my neck, kissed me tenderly.
“Whether or not Mona succeeds,” she said softly as our lips parted, “we’re going to find a way.” She pressed her palm against my chest. “Nothing can keep us apart now.”
I smiled at Victoria’s serious gaze, still not quite believing that she was mine.
Her brows rose in question at my smile. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing, beautiful,” I whispered, drawing her closer to me, “just keep kissing me.”
We ended up spending some time lying in my bed together. We had too much on our minds to be in the mood for anything more than kissing, but there was something endlessly satisfying about simply lying with my mate, relishing the feel of her body close to mine, the way our forms melded. I could be in the middle of a storm, but Victoria made me feel at peace with the world.
Finally we made our way downstairs. Mona and Brock were still standing by the table, both of them gazing down into the mixing bowl which now held a brownish liquid, filled almost to the brim.
“How are things coming?” Victoria asked tentatively as we stood on one side of them.
Mona and Brock appeared to have been so absorbed in what they were doing they didn’t even detect our entry until she had spoken.
“Oh,” Mona murmured, pulling her eyes away from the mixture for but a moment. She inhaled. “Well, I can tell you that I’ve had no luck yet.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Brock told her. “We haven’t even opened up the vial yet. We need to take a drop and test it to see how it reacts with what we’re brewing up,” he added on noticing our confused faces.
“We should be ready to test the first drop very soon though,” Mona said, her eyes narrowing in concentration as she dipped down to sniff the concoction she was brewing.
I had no idea what all—or any—of the ingredients were that Brock had brought back to her. And in all honesty, I didn’t care. I wasn’t interested in distracting the witches by asking them to explain their process; I just wanted to see the result.
We needed to solve this Mortclaw problem, once and for all.
Derek
It was a shock for all of us to discover Field’s true identity. I never could have imagined it in my wildest dreams. Yes, we’d suspected that the hunters had extract
ed some of River’s eggs, but this… What chance was there of this? It had to be one in a million.
All I could think was that fate was on our side. If it weren’t for Lawrence discovering Field and his four siblings, Grace would still be thrashing around on the hospital floor as a bloodsucking monster.
Sofia and I found out about Field after we had woken up and made our way to the hospital to check in on Grace. We found her and Lawrence, and she told us everything.
Now, I was hardly one to talk, given my history as a fire-spurting human… But, with the addition of Field, I couldn’t help but think that our family was only getting stranger and stranger.
I could only imagine what a shock this must be for River to go through. And for my son. He suddenly found himself a surrogate father to a young man he hadn’t even known existed a day ago. But I didn’t have any doubt that he would adjust to support River. Their relationship was as solid as Sofia’s and mine. They’d figure it out.
We stayed a while together in the hospital room before it was finally time to get down to business. Serious business. We had a mountain of work ahead of us, and we needed to start discussing order and strategy.
I called a meeting in the Great Dome. I made sure that Dr. Finnegan and the Hawks—or at least some of them—were invited to come, in addition to our regular council members. Everybody by now had already had ample opportunity to rest, so nobody should have an excuse not to attend.
Though, as the last of us piled into the building and took seats around the table, my brother was still noticeably absent. But if there was anybody who had an excuse for not attending, it was him. He deserved to miss out on whatever our next mission was after the trauma he had been through in The Dewglades.
Thus, I found myself sitting at the head of the table with Sofia at my side. We had many deep issues to discuss now, but there was one smaller nagging issue that I wanted to get out of the way first before we sank ourselves deeper.
“The babies,” I said, my eyes sweeping around my council. “We still haven’t figured out what we are going to do with them. They can’t live in the hospital forever. We have the ogres, the wolf cubs and then… those other things.” My eyes fell on Safi. “Do you have any idea what those gray babies are?”
The jinni shrugged. “None of us do,” she replied. “They are strange. Very strange. While the other babies cry and fuss, they hardly make a sound. Heck, they hardly even blink.”
Creepy things…
“We haven’t figured out what food they will eat yet either,” she went on. “They’ve rejected everything we’ve tried to feed them so far—food that the ogres and the cubs have happily lapped up.”
I inhaled through my nose. “All right,” I said. “Well, let us first turn our attention to the three cubs and the two ogres. I am hoping that Bella and Brett will agree to adopt the latter…” At this point, I couldn’t help but smirk internally. I was rather tempted to tie a ribbon around the more troublesome ogre baby, place him in a blanket-lined basket and leave him outside Lucas’s door. “One of us should go and ask the ogres. And as for the wolf cubs—what are your thoughts?”
There was a pause before Micah, who sat next to his wife Kira, spoke up. “We will adopt one of them.”
“Oh, good,” I said, pleasantly surprised.
The next one came even more quickly. From Saira. “I’ll take in one of the little snowflakes,” she said.
Saira loved children, so that wasn’t really a surprise.
I gazed around the room expectantly, waiting for the third taker. White, fluffy wolf cubs were hardly a tough sell… But I really was not expecting Aiden to suddenly call out, “Can you… give Kailyn and me a minute?”
“O-Of course,” I said. I stared at them as they rose and headed swiftly out of the Dome.
I exchanged a glance with Sofia. Her eyes were sparkling with excitement, and the same surprise that I felt.
The couple returned a couple of minutes later, hand in hand, both with huge grins on their faces. “Derek,” my father-in-law said, “Kailyn and I will take the third cub.”
“Sold,” I said, bringing a hand down against the table. “Good. So if we assume for now that Bella and Brett will take the two ogres, then that leaves us with the gray babies… Until we figure out what they are, I suppose they should probably stay in the hospital.”
We had no idea what kind of species they belonged to. For all we knew, they could be dangerous. We would have to do some investigation at some point in the future. Since not a single person on the island knew what they were, we would need to make a trip with them to The Sanctuary to ask if anybody there knew. But none of this would happen for some time, as we had to move on to more urgent matters first.
“All right,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Moving on… Let us talk about the antidote first. We have managed to discover it thanks to Lawrence and Dr. Finnegan.” Lawrence was not here at present; he was still in the hospital with my granddaughter. “We have figured out the mixture that is required to cure the Bloodless disease and have recorded Grace’s entire transformation on camera—courtesy of Xavier…”
Xavier nodded my way.
“But the first problem we face,” I went on, “if we want to stand any chance of distributing this antidote en masse, is how do we replicate it? There are a number of issues. First, we have only five vamp-Hawk boys—against who knows how many thousands of Bloodless roaming America.” And other parts of the world. We had to make America our starting place, since that was the most severely affected.
“We have enough trees, so that is one ingredient solved,” I said, “but then there are three other suspected plant-based ingredients.” I looked to the Hawks among us, then to Corrine. “Corrine, I believe that you kept a sample of each of those ingredients, correct?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Could you please fetch them now?” I asked her.
She vanished, and less than a minute later, she reappeared holding three almost empty test tubes.
“We suspect that these are plants from Aviary,” she told the Hawks. “See if you can identify them by their smell.”
She handed them to one of the Hawks, who sniffed each of the tubes before passing them to the others who had attended the meeting. Their brows lowered in thought.
“Well?” I asked. “Any idea?”
Killian, who’d been seated at the end of the line of Hawks and was still holding the tubes, said, “Definitely familiar.”
“I have some ideas,” Tidor added. “But we need to return to Aviary and do some investigation before getting your hopes up.”
I feared that along with the trees, the hunters might have destroyed the rest of the ingredients, too. Though I found it hard to believe all of these other plants would also be isolated to that same area. It seemed too far-fetched. But there was no point in speculating.
“Will you return there now?”
The Hawks nodded, and rose. “Yes,” Tidor said. “We will return and let you know our findings.”
“Ibrahim.” I addressed the warlock, sitting a few seats away from me. “Would you mind going with them? It will make transport much faster.”
Ibrahim agreed.
“I suggest you take every single Hawk here on this island with you, in case you find the ingredients. If you do, you should bring as much back as possible.”
The Hawks gathered round Ibrahim and a few moments later, all of them had vanished from the room.
Now, while we waited for their answer, we had other matters to discuss.
“How are we ever going to generate enough of this antidote?” I asked, directing my question at Dr. Finnegan, who sat with her young son at the other end of the table.
“Good question,” Dr. Finnegan said. “One thing we do have on our side is that only a very small amount of each ingredient is required. You’ve seen the liquids up close, haven’t you? They are all but transparent. Even the vial containing the blood—it wasn’t even tinged red… now, I don’t
know how much blood those boys are able or willing to give up, and it’s a stretch of the imagination to believe that we’ll be able to cure every single Bloodless out there… all we can do is try to make the ingredients stretch as far as possible. It occurred to me that perhaps we could attempt to mix in some full Hawk blood, while still retaining the same effect. I don’t know. I have to experiment. Full Hawk blood on its own doesn’t work—that much we know.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So assuming that we manage to create a mass amount of antidote,” Ben said, carrying forward my train of thought, “then what?”
I glanced at my son. I was sure that he already knew what would follow.
“Then we need to expose the IBSI,” I said.
There was a span of silence as we all glanced at each other. There were a number of ways that we could go about this, and I had many ideas buzzing around in my head, but everything had to line up right, with the right timing, or we could find our actions backfiring on ourselves.
We began to discuss our options and potential strategies, along with all the things that could go wrong with each. It could be hard to come to a conclusion about anything when surrounded by so many—oftentimes conflicting—opinions. But after five hours, we managed to arrive at a plan we all agreed on. There were still potential holes in it—a number of potential holes—but those would always be there, no matter which route we chose…
Because dealing with the IBSI was never easy. And to combat what we had planned, I feared that Atticus Conway was going to put up the fight of his life.
Ben
My father, Xavier and I headed to the port to clear our heads and wait for the Hawks to return. In the meantime, Dr. Finnegan took Field and his brothers to the lab to begin experimenting with how to make their blood stretch as far as possible.
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