We strolled to the edge of the jetty and gazed out at the horizon. I remembered how, for so many months, IBSI ships had loomed outside our borders, floating in our waters and watching us.
Hopefully, soon a new dawn would break… a dawn without the IBSI.
They had been in power for so long, it was hard to even remember what the world had been like without their presence. But I could imagine how it would be… if everything went according to plan.
The three of us were tense as we waited. We had so much to get started on, but we couldn’t do anything until the Hawks had returned and confirmed that they were able to find the ingredients. If they couldn’t find them, all those hours of discussing and planning we had just been through would be for naught. Everything rested on us being able to manufacture the antidote on a meaningful scale.
When we caught sight of Ibrahim and a group of at least a hundred Hawks arriving further down the beach, I dared to get my hopes up. Especially as each of them was carrying large, bulging sacks. Yes. Yes! My father, Xavier and I raced toward them, hardly able to contain our relief.
“Did you discover all of them?” my father was the first to blurt out.
“We believe so,” Ibrahim said, raising his own sack. “The Hawks located the three plants in a completely different part of Aviary—closer to where they had set up their residences.”
Perfect.
We hurried to the Sanctuary and dumped the sacks in the courtyard. Ibrahim hurried to fetch Corrine and Dr. Finnegan and brought them outside. The two women began opening up the sacks, examining their contents. One of the plants was a kind of dark green weed, another a pale blue star-shaped flower, and the third a thorny deep-purple vine.
Corrine’s eyes widened as she took in the mass of ingredients now piled up outside her front door. She blew out. “Okay… We’re going to need containers. Very big containers.”
Corrine and Dr. Finnegan quickly mixed up a potion using the new ingredients, along with an extract from the trees and the boys’ blood, and tested it on one of the Bloodless Ibrahim still had locked up in their food cellar. As soon as the creature showed signs of turning—similar positive signs that Grace had shown—we could safely conclude that the plants worked.
Xavier, my father, Ibrahim and I exited the Sanctuary and returned to the sack-strewn courtyard. As we stood together, my father gripped my shoulder as well as Xavier’s, looking us sternly in the eye.
“So you know what to do,” he said.
Xavier and I glanced at each other, then nodded.
“And you, Ibrahim and Horatio,” I said, “had better be punctual.”
“I know,” my father muttered. “I know.”
As Ibrahim vanished with my father, they were supposed to stop at the Black Heights to pick up Horatio, and then the three of them were to depart from The Shade… Leaving the rest of us to pull together the rest of the puzzle.
First, Xavier and I headed to Eli and Shayla’s apartment. We found Eli alone in his messy office. His hair was rumpled, glasses slightly askew as he slouched over his computer. He was editing footage—the footage of Grace turning into a human.
Xavier and I pulled up chairs and seated ourselves next to him, every harrowing detail playing before our eyes. This was not something that I wished to watch, but it was necessary.
“We have to trim it down so that it’s not too long, but it must be enough to prove our point,” Eli said, rubbing his forehead.
“I still worry that the broadcast station will say it’s a fake,” Xavier said, leaning forward tensely in his seat.
“Well,” Eli said, turning to us with a dark expression in his eyes, “if all goes to plan, it won’t matter.”
Bastien
Victoria and I ended up wandering around for another hour, consistently checking in on the witches to keep up with their progress, until Mona and Brock announced—albeit with uncertain faces—that they had arrived at a solution they believed they were now ready to experiment with. Mona said that, assuming it worked as they intended, the new potion would interfere with the active nature of the elixir in a way that would smother it, rather than break it down… whatever that even meant.
Whatever the case, the idea was to dull the apparent life of the elixir—which even now seemed to have something of a life of its own, even when it sat untouched on the table top. I noticed, for instance, on approaching it, it would start to swirl a little of its own accord. Victoria confirmed her own experience with the liquid when she’d tried to ingest only a tiny drop—but found much more leaping out onto her tongue.
This apparent liveliness of the liquid was what Mona believed she needed to still.
As she finished mixing up the brown liquid in her bowl, she eyed Victoria and me nervously.
“We’ve really got to hope this doesn’t do any major damage,” she muttered as she reached for the vial.
Opening its cap, she produced a spoon before tilting it ever so gently, pouring out a small amount of elixir. Then she produced a small clean glass bowl and tipped the elixir into it.
“Everyone watch it carefully,” she said, as she set the bowl in the center of the table.
After about a minute, the small amount of elixir began to swirl in the depths of the bowl.
“So you see it moving now,” Mona said. She dipped the spoon into her brown concoction and filled it in equal measure. She tipped it into the small glass bowl along with the elixir.
We watched with bated breath as a small hiss emanated from the bowl, followed by a small stream of smoke.
Mona kept it completely still for the next three minutes before she dipped the spoon in and mixed it more thoroughly together.
She removed the spoon, and we continued to stare at it.
Slowly, the mixture became still—recovering from Mona’s stirring—but it did not begin to move again afterward, as the elixir on its own would have done. Not even the slightest bit of movement.
She picked up the bowl again and sniffed it, her nose curling. Brock sniffed it too.
“What are you thinking?” he asked his mother.
“I… I’m not sure,” she replied, setting it still again on the table. “But it does seem like we’ve arrived at something. The only way to really know, of course, is to mix up the whole lot. I’ve only taken a tiny fraction of the vial’s liquid so far. We now need to combine everything in the vial with our own liquid in equal measure.”
She hesitated.
“What?” Victoria asked.
Mona shook her head. “I’m nervous about this.”
If she was nervous, then Victoria and I definitely should be, given that we were directly in line to be affected if something went wrong. But I could hardly bring myself to feel afraid or nervous in the slightest. If anything, I just felt impatient now. I wanted Mona to mix it all together so we could see what happened. I hated all this suspense.
“I suggest we go outside for this,” Mona said. “Then we can witness what’s going on as it’s happening.”
“It’ll be instant?” Victoria asked.
Mona clenched her jaw. “We’ll see.”
Brock carried the elixir, while Mona carried the brown substance. We headed by foot out of the mountain and approached the clearing, our eyes settling on the frustrated line of Mortclaws. The sun had reached them by now in their corner, and I imagined they were feeling incredibly hot and bothered. But this was a small punishment for all the lives and families they’d torn apart.
As they noticed us approach, they began to cause a ruckus again—most audibly, my mother. Demanding that they be freed, some even had the gall to threaten us. Not exactly the best strategy, given that Mona had the ability to keep them frozen as statues for as long as she felt like it.
We approached within six feet of them, where Mona and Brock paused. They set the two containers of liquid on the ground and knelt on the grass before them. I didn’t miss the slight unsteadiness to Mona’s hand as she unscrewed the vial. Given that the brown mixture�
��s container was much larger, it seemed that she was going to tip all the elixir into it.
“You guys ready?” she muttered.
Ready for what? We had no idea. Victoria clutched my hand, even as we both said, “Yes.”
“Just do it,” I encouraged her.
“What are you doing?” Sendira shrilled.
What should have been done a long time ago, I felt like replying, but I bit my tongue. Mona needed to concentrate.
In one swift motion, she tipped the entirety of the vial into the brown substance and began to mix it rapidly. My hand around Victoria’s tightened as a thin veil of smoke began to emanate from it, which soon became thick.
As five minutes passed, the Mortclaws grew more and more agitated to know what we were doing. Then, after ten minutes, they began to let out piercing howls. Their eyeballs bulged and if they had been able to move their bodies, I was sure that they would be thrashing about on the ground.
“Stop! Stop!” came the growls.
Then I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. Gripping Victoria’s hand hard, I looked nervously at her.
“You feel anything?” I asked.
She clutched her forehead with her other hand. “Kind of dizzy,” she murmured. Her forehead was breaking out in a sweat. My head felt hot, too.
I hoped the nausea would subside, and we wouldn’t develop any worse symptoms.
The witches had risen to their feet by now, leaving the concoction on the ground, still billowing with smoke.
“You think it’s working?” Victoria asked.
Mona gulped. “Something’s working.”
We dared to move closer. I hovered near my mother and father, watching as they experienced apparent agony. Could this procedure kill them? They looked to be in enough pain to be dying. I wasn’t sure how that made me feel. As much as I wanted them out of my life, I couldn’t say that I wanted them dead. They were still my parents, parents who had treated me the only way they knew how. My mother thought that she loved me. She thought that she was doing what was best for me and her family by arranging my marriage to Yuraya and keeping me away from Victoria. I couldn’t bring myself to be so callous as to wish for their demise.
Finally, something more hopeful started to happen. My nausea began to subside, and Victoria confirmed the same for her. But more importantly, each of the Mortclaws—who had been in their giant wolf forms, Mona having caught them in the midst of an attack—before our very eyes, were starting to shrink. Slowly but surely, their oversized limbs began to retract on themselves, grow slimmer, shorter. After half an hour, every one of them was down to a normal size—or a relatively normal size for a werewolf. They were still large, but the Mortclaws were a naturally large breed; they had been large even before the black witches had gotten hold of them. This new size they were adopting was certainly explainable.
I once again looked at Victoria, and I caught her looking at me too. We were searching each other for external changes. Neither of us saw anything different.
As we resumed our attention on the Mortclaws, I realized that something else was starting to happen now. Their limbs were mutating. Tails shrinking. Paws thinning. They were assuming their humanoid forms.
Of course. It’s daytime. That meant that they were losing their ability to shift at will. They must be humanoid during the daytime, wolf at night, just like the rest of the werewolves in The Woodlands.
Mona, her son and Victoria all looked to me at once. I knew what they were thinking, because I was thinking exactly the same thing. Does this mean that I have lost my ability to switch at will, too?
I must have.
I tried to assume my wolf form now, and what had previously been as effortless as blinking, I found I was unable to do, no matter how much I willed the transformation. I was stuck as a humanoid and I would be until tonight. This revelation brought about an unexpected twinge in my chest. I felt disappointed, saddened to have lost this ability. I’d taken it for granted for most of my life and indeed, it had been useful on more occasions than I could count. It had given me a freedom that other wolves couldn’t enjoy. Still, I could hardly feel too upset about it, given the miracle that was happening to my family before my very eyes.
It was hard to really tell when a wolf was disheveled, given that they looked like wild beasts anyway. But as all of the Mortclaws were forced back into the humanoid forms, each of them looked like they had been dragged backward through the woods—their hair sticking out at odd places, their breathing unregulated, and each of them… naked.
The four of us quickly looked away, facing Blackhall Mountain.
I guessed that this marked the completion of their transformation, or rather, de-transformation. No longer the extraordinary beasts who used their powers for evil, I imagined it would take a long time for them to get used to being fallible again. And they had made enemies out of every single werewolf who roamed The Woodlands. They would have to watch out; it wouldn’t surprise me if, once others found out, they’d band together to attack the Mortclaws out of revenge.
But these were the seeds the Mortclaws had sown. Be it their fault or not that they craved werewolf flesh, it didn’t vanish the fact that they were going to have to face the consequences of their actions. They had better watch their backs.
Time to finally wake up to reality.
Victoria
As I accompanied Bastien to Blackhall Mountain to fetch some clothes for his family (this was Bastien’s wish—in spite of all they’d done, he wished to treat them with at least this basic civility), I couldn’t find words to express my relief. Assuming that Mona’s procedure had done its work already, Bastien and I were okay. We had survived it. And the Mortclaws were back to their original state.
As for the diluted elixir, Mona said that she would carry it back to The Shade with us and keep it somewhere safely in her spell room.
“See if you can still fly,” Bastien told me, as we neared the mountain entrance.
I found myself filled with trepidation as I attempted to rise.
I couldn’t.
Disappointment gripped me. I had been hoping that I might be able to keep that power. I had become a kind of Superwoman. I supposed that my increased strength would’ve gone now too… and my speed. Bummer. It was a shame I’d never gotten the chance to explore the full extent of the powers I had adopted—it really would have been cool if I had the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes. Oh, well. That ship had sailed.
I couldn’t feel too sore, just as I doubted Bastien felt too sore about losing his own exceptional abilities.
As far as I understood Mona’s procedure, the elixir was still active but in some kind of neutralized state—diluted by whatever that other brownish substance that she had mixed it with was. I doubted that there would be any way to restore the elixir to its former state, even if it did somehow get into the wrong hands. Mona had mixed the bowl thoroughly.
Although everyone in the mountain was mourning—and this was something that werewolves needed to be left alone for—Bastien couldn’t help but yell out, “The Mortclaws are no longer the monsters they were! The spell has been broken. They are outside now, you can see for yourselves!”
This captured the attention of dozens of werewolves. They poked their heads out of their doors as we passed, many of them even leaving the corridors and making their way to the exit.
Once we had gathered enough clothing, we hurried back out and laid a set of clothes in front of each of the Mortclaws, whom Mona still had frozen and immobile. I didn’t pay much attention to male and female clothing, though I tried not to give any men a dress.
As I glanced back at the entrance, it looked like the news had quickly spread throughout the entire mountain and everybody was crowding out to witness the scene.
Bastien looked at Mona. “Do you think it’s safe to release the spell now?” he asked.
Mona shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that it’s as safe as it will ever be. I wanted to wait for you to see if you are ready.�
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Bastien nodded. “Yes, I think I’m ready.”
As Mona lifted her spell, there was a scurry among each of the Mortclaws, snatching up clothes angrily and dressing themselves before they all stood to their full height.
They looked like they wanted to run at Mona and attack, but after being frozen and unable to move a single limb for gods knew how many hours, they were hardly about to charge at her.
Instead, they snarled and hissed curses. Then Bastien’s mother stepped forward and approached him, Bastien’s father behind her.
Bastien’s arm immediately shot to me and shoved me behind him. I had to remind myself that I could no longer fly away, as I had been able to do when escaping Yuraya. I had to scrub that boldness from my system from now on, or I could find myself getting into big trouble.
I was the human girl again… at least until, maybe, I decided to turn into a vampire like my parents.
Sendira and her husband stopped two feet away from us. She stared into the eyes of her son, searching, as though a part of her still disbelieved that Bastien had allowed this to happen to them.
“And where do we stand now, Bastien?” she asked, her voice deep and scratchy.
Bastien’s brows lowered in a deep frown. “Where do you think we stand? I can give you one hint: it’s not on the same side.”
She pursed her lips, swallowing hard. Bastien’s words had hurt her.
“You, Father, and the rest of your pack can do whatever you want now,” Bastien went on, “Though I suggest that you be careful and tread lightly,” he added in a lower tone. “You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to make friends in this land.”
I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Mortclaws were forced to leave The Woodlands now. I would’ve thought that it would be incredibly dangerous for them to stay here. I could imagine a huge army of wolves banding together and attacking them at night while they slept, finishing them off for all the lives that they had claimed. But that wasn’t Bastien’s or my concern anymore.
A Shade of Vampire 32 Page 6
