A Shade of Vampire 32: A Day of Glory (6 page)

I
t 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 extracted 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.

M
y 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.

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.”

* * *

C
orrine 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.”