An Hour of Need (9 page)

A
t least the
machinery had been meddled with, which would make it difficult for the IBSI to transport any explosives to get them where they needed them—assuming they did hold explosives here to begin with.

In spite of our hideout having been discovered, Horatio suggested we stay in the same cave and wait for Lucas, to avoid delays in him and our new recruits finding us. We shouldn’t be waiting long anyway, given Lucas’ supernatural speed.

But then my grandma Sofia countered, “Hopefully the IBSI doesn’t have any witches hanging around nearby who might close the portal in the meantime. That would delay things for us a lot.”

“That’s a good point,” Derek replied. “Maybe we should set up closer to the gate then, to keep an eye on it. Horatio?”

“Hm,” Horatio said, stroking his jaw. “Yes. That might be a better idea. Then we’ll have to stay alert for the others returning through it, so we don’t miss each other.”

Horatio transported us away from the cave and landed us in the treetops, almost directly above the portal. We tried to settle down and make ourselves somewhat comfortable as we waited, but I could hardly sit still for a moment.

Only a couple of hours ago, it had been Orlando occupying my mind, and I’d found it almost impossible to pry my thoughts from his kiss. Now, all that was practically forgotten. I was barely even aware of his presence a few feet away from me on the branch. Everyone surrounding me in the tree became invisible to me as those few seconds of my reunion with Lawrence played over and over in my mind like a broken record.

As lost as Lawrence seemed to me, I couldn’t shake the doubt that he might not be like his father. That the Lawrence I had spent time with in The Shade had been genuine. That he was not inherently evil, and if I could somehow get him to realize the harm the IBSI had perpetrated, the real truth about the organization and his father’s almost definite murder of his mother, I might get him to see the light, no matter how vigorously his mind had been programmed.

But if I was going to attempt this at all, I needed to find him before Lucas returned with an army… before the dragons arrived. I knew the chaos that would ensue. I would have no control over who got killed. Lawrence could easily be among the casualties.

“Are you okay?” A husky whisper came from my right. Orlando.

I focused my gaze on him. It was the first time I had looked him in the eye since he’d kissed me. I nodded slowly, even though the truth couldn’t be further.

He inched closer to me, looking genuinely apologetic. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay?” he breathed. “I took things too far. Way too far. I just thought for a moment… you were thinking the same thing and, hell, it’s been so damn long since I kissed a girl. And I… I’ve never kissed a girl quite like you.”

He glanced away, sealing his lips.

Now was not the time for Orlando to be talking to me about this. I was too overwhelmed with anxiety to focus on his words.

“It’s okay, Orlando,” I murmured. I cast my attention firmly away from him—to Horatio, who sat on the other end of the branch. The jinni’s head was panned downward as he kept a close eye on the portal. Orlando took the hint and backed away, giving me some much-appreciated space.

I realized as I watched the jinni how dry my throat was feeling. I reached into my backpack and grabbed my water. I downed the whole bottle in a matter of minutes, but still, the uncomfortable scratchy feeling at the back of my mouth didn’t subside. Not in the least.

I looked toward my mother and was about to ask her for some more water when my throat closed up. I began to choke.

Oh, no. No. Not again.

I began hacking as though I was trying to cough my organs out, and then came blood. Drops of blood, raining from my mouth onto my knees and open palms. As I continued coughing, I was expelling far too much blood for comfort.

Oh, God. I’m getting worse.

Orlando and my parents, who were nearest to me, hurried to stabilize me on the branch so that I would not slip as tremors claimed my body again. They lasted longer than ever before, each one more powerful, more violent. My skull banged against the branch. My teeth chattered. My extremities felt like ice cubes and tingled like they were being punctured by needles.

When the fit subsided, and I attempted to sit up slowly—Orlando and my parents still gripping hold of me to keep me steady—I already knew that it had not left me the same person.

I knew instantly from the look on Orlando’s and my parents’ faces.

“What is it?” I demanded in a panic.

Their eyes were roaming the length of me.

I glanced down at my hands and realized just how much paler they looked all of a sudden. Paler and more… veiny. I twisted my hands so that my wrists were visible. Blue veins jutted out so far my arms had become practically unrecognizable.
These are not my wrists.

“Hand me a mirror,” I stammered to my mother, even as I feared I would regret it.

“Grace,” she gasped.

“Please! Just hand one to me,” I begged.

She dipped into her backpack and rummaged. “Oh, I handed my travel mirror to you earlier, darling,” she said. “You never gave it back.”

Dammit. I must’ve left it back at the cave.

My aunt Rose’s concerned face appeared within my view. Her expression was a mirror of the others’.

“I have a mirror, but—” Rose said.

“Then let me see myself!” I cried, too loudly.

Rose searched her bag and pulled out a foldable mirror. Trembling, I pried it open and stared at myself. As I had feared, the tone of my face had changed drastically, just like the rest of my body. And it was as if my skin had thinned. Blue veins were also visible where there had been no trace of them before, especially near my temples.

I clapped the mirror shut and flung it back to my aunt, terrified of my reflection. My father’s hand closed around my shoulder. “Grace, it’s time to take you back to The Shade. We are just asking for trouble dragging you around with—”

“No,” I insisted. “That won’t solve
anything
! I would turn there just as I am now! No,” I repeated, in a quieter though no less desperate tone, “That’s not what I need… I need to get through to Lawrence.”

I
was feeling
beyond confused as I carried my father back with me and my colleagues to Aviary city.

What had just happened?

Who were those people who had taken my father hostage?

One moment I had been on the phone to my father, filling him in on the progress we’d made and the remaining estimated tree count, and the next I’d heard him grunt, followed by the thump of the phone hitting the ground.

I’d set out with an emergency search party immediately, though it wasn’t difficult to find him. As was mandatory for all IBSI members recruited to work on the new construction site in Aviary, as soon as we arrived in this land, we had to hook ourselves up to a central tracing system based in one of the technology caravan units in the center of the main clearing ground. For such a large project as this, it was mandatory that I had the means to know where everyone was, to manage our resources and ensure that everybody was working together as efficiently as possible… In all honesty, I was surprised that my father had given me such a prominent role so soon after my successful drug trial. I found the attention he was showing me now rather difficult to get used to, though it certainly was not unwelcome. I had been all but estranged from him while growing up. After my mother’s accident, I’d rarely seen him. It was understandable, of course. He had arguably the most demanding job in the world.

Now, he thought I was up to managing the IBSI’s activities in Aviary. He assured me that I was a fast learner and would easily fill in the gaps in my knowledge while on the job.

So far, he was right—it hadn’t been difficult to slip into this role, even if I did find myself asking several times a day what exactly I was doing in this position of authority.

We arrived at our temporary base among the treetops in old Aviary city. We had cleared away the medieval treehouses that been perched among the branches and replaced them with glass box-like constructions with interconnecting walkways. There were over a hundred rooms in this sprawling architecture, and that was with some workers sharing a room. My father and I parted ways with the other men, and landed directly on top of one of the walkways with the mutant. The creature set my father down before I slid off myself. I gave the mutant a nod, indicating that I had finished with him for now and he ought to rejoin the others.

Riding these…
things
was a skill I had not forgotten. There were many others that I remembered, too. It was only a period of a couple of months that had been completely erased from my memory during the drug procedure—and my father said that I was lucky, since two months was a very short period. Much less than expected. He said that, before I’d gone in, they had predicted I might even lose up to a year of my life.

My last memory was my graduation day from Creston Academy, an elite training center for future IBSI members. I recalled all the training that led up to my graduation, and then on the actual day, I remembered the elation I’d felt as I’d been getting ready to attend the ceremony. More than anything, I recalled imagining my father being present among the crowds. I wished that I could remember him actually being there, but my memory cut short after that and returned only after waking up from the drug-induced coma to be informed that my transformation was complete. I didn’t remember the day I’d discovered that my father was looking for volunteers for a drug trial, or his initial reluctance to allow me to volunteer, or his eventual agreement when I had insisted. I’d had to rely on my father to fill in these gaps for me.

We climbed through a glass trap door in the roof of the walkway and emerged in a communal kitchen.

“Who were those people?” I asked. “They looked like supernaturals.”

“You know,” my father said, looking irritated as he leapt up and yanked the trap door shut above us, “I’ve told you about them before. They’re rogue agents, from that little island in the Pacific. They’ve been seething ever since they got dropped from their official roles. Blaming us for their incompetence, they take every opportunity to sabotage our work. They were the instigators of the massacres that took place in The Woodlands and The Trunchlands—didn’t I mention that?”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “You did.”

He retrieved a first aid kit from one of the shelves. I watched him sterilize and bandage his wounds.

“Why do they bother?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Seems a stupid amount of effort to follow us around.”

He turned his back on me and reached into his right pocket, drawing out a pack of supplements. “As I said, they are bitter,” he said, popping a round green pill into his mouth—the same pill I took mornings and evenings, along with a plethora of others. He heaved a sigh. “Basically, they’ve somehow gotten it into their heads that we shouldn’t be felling these poisonous trees. They don’t understand that we need to create space here. The base that we’ll build in the coming months will prove to be invaluable to our defense strategy, as we’ve discussed.”

I nodded, reaching for a bottle of water. Although I had not gripped it hard, the plastic dented beneath my touch, and I had to remind myself to ease up a little. I still was not close to being used to this new body I’d woken up in. My father told me that certain aspects of my strength had the potential to rival even that of a vampire when I was on the right cocktail of supplements. My father was to undergo the same procedure as myself soon, as were a dozen other IBSI members. The rigid regimen of supplements he was taking every day was preparation for this.

As I swallowed down my water, I thought back to something else in that cave that I’d found odd—that young woman who’d yelled out for the magic-wielder to stop.

But my father didn’t appear to be in any mood to continue discussing the matter.

“So what’s going to happen now?” I asked him, frowning. He leaned against the counter and rubbed his temples. “Are we just going to allow them to roam freely around Aviary and continue causing us trouble? What if there are more of them than those we found in that cave? And what if there are more
dangerous
League members, like dragons?”

My father nodded, lowering his hands again to his sides and holding my gaze. “You’re right, Lawrence. We can’t have them meddling, and we
definitely
can’t have a repeat of the slaughter they carried out in The Woodlands or The Trunchlands. And we won’t have either…” My father tightened his belt around his waist before concluding, “I’ll keep you informed.”

I raised my brows. “Well, what are you planning to do?”

“Leave it to me,” he said shortly. “You just get some sleep, it’s been a long day. And stay inside. You won’t want to be stepping out for a while… You’ll soon realize why.”

I frowned as my father left the room.
What is he planning?

I helped myself to a protein shake. Gulping it down, I gazed out through the glass into the dark treetops surrounding us. They swayed to a breeze I couldn’t hear, the occasional shaft of moonlight spilling down to illuminate their broad, tapered leaves.

There were times when I felt that the things my father told me were only the tip of the iceberg. Times I wished that his explanations were more detailed… but this was the way he was. A busy man who wasn’t accustomed to stopping to explain. I was used to that. I’d had my whole childhood to get used to that.

I wasn’t wondering long what he had planned, however. After finishing my shake and returning along the walkways to my room, I glanced out of the window again and noticed a thick smoke with a greenish tinge had descended outside the glass. So thick that I could hardly see through it.

I dropped to my mattress, staring at the mist billowing around the glass construction. I knew what this was.

I just hadn’t been expecting us to use it so soon.