A Shade of Vampire 33: A Dawn of Guardians
Bella Forrest
Contents
Also by Bella Forrest
The “New Generation” Names List
Prologue: Sofia
1. Grace
2. Hazel
3. Hazel
4. Hazel
5. Hazel
6. Hazel
7. Hazel
8. Hazel
9. Hazel
10. Hazel
11. Hazel
12. Hazel
13. Hazel
14. Hazel
15. Hazel
16. Ruby
17. Hazel
18. Hazel
19. Hazel
20. Hazel
21. Hazel
22. Ruby
23. Rose
Read more by Bella Forrest!
Also by Bella Forrest
THE GENDER GAME
The Gender Game
A SHADE OF VAMPIRE SERIES
Series 1: Derek & Sofia’s story
A Shade of Vampire (Book 1)
A Shade of Blood (Book 2)
A Castle of Sand (Book 3)
A Shadow of Light (Book 4)
A Blaze of Sun (Book 5)
A Gate of Night (Book 6)
A Break of Day (Book 7)
Series 2: Rose & Caleb’s story
A Shade of Novak (Book 8)
A Bond of Blood (Book 9)
A Spell of Time (Book 10)
A Chase of Prey (Book 11)
A Shade of Doubt (Book 12)
A Turn of Tides (Book 13)
A Dawn of Strength (Book 14)
A Fall of Secrets (Book 15)
An End of Night (Book 16)
Series 3: Ben & River’s story
A Wind of Change (Book 17)
A Trail of Echoes (Book 18)
A Soldier of Shadows (Book 19)
A Hero of Realms (Book 20)
A Vial of Life (Book 21)
A Fork of Paths (Book 22)
A Flight of Souls (Book 23)
A Bridge of Stars (Book 24)
Series 4: A Clan of Novaks
A Clan of Novaks (Book 25)
A World of New (Book 26)
A Web of Lies (Book 27)
A Touch of Truth (Book 28)
An Hour of Need (Book 29)
A Game of Risk (Book 30)
A Twist of Fates (Book 31)
A Day of Glory (Book 32)
A SHADE OF DRAGON TRILOGY
A Shade of Dragon 1
A Shade of Dragon 2
A Shade of Dragon 3
A SHADE OF KIEV TRILOGY
A Shade of Kiev 1
A Shade of Kiev 2
A Shade of Kiev 3
BEAUTIFUL MONSTER DUOLOGY
Beautiful Monster 1
Beautiful Monster 2
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Copyright © 2016 by Bella Forrest
Cover design inspired by Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations LLC
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The “New Generation” Names List
Arwen: (daughter of Corrine and Ibrahim - witch)
Benedict: (son of Rose and Caleb - human)
Brock: (son of Kiev and Mona – half warlock)
Grace: (daughter of Ben and River – half fae and half human)
Hazel: (daughter of Rose and Caleb – human)
Heath: (son of Jeriad and Sylvia – half dragon and half human)
Ruby: (daughter of Claudia and Yuri – human)
Victoria: (daughter of Vivienne and Xavier – human)
Prologue: Sofia
A lot had happened in the last two years.
A lot.
On a personal note, Vivienne and Xavier had become grandparents to a beautiful human-werewolf hybrid. Vicky had experienced a few scares during the pregnancy but with the diligent help of Corrine, she’d managed to give birth to one of the cutest baby boys I’d ever laid eyes on. Jovi Blackhall was his name. (Bastien shunned his Mortclaw parents’ name in favor of his surrogate parents’, who’d always felt more like his true parents to him anyway.) With gray-blue eyes and curly black hair, Jovi would be five months old at the end of this month. He was showing no signs that he had the ability to morph, but he was hairier than a regular human baby, and he was definitely showing early signs of supernatural strength. His grip was as hard as a twelve-year-old’s, and he had a full set of teeth (which caused Vicky a lot of grief during breastfeeding).
Lucas, for the first time in his over five hundred years of living, got hooked enough by a woman to tie the knot. Not only had he vowed to remain true to Marion forever, he’d also promised to be a father to her child, Avril (which, so far, he seemed to be doing a commendable job at). Their wedding had been held among the rocks at the base of the lighthouse. Derek, as Lucas’ best man, had looked prouder than I’d ever seen him of his brother. Prouder than when Lucas had survived The Dewglades… Prouder than when Lucas had survived The Underworld. Yeah, committing himself to a woman was a big step for Lucas. He was no longer a skittish bachelor. Derek had his fair share of fun with his older brother that day, including swiping Bella and Brett’s naughtiest ogre toddler and wrapping him up as a wedding gift. And Marion had plans to become a vampire once Avril grew a bit older.
Lawrence had gotten down on one knee before Grace last Christmas, after our family dinner. Grace—bless her heart—had burst into tears before throwing herself into his arms and accepting his proposal. They’d married this year in the spring in an exquisite ceremony held in The Hearthlands, following in the path of her parents. I had cried like a baby on seeing Grace in her wedding dress. It had brought back the memory of River walking down the aisle toward my son. Grace had positively sparkled in her gem-encrusted white gown, fashioned by dragon seamstresses. Heath, who had moved permanently to The Hearthlands, presided over the ceremony and their vows, which was lovely to see. Grace and Lawrence had just recently left The Shade for their honeymoon in the Alps.
Another recent coupling was Arwen and Brock. They’d gotten engaged in the New Year—something that had caused Corrine and Kiev to have another one of their little, ahem, “heart-to-hearts”.
Orlando and Maura, who’d remained with us in The Shade, had also caught the love bug—Orlando had been seen hanging out a lot with Regan, the half-human, half-dragon twenty-year-old daughter of dragon Azaiah. Orlando was a couple of years her senior, and from what I could gather, they were getting along like a house on fire… so to speak.
Azaiah wasn’t too pleased about that, to say the least. Regan was a rare creature; she was one of the dragon hybrids on the island who was able to shift into a beastly form, in spite of her mixed blood. And a stunning beastly form at that. Azaiah wanted Regan to end up with a fire dragon—the fire dragons were still in great need of females to increase their population—but he wasn’t going to interfere with his daughter’s happiness, so he let the couple be. I supposed at the back of his mind he was hoping the relationship wouldn’t last, and he’d be able to introduce her to a strapping Hearthlands native. Only time would tell whether he’d get his wish.
As for Orlando’s sister, Maura, it had taken her about a month to make a full recovery from her former Bloodless state, and once she was out of the hospital and roaming around
the island, River’s halfblood-Hawk son, Field, had caught her eye. Neither Field nor the other four Hawk boys had shown a lot of interest in girls—in my opinion, they were shy of them. It had been Maura who’d initiated the friendship with Field and coaxed him out of his shell, and now they were dating.
Aisha had become the mother of a healthy baby girl, whom they’d called Riza. She and Horatio had been on cloud nine for weeks, wrapped up in their own little bubble. Riza was the first jinni baby most of the Shade residents had ever seen. Unlike her parents, her bottom half wasn’t covered. Apparently it was jinn custom that children began to cover their lower halves at the age of six, when they were old enough to understand its significance.
Jinni babies could almost pass for humans, were it not for their thick jaws and inherent magical powers.
My father and Kailyn were still proud parents to their adopted werewolf son, whom they’d named Hunter. Saira, Micah and Kira were relishing their roles as parents to the other two cubs. We had asked the werewolves from The Woodlands whom we’d worked with over the years if anybody knew of the cubs’ biological parents. Based on the cubs’ pure white fur, the werewolves had an idea of whom they had belonged to—but informed us that the pack had gone missing some years ago. Perhaps the harpies had been responsible for that.
As for the gray babies, soon after TSL’s victory over the IBSI, Shayla and I had made a special visit to The Sanctuary to speak to the Ageless and her sisters. We figured that if the sisters and their council didn’t know what the babies were, who would? Well, the witches did claim to know. They said that the babies were incubi, demonic horned creatures who, once they grew old enough, stalked prey in the night and were known to do… unsavory things to them while they slept. Those gray babies were definitely not on the cards for staying in The Shade. We couldn’t just abandon them, though. They had still been infants after all. We had no idea how the harpies had originally gotten hold of them, but the witches agreed to take them off our hands and attempt to return them to the land of the incubi (somewhere I would rather not approach within a thousand miles of).
That experience with the mysterious gray babies truly opened our eyes as to how little we had scratched the surface of the supernatural world. It both struck me with awe and made me feel small to think that we had probably still only come across a fraction of the species that lived in the parallel dimension.
Which leads to what else changed over the past two years. On a professional note… Well, where to even begin?
After our victory over the IBSI, we were formally announced as their replacement, so there was much, much work to be done in terms of structural organization. We had a huge fleet of people to train. We had to teach every member of our new organization, as well as every volunteering member of the public, how to administer the cure. Then we had the even greater task of disseminating the cure to such a large volume of Bloodless. We worked tirelessly, day in and day out for months, until finally we had quelled the worst of the virus. The rest was a matter of stamping it out wherever we happened across the odd victim. Although we could never become complacent, we had spread enough awareness about the cure and its administration to ensure that the virus would never become rampant again.
Lives were saved. Families were reunited. Members of TSL were declared heroes and held in much higher esteem as fighters and protectors of humankind than the IBSI had ever been. Over the months, we had been featured on the news so much we became like movie stars. We couldn’t go anywhere these days without being recognized—at least, the core members of our group couldn’t: Derek and I and our immediate family and closest friends, who were at the heart of TSL’s leadership.
Three months after taking over from the IBSI, we decided to change TSL’s name. The Shadow League no longer seemed like an appropriate name for our organization. We were no longer shadows. We were the predominant protective organization. Thus, we changed our name to the Global Agency for Supernatural Protection, aka GASP.
Derek was the formal chairman of GASP and was ultimately in charge of making decisions. He was the CEO, the boss man, whatever you wanted to call him. This was a role that my husband slotted into easily. As reluctant a king as he might’ve been in the earlier stages of his life, he was used to the role of leadership by now, and he bore the responsibility better than anyone. The rest of us had high management positions—and in those early months of suppressing the Bloodless, each of us had a specific region that we were responsible for.
But once the Bloodless were no longer a threat, the focus of GASP shifted to the second problem that had plagued Earth for decades—a problem that the IBSI had never been well-equipped to solve: the problem of meddlesome supernaturals other than Bloodless. Supernaturals who came from the supernatural dimension with the sole intention of causing trouble—those that used humans for whatever nefarious purposes they had in mind. Humans were a delicacy not only to vampires. This was where our supernatural army came into play; the ogres, werewolves, Hawks, witches and dragons that we had allied with.
One of the earliest problems that we successfully solved was the infestation of merpeople that plagued the coasts, making the beaches too dangerous to frequent. It was our dragons who helped with this, as they had once helped The Shade get rid of an infestation. We had a huge horde of dragons spend months in a row swimming along the coasts and devouring as many merpeople as they could. After four months of the dragons’ nonstop assault, and God knew how many eaten merfolk, the merfolk became more cautious about roaming shallow waters and soon, they became a rare sighting. There were still reports of them causing trouble to boats and ships in deep water, but those complaints too were becoming less common.
The merfolk had apparently decided that the prospect of human flesh was not worth the risk of becoming a dragon’s next meal. The dragons, of course, had been quite happy to do this job. Merfolk flesh was not their favorite food, but it was certainly not something they would turn down.
Another problem we’d managed to solve was intruding ogres. They mainly encroached in mountain regions, particularly in Canada. We’d had our army of allied ogres storm the worst-affected areas. They, too, were more than happy to do this job, for they had permission from their king Anselm to eat whatever ogres they found (I hadn’t known ogres could descend into cannibalism). Food often seemed to be a good motivator for supernaturals.
Word soon spread among the rebel ogres, and they, like the mermaids, decided that it was no longer worth causing trouble on Earth. They soon chose to stick to the supernatural realm for food.
We also had a surprisingly large number of meddlesome werewolves who had taken up residence in huge swathes of forest. Ironically, the Mortclaws would have been good people for this job, had they been allied to us and still in their monstrous forms. They’d had a keen appetite for their own kind. But they had been cured of that tendency by Mona, and in fact, we no longer even knew where they were. Neither did Bastien. Apparently, they had been driven out of The Woodlands and forced to take shelter in some other distant place in the supernatural realm. So our army of werewolves worked together to drive out their meddlesome compatriots, along with the assistance of a team of witches.
We’d tried to work as strategically as possible to root out each and every major disturbance, and now the world was a far different place than it had been two years ago.
It was truly amazing how much Earth had changed in such a short amount of time. I had been expecting it to take far longer, but I supposed our success was simply a testament to what could happen under good leadership and when everybody worked together in harmony and cooperation.
Nowadays supernatural crime still existed, of course, but it was just like any other crime—whether it be among humans or supernaturals, evil existed everywhere. There was no escaping it. And that was what we at GASP were occupied with these days. We weren’t away from The Shade nearly as much as we used to be. We had centers and agents all over the world who were trained in handling supernatural situations
, and we still had clusters of our supernatural army to help out in various places—as well as witches on call when we needed them. After having been in the trenches getting our hands dirty for the past two years, now the majority of our work was strategy and high-level management, both of which we could do from home. Derek stalking about the living room in his blue checkered pajamas while in the midst of intense conversations with our agents was a daily sight in our home. It helped that as vampires we didn’t need to sleep much. We could accommodate most time zones.
There were still occasions, however, when we were called out: for the most difficult cases. The cases that nobody else could solve.
We had received one such call yesterday, from Europe. The Greek island of Crete, to be precise. Strange happenings had been going on surrounding the archaeological site of Knossos. People—tourists and locals—going missing. Unexplained noises during the night. Vehicles mangled in odd ways. Some superstitious locals were afraid that the Minotaur had returned from the hidden ruins of its labyrinth. I supposed I couldn’t blame them for fearing this; when their eyes had been opened to so many other types of supernatural creatures over the past few decades, why rule out the Minotaur?
But yeah… I doubted we had a Minotaur on our hands. More likely it was some other kind of meddlesome supernatural.
Our troop was due to leave in a few hours’ time.
I rolled over in our bed where I’d been trying to catch a bit of sleep before our departure. Derek was already up. And on the phone. I could hear his voice drifting from the kitchen.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes and stretching.
If there was one thing that I could say about this crazy life I was thrust into at the age of seventeen, it was that it never got boring.
Grace
Lawrence had no idea how gorgeous he looked after a long day of skiing in the Alps. His locks of sandy blond hair were all mussed and touching the corners of his eyes as he pulled off his hat and goggles at the entrance to our log cabin. His lips and cheeks were still flushed, eyes alight and invigorated from the cold and the exercise.