I couldn’t stop my mind from returning to Thornton, replaying those last, unnerving moments of his life back in my head.
And I couldn’t stop myself from wondering:
What exactly did he mean by it all?
Grace
The first sense that returned to me was my sense of smell. I was breathing in an overpoweringly bitter stench. It made me want to retch. A round of coughs escaped my throat, drawing me further into consciousness. I was no longer surrounded by water. In fact, my body felt bone dry, if very cold. But my head ached terribly, like someone had just clubbed me with a baseball bat. I unglued my eyelids, my vision slowly coming into focus as I tried to prop myself up on my elbows. Beneath me was some kind of ultra-thin mattress. I could feel a hard, chilly floor beneath my joints.
My sight becoming crisper, I took in my surroundings. I was in some kind of long, rectangular room… an old loft. Heavy metal beams ran from the ceiling to the walls, and the gap-filled floor was lined with holey wooden floorboards.
A gas lamp burned in one corner, casting an orange glow around the loft. It was the only source of light except for rays of pale moonlight that spilled down through a central ceiling window. A ladder extended from the floor directly beneath it and connected to hooks under the windowpane.
A few feet away from me was a worn sleeping bag and an austere-looking mattress like mine. I gazed down to realize that a second sleeping bag had been placed on me—it covered my legs and had been pulled up to my stomach.
Then, in another corner, was a pile of utensils—an old-fashioned steam kettle, a few metal plates and spoons, steel pots and what looked like a camping stove.
I realized that a thin veil of smoke was pervading the area. I caught sight of a burning object—a coil—set several feet away from the base of the ladder. That was where the bitter smell was emanating from. It looked like the type of coil one would use to fend off mosquitoes. It felt far too cold for there to be mosquitoes in this place, though.
I clutched my throbbing head. How long have I been out for?
Then it dawned on me. My hands. They were no longer locked behind my back. I was able to move my arms freely. I stared down at my red raw wrists. Who removed the cuffs?
As much as it was a relief, the sight of my free hands caused a surge of panic to erupt within me. I suddenly feared that I was back in the hunters’ base—thrust up in some old, dilapidated loft, until I came to and they could complete their interrogation. Who else would’ve had the handcuffs’ key but the hunters?
But why would the hunters want to free my hands? Especially after all the damage I’d caused—even with my hands tied. What hunter in their right mind would have removed the restraints?
I dared climb to my feet. It took me a few attempts before I was finally able to stand without feeling faint.
I moved slowly and cautiously toward the ladder in the center of the room that led up to the skylight, even as floorboards groaned beneath my feet. Gripping the sides of the metal ladder, I began climbing up. Once the top of my head was brushing against the glass, I gripped the handle of the window and pulled downward. With an unpleasant grinding sound, it opened, sending a pile of debris falling down into my hair and onto my face.
Brushing myself off, I climbed a step higher, until my head poked through the window. A strong, bitingly cold wind immediately took away my breath and chilled me to the bone… But not as much as the vision that sprawled out all around me. I couldn’t even begin to estimate how many feet I was above the ground. I’d just pushed my head out from the roof of one of the numerous skyscrapers spiking the skyline… I was in the midst of a city. An old, dilapidated city that looked like it’d been ravaged by one too many violent riots.
It was hard to spot a building, short or tall, whose windows weren’t smashed. Whose doors weren’t hammered in. Whose walls weren’t crumbling. The roads were littered with all sorts of junk—furniture, battered vehicles, and what looked chillingly like the remains of bodies.
The truth of where I was dawned on me as I looked further into the distance. I spotted the long black river, beyond which was a high, solid electric fence.
This meant that the hunters had not recaptured me.
Someone else had.
My eyes were drawn to a sudden spurt of movement in the street below. A tall, pale, naked form loped along the sidewalk just by my building. It wasn’t alone. Ten more followed after it, emerging from behind a crashed truck. I watched with bated breath as they passed the entrance to my building. They continued on their way down the road
Now that I looked more closely, I spotted another group of pale, skeletal figures, moving along the road parallel to me. And then another crowd, several streets along. I realized that there was even movement in the lower levels of the high building opposite me.
Bloodless.
Could they be in this building too?
I had escaped the hunters, I knew that for sure now. They would never bring me here. But where I had escaped to was now another matter entirely… I was out in a wilderness, right in the heart of Bloodless territory.
Apparently, vast swathes of Chicago on this side of the river had been overtaken by the monsters. And on the other side was the IBSI’s base, and perhaps some safe, well-maintained residential areas. In all likelihood, the hunters had deliberately contaminated that river water with something that repelled Bloodless to keep them from crossing over it.
I furrowed my brows, my last moments of consciousness in those murky waters returning to me. My head had hit against a hard surface. Something above me.
What had that been?
How had I gotten here?
Who had saved me?
A myriad of questions flooded my brain. But, as memories of the past forty-eight hours returned to me, a single question rose above all others. A question that was the sole cause of my being here in the first place. And a question whose answer I couldn’t help but feel held the key to the mysteries plaguing my mind regarding the IBSI, Atticus, Georgina… and Lawrence.
WHAT IS FOEBA?
Brucella
“Don’t expect me to catch them again…”
I couldn’t deny that the witch’s words gave me chills, but there was not a single molecule within me that was willing to reconsider my plan. This was the way forward.
Admittedly, it was good of Loira to agree to help me again at all. It wasn’t like she owed me any favors. She could have just dismissed me as crazy like my husband, blasted me off her territory, and returned home without another thought for me.
Indeed, her assisting The Woodlands all those decades ago had also been generous. She had not asked for much in return—just a few sacks of clipped wolf nails for her apothecary.
I was aware of how ironic the situation must have seemed to her—one of the very leaders who’d commissioned her to rid us of the Mortclaws now requesting her to let them go, free as birds.
At least she did not waste time by pressing for an explanation. Perhaps she just wanted to get the task over and done with, and see the back of me. She knew from past experience how bullish and persistent I could be, so I supposed that this was wise on her part.
After agreeing to assist me, Loira said that she needed to return home before leaving. I had interrupted a family lunch, and there were also other plans she’d made. She couldn’t say when she would return, but she said that it was unlikely to be before the end of the day…maybe not even before the next day. I cringed at the thought of wasting so much time, but bit my tongue and nodded curtly. I had no choice.
I found somewhere sheltered on the beach to set up camp, and thus began my wait. I breathed in the ocean air, attempting to calm my nerves. Nerves that had been knotting up my stomach ever since I’d first laid eyes on that girl… Victoria. What an odious name.
I didn’t even understand what Bastien saw in her, anyway. She had no appeal like my Rona did. A plain, shapeless body. Straight, lackluster hair. A wholly unremarkable face. And she was a h
uman, of all things. How did Bastien ever think that it would work out? The children he begot with her would be stripped of half their potential before they were even born. They would be frail little babes, in comparison to the strong cubs he would have with my Rona. And then what about Victoria aging rapidly compared to him? Human years were very different from werewolf years. Would she become a vampire to combat this? My blood boiled just thinking of it. Bastien Mortclaw married to a vampire! Preposterous!
There was only one person who had lost their mind in this whole situation and that was my poor, weak-minded nephew.
My heart pounding, I tried to stop speculating and thinking about the hussy. Yes, she might have Bastien now, but it would not be for long…
I thought momentarily of my husband, the fury that would be burning in his eyes if he saw what I was doing right now. Then I turned my thoughts once again to the Mortclaws. They were what I needed to focus my concentration on now. In truth, I was still largely in the dark regarding how exactly I was going to pull this off. How I would manage to control their actions once the witch did free them. But I was a fast thinker under pressure. Given what was at stake, I trusted that I would find a way. I would have no choice.
I could not think about the consequences that could potentially ensue for The Woodlands again after freeing them.
I would have to face that when we came to it.
Relief washed over me when Loira finally returned. Her mouth was grim as she approached.
“Are you still sure that this will help The Woodlands?” she asked.
I nodded, stoic. It occurred to me now that perhaps her delaying our journey had been an attempt to get me to reconsider my request during the time that I’d been forced to wait.
“Well, you’re the ones who will suffer if you’re wrong,” Loira said with a sigh. “Let us depart.”
She made us vanish and reappear on the scorched, dead land known as Murther—a small islet with no neighboring land masses for hundreds of miles. Hundreds of years ago, it had been home to a thriving little town of nymphs, but as with several other islets in the supernatural realm, it had become the victim of an angry dragon. As the tale went, an old dragon had embarked on a long voyage—to where, exactly, I forgot now—but he had stopped over on this luscious island of nymphs, requesting water and a meal. He should have been wiser. Men never did well to ask nymphs favors for anything.
The spirits seduced him with their beauty, their sparkling eyes, and shimmering skin, with the intent of making an exotic meal out of him. Unfortunately for the nymphs, however, the dragon had come to his senses in time and in his rage burned the entire islet to a crisp. The nymphs had abandoned it, and Murther Island had remained abandoned ever since… Ever since Loira had made it the permanent prison of the Mortclaws.
As I gazed around the black and gray landscape, waves of memories washed over me. Few knew the true history of the Mortclaws, how they’d evolved into such creatures of nightmares. Their legend had begun with the dawn of the black witches, during the time when the black witches were rampant and striving to regain the lost powers of their Ancients. A particularly pernicious group of such witches had desired to conduct a ritual to test how far their powers had advanced. The ritual involved enhancing a supernatural species’ powers above and beyond their natural capabilities. The black witches always did have a penchant for werewolves. They often utilized them for their nefarious activities—they even slaughtered them for their blood, which they used in potions or simply drank neat.
It was logical and convenient for the black witches to make werewolves the subject of their new experiment. Thus, a group of them—led by a particularly vicious warlock—had descended on The Woodlands.
At the time—many years ago—the Mortclaws had been a normal wolf pack, just like any other. Well… almost. They had been one of the most powerful tribes in our country. They had been feared and respected, and other packs usually avoided getting into conflicts with them at all costs and stayed far away from their territory due to their aggressive nature. Their bloodline was pure and strong, and it showed in their physical prowess. They had been among the largest wolves to ever roam our land.
Given the natural prowess of the Mortclaw tribe, the black witches had chosen them specifically for their ritual. The witches had swooped down on The Woodlands one fateful night and surrounded the pack’s mountain abode. They had trapped all the residents inside and begun their ritual—a ritual that had lasted three days, and whose details nobody knew but the Mortclaws themselves. Whatever the black witches had done to them during those three days, by the time they had finished, the Mortclaws were practically a new species—a species unlike anything any of us had ever witnessed before.
They had become the products of a heinous, black ritual.
And once the witches were done with their experiment, satisfied by the progression of their magic, they’d simply left The Woodlands—after unleashing the Mortclaws upon the rest of The Woodlands’ inhabitants.
None of us had had any idea what had hit us at first as the four-legged nightmares began sweeping through the land, ravaging the lairs of innocent tribes in their wake.
The more superstitious among us believed them to be demons, or ghosts of some kind. They certainly looked like demons. Their appearance was threatening enough, being large, muscular beasts with striking, jet-black hair. But after the witches had meddled with them, although they retained the appearance of wolves for the most part, they had become almost like ghouls.
Suddenly they had developed the ability to assume a subtle state and vanish at will, reappearing without warning at the most unexpected moment. They had enlarged to about twice their former size—including their jaws and claws—and they possessed the power to shift between wolf and human at will.
They had also crossed a boundary that no wolf I’d ever known or heard of had ever crossed before. As if needlessly slaughtering their countrymen wasn’t enough, they had turned to cannibalism.
They feasted on the corpses they felled like ravenous vultures, stripping the bodies to the bone. It was as if there was nothing else that appealed to their taste buds anymore but the warm flesh and hot gushing blood of their compatriots.
I doubted that we’d ever experienced the full extent of the bizarre new powers that the witches had endowed them with. But perhaps the most chilling and disturbing of all was the way their eyes had changed. On looking into them, they could appear normal—extremely vivid in color, but nothing too out of the ordinary… that was until red tinged their pupils. A boiling, hellish red that spread across the entire eyeball with barely a second’s notice. If the unfortunate onlooker didn’t break eye contact in time, their own eyes would begin to burn from the inside out until their pupils were simply black holes.
Many wolves did not survive the trauma—indeed, it was thought that if the onlookers’ eyes were glued for too long upon the Mortclaws’, their gaze would drill even deeper and carve crevices in their brains.
Orion, Detrius’ uncle and my rather abhorrent relative, had been the victim of one of the Mortclaws’ burns. It had rendered him blind for life, but somehow he had managed to tear himself away before his brain was affected—Loira herself had been unable to restore vision in him after the assault. She’d simply cosmetically altered the appearance of his eyes so that he looked like a regular blind person rather than one who had gaping holes through his eyeballs.
The devastation caused by the Mortclaws became quickly widespread, due to their ability to move with the speed of a witch and manifest themselves without the slightest bit of warning. Boundaries meant nothing to them—there were no boundaries that could keep them out. There was no way for us to stay safe, to protect our families from their horrific new appetite.
Many wolves had believed that this would the end for us. But I was not among such believers. Neither was Sergius, my sister and brother-in-law, and a number of other strong alpha leaders. We had all combined together in what was arguably the most urgent a
nd secretive meeting ever called in the history of The Woodlands and decided that our only course of action was to seek the help of The Sanctuary’s witches. The white witches.
Thus, we embarked on a journey to the witches’ realm, and after much pleading, we managed to find a single witch who was willing to help us… or at least attempt to help us.
The main obstacle that we faced was how to even catch the Mortclaws in the first place. How would we lure them out of The Woodlands? The answer to that question came the very night we returned to our homeland with Loira. We had been scoping out the area outside the Mortclaws’ lair when we caught the sound of a cub crying.
A cub.
I guessed instantly to whom that cub belonged. There was only one infant in the Mortclaws’ tribe I was aware of, and that was the baby of Vertus and Sendira Mortclaw, the alpha male and female of the pack.
Loira, with the ability to make herself invisible, vanished herself and entered the Mortclaws’ lair. When she returned, she was carrying a cub with glossy, black-as-night fur and light gray eyes. Bastien was what Vertus and Sendira had named their cub, or so I’d heard. Loira said that she’d found him alone in a crib. She hadn’t spotted any adults around. Perhaps they had all been out on a fresh killing spree.
The first thing that struck me about the baby was that he seemed to be the same size as an ordinary wolf cub—no sign of abnormal enlargement like his parents and other adults in his tribe. This made us speculate that perhaps Bastien had been left out of the black witches’ ritual, given that he was only an infant. Or at least he hadn’t been affected to the same extent the others had.
The fact that the cub was still alive, and appeared to be healthy, also led us to believe that the Mortclaws still had the ability to love and care for their young. It was a wolf’s natural instinct, after all—be they male or female. All wolves went soft in the face of cubs. Even I, who had not exactly garnered the reputation of being a softhearted woman, went soft before babies. The same was true to this day.