A Shade of Vampire 31: A Twist of Fates (7 page)

M
y father
, mother and I arrived at the Port before everyone else. We waited on the jetty, watching as people gathered. I began checking everyone’s names off in my head. Every member of the group arrived on time, except Lucas and Jeramiah, who were a couple of minutes late.

Then it was time for us to leave. We gathered in a circle, and the witches among us vanished us away from The Shade, to the portal located on the nearby abandoned island that led to The Trunchlands.

I must’ve taken this route hundreds of times by now. I felt like I could find my way from the island’s beach to the gate hidden in the well with my eyes closed.

We leapt through the hole and arrived on the ogres’ beach. I barely even had time to check if anybody was around before the witches vanished us again, straight to the shore of The Sanctuary.

I gazed up and down the length of the shore, memories washing over me.
The Sanctuary
. It had played such a huge role in our history—my parents’ especially.

We were unable to penetrate the boundary, of course. They still kept it up at all times. Not even the witches among us could pass through, because they were not official residents.

We ended up yelling, which was what we normally had to do if there was nobody roaming the beach on arrival.

We were kept waiting about ten minutes before a blond warlock showed up.

“We are here to speak with Loira Sulvece,” Ibrahim said immediately.

The warlock eyed us. His face was vaguely familiar. I was sure I’d seen him before, though I couldn’t remember how or when. The main thing was that he recognized us. He nodded, then vanished.

We were left to wait yet another fifteen minutes before a thin, wiry woman with limp blonde hair and an odd stiff-shouldered dress appeared on the beach.

“Loira,” Corrine said, and we all moved closer.

Loira pursed her lips as she cast her glance over each of us. “Why have you come to see me?” she asked, wary.

“We have come to question you about an event in your past,” Ibrahim said. “Some years ago, you were working for the IBSI, were you not?”

Loira rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t working
for
them. It was a trade.”

“Well, whatever it was,” Ibrahim said impatiently, “we have some questions for you about it. If you could oblige we’d be eternally grateful… I’m sure you remember the time when Atticus put you in charge of an investigation regarding the disappearance of five specimens from the hunters’ lab?”

She nodded slowly, her eyes narrowing. “Why do you ask?”

“Because we badly need to find out what happened to those specimens. We have been informed that when you were conducting the investigation, it basically lost steam before it even started because you hit a complete dead-end. Is that what happened? Did you really have no idea where they could’ve gone? If there’s anything at all you can tell us, however insignificant—”

Loira held up a hand, causing Ibrahim to stall. Then a small smile stretched her narrow lips. The amusement spread to her eyes.

“You want to know what happened to the specimens,” she repeated.

“Yes!” Ibrahim said.

“Well, the truth is… I took them.”

I did a double-take. We all gaped at her.

“What?” several of us spluttered at once.

She rolled her eyes again. “I took them! The kidnapping was done by me. I set it up to look like it was something more mysterious, and when I was given the job of tracking down the culprit, it was easy to shut the investigation down—since Atticus himself hardly cared anyway…”

“Why did you want those specimens?” Ibrahim asked.

“So you have them now?” I blurted over the top of him.

“One question at a time,” the witch muttered, taking a step back. “I wanted the specimens because, well, they were unique. There was nothing else like them. I wanted to see what their blood was capable of in my own experiments. And as to whether I have them now?”

I held my breath.

“No,” she replied, shrugging.

My heart hit my stomach.

“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t be sure where they are now.”

“What?” I practically roared. I felt the urge to grab the woman and shake her. “B-But what happened? You just said you took them!”

“Yes, I took them… I had them with me for a week or so… and then I gave them away.”

“WHAT?”

“I received a rather generous offer from an interested third party.”

“Who?” I seethed.

“A harpy.”

Oh, God. No, no, no! Confounded woman!

“I gave up the specimens to a harpy named Miral in exchange for a sack of silkweed,” Loira explained, as if anyone other than Ibrahim and Corrine knew what silkweed was. “I didn’t even have to think about it. I had already drawn the blood I needed from the babies.”

I was ready to strangle the woman.

“A harpy!” my father and I hissed.

“You gave
babies
to a harpy,” I clarified, even as I realized that we needed to keep our tone in check. The witch was beginning to look shifty and irritated by it. She could, after all, simply vanish back into her home and refuse to answer any more questions. Then we really would be screwed.

“I’m sorry,” I added quickly. “It’s just that…” I exhaled. “The specimens are really, really important to us.”

“Well,” she said, “as I said, a harpy took them. She and her four sisters had set up residence on an abandoned island in the Deep North. She said they had established an orphanage there and were collecting abandoned children… I saw no harm in giving the things to a creature who was clearly desperate to be a mother.”

My stomach clenched. Loira had obviously just wanted to get rid of them. She must have known that a “harpy orphanage” was something no child should ever have to visit, much less grow up in. (Assuming they would grow up.)

“Where is this island?” Corrine demanded. “Where
exactly
in the Deep North?”

“I can show you on a map if you like,” Loira said, nonchalant.

“Yes.
Please
,” Corrine said.

“Wait here then.”

As she vanished, the rest of us exchanged disbelieving glances. Talk about stranger than fiction. A nest of harpies raising a group of halfblood-Hawk chicks. If they could even be called chicks. I wondered what else those harpies had raised…

I was relieved when the witch returned five minutes later. I had feared for more than a moment that she might’ve simply gotten fed up with us and decided to make an early departure.

She had brought with her an old map. We moved over to some rocks, where she spread it out and indicated to Ibrahim and Corrine where exactly the harpies’ island was situated.

In the Deep North was no exaggeration. No exaggeration at all.

W
ell
, this was already getting off to a rather unpromising start. After Loira left us—even having the gall to wish us good luck—I heaved a sigh.

I wondered if that woman had children of her own. If she did, I doubted she would’ve been so quick to offer up the specimens’ lives in exchange for… whatever the hell silkweed was.

At least she’d had the decency to leave the map with us. Ibrahim and Corrine huddled over it before instructing everybody to get in a circle.

The ground beneath us disappeared, and when we reached a solid surface again, the temperature had dropped dramatically. My vision focusing, I found myself gazing around at a beach, completely caked with snow. We were on the shore of a frozen island. Even the ocean behind us was iced over.

It came as a shock to my system. Barring Cruor, which could get very cold, most of the places I had visited in the supernatural dimension had moderate to hot temperatures. This was the first time I could remember seeing actual snow at this end of the universe.

Luckily, all of us being supernaturals, we weren’t too affected by the cold. The witches sparked fire in their palms to warm themselves. Kailyn, Lucas and I scooped up sparks from them to warm our own hands.

This island appeared to be much larger than I had expected. Its shore stretched out for miles—I couldn’t even see the end of it. I rose into the air to gain a bird’s eye view, higher and higher, until I could see the shape of the island. But before my eyes reached the opposite shore, they lingered on an elevated dot near the center of the land mass. There was some kind of construction down there—the only construction on this whole island, apparently. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of construction it was because it was covered in snow, but it was obvious that was where we needed to head.

Ibrahim and Corrine floated up to join me, and I pointed it out to them. Then we returned to the beach for the witches to transport us all swiftly in one go.

As we approached the construction, we realized it was a large three-story house constructed entirely of wood. From what I knew of harpies, they tended to live in nests—so I doubted this was constructed by them. If they were still living here, they must’ve had some other kind of help to build it. As drafty as it looked—with some of the uneven window panes completely devoid of shutters—it was still certainly more habitable for non-harpies than an open-air nest.

I shuddered. Not from the cold, but from the scene I was envisioning inside the house, if this was indeed still an orphanage…

The closer we got to the building, the older and more rundown it looked. Not only were some of the windows wide open, but there were cracks in the walls themselves. The wood in the front door had warped, its edges hardly even fitting the doorframe anymore. Perhaps this had once been a decent place, but if it had, too many years had passed since its last maintenance.

We stopped five feet away from the entrance.

My father turned to Ibrahim. “Please cast an invisibility spell over us.”

Ibrahim obliged.

It was best that the harpies didn’t spot us until we had a proper game plan—the first step of which was obvious to me.

“I’ll go and check out the house and report back,” I said, thinning myself and soaring forward. I sank through the front door, steeling myself for the other side.

I arrived in a small entrance room, bare, except for a pile of damp logs in one corner. A vile smell pervaded the air, making me wonder what kind of toilet facilities they had in here… if any.

I headed through the door to my right, emerging in a rickety winding hallway whose walls were covered with cobwebs, floors caked with dirt and feathers. A candle burned in a basket at intervals against the walls. I heard the sound of murmuring further up. As I turned a corner, I caught sight of the dim glow of light escaping around a doorframe.

Hardly breathing, I approached the door and poked my head around it.

The room was bare, except for a bed of kindling in one corner. Lying on the bed were two infants with skirts of black feathers around their waists—infants whom I immediately recognized as ogres. And surrounding them were two harpies. Their heads were those of women—with long, matted hair—yet their short, stunted bodies were those of feathery birds. Both of them had coal-black feathers, with hair to match.

They were cooing softly—eerily—over the infants, apparently putting them to sleep.

Tearing my eyes away from the bizarre scene, I moved into the next room along. There were no harpies in this one, but there was another bed of kindling, upon which lay three werewolf cubs. Their fur was pure white, and their eyes were closed. They looked terribly thin.

The next room held another black-feathered harpy bending over a bed of twigs. She was hovering over five… infants. But what kind of infants, I had no idea. I’d never seen this species before in my life. Their small forms were humanoid, but their skin was scaly and the color of ash. Despite the scales, they were not dragons. I was sure of it. They each had two tiny bumps on either side of their foreheads. These were… something else. Something undiscovered.

I wondered where the harpies had found all these children. It would not have surprised me if some of them had been stolen from their parents.

It was also odd to me that they were all so young—babies. There weren’t even any toddlers around. If this orphanage had been going for years… What had happened to the other children they housed, who would have grown up? What had they done with them? Maybe I didn’t want to know that answer…

I searched the rest of the ground floor—not finding any more children or harpies—and then the upstairs, which was by far the most dilapidated part of the house. Most of the windows hung open for the freezing breeze to flow in, and there was no indication that anybody lived up here or had even ventured up here recently except for the odd feather scattered on the dusty floors.

I returned to the ground floor, defeated.

Our specimens were not here. Maybe the harpies had done something to them.

I needed to speak to those birdwomen.

I hurried back outside to where the others were waiting and resumed my solid state so that they could see me. A hand grabbed me and pulled me closer; it felt like a woman’s hand—my mother’s, perhaps.

“So there are definitely harpies in there, and it appears to still be a running orphanage,” I said, even as I winced at the latter word. “But I didn’t find any signs of the specimens. I’m going to go back and talk to them now. I’m thinking it’s best only one or two of us go, in case it makes them nervous.”

“I’ll come with you.” A voice spoke to my right, the same person who had gripped my hand. It was Rose.

Ibrahim removed the invisibility spell from her.

“Okay,” I said, taking her hand. I looked toward the general direction of the others. “We’ll be back soon.”

Rose and I headed to the building and knocked, as was decent.

There were no sounds of anybody approaching for at least a minute. Then a grating voice called, “Who is it?”

“A brother and a sister who mean you no harm,” were the first words that came to mind.

Maybe she’d think we were orphans, come for shelter. Two rather overgrown orphans.

I heard the sound of flapping wings.

“Push the door open,” the unpleasant voice commanded. “It’s not locked!”

It occurred to me that it might be difficult for them to open doors. That was probably why they kept open windows in the top floor, to serve as entrances into the building… even if it did mean allowing the freezing cold to seep down into the entire house. I imagined many babies wouldn’t have survived the cold, not to speak of the apparent lack of nourishment.

Rose took the initiative and pushed the door, a little too forcefully. It sprang open, causing the harpy to screech and flap back to avoid being hit by its heavy weight.

The harpy glared at us. Her face was triangular, with small, mean lips, and heavy, untamed brows.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“First tell me who you two are,” she said, eyeing us over with suspicion.

We had to be cautious with these harpies. A graze of their talons could potentially be deadly for me if I got caught in my physical form—but I wasn’t sure exactly what effect it would have on Rose as a vampire.

“My name is Benjamin Novak, and this is my twin sister, Rose. We have come to inquire about some former residents of your esteemed establishment… We don’t intend to take up much of your time.”

Her chest puffed at my compliment. Although her eyes were still narrowed, she said, “All right. Come in. My name is Miral.”

Good. This is the woman we need to be talking to.

I was a bit wary about moving inside with Rose since she would not be able to thin herself if the harpy lashed out for some reason. So although we moved inside, I remained by the door, keeping it open in case we needed to make a quick exit. It wasn’t like the harpies minded drafts, anyway.

“Over a decade ago,” I began, “a witch made a trade with you—a witch of The Sanctuary, named Loira Sulvece. Do you remember that?”

She ruffled her feathers before nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I remember. I remember every infant who passes through our home.”

“Passes through”. What exactly does that mean?

“So she gave you five infants—part vampire, part Hawk—is that correct?”

“Yes that’s right.”

“Do they still live with you?” I asked.

“No.”

“What happened to them?”

“Why do you want to know?” she asked wryly.

I sighed. I didn’t even know how to start explaining the truth to this harpy, and we didn’t have all day. I sufficed by saying, “We just need to know that they are safe. That’s all.”

“Why? Are you related by blood to them?”

“We might be.”

She clucked her tongue, scoffing. “Well, they are
long
gone.”

“What happened to them?”

“My sisters and I took them in and raised them as though they were born of us, but as soon as they learned to fly, they escaped!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “The ungrateful vermin… I knew we should have clipped their wings the day they arrived.”

My breath hitched at imagining the trauma the kids of this “establishment” must go through on a daily basis at the hands of these creatures.

“Okay,” I managed. “So they escaped… and they actually
grew up
in your care? They developed and aged?”

“Yes, they aged!” she snapped. “Their wings grew and they worked out how to use them!”

“How old were they when they left?” I asked.

“About five.”

“And did you not try to find them?”

“We did!” she insisted. “Like besotted parents, we did! But we couldn’t find them anywhere. They were gone. Never to return. Without so much as a thanks or goodbye.” She ground her teeth spitefully, her expression darkening. “I suspect, though, that they met with some nasty end. Stupid little twits who thought they could survive without us…”

Exchanging glances with Rose, I swallowed.
Okay.
Whatever we did next, one thing had become clear—while we were here, whatever kids remained in this orphanage, we needed to get them out. Even the ogres.

“So this is all you can tell us,” I concluded. “They escaped one night when they were about five years old, and although you tried to look for them, you never succeeded in finding them.”

She nodded defiantly.

“Okay, well, thank you for your help, fair lady. We will not take up your valuable time any longer.”

Rose and I backed out of the house. I reached for the door handle, pulling it politely closed behind us.

“Crazy woman,” Rose murmured with a shiver as we made our way back to the rest of the group.

It occurred to me that Miral could of course have been lying to us about the specimens—that maybe she and her sisters had done something to them, maybe even murdered them—but Miral didn’t exactly strike me as the type of woman to hide that fact. She would’ve told us if she and her sisters had ended them.

The rest of our group had overheard the conversation—they weren’t standing far away.

“Let’s move around the back of the building,” I muttered.

Rose and I traipsed through the snow around the building, the others following us.

It appeared that it was nap time for these kids. After which the harpies would presumably leave them alone for some time and retreat to different parts of the house. This would be the best time to get the babies out, while the harpies were distracted. I didn’t want to turn this into a war and end up killing the harpies—we just needed to get those kids out of there.

Rose and I explained the situation, and everybody agreed with my idea of organizing a rescue mission. We discussed the plan in hushed tones before Kailyn, Lucas and I entered the building in our subtle forms.

We kept watch on the three bedrooms containing children until they had all fallen asleep, and the harpies gathered in the corridor.

Spreading their wings, the harpies flew to the staircase and headed upstairs. I wasn’t sure what they were going to do now—go hunt for food perhaps? Whatever food existed in this desolate landscape. Or perhaps they went to neighboring islands to hunt.

Whatever the case, we needed to be swift. We assumed our physical forms and I entered the room closest to me, which contained the strange gray babies. Kailyn entered the room with the werewolf cubs, while Lucas was left with the ogres. The doors hadn’t been closed, fortunately, which kept us from making noise.

Staring down at the sleeping infants whose species I was still trying to figure out, I dipped down and managed to scoop three of them into my arms. Their sleek skin was strange to the touch, and they felt far too cold.
A human baby wouldn’t last an hour in this place.

Lucas and Kailyn emerged in the corridor at almost the same time—Kailyn holding two of the cubs, and Lucas the two ogres. All the infants remained asleep, except for one of the ogres… who had woken up and apparently taken a keen interest in Lucas’ nose. The baby face-splatted him in an attempt to grab it, even as Lucas jerked his head back.