A Shade of Vampire 31: A Twist of Fates Read Free

corrupted later on. I know there must be others like my husband, others within the organization who have become disillusioned, and who desperately want out… They feel trapped, like he did. But they know there is no way to retire without fearing they and their family will be monitored for the rest of their lives… The mortality rate of ex-IBSI managers is frighteningly high… I suspect sometimes they’re knocked off even without a reason. Just to be safe. I fear for my life and the lives of my daughters, though we weren’t even actively involved. That’s why we left Australia.”
    “Can you name others who wish to get out?” I asked.
    Mrs. Thornton shook her head, although something told me that she did have names in mind, but simply didn’t feel comfortable outing them to us.
    I frowned at her. “Then why are you telling us any of this? What’s the point?”
    She looked directly at me, holding the gaze of her husband’s murderer. Her voice was pleading as she replied, “Because there is nobody else. Your League is our only hope.”

Corrine
    I was used to stress . We all were. Heck, a day without stress almost felt incomplete. But this whole Grace as a vampire-zombie nightmare really was taking the cake.
    After Ben, Derek and my husband left, I snatched up the four unused test tubes—their caps color-coded purple, green, orange and blue—that Ben had brought back from Chicago. Ben had suspected that these four tubes held genuine ingredients for the antidote, and that it had been the fifth, red capped one that was the culprit. I hated to think what could have been in that to make Grace’s turning complete so suddenly.
    While we had dealt with the trees, to me, the next logical step was to examine these first four ingredients. I’d try to figure out what they were. If Ibrahim and Derek were unsuccessful in tracking down the doctor and finding out the fifth ingredient, if I was able to spot a pattern in the first four, maybe, just maybe, I would be able to take a guess as to what the fifth one was.
    I vanished myself to my spell room in the Sanctuary and laid each of the tubes on the table. I stared down at the colors, swishing the liquid within them a little. The liquid in the purple tube had a grayish hue, while the liquid in the orange had an… orange hue. The other two bottles were all but transparent.
    I had to be careful not to drop or damage any of them while I opened and examined them. These were the last set we had.
    I unscrewed each of the caps and sniffed the liquid. They all emitted quite a distinct smell—and one in particular was familiar. The liquid in the green tube. It gave off the same nutty, sweetish odor as the trees we had brought back from Aviary. This disappointed me greatly. In the back of my mind, I had been daring to hope that maybe the missing ingredient was derived from the trees we had hijacked. We had a whole cargo ship full of them, waiting by the Port. I could have mixed up an extract with these four tubes and tried to feed it to Grace. After all, she was already a Bloodless. She could hardly get worse . Could she?
    I poured out the tiniest drop of each of the liquids onto a palette and replaced the caps on the tubes before proceeding to examine them closely. After half an hour, I began to spot something common in each of them and came to an interesting conclusion, but wanted to get a second opinion from Shayla. I fetched her from the hospital and brought her back to my spell room.
    “Interesting,” she murmured, bending over the tubes after ten minutes of inspection. “All of these appear to be plant-based.”
    “It is strange, isn’t it,” I said. I’d thought I might have been mistaken.
    “As you say, one of them is definitely from the trees we brought back… but the others… Hm.”
    Their scents were not like any plant I’d come across on Earth before. I could well believe that they had also come from Aviary. “What do you think?” I wondered aloud.
    “It’s