A Vial of Life Read online

  Splashes thundered behind me. I cast my eyes over my shoulder just in time to see a giant dog bounding toward us in the waves. I thought for a moment that Shadow had come to the rescue, until I realized that this creature was the wrong color. It wasn’t a dog. It was an enormous, shaggy brown wolf.

  As my hands slipped from the mermaid’s tail, the wolf reached the creature and, opening its heavy jaws, clamped them around the mermaid’s midriff. She let out a shriek as blood spilled from her insides and stained the water surrounding us. While the werewolf chomped on the mermaid, I leapt toward my mother. I caught her arm and held her tight, hauling her to the surface. She choked and spluttered, coughing out seawater and drawing in rasping breaths. I wrapped an arm around her waist and kicked my legs hard, propelling us both toward the shore.

  “Hurry!” the wolf growled behind us.

  I turned back to see that the wolf had let go of the mermaid—who now floated motionless in the water—and was dashing toward us. I was confused as to the wolf’s command to hurry, since it seemed that the mermaid was already dead. Then I looked beyond the corpse to see in the distance the ocean swelling. Teal-green tinged the water, a sea of scales shimmering in the moonlight beneath the ocean’s surface. Then over two dozen heads poked out of the waves—each sharing the same fearsome features as the mermaid I’d just tackled.

  I let out a gasp and kicked harder. The wolf caught up with us. He—or was it a she?—allowed my mother to climb onto his back and carried her the rest of the way to the beach while I hurried after them.

  Reaching land, my mother flopped off the werewolf and lay panting on her back on the sand, wheezing and rubbing her throat. I gazed back out toward the ocean to see the crowd of merfolk racing toward the shore.

  I glanced at the werewolf, who also looked confused—as confused as a wolf could look.

  Where have these merfolk come from? And how on earth did they all gain entrance to The Shade?

  Chapter 9: Derek

  Since we returned to The Shade, many people had inquired about our journey, so I called a meeting in the Great Dome. Sofia and I arrived in the council hall before the appointed time so that we would have a few minutes of peace before the bombardment of questions started.

  As we entered the room and headed toward the raised platform designed for the king and queen to sit upon, I stopped short. The stately chairs Vivienne had designed for Sofia and me were missing. Our raised seats had been built more like thrones than regular chairs. They were large and heavy, and had been sealed into the floor. I moved closer to see that the chairs had been unceremoniously ripped from the stone.

  I exchanged glances with Sofia. Her expression was marred with a frown.

  “Who would do this?” she whispered.

  Throughout all our time of ruling over the island, nothing like this had happened before. Heck, I didn’t think that a single chair in this room, even the movable ones surrounding the meeting table, had been taken out. Furniture in this room was to be kept as it was—specifically for the purposes of our council.

  Unnerved, I swept my eyes around the room, as if expecting to find the culprit lurking in a shadowy corner. But the Dome was empty, and there were no signs of the chairs anywhere.

  There was a knock at the door, which clicked open a second later. Xavier. He’d arrived here early, like us. Dying to find out what happened, he would’ve left Corrine with Vivienne.

  He spotted Sofia’s and my missing seats almost immediately.

  “Did you do that?” he asked, his face twisting in confusion.

  Sofia and I shook our heads. “We just got here and found it like this,” Sofia murmured. “We’ve no idea what happened.”

  I bent down on the platform, running my hand over the stumps where the legs of the chairs had been. The splinters of wood pricked my fingers, residue of where the chairs had been fixed.

  Of course, missing chairs weren’t a big deal. They could easily be replaced. It was the intent of this action that left me ill at ease. If someone had just needed to borrow a couple of chairs, they could have easily taken them from around the table. Ripping these chairs from the floor would render them unusable—they would have been badly damaged in the process. No, whoever took them wasn’t interested in chairs. This was a direct affront to Sofia and me. Who would target us in this way? I couldn’t think of a single person on the island who would do such a thing. The Shade accommodated many residents, the population being far too great for me to know everyone on a personal level, but I liked to think that my people were happy under our rule, and loved and respected the king and queen.

  Still shaken, I forced the thought aside and shifted my focus back to Xavier.

  “We will need to launch an investigation into who did this,” I said, “but for now, I don’t want this to distract from our meeting. We already set an agenda and we should stick to it until all questions are answered.”

  I pulled up one of the lower chairs from around the table and sat down at the same level as the council members. Sofia followed my lead. It wasn’t that I was power-hungry and required a special throne to lord it over all my subjects. And neither was Sofia. But when the two of us were leading a conversation, being on a raised platform allowed us to better communicate with a room full of people. We could see each person clearly as they talked, and it aided understanding. Besides, elevated seats were a sign of respect, and there was nothing wrong with that when the respect was genuine. I liked to believe that Sofia and I had done enough to command respect, rather than demand it.

  Xavier started asking questions—questions he couldn’t ask us back in the Sanctuary because Corrine had forbidden talk of anything but Vivienne’s recovery. Even though Xavier knew that the reason I’d called this meeting was to recount everything in one go rather than having to repeat it multiple times to dozens of people, he apparently couldn’t help himself. He was too anxious to hear what had happened and why we had returned without Benjamin.

  I gave in and started explaining, but I didn’t get far before the door opened again and about fifty people piled in, mostly curious vampires and witches—excluding Corrine but including Ibrahim—who had not accompanied us on the excursion. Surprisingly, there were also many present who had come with us. Neither Rose nor Caleb were among them—I assumed they had retired to bed—and the dragons were also notably absent, not that they attended many meetings anyway. They would’ve returned to their mountain apartments, no doubt eager to be reunited with their lovers.

  The newcomers gathered around the table, and surprise registered in some eyes as they noticed Sofia’s and my missing seats. Before we could be hit with a wave of questions, I cleared my throat and spoke up, “I don’t know what happened here. It is something that I must investigate later.”

  I was about to begin recounting our voyage when the door blasted open. Saira’s huge werewolf form bounded inside and skidded across the floor. Riding on her back were River’s two sisters, brother and mother. River entered the room after her. She was soaking wet and shivering.

  “Merfolk,” she gasped. “There is a whole swarm of them on the beach! One almost kidnapped my mother just now!”

  “What?” I breathed. My eyes shot to Ibrahim. “Did you not get rid of those two merfolk Ben and River brought in on the sub?”

  “A lot’s been going on, Derek,” Ibrahim replied. “It’s only since you left that I even had an opportunity to see to the task. I got the help of two other witches, but searching the water, we found neither the mermaid nor the merman. I thought that perhaps they’d grown tired of these shores and left the island for deeper waters. Otherwise, they were sneaky enough to avoid our detection. Whatever the case, we were unable to find them.”

  “There are way more than two now!” River urged. “There’s like a whole wave of them, and they were surging toward the island.”

  “This meeting is postponed.” I looked around at the witches present in the Dome. “We must all head to the beach at once. Which beach exactly?”


  “Near the Port,” River replied, shakily.

  “I killed one of them,” Saira growled. “It was the quickest way to free River’s mother. That seems to have angered them greatly. I haven’t the first clue as to what they’re doing on this island, but they are not happy. Really not happy.”

  “My mother cannot walk well,” River said, looking anxiously back at Nadia. “Her back was injured in the attack. She needs—”

  “Shayla,” I called, stalling the short witch as she was about to vanish to the beach with a group of vampires. “Please stay with River’s mother and tend to her injury.”

  Shayla nodded and, leaving the group of vampires, approached Nadia, who was still perched awkwardly on the back of the she-wolf.

  “You stay with your mom, River,” Sofia said, eyeing the girl. “And here…” She reached around her shoulders and removed her shawl before handing it to River. “You’re freezing, put this on.”

  “Thank you.” River looked at her gratefully.

  I turned to Ibrahim, who was still standing beside me, waiting for my order. Except for Xavier, the rest of the room had emptied by now, witches having transported everyone to the beach. Now it was time for us to leave.

  Vanishing from the Great Dome and arriving at the beach, I was shocked at the sheer number of merfolk arriving at the beach. There must have been over a hundred. And surprisingly, they didn’t stop at the border of the ocean. On reaching it, they dug their hands into the sand and began crawling out of the water, their long, heavy tails trailing behind them like snakes. I was amazed by the speed at which they were able to travel, almost as though they were amphibians. I didn’t know how long they could survive out of water, and strangely—although many of them had started wheezing—they maintained their pace. It appeared that they were heading for the woods that lined the beach.

  No. We can’t have an infestation of these monsters. I’d seen how devilish these creatures were—my wife had firsthand experience during our quest to vanquish the black witches.

  “Oh, God. Look!” Sofia clutched my arm and pointed further along the shore. I turned just in time to catch sight of a cluster of tails disappearing into the woods. All our witches were tied up with tackling the mermaids squirming along the sand in droves.

  “They must not enter the island!” I bellowed. I lunged forward with Xavier and Sofia after the merfolk, who seemed to think that they’d escaped anyone’s notice, even as I continued to rack my brain as to how these merfolk could have gotten here. First of all, why were they even in this area? How had they discovered The Shade, and how on earth had they managed to get inside the boundary?

  I could only guess that somehow, the two merfolk already inhabiting our water had sent some kind of subaqueous signal and they’d come swarming in. And perhaps the pair Ibrahim had failed to catch were also the ones responsible for leading them in through the boundary.

  Although the merfolk were fast, we were of course much faster, and they made a lot of noise as they scrambled through the undergrowth. We quickly caught up with them, grabbing hold of the ends of their tails—still slimy even after crawling across land.

  They rolled onto their backs to face us, flashing their fangs and screeching. They lashed out, trying to maim us. My grip tightened around the tail of the merman I was tackling. Seeing that this guy wasn’t going to play ball, I distanced myself from Sofia and Xavier and began hurling the merman round and round, picking up speed until he lifted off the ground. Then I knocked his head against a tree trunk.

  That did the job. There was a dull thud as his head made contact with the wood. He fell limp instantly. I could see that he wasn’t badly injured—there was no blood spilling from his head. I’d only wanted to knock him out.

  Xavier followed my lead, tackling his merman in a similar way, while Sofia fought with a mermaid. Both of them knocked the creatures’ heads against trees, rendering them unconscious.

  We lined up the merfolk together in a row before scanning the surrounding area to see if any had managed to escape our notice. Satisfied that these were the only ones who had managed to take this particular detour around our guard of witches and vampires, we picked up the stunned merfolk and carried them over our shoulders back to the beach.

  Rows of captured merfolk covered the beach. Some were unconscious, some bound, while some appeared so still and injured I was certain they’d been killed.

  “Did any others manage to enter the island?” My voice boomed across the beach.

  “Don’t think so!” came several shouts, between the screeches of the last of the merpeople putting up a fight.

  Soon, all the merfolk were piled up together in the center of the beach. I cast my eyes out toward the ocean, unable to spot any more in the waves, although that certainly did not mean that there weren’t more. It was more than likely that the merfolk we had lined up on the sand were only those who’d crawled out of the ocean before we arrived. Others could have just retreated into the depths.

  “What do you suggest we do now?” Ibrahim called, brushing sweat away from his brow with the back of his hand.

  I chewed on my lower lip, my eyes traveling over the long line of merfolk. From the looks of it, most had been stunned, but apparently in some cases where they had been caught by impatient vampires, they had been maimed and killed.

  What now? I asked myself Ibrahim’s question. What are we going to do with all these fish? The logical step would be to transport them outside the boundary, far away from our island, and drop them into the depths of the ocean. Then the problem of those merfolk who might still be lurking in our waters would remain. Ibrahim had already stated how difficult it was to catch them—and he’d only been talking about two merfolk. Here, we could be talking about a huge swarm of them. We didn’t know. And it wasn’t like we could send the dragons after them either, being protected by all this water…

  “Not all of them lying here are dead,” Xavier commented, “and we don’t know how long it will take for those who were stunned to come to. We need to hurry and make a decision.”

  “We don’t know how many more are still swimming within our boundary,” Sofia said, looking anxiously out at the waves. “I think the first thing we need to do is set up a second boundary. A boundary that separates the water from the land. We need to prevent anyone from swimming at Sun Beach, or on any other shore of the island. I don’t know what these merfolk are here for, or how they got inside, but it seems clear they want to enter the island. If we keep a second boundary up long enough, perhaps they’ll go away…”

  I had my doubts about that, and from the look on my wife’s face, she did too. But she was right about what our first steps had to be. We had to secure the island immediately, which meant shutting off our access to the ocean.

  Ever since The Shade was founded, we’d always had access to the stretches of water that surrounded the beaches. This would be the first time in history that we were forced to cut them off—for however long it took to get rid of this infestation.

  I turned to Ibrahim. “You heard Sofia. The first thing we need to do is set up a second boundary. Not only must it prevent merfolk from entering the island, but it also must prevent any of our residents from entering the ocean. For now, we need to have a total lockdown. Other than the witches, the only persons with permission to exit should be Sofia, Xavier, and me.”

  Contact with the ocean was ingrained in our island’s culture. Our people, especially the humans, enjoyed lounging around on Sun Beach and swimming in the waves. It would come as a shock to have that taken away from them without any warning, but it had to be done. I feared that even now, although it was evening, people might be swimming on some other part of the island and could be in danger of another attack.

  “How soon can you work your magic?” I urged Ibrahim.

  He exchanged glances with his fellow witches. “We’ll get on it right away.” With that, he and the other witches vanished, leaving the rest of us gathered around the line of merfolk a
nd staring down at them grimly.

  But we didn’t have time to stand and stare. “We need to scour the beaches to check that the merfolk haven’t simply migrated to another part of the island. In the meantime, ten vampires should stay here to make sure the merfolk don’t escape. Once we’ve finished searching the island, and Ibrahim has confirmed that the second boundary is up, I’ll return and give further instructions about what we’re going to do with these creatures.”

  We formed a search party, while ten vampires volunteered to stay behind and keep watch on the merfolk on the beach.

  Our search group split into two and began running in opposite directions. Each would work its way around the circumference of the island and we would meet again at the halfway point. Although I still hadn’t turned back into a vampire and was technically a human, in addition to my ability to wield fire, my speed was nearly fast enough to keep up with a vampire— they lagged a little to keep up with my pace, but we were still able to cross the island quickly. I instructed everyone to keep a sharp ear and instantly report any screams or even the slightest sounds of struggle.

  My throat was tight as we ran, my heart pounding. I kept expecting one of them to report an attack at any moment. Thankfully, we made it halfway around the island with no such alarm, and we didn’t see any signs of an incident along the way. When we met up with the second party, led by Xavier, they hadn’t come across any attack either.

  Ibrahim came to us and informed us that the second boundary had been erected. Then it was time to deal with the merfolk we had left guarded by the other vampires. I arrived on the stretch of beach to find that most of the creatures had come to by now. Some had been bound, an attempt by the vampires to keep them in check. The latter all looked relieved to see me as I approached.

  “So?” Ashley, who’d remained as one of the guards, asked, hands on her hips. “What are we going to do with these creeps?”

  I was tempted to instruct the witches to hover the merfolk over the hunters’ ships, still floating outside, and give them a nasty surprise. But of course, that was not the most tactful way of handling the situation.