A Touch of Truth Read online

  I was spared from answering Corrine as Arwen rushed forward and hugged me tight.

  “How are you?” she asked, her face stricken with guilt. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault!” I exclaimed. Then I addressed Corrine. “It really wasn’t Arwen’s fault. She took me to Hawaii only because I requested it. She was doing me a huge favor.”

  Before Corrine could respond, Kailyn said, “Ben said we need to take Grace to the hospital right away and check her out.”

  My mind turned back to the wound in my leg, where the Bloodless had bitten me. It still tingled slightly, though it had stopped stinging. I hadn’t had the chance to look at it for ages. There had been far too many things going on and my injury had become the last thing on my mind.

  Corrine performed her routine identity check, then allowed Kailyn and me through the barrier. Together we headed directly to the hospital. They took me to one of the long-stay rooms, equipped with a television which was playing some news channel in the background and even a small shelf of books. But the only thing I was interested in at this moment was the soft, warm bed. When they laid me down on it, I turned to Kailyn, about to request that she go inform my mother and the rest of my family that I was back, but the fae had already anticipated my request. “I’ll fetch your mom and everyone else now.”

  She hurried off, leaving me with Arwen and Corrine.

  “So,” Corrine began, standing at my bedside. “I won’t ask you to recount everything now, since you’ll only have to repeat it again when your mother arrives. You must tell me, however, any injuries you might have sustained, and how you’re feeling in general.”

  I considered the latter question first. How am I feeling? It felt like a part of me was still shellshocked, to be honest. The last twenty-four hours especially had just been a blur of one insane, terrifying situation after the other.

  I blew out a breath, and leaned back against my pillows. “I’m feeling… relieved. That’s all I’m feeling right now,” I replied.

  “And are there no injuries you need me to look at? Nothing at all?” She raised her eyebrows, surprised.

  I showed her the finger I suspected was broken, and she healed it within a matter of minutes. Then I cleared my throat, and reached down to tug at my pants. “This leg,” I said, raising it tentatively. “You should take a look at this leg.” Even as I said the words, I was bracing myself for the witch’s reaction.

  I’d predicted it precisely. Her mouth dropped open as she glimpsed the fang wounds. Her eyes shot to me, wide with horror.

  “Grace,” she gasped. “What… You were bitten?”

  I swallowed hard, and nodded.

  “By a Bloodless?” Arwen asked, looking just as petrified as her mother.

  I nodded again. “But I haven’t turned yet… obviously. And this happened like, over twenty-four hours ago now, I think. I think my being half fae has counteracted it. I-I’m still okay.”

  Corrine fell silent. She and Arwen leaned over closer to my wounds to inspect them. Then Corrine looked me over from head to toe.

  She straightened. “Right,” she said, letting out a breath. “We’re going to have to hope you’ll be fine, since as you well know, neither the witches nor the jinn of The Shade are able to counteract the venom.” A tense silence followed her words. “You… you haven’t experienced any symptoms at all?” she asked, almost disbelieving.

  “No,” I replied quickly. “I mean, the wounds stung like hell at first, and they still tingle a bit, but they’re deep wounds that still haven’t fully healed over…”

  “No trembling, shivering, etc?” she pressed.

  I was about to blurt out, “No,” again, but it wasn’t exactly true that I hadn’t been shivering. I had felt cold a lot while I’d been in Chicago, but anyone would have. I’d been drenched to the bone in rainwater much of the time, for heaven’s sake. I realized that I did still feel rather cold even now, but my clothes were still damp, and this room was pretty chilly. “No,” I replied firmly. “Nothing.”

  “Okay,” Corrine said. “Well, I’m going to examine you further, but the first thing you should do is take a shower and clean yourself up.”

  “Agreed,” I said. I couldn’t nod vigorously enough.

  The witches stripped me out of my filthy clothes and ushered me into the bathroom. Here I ran the shower, as hot as it would go, and stepped inside. I cherished the clean, steaming water like it was liquid gold as it beat down against my back. I rinsed all the muck off my body and washed my hair thoroughly, applying four rounds of conditioner just to get it free from tangles. The rash that had broken out on my skin from the contaminated river water had faded now.

  By the time I stepped out of the bathroom, wearing a pair of fresh cotton pajamas I’d found in one of the closets, my heart leapt to see that my mother and family were already waiting for me in the bedroom.

  My mother’s face lit up like fireworks. I leapt into her arms and held her tight, even as she kissed my cheeks over and over again. “Oh, Grace! You have no idea how worried I’ve been!”

  “I know, Mom. And I’m sorry.”

  My mom wouldn’t let me go for another five minutes. She held onto me like a mother bear. When I finally backed away, I moved to greet my grandmother, Sofia, who was next in line, then my grandfather, Derek, my other grandmother, Nadia, my aunts Rose, Lalia and Dafne, Uncle Caleb and Jamil, great-grandfather Aiden, great-aunt and uncle Vivienne and Xavier, and finally Victoria, Hazel and Benedict, who’d also come along to see me. Kailyn had returned, too.

  I hugged the rest of my family one by one, curious to know what had been going on with everyone while I’d been away. Benedict was the last to embrace me. As I pulled away, he said with a grin, “I sure have missed you, Gracie…”

  Taking in Benedict’s boyish face, I realized that I truly meant it when I replied, “And I missed you too, squirt.” Before my cousin could tack on a misplaced comment which I sensed was seconds from rolling off his tongue, I turned to my mother. “I’ve got a lot to tell you guys,” I said.

  Corrine brought in some extra chairs for everyone to take a seat around my bed, while I sank into the mattress and leaned against the headboard.

  “I want to see your wounds before anything else, Grace,” my mother said, anxiety washing over her relief. A part of me had been kind of hoping Corrine wouldn’t have mentioned them to my family yet. I’d wanted to give them at least a short breather from worrying about me. But of course Corrine would have clued them in.

  My mother rolled up my pants to reveal my cleaned bite marks. Her breath hitched. Everyone crowded over my bed and stared down at them.

  “You’ve really experienced no symptoms?” my mother asked.

  “No,” I replied, feeling more confident in my answer this time. I felt warmer now after my hot shower. Perhaps Corrine had turned up the heat in this room, too. I instinctively clutched my blankets around me all the same, finding them comforting.

  “I had wanted to do a full examination on her before you arrived,” Corrine explained to my mother, “but I suppose it was stupid of me to think I could fit it in before you guys came rushing in. And now you are here, I guess I have to wait until she’s finished telling her story… though I would much prefer to check her out now.”

  “I don’t have any other injuries,” I told the witch confidently. I’d been bashed about a lot—I had bruises and cuts aplenty, for sure—but I hadn’t noticed anything else very serious in the shower. “I’m okay,” I said, offering them a smile. “Really, the examination can wait. Now, I’d like to tell you everything.”

  “First tell us where your father is,” my mother requested, nervous.

  “He and Lucas should be arriving anytime now,” I explained. “They stayed back because, well, I made a couple of friends while I was in Chicago, and they were in trouble—I asked him to help them. Dad and Lucas are probably on their way back now, as we speak. Maybe even nearing the island. It’s been a while since we left the
m.”

  “Okay,” my mother said, loosening up a little. She reached out and held my hand. “So start at the beginning.”

  And so I did. I took my mind back to everything that had happened since my parents departed with the League for the ogres’ kingdom.

  I told them about my investigation into Georgina’s background, my visit to her parents in the UK, how Arwen and I ended up in Hawaii, and then my eventual capture and escape into Bloodless territory. My father returned at this point in the story. He and Lucas hurried into the room, and to my delight, they were carrying Orlando.

  I leapt off the bed and hurried to them.

  “Is he okay?” I whispered, checking his pulse.

  “Well, as you can see, he’s breathing,” my father replied.

  “Hardly looks okay though, does he?” Lucas muttered.

  As okay as a terminally ill person can be…

  My gaze rose to my father. “And Maura?” I asked hopefully, even though I had already assumed they had not been able to find her.

  My father shook his head darkly.

  Ouch. I couldn’t say that I would exactly miss the girl, but that would be a tough pill for Orlando to swallow when he woke up.

  “Arwen,” Corrine said, “take this lad into one of the spare rooms and have someone look at him.”

  Arwen obeyed her mother, approaching Orlando and vanishing the two of them from the spot.

  I rose to my feet. My mother was already wrapped in my father’s arms, greeting him. I hugged Lucas in the meantime, thanking him, and then gave my father a proper greeting when my mother had stepped back.

  Then I returned to my bed, Lucas and my father taking seats around me with the others.

  Although I still hadn’t finished my story, and indeed, I would have to start again for my father and Lucas, I was too anxious to hear what my father had seen in the crematorium and where exactly he had found Orlando. I fired the questions at him in quick succession.

  My father’s brow was furrowed, and I noticed for the first time how… distant he looked. Although he sat just feet away from me, his mind still seemed far away. He cleared his throat.

  “Something very odd is going on with the IBSI,” he said finally. His voice was surprisingly hoarse. He locked eyes with my grandfather Derek, who raised his brows in question.

  “What?” my grandfather asked.

  My father stood and began pacing up and down by my bed. Then his gaze returned to me. “Grace, that crematorium was not a crematorium.”

  “Huh?” I asked, wrinkling my nose in confusion.

  “It was not a crematorium,” he repeated. “It was a massive laboratory, with whole floors containing cages of Bloodless and people like Orlando. They are using the Bloodless for something. We witnessed them feeding one of the sickly humans—a man—to a Bloodless in a cage who, uh, I have a suspicion was actually Maura.”

  My jaw dropped. “W-What? Are you serious?”

  “Of course I could be mistaken, but she was the right height…” He let his words linger in the air for several moments before continuing, “As they fed the man to the Bloodless, they withdrew blood from him as he was in the process of turning. They’re doing some kind of major experimentation, or major research… or… I don’t know what.” He exhaled in frustration, his expression growing more agitated.

  “Ben,” my grandfather said, “you need to start from the beginning for the rest of us. We have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” my father said, still disconnected. He took a seat again and recounted the first part of his story that I also had not heard—how he’d left The Shade and managed to figure out that I was in Chicago.

  “We scoured the Chicago HQ,” Ben explained, “and we managed to locate Atticus’s room. He was on the phone to someone, and he referred to Grace having leapt into the river before escaping into the other part of the city.” He stopped abruptly, his disturbed expression returning. “Dammit, they’re up to something. I caught sight of something on his computer screen. Fight for open education on the Bloodless antidote. But he slammed the laptop shut before I could read further, and then I needed to…”

  I barely heard the rest of my father’s sentence. I almost choked on my tongue as the words trickled through my brain.

  Fight for open education on the Bloodless antidote.

  F for Fight… O for Open… E for…

  “Oh, my God!” I practically screamed, leaping from my bed like a Jack-in-the-Box and scaring the crap out of everyone. “FOEBA!” I stammered. “That’s what damn FOEBA must stand for! Fight for Open Education on the Bloodless Antidote!”

  A silence descended on the room. Everyone stared at me.

  My father’s eyes widened. “So it does…” he breathed.

  A dozen questions flooded my mind. Did a Bloodless antidote really exist? Was it Georgina who had discovered it? Why was she having to fight to educate people about it? For heaven’s sake, millions of the IBSI’s resources were invested every year just in keeping the Bloodless away from human settlements. If there was a cure, they should be the first to leap on it.

  Why would the IBSI want to keep it such a secret?

  “Antidote,” my grandfather Derek repeated, a profound expression on his face. “I wonder what that could be?”

  Everyone looked at each other blankly.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “the IBSI are hell-bent on stifling information about it. And Georgina… Lawrence’s mother. Somehow she discovered it… and she was on the run somewhere.”

  “Before she got conveniently killed in an accident,” Shayla finished. I looked up to see the witch standing in the doorway of the hospital room. I hadn’t even noticed her arrive.

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  I just knew that she had been fleeing from Atticus. But would he really have killed his own wife? I supposed it would’ve been easy enough for him to have her assassinated and then make the whole thing look like an accident.

  And what of Lawrence? What exactly did Atticus have planned for him?

  “Well, I just witnessed firsthand that the IBSI have uses for the Bloodless,” my father said. “Whatever the exact uses are, it seems clear that they want to keep the Bloodless alive and thriving.”

  That would certainly explain why Atticus did not want copies of Georgina’s files lying about, even if they were encrypted. Some non-IBSI tech-savvy geek might have been able to crack them.

  And did those files really contain information, like, actual details about the cure? There had certainly been enough files on that thumb drive.

  So, Georgina. I continued to mull it over. It seemed like she had started—or been trying to start—some kind of underground movement to try to spread this knowledge. Wherever she had planned to go with Lawrence after she left Atticus, it must have been somewhere she thought was safe, where she believed she could further her mission… or maybe it had been solely out of fear of her husband.

  Another thing was clear at least: Whoever Georgina had been, she obviously couldn’t have agreed with her husband’s way of doing things. And then somehow he must have found out about her activities or intentions…

  I clutched my blanket closer, feeling unnerved.

  How deep do these lies go? For all I knew, we might have still only touched the very tip of the iceberg of the IBSI’s deception.

  “Oh, my. Th-That’s Lawrence!” my mother exclaimed suddenly beside me. “On national news!”

  She was staring at the television screen, playing noiselessly in the background.

  My eyes bulged.

  Filling the frame of the news channel was a young man who looked unmistakably like Lawrence Conway. He was… standing. Standing on a platform in some kind of small, bare, stark white room, wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. He no longer looked pale or sickly. His handsome face, stoic and still shaven like the last time I’d seen him, had a healthy complexion to it, almost a glow. And his dusty blond hair, which had been trimmed shorte
r, looked thicker, healthier.

  The platform he was standing on swiveled, showcasing his body like he was some kind of specimen… which, I realized, he was.

  He was tall, just like I’d suspected he would be if he’d been able to stand upright. And his build was bulkier, his muscles toned—also as I had believed they must’ve been.

  I jolted from the bed so hard that I tripped on my own feet and smacked my knee against one of the low bedside tables.

  “Grace!” several voices admonished me at once in concern, but I lifted myself up before they could do anything and staggered forward to the mantelpiece, which held the remote. I grabbed it and turned up the volume.

  “… momentous milestone for the IBSI,” the voiceover of a female newscaster was announcing. “The drug is yet to be named and it is still being trialed, but we have been lucky enough to gain a first glimpse of the results.”

  I moved up closer to the screen, where I could take in Lawrence in more detail. As the platform swiveled round so that he was facing the camera directly, I gazed into his tawny brown eyes. Brown eyes that seemed faded, distant. As though he was not quite present.

  I suddenly felt a twinge in my chest. A deep, throbbing ache. I was taken aback by how strong it was.

  Lawrence.

  What have they done to you?

  “The test subject,” the newscaster went on, “whose name has been withheld for privacy reasons, successfully completed the procedure. According to our IBSI correspondent, the young man has developed combat abilities that have surprised even the organization itself. We were not able to procure exact details but no doubt they will be disclosed in the coming months, as more trials are carried out. On questioning, the IBSI confirmed that there is currently no estimate when—or if—the drug will be available to the public, but discussions are certainly underway. We hope that we will be able to provide demonstrations of the test subject’s abilities in the coming weeks at the IBSI’s discretion. But for now, this breakthrough serves to demonstrate IBSI’s continued commitment to protecting our borders, and reducing the loss of lives of the courageous young men and women who fight to keep us safe at night.”