A Vial of Life Read online

  Oh, God.

  Tearing my eyes away from the witches’ sleeping forms, I continued hurtling forward. A hundred alarm bells rang out in every corner of my mind, and as I stumbled across a group of human children—perhaps six or seven years of age—lying asleep in the undergrowth beside wooden swords and hand catapults, my alarm only grew louder.

  As I made it out of the woods and approached the fields, I beheld a scene I’d feared I might find.

  Scattered about the field surrounding the farmhouse were dozens of sleeping forms—The Shade’s council members.

  No. No!

  The only signs of life, in this field, ironically, came from the ghosts who still hovered by the old building.

  I scanned the ground desperately for my parents, but I couldn’t see them. I approached the farmhouse, ignoring Lucinda as she called to me. I swept through the house in a panic.

  It was empty. The memorial stone was missing, and so were my parents.

  I stormed out of the house and back into the field. I raced up to Lucinda and tried to grab her, forgetting for the hundredth damn time in my urgency that my hands were made of nothing.

  “What happened here?” I demanded.

  “The crowd of people came,” she murmured, raising her eyebrows as she gazed around at the sleeping bodies surrounding us. “Rather strange people if you ask me… They were looking around the area, and they seemed particularly interested in the farmhouse. Then it was like they all had a heart attack at once. They fell to the ground and now are apparently sleeping. Then I spotted the man with the pipe. He came here with his lady friend. They picked up two people, and then they both just… vanished.” She looked utterly confused even as she said the words. Although she was a ghost, I guessed that she had not had many encounters with other types of supernaturals.

  I didn’t bother asking which two people Jeramiah had swooped down on.

  And where is my grandfather? Have they caught him already?

  Amaya must have cast a sleeping spell over the island to wipe out any obstacles our witches might pose. Being able to affect the whole island like this meant that she was more skilled a witch than I had expected.

  Although I was raring to go racing after Jeramiah and Amaya to the cluster of rocks, to see what state my parents and grandfather were in, what use would it do? I had to get help. I had to wake someone!

  I scanned the ground, and my eyes fell on River and Rose, who’d fallen and lay sleeping next to each other on the soil. There were others that I could’ve approached, but I instinctively moved closer to River. She had already helped me the first time, it should be both easier and faster to get through to her a second time… I just had to hope that the slumber Amaya had cast upon everyone did not preclude dreams.

  I knelt on the soil next to her and closed my eyes, squeezing them tightly shut and trying to clear my mind.

  The minutes that followed were agonizing, just sitting there in the quiet field, shrouded in darkness with my eyes closed.

  Then, as I was beginning to give up hope that even a single person in the field was dreaming, I caught a glimpse of stars twinkling behind my eyelids. A vision emerged, a vision of a night sky. The moon was nowhere to be seen, but the brightness of the stars almost made up for its absence. Calm waves rolled beneath the star-strewn canvas, and floating in the midst of them was River.

  She was lying on her back, sleeping, with an expression of profound peace on her face.

  “River,” I called. “River, wake up.”

  I descended on her in the dream, reaching out to grip her shoulders. I squeezed and shook her, just as hard as I’d done in her previous dream, but this time, she wasn’t budging.

  Wake up, River. Wake up!

  Chapter 22: Derek

  Consciousness trickled slowly through my brain. My head ached dully. My limbs felt stiff and rigid. An odd warmth touched my skin. My heavy eyelids parted and I found myself assaulted by a blinding light. I was forced to clamp them shut and reopen them more slowly. I squinted, allowing my pupils to adjust to the change in brightness. I found myself staring up at a sun-streaked sky.

  I tried to sit up, but my limbs would not obey my brain. I could only move my neck and the muscles in my face. I turned my head to my left to see Sofia lying next to me. On her other side lay Aiden. Both appeared to be in deep slumber. Sea spray wet my face and I realized that we were lying on a cluster of craggy rocks, surrounding by rolling waves. I recognized these rocks—they served as a landmark for our island’s boundary.

  I wasn’t sure how long we’d been lying here. I guessed it couldn’t have been that long because, although Sofia and Aiden’s vampire skin had begun to singe, neither was too badly wounded yet. It wouldn’t be long though before their skin started to flake and peel away. A panic welled within me. Why weren’t they waking up? The pain should have aroused them by now. The only comfort I had was that they were still breathing.

  “Sofia.” I spoke up, my voice crackling through my dry throat. “Aiden.”

  Since I’d opened my eyes, my memory had been trickling back to me in pieces, and now the puzzle was complete. Sofia and I had been searching inside the farmhouse when an overwhelming sleepiness had come upon me. I hadn’t even had a chance to fight it before my eyes closed. I was sure that I’d fallen asleep before I even hit the floor.

  “Uncle.” A voice spoke. A deep male voice. A voice that sparked a chill at the back of my neck. It sounded eerily familiar.

  I strained to see who had spoken, but although it came from only a few feet away, a rock near my head blocked my view. Then I didn’t need to strain myself. A man holding a wide umbrella leapt on top of the rock and gazed down at me.

  So this is Jeramiah Novak. My nephew. He looked less like his father then I’d expected—with long, dark hair tied up in a bun—although he shared the same cold, harsh eyes and hard, square jawline. He certainly had the height and build of a Novak, too.

  I glared up at him, uncertain of how even to respond. Hello? Nice to finally meet you? I knew almost nothing about this man, while he had never met me, and yet he stared down at me with such hatred that one would have thought I’d been his enemy all his life.

  “Nephew,” I replied in kind, clenching my jaw.

  He leapt from the rock and landed near my head, still gazing down at me with a calm expression on his face, though his eyes glinted dangerously. I knew those eyes. I’d seen them before in my own brother. They were the eyes of a man who had nothing to lose.

  “I’ll admit,” I said, glaring daggers up at him, “this is not the way I’d hoped our first meeting would go.”

  His lips parted slowly from the hard line they had formed. “On the contrary, this is exactly how I’d imagined it.” I could see that he was being careful not to cast any of the shadow from his umbrella upon us.

  Sofia began to stir. Her eyes lifted open and she grimaced, then groaned in pain. She couldn’t even turn over on her stomach to at least hide her face from the sun.

  Time was running out for Sofia and Aiden. The clock had started ticking the moment Jeramiah had placed them in the sun. While one thing was abundantly clear—I had to maintain my calm around this vampire—it was hard with my wife and father-in-law being tortured just a few feet away from me.

  Even I, in my human form, found the sun’s blaze to be unpleasant. There were no clouds at all in the sky, and although midday had come and gone, the sun was still glaringly bright.

  As my eyes shifted back to my nephew, his stubborn jaw locked, I was struck by a wave of déjà vu. It had been almost twenty years now since I’d had to deal with my brother, but now, as his son stood over me, I found myself sliding into exactly the same mode I had always tried to assume with him. While Lucas had been the one to try to spark an argument or fight, I had tried to avoid it—it was only when he’d pushed my hand too far that I’d snapped. I realized that I needed to take the same approach with his son, who appeared to be made of the same fabric.

  Lucas had
reveled in conflict and evoking a reaction in me. I wasn’t going to give the latter to Jeramiah, and I was going to do all that I could to avoid the former.

  “And what else did you imagine for this meeting?” I asked, maintaining a steady voice.

  As though he had not heard my question, Jeramiah glanced away from me and fixed his gaze on Aiden, who, like Sofia, was also just beginning to come to. He left my side and walked over to him.

  “Amaya,” Jeramiah called.

  A witch appeared from nowhere and stood by my nephew’s side. She was tall and thin, with sleek black hair and sharp, elongated facial features.

  “Keep me in shadow,” he ordered.

  She took the umbrella from him and held it up over him.

  Now, with both hands free, he bent down and gripped Aiden by the throat. Aiden—his eyes still drowning in mourning over the loss of his lover—grunted, unable to fight back, as Jeramiah lifted him up and pinned him upright against the side of the rock.

  “No!” Sofia gasped. “Let go of him!”

  Jeramiah turned his back on us and I could only imagine the expression on his face as he stared at Aiden Claremont.

  Just like Lucas. He never was interested in a fair fight.

  The way he was holding Aiden reminded me of the way Lucas had once held Sofia—helpless and pinned up against a wall—while he had assaulted her in my Sun Room.

  “Pray tell, vampire,” I spoke up, even as it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain an even tone, “what exactly are you seeking to accomplish by all this? Apparently not a family reunion…”

  Jeramiah threw a cold glance over his shoulder at me, and this time, his poker face broke and a scowl spread across his stony features.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what was going through his mind as his hold abruptly loosened on Aiden, causing him to collapse onto the sharp rocks, but I was glad that at least I had managed to cause a distraction—however fleeting it might be.

  At this point, it felt like I was dancing on hot coals, trying to figure out how to get through to a man I’d never met, going solely by the instincts I had developed while dealing with my brother.

  He returned to my side and bent down, his knees jutting out and almost knocking my shoulder. Amaya followed him, continuing to provide shade.

  His sharp blue eyes fixed on mine, and I held his gaze, unflinching.

  “A family reunion would have been welcome, actually,” he said, in a softer voice than I had expected from him. A voice that didn’t quite match up with the harshness of his gaze. A voice that even quivered, ever so slightly. Perhaps he was not as closed off from emotion as he made himself out to be.

  “In fact,” he continued, clearing his throat, “it’s what I had been hoping for the day I discovered that I was not the first Novak to be turned into a bloodsucker.” His jaw twitched. “I suppose you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that my father had been murdered by a member of my own extended family.”

  “You never met your father,” I stated, knowing it for a fact. I was sure that Lucas himself had been oblivious to fathering Jeramiah, and I even found myself wondering whether this young man had been the only child born from one of Lucas’s many old flames. “And you were not present the day he died,” I continued. “Do you know why he was killed? Do you know even the slightest thing about the circumstances of his death? Or anything about who he was during his life?”

  To my surprise, a small smile curved Jeramiah’s lips. Not one of amusement, but one of bitterness.

  “I know more about my father than you ever bothered to find out,” he said, his voice dropping to a low hiss.

  A pain stabbed my chest as Sofia and Aiden’s groans intensified. I didn’t know where all this talking would lead, or how much longer Jeramiah would stand being distracted from what he was planning to do with us, but right now, keeping him in conversation was the only thing that I could think to do.

  “Why don’t you enlighten me then?” I said, a part of me genuinely curious as to what conception—or rather misconception—this vampire had formed about my brother.

  “It’s a bit late for that now, don’t you think?” he replied. My gut twisted as he stood up. I had been hoping to keep him kneeling down on the ground, away from my wife and father-in-law.

  “Jeramiah,” Sofia breathed out, even as her face continued to contort with pain. She would’ve been writhing around by now had she had control of her limbs. “Lucas Novak was a disturbed man.”

  To put it politely… I thought.

  “We never set out to make an enemy out of him. Since the day I arrived in The Shade, he had it in for me. He murdered an innocent girl who was staying in Derek’s quarters—she was only one of his helpless victims—and he would’ve done the same to me. We never wanted to isolate or cause harm to him. He did both of these things to himself. He was blinded by envy of Derek and—”

  “Silence!” Jeramiah’s demeanor had turned to ice. Every part of his body was rigid, and his breathing had become uneven, his chest and shoulders heaving.

  Sofia had overstepped the mark in what he was willing to hear about his father, it seemed. Whatever picture Jeramiah had painted for himself about my brother’s character, it was obviously filled with rainbows and unicorns. And he wasn’t willing to shatter his illusion.

  As I gazed up into his face, now contorted with anger, it was clear that there were many layers to this man, one of which was instability. And for that, I couldn’t blame him. From what Ben had told me of his childhood, it had been traumatic, no doubt. He’d never met his father, not even once—Lucas had turned from human to vampire soon after Jeramiah’s conception, and then he’d been long gone. And then Jeramiah had lost his mother when he was very young, and I couldn’t imagine that his life with his grandparents had been a satisfying one, since he’d left them at such a young age to go traipsing halfway across the globe.

  I guessed that my nephew had never truly felt firm ground beneath his feet. He’d never had a figurehead, or a role model.

  Or perhaps he had… in his father.

  Perhaps he had taken refuge in his father, and that was why he clung so tightly to his rosy vision of him, however misguided it was.

  The irony was, if he weren’t so bent against us, I would have invited him into our family, perhaps even treated him as though he were my own son. Since I’d first found out about Jeramiah’s existence from Ben, I’d known that I never wanted to make an enemy out of him. I’d known that if I ever got the chance to meet him, I would try to hold no prejudices against him. Because I’d never been happy with the relationship—or rather lack of it—that I’d had with my brother. Jeramiah was my own flesh and blood, and he would have been welcomed onto our island. Perhaps he didn’t know it—and perhaps he didn’t care—but by accosting us like this, he was cutting his nose off to spite his face.

  As I stared up into his angry eyes, the small amount of hope I’d held that I might still be able to turn him around and make him see sense evaporated. He didn’t want the truth. He wanted anything but the truth. And if he wasn’t willing to even hear us out, there was nothing we could do to try to cobble together a relationship.

  Sofia and I could have gone on, kept talking, forced him to listen to what had actually happened, but it was clear that it would only aggravate him further, and I doubted we would be any better off for it.

  I feared that Jeramiah was going to head back over to Aiden and continue harassing him. But, to my surprise, he didn’t. He didn’t walk over to Sofia either. With the witch following behind him, he moved away from us and straightened, his eyes fixing on the ocean somewhere in the distance—out of my limited angle of vision.

  And then I heard it, coming from somewhere in the distance. The sound of a motor. A loud, powerful motor. It sounded like that of a speedboat.

  Jeramiah turned to face us again with a much calmer expression. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said in a deep, low voice. “While you were asleep, we took the liberty
of inviting some guests to our rendezvous. You get along with hunters, don’t you?”

  Chapter 23: River

  “Wake up, River. Wake up.” A deep voice echoed in my head. It was a familiar voice, though, buried in the depths of my subconscious, I couldn’t quite put a name to it. I couldn’t put a name to much at all, even myself. My being was infused with the enjoyment of a profoundly satisfying sleep.

  “Wake up!” it called again.

  But my sleep was too comfortable. I felt warm and deliciously relaxed. I was floating across an endless mass of gentle waves. The water lapped against the sides of my body like a massage, only serving to deepen my relaxation.

  “Wake up, River!”

  “No. I don’t want to wake up. Go away,” I thought to the echo, irritated at the disturbance.

  I tried to block the voice out. I tried to ignore it and hope that it would go away. But it only grew louder and louder, shattering my peace like a foghorn.

  “Wake up!”

  “Why should I wake up?” I shot back. “There’s nothing worth waking up for.”

  But the voice remained persistent, each call drawing me further and further away from sleep until I was pulled back to consciousness enough that I felt damp soil beneath me. My eyelids unglued. My vision was hazy as I fought to brush away the cobwebs of sleep.

  I was… in a field. The same field I’d been in just… how long ago? How could I have fallen asleep here and…

  My eyes traveled over the many sleeping members of Derek and Sofia’s council on the ground surrounding me. Rose slept next to me.

  The atmosphere was so quiet, I could distinctly pick up the rolling of the waves on the beach.

  What happened here?

  I stumbled to my feet and bent down over Rose. Gripping her shoulders, I shook her hard. She didn’t respond at all, and had she not been breathing, I might even have feared that she was dead. I cast my eyes over the others and tried to wake Caleb, who lay nearby. He too was still as a rock. I tried several others—some vampires I didn’t even know the names of—before I straightened, panic lighting up my brain. Derek and Sofia were absent. Though the last thing I remembered, they had been in the farmhouse…