A Shade of Vampire 37: An Empire of Stones(2)

“Hazel?” he asked.

My heartbeat quickened as I walked slowly toward his bed, careful not to startle him.

“That’s my daughter,” I replied. “Do you know her?”

“I think I scared her,” he said sadly. “But I don’t know…I don’t remember much.”

“Can you tell us what you do remember?”

The others waited behind me, leaning in toward the boy, but careful not to crowd him. I glanced at Corrine and she gave me an encouraging nod.

The boy was silent for a moment, and then began to speak.

“I suppose first it was the camp organizers…I remember them being weird—nice one minute and then angry the next. Then people started getting headaches. We thought it was the weather, and sleeping outdoors…but then it got even stranger, and I had a horrible dream. These huge men with dark eyes, dark hair…pale faces, really pale.”

Everyone looked at one another. Pale faces? That usually indicated vamps.

“I got angry. Furious. Like I wanted to destroy things. Everyone was running wild, smashing stuff up — it was mayhem. But I don’t remember Hazel being like…us. I think she and her friends—she had a brother with her—they ran. I never saw her again. I hope she’s okay…”

He trailed off.

“Do you remember more about what these creatures looked like?” I prompted. “Or where they came from?”

The boy shook his head and looked blankly around the room again.

“I don’t remember a boat or anything. It was like they appeared out of thin air.”

We had found the footsteps by the jetty. If they hadn’t come by boat, then maybe there was a portal nearby?

“They could have come from further along the coast,” Corrine said. “The ground was muddy—if the humans had run over their tracks, it would be difficult to find the trail.”

She was right. The ground had been stampeded by the mindless humans; if there had been clues there, they were now destroyed.

“We need more to go on,” Corrine sighed as she escorted us out of the room. The boy had started to stare blankly at the wall again, and it looked like he was starting to revert to his mindless state.

“What’s the likelihood of him having his mind restored?” I asked Corrine as soon as we were out of earshot.

“I think eventually we’ll manage to fix him—he needs rest and quiet. It looks like their minds were drained almost entirely of energy. It weakened the frontal lobes and the connectivity between the left and right sides of the brain. In that weakened state, their minds were far more susceptible to ‘pack mentality’, which might be why they attacked us… I want to make a brief visit to The Sanctuary and tap into their larger pool of knowledge, see if anyone there has any ideas.”

“Okay,” I said, swallowing. “Well then, we’ll continue looking at police reports—we should spread the search as wide as we can.”

“We’ll help,” Claudia replied, and the rest of the parents agreed. We divided up the search locations, and then Caleb and I started to make our way home from the hospital. When we reached our treehouse apartment, my mom was waiting on the balcony.

“Any news?” she asked.

I filled her in on the little information we had, and she nodded.

“I doubt our kids were an isolated incident,” she murmured. “If these creatures were feeding off mind energy, then they were successful. They’ll probably try again, if they haven’t done so already.”

“Have Derek and Ben returned yet?” Caleb asked. I’d filled him in on their visit from Sherus, and he’d been just as surprised as I was at the request from the fae.

“Not yet.” My mom shook her head with a worried frown. “Though I expected them back by now.”

I recalled the description my brother had given me of the fae realm—consisting of four elemental stars that were situated in the In-Between, the strange, dark, vacuum that we had all passed through via portal countless times when travelling between the human and supernatural dimensions. None of us ever ventured into the In-Between—GASP hadn’t had reason to—and consequently it remained shrouded in mystery. Other than the fae, we had no idea what creatures lived there, if any.

From the strange figures appearing at Murkbeech to the motivations of Sherus, it felt like we knew too little about everything right now.





Hazel





I stood staring into the darkness of the passageway.

My brother had just been sucked back into whatever was at the end of its cavernous depths, while I had struggled in Tejus’s grip, totally helpless to do anything other than scream. The image of Benedict scrambling around to get a grip on the stones of the wall to stop himself from being dragged backward, his eyes wide with fear, would stay with me forever.