A Vial of Life(69)

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…

I hurried into the old building only to find that it was empty. I scanned the fields outside once more, just to double-check that Derek and Sofia definitely weren’t there—that I hadn’t accidentally overlooked them. They weren’t.

Oh, God. How long have Derek and Sofia been missing? And where is Aiden? Did Corrine even manage to find him?

What do I do now?

One option was to keep trying to wake others up so they could assist me, but I’d just tried that. And they were all so deep in sleep that something told me that even if I stayed there shaking people for another hour, I still wouldn’t have managed to arouse anyone. I had already shaken them hard—as hard as I dared to shake a person. I didn’t understand how I was able to wake up and they weren’t. But now was no time to ponder over it.

A witch must have been behind this. And who else but Jeramiah’s witch?

My pounding heart rising to my throat, I tore my eyes away from the sleeping bodies scattered in the fields and back toward the entrance of the woods.

A chill ran down my spine as I began to race with all the speed my legs could muster into the woods. I was still oblivious to the time, and for all I knew, it could be too late for Ben’s family already. Jeramiah and Amaya had already swooped down to put everyone in a slumber. They would’ve grabbed Derek and Sofia, and if they’d taken them, I was sure that they would have managed to find Aiden by now too. The question was, were they still alive?

In the dream when Ben had come to me, he’d said that Jeramiah was planning to hand them over to the hunters, and that he was going to meet them on a cluster of rocks near the boundary of The Shade. But where was that exactly? As I tried to rack my brain for the location, I soon realized that the location was the least of my worries. How was I going to get there? Even if I did manage it somehow, what would I find there? Would I be in any position at all to help them, assuming they could still be helped?

My mind turned to my own family, wondering if they too had been put to sleep or whether it was just us near the farmhouse, since we’d been near Amaya’s targets, Derek and Sofia.

I couldn’t see a reason why Amaya would cast a spell over the human population, but now wasn’t the time to find out. My family wasn’t the target, Ben’s was.

As I raced through the trees, winding along the forest path, I wasn’t comforted to find a group of children lying sound asleep on the ground. They had wooden toys around them, and had clearly been in the middle of playing. Even these innocent children had been affected by the spell.

I feared that everyone in the island might’ve been hit. Then again, this island was big, and I hadn’t yet ventured far from the fields. Would the witch really have bothered to cast such a wide spell? I wondered if she was even powerful enough to achieve such scope.

I still didn’t know this island well, but I knew it well enough to be able to sense that the furthest point away from the agricultural area—where I guessed the spell would’ve been concentrated—was the Black Heights. The mountains were all the way on the other side of the island. If I hurried there, I could see if anybody at all was awake and could help…

I was tempted to just get in a boat and try to navigate there myself but, firstly, as much as I had observed Ben during our voyage across the seas, I didn’t know how to work a vessel by myself. And secondly, a second boundary had been put up around the island by the witches to protect The Shade’s inhabitants from the merfolk infestation. And unlike the original boundary, this one didn’t allow people out, unless they had special permission. Derek and Sofia would have that, no doubt, but I certainly didn’t.

And so, as I neared the clearing before the Port, I didn’t head toward the jetty. I took a left turn and continued running through the forest toward the mountains.

On my way, I spotted dozens more vampires and even humans lying asleep in the woods, and even as I passed by the Vale, I couldn’t hear the usual bustle of the town—it sounded eerily quiet, confirming my fears.

Still, I clung on to my thread of hope and didn’t let up my speed until I arrived at the foot of the Black Heights. My eyes traveled around the mountain cabins perched among the rocks. Spotting the burnt-down cabin of Aiden and Kailyn, I shuddered. All seemed quiet—I couldn’t spot anybody walking around up there—though I tried to comfort myself that did not necessarily mean they were all asleep.