A Wind of Change(58)

She positively beamed as she sat at the opposite end of the table, digging into the meal Sofia and I had prepared together. They had not been gone long—not that any of us had expected it to take long.

Claudia’s animated voice filled my ears as I ate from my own plate of food, while all the vampires present just drank blood. Claudia dominated the conversation, asking question after question about what had happened on the island since they’d been gone.

“You missed Caleb’s and my wedding,” Rose said, through a mouthful of quiche. She held up her ring finger.

“Oh, my God. You got married!” Claudia practically bounced in her chair. “Are you going to turn into a vampire?”

Rose shot me a sideways glance, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “We don’t know yet,” she replied. “Ben still hasn’t returned and we still don’t know what went wrong with his turning… So we’re just waiting for now.”

“What about your honeymoon?” Claudia asked.

Rose blushed as she looked at her new husband. “We’re still deciding on that also…”

Sofia changed the subject and proceeded to explain about the dragons. Claudia seemed to be most interested in gossip about the relationships the fire-breathers had struck up with the humans around the island. Not that it interested me much. Rose mentioned that none of the girls had revealed any details about their relationships, but they all seemed to be exceptionally happy—which was all that mattered.

As for the dragon prince, he had left unexpectedly after my daughter’s wedding, and nobody was sure exactly where he’d gone, or if he would ever be returning.

“You’re going to have to do some detective work yourself about those dragons, Claudia,” Vivienne said, grinning. “Those girls are tight-lipped.”

I smiled at my sister, eyeing her growing bump. She grew more luminous by the day. We still didn’t know if she was carrying a boy or a girl, but none of us could wait to meet our newest addition to the family.

By the end of the meal, we’d recounted everything else that had happened that we could think of while Claudia and Yuri had been in Paris. After a dessert of cheesecake and fresh fruit, I leaned back in my chair, listening to the conversations around me. Then I locked eyes with Xavier. I nodded subtly, and he nodded back.

I leaned over to Sofia, who was chatting with Corrine, and kissed her neck.

“I’ll see you later,” I said softly.

My wife understood where I was going. She squeezed my hand and kissed me back.

Then I took my leave with Xavier. We headed out of the penthouse and made our way down to the ground. We walked silently through the forest and to the Port. A seventeen-foot boat was waiting at the end of the jetty—a new one that Caleb had recently designed. Xavier and I boarded it and navigated it across the waves toward the boundary of the island. We stopped just before we reached it and scanned the ocean surrounding us.

Even without vampire vision, I could see clearly three large gray ships floating in the distance.

“So they’re still here,” I muttered.

“They’re too close to The Shade for this to be a coincidence,” Xavier said.

Of course, he was right. These ships had first been spotted by Micah three days ago, and they had been floating in the same area ever since. Clearly, they were also strategically distanced from each other—the space between the three of them was identical. Their presence here was precise and calculated.

Someone had discovered The Shade’s location, and was watching us.

And that someone was a hunter.

There had been several more sightings of supernatural creatures in the past week that had been picked up by mainstream media—sightings that had not been of anyone from The Shade. No, there were other supernaturals who knew how to enter the human realm, and they were no longer bothering to keep themselves hidden since the code of secrecy had been broken.

The most recent sighting had been a trio of ogres, up in Canada, near Mount Logan. The most disconcerting thing was that Mona’s map marked many gates connecting this human realm to the supernatural one. But there wasn’t a gate within hundreds of miles of Mount Logan. And there was no way that three huge ogres could’ve traveled that far without being noticed. This left us with the chilling conclusion that there were more entrances into the human realm than were marked on the map. Which meant that, even if we managed to close every single gate listed on this map, there were still other ways supernaturals were getting into this human realm.

I looked from one gray ship to the other. They looked like naval ships.

Eli and Aiden were convinced that the hunters were no longer the clandestine organization they had once been—funded by independent backers with a personal grudge against bloodsuckers. Rather, Eli and my father-in-law believed that the hunters were now being supported directly by the government. All of this exposure in mainstream media was striking panic in people and putting enormous pressure on leaders to take drastic action.