A Shade of Vampire 31: A Twist of Fates Read Online Free Page B

you recommended Lawrence pick up, right? And there was supposed to be one more ingredient? Yes?”
    She nodded slowly. “Yes. There’s a fifth ingredient. The black-capped tube is the fifth one.”
    Black-capped tube.
    “Okay,” I said, my mind racing. “Then I need to hurry back to the lab and look for it. Then it’ll just be as simple as mixing them all up and feeding the mix to my daughter?”
    “As far as my knowledge goes… Though I can assure you almost one hundred percent that those ingredients will no longer be there in the lab. Not after they found out I had given the cure to Lawrence. And they obviously suspect now that you were in cahoots with him.”
    Dammit . The IBSI had a history of making important things vanish. I felt a wave of déjà vu. Only recently, I had hurtled back to Chicago in search of Atticus’s laptop for the FOEBA files, only to be unable to find them, and now I would be embarking on yet another wild goose chase for the black-topped vial.
    “Well, even if they have moved it, you know what it actually is, right? What is that ingredient? We already have the four, we just need that final one!”
    The scientist swallowed. “I do know,” she began, eyeing me furtively. “But procuring it was, and would be, extremely difficult. And I mean extremely. I suggest that, before we talk further on this matter, you head back to Chicago and check that they have indeed removed them. Search everywhere—not just in the lab. Check the whole base as thoroughly as you can…” Her lips pursed, her eyes radiating a sense of foreboding. “Do everything you can to find it.”
    Unsettled, I was about to turn to Ibrahim and take the doctor’s advice, but I couldn’t leave without asking one last question. “What was in the red tube?”
    “The red tube,” she muttered, knotting her brows. “Why do you ask?”
    I briefly explained what had happened—or at least, what I had pieced together regarding Atticus sabotaging the treatment and giving his son a faulty ingredient.
    “Oh, dear,” she said, her arms wrapping more tightly around her son. “That was concentrated Bloodless venom.”
    My heart hit my stomach. It was no wonder Grace’s transformation had completed so rapidly. Bloodless venom . I fed my daughter Bloodless venom.

Lawrence
    A fter my father vanished from the screen and it went blank, I was left alone in that small interrogation room for hours. In some ways, the waiting was more torturous than physical pain. I worried about what was happening to Grace right now. What it was, exactly, her father had likely already fed her by now. And what her reaction would be to it. Whatever happened, it was all my fault. I owed Grace my life—my life and my sanity. If it hadn’t been for her waking me up, slapping me out of my brainwashing, I would still be living a lie.
    The guilt was crushing.
    All the while, the words my father had spoken to me swirled in the back of my mind. The justification he had given for his actions had been uttered with such conviction that I even found myself wondering for more than a few minutes whether his sentiments were really genuine. But if they were, I didn’t understand why he couldn’t make peace with The Shade. If they were both ultimately working for the same thing, the good of greater mankind, why couldn’t he at least hold a meeting with them? Even if they differed in opinion, an open forum would help to establish at least a semblance of understanding between the two parties. And, hopefully, end the intense animosity.
    It was his outright refusal to even give them the time of day—when The Shade and its people were clearly a valuable asset to anybody—that made me sink back into suspicion. Although he pontificated about noble ideas such as working for the “greater good” of the Earth, I feared they were nothing but empty words, and that at the end of the day, his need for power and control would always win out.
    After hours of being strapped to that