A Shade of Vampire 30: A Game of Risk Read Online Free Page B

appeared that the witch and the warlock were trying to persuade her to move on. Still, she stayed put. Then the warlock reached out and touched her shoulder. They stood facing each other for a minute or so longer before Victoria climbed onto his back and all three of them rose into the air.
    My blood pounded in my ears. I immediately assumed they were going to come after me. I submerged myself again, along with Rona. I resurfaced a minute later. They were not upon us. They had vanished from sight, nowhere to be seen in the sky or by the shore. Hopefully, the witches had convinced her to return to The Shade.
    “Bastien,” Rona breathed beside me. She clutched my shoulder, tugging at me to face her. Tears were still streaming from her eyes, mixing with the saltwater on her cheeks. “What are we going to do? We can’t just float here in the ocean.”
    “No,” I replied, my voice cracked and rough. “We can’t.”
    What we needed was to tackle the root of the problem. The Mortclaws. As insurmountable a problem as they seemed, everybody had a weakness. That belief had been instilled in me by my father… my Blackhall father.
    I reflected for the next half hour or so, and admitted what I already knew deep down; the idea of escaping was a foolish one. An idea born out of blind desperation, not out of strategic thinking, which was the only way I ought to be conducting myself right now.
    In truth, there was no escape. Even if I managed to distance myself from the Mortclaws for a day, two days, even a week or a month—eventually I would be brought slamming back to reality. My mother would find me again, just as she had found me before. And the ocean was treacherous—I had almost died in its depths before. While the waters immediately surrounding The Woodlands were not so bad, the further we swam, the more lethal the waters became. And now, I had more than only myself to think about. Rona had become my responsibility, too.
    Every fiber of my being fought against it, but I couldn’t help but conclude that perhaps the only way out of this mess was to ride right back into it.

Ben
    A fter my father made his demands to Killian, the Hawks obliged. They went about gathering volunteers, only the largest and most powerful among the assembly.
    As my father, uncle, Kailyn, Horatio and I waited in the center of the platform while they all went about their preparations to leave, my mind returned to my daughter—though it wasn’t like it had ever actually left her. Thoughts of Grace punctuated every minute of my day. She would be back in The Shade by now. But what state would she be in? How would she be keeping? Would she have gotten any worse since I’d last seen her?
    The most frightening aspect of her predicament was having no idea of the timeline of her degeneration. We were at the mercy of the disease that had her in its clutches.
    It was all that I could do to pull myself out of such negative thoughts and focus on positive action. Yes, Grace was deteriorating fast, but for all I knew, the witches had made some breakthrough by now with the sample of trees that Ibrahim had taken back with him to the island. And we were going to save more trees now. A whole cargo ship’s worth… We just need Lawrence to hurry up and figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do with them. Lawrencestruck me as a smart man. And hopefully, any cunning he had inherited from his father, he could now use to outsmart him. Lawrence clearly held affection for my daughter, which would only spur him to move faster, and that was leaving aside the fact that his mother had died fighting to expose the antidote. That alone should be enough to make him give it his fullest, most intense effort.
    My father gripped my shoulder, apparently guessing what was going through my mind. I was sure that he was experiencing the same thoughts. We Novaks were close. There was barely a distinction between daughter and granddaughter, father and grandfather. It felt like we loved