A Vial of Life (A Shade of Vampire, #21)

“Oh, God. Look!” Sofia clutched my arm and pointed further along the shore. I turned just in time to catch sight of a cluster of tails disappearing into the woods. All our witches were tied up with tackling the mermaids squirming along the sand in droves.

“They must not enter the island!” I bellowed. I lunged forward with Xavier and Sofia after the merfolk, who seemed to think that they’d escaped anyone’s notice, even as I continued to rack my brain as to how these merfolk could have gotten here. First of all, why were they even in this area? How had they discovered The Shade, and how on earth had they managed to get inside the boundary?

I could only guess that somehow, the two merfolk already inhabiting our water had sent some kind of subaqueous signal and they’d come swarming in. And perhaps the pair Ibrahim had failed to catch were also the ones responsible for leading them in through the boundary.

Although the merfolk were fast, we were of course much faster, and they made a lot of noise as they scrambled through the undergrowth. We quickly caught up with them, grabbing hold of the ends of their tails—still slimy even after crawling across land.

They rolled onto their backs to face us, flashing their fangs and screeching. They lashed out, trying to maim us. My grip tightened around the tail of the merman I was tackling. Seeing that this guy wasn’t going to play ball, I distanced myself from Sofia and Xavier and began hurling the merman round and round, picking up speed until he lifted off the ground. Then I knocked his head against a tree trunk.

That did the job. There was a dull thud as his head made contact with the wood. He fell limp instantly. I could see that he wasn’t badly injured—there was no blood spilling from his head. I’d only wanted to knock him out.

Xavier followed my lead, tackling his merman in a similar way, while Sofia fought with a mermaid. Both of them knocked the creatures’ heads against trees, rendering them unconscious.

We lined up the merfolk together in a row before scanning the surrounding area to see if any had managed to escape our notice. Satisfied that these were the only ones who had managed to take this particular detour around our guard of witches and vampires, we picked up the stunned merfolk and carried them over our shoulders back to the beach.

Rows of captured merfolk covered the beach. Some were unconscious, some bound, while some appeared so still and injured I was certain they’d been killed.

“Did any others manage to enter the island?” My voice boomed across the beach.

“Don’t think so!” came several shouts, between the screeches of the last of the merpeople putting up a fight.

Soon, all the merfolk were piled up together in the center of the beach. I cast my eyes out toward the ocean, unable to spot any more in the waves, although that certainly did not mean that there weren’t more. It was more than likely that the merfolk we had lined up on the sand were only those who’d crawled out of the ocean before we arrived. Others could have just retreated into the depths.

“What do you suggest we do now?” Ibrahim called, brushing sweat away from his brow with the back of his hand.

I chewed on my lower lip, my eyes traveling over the long line of merfolk. From the looks of it, most had been stunned, but apparently in some cases where they had been caught by impatient vampires, they had been maimed and killed.

What now? I asked myself Ibrahim’s question. What are we going to do with all these fish? The logical step would be to transport them outside the boundary, far away from our island, and drop them into the depths of the ocean. Then the problem of those merfolk who might still be lurking in our waters would remain. Ibrahim had already stated how difficult it was to catch them—and he’d only been talking about two merfolk. Here, we could be talking about a huge swarm of them. We didn’t know. And it wasn’t like we could send the dragons after them either, being protected by all this water…

“Not all of them lying here are dead,” Xavier commented, “and we don’t know how long it will take for those who were stunned to come to. We need to hurry and make a decision.”

“We don’t know how many more are still swimming within our boundary,” Sofia said, looking anxiously out at the waves. “I think the first thing we need to do is set up a second boundary. A boundary that separates the water from the land. We need to prevent anyone from swimming at Sun Beach, or on any other shore of the island. I don’t know what these merfolk are here for, or how they got inside, but it seems clear they want to enter the island. If we keep a second boundary up long enough, perhaps they’ll go away…”

I had my doubts about that, and from the look on my wife’s face, she did too. But she was right about what our first steps had to be. We had to secure the island immediately, which meant shutting off our access to the ocean.