Of course, they couldn’t remain hidden for long. I still remembered the night Eli had showed up at our apartment. He’d taken us to see a news report of what we’d thought at the time was an isolated incident; it was a dead Bloodless, in fact. One of the early arrivals who’d gotten caught. But things soon spiraled after that, with more and more sightings, until the government declared it an epidemic. From Hawaii, the Bloodless spread to surrounding countries—the worst hit being Japan, Canada and the US—in their determination to create more of their kind. The IBSI had already gone to great lengths trying to find a cure, but they had failed.
It was at this point that Derek and I had decided it was time to make contact with the surrounding governments. We might be safe in our cozy sanctuary here in The Shade, but this planet was our home, too. It was only right that we offered whatever help we could.
They had accepted readily since, at the time, the IBSI was still largely in development mode—they had not developed the hybrid supernatural mutants they had today, for example. We’d formed an army of our strongest people and been given official and international recognition as The Shadow League—abbreviated TSL—with Ben and Derek listed as commander and commander in chief respectively. The IBSI weren’t happy about it, betraying early on where their real motives lay: in power and control. But at the time, there wasn’t much they could do to protest, since they weren’t yet a strong enough force to tackle the situation on their own.
The Shadow League had worked overtime in those early years of tumult to create effective partitions between humans and supernaturals—something our witches and jinn proved invaluable with. Many of the boundaries in the United States that still stood today were charmed with protection by their magic.
We’d also attempted to find a cure for the Bloodless, even going to the extent of bringing a handful of the heinous creatures back to our own island for the witches to test on, but in the end, we’d failed.
Then the IBSI had finished developing their technology and had bred an army of mutants—mutants who were still to this day a mystery. They appeared to be a cocktail of griffin, dragon, werewolf, and I didn’t even know what else. All we knew was that they were killing machines. They could fly, breathe fire, and run with frightening speed. They were also impervious to the Bloodless, whom they tore to shreds in seconds with their razor-like talons.
They had been known to attack humans due to insufficient training, but thankfully, those incidents had gotten fewer and fewer over the years. It was rare to find a human settlement these days that was not surrounded by such creatures guarding the boundaries, keeping out trespassers, while very effectively keeping in residents.
They had not been successful, however, in eradicating other supernaturals on any significant scale. This was something that the hunters were still working tirelessly towards, but truth be told, I doubted they would ever be successful.
Once the IBSI came to prominence, we of The Shadow League had found ourselves being called less and less, until eventually we were relegated to the waters surrounding our island.
We had received one such call at three AM this morning on one of ten special phones charmed by Corrine to accept outside communication, each given to selected members of TSL. We didn’t have the full details yet; we just knew that we needed to take the sub and start heading to the Northern Mariana Islands. Fowler had promised to provide more information along the way.
I entered the kitchen to see Derek already dressed. I took a moment to appreciate how handsome he looked with his dark hair still wet from a shower. He was wearing the sleek black uniform that all of us were afforded, complete with a silver badge inscribed with the letters TSL.
His vivid blue eyes settled on me. “You look tired,” he commented.
“I’ll be fine once I freshen up,” I replied, before kissing his jaw and going to take a shower. After I washed and changed into my own uniform, the two of us gathered our backpacks and descended in the elevator. We made our way briskly through the forest and arrived at the training ground that held the Armory.
I felt a stab of melancholy as I took in the building—so different from the old one that used to stand in its place. The old Armory had held some of my earliest memories with Derek. He had taken me there to learn how to defend myself. Then it had been used for storing medieval weapons. There had been swords, spears, stakes… we barely had room for those kinds of weapons these days. It was all filled with the most cutting-edge combat equipment, supplied directly by the authorities—mostly guns and explosives of various types, designed with specific supernatural species in mind. The building itself was no longer the stone construction it had been; we’d had to rebuild it from the ground up. It was a modern building now, with a steel exterior and a concave glass roof.
I shook away my nostalgia as Derek and I reached the steel door. He pressed his thumb against the screen by its side and the entrance glided open. It was important that we kept high security in this place now; we couldn’t have any of the island’s meddlesome youth wandering in. Only members of the League had the ability to open this door.
We stepped inside to see a group of people already here, milling around the weapons and piling them into five large metal cases.
Nearest to us were my father Aiden and son Ben.