A World of New (A Shade of Vampire, #26)

We couldn’t alert them to our plans yet. The element of surprise was one of our main advantages, and we had to keep it that way.

I clenched my jaw. “All right,” I said heavily. “This just means that we will have to return to the supernatural realm via a different gate and then travel to the Woodlands on the backs of our dragons.” Since they still won’t allow themselves to be transported by magic. The dragons would play an important role in what I had planned. We could not do this without them.

“What about all our supplies? And our chopper?” my daughter asked.

“We will stick with the same plan. We will leave Nightshade outside the portal, and the witches can cast a spell of protection over it. It will take much more time to stock up on supplies, of course. Hence we need to try to find a gate that will lead us as close to The Woodlands as possible. We will need to carry with us as much as we possibly can.”

“So which portal do you suggest we travel through?” Ben asked me.

I looked to our witches. “What do you suggest?”

“Hm,” Ibrahim muttered. “I suggest that we go via the nearest gate to The Shade—leading to the ogres’ realm. At least we know exactly what is on the other side of that.”

Everyone agreed, and so we returned to the aircraft and took off again.



Touching down on the beach, Kyle transformed the aircraft into a tank, and we went trundling into the jungle where we knew the gate to be—in the hollow of an old abandoned well. Once we reached it, Kyle drew the still-invisible Nightshade to a halt. We gathered as many weapons as we could manage before piling outside. After the witches had put up a protective barrier over Nightshade that only we could penetrate, we leapt into the portal in pairs.

At the other end, we landed on a familiar beach. Over the years, weeds and bushes had encroached on this area, being close to the forest that lined the beach. It had become overgrown, rendering the gate hidden to anyone who didn’t have prior knowledge of its location.

I moved onto the sand and looked up and down the long strip of beach. There were no ogres in sight.

We made a few more trips back and forth, carrying through more weapons, before the dragons shifted into their beastly forms, allowing us to load the heavy equipment onto their backs.

I climbed atop Ridan with Sofia, while others chose their own dragons and the jinn cast shadow over our group to shield us from the sun. The jinn opted to fly alongside the dragons.

We launched into the sky. The ground beneath us quickly became a distant sight. As I gazed down upon the landscape, I could see the mountain kingdom of the ogres sprawled out beyond the high skull-topped gates. Then I noticed something else. Something gleaming from a mountainside beyond the gated kingdom in the far distance. Gleaming like glass against the sunlight.

“Wait,” I called, causing everyone to halt in their travel. I pointed toward the shine. “Do you see that? Let’s move closer.”

I should have been able to see clearly what it was even from this distance with my vampire vision. But the sun outside our shadowy shelter was impairing my sight. I considered whether it might just be an optical illusion.

But as we drew closer, it was not. Brown oblong buildings with wide tinted glass windows came into view. Signature architecture of the IBSI.

My fear had been realized. The Woodlands was not the first land the hunters had touched. While the ogres were not exactly a species we wanted to help, given their penchant for human flesh—particularly that of newborn babies—hunters gaining control in any place within the supernatural world would be good for nobody.

I was half torn over destroying the hunters in this realm first, while we were here. But we would have to come back this way anyway for the portal. Our first priority had to be the werewolves—especially in light of the mutant attack. We didn’t know how many had survived, how many had managed to flee, or what the hunters were doing there now.

Thus, I instructed the dragons to continue forging ahead to The Woodlands.





Grace





The Woodlands was so densely populated by trees, I feared we might not even be able to spot the IBSI’s buildings from above. But thanks to a high pole rising through the treetops—perhaps some kind of power or communication pole—we didn’t have difficulty. Then we caught the glinting of fluorescent lighting through the treetops’ foliage. We had arrived.

“We ought not descend too low,” Derek said, “lest they’ve installed more sensitive alarms.”

“Our first protocol will remain the same as regular missions, of course,” my father said, sitting behind me with my mother—all of us atop Tyron. “And what is that, Grace?” he asked me.

“Rescue any humans or other innocents,” I replied.

“Exactly,” my father said. “Lucas and Kailyn,”— he looked to the fae who were now hovering in the air—“you’ll come with me to do the initial scoping out, I assume.”