A Shade of Vampire 31: A Twist of Fates by Bella Forrest Page A

laughing, took pity on his brother’s plight and pulled the baby away from Lucas.
    But the ogre baby didn’t like that. He really didn’t like that.
    He let out a guttural roar—quite shocking from something so small—which pierced the up-til-now quiet atmosphere.
    Oops .
    Corrine and Ibrahim didn’t dally after that.
    Shrieks erupted from the house and I just caught sight of the harpies soaring over the rooftop before the witches vanished us from the spot.

Ben
    T he witches transported us to a familiar-looking shore. We had arrived on one of The Tavern’s beaches. The spike in temperature was abrupt, to say the least.
    Every baby had woken up by now, four of them crying—the werewolves whimpered, the ogres roared, while the gray babies… all remained silent. And as their eyes blinked open, their appearance only became stranger to me. Their eyes were all the same—solid black dots in the center of their eyeballs. It was hard to even make out their pupils. Their eyelashes were thick and strangely long.
    Everybody else was eyeing them with the same curiosity, but we had to push on.
    “We need to take the orphans to The Shade,” I said, turning to the witches.
    “I’ll take them back,” Corrine offered above the werewolves’ and ogres’ noise.
    “I’ll help you,” my mother said. She fetched the cubs from Kailyn and Kira, while Corrine gathered the rest of the babies to her, levitating them with her magic. Then, after wishing us good luck, they vanished.
    I drew in a breath, rubbing my hands together and reorganizing my mind. “Right. Now… we need to think about what’s next.”
    “I think the next logical step is for us to return to the area we just left,” my father said. “Have a look around the neighboring islands. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody there who might have a clue about what happened to them.”
    Since we all agreed, Ibrahim transported us back toward the cold island.
    When we stopped whizzing through the air, Ibrahim had us all floating above an icy ocean. I gazed down. In the distance, I could make out the island we’d just fled—I even spied the three harpies flying in seething circles. Now they would have to start their unfortunate collection afresh. Somehow, I couldn’t feel too sorry for them.
    Ibrahim extended the map Loira had given us and indicated the nearest island. In fact, we could actually see it in the distance from our current location. He transported us the rest of the way to the designated location, and we found ourselves soaring over another icy land mass. Only this appeared to be completely deserted. There wasn’t even a single scrap of civilization, unlike the harpies’ island. So we didn’t bother wasting time here. Ibrahim consulted the map again, and we moved on to the second nearest landmass.
    Although it was no less frozen than the others, this one looked more promising. At least the landscape was more varied. There were forests and rolling hills, even a small range of mountains. All this indicated that there could very well be habitation here.
    We descended and touched down on the highest mountain peak.
    “So we should start a search, I guess,” Ibrahim muttered. “See if there’s anyone around…”
    Even if we found creatures living here whom we could talk to, it really did seem unlikely that we would have luck questioning them about a group of children who might’ve passed this way over a decade ago… but we weren’t exactly overflowing with options at the moment. This was what we had to work with.
    We decided that Lucas, Kailyn and I would fly overhead, while Ibrahim would remain on the ground with the others.
    As we set off on our search, a thought hit me in a way that it hadn’t really before. Perhaps it had been seeing those babies. Holding them in my arms…
    Soaring over the icy landscape, I realized I could be looking for my own stepson.
    Grace often used to say she wanted a sibling… maybe she has one after all.

Ben
    K ailyn ,