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

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Ben
    W ell , this was already getting off to a rather unpromising start. After Loira left us—even having the gall to wish us good luck—I heaved a sigh.
    I wondered if that woman had children of her own. If she did, I doubted she would’ve been so quick to offer up the specimens’ lives in exchange for… whatever the hell silkweed was.
    At least she’d had the decency to leave the map with us. Ibrahim and Corrine huddled over it before instructing everybody to get in a circle.
    The ground beneath us disappeared, and when we reached a solid surface again, the temperature had dropped dramatically. My vision focusing, I found myself gazing around at a beach, completely caked with snow. We were on the shore of a frozen island. Even the ocean behind us was iced over.
    It came as a shock to my system. Barring Cruor, which could get very cold, most of the places I had visited in the supernatural dimension had moderate to hot temperatures. This was the first time I could remember seeing actual snow at this end of the universe.
    Luckily, all of us being supernaturals, we weren’t too affected by the cold. The witches sparked fire in their palms to warm themselves. Kailyn, Lucas and I scooped up sparks from them to warm our own hands.
    This island appeared to be much larger than I had expected. Its shore stretched out for miles—I couldn’t even see the end of it. I rose into the air to gain a bird’s eye view, higher and higher, until I could see the shape of the island. But before my eyes reached the opposite shore, they lingered on an elevated dot near the center of the land mass. There was some kind of construction down there—the only construction on this whole island, apparently. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of construction it was because it was covered in snow, but it was obvious that was where we needed to head.
    Ibrahim and Corrine floated up to join me, and I pointed it out to them. Then we returned to the beach for the witches to transport us all swiftly in one go.
    As we approached the construction, we realized it was a large three-story house constructed entirely of wood. From what I knew of harpies, they tended to live in nests—so I doubted this was constructed by them. If they were still living here, they must’ve had some other kind of help to build it. As drafty as it looked—with some of the uneven window panes completely devoid of shutters—it was still certainly more habitable for non-harpies than an open-air nest.
    I shuddered. Not from the cold, but from the scene I was envisioning inside the house, if this was indeed still an orphanage…
    The closer we got to the building, the older and more rundown it looked. Not only were some of the windows wide open, but there were cracks in the walls themselves. The wood in the front door had warped, its edges hardly even fitting the doorframe anymore. Perhaps this had once been a decent place, but if it had, too many years had passed since its last maintenance.
    We stopped five feet away from the entrance.
    My father turned to Ibrahim. “Please cast an invisibility spell over us.”
    Ibrahim obliged.
    It was best that the harpies didn’t spot us until we had a proper game plan—the first step of which was obvious to me.
    “I’ll go and check out the house and report back,” I said, thinning myself and soaring forward. I sank through the front door, steeling myself for the other side.
    I arrived in a small entrance room, bare, except for a pile of damp logs in one corner. A vile smell pervaded the air, making me wonder what kind of toilet facilities they had in here… if any.
    I headed through the door to my right, emerging in a rickety winding hallway whose walls were covered with cobwebs, floors caked with dirt and feathers. A candle burned in a basket at intervals against the walls. I heard the sound of murmuring further up. As I turned a corner, I caught sight of the dim glow of light escaping around a doorframe.
    Hardly breathing,