I feared that Jeramiah was going to head back over to Aiden and continue harassing him. But, to my surprise, he didn’t. He didn’t walk over to Sofia either. With the witch following behind him, he moved away from us and straightened, his eyes fixing on the ocean somewhere in the distance—out of my limited angle of vision.

And then I heard it, coming from somewhere in the distance. The sound of a motor. A loud, powerful motor. It sounded like that of a speedboat.

Jeramiah turned to face us again with a much calmer expression. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said in a deep, low voice. “While you were asleep, we took the liberty of inviting some guests to our rendezvous. You get along with hunters, don’t you?”

Chapter 23: River

“Wake up, River. Wake up.” A deep voice echoed in my head. It was a familiar voice, though, buried in the depths of my subconscious, I couldn’t quite put a name to it. I couldn’t put a name to much at all, even myself. My being was infused with the enjoyment of a profoundly satisfying sleep.

“Wake up!” it called again.

But my sleep was too comfortable. I felt warm and deliciously relaxed. I was floating across an endless mass of gentle waves. The water lapped against the sides of my body like a massage, only serving to deepen my relaxation.

“Wake up, River!”

“No. I don’t want to wake up. Go away,” I thought to the echo, irritated at the disturbance.

I tried to block the voice out. I tried to ignore it and hope that it would go away. But it only grew louder and louder, shattering my peace like a foghorn.

“Wake up!”

“Why should I wake up?” I shot back. “There’s nothing worth waking up for.”

But the voice remained persistent, each call drawing me further and further away from sleep until I was pulled back to consciousness enough that I felt damp soil beneath me. My eyelids unglued. My vision was hazy as I fought to brush away the cobwebs of sleep.

I was… in a field. The same field I’d been in just… how long ago? How could I have fallen asleep here and…

My eyes traveled over the many sleeping members of Derek and Sofia’s council on the ground surrounding me. Rose slept next to me.

The atmosphere was so quiet, I could distinctly pick up the rolling of the waves on the beach.

What happened here?

I stumbled to my feet and bent down over Rose. Gripping her shoulders, I shook her hard. She didn’t respond at all, and had she not been breathing, I might even have feared that she was dead. I cast my eyes over the others and tried to wake Caleb, who lay nearby. He too was still as a rock. I tried several others—some vampires I didn’t even know the names of—before I straightened, panic lighting up my brain. Derek and Sofia were absent. Though the last thing I remembered, they had been in the farmhouse…

I hurried into the old building only to find that it was empty. I scanned the fields outside once more, just to double-check that Derek and Sofia definitely weren’t there—that I hadn’t accidentally overlooked them. They weren’t.

Oh, God. How long have Derek and Sofia been missing? And where is Aiden? Did Corrine even manage to find him?

What do I do now?

One option was to keep trying to wake others up so they could assist me, but I’d just tried that. And they were all so deep in sleep that something told me that even if I stayed there shaking people for another hour, I still wouldn’t have managed to arouse anyone. I had already shaken them hard—as hard as I dared to shake a person. I didn’t understand how I was able to wake up and they weren’t. But now was no time to ponder over it.

A witch must have been behind this. And who else but Jeramiah’s witch?

My pounding heart rising to my throat, I tore my eyes away from the sleeping bodies scattered in the fields and back toward the entrance of the woods.

A chill ran down my spine as I began to race with all the speed my legs could muster into the woods. I was still oblivious to the time, and for all I knew, it could be too late for Ben’s family already. Jeramiah and Amaya had already swooped down to put everyone in a slumber. They would’ve grabbed Derek and Sofia, and if they’d taken them, I was sure that they would have managed to find Aiden by now too. The question was, were they still alive?

In the dream when Ben had come to me, he’d said that Jeramiah was planning to hand them over to the hunters, and that he was going to meet them on a cluster of rocks near the boundary of The Shade. But where was that exactly? As I tried to rack my brain for the location, I soon realized that the location was the least of my worries. How was I going to get there? Even if I did manage it somehow, what would I find there? Would I be in any position at all to help them, assuming they could still be helped?

My mind turned to my own family, wondering if they too had been put to sleep or whether it was just us near the farmhouse, since we’d been near Amaya’s targets, Derek and Sofia.

I couldn’t see a reason why Amaya would cast a spell over the human population, but now wasn’t the time to find out. My family wasn’t the target, Ben’s was.

As I raced through the trees, winding along the forest path, I wasn’t comforted to find a group of children lying sound asleep on the ground. They had wooden toys around them, and had clearly been in the middle of playing. Even these innocent children had been affected by the spell.

I feared that everyone in the island might’ve been hit. Then again, this island was big, and I hadn’t yet ventured far from the fields. Would the witch really have bothered to cast such a wide spell? I wondered if she was even powerful enough to achieve such scope.