Page 57 of Even Vampires Bleed
It’s filled with dark water, so it takes me a while to see what I’m looking at.
Wait.
This is what he came for?
“Elis, this is not a fish,” I say in my calmest voice.
I still sound like I’m freaking out, but it doesn’t matter.
He can’t carry that with him.
The tank is too big. The animal within is too dangerous.
“It’s the biggest of them all, but yes, she’s still a fish,” he says as he plays with the buttons on the screen.
I know he’s right, but it doesn’t make it less shocking, because, here in a tank under Versailles’s Palace, floats a—most likely drugged and sleeping—ten to twelve meters long whale shark.
A WHALE SHARK.
And this is the fish Elis wants to save.
It all makes sense now.
I don’t even know how he’s going to carry her away, but he can’t possibly carry anything else.
I have no doubt about that.
As he toys with the commands on the screen, the tubes unhook themselves from the shark. She’s still not moving. He punches another button, and the water is evacuated altogether.
I gasp.
“Can she breathe outside of the water?” I ask Elis.
“She’s a shifter, of course she can,” he grunts, and I suddenly feel a little dumb because this is something I should know with all I read.
Except I’m a bat-shifter, and it never occurred to me that aquatic animal-shifters could both breathe underwater and on the ground.
He quickly moves to type on Gabriel’s wings screen panel so the wings release, and I commit to memory all the buttons he’s pushing.
When he’s done, he turns to me.
“This is goodbye. I won’t be seeing you again. I’m off now. Good luck,” he tells me with the huge shark on his shoulders.
It takes me a second to understand what he just meant.
He’s leaving.
He got his shark so there won’t be any other missions with himfrom now on.
I jump and hug the side of him—which isn’t easy to do with the shark in the way—before letting him go.
“Don’t stay too long here,” he tells me. “And don’t forget, you probably need to get those wings stitched back on in the next couple hours once they’re not in the liquid anymore.”
I nod and turn on a countdown on my holo as I see the rest of the liquid evacuate through a hole in the ground of the tank.
“What about beings?” I respond with a question.
I’m thinking about the butterfly and the lizard I saw in other tanks.
