A World of New (A Shade of Vampire, #26)(28)

He met her eyes, his expression dead serious. “I’ll drink any damn thing you feed me. Trust me when I say that I want to discover my identity more than you.”

“Good,” the witch said, rising to her feet and clasping her hands together. “So it’s back to the drawing board for me. I’m going to call a meeting with both witches and jinn. I think you can expect us to start with our various procedures within the day.” Shayla turned to address me. “I suspect that this will be a process that lasts several days. We should experiment with Josh as much as we possibly can, even though it may be overwhelming—we must get to the bottom of this.”

I couldn’t help but sense a deeper meaning to her words, a more chilling meaning. I sensed, more than burning curiosity to find out about his background, an underlying fear that I still had myself—that there could be something fatally wrong with him.

But whether that was or wasn’t the case, either way, we needed to unravel Josh’s mystery.

“So,” Shayla went on, “you will still have free periods together, of course, in between our calls. But I don’t want you to be gone too long at one time. Always take a phone with you and keep it switched on, because we could need him back at the hospital at a moment’s notice if one of us thought we were on to something.”

“Okay,” I said.

And so passed the next few days. Basically they became a constant bombardment of appointments with various jinn and witches—not just Shayla and Safi—and crazy numbers of potions swallowed, along with other magical procedures that were quite mystical to me. In between the appointments, I managed to take Josh to his new gym every morning, where his routines were gradually becoming more daring. After about a week, I noticed a pronounced difference in his arm muscles. Slowly, they were starting to take shape again. His appetite also remained steady, and he was able to continue eating solid foods.

In addition to his exercise routine, I took every opportunity that came my way to take him out for explorations around the island. We made it a habit to visit Sun Beach for at least half an hour in the mornings, and I showed him other parts of the island that he had not seen before. For some reason, he was particularly drawn to the lake, even more than Sun Beach. I didn’t offer to cook for him myself again after the omelets, but instead took him to my grandmother’s house for meals. She was delighted to meet Josh, and she was always happy to have guests for lunch.

I continued to take notes in my trusty polka-dot notebook, although the things that I picked up on were few and far between. He continued to be curious and ask questions about The Shade and the world around us, but I was able to learn very little more about him. Whenever I was around him, I found myself mostly answering questions, as well as broadening his knowledge on the supernatural dimension, until after the ninth day there really wasn’t much more I could tell him about the world that I hadn’t already. After all, my own knowledge of the outside world was fairly limited. I knew about it mostly from tales of my parents and other family members, because I had only recently joined the League and started going out on missions.

To my and Josh’s heavy disappointment, throughout these nine days, neither the witches nor the jinn had any luck with a cure. Though I couldn’t honestly say that this came as a surprise to me. I had been hoping against hope that if we just threw enough at him, we would reach a breakthrough. But it just wasn’t happening.

After Josh was in bed one evening, Shayla called me in for a joint meeting with the witches and the jinn, where they explained to me their failures.

“Nothing any of us have tried has worked, nor has shown even the slightest sign of working,” Shayla said, her round face glum.

“I think we just have to accept that the types of external cures we’ve been trying aren’t going to bring back his memory,” Safi said, looking hardly less disappointed than Shayla.

“It’s like his head is made of wood,” another Nasiri complained.

“So what?” I said, gazing around at each of their hopeless faces. “We’re going to admit defeat?”

Nobody responded except Shayla, who simply shrugged. “Unless one of us has a break through. But all of us have worked pretty much nonstop for the past nine days. Working for another nine days isn’t going to make a difference. We are no further than when we started.”

I blew out a sigh, slumping back in my chair. Safi’s words played over in my head. An external cure. Meaning a forced cure, induced by some sort of magic. It was endlessly frustrating. I knew that Josh held memories. More memories than he was revealing. He was not as far gone as I had initially thought—I’d seen for myself how some things were instinctive to him. Which meant that he remembered them. It was just a matter of figuring out how to bring them to the surface. I was sure of it.

In any case, everyone around me was clueless, and sitting here in this meeting any longer didn’t feel like it would bring us any closer to a solution. Since it was late anyway, I stood up and bade them good night. I went straight home and headed to my bedroom, where I pulled out my laptop. I stayed up for hours scouring the web for any mention of a missing Brit named Josh. My search proved fruitless. I found a man of the same name—a couple actually—but their pictures weren’t of our Josh.

I flopped into bed, but did not sleep. I lay awake, tossing and turning.

If only those two oracles were still alive…