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table had already been laid with glasses of deep red liquid; they’d started their meal. My grandmother always kept her fridge stocked with human food for when she had visitors—specifically me as a visitor. She prepared some falafel before planting it down in front of me. Mmm. How I loved my grandma’s cooking.
    “Do you know when they’ll return?” Lalia asked.
    “No idea,” I muttered.
    We talked almost exclusively about the trip over dinner, until eight o’clock struck and I decided to leave. I didn’t usually fall asleep until around 10 PM at night, but I had some preparation to do for tomorrow. So I bade them good night and left, returning to my treehouse.
    I took a shower and washed my hair before slipping into my nightie and heading to my bedroom. I sat down at my desk and retrieved my brand-new, pink polka-dot journal from a drawer. Picking up a pen, I turned to the first page. This notebook had been a gift from my cousin Hazel on my sixteenth birthday, and I had just been waiting for the opportunity to use it. This new project I was about to undertake felt like the perfect excuse.
    The witches’ training had been thorough and extensive when it came to caring for sick patients and sufferers of trauma. I turned my mind back to those lessons now. They had taught us to approach each patient individually and methodically. We would always start by taking a piece of paper and listing down everything and anything we knew about the patient—basically a character profile.
    As I placed the tip of my pen against the paper, I realized what a difficult exercise this was in this man’s case. Usually I would write the name of the patient at the top of the page. Here, I could only think to write, British Guy.
    Still, I wrote down what little I knew of him. His physical symptoms, like his coldness and inability to move his legs. Shayla’s statement that he was a half-blood. His general physical appearance. And then some notes on his demeanor, what little I had gleaned of that. I hadn’t had much of a chance to observe his personality yet. I also noted his inability to hold down food today. And that was about all I could fill the page with.
    Well, that was quick.
    But it was a start nonetheless. Hopefully, in the coming days, Shayla and I would be able to learn a lot more about him, and I would fill up more pages of my notebook. For now, I placed it into my backpack along with my pen, which I planned to take with me to the hospital tomorrow. Then I sank into bed.
    Although I had gotten to bed earlier than usual, it wasn’t until about midnight that I finally dropped off to sleep. My mind was too filled with recollections of everything I had witnessed in The Woodlands, and I also worried about how my parents and family were faring now on the mission. Then I began mulling over what the day might be like tomorrow with the nameless half-blood stranger.
    If there was anything that I could complain about in my life—which, if I was honest with myself, there really wasn’t—it certainly wasn’t that it was boring.

Vivienne
    A s we arrived at the mountain, it was time to make good on my word to Victoria. I’d promised her that we would do our best to look for Bastien and relay her message to him.
    Truth be told, when my daughter had confessed to me that she had fallen for the young man, I’d felt deeply concerned, although I’d tried not to show it. She was nineteen years old now. I’d meant it when I’d said that she was free to make her own decisions. Of course she was. Still, the abrupt way in which she and Bastien had met, and the exceptionally short amount of time they had spent together, made me fear that the relationship would end in disappointment—even if Bastien survived the hunters. But that was a concern that I had to keep to myself.
    In any case, as much as it pained me on my daughter’s behalf, I didn’t hold out much hope that she would ever see him again. I feared that the hunters might’ve