Unnerved, I swept my eyes around the room, as if expecting to find the culprit lurking in a shadowy corner. But the Dome was empty, and there were no signs of the chairs anywhere.

There was a knock at the door, which clicked open a second later. Xavier. He’d arrived here early, like us. Dying to find out what happened, he would’ve left Corrine with Vivienne.

He spotted Sofia’s and my missing seats almost immediately.

“Did you do that?” he asked, his face twisting in confusion.

Sofia and I shook our heads. “We just got here and found it like this,” Sofia murmured. “We’ve no idea what happened.”

I bent down on the platform, running my hand over the stumps where the legs of the chairs had been. The splinters of wood pricked my fingers, residue of where the chairs had been fixed.

Of course, missing chairs weren’t a big deal. They could easily be replaced. It was the intent of this action that left me ill at ease. If someone had just needed to borrow a couple of chairs, they could have easily taken them from around the table. Ripping these chairs from the floor would render them unusable—they would have been badly damaged in the process. No, whoever took them wasn’t interested in chairs. This was a direct affront to Sofia and me. Who would target us in this way? I couldn’t think of a single person on the island who would do such a thing. The Shade accommodated many residents, the population being far too great for me to know everyone on a personal level, but I liked to think that my people were happy under our rule, and loved and respected the king and queen.

Still shaken, I forced the thought aside and shifted my focus back to Xavier.

“We will need to launch an investigation into who did this,” I said, “but for now, I don’t want this to distract from our meeting. We already set an agenda and we should stick to it until all questions are answered.”

I pulled up one of the lower chairs from around the table and sat down at the same level as the council members. Sofia followed my lead. It wasn’t that I was power-hungry and required a special throne to lord it over all my subjects. And neither was Sofia. But when the two of us were leading a conversation, being on a raised platform allowed us to better communicate with a room full of people. We could see each person clearly as they talked, and it aided understanding. Besides, elevated seats were a sign of respect, and there was nothing wrong with that when the respect was genuine. I liked to believe that Sofia and I had done enough to command respect, rather than demand it.

Xavier started asking questions—questions he couldn’t ask us back in the Sanctuary because Corrine had forbidden talk of anything but Vivienne’s recovery. Even though Xavier knew that the reason I’d called this meeting was to recount everything in one go rather than having to repeat it multiple times to dozens of people, he apparently couldn’t help himself. He was too anxious to hear what had happened and why we had returned without Benjamin.

I gave in and started explaining, but I didn’t get far before the door opened again and about fifty people piled in, mostly curious vampires and witches—excluding Corrine but including Ibrahim—who had not accompanied us on the excursion. Surprisingly, there were also many present who had come with us. Neither Rose nor Caleb were among them—I assumed they had retired to bed—and the dragons were also notably absent, not that they attended many meetings anyway. They would’ve returned to their mountain apartments, no doubt eager to be reunited with their lovers.

The newcomers gathered around the table, and surprise registered in some eyes as they noticed Sofia’s and my missing seats. Before we could be hit with a wave of questions, I cleared my throat and spoke up, “I don’t know what happened here. It is something that I must investigate later.”

I was about to begin recounting our voyage when the door blasted open. Saira’s huge werewolf form bounded inside and skidded across the floor. Riding on her back were River’s two sisters, brother and mother. River entered the room after her. She was soaking wet and shivering.

“Merfolk,” she gasped. “There is a whole swarm of them on the beach! One almost kidnapped my mother just now!”

“What?” I breathed. My eyes shot to Ibrahim. “Did you not get rid of those two merfolk Ben and River brought in on the sub?”

“A lot’s been going on, Derek,” Ibrahim replied. “It’s only since you left that I even had an opportunity to see to the task. I got the help of two other witches, but searching the water, we found neither the mermaid nor the merman. I thought that perhaps they’d grown tired of these shores and left the island for deeper waters. Otherwise, they were sneaky enough to avoid our detection. Whatever the case, we were unable to find them.”

“There are way more than two now!” River urged. “There’s like a whole wave of them, and they were surging toward the island.”

“This meeting is postponed.” I looked around at the witches present in the Dome. “We must all head to the beach at once. Which beach exactly?”

“Near the Port,” River replied, shakily.

“I killed one of them,” Saira growled. “It was the quickest way to free River’s mother. That seems to have angered them greatly. I haven’t the first clue as to what they’re doing on this island, but they are not happy. Really not happy.”

“My mother cannot walk well,” River said, looking anxiously back at Nadia. “Her back was injured in the attack. She needs—”