Chapter One-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eight
Adam and Kat looked around in surprise, but they couldn’t see anyone else.
“I think the objective announcement must just arrive when you set foot on the island,” Adam concluded after scanning the surrounding dock thoroughly and still coming up empty-handed.
“She is in the castle, isn’t she?” Kat replied.
Adam spread out his perception, finding a single third-generation bloodfiend not too far away, and a potent melody much deeper in, near to what had to be the back of the island.
She’s not hiding like the Patriarch, Adam realised.
“It seems that way,” he said.
On top of the two bloodfiend melodies, Adam detected a surprising amount of humans nearby, though their melodies suggested they were drugged or spellbound, given how prevalent happiness and ecstasy were amongst the tones emanating from them. Beck had said that charm magic was a dangerous power to go up against when dealing with the Matriarch Island, so Adam figured it was why the humans all radiated such strange melodies. It was similar to the melody he’d observed in the Sober Eel, before coming upon the bloodfiend feasting on another person.
Surprisingly, there were no ghoul signatures on the island, but Emelia had told him that the Matriarch and her coven opted to keep humans alive and drain their blood without turning them, except for when they needed more bloodfiends.
“What do we do first?” Kat asked.