A Shade of Vampire 88: An Isle of Mirrors

by Forrest, Bella

  “Now, we wait,” he muttered, giving me a playful wink.

  I had a feeling he was working on his own resolve, just as I was. That was the trouble with powerful and potent beings like us. We were fierce and difficult to defeat, yet utterly useless without our scythes. The clones had managed to point out some serious design flaws, but this wasn’t the time or the place to do something about it. Sure, the Spirit Bender had almost kicked our asses more than once—in retrospect, however, there was really only one of him. In this case, we were dealing with at least dozens of creatures made solely to stir confusion and equipped not only with all forms of known magic, ours included, but also with spells that were simply out of this world.

  It sounded awful to even think such things, but I would rather have dealt with Spirit than with these fiends. Spirit was a familiar enemy. He had limitations. I wasn’t sure what weaknesses we’d find in the clones, and whether it would be enough to stop them.

  Soul and I spent another maybe twenty minutes talking and trying to keep ourselves from succumbing to anxiety and despair. He was doing a surprisingly good job of nudging my mood in a more positive direction.

  “Do you think Sidyan and Lumi will ever be an official pair?” I asked him. We’d been dishing and gossiping about the Reapers in our close circle of friends, and the bond between a Reaper and a living swamp witch had been the subject of constant fascination for the past two decades, at least.

  “I think Sidyan would like that,” Soul said. “Lumi’s the one holding back.”

  “Really? I could’ve sworn it was the other way around.”

  He shook his head. “Sidyan even spoke to Death about sanctioning their relationship. She moaned about it at first, but given the changing trends in our society, I think she just gave up trying to enforce those antiquated rules. It’s definitely Lumi who’s keeping him at arm’s length.”

  “Why, though?” I replied. “I know she loves him…”

  Soul offered a dry smile in return. When he realized it wasn’t enough of an answer, he sighed and gave me his lengthy opinion. “I think she’s afraid it might end badly. Think about it. She spent thousands of years locked in that Nerakian basement. She was tortured and demeaned. Lumi has some serious trust issues. Sure, she’s friendly and loyal to GASP, and she will tear down mountains for her disciples. But in the end, the path to her heart is wrought with trouble and distrust. I don’t think she’s got any control over it, however. She probably wants more out of this relationship with Sidyan, yet she can’t bring herself to fully trust that things might be okay for them in the end. If you look around now, you can certainly see what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, this clone war is certainly unexpected.”

  “And a good reason for Lumi to stay focused on the job. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll see Sidyan again soon. He can’t stay away from her for too long.” He chuckled.

  Someone cried out. Soul and I looked for the source, observing commotion in the distance. Two people were running toward us in a loose zigzag pattern. Behind them, I could see Stan and Ollie getting bigger as they drew closer.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I managed. We didn’t move, but I could feel myself tensing with anticipation. Our ghouls had accomplished something incredible in a short period of time. They’d found Serena and Draven’s clones, and they’d succeeded in chasing them all the way here. I had no idea how they’d done it, but I was damn proud of them. “Yes, Stan! Yes, Ollie! Bring them over, boys!” I shouted, feeling a huge grin stretch across my face.

  Soul shifted slowly, getting in position on the edge of his pentagram enclosure. By the time I looked out again, Draven and Serena’s clones were only yards away, nearly stumbling as they tried to escape the wrath of our ghouls. I’d have expected them to be more frightening and less frightened, but as I noticed a missing arm on Draven’s clone, I realized that Stan and Ollie had been pretty aggressive in their approach.

  Draven’s doppelganger’s face and chest were covered in deep gashes, blood dripping as he ran faster. But Ollie pounced and rammed into him. The sheer force of impact pushed him right inside my pentagram. To my surprise, the marvelous loopholes of Reaper trapping pentagrams had struck again—normally, non-Reaper related items and beings remained subject to the laws of physics, regardless of the pentagram’s rules. A Druid or a Druid’s clone or any living creature could still get in. But Draven still had my scythe on him, so he shouldn’t have been able to come through. Yet he did. Draven fell so hard and so fast, he didn’t even see it coming. I caught a glimpse of Stan doing the same to Serena’s copy, propelling her directly into Soul’s arms.

  It quickly turned into a fight to the death as I tackled the Druid’s clone, kicking and punching as fast and as hard as I could. He snarled when I caught him in a head lock, pinning him down with my full body weight. I tightened my grip and yanked with all my strength until his spine broke, before he could shift into a snake and slither out of my hold. “Argh…”

  His body softened, and I heard the last breath he gave. There was no sign of his spirit anywhere, though. How could there be, if he didn’t have a real soul? Then again, Thayen had been able to glamor them. I hadn’t seen any clone ghosts so far, and it was an interesting pattern to observe, but also a disturbing discrepancy. While their fake souls were meticulously crafted to fool even a Reaper, partly susceptible to glamoring, none made it into our realm. None survived beyond death…

  Soul celebrated when Serena’s clone finally expired. “Hell, yeah!” my beloved snapped, gripping his weapon with both hands. Beaming with pride, he shot me a devilish grin. “Grab your gear, sweetie. We’re going clone hunting!”

  The blade of his weapon shone white as he aimed it at a nearby tree. His lips moved as he uttered a telekinetic spell. It shot into the trunk and severed it at the base. The whole thing came down with enough weight to crash right into the pentagram that had held Soul in place for too long.

  “For your information, the traps they put us in were glitchy,” I said briefly. “Our scythes got in while on the bodies of the living doubles.”

  “Heh. Go figure,” Soul replied. “Happy accident?”

  I found my scythe under Draven-clone’s body. Rolling him over, I retrieved my weapon and did the same number on another tree, forcing it to come down and disrupt the pentagram’s outer circle, breaking the magic.

  “Maybe. I think we’ll need to be careful in the future, nonetheless. The mere fact that they know death magic, with incomplete, faulty spells or not, is enough of a problem already. They might figure more out. We obviously don’t know enough about them… Anyway!” Breathing a sigh of relief, I threw my arms around Soul’s neck and pulled him close. We kissed, closing our eyes for a moment, thankful to have escaped from the clones’ traps.

  Draven and Serena’s clones were dead, and we’d gotten our weapons back, but this was nowhere near over. I looked to Stan and Ollie. “Boys, you’ve earned yourselves a snack,” I told them, pointing a thumb at the doppelgangers’ bodies. “Have at it.”

  “We have to find Thayen and the others. Voss, Chantal, Richard. We don’t know what happened to them,” Soul said, his brow furrowed.

  “We’re free now, my love. We can cover enough ground,” I replied.

  “Yeah, that’s all nice and wonderful, but we still can’t summon more Reapers to help. The situation is clearly getting out of control here.”

  Behind us, Stan and Ollie were ripping pieces out of the clones, feasting on flesh and bones with satisfied purrs. It was an absolute mess, and it made me sick to a stomach I no longer really had, so I chose to focus on Soul instead. Even in death, there were things I just couldn’t bear to look at.

  “One step at a time. You’re right, we need to make sure the others are okay first. Astra, in particular. She’s been the clones’ target from the very beginning,” I said.

  We knew what we had to do. Hopefully, our friends would have made significant progress while we’d been stuck out her
e. Whatever came next, I sure as hell wasn’t willing to let the clones win this war—because this was a war, and they’d picked the wrong people to wage it against.

  Kelara

  With Stan and Ollie by our side, we zapped to different key points across The Shade. First, we checked the terrace area near the hospital again, then the hospital itself, and I found myself speechless at the destruction that had occurred. The silence was almost unbearable, a symptom in the aftermath of great violence.

  The ground had been burned black on a wide radius. There was nothing left of the hospital, save for the room where Isabelle’s clone had been. “Soul, she’s not here anymore!” I said, alarmed.

  “I think Stan and Ollie leaving their post to come for us was a dead giveaway,” he said, then nodded at the ghouls. “Look at them. They’re calm. I think it’s a good sign.”

  “A good sign of what, exactly?” I scoffed, motioning around us. “Look at what happened here. How is any of this okay?”

  Soul chuckled, irritating me with his calmness. “None of this is okay, but the fact that Isabelle’s clone isn’t here, coupled with Stan and Ollie’s relaxed demeanor, should tell us something. I’m willing to bet she’s with Thayen and the others. I think they came back for her; otherwise, our ghoul buddies here would be fidgeting and snarling and whatnot.”

  I realized that he was almost certainly right. “You’re right,” I said, then looked to the ghouls. “Did the clone leave with Thayen’s crew?”

  They both nodded, their lips moving as they hissed and struggled to make their thoughts understood. I caught snippets of what they were trying to tell us—they’d lived as mindless beasts for so long that they lacked Herbert’s eloquence, though we could still communicate, albeit in simpler terms. I gave Soul an alarmed look once Stan and Ollie were finished with their choppy account.

  “Clones galore,” I sighed, then pointed to the clone’s room. It was intact—the only thing to have survived the inferno that had swallowed this place whole. Redwoods had been burned to a crisp, reduced to piles of ash. Smoke was still rising from the embers, and there were throngs of footprints scattered all around. I walked over to the edge of the charred disk, analyzing a piece of burnt wood. “The fire that caused this was at a very high intensity. We’re talking dragon flames,” I added.

  “Probably Jericho. And I’m guessing that thing over there was a dragon clone,” Soul replied, pointing to the opposite edge of the blackened area, where a smoked pile of bones had survived the scorching blaze. “I mean, it looks like a dragon from here, but his species is supposed to be immune to fire. Considering the clones aren’t all perfect, maybe their maker didn’t know about the flame-retardant capabilities… I don’t know, I’m just guessing here.”

  “No, no, no, you’re onto something,” I murmured, rushing toward the dragon corpse. The closer I got, the clearer I could see its skeletal features, its wing bones shattered from the high temperatures of Jericho’s fire. “You’re right, and the ghouls confirmed it. A real dragon would never die from… well, dragon fire. Just like the water fae can’t drown. Creatures of one element can’t usually be killed by that element.”

  “That, in turn, tells me that whatever went down here ended with Jericho and his group escaping,” Soul said, while Stan and Ollie nodded once more. “I don’t see any drag marks, just a whole bunch of confused traces. Hordes of clones probably spun around here, trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “Still guessing?” I chuckled, giving him a sideways glance. Meanwhile, Stan and Ollie got to sniffing the entire area, all the way to the burnt edges where fresh grass was still growing. “Hey, what put the fire out? I don’t see any wet patches anywhere. No trace of water.”

  Soul shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe. If the clones are capable of putting out a dragon fire, then why’d they bother? Why didn’t they just let it spread and burn?” I replied.

  My question seemed to trouble Soul, but he didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know.”

  The ghouls moved toward the center of the burnt clearing, their deformed nostrils flaring, their black eyes darting in different directions as they registered every scent that had been left behind. There was something wrong about this place. The pieces of the puzzle weren’t clicking in the right spots. We were missing valuable information, and I loathed making assessments with incomplete knowledge.

  “Soul, it’s worth asking this question, though, don’t you think?” I said, eyeing him curiously.

  “What question?”

  “About putting out the fire. If Thayen’s group managed to get out of here, likely on Jericho’s back, then why did the clones bother to stop this place from burning to the ground? Why not just go after them?”

  “Maybe they did go after them,” he said, and Ollie growled softly in support of his argument. “See? They went after them.”

  I sighed deeply. “Yeah, but time would have been of the essence. Especially when their target was flying. I’m sorry, I’m repeating the same issue, I know… but it’s bugging me.”

  “We’ll figure it out eventually. For now, I’ve got a better question for you,” Soul shot back, hands resting on his hips as he walked toward me. “Where’d everybody go? The originals, the clones… where are they?”

  “We should try the Great Dome next,” I replied. “Thayen did say they were headed in that direction when we first parted ways. And if that doesn’t yield anything, we should check the witches’ sanctuary and the treehouse residences. Maybe the Shadians figured out they were being invaded and went into some kind of self-imposed lockdown.”

  Soul nodded once. “I think I remember Lumi or one of the senior officers—Rose or Caleb, I don’t remember which one—saying something about underground bunkers being accessible from pretty much anywhere on the island. Then there are the Black Heights. I know the dragons will happily welcome refugees in times of crisis. It’s just the two of us, Kel… we don’t have time to check every damn spot in The Shade, so we’d best focus on what we can do.”

  “Finding Thayen,” I said. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “One step at a time, remember?”

  Stan groaned softly, looking up at the moonlit sky. As if his feet had suddenly caught fire, he jumped and vanished into the air. Soul, Ollie, and I quickly followed, leaving the ground and taking to the skies in our subtle forms.

  Below, the black disk looked smaller and less significant. The redwood forest was dark and quiet, the wind blowing through its branches and making the leaves rustle. The smell of smoke persisted, but the skies were clear. Lights glimmered in the distance, in different areas of The Shade. Soul was right: we didn’t have the time or the resources to verify the entire island. Not without the Time Master to help us.

  One thing was clear, however.

  The clones had caused enough trouble to throw the whole of GASP for a loop. We stayed close to Stan as he pursued the aerial traces left behind by Jericho in flight. We bounced through the open air, the redwoods’ crowns inches beneath our feet. I was nervous and anxious, but I knew we couldn’t let our friends deal with this on their own.

  Thayen and Astra needed us right now. To be honest, getting to the bottom of this mystery would’ve satisfied my own restless curiosity. Who were these doppelgangers? Who’d sent them? What were they after? It bugged me that even after all this time, we still had so many questions left unanswered, while the clones pranced around The Shade like it was their domain. It irked me beyond belief.

  Somewhere far ahead, I saw a dot moving. A creature with its wings flapping, headed toward the Port. “Soul, I think we’re getting closer.”

  We had to be careful. Zapping across greater distances, we barely had time to look to the ground and see if the clones had passed through. We didn’t know what they were planning or where they were headed. We only knew they wanted Isabelle’s clone alive and Astra dead. That was the very core of the issue, and the only place in this entire mess where Soul and I could act
ually make a difference.

  So we kept chasing after Stan, who’d caught a solid trace of Jericho. We kept going, in a rush to find our friends and help them fight back against creatures that didn’t belong here. Hell, these clones didn’t belong anywhere. Their mere existence was a troubling abomination, and I was looking forward to being able to communicate with Death again—or to at least send her a message. She needed to know that someone had been fabricating fake souls. She had the power and the authority to help us investigate on a much broader and more effective scale.

  But first and foremost, we had to get to Astra and the others before it was too late.

  Thayen

  For a second, I actually dared to think we’d make it safely to the Port.

  Jericho suddenly tilted hard to the left, nearly throwing us off his back in the process. I wanted to ask what the hell was wrong with him, but then I saw the ice shards narrowly missing his belly. Someone was firing frozen projectiles from the ground.

  “Thayen, they caught up with us,” Dafne breathed.

  I looked down, my blood curdling at the troubling sight. At least five dozen figures were running on the ground, chasing after us. I recognized some of them—Ben and River, Hazel and Tejus, Dafne, Lethe, Heath, to name a few—all of them clones. All of them focused on us. The air rippled from the multitude of barriers the sentry doppelgangers launched upward, and Jericho was forced to bank right. Dafne cursed loudly enough for the whole island to hear.

  “Damn these bastards! They copied me and my dad!”

  “Not that well, apparently. None of them are flying!” Astra replied. With no time to wonder how that had come to happen, I only took it as a much welcome fluke.

  “Hold on!” I shouted. “It’s going to get bumpy!”

  Jericho roared and released a heavy rain of fire below. I watched the flames spread and engulf some of the clone clusters. Screams tore across the clearing, but some of them managed to slip into the woods ahead. We weren’t done with them, and I knew they’d try harder to get to us.