“How?” Nightmare asked.
“It’s not the original shell,” Soul replied. “It’s what threw me off, and why I didn’t even think about it as a possibility.”
“Hey!” I shouted, making everyone’s heads snap to look at me. “What are you all talking about? The rest of us are in the dark here, and this is Isabelle—our Isabelle—that you’re… I don’t know, dissecting?”
Soul turned around to face me. “Actually, that’s not Isabelle.”
As the revelation sank in beyond all the tests that had said otherwise, I could almost feel our collective resolve breaking down and falling apart like a brick wall swallowed by a stormy ocean. Nothing was left but our dumbfounded expressions and numbed brains as we tried to understand what this meant for us. I certainly had no idea, but I looked to my mom and Dad for guidance.
To my dismay, they had nothing. They were as blank and as horrified as the rest of us.
“How is she not Isabelle?” Corrine croaked, beads of sweat gathering on her brow. As the truth came to light, as reality forced us all into submission, we were all in for quite the reckoning. If this wasn’t Isabelle, then we had a whole new set of problems to deal with. “We tested—”
“I know you tested her. You’ve made that perfectly clear,” Soul sneered, no longer patient. “It’s not your fault, though. She is a flawless copy. Designed to escape all methods of human or magical detection known to you or us—it’s how she got away with it until now.”
“How do you know it’s not Isabelle?” Serena managed, her eyes round and puffy as they darted between Soul and Isabelle. “Where’s our daughter, then?”
“I’m not sure, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that this one isn’t her.” The Reaper pointed a finger at the girl’s chest. “There isn’t a soul in there. I mean, whatever is in there it’s passing off as a soul, but it’s not. Whoever made her is very good. I’ll give credit because they certainly deserve it. But they were unable to fully recreate Isabelle’s spirit. That’s how she’s been getting away with this. A sentry can read her fabricated aura which is weird since auras are part of the soul, in a sense. But this is a forged soul, so… I don’t know. A Reaper won’t notice the difference between her fake spirit and the real one… fortunately, Astra could. Isabelle isn’t Isabelle, okay? She’s what we call a ‘shell,’ a body without a soul—well, in this case, a real soul. It functions perfectly, but it lacks a moral compass. It just serves to fool us all. It can’t differentiate between right and wrong, good or evil, stuff like that.”
“So, she’s kind of like you or the Hermessi,” Jovi replied dryly.
“No. We are souls,” Time corrected him. “We may be cold and ruthless bastards sometimes, but we are not like Isabelle. Well, Isabelle’s pristine copy, anyway.”
“How is this possible?” Draven asked, gaze fixed on Soul.
“I think it has something to do with these rogue portals,” the Reaper said. “We don’t have enough to go on right now, but I’ve got a feeling that examining Richard’s murderous doppelganger would’ve yielded the same results. The only reason you knew from the get-go that Astra’s attacker wasn’t Richard is because the real Richard was verifiably elsewhere at the time. Plus, you saw two Richards at one time. Someone made exceptional copies of your people and sent them into The Shade.”
And as he said that, the world fell out of balance in my head because I couldn’t even imagine who would do this—let alone why or how. I’d hoped we’d have more answers by now, but the waters were getting murkier and deeper with every minute that passed, and I was a lousy swimmer. I’d drown in so many unknowns.
“But why? Who?” Astra replied. “And why do they keep coming after me?”
“My money is on your ability to detect them,” Kelara said, offering a cool smile. “You were able to sense the portal after it vanished. You’re likely able to sense them even when they’re open, if you’re in their vicinity when that happens. When you and Isabelle struggled, you could tell it wasn’t really her. Despite everyone else failing, you saw things no one else did. Clearly, these copies see you as a threat. They know you can see right through them if you think about it. They’re obviously planning something, and they are intimately aware of not only The Shade, but of the people in it as well, on a level that not even the people themselves are. Think about it… Reapers are experts in souls, and we weren’t able to pick up on Isabelle’s doppelganger. But you were.”
“That doesn’t answer the who part,” I muttered, my blood running cold.
Soul exhaled sharply. “Because we don’t know. We’ve never dealt with something like this before. I mean, I’ve come across shells once or twice, but they were original bodies left without their souls, the result of a rogue Reaper who’d done all sorts of nasty stuff before we caught him, before Death destroyed him. I could at least detect them. This is a wholly different bucket of weird.”
“Nice to hear Spirit Bender wasn’t the only rogue Reaper,” Dad grumbled, shaking his head.
“Hey, we have a complicated history,” Soul replied. “Anyway, your issue here is different, but fret not. It isn’t over yet. Something tells me the fun is only just beginning.”
“Fun?” I asked, downright nauseated.
“Forgive him. He likes trouble a little too much,” Kelara chimed in. “It’s his way of coping with the unknown, I suppose.”
Soul offered a shrug as his main response before he kneeled by Isabelle’s side. Draven and Serena’s eyes were throwing flurries of daggers at the guy, but he didn’t give a damn. Isabelle fascinated him—well, Isabelle’s doppelganger.
“I will bet you all a million years in the nothingness that this girl here and Richard’s double come from the same… manufacturer, and that said manufacturer dwells in whatever realms those shimmering gashes connect to,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Think about it. Imagine I’m a baddie. You clearly don’t know who I am or what I can do, but I’ve got an agenda. In order to execute my plans, I need to eliminate all potential threats.” He paused to point at Astra, which made my stomach tighten into a painful ball of stinging stress. “In this case, that’s you. So, I need to get rid of you somehow. I know who you are and what you’re capable of. Therefore, I send flawless copies of people you love and trust, because I need them to get close to you in order to deliver the killer blow.”
“But they failed,” Astra said, pale as a sheet of paper.
“They probably underestimated you. They knew your abilities better than you did, but still… they couldn’t kill you. Maybe you exceeded your own expectations. Or maybe the baddie out there doesn’t know you as well as they should,” Soul replied. “It worked out in your favor, though. Welcome it as a gift from fate, Astra. Not everyone is so lucky.”
Serena shuddered and scrambled away from Isabelle’s copy, disgusted and creeped out—as if she’d just realized she’d been holding a corpse’s head in her lap. “Where… Where’s my daughter, then?” Serena asked again, then got up, raising her voice as panic took over. “Where is our child?!” She was losing it. Soul had already answered this crushing question, but she couldn’t cope.
“I wish I had an answer for you,” Soul sighed. “I don’t. But if I were to guess, I’d say Miss Knock-Off over here might have a clue,” he added, nodding at Isabelle’s copy. “Richard’s doppelganger risked running into Richard in The Shade in order to get close enough to Astra to kill her.”
“Whoa…” I managed, memories resurfacing of previous conversations I’d had with Richard and Astra. Things that had seemed out of place earlier were starting to make sense as I began to realize what the true course of events had been. “Hold on. No, it went down differently. Isabelle’s copy was sent here to kill Astra. That’s proven by the many times she’s come after her, even in cuffs. Richard was with me on Visio when his copy came into The Shade and attacked Astra.”
“Ah. Emphasis on attack!” Astra exclaimed, picking up my train of thought almost effortlessly while Richard
struggled to follow our reasoning.
“Exactly. He wasn’t there to kill you. He was there to help Isabelle kill you,” I said, going over the events in my head. “He tried to hurt you, yes, but you pushed him away with your Daughter powers. He clearly was no match for you, but all he needed to do was keep you distracted long enough for him to throw that smoke bomb and slip whatever Isabelle needed to get out of those cuffs under the door!”
“And then he ran off because I was obviously going to take him down,” Astra muttered, her shoulders gradually dropping as something else occupied her mind. “And he couldn’t afford to get caught in The Shade because Richard was still out there and bound to return today. With Richard on the loose, he couldn’t do much.”
“Because that would’ve made you all suspect Isabelle of being a clone, too, despite the tests you’d run,” Soul concluded with a dry grin. “Of course, Astra still thought about it, since she’s obviously more receptive. Your enemy is underestimating you,” he said to Astra. “I think your enemy fears you enough to want you dead, but they don’t know absolutely everything about you.”
“And whoever that enemy is,” Astra replied, her voice breaking, “I think they have a way of communicating with one another, of knowing where to find one another. It’s the only thing that explains how Richard’s copy was able to get to Isabelle’s in the first place. Worst of all, I think they have our Isabelle.”
The words came out uneasily, but as soon as she said it, we all knew it to be true. This heartbreaking realization made us question everything we thought we knew as we all stared at Isabelle’s half-conscious and limp copy, but it also led to a sobering resolve. We couldn’t sit idly by and let this happen to anyone else.
Mom and Dad were furious, but they stayed quiet. I didn’t need them to say anything—their thoughts were written all over their faces. They were absolutely pissed. Someone had tarnished the peace here. Someone had defaced our precious island by inserting these doppelgangers and sending them after Astra, one of the most powerful among the Novak lineage. Someone had dared to disrupt our lives, sowing doubt in our hearts and making us think the worst of people we’d grown up with, people we knew better than we know ourselves.
Draven and Serena were devastated. Their daughter was missing. Jovi and Anjani appeared horrified. Someone had tried to frame their son as a coldblooded killer. Phoenix and Viola looked startled and angry at the same time. This unseen and unknown enemy was determined to murder their daughter in cold blood and by any means necessary.
This unseen and unknown enemy had powers. Portal powers that the white witches and the swamp witches had never seen before. Doppelganger craft skills that the Reapers had never dealt with before. This unseen and unknown enemy wanted something, and I worried it wasn’t just Astra’s head on a platter. No, there was more to this than we knew.
There was an endgame, and the longer we went not knowing what it was, the greater the danger we were in—Astra, most of all. There was also another issue I wasn’t sure we were taking into account, at least not now while the shock of discovery was still fresh. If this unseen and unknown enemy had been able to craft such undetectable copies of Isabelle and Richard, who else had they forged? How did they set the timing to send the clones in? Why did they take the real Isabelle, and not Richard? There were a lot of new questions to tackle here.
I glanced around at the gathered group. They all looked like my family and friends, but the sickening possibility remained that one or more of them could actually be soulless copies, murderous fakes just waiting for the right moment to go for Astra’s throat. If there were other doppelgangers in The Shade, how would we know? And how could we reveal them before it was too late? Soul’s method was up close and personal. So was Astra’s. We needed something preemptive and more effective, because the clones were really good at this and terrifyingly well organized, while we were in the dark about their origin and endgame.
Tristan
We reached Red River Mountain and found it eerily quiet. Checking my watch, I realized we were only minutes away from meeting Anunit, the one Reaper who could do for us what Death wouldn’t. My nerves felt stretched, and I feared they might snap from the tension.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Unending said as we settled on a large boulder at the top of the mountain. The kingdom rose far away in the distance, lights twinkling from its sea of houses. The castle stood proud in the middle, flames burning in its tall towers. The city center was still awake, judging by the number of lights, while darkness reigned on the outskirts. Like any busy metropolis, the heart of it never really slept. Meanwhile, up on this lonely mountaintop, a Reaper and a vampire—two creatures from different realms—had come to seek the help of another.
I could see where Red River Mountain had gotten its name. A stream flowed from the peak’s western ridge, and due to the reddish stone and iron at its source, the water came out red, almost like blood. Farther down, it passed through a series of natural underground filters. By the time it reached the bottom of the mountain, the water was clean and clear, gathering other streams along the way until it swelled into the river that cut clean through the kingdom’s capital. Up here, however, it was strange. Red River Mountain. Yes, this place had a history. I could feel it, like a heavy presence. Things had happened here. Things I couldn’t see for myself, but the memory of the events persisted in the air.
“It is beautiful, yes. But what is it about this place that feels so… wrong?” I asked.
Above us, the full moon reigned supreme, drowning out the stars and bathing the mountaintop in a soft white light. Unending glanced up and smiled. “I think I’ve rubbed off on you. You’re starting to sense things that happened so long ago that only the earth remembers them.”
“Is that even possible?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s the anthropologist in you, Tristan. You come to a place, and you can just… tell. The worlds are all the same in a certain sense, aren’t they? Violent and painful beginnings. Bloody histories. Dark pasts.”
I found myself nodding. “Maybe. But this mountain in particular baffles me.”
“Oh, that’s simply because something truly awful happened a long time ago, right here where we’re sitting. I’d have to work on a pretty delicate and detailed spell to find out what exactly left such a powerful imprint that you can feel it,” Unending said. “And I’m afraid we have more important things to do right now.”
“Right, we’re waiting for Anunit. I can’t believe we’re so close,” I replied, my heart beating a little too fast and too hard.
She covered my hand with hers. “Let’s hope she can come through for us. That it’s not just an elaborate rumor.”
“Do you think she’ll want to help?”
“I hope so. I have no intention of keeping her in the traps I laid out for her,” she said. “It’s only to stop her from bolting right away.”
Unending had spent about an hour drawing specialized sigils in the dirt and covering them with grass and weeds and pebbles from beneath the ridge. She’d opted for multiple types of Reaper traps, not knowing what Anunit might have warded herself against. For our safety and hers, Unending had gone through the entire repertoire to make sure no one got hurt.
I checked my watch for the millionth time, feeling increasingly nervous. It would get worse before it got better. I knew that. Unending chuckled softly. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”
“You can hear my heart beating, huh?” I replied with a weak smile.
Something crackled in the air above us. Unending wanted to tell me something, probably along the lines of “don’t worry” or “everything’s going to be okay,” but she knew better than to offer empty platitudes. The same crackling sound burst over our heads a second time, making us both look up.
I held my breath as a shimmering figure descended from the night sky. It landed on the ground, mere yards away and smack in the middle of a hidden symbol. I couldn’t breathe at all—not even if I wan
ted to. She appeared. Anunit. Just like we’d seen her in the holographic memory, she was a vision to behold.
Her galaxy eyes were big and round, guarded by thick black lashes. Her hair was rich, a mass of blonde swirls flowing all the way down to the back of her knees. The Reaper uniform she wore was mostly white, consisting of a tight bodice and leather pants with thigh-high boots. The only black I could see were the scythe’s handle and the collar around her neck. She looked more like an angel than a Reaper, though I had only ever seen the latter. Angels were the stuff of dreams and legends, yet Anunit had somehow managed to stir that image in my head. I was impressed.
But then she saw us, and the smile that had begun to blossom on her lips withered.
Unending got up. “Please, don’t run. We’re not here to hurt you.”
She’d been right. Sometimes, Reapers didn’t immediately register all the details in their surroundings during the landing phase, especially if they came from some distance away. This had proven to be a fruitful gamble, since Anunit had taken a while to spot us sitting so close.
“We just want to talk,” Unending added, slowly approaching the strange Reaper. I didn’t dare move a muscle, worried I might startle her. That was the last thing we needed. “I swear, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Anunit didn’t move. She just scowled at Unending and me, and I felt terrible. We didn’t have a better choice, since we still didn’t know who we were dealing with, but… I felt bad. It was a good minute before Unending spoke again, and I could tell she was just as nervous as I was, if more so.
“We need your help, Anunit. We’ve come very far to talk to you.”
“You’ve got a funny way of asking for my help,” Anunit replied, her tone clipped as she pointed at the ground. “How many traps am I in?”
“Five. I’m sorry. I had to make sure you wouldn’t run,” Unending said.
Anunit froze, her eyes slowly narrowing. “Wait, I know you. I mean, I know of you…”
A Shade of Vampire 87: A Shade of Mystery Page 21
