A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones

by Forrest, Bella

  “About the World Crusher?” I asked, drawing alarmed glances. “I’m told she is the true first Reaper.”

  “She is,” Eneas replied.

  “And she’s being held here,” I continued.

  He nodded.

  “You all serve to keep her safe?” Tristan asked.

  “No, we serve to make sure she never gets out. At least that’s what we were told,” Eneas shot back. “Death summoned us ten million years ago. She said we had a great mission ahead. That the entire universe would thank us for our work. Little did we know…”

  He sounded disappointed, even upset, by this predicament. I couldn’t blame him, considering what he’d been turned into. “Sorry to ask again, but how did you devolve into Ghoul Reapers?”

  Eneas took a deep breath, gazing out into the incandescent sunset for a short while, just as the glowing orange disk dipped low and left a rippling mass of warm colors in its wake. “We came here as Reapers,” he said. “And we were honored to undertake this mission. The six of us, heroes of our realm, were chosen to keep the World Crusher bound, to stop her from breaking out. It wasn’t until much later that we learned the truth.”

  “The World Crusher would never be able to break out of the sigil spell on her own,” Fileas continued, sitting on one of the temple’s steps. The others seemed to relax as well, though none put their weapons away. “We were brought here to keep her rage from infecting this world. Imagine being locked inside a damn book for so long, unable to move, unable to leave, unable to do anything other than brood and contemplate an eternity in absolute misery.”

  “Her rage…” I murmured, remembering my situation on Visio. It rang a painful bell.

  “Yes. The World Crusher has been like this since before you were made,” Malin added, giving me a bitter smile. “That look on your face tells me you know a little bit about what it’s like.”

  I told them about my time on Visio and how I was able to break free. They listened, hanging on every word with childlike interest. In the end, these creatures understood exactly what I had been through. As it turned out, they shared a similar plight.

  “Death bound us to Biriane,” Filicore said. “She wanted to make sure we wouldn’t abandon our posts. Granted, we weren’t deprived of ourselves or our powers, but we’ve been stuck here for ten million years. You know what that’s like after your imprisonment on Visio.”

  “I do, and I’m sorry,” I replied.

  “So, the World Crusher’s rage seeped out through the book in which she was sealed,” Tristan said. “What were the effects?”

  Hadras motioned around him. “Isn’t it obvious? My brothers and I fortified the temple’s magic as best as we could. We added new protection seals, and we carved a thousand charms into the columns and the walls to keep the poison from spreading… because that’s what the World Crusher’s rage feels like. Poison. It burns through your brain, it makes you vicious and always angry. It eats away at your soul until there is nothing left.” In that sense, this situation differed from my own. My suffering had manifested through the Black Fever, mimicking physical disease and making people sick. What they were describing was something much deeper. “Our measures didn’t help much.”

  “You feel her, don’t you?” Eneas asked, watching me with renewed interest. I nodded once. “For what it’s worth, we do apologize. We failed to contain it. The poison spread, and it corrupted the people. They fought over everything and nothing. They killed one another in the streets. They started wars. They obliterated their own civilization. The last people standing after the Doom of Biriane, as we called it, took up knives and went for each other’s throats. It didn’t stop with the people, either. It did the same to the animals. Every insect, every beast from the woods, every bird—they tore through their own. Pecked out eyes and hearts. Killed relentlessly until nothing was left. Until Biriane became this…”

  “And then the trees started to die,” Malin said. “The grass. The flowers. Life itself succumbed to the World Crusher’s rage, forcing the first Reaper to live up to her name, I suppose. This is all that remains. What you see before you. Stone and dirt and dust.”

  “Plus, a pretty sunset,” Filicore chuckled bitterly.

  The more I listened, the angrier I felt. How could Death have let this happen? “Where was Death in all of this?” I asked, a fire burning in my chest.

  “Oh, she tried to do something, too. After the Biriane people were gone, she came down here. We showed her everything we’d done, and she laid charms of her own. Powerful stuff based on words and sub-words that we didn’t even know,” Eneas said. “None of it worked. You see, you may be powerful, Unending, but the World Crusher is more so. In terms of strength, she’s closer to Death’s level than you will ever be.”

  Tristan sighed deeply. “Death could never bring herself to destroy her own creation. Not until the Spirit Bender, at least.”

  “Technically speaking, the World Crusher cannot be destroyed,” Eneas replied.

  “What do you mean? Anything that Death makes can be destroyed,” I said, alarm bells ringing in my head. The implication of his statement terrified me. At least the Spirit Bender could be tossed into the nothingness. Any of my siblings could suffer the same fate, effortlessly, at the hands of Death. And yet the World Crusher was somehow exempt?

  “Not the World Crusher,” Eneas declared. “I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but Death was convinced that her first could not be sent into the nothingness because there’s too much of Death herself inside this Reaper. Something about rapport of power and concentration of death—literal death. Point is, she couldn’t destroy the World Crusher.”

  Tristan touched my arm gently. “We have to remember that Death was… young, so to speak. Just like she was when she made you.”

  “Worse, actually,” I replied. “Worse, if she didn’t even consider making her creation vulnerable in some way.”

  “And so, here we are, the suckers of the universe,” Fileas said with a shrug. “Death forbade us to leave, saying we’d simply have to keep renewing the charms and the spells indefinitely. We had already succumbed to the rage, anyway. We were Ghoul Reapers by the time she got here, and our condition is irreversible, it seems, because our souls perished in the process.”

  “Much like other ghouls,” I murmured.

  “Not really. We never ate a soul. World destroyed ours. This is us, ages later… empty, black-eyed, and miserable.” Eneas came closer.

  “What do you feed on, then? If you’re part-ghoul, for lack of a better term?” I asked. His proximity made me tense from head to toe. Unwillingly, he’d become a vehicle for the World Crusher’s rage. The poison didn’t just ooze from inside the temple. It had found a beacon in the Ghoul Reapers, whose physical forms amplified its effect.

  “On our own rage. On the distant dream of freedom,” he replied. “We don’t need food. Technically speaking, we’re still Reapers, so we don’t need to feed. Our souls just died, so the ghoulish degradation is in a limbo. I assume we’ll become beasts if we eat souls, but we’ve never felt the urge. Of course, by the time World killed us on the inside, the people of Biriane had already been destroyed and were long gone. But I look at you now and I look at your husband, too, and… well, let’s just say I don’t feel peckish. Consider us an anomaly.” The closer he got, the worse I felt. It forced me to take a step back and apologize. “Forgive me, Eneas. It’s too much, even for me.”

  “Imagine what it’s like for us!” he hissed, slipping into a sort of fury.

  Tristan reached out to me telepathically. Be careful with them. They’re twitchy and volatile, likely a side effect of the World Crusher’s rage. They might seem okay now, but there are micro-expressions I keep seeing, faint signals of alarm. They’re not stable.

  I gave my husband a faint nod, then smiled at Eneas. “How can we help?”

  “Start by telling us why you’re here,” he replied.

  “I wanted to know if it was true, what Anunit told me. H
ow were your conversations with her?” I asked. “She didn’t tell us much.”

  Hadras grinned coldly. “We beat the living daylights out of Anunit and sent her away with a promise to do worse if she ever came back. I don’t sense her now, so I assume you two came here alone.”

  “We did,” I replied. “Please, allow me to apologize on behalf of our maker. I’m afraid she has left you here to be… forgotten. I wasn’t even supposed to know about you.”

  “But you do,” Eneas shot back. “What else do you wish to do here? She’s real, you know that now. So what next?”

  I thought about it for a moment, choosing my words carefully. Tristan’s warning persisted in the back of my head. The last thing I needed was to burn this bridge before I could cross it. “Can I see the book where she’s kept? I’d like that very much.”

  The Ghoul Reapers exchanged fleeting glances, and Filicore took the lead as he got up. “Unless you can set us free, you will not get past us.” He pointed his half-moon scythe at me for good measure. The dusky light bounced off it in fractured shards of amber and pink that persisted at the corner of my eye for a second or two.

  “You want to leave Biriane?” Tristan asked, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Would Death allow that?”

  “Of course not!” Eneas barked, obviously insulted. “She cannot even undo this state we’re in. World’s rage did such a number on us that it’s practically irreversible. Our souls were destroyed without us eating other souls. We got the ghoulishness but without the bad deed that usually leads to it. It’s still ghoulishness. Irreversible, regardless. So, no, Death wouldn’t want us to leave. But Unending here is her precious baby. She knows death magic that we don’t. The kind of death magic she could use to let us leave this wretched place. Don’t you see? Biriane is dead. There is nothing here left to protect. We failed, and Death failed, and the World Crusher will keep rotting away inside that damn book, regardless. We don’t have to share her fate!”

  Knowing Death as well as I did, I didn’t dare express certainty in my ability to give them what they wanted. There were several factors to discuss first—there could be repercussions to releasing them. I had no idea how Ghoul Reapers might react once they were free. Where they would go and how I might be able to track them. On top of that, I wasn’t sure if their status depended on the World Crusher’s. Would they leave her rage behind, or would they carry it with them? Would it then infect others beyond this realm?

  I couldn’t talk to Death about this. Not without risking her intervention and potential demand to abandon this trial before I uncovered the whole truth. No, I had to keep this between Tristan and me for now.

  “I think we should discuss this further,” I suggested.

  Filicore sneered, baring his white fangs at me—another sign of the ghoulish nature taking over the former Reaper. “I think we’re done talking.”

  That sounded like a threat, which worried me. Were they ready to pounce? Were they so irrational that they would jump us before we could even consider helping them? It sounded counter-productive, but their condition was unique and without precedent. I had no idea how they would react or how to prevent a potentially violent outburst.

  Tristan and I had waded into dark and unknown waters. My primary concern was to keep us safe. Nothing else mattered. Nothing, unless Tristan and I were in it together. Looking at the Ghoul Reapers, I understood that they had been betrayed and deceived by Death. Where would I even begin to repair the damage she’d done to them without causing more damage to the universe itself?

  Sofia

  A few days had tumbled by since Thayen and the others vanished, likely into the same unknown realm that had flooded ours with murderous clones. Two days of feverish waiting and studying every portal remnant the creatures had left behind, thanks to the Daughters of Eritopia. There were hundreds of shimmering portal traces, some newer and others dating back six months. It still boggled the mind to consider this horrifying fact. For half a year, the clones had been coming in and out of this world, and we were no closer to figuring out their agenda.

  They had taken Isabelle, Serena and Draven’s daughter, two months ago. Voss, Chantal, and Richard were also missing. Viola had been taken, as well… I could only hope that our son’s crew would bring some justice. That they would recover our people safe and sound.

  But in the end, we didn’t know anything. We only had this muted hope while we struggled to find a way into that strange realm. Phoenix was working with Safira and the other Daughters on a way to reverse engineer the shimmering portals, though they were nowhere near a solution. Mona and Kiev had returned, but the witch didn’t have much to add to our investigative efforts—much like Corrine and Shayla and the others, Mona was stumped by this entire affair. This wasn’t about throwing our most powerful witches at the problem—the problem itself pertained to magic and knowledge that none of us had ever dealt with before.

  We had put teams in place, each with a witch or a djinn ready to teleport them to wherever a new passageway might open. Derek and I had made a crew of our own for the same purpose, joined by Rose, Ben, and Kailani. Caleb and River were manning the executive side of all things GASP-related, while the rest of our friends and family—Victoria and Bastien included, along with Lucas and Marion, Claudia and Yuri, Eli and Shayla, Tejus and Hazel, Vivienne and Xavier, and Liana and Cameron—focused on making sure each of the deployment teams were fed and equipped with everything they might possibly need for a new and mysterious dimension. Alas, there was only so much preparing we could do…

  Waiting was all we had left, and I refused to spend another moment in this damn limbo. A mere hour earlier, I’d decided to take Derek, Ben, Rose, and Kailani to Serena and Draven’s treehouse. Our great-granddaughter and her Druid husband only used it for their holidays since they lived on Calliope, but Isabelle had been spending more time here over the past year, particularly during her training sessions with GASP. She’d once told me she liked The Shade better, though she hadn’t given me any specific reasons why.

  The house had already been searched by our agents, and nothing of significance had come to light. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do another thorough search, but it was the only thing I could think of to stop the anxiety and keep me from falling apart. We needed our wits about us if we had a chance to go after Thayen. My son was missing, and an emotionally distraught mother would not be able to save him.

  Keeping busy in this treehouse had seemed like a good idea, and none in my crew had spoken against it. We assigned ourselves different parts of the redwood residence to search. Draven and Serena had built it on three sprawling levels, with each floor designed as a self-sufficient apartment—the top belonged to Isabelle, the middle to her parents, and the bottom was reserved for potential guests from Eritopia. I suspected Draven and Serena had also contemplated having a second child, but given the current madness, it was the last thing on their minds.

  “Derek is making them tea,” Kailani said as we searched through Isabelle’s living room. Rose and Ben had the bottom level, while my husband was keeping our great-granddaughter and her soulmate company. Both were devastated by Isabelle’s absence, though they did retain a certain calmness. Despair would serve no one, anyway.

  “Yeah, I can hear the kettle, too,” I replied, trying not to smile. The things I loved most about Derek were these small details of his behavior. For all his strength and masculine poise, he was a sensitive and caring creature. He drank blood, yet he didn’t mind brewing a cup of fragranced tea for those who might find it refreshing and perhaps even comforting. That was Derek. He cared about others more than he did about himself. A selfless beacon of light confined to living in the shadows.

  Isabelle’s floor of the house was spacious and airy, with large square windows and flowers growing in tin pots at every sill—red and pink blossoms overflowing and spreading their perfume throughout each room. There were pictures of Isabelle with her parents, cousins, and friends framed in delicate bamboo and hung on the wal
ls, leaving little room for much else. To Isabelle, these moments were important. Her family and those she’d bonded with were important. I remembered she wasn’t the most social of creatures, but those she’d grown close to meant everything to her.

  “It’s like a little corner of her mind,” Kailani said, almost reading my thoughts as we moved our search to the bedroom. We weren’t sure what we were looking for, just looking for anything the others might have missed before us. “Every inch of this place says ‘Isabelle.’”

  The bed was a classic four-poster with a sculpted headboard and a pale blue organza canopy. The silks were a creamy green, and she had stocked up on decorative pillows with intricate white floral embroidery. The desk and bookshelves matched the hazelnut wood used for the bed, and soft rugs of green and warm yellow covered the hardwood floor.

  Photos covered the walls here, too, along with a massive corkboard on which she’d pinned keychains from all the Earthly places she’d been to over the past five years. There was a miniature Eiffel Tower from Paris, a Spitfire bombardier from London, and countless other trinkets that put her all over Earth’s map. Isabelle loved our realm the most, I realized, and it warmed me up on the inside. She was destined to rule over Eritopia someday, but until then she had chosen to spend her time here. Draven and Serena didn’t show any signs of slowing down with their honorable leadership of Calliope, anyway, and there were places I looked forward to visiting with Isabelle, places I loved and I’d told her about. I’d promised I would take her to the Grand Canyon. It was a promise I intended to keep.

  Here I am, thinking about her like she’s just around the corner, about to walk through the door. My heart ached. I took a deep breath and got down on my knees to look under the bed, while Kailani worked through each shelf loaded with books and old notebooks.

  “I have to admit, Draven and Serena are doing great at keeping their wits about them in this situation,” the witch said, keeping her voice down. “I don’t know what I would do if my child went missing like this.”