“What if this is their lair?” Rose said, unable to peel her eyes off the screen. “Think about it. Clones of us. Would it be weird to think they might live in a place like ours? I mean, what if we’re not the only things they copied?”
“That makes sense, actually,” Derek replied. “It’s deeply disturbing, of course, but… yeah. I’d see that.”
“Look over there,” Ben said, pointing at the moving images. Isabelle’s clone had made it deep into the woods, where a gorgeous two-story villa with wisteria-covered walls dominated the clearing. “That’s supposed to be the entrance to the witches’ Sanctuary. There’s no Sanctuary there, from what I can tell.”
Rose nodded. “But those are absolutely our redwoods.”
“Not ours, per se,” Esme sighed. “Derek is right. I think we’re looking at a modified copy of our world. It’s the only explanation for this…”
There were people gathering in the clearing. All the clones from every corner of that… “Shade.” I saw myself and Derek, too. Our children and grandchildren. Their uncles and aunts. Their cousins. Friends and colleagues. People we’d lived with for most of our lives, mimicked by these vicious creatures. A woman came out of the villa, and everything fell silent.
“Welcome, children,” she told them, smiling and obviously satisfied by the gigantic turnout. Isabelle’s clone was but a drop in this ocean. “Welcome. I know this has been a long journey for each of us. Some of you might have worried that what I promised might not come true. Some of you might be thinking you’re better off losing yourselves in the world, pretending to be someone you’re not. Do not despair, children…” The crowd grew restless, but the woman didn’t care. She glowed like a sunbeam, her hair long and golden, her dress black and white, her sapphire eyes burning like nothing I’d seen before. Even her voice… it was sweet and different, designed to send a rush of adrenalin through me as I listened. “Do not despair, for we shall have it. Soon, everything we have worked for will become a reality. Soon, we shall have it all. You! You shall have it all!”
The clones roared and clapped with delight, while the woman smiled and enjoyed their reaction, taking it all in, sipping from the joy of each and every person present.
“You know the switch is needed, and a perilous journey lies ahead. Certain conditions must be met,” she went on to say, growing suddenly serious. “Most importantly, we need more portals.”
“Every time you open one, one of us dies!” a clone shouted. “And we never know which one of us it will be until it’s too late!”
The golden woman was unmoved. “It is a minimal price to pay for greatness and freedom, don’t you think? Besides, there are more of you in my laboratories than there are stars in the sky. I only need to greenlight your production. So, it doesn’t matter which of you dies. Your lives are needed to fuel the portals, and your lives are absolutely replaceable. This is about more than just your well-deserved rewards, however. How much longer shall we let those Shadians think they own the world, huh?”
The clones burst into cheers, shaking their fists as the golden woman smiled once more.
“We will take it,” she said. “We will take it all!”
That was everything the crowd needed to explode, applauding and crying and laughing at the same time. By the time the video ended, we were slightly wiser but just as confused. It took us a while to even formulate thoughts after what we’d watched. We had so many questions.
“Do you think that’s where the kids are?” Phoenix said, asking the most important question of them all.
I wanted to say yes, but the thought horrified me because it meant our children were out there in that wretched plane of existence, surrounded by awful clones that were led by that golden woman with way too much power of persuasion in her voice.
“We need to get to them. Fast.” Derek said what I couldn’t. He was scared, too. I could see it in his eyes. Rose and Ben were troubled, stealing glances at one another. We knew what the general consensus was, but nobody wanted to say it aloud.
Our children were in deep trouble, if that was their current environment. The worst part was that we couldn’t do a damn thing to get to them. Not until one of those shimmering portals opened.
Astra
My immunity to the black mist was an ace I had to use fast. As the Berserkers came down on us hard and with everything they had, I bounced across the short grass and tapped Regine’s shoulder, then Myst’s. The light inside me had grown beyond my ability to control it—an apparent side effect of my physical contact with the liquid darkness. But it didn’t matter. Whatever my nature was responding to, it was making me stronger and bolder than ever.
Maybe it was the knowledge of my ability to open shimmering portals that had been the true game changer. Maybe my psyche had taken a leap of faith, and now everything else was just… falling into place, piece by piece.
Thayen used his pulverizer weapon on the incoming clones. The ground shook from their approach. A mass of doubles came from every direction, converging on the villa. Whatever Hrista’s ultimate goal was, she wasn’t here to tell us about it. No, she’d left us here to die. After playing with us, waiting for us to actively search for trouble, she’d decided it was time to end us.
“Jericho, Dafne! We need dragons!” Thayen shouted. They would be effective against most of the clones. It left the two of us with Myst, Regine, and Brandon against Torrhen and about a dozen other Berserkers, each looking scarier than the last.
One of them was tall enough to rival a tree, with massively square shoulders and a cape as black as night. Another was stocky and muscular, with blue fires in his eyes so bright and vicious that it made my blood freeze. They had weapons of darkness—swords, long knives, axes, and even a sickle-sword. They were fast and ruthless, and sometimes it was hard to push back. My light held them back, but never for too long.
Torrhen, in particular, was a persistent foe. Myst drew light from Jericho’s fire, and Regine came to me for hers. Allowing the glow inside me to expand, I set my mind into a sort of meditation. Every thought I had was brought back to the pink light. Every idea, every fear and doubt… it would come back to the pink light, feeding my power and suffocating the horror that had been creeping through my veins since I’d first laid eyes on Hrista.
“Thayen, focus on helping your dragon friends,” Brandon said as he circled our cluster with both swords out. He hacked and slashed at each of the Berserkers who dared get close enough. “We’ll handle these Purgatory fiends.”
Myst nodded in agreement. “Use the rest of your clips and thin that crowd. Jericho and Dafne will soon be overwhelmed otherwise.”
I could already see what she was talking about. The woods trembled as the sea of clones tightened around the clearing. Dafne spat her blue flames that turned to ice, raising frosted walls against the incoming foes. Jericho took flight and circled above, casting fire down on the doppelgangers. The redwoods burned, too, and it hurt me until I remembered that this place wasn’t real. It had to be destroyed. I couldn’t see any other way out of this awfulness.
Thayen turned his pulverizer weapon on a bunch of clones who’d managed to climb Dafne’s ice walls. Poof! Poof! And they were gone, vanished in puffs of shimmering gray ashes. One of the Berserkers got too close for comfort, but Myst was there to slash her shiny sword at him, causing light to dance across the grass. It hit the Berserker in the shoulder, and he cried out, moving back as he cursed under his breath.
“Come on, give it your best shot!” Regine snarled somewhere to my left. Myst was an elegant and ruthless fighter. Her blows were heavy and determined. In a clear contrast, Regine was like a firecracker. Light-footed and fast, she never stayed in one spot for too long. She bolted across the clearing so many times, it left some of the Berserkers standing in irritated confusion.
Brandon was quick to capitalize on that hesitation, driving his twin swords through their backs. Like Myst and Regine, he couldn’t kill Berserkers—the creatures of Purgatory could not k
ill one another—but we needed them disabled or slowed down, at least, or else they would certainly kill the rest of us.
I focused the pink light into my hands, opening the palms toward Torrhen. He stood about twenty feet away, smiling calmly. “You’ll get tired soon enough,” he said. If there was one thing I was grateful for, it was Haldor’s absence. His shadow hounds would have been too much to bear. I wondered if I could find out where they had taken him.
“You know, you’re pretty pathetic to let a Valkyrie boss you around like that,” I replied. The light poured into my ankles and feet, learning to spread over the grass like Hrista’s liquid darkness. The more I focused, the more I dared to imagine I could do with my power. I held back a smile and focused on the light. It trickled across the flowers and the green blades of grass, hurrying toward Torrhen.
His blue eye twinkled. “Hrista is more than a Valkyrie now, little girl.” He brought out an axe, a monstrous thing with a deep black blade that was three feet wide. I dry-swallowed at the sight of it. He brought the axe down with a grunt, hitting the precise spot where my liquid light had met the darkness, and begun to push it back. As soon as the blade came down, it launched a powerful pulse that smacked into me with the force of a tidal wave.
I heard myself cry out as I flew backward. Brandon moved like a shadow, catching me in his arms. The impact knocked the air from my lungs for a second, my pink glow fading. Torrhen was right. I was already getting tired. I’d put plenty of energy into Regine’s sword, plus the light I’d expelled against the Berserkers to stop them from reaching me. “Are you okay?” Brandon asked, his gaze wandering all over me, checking for obvious injuries.
“Yes.” I nodded briefly, gripping his shoulders for support. For the first time, I had a full understanding of how broad the Berserkers were. Metal covered both biceps, but I caught glimpses of his muscles stretching, taut and firmly contoured, as he raised his arms and reached for the sheathed swords on his back.
“Stay close and use your light wisely,” he said. “You can’t run out too soon. It’s the only thing holding these monsters back.”
It saddened me a little to hear him refer to his brothers as monsters. Unfortunately, he was speaking the truth. The Berserkers in Hrista’s service were determined to kill us. They didn’t value life or the Order that had made them. They had gotten involved in something truly heinous, and there was no excuse for their terrible behavior. Darkness flashed past us. Something big and black grabbed Brandon and pulled him away from me.
I let out a soft whimper and held up my hands, pushing light from both hands and aiming at the violent clash of shadows. It hit them hard and bright, and the Berserkers were equally affected. Brandon shrugged it off quickly, but the other one needed another moment to pull himself together. I knew I’d hurt an ally too, but I couldn’t allow anyone to take Brandon down permanently. Fortunately for me, he’d seen it coming.
He came down on the Berserker hard and without mercy. Both blades pierced the guy’s throat, and he hissed from the pain, the shadows running off him, revealing his paled skin and blackened veins as they dissipated. That was the effect of a dark stab, I realized. There was so much I didn’t fully understand about their light and dark powers, about their weapons and their magic.
I only knew we couldn’t let them take us.
Myst and Regine amplified their blows against the Berserkers, while Torrhen continued to follow me around, never attacking unless I hit first. It always ended in my light pushing him away, but even I could see the glow weakening with each use. I didn’t have much left, and there was no shimmering portal around for me to feed on.
“Thayen, don’t!” I heard Myst shouting, then saw him doing the one thing he’d been warned against. A Berserker had gotten the better of Regine, and Myst was too busy with two other foes to come to her sister’s aid, so Thayen tried to glamor him. The intention had been good. The outcome… not so much.
His glamoring worked, but only for a brief moment, before the targeted Berserker, the stocky and fast one, flexed his muscles. Thayen gasped as blood shot from his nose. He fell to his knees, eyes rolling back in his head. Around us, the battle raged on. Jericho and Dafne were no longer enough against the throng of clones. Thayen was down. Myst and Regine were overwhelmed.
My light was running low, and Brandon couldn’t hold on for much longer, either. The energy I’d felt buzzing through me earlier had turned into something meek and bland and tasteless. Nothing I did brought me any closer to a resolution. This wasn’t a fair fight, and I wanted us all out of this place. I wanted us safe and alive.
“Thayen,” I murmured as I rushed over to him. The liquid darkness on the ground pulled back wherever my boots landed, still very much allergic to me. “Thayen, wake up!”
I tried to slap him back to consciousness, but he was really out of it. He had a pulse and his breathing was steady, but I couldn’t think of any way of bringing him back. If I were to use my healing powers on him now, I’d have little to no light left to fight the Berserkers—and if my light went out, we were absolutely screwed.
Myst finally reached us, growing pale when she saw his face. “Will he live?”
“Yeah. He exerted himself again,” I said, shaking.
“The fool. I told him not to—” Myst screamed as a long blade pierced through her shoulder. It was a weapon of light, much like a rapier with an elegant swirl of gold and steel serving as the handguard. Hrista rose from behind the Valkyrie, smiling as she pushed the sword deeper, its glowing tip inching closer to my throat.
“Myst…” I managed, trying to wrap my head around this new reality.
The illuminated rapier turned black as Hrista’s lips moved. Torrhen was right. She was more than a Valkyrie now. She had darkness and light in her hands and an ability to work with both. And she’d learned death magic from the Spirit Bender. Hrista had said so herself. And I… I was speechless as Myst cried out from the pain her own sister had inflicted upon her.
“Did you think I’d go away without making sure your head came off first?” Hrista snarled as she pulled her blade out of Myst’s body. I caught the Valkyrie, losing sight of Thayen for a moment. Hrista brought the sword down in a bid to hit me, but Myst found the strength to shield me with her forearm. The steel of Hrista’s rapier clashed against the steel of Myst’s armored cuff, sparks flying around us in a shower of light.
I heard Jericho’s spine-tingling growl. The screams of people burning. Brandon’s gasps. The sharp kisses of swords meeting in violent combat. And Hrista was about to bring her sword down once more, aiming straight for my head.
My mind went blank.
Thayen
“No one is going to ruin this for me.”
Her voice cut clearly through my head like a red-hot knife going through a stick of cold butter. The words sizzled and stuck to my brain, echoing with their deliberate cruelty as I tried to figure out what to do next. I’d pushed myself too far.
I knew I’d made a mistake, but Regine had needed me.
My pulverizer weapons didn’t work against Berserkers. I only had my glamoring ability. What else could I have done, besides leave her at the mercy of her foes? I’d made a choice, and it had cost me. But at least Regine had managed to pull through. That much I was certain of. Everything else was a blur. A wretched blur I couldn’t navigate. My body was out. My limbs limp.
The flesh had surrendered, but the mind persisted. The ears… they listened.
“You’re not going to break us!” Astra’s voice made my soul tremble. She grunted, and the sound of steel on steel told me there was trouble afoot.
It was Hrista I’d heard earlier, and she said it again. “No one is going to ruin this for me! No one!” I heard metal meeting flesh, followed by Astra’s sharp whimper. She’d been hurt.
How had I gotten here?
That was a stupid question. I knew exactly how I had gotten here, and this was absolutely not the time for any kind of introspection. My friends needed me. Astra w
as facing Hrista. Jericho and Dafne were overwhelmed. Myst needed me—did she, though? Or was I fooling myself? Her scream had pierced through the veil of my subconscious, rattling my bones. She was in trouble. I’d made it this far. I’d learned who the enemy really was.
I might have had no way of beating Hrista, but I could not let her kill us. My parents deserved a better son than that.
My eyes peeled open, as if my body had finally responded to my soul’s ardent pleas. I’d been struggling to return to the real world for so long, and it angered me to see it all again. I was late. I knew I was late. Astra’s labored breathing made my head turn slowly. I found her in the grass, lying on her side and bleeding profusely from her thigh. The blood was strange, though. It wasn’t the usual crimson but an incandescent dark pink. She’d scraped her knees before. She’d had cuts. None had bled like this. “Astra… what…” I murmured, my lips dry.
A glowing sword came down, its pointy end shooting straight for Astra’s head. Myst’s fist swung out, and the steel and gold cuff blocked the sword with a rain of sparks. White sparks. Thousands of them. For a second, I was hypnotized. I lost track of things.
I’d come back to the world after falling midway through the battle. I had sworn to myself that I would not be killed. “No. Stop.” That was me talking, I was pretty sure.
A pair of sapphires filled with hate found me. “You. How are you not dead?”
“I’m more resilient than you think,” I said, finding focus in that glare.
“You are no more resilient than a bug, and I will crush you under my boot,” Hrista replied, and her glowing rapier came for my throat. I raised my hand almost as a reflex. I found her soul in the span of seconds. It was right there, open, almost waiting for me. She didn’t even see it coming.
I had her. I felt her spirit in my bare hand, its luminescent tendrils twitching nervously in my presence. I’d caught Hrista in a glamoring bond, though I had no idea where the strength had come from… or where this might end. She terrified me. I knew that. She was worse than the Berserkers we’d fought. She’d put all of this together. Hrista was the mastermind, and I’d just tried my glamoring on her, even though the blood from my previous attempt was still drying on my upper lip.
A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones Page 18
