Whatever had settled in this room, it was hostile toward me, and it extended beyond Isabelle’s physical form. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let her see my fear or hesitation, so I sucked it up and pulled the spare chair out from the table. As I sat down across from her, I kept my back straight and my breathing under control. Isabelle’s sentry abilities were stifled by the charmed cuffs, but she could easily read my body language if I wasn’t careful.
“Here I am,” I said, keeping my tone even. “I’m listening.”
“Have you ever wondered if you’re truly the best version of yourself?” Isabelle asked, cocking her head to the side as she looked at me.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a simple question, Astra. Is this the best version of yourself? Or do you see yourself evolving at some point?”
“The purpose of living is to constantly strive to become a better version of ourselves,” I replied. “We live, we learn, we use our experiences to make smarter choices. So, to answer your question, no. The person I am right now, sitting here in front of you, is not the best Astra. Not yet.”
She nodded slowly, glancing to the side for a moment. “It’s sad that you have such a long way to go. I’m already there. I’m the perfect version of myself. I’m the best Isabelle Hellswan in existence.”
“Are you, though?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “You tried to kill me yesterday. If I let you out of those cuffs right now, you’d try to kill me again. You broke your mother’s heart. Your father is devastated. How can this be the perfect version of you if you’re causing so much pain?”
“Because I don’t depend on anyone else’s wellbeing to be happy,” Isabelle replied. “My conscience is clean. I do what I want. And that, my dear Astra, is the kind of freedom you’ll never have because you adhere to antiquated moral constructs.”
I scoffed. “That’s a foolish approach. Being kind isn’t an antiquated moral construct. It’s embedded in our genetic code to be social and good to one another. Culturally speaking, we thrive by participating in our communities, not from being murderous sociopaths.”
“You’ll never understand,” Isabelle said. “It’s why I have no qualms about killing you. The world will be better off without drones like you.”
I leaned closer in an attempt to peer into her soul, but my aura reading failed. I still couldn’t figure her out. Her emotions were a permanent jumble of colors despite her calm demeanor, and I couldn’t make sense of it. “You’re a prisoner in this room, Isabelle. You will not lay a hand on me. Now, tell me about what happened earlier with Richard or whoever that was. You said you know what went down. It’s why I came in here, so talk.”
“It’s a long story,” she replied. “I’m not sure you have the comprehension needed to fully understand it.”
“You’re calling me stupid now? You’re the one who insisted on telling me what happened.”
She giggled. “I’ve already told you something important, but you clearly didn’t pick up on it. Why would I bother explaining more if you haven’t even caught the first nugget I dropped in your lap?”
“What are you talking about?”
I was beyond confused. I was close to losing my temper, and I could feel the heat testing my veins, spreading and burning everything in its path. Isabelle was toying with me, but to what end? What was her angle here?
“You don’t deserve my full knowledge, Astra. You lack the required attention to detail,” she said, raising her chin defiantly. “Unless you tell me you understood what I’ve already given you, we can’t continue this conversation.”
“This was a waste of my time,” I muttered.
She laughed, throwing her head back to make it clear she was mocking me. “Do you know what the sad part is? You are so trusting of your surroundings that you can’t even see what’s happening right before your very eyes. I’ve been sitting here for two hours…”
“And?”
“What do you think happened in the few seconds you were blinded by that smoke bomb?”
I stilled, a sense of danger crawling up my spine. “Isabelle. What are you trying to tell me?”
The air thickened between us, eventually growing so dense I could barely breathe. Every hyper sensation I’d pushed away earlier came back with a vengeance. The hostility. The blinding white. The buzzing in my ears. The choking smell of bleach and spices. My blood curdled as I slowly shifted in my chair.
Isabelle and I stared at each other for what seemed like forever, until finally something else came to the surface of my consciousness, clear as day and impossible to refute, despite all the tests we’d put her through. I looked into her eyes and I knew, deep within the fiber of my being, that she wasn’t Isabelle. She wasn’t my Isabelle. Richard might have been on to something. But how could I prove it, when we’d already used every tool at our disposal to verify her identity?
“You magic-proofed this room to stop me from getting out. None of you considered the possibility that someone might try to come in,” she said, and dread washed over me like a wave of frozen water, biting into my skin and stiffening my joints.
She raised her hands slowly, and I couldn’t hear the jingle of chains anymore. Time stopped.
I replayed the earlier altercation in my mind’s eye. The smoke bomb went off. I’d covered my eyes, temporarily blinded, coughing and wheezing. I’d turned away, desperate for some fresh air. There were a few seconds there, between the explosion and the sound of Richard-copy’s retreating footsteps, when something had happened.
Isabelle was right. The room was never warded to keep anyone out, because why would any of us try to help her after what she’d done? The Richard-copy had time to slip something under the door. Something she could reach with her foot and drag closer. Something she could pick up from the floor.
Serena screamed as Isabelle lunged at me, but I was lost in the realization of what had happened. I ended up on the floor, chair still under me. Isabelle was on top of me, and she closed her hands around my throat, determined to drain the life out of me. By the stars, the look in her eyes was terrifying. I couldn’t reconcile it with the person I’d known her to be before.
Thayen appeared in my line of sight and tackled her. Suddenly, I could breathe again. Her cuffs were off. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Fear had paralyzed me. Thayen and Isabelle wrestled on the floor, then he managed to push her into a corner. Richard reached me and pulled me up, dragging my feet as he carried me out of the room.
I heard Isabelle hiss. Thayen cursed under his breath, struggling to contain her, but she kept moving and squirming, her limbs slipping from his grasp. Serena and Draven joined him and tried to get Isabelle under control, but it… it was too late. She morphed into a small black snake and slithered through a crack in the wall.
“No… No! No!” Serena cried out, clawing at the wall. She scratched some of the white paint off, desperate to get to her daughter. But Isabelle was already gone. “Draven, why? Why would she do this?”
“It’s not over yet!” Jovi growled, catching movement somewhere in the hallway. He bolted toward the exit, closely followed by Anjani, Derek, and Sofia.
Kailani touched my forehead and whispered something. Whatever that spell was, it energized me. Sunlight burst through my arms and legs, while my lungs filled with crisp, cold air. Everything had happened so fast, and my brain hadn’t fully registered everything, but I knew Jovi had spotted something—likely Isabelle slithering away.
“We have to stop her,” I said, then ran after Jovi and the others.
Within seconds, we were all racing down the stairs as Hunter shifted into his white wolf form and joined Jovi at the front of the pack. We flashed through the ground-level hallways and pushed through the backdoors. Only then did I see the black snake darting into the underbrush, headed straight for the redwood forest.
Isabelle had tried to kill me again, and we’d been deprived of an opportunity to get answers because she’d been playing the long con from the moment th
e Richard-copy had slipped something into the room to help her. The two were connected, and there was some kind of bigger plan in play here. A plan we knew nothing about.
But I ran as fast as I could, determined to stop Isabelle from disappearing. I would get to the truth, one way or another. They had plotted to kill me, and I refused to let them win.
Thayen
We ran deep into the redwood forest, but Isabelle had slipped out of sight. Hunter and Jovi circled our group, constantly sniffing and checking every bush and tree trunk. They’d both turned, followed by the full moon casting its milky light through the shivering green crowns above. My heart was beating so fast, I worried it might burst. The adrenalin was just too much to take, and I couldn’t see a way out of this indecipherable mess.
Richard cursed under his breath, his brow furrowed as he looked around. His nostrils flared. “She’s here somewhere. I can smell her.”
“So can your Dad,” Astra added, nodding at Jovi. But the wolves were confused. Yes, they could smell her, but where was she? How did her scent persist while also throwing them off Isabelle’s tracks? “We cannot, under any circumstances, let her escape.”
“I know,” Richard grumbled. His bones cracked as he began to shift, determined to get to Isabelle before it was too late. He grunted as he dropped to his knees, and I trembled at the sight of him. For all our years together as friends, I had rarely watched Richard turn—mainly because I understood the process to be both painful and intimate. Under the current circumstances, however, he didn’t have the luxury of privacy.
Once he was in full wolf form, I couldn’t stop staring at the silvery sheen of his otherwise black fur. He had a shade of incubus even in his coat, and the effect was mesmerizing. He looked at me with his big, gold-emerald eyes, then went after his father and Hunter, joining them on the search for Isabelle.
Draven got down on his knees, fumbling through his coat. “Damn… I almost forgot,” he muttered, fishing a small leather pouch from one of the pockets. “I can do a tracking spell. Hold on.”
“What’s in that?” I asked.
Serena put on a confident smile. “A lock of Isabelle’s hair. It’s from her very first haircut,” she said. “Draven kept it as a memento, but also as a means to track her down if he ever needed to.”
“Lo and behold, I need to,” he said, pouring red dust from another pouch around the lock of curled blond hair. I took a moment to look around, but there was no sign of Isabelle. The wolves were feverishly searching, sometimes vanishing into the mossy green underbrush. I could tell where they were by the sudden movement of the ferns and the oval yellow-spotted leaves.
I turned to face Astra. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m pissed off, but okay,” she sighed.
Derek and Sofia returned from different directions, both panting and shaking their heads. Anjani climbed down from a nearby redwood—she’d gone up to check the crowns, in case Isabelle had gone for the trees instead of the ground. Isabelle seemed to have slipped through our fingers. My skin was still crawling from the feel of her scales as she’d shifted and left her clothes behind.
“No luck,” Dad said. “The wolves are our best bet now.”
“They’re our best trackers,” Kailani agreed. She’d tried a couple of tracking spells of her own, but Isabelle had evaded everything. “How is she even doing this? I didn’t think anyone could dodge my tracking magic, not to mention Viola’s powers. This is insane.”
Indeed, it was insane. Isabelle wasn’t supposed to have this kind of knowledge or abilities, especially when the more seasoned GASP officers didn’t have them. How had she steered clear of Word magic? How had she avoided Viola’s Daughter energies that had scanned the entire forest? This was completely unnatural and highly suspicious.
“I’m willing to stake my life that this isn’t really Isabelle we’re dealing with,” Astra whispered. “I don’t want Serena or Draven to hear me because I can’t prove it yet, and they’ve got enough to worry about right now.”
“How is that possible? We tested her,” I replied.
“I know we tested her! The Reapers tested her, too!” she snapped. “But I felt it earlier, in the room. I looked her in the eyes, Thayen… and she wasn’t really there. I’m not sure how to explain any of this, except to say it’s my instinct.”
It made sense. Astra had sensed the shimmering gash when no one else had. And Isabelle had been so determined to kill her. Not to mention Richard’s doppelganger. Maybe this was it—the connection I’d been looking for. Somebody wanted Astra to die, and it was probably because of her ability to read this situation and see things we’d all missed.
“Hold on,” Draven replied, bringing our hushed conversation to a halt. “It’s almost done…” He added another powder onto the circle of red dust that surrounded Isabelle’s hair. Once he finished, he placed his hands over the composition and closed his eyes. Green light burst from his palms, spreading and engulfing the spell ingredients. “Be ready to run!”
I held my breath, watching as the green light turned into a lime green fire that consumed the powders, then the hair. Sparks flew outward in a myriad of colors, until a glowing white orb the size of my fist emerged from the black smoke caused by the fire. It shot up, hovering for a moment before flying north.
We all took off after it, running as fast as our legs could carry us. Richard and Astra were by my side, while Jovi and Hunter continued leading the group, followed closely by Mom and Dad. To my right, Serena, Draven, and Anjani were keeping pace with me, while Kailani, Phoenix, and Viola watched our backs. I wanted to believe that we still had a chance—that we weren’t destined to return to the hospital empty-handed. Isabelle knew more than she’d told us. Much more.
Minutes flew past as we jumped over swirling redwood roots and steep ditches, jagged rocks, and puddles that stretched across the grassy forest floor. The light orb glowed brighter. We were getting closer, and a knot of anticipation formed in my stomach, sensing the fight ahead of us. Isabelle wouldn’t go down easily—I knew her to be a formidable fighter despite her more scholarly nature.
“We’ve got to…” My voice disappeared as I spotted someone to our left, mere yards away, running in the same direction. I couldn’t stop because we were following the orb, but I shifted slightly to the left to get a better look. My blood ran cold. “What the hell?” I croaked.
It got Astra’s attention. She followed my gaze, and her eyes nearly popped out. “Richard?”
“Richard,” I said. But it wasn’t really Richard. Our Richard was in wolf form beside me, running with the rest of the group to catch Isabelle. But ten yards away and running in his incubus form was the Richard-copy. I wondered if I was hallucinating.
“Derek, Sofia, look!” Astra shouted, prompting them to turn their heads and see Richard’s double sprinting between the giant redwoods.
“Oh, come on…” Dad breathed.
“He’s headed in the same direction,” I said, keeping an eye on the doppelganger. He didn’t bother to look at us, but I knew he was aware we’d seen him. He didn’t seem to care, and that worried me even more. The truly scary part was his resemblance to the real Richard—viewed side by side, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.
Richard growled and went after him. “Rich, no!” I shouted, but it was too late.
I caught a glimpse of the Richard-copy smirking before he started running faster through the woods with Richard hot on his trail. In the meantime, we had to keep following the white light, though I tried to keep an eye on my friend, too.
“There she is!” Mom gasped, pointing ahead.
Serena and Phoenix threw out targeted Barriers—rippling pulses of invisible telekinetic energy that darted ahead like bullets, headed straight for the back of Isabelle’s head. She was naked and running without so much as a glance back over her shoulder. She knew we were after her.
“This ends here,” I hissed and pushed myself, muscles burning as I accelerated and surpa
ssed everyone in the group. I hadn’t run this fast since my GASP trials when I’d beaten Richard to the finish line. He’d always been the quick one, but I’d never really tapped into my full potential until that day.
This time, I was driven by something more powerful than the desire to succeed. I wanted to protect my friends and my family, and taking Isabelle down felt like the only way to do that. So my heels caught fire as I dashed along, soon passing Mom and Dad, then Draven and Serena, then Phoenix and Jovi and Hunter. I left them all behind in my relentless pursuit of Isabelle.
Finally, she looked back at me, and I saw concern glimmering in her steely gray eyes.
Richard’s snarl caught my focus for a second, and I turned my head to see him so hot on the doppelganger’s trail that he was just inches from clawing the bastard down. But the imposter held something in his hand, something round and black, and… Oh, no.
“Richard! Watch out! Smoke bomb!” I shouted.
“I’ve got him!” Astra called from behind me.
I couldn’t get distracted by Richard’s endeavor. Isabelle was so close I could almost smell her. Something emerged ahead, something shimmering white and hovering in the air. My heart stopped for a second. It was another slit in the fabric of space. The third one I’d seen so far, and it wasn’t getting any less weird.
“Are you seeing that?” I heard Mom ask, her breathing ragged.
“Holy crap!” Kailani blurted.
“She’s headed right for it!” Draven said.
Serena had nearly lost her voice. “We have to get her back…”
I’d heard her, though. Loud and clear. No matter what came next, I couldn’t let Isabelle slip away. If that shimmering gash was a portal and she made it through, then Isabelle would be lost to us. I couldn’t risk it. Pushing myself beyond my own physical limits, I cried out as I leapt forward and locked my arms around her.
We hit the ground hard and rolled over for what felt like miles and miles of rough and hardened terrain. Twigs poked me in the ribs. Stones bruised my flesh. Dirt pelted my face, but I didn’t let go. I heard her whimpering from the violent tussle, but I didn’t let go.
A Shade of Vampire 87: A Shade of Mystery Page 18