A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones

by Forrest, Bella

  “Okay, you deserve to know. I imagine you’ve been racking your brains over this long enough,” she said, casually coming down the curving steps. The mist trembled in her presence, pulling back to reveal the white stone and the grass as she walked. “It’s an object the witches have had for so long, I’m not sure any of them even remember it.” She brought a hand up, showing us the tiny cube I’d seen Claudia’s double carrying. “It’s a remnant of the Black Witches, but they never understood what it did, mistaking it for an artifact.”

  I’d never heard of it. And the Black Witches had been extinct for ages. It just went to prove that Hrista had been around for quite a while, traveling between realms without any limitations and without anyone knowing. It made her whole “web of plans” statement even scarier because it could absolutely be true. If all of this had been years in the making, what were our chances of stopping it?

  “It’s the size of a game die,” Thayen muttered. “Isabelle had it inside her. Well, her clone. And Claudia’s doppelganger killed her for it.”

  “Of course. Isabelle’s clone thought she could outsmart me,” Hrista replied. “I told her to get out and bring it over, but she insisted on pissing me off.”

  “Trouble in paradise?” Jericho scoffed from behind us. His voice was a low growl, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d slip out of his special uniform and go full dragon. He had to be aware that it might not do anything against the Valkyrie, but what other choice did he have? We couldn’t throw a flare out for Mom, either. It would just draw her into this trap.

  “No, just a silly clone,” Hrista retorted. “I made them. I own them. I control them. And some had the audacity to demand rights. That was foolish, which Isabelle learned the hard way.”

  “What does the artifact do?” Myst asked. She’d heard enough to understand that Brandon had been right all along. He was vindicated. Unfortunately, he was also a prisoner of Hrista’s black mist. I took another discreet step, pushing the liquid darkness farther back. Hrista clearly hadn’t noticed, otherwise she would’ve thrown something else at me, but she was so consumed with gloating that she didn’t even notice my slow advance.

  Hrista gave her sister a dry half-smile. “There was once a Black Witch named Kedra. Vicious little thing, that one, and overly ambitious. Spirit introduced us. It didn’t take long for me to see why he’d taken a liking to her. Spirit had a way of finding powerful women and drawing them to him, I suppose. Consider me the most powerful among them. As for Kedra, she managed to convert an entire world—a whole realm—into dark energy. The kind you see in Purgatory. It was an incredible and unprecedented accomplishment, to say the least. Most would have deemed it impossible.”

  “The living shouldn’t be able to manipulate the powers of light or darkness,” Myst murmured, genuinely shocked.

  Torrhen flashed her a grin. “Well, beings of light can’t manipulate darkness, either, yet here we are,” he replied, nodding at Hrista. Indeed, she was special. Unlike the other Valkyries, she had power over the black mist, over the darkness, but she also had power over the light. It didn’t make any sense.

  “I’ve come a long way, I know,” Hrista giggled. “Anyway, Kedra was a badass. A talented badass. Alas, her ambition was her undoing. After turning an entire realm into dark energy and compressing it into this dice here, she swallowed it, thinking all that power would become hers. Imagine a world with its natural elements, with its people and animals—imagine it transmuted into pure dark energy. The mere feeling of that much power inside her… whew! She didn’t make it. Her body was not made to withstand such a thing,” she added, drawing our attention to the dice. I took another cautious step toward Brandon. Only a couple of feet remained, and the black mist was constantly pulling back because of me. “Kedra, the poor thing, was destroyed. Blown to tiny bits and pieces. But the dice survived. I think one of the White Witches found it. No one knew what it did, and that worked to my advantage. At the time I had no intention of using it, obviously. Then and now… two very different Hristas.”

  Time was running out. It was evident from the delicate shift in her expression that Hrista was getting ready to wrap things up. She’d had her shot at glory, and she’d taken the stage for her finale number—her ego was titanic. I imagined it was one of the things that had drawn her and the Spirit Bender together. The lovebirds from hell.

  “So, it’s true,” Myst said, gradually regaining her composure. This encounter had clearly shaken her. “You’ve forsaken everything. Your nature, your vows, your sisters… and for what? To play god in a foreign dimension? To live with a Reaper? What was the point of all this?”

  Hrista lit up like a beacon with pure white rage. “That was the plan until these bastards took Spirit away from me!” She drew a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment as the light dimmed slowly. “But it’s fine. I have better plans now. New angles. A bright and interesting future to look forward to. You wouldn’t understand, Myst. You were always a sheep, accepting what you were told you could or couldn’t do. Not once did you ever consider rebellion. None of us did, I suppose. Not for a long time. It took a Reaper breaking into Purgatory over and over to make me see that there could be a different path… that I had the same strength.”

  I didn’t understand the reference. Myst was confused, too. “What are you talking about?”

  “You hadn’t been made at the time,” Hrista replied with an eye roll. “It doesn’t matter, Myst. You will never understand.” She raised a hand slowly, and the liquid darkness trickled across the grass and over to Myst, who tried to get away, but Torrhen appeared behind her and caught her wrists for the second the black mist needed to reach her. Myst was paralyzed, like her sister and Brandon. Torrhen gave me a curious glance.

  “Would you look at that?” he muttered, while Dafne, Jericho, and Thayen moved farther away from him. He didn’t care about them, anyway. His attention was focused entirely on me, and it made my skin crawl. “Someone seems to have developed an immunity to the black mist.”

  “Hm… I figured. Just one more reason to kill her,” Hrista replied.

  “Why are you so desperate to see me dead?” I asked, the air thickening around me. My pink light reacted to Torrhen’s slow and cautious approach. I was glowing menacingly, the energies gathering in a heavy ball in my chest, ready to be expelled and destroy everything in their path. I remembered the time I’d been hit with the clones’ black spray—that had certainly affected me. Torrhen appeared to be right. Something inside me had triggered the development of some kind of immunity against the darkness of Berserkers, for it had been Haldor’s blackness that had fueled the clones’ devices, according to Brandon, and it was a similar blackness paralyzing Brandon, Myst, and Regine here, too. “With all your powers and tricks and allies… why am I such a problem to you?”

  “It’s your sentry blood,” Hrista said. “It causes a weird reaction with your Daughter genes. Sentries are distant relatives of ghouls and Reapers, and Daughters are products of the Hermessi. There is something about that combination that makes you… special.”

  “Special how?” Thayen replied.

  Torrhen smiled. “She can’t just sense the shimmering portals. She can open them.”

  “Why would you tell her that?” Hrista snapped.

  “You’re going to kill her now, aren’t you? It’s courtesy,” Torrhen replied, defending his decision. The certainty of my impending doom made it clear. I couldn’t waste another second.

  One way or another, I’d have to get us away from this Valkyrie before she destroyed us. As long as I drew breath, I was a threat to her, and now I knew why—though I still wasn’t quite sure how. This was it. My moment of truth. Surrendering to instinct, I touched Brandon’s shoulder.

  The black mist pulled back as if burned by my touch, and Brandon sucked in a breath, suddenly free and conscious. Hrista had failed to follow up on Torrhen’s observation, though I couldn’t blame her. Teeming with insecurities, she’d poured plenty of energ
y into making this moment count, into positioning herself as the superior Valkyrie, the supreme being that could navigate and control any realm she wished. I felt like I was seeing another side of her personality—the fractured one that had to prove something to everybody. I wondered if I could ever use it against her.

  Brandon gave me a startled look. “Get us out of here,” I whispered to him.

  “Kill them all! And kill the pink-haired bitch first!” Hrista said menacingly. A split second later, she vanished altogether.

  It quickly became apparent that Torrhen wasn’t the only Berserker present. Other shadows emerged from the edges of the clearing, each one bigger and darker than the other, each with furious blue eyes that sought our deaths.

  I only had a few seconds to make my move. I’d caught Hrista unprepared with my immunity to the black mist. It proved I could do more for my friends and family. It proved, along with Hrista’s own words, that there was more to me than I’d originally thought. The idea both scared and thrilled me, but I needed to survive now if I wanted the chance to figure out what it all meant later.

  And survive I shall.

  Sofia

  Esme’s return to The Shade kept me busy while Phoenix and Kailani worked on figuring out the silvery cubes. We’d heard voices inside them, and we knew they had some kind of mechanism on the inside, but the details of how they worked remained a mystery.

  Derek caught up with Kalon for a while. The Aeternae-turned-vampire had left his younger brothers behind and in charge of some of GASP’s local operations on Visio, while he and Esme had come over to The Shade, deeply concerned and eager to help. They knew as much as any of us, and they had agreed there was more to this. Something else would happen sooner or later. The clone incidents had just been the tip of the iceberg.

  Phoenix had managed to crack open one of the cubes, revealing the circuitry inside. It was an odd combination of metals and tiny conductive crystals, each pulse of energy flowing visibly. “Look at this,” he said, having connected one side of the inner circuit board to a couple of pliers with electrical charges. Whenever he brought his special screwdriver closer to the board, energy began to flow from the electrically loaded pliers to the slim tip of the screwdriver. “There’s something happening here.”

  “The circuit is alive,” Kailani replied, raising both eyebrows.

  “Try touching it with the screwdriver,” Esme said, eyes fixed on the cube’s electronic entrails. “It’s obvious the energy current senses it.”

  Phoenix nodded slowly and brought the screwdriver closer. As soon as its tip touched the circuit, lights flashed and voices echoed throughout the room—familiar voices, I realized with a gasp. Mine. Derek’s. Serena and Draven’s. Rose’s. “Whoa,” I managed, getting up from my seat.

  “We should totally consider dinner in Paris for our wedding anniversary,” I heard Serena telling Draven. I remembered that moment. It was from a Sunday brunch we’d had.

  “I know this,” I murmured, trying to remember the entire conversation. “Serena wanted Paris, but Draven had become fixated on—”

  “Bali,” the Druid cut in, wide-eyed as he heard himself speak in the recording, saying the exact same thing, followed by Serena’s laughter. As soon as Phoenix pulled the screwdriver back, the sounds went away, and a heavy silence settled over the Great Dome.

  “What the hell is this?” Ben muttered, staring at the cube.

  Phoenix turned it over several times until he found a small hole to connect a wired pin. “It’s a storage and projection device,” he said. “It’s electronic, though the circuitry shouldn’t be able to function like this. My guess is that foreign magic is at least partially responsible. See these?” he added, pointing at tiny crystal dots that had been glued to a small green square. “These are quartz inserts, and that’s jade. They’re not supposed to work this way. The metals and wires are excellent conductors, yes, but the precious and semiprecious gemstones are an aberration in this setting.”

  Derek and I looked at one another. “Isabelle’s clone was recording us,” I said.

  “But what was the point of keeping the recordings here, in The Shade?” Esme asked. That was a good question, but none of us had an answer. “I would’ve taken these back to my leader, if I had one. I’m assuming she had one.”

  “Someone is absolutely calling the shots with these creatures,” Rose sighed.

  It took a few more tries and inspections with other strange-looking tools, but Phoenix was finally able to tap into the cube’s video source. He’d found the right switch on the circuit board, pointing the display lens at a flat white surface—a sheet of paper that Kailani held up for him. Images danced across it, accompanied by muffled voices and crackling music. “It’s a party,” the witch said. “With… guitar music. Holy crap, I remember this. Voss’s birthday from a month ago!”

  “I need a bigger surface,” Phoenix told her. “The image and the sound are both displayed and limited by their projection surface. That sheet of paper won’t do if we want to see and hear the full picture.”

  Kailani nodded and walked over to the nearest glass pane, pressing both palms against it. It turned matte white, and Phoenix brought the cube over, careful not to disturb the improvised contraption of pincers and pliers that made this projection possible. The closer he got to the white pane, the better we could see and the louder we could hear.

  Yes, there was music playing. Field was strumming heavily on a Spanish guitar. They were on the beach beneath a starry night sky. “They’re near The Shade’s extension,” Kailani said. “I know that area.”

  We were all quiet, watching the scene unravel before us. Field and Aida sat on a tall rock. He handled his guitar while she fawned over him, love leaving her face aglow. Below, a campfire had been lit. Voss and Richard were laughing and adding more wood to the flame. There weren’t many people present, but that had always been Voss’s nature. Isabelle, Chantal, and Astra had been invited, along with Kailani, Hunter, Jovi, and Anjani.

  “I think we can make this hotter,” we heard Isabelle say, giggling as she approached the fire, holding something in her hand. It was a bottle of lighter fluid, which she squirted over the flames until they swelled and licked at the night sky. The fire got too big, too fast, startling Field and Aida with its sudden heat. They fell back, vanishing behind the rock.

  Voss and the others broke into hysterical laughter, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw him grinning at Isabelle. “That’ll stop his mewling,” he said, running a hand through his dark shaggy hair. “I keep telling him he’s terrible, but he keeps playing that damn thing anyway.”

  A low growl emerged from behind them. Isabelle yelped and jumped back. Voss whirled around just as his mother jumped him in wolf form. She was big enough to knock him down. Voss ended up on his back, Aida licking his face as she held him down with her huge paws. It was a sweet moment, until Chantal smiled and discreetly took Isabelle away from the jolly beach party. We watched them walk up the sandy beach for a while, going deeper into the night and farther from the sounds of music and laughter.

  “Did you get it yet?” Chantal asked. Only then did I understand that she was a clone. After all, so was Isabelle in this recording.

  “No.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not easy to find something that not even the witches know they’ve got!” Isabelle’s double replied bitterly. “I don’t need any of you breathing down my neck!”

  Chantal’s clone gave her a cold grin. “Tick tock. You know she hates waiting. Time is not a concept she likes much.”

  The recording ended there. The cubes had to be data packets from the time Isabelle’s clone spent among us, searching for that tiny dice she’d lost to Claudia’s doppelganger. Phoenix worked quickly to patch us into another storage unit. One by one, we watched footage as old as two months ago. We’d even witnessed the data transfer moments. The clone’s eyes did the recording, and the images were wirelessly transmitted int
o the cubes, which had a tiny green light that flickered, indicating transmission. Isabelle’s clone would occasionally bring each cube closer to her head in order for the transfers to go faster, it seemed.

  The more we saw, the clearer it became that the clones had done quite a lot of intel gathering from our Shade. Just thinking through the whole truth made me shiver. Isabelle’s clone had been but one of many who had listened to us, who’d stolen from us.

  “There’s no sight of our Isabelle,” Serena said after five cubes’ worth of footage. “Where is she, damn it?”

  “We need to watch the rest of these things,” Phoenix replied, fumbling with another one. The image flashed across the white glass, the sound coming through with crystal clarity. “Here we go…”

  This was an eerie scene. That much was obvious from the very first seconds. “Hold on, is this our Shade?” Derek asked, sounding as confused as I felt.

  Isabelle’s clone was walking up a white sand beach. The Port was right behind her, and the woods ahead were huge and dark but… something was off. “The colors aren’t right,” I mumbled. The greens were off. The browns were almost gray. And the dull light didn’t make sense. It looked like The Shade I had known for years, and yet I was willing to bet all the money in the world that it wasn’t our Shade. “It’s not The Shade. It just… it just looks like it,” I concluded, trying to ignore the shivers that ran down my back.

  The more I watched, the creepier it got. Isabelle’s clone crossed paths with many of us, only… I could tell they weren’t us. None of them were originals. Their smiles and the instruments they held and operated told me that much. I spotted the reflective disks that we had yet to fully understand. The black mist canisters responsible for creating some of the most horrific mental anguish in the known history of existence itself. No, these were clones. They were all clones, and they were all going in the same direction.