An Isle of Mirrors (A Shade of Vampire #88) - Bella Forrest Page 0,23

me all the way into the waking world, long after a restless sleep. I looked at Thayen and noticed his troubled expression. “What is it?” I asked him, and he replied with a shrug. “Come on, talk to me.”

“I can’t shake it off,” he said, his shoulders dropping. “I don’t know what they put in that black spray, but… I think it’s doing something to me.”

“To the both of us,” I replied. “And we will get through it. For now, however, we must keep moving.”

Jericho and Dafne gave us both a pair of worried frowns. “What’s Thayen talking about?” the ice dragon cut in, measuring me from head to toe. I told her about the black spray and the effect it had on us. She and Jericho had come in wrathful and violent, and they hadn’t noticed the devices that the clones had used against us. By the time I was done describing every sensation that Thayen, Soul, and I had dealt with, I could tell they were both disturbed.

“It hasn’t done anything to us, physically speaking,” I added. “I would’ve felt it, for sure. But my psyche, and apparently Thayen’s too, is… I don’t know. ‘Damaged’ is perhaps too strong a word.”

“You should have Viola or Lumi look at you both,” Dafne advised.

I nodded my agreement. “As soon as we get over this next hurdle. You heard Soul. We’re in the first wave.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Richard interjected, stalking toward us from the other end of the hallway. I didn’t need to put my hand through his chest to recognize him as a clone. He carried a mirror disk much like Chantal’s copy, and he had a murderous look on his face. But the fact that he was alone baffled me.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed, either. “What’s a clone doing up here on his own?” Jericho wondered aloud, following up with a low growl.

“We can’t shift in here,” Dafne warned him. “It’ll tear what’s left of this hospital apart.”

“You don’t need to,” Thayen said, his posture stiffening in anticipation, as only a few yards remained between us and Richard’s clone. “You said it yourself, Jericho. He’s alone. We can take him.”

“You can certainly try.” The doppelganger chuckled. He bolted toward us, and I reacted with a powerful barrier. The rippling pulse shot forward, nudging Thayen aside as it hit Richard’s clone in the solar plexus and knocked him back.

In an instant, he was back up, grinning like a deviant as he brought the mirror disk up in one hand and the black spray in the other. My stomach tightened as I realized we weren’t prepared to deal with another horror trip like the one before.

“Thayen, stand back,” I shouted and hurled another barrier at the fiend. “Dafne, Jericho, don’t let him reach you with that thing!”

Dafne was quick to react and improvise. She grabbed what was left of a chair and threw it at Richard’s clone. It distracted him long enough for Jericho to swerve behind him and kick him right between the shoulder blades, expelling the air from his lungs.

Thayen dashed forward and drove his knee into the clone’s back, pinning him down, while I grabbed his wrists and slapped on a pair of charmed cuffs.

“Like this… is going to stop me.” Richard’s double laughed between bouts of coughing and wheezing from Thayen’s pressure on his back.

“Wait, hold on,” I murmured, understanding the subtleties in his tone. “Thayen, get off him.”

The vampire got up, and I rolled Richard’s clone over. Only then did we all see the strange object serving as a belt buckle. It was shaped like a tear, featuring tiny channels in a circular pattern. Light flickered through each indent, moving from the edges in toward the center. My senses blared as I realized it was a countdown of sorts, the object beeping louder as the light filled it from within.

“We need to get away from him,” I managed. I dragged Thayen as far as I could before his own instincts kicked in, and he started running beside me.

We all raced down the hallway, headed for the stairs. Richard’s clone was left behind, laughing maniacally in our wake. I didn’t even get a chance to look over my shoulder before a violent blast ripped that whole hospital wing apart. The thundering shockwave followed in a split second, ramming into us with the force of a high-speed train.

“Go, go, go!” Thayen shouted. We nearly tumbled down the stairs, aided by the blowback, and crossed the lobby on