An Isle of Mirrors (A Shade of Vampire #88) - Bella Forrest Page 0,37

mentally crippled in a matter of seconds.

Rage filled me to the brim, my temperature spiking as a natural reaction to the damage I knew the clone could do. I allowed this anger to burst out, bright pink light shining from within as I unleashed it all upon him. He stopped, frozen, with only a few yards left between us. As the pink light expanded, he knew he couldn’t continue with his attack, so he scrambled backward instead, while Thayen and Soph moved away from me.

“I’ll be damned…” I heard Soph exclaim.

Richard’s doppelganger was gone. He must’ve escaped, since there was no trace of his corpse anywhere in sight. Jovi and Anjani’s copies had been torched, their forms collapsed in the short grass, reduced to smoking black figures—way worse than what had happened to Chantal’s double. But she’d been modeled after a fire fae, supposedly immune to the flames. She’d been disfigured, though she’d lived and run off. I figured these two clearly weren’t designed to even survive, much like their originals. Hazel’s clone was still standing, but Dafne had managed to sink her enormous fangs into Tejus’s double. He screamed in agony. The sound made my skin crawl as the dragon crunched through his bones until there wasn’t much left of him. Hazel’s copy tried to get back at her, but Jericho slapped her down with his claws and spat enough fire to kill.

The smell of burnt flesh was overwhelming, but I still breathed a sigh of relief when the clearing became safe again. We regrouped—Dafne and Jericho putting their temporary attire back on—and prepared ourselves for the rest of our journey.

“He got you, didn’t he?” Jericho asked Thayen, nodding at the blood on his leather uniform. The tear in the fabric was visible, but the wound had already healed.

“I’ll be fine,” the vampire replied, then looked at Soph. “You okay? Richard’s doppelganger threw you around a bit.”

“I know!” Soph grumbled. “Got one over on me, and I have no idea how that happened. You were right, these spooks are getting better and faster. The creep managed to slip away.”

“What about the energy levels?” Dafne asked me. “Do you feel the remnants of the portal anymore?”

I shrugged. “Barely. As it turns out, I sense them better when they’re about to open in my vicinity, but without a geographical pattern to follow, there’s no way of telling where one will pop up next.” Pausing, I gave myself a second as a troubling feeling took over. “Oh, no,” I managed, quickly realizing what was happening.

“What is it?” Thayen asked. The look he gave me was understandably troubled.

“They’re coming…”

“Another portal?” he asked.

I nodded. Without hesitation, he grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the clearing. Jericho, Dafne, and Soph followed. We ran as fast as we could, but I still felt the tear in space, the portal opening behind us.

“Faster!” Thayen whispered. Trees and ferns brushed past us. The wind caressed my face, combing through my hair as we moved, our feet light and our hearts stricken with fear and fury. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the clearing as it shrank behind us. The portal was bright and wider than the previous one.

“Oh, no…” I mumbled, nearly tripping. Thayen was quick enough to react and keep me going, but he couldn’t resist following my gaze.

“Crap!”

There were dozens of clones pouring into The Shade. I didn’t recognize everyone, but they were all modeled after the island’s inhabitants. There were many of them, just like Isabelle’s clone had said. They were spreading out, quiet in their infiltration of our precious world.

“What the hell are we going to do about them?” Dafne asked, panting as we put more distance between us and them.

Chills tumbled through me, and I prayed to all the stars that this would turn out to be nothing more than a bad dream. Alas, that wasn’t the case. It was real, and it was developing in directions we no longer had any control over. There were too many of them, and they’d caught us off guard and divided. My ability to verify the clones was now more precious than ever. We only had Soul and Kelara to help, and they were on the other side of The Shade.

“We get to the Great Dome,” Thayen replied, shifting his focus to the wild path ahead. The redwoods in this area were the biggest, thick enough to conceal us from those we’d left behind. The underbrush was higher too, foliage spreading out like