An Isle of Mirrors (A Shade of Vampire #88) - Bella Forrest Page 0,76

doing the same to Serena’s copy, propelling her directly into Soul’s arms.

It quickly turned into a fight to the death as I tackled the Druid’s clone, kicking and punching as fast and as hard as I could. He snarled when I caught him in a head lock, pinning him down with my full body weight. I tightened my grip and yanked with all my strength until his spine broke, before he could shift into a snake and slither out of my hold. “Argh…”

His body softened, and I heard the last breath he gave. There was no sign of his spirit anywhere, though. How could there be, if he didn’t have a real soul? Then again, Thayen had been able to glamor them. I hadn’t seen any clone ghosts so far, and it was an interesting pattern to observe, but also a disturbing discrepancy. While their fake souls were meticulously crafted to fool even a Reaper, partly susceptible to glamoring, none made it into our realm. None survived beyond death…

Soul celebrated when Serena’s clone finally expired. “Hell, yeah!” my beloved snapped, gripping his weapon with both hands. Beaming with pride, he shot me a devilish grin. “Grab your gear, sweetie. We’re going clone hunting!”

The blade of his weapon shone white as he aimed it at a nearby tree. His lips moved as he uttered a telekinetic spell. It shot into the trunk and severed it at the base. The whole thing came down with enough weight to crash right into the pentagram that had held Soul in place for too long.

“For your information, the traps they put us in were glitchy,” I said briefly. “Our scythes got in while on the bodies of the living doubles.”

“Heh. Go figure,” Soul replied. “Happy accident?”

I found my scythe under Draven-clone’s body. Rolling him over, I retrieved my weapon and did the same number on another tree, forcing it to come down and disrupt the pentagram’s outer circle, breaking the magic.

“Maybe. I think we’ll need to be careful in the future, nonetheless. The mere fact that they know death magic, with incomplete, faulty spells or not, is enough of a problem already. They might figure more out. We obviously don’t know enough about them… Anyway!” Breathing a sigh of relief, I threw my arms around Soul’s neck and pulled him close. We kissed, closing our eyes for a moment, thankful to have escaped from the clones’ traps.

Draven and Serena’s clones were dead, and we’d gotten our weapons back, but this was nowhere near over. I looked to Stan and Ollie. “Boys, you’ve earned yourselves a snack,” I told them, pointing a thumb at the doppelgangers’ bodies. “Have at it.”

“We have to find Thayen and the others. Voss, Chantal, Richard. We don’t know what happened to them,” Soul said, his brow furrowed.

“We’re free now, my love. We can cover enough ground,” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s all nice and wonderful, but we still can’t summon more Reapers to help. The situation is clearly getting out of control here.”

Behind us, Stan and Ollie were ripping pieces out of the clones, feasting on flesh and bones with satisfied purrs. It was an absolute mess, and it made me sick to a stomach I no longer really had, so I chose to focus on Soul instead. Even in death, there were things I just couldn’t bear to look at.

“One step at a time. You’re right, we need to make sure the others are okay first. Astra, in particular. She’s been the clones’ target from the very beginning,” I said.

We knew what we had to do. Hopefully, our friends would have made significant progress while we’d been stuck out here. Whatever came next, I sure as hell wasn’t willing to let the clones win this war—because this was a war, and they’d picked the wrong people to wage it against.

Kelara

With Stan and Ollie by our side, we zapped to different key points across The Shade. First, we checked the terrace area near the hospital again, then the hospital itself, and I found myself speechless at the destruction that had occurred. The silence was almost unbearable, a symptom in the aftermath of great violence.

The ground had been burned black on a wide radius. There was nothing left of the hospital, save for the room where Isabelle’s clone had been. “Soul, she’s not here anymore!” I said, alarmed.

“I think Stan and Ollie leaving their post to come for us was a dead giveaway,” he said, then nodded at the ghouls. “Look at them. They’re