An Isle of Mirrors (A Shade of Vampire #88) - Bella Forrest Page 0,91

weren’t saying anything, and that just made this whole affair creepier. No order, not even a whisper or a mob-like cheer. They were so well trained and so focused on their mission that nothing else mattered.

“Head for the Port,” Thayen advised. “I know we were going to take Isabelle’s clone there for relative safety, but I think we’re the ones who need it now.”

“Yeah, the fake Shade’s layout is likely identical to ours. There should be dungeons down there,” Jericho replied.

Soph scoffed. “What really annoys me is that none of us thought to pack some invisibility magic. It sure would’ve come in handy right about now.”

“Not really,” Thayen said, his voice breaking as he jumped over a gnarly root I’d just hopped past. “They’ve got red lenses and stuff. They know our methods and protocols.”

The robotic voice could still be heard, loud and high-pitched. “Catch the pink-haired half-Daughter. Kill her. Catch the pink-haired half-Daughter. Kill her.” It was playing on repeat, and the clones were more than happy to obey. There was no time to think about anything other than safely making it back to the Port.

My grandparents’ doubles threw barriers at us, but I responded in kind with twice as much. The pulses were shooting out of my hands like rippling balls of energy, bouncing back and slamming into different clusters of hostiles. Thayen, Jericho, Dafne, and Soph had already learned to duck whenever I launched one.

The sound of the clones’ footsteps was so close that I could almost feel them breathing down my neck, their deadly intentions seeping through my soul and chilling me to the bone. Fireballs flew past our heads. Redwoods came down like defeated giants, aiming to crush us under their massive trunks. But we were fast. At least we had that working for us.

The darkness grew ahead, and I couldn’t see much, even with the strong pink glow in my hands. New sounds emerged. Low growls that sent my senses spiraling into disarray, my fight-or-flight instinct blaring in the back of my head. Whatever these creatures were, I doubted we could engage them in combat.

“What the hell is that?” Dafne croaked, the alarm in her voice painfully obvious.

“I doubt it’s anything good,” I said.

We were finally putting some distance between us and the clones, but something else was running along the narrowing trail. Shadows swished past us. Branches broke. Heavy paws hit the hard ground, tumbling toward us.

The fear was so powerful, so intense, and the darkness so heavy and suffocating. I screamed just to ease some of the tension, releasing enough pink light to illuminate a fifty-yard radius around us. What it revealed made me scream even louder. Between the trees, black figures with enormous backs and claws ran toward us. Their eyes glimmered blue as they snarled and quickly fell back, overwhelmed by the light. They didn’t like it.

“Holy smokes!” I heard Thayen exclaim.

“Don’t stop!” I cried as the glow faded around us, and the creatures resumed their frantic race to take us down. “We have to keep moving!”

We didn’t have any other choice. Jericho cast repeated series of fireballs left and right in a bid to slow down the nightmarish fiends. Behind us, albeit about a hundred yards away, the clones were still in hot pursuit, relentless and eerily quiet.

Ahead, I could see a faint light in the distance. The closer we got, the better I could discern the black figure standing in the middle of it. “What the…” My voice trailed off as it raised a hand, pointing somewhere to the left.

“Astra, what’s that light?” Thayen asked. “Is that the Port?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied, glancing over my shoulder just in time to see a black shadow jumping at him. “Thayen, duck!”

He lowered himself as though we were running through an obstacle course, and the creature missed him by inches. We heard it scrambling back into action, however, and it was only a matter of time before it would catch up once more. Energized by the earlier maneuver and determined to get to that light, I cried out and launched another powerful light pulse. It burst in every direction, again revealing the shadowy fiends with sparkling blue eyes. And again, it pushed them back by a few feet, just enough to give us a slightly better advantage.

The figure I’d seen ahead was gone, but the direction in which it had pointed remained at the center of my consciousness. I wasn’t sure if it was an enemy, but I doubted we