A Shade of Vampire 84 A Memory of Time - Bella Forrest Page 0,46

and everything you’ve told us about the Whips’ state of mind regarding this sacrifice for the Spirit Bender, I’m pretty sure we can put out some feelers and discover where they’re hiding before Danika gets to them.”

“Right. Because they’re selfish bastards,” Trev replied. “That’s the only thing working in our favor right now.”

“Might as well take advantage of it,” Derek said. “We’ll hunt the Whips down first and take as many of them as we can. We have to make sure Danika never finds them.”

“I have one concern here,” Nethissis said, her brow furrowed. I’d yet to get used to her slightly translucent figure, and I still wished there was something we could do to bring her back. Alas, fate had thrown too many obstacles at us, and we were struggling to keep the rest of our group alive. “What if Danika has a way of tracking down the soul shards? I mean, say all the Whips decide to run off and hide. Wouldn’t she have taken this possibility into consideration already?”

“Most likely, yes,” Derek replied. “Which is why we must move quickly.”

“We have to defend Roano,” Sofia concluded. “If Danika has a way of tracking the shards, then she’ll be at what’s left of the gates eventually.”

“Why hasn’t she done that before now?” I wondered.

There was no immediate answer, but Kemi offered a theory. “Maybe she didn’t think she’d have to do this… not until she and Corbin reached the decision to resurrect the Spirit Bender.”

“It’s also possible that the tracking process isn’t all that easy,” Mira surmised. “Otherwise we would’ve seen the bitch by now.”

Arya nodded. “She’ll likely go after the easier targets first. That’s the pattern she established with the first two Whips she took down. Danika is working her way up.”

A moment went by in absolute silence as we all looked at each other. We were creatures of different worlds—some modern and others from ancient times—and we represented varied cultures across three dimensions of this vast and immutable universe, yet we’d joined forces, as mismatched and as scared as we were, to make things right. To give the natural balance a nudge. To restore what the Spirit Bender and his cohorts had destroyed.

Beyond the uncertainty of how this might end, the one thing that persisted in my head, with crystal and undeniable clarity, was the thought that none of us would go down without a fight. That we would swing and kick and punch and claw our way through the evil and darkness until our very last breaths.

“We’ll have to split up into teams for this,” Sofia said after a while.

And split up we would. The city of Roano needed defenses, and there were a bunch of Darkling Whips out there who needed killing. In my mind, I made Kalon a promise that I would rather die than break—I promised that I would keep him safe, and that we would be together for as long as we could. For as long as the fates allowed it.

Petra was not going to get her way. Not while I was still alive.

Nethissis

There was so much to deal with, I’d almost forgotten about my own demise.

Being dead had been less uncomfortable than I’d first imagined, especially since Morning had been kind enough to cover me in white silk. Dying completely naked had never been the plan, that was for sure. Being able to wield a Reaper scythe and cast death magic hadn’t been part of the agenda, either, but I took it as a win.

Small victories made the afterlife just a little bit sweeter.

I had no promise of ever returning to my life. Danika had burned my body out of spite, which meant I had no flesh to go back to. My connection to the Word had vanished the moment I died. My abilities were gone, and I only had my ghostly form to rely on now.

Even so, I had to keep going. The Darklings weren’t going to stop until the cycle was reset. I doubted any of us—except, perhaps, for the Reapers—would survive such a defeat. The enemy was determined to destroy everyone and everything in their path in order to secure the Unending’s constant cycle of misery and forced rebirth. They’d already killed me, and I wasn’t going to let them take any of my friends. No one else was dying. Not on my watch.

We all had something to look forward to, no matter how small or how complicated it might turn out to be. My situation was