A Shade of Vampire 91: A Gate of Light - Bella Forrest

Astra

Two days had passed since the Flip. There wasn’t a better name for it. Our lives had essentially been turned upside down. Hrista and her clones had taken over the real Shade, and we were stuck in the fake one. Blistering irony aside, at least we were all together again. My parents. My grandparents. My cousins and uncles and aunts. My friends. A handful of Reapers and the seven of the Daughters, too. We were all here. Not yet defeated.

“Only mildly inconvenienced,” Lumi had said dryly.

Thayen and I stayed close to one another, always shadowed by Myst and Brandon. The Valkyrie and the Berserker weren’t fans of the living, which didn’t come as a surprise. Technically speaking, no one was supposed to know they even existed. Regine and Haldor were even worse, keeping their distance from us altogether and only coming out during the so-called night, when the fake Shade forced most of us into a deep sleep, after feeding on our life energy throughout the day.

Whether we liked it or not, rest was mandatory in this strange world.

“Damn this,” I muttered as I left the comfort of my bed in the treehouse my friends and I had used as refuge before the Flip. Now I shared it with my parents. It wasn’t even midnight yet. While I did feel tired, part of me wanted to fight the fake island’s oppression. Besides, my work was nowhere near done.

Leaving my parents behind to sleep, I made my way through the dark redwood forest. I wasn’t heading in a particular direction, but rather following a feeling that I had to be elsewhere. My mom and dad were together again, wholeheartedly relieved, but without my mom’s abilities, which remained locked under the multiple runes that had been carved on her body. I had found an inkling of comfort knowing that Hrista’s HQ had failed to copy me and the Daughters. It was something about our Hermessi roots, apparently, or so we’d theorized, at least, in the early days of the clone attacks. Jericho had gone back to the Black Heights—well, not the real mountains. This wasn’t our home, yet we’d had to make it so while we figured out a way to get us back.

Hrista and her clones had stolen our island. There was no telling what she was capable of, especially when flanked by a dozen Berserkers. I wanted to believe that GASP was bigger and stronger, but this scorned Valkyrie had managed to throw us out of our homes almost effortlessly. We had every right to be worried, but until I figured out how to open shimmering portals of my own—Torrhen had let slip that I could during our confrontation—there wasn’t much else we could do. The swamp witches had tried. Sidyan, Seeley, Kelara, Nethissis, and even the Time Master and the Soul Crusher had tried. The Daughters had tried. They had all failed.

I found myself standing in a wide clearing. Triangle-shaped purple leaves climbed up the redwoods with their sprawling vines and slim indigo stems. Some were loaded with lilac flowers that spread their sweet fragrance through the night air. The white glow came down from above like a fake moonlight, slipping through the almost-black canopy, blades of pale white slashing through the obscurity and stabbing the mossy ground. My mind was a jumble of incidents and emotions I couldn’t quite reconcile.

Sitting down, I crossed my legs and took deep breaths, trying to find myself in the middle of the madness. For two days, I had been trying to open a shimmering portal. I’d already known I could sense them. Hrista had wanted me dead because she knew I could open them, too. But how?

“I should be able to do this,” I whispered to myself, allowing the nocturnal darkness to embrace me. The Shadians had tried to find comfort in this place. The similarity it bore to our home helped, but in the end, we all knew this wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t our island. Our island was under attack, and I dreaded to even imagine what that meant.

I tried to focus, but the fact that my mind kept wandering back to Brandon wasn’t helping. It was bad enough we were cut off from the realm of the living, yet my heart kept thumping whenever the Berserker came close. I was happy to see him reunited with Hammer, however. Only now did I see that an essential piece of Brandon had been missing. The Aesir, a glorious black wolf, was