into a shadow beast like the many pets of Haldor. At this point, it didn’t matter for us, though. There was no time. We would have to make do with what we had.
I caught a glimpse of Viola sneaking past Torrhen and Myst, the shadow hounds darting left and right as they went for Astra and Jericho first. The creatures must have identified them as sources of light that had to be destroyed. Viola was quick enough to slip away relatively unnoticed. I dropped as one of the shadow hounds lunged at me, then scrambled around Myst and Torrhen, while Haldor laughed from the flat rooftop.
By the time I caught up with Viola inside the glass house, a terrible scene was unfolding. She’d been pinned down by Isabelle, while Voss and Chantal watched, smiling. They were clones, all three of them. Haldor’s laughter grew louder, practically mocking us. “It’s a trap. It was a trap from the very beginning…”
Cursing under my breath, I took swift action. There was nothing I could do against the Berserkers outside, but the clones… these bastards were mine.
“Hey, Isabelle!” I shouted. She growled as she looked at me, no longer touching Viola and eager to jump me instead, until she saw the weapon. I fired a pulverizer shot, and she exploded into a cloud of gray ashes. The other two joined her in the nothingness as I emptied my clip on them both. Viola jumped back up, giving me a horrified look.
“This is wrong on so many levels…”
“I know.” It was all I could manage as we rushed back out to find the melee growing increasingly violent. I was itching for some action. They’d made me the leader of this group, yet I was useless against the Berserkers. It killed me to watch everything unfold around me like this.
Astra and Jericho stood back to back, casting light and fire at every shadow hound that tried to attack them. Haldor had come down, casually approaching them with his black whip loose, eager to bite into them. Viola left me in the doorway and joined her daughter and the fae dragon, producing light of her own to keep the shadow hounds at bay. For a while, it worked, until Haldor lashed his whip at them.
All three ducked, but the whip would certainly strike them eventually.
I felt helpless on the edge of this battle, and the thudding of incoming clone guards rushing up the main extension alley didn’t help, either. Myst was thrown back, landing on her back with a grunt of pain. Still, she refused to yield. My friends were three against Haldor, but the Valkyrie was on her own. With Brandon gone, our edge was gone, too. Worst of all, Isabelle, Chantal, and Voss weren’t here. Only the ashes of their doppelgangers remained. Either Myst had been wrong since the beginning, or Torrhen and his Berserkers had swapped Isabelle and the others out for copies, in anticipation of our arrival.
We were losing precious time and hurtling toward a bloody end. I was no match for the Berserkers, and Myst on her own wouldn’t be able to hold them and the shadow hounds back.
“Where did you take them?” Myst asked Torrhen. Panting, she pulled herself back to her feet, gold and steel armor jingling as she moved. The darkness persisted around us, blocked only by the Daughters and the fae dragon’s light. “Isabelle, Voss, Chantal. Where did you take them?”
“Finally, she figured it out,” Haldor chuckled, tightly gripping his black whip as he circled Astra’s cluster. He was biding his time, patient in his pursuit, knowing that it would only require a second’s worth of distraction to take them down. For now, however, their combined light held him and his shadow hounds back.
“You’ll never find them,” Torrhen said. “We didn’t bring you here to find them.”
He raised his long black daggers and lunged at Myst once more. She dodged him and swerved, lashing out with her sword in one swift motion. The illuminated blade cut through the shadow, making him shriek from what I hoped was pain. It wasn’t enough to bring him down, though. No.
But it did make him angrier.
Haldor muttered something under his breath, and two of the shadow hounds moved away from their position near Astra to focus on the Valkyrie instead. They nipped at her ankles first, fangs hitting metal once, twice… by the third bite, their sharp, jet-black canines had pierced Myst’s protections, sinking deep. She screamed in agony and fell. All