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 an integral part of his being. Even if nothing else had really gone our way, at least Hammer had been returned safely.
I closed my eyes for a long second, trying to find the feeling I had experienced before. A shimmering gash had ripped open here at some point. Faint tendrils of its energy had been left behind, like fingerprints of an era long gone. The Daughters’ pink mist from The Shade had picked up on portal residue from up to six months earlier, so it didn’t shock me that I could still sense traces myself. I only needed a little to build on. It was something I’d learned after the Flip: if I could find a smidge of energy to latch onto, I could then construct my own layers on top of it and hopefully, eventually, summon a new portal. I’d had to figure most of this out on my own, too, and I wasn’t even sure it would work. Maybe all I needed was just my own power. No one else could teach me. This stuff didn’t come with a user manual.
Slowly but surely, my nerve endings expanded like corn popping in a hot iron pan over a blazing fire. Pop. Pop. Pop. Sensations came to life, one by one, until I was one with the universe and directly plugged into the atoms of the cosmos. The best I could describe this process was like an in-depth meditation, though I wasn’t yet sure how I’d gotten to it. My instincts had never steered me wrong before, however. I’d ridden the wave this far, and I knew I was on to something.
I could feel it in my bones.
Every time I tried focusing on the shimmering gashes, every time I fed on the ghost of portals past, my whole being vibrated and followed a quiet, electrifying pattern. My skin tingled, every pore pricking. The current danced down my spine, tumbling and tickling along the way. There it was—the jolt I needed. It was just inches from my reach, and I was desperate to get to it.
Alas, it slipped away. The more I tried, the closer I got. But never close enough. “Damn it,” I cursed under my breath, normalcy taking over and dragging me back into the real world. Well, a copy of the real world, anyway.
“You’re frustrated,” Brandon said, startling me as he emerged from the darkness on the other side of the clearing. He walked toward me, and wisps of it curled off him like black smoke. “The more you push yourself, the closer you will get, and still… you won’t reach your destination.”
“You seem to know a lot about my power,” I replied with a sulking grumble. “Also, you suck at encouragement.”
He shrugged. “It was a statement of fact, not an encouragement. Anyway, I’ve seen something similar before, a very long time ago. Many souls have passed through Purgatory, Pinkie. Souls of hybrids that weren’t ever supposed to be born. Life found a way, however—and so did death, for they came to my door, in the end.”
Brandon’s darkness faded slowly, leaving only his true form, clearer than ever before. The blue fires in his eyes flickered white more often than before, and especially when he looked my way. I’d identified that as a sign of an intense emotional state, though I wasn’t sure what emotions were at play here. I knew what emotions I would’ve liked from him, but I didn’t dare wish or even imagine it when I peered into his eyes. His black hair poured down his back in slick, shiny braids with silver threads at the end. The leather of his vest stretched across his torso, his broad shoulders and narrow hips forming an athletic yet elegant frame. The chain links on his shoulders jingled faintly with every step that he took, as did the steel and silver buckles on his knee-length boots, and I was breathless once more.