A Shade of Vampire 91: A Gate of Light Read online

  A Shade of Vampire 91: A Gate of Light

  Bella Forrest

  Contents

  Problems reading?

  New Generation List

  Family tree

  1. Astra

  2. Astra

  3. Thayen

  4. Thayen

  5. Sofia

  6. Unending

  7. Unending

  8. Unending

  9. Dafne

  10. Jericho

  11. Astra

  12. Thayen

  13. Death

  14. Unending

  15. Unending

  16. Astra

  17. Astra

  18. Thayen

  19. Sofia

  20. Astra

  21. Thayen

  22. Astra

  23. Dafne

  24. Thayen

  25. Unending

  26. Sofia

  27. Astra

  28. Thayen

  29. Death

  ASOV 92: A Dawn of Worlds

  Read more by Bella Forrest

  Copyright © 2020

  Cover design by Okay Creations LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Problems reading?

  If you experience any problems reading this ebook—such as pages skipping, etc.—it’s a Kindle glitch. Just delete the ebook from your device and re-download it, and the problem should solve itself. If not, contact Amazon’s customer support; they’re helpful and efficient.

  New Generation List

  Thayen - Adoptive son of Derek and Sofia

  Richard – Son of Jovi and Anjani (Wolf-Incubus Hybrid)

  Astra – Daughter of Phoenix and Viola (Daughter-Sentry Hybrid)

  Isabelle – Daughter of Serena and Draven (Sentry-Druid Hybrid)

  Jericho – Son of Caia and Blaze (Fae-Fire Dragon Hybrid)

  Voss – Son of Aida and Field (Wolf-Hawk Hybrid)

  Dafne – Daughter of Lethe and Elodie (Ice Dragon-Human Hybrid)

  Family tree

  If you’d like to check out the Novaks’ family tree, visit: www.forrestbooks.com/tree

  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.<
br />
  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.

  He was a dominating presence in my life, and I had not gotten used to that yet.

  “You’ve met people with powers like mine before?” I asked, keeping a sullen frown on my face as a means to mask the rapid beating of my heart. Brandon had already admitted to having a soft spot for me, but I didn’t know what to do with that, nor what the next step would be. I was permanently nervous around him because I wanted more, and maybe so did he… but neither of us had made a move.

  I was stupidly shy. I’d always been like that. Or was I too impatient? No, maybe just overthinking. He’d already told me that Berserkers and Valkyries weren’t made for love, yet I was yearning for something I wasn’t sure he could even give me. Yep, definitely overthinking, though it was hard not to when the truth was right in front of me. But even so…

  Snap out of it, Astra. Be a Daughter, not a chicken!

  “Not exactly like yours, no, but hybrids with Hermessi origins. Daughters of other realms, though not precisely pink wonders like you and your mother. Similar creatures with frightening powers, some of whom fell in love with the commoners, the less extraordinary residents of those realms. The fruits of their love were incredible beings with powers that befuddled even their parents,” Brandon said, stopping right in front of me. I craned my head back so I could keep looking him in the eyes. “You, however, are a step above any others I’ve met. There is absolutely nothing common about sentries. Your genetic package is truly out of this world, something I’ve never seen before. But you do share some similarities with your otherworldly equivalents.”

  “Oh?” I managed, his gaze hypnotizing me.

  “This portal opening talent, I’ve seen it before, albeit in different formats, but the basis remains the same. I’m guessing that the more you try, the better you’ll get at it. However, the secret to succeeding is more about letting go than it is about delving deeper,” Brandon said, then casually sat down beside me. We both stared at the clearing and the washed-out moonlight that filled it, turning most of the leaves from a dirty green to an olive yellow. The colors were wrong. Everything about this place was wrong.

  I slowly turned my head to look at him. “So, I should just let go? That’s your suggestion?”

  “It’s just an idea, but unless you tell me what it is you feel is missing, it might be the wrong idea,” he replied.

  For two days, Brandon had been quietly watching my efforts to prove Hrista right—to demonstrate I could indeed open a shimmering portal. The process of discovery was sloppy and painfully slow, though I didn’t lack encouragement. My mother, my father, my violet-eyed aunts—my entire family had my back in this. But I’d failed to deliver so far, and it made me feel… inadequate. Frustrated. Yes, Brandon was right, I was frustrated.

  “I’m not sure what’s missing,” I said. “It’s just… the urgency of it. We’re stuck in this place while Hrista and the clones and some of your brothers are traipsing around on our island, doing who knows what. Every day that we’re here is a day that they’ve won. We know nothing. We’re in literal darkness, and I could be the only one who can do something about it.” Pausing to breathe in, I felt the sting in my eyes and blinked back tears. “It’s all on my shoulders, and my inability to deliver sooner rather than later angers me.”

  Brandon didn’t say anything for about a minute, while I tried to adjust to what I’d just expressed. Saying it aloud had made it even more real. “If you focus on the time you have left, you will never open a portal,” he finally replied. “If you channel your energy into the urgency of your situation, only failure awaits at the end of your journey, Astra.”

  Every time my name left his lips, it felt serious. Profound. Of great meaning and importance. I couldn’t look away from him, but I fed on his words and his sound reasoning. He was right. The more anxious I got, the worse it would be. No one had accomplished anything with anxiety.

  “You think I should just… what, relax?” I asked, my voice quiet.

  His lips were closer than I’d thought. I wasn’t sure when the approach had occurred, but mere inches of space were left between us as he’d leaned in, and the proximity sent my blood into a frenzied rush through my body, making me feel lightheaded. For a moment, I wondered what would happen if I just leaned in and kissed him. The white flames of his gaze told me I was on the right track here, but my body… failed me. I’d never had the confidence of a sentry. My aunties, Harper and Serena, were fierce, and they always took what their hearts desired. I, on the other hand, had always been more timid. Like a mouse.

  “Deep breaths, in and out,” Brandon said, his breath warming my face. It was a strange feeling—more of an illusion, really, since he was only concentrated spiritual energy that had taken a physical form. But he felt real. He felt… oh, so real. “Focus on nothing other than the shimmering portal. You can already feel one after it has closed, right?”

  I nodded, my brain slowing down.

  “I think you just… you just need to put everything else out of your mind,” Brandon added, his voice dropping an octave. I hadn’t noticed the raspy undertone before, but it made my breath falter. He was so close. His lips so inviting. We were both slipping away, I realized. The reality of our situation was dissipating like watercolors in a glass of water, until nothing but our souls remained.

  “That’s going to be hard,” I mumbled.

  “You… have to try,” he replied, his gaze dropping. It settled on my lips, and heat burst through me as if I’d just swallowed the sun itself. We were so close.

  But I heard Hammer before I saw him. It only took a split second to understand where this moment would end. The Aesir came tearing out of the dark woods and pounced on Brandon, forcing us apart and making him laugh. My cheeks were flushed, and fires burned in my throat, but I giggled too. Ever since they’d been reunited, Hammer had had a hard time letting Brandon out of his sight.

  The wolf had the energy of about
fifty preschoolers on a sugar rush, and his Berserker was there for all of it. Despite the missed opportunity, I had to admit that seeing them together like this filled me with the kind of warmth I’d rarely felt since this whole clone nonsense had begun.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Brandon said to me as he playfully tackled the dire wolf. They rolled over in the grass, dried leaves crunching beneath them, but Hammer didn’t give an inch. “He keeps butting in…”

  At least he’d said it out loud. I would’ve felt bad to be the one to point out the pattern. Twice now, Hammer had come between us in what should’ve been private moments. Twice, the Aesir had interrupted something… important. I couldn’t fault the enthusiastic creature, but I did wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if it was just a coincidence.

  There was a lot I didn’t fully understand about the relationship between a Berserker and his Aesir, so I couldn’t exclude anything just yet. I only knew that the Aesir were much brighter than their living equivalents. Either way, my lips tingled at the thought of Brandon’s, and I knew we’d take things further eventually. Everything was moving fast, but I didn’t know how it would end for us. So why not go at lightning speed now and maybe slow down once we survived?

  Brandon’s laughter filled me with a muted joy, and I smiled as I watched them wrestle. Where were we going with this connection between us? What was our destination? Did either of us even know?