“Trouble in paradise?” Jericho scoffed from behind us. His voice was a low growl, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d slip out of his special uniform and go full dragon. He had to be aware that it might not do anything against the Valkyrie, but what other choice did he have? We couldn’t throw a flare out for Mom, either. It would just draw her into this trap.
“No, just a silly clone,” Hrista retorted. “I made them. I own them. I control them. And some had the audacity to demand rights. That was foolish, which Isabelle learned the hard way.”
“What does the artifact do?” Myst asked. She’d heard enough to understand that Brandon had been right all along. He was vindicated. Unfortunately, he was also a prisoner of Hrista’s black mist. I took another discreet step, pushing the liquid darkness farther back. Hrista clearly hadn’t noticed, otherwise she would’ve thrown something else at me, but she was so consumed with gloating that she didn’t even notice my slow advance.
Hrista gave her sister a dry half-smile. “There was once a Black Witch named Kedra. Vicious little thing, that one, and overly ambitious. Spirit introduced us. It didn’t take long for me to see why he’d taken a liking to her. Spirit had a way of finding powerful women and drawing them to him, I suppose. Consider me the most powerful among them. As for Kedra, she managed to convert an entire world—a whole realm—into dark energy. The kind you see in Purgatory. It was an incredible and unprecedented accomplishment, to say the least. Most would have deemed it impossible.”
“The living shouldn’t be able to manipulate the powers of light or darkness,” Myst murmured, genuinely shocked.
Torrhen flashed her a grin. “Well, beings of light can’t manipulate darkness, either, yet here we are,” he replied, nodding at Hrista. Indeed, she was special. Unlike the other Valkyries, she had power over the black mist, over the darkness, but she also had power over the light. It didn’t make any sense.
“I’ve come a long way, I know,” Hrista giggled. “Anyway, Kedra was a badass. A talented badass. Alas, her ambition was her undoing. After turning an entire realm into dark energy and compressing it into this dice here, she swallowed it, thinking all that power would become hers. Imagine a world with its natural elements, with its people and animals—imagine it transmuted into pure dark energy. The mere feeling of that much power inside her… whew! She didn’t make it. Her body was not made to withstand such a thing,” she added, drawing our attention to the dice. I took another cautious step toward Brandon. Only a couple of feet remained, and the black mist was constantly pulling back because of me. “Kedra, the poor thing, was destroyed. Blown to tiny bits and pieces. But the dice survived. I think one of the White Witches found it. No one knew what it did, and that worked to my advantage. At the time I had no intention of using it, obviously. Then and now… two very different Hristas.”
Time was running out. It was evident from the delicate shift in her expression that Hrista was getting ready to wrap things up. She’d had her shot at glory, and she’d taken the stage for her finale number—her ego was titanic. I imagined it was one of the things that had drawn her and the Spirit Bender together. The lovebirds from hell.
“So, it’s true,” Myst said, gradually regaining her composure. This encounter had clearly shaken her. “You’ve forsaken everything. Your nature, your vows, your sisters… and for what? To play god in a foreign dimension? To live with a Reaper? What was the point of all this?”
Hrista lit up like a beacon with pure white rage. “That was the plan until these bastards took Spirit away from me!” She drew a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment as the light dimmed slowly. “But it’s fine. I have better plans now. New angles. A bright and interesting future to look forward to. You wouldn’t understand, Myst. You were always a sheep, accepting what you were told you could or couldn’t do. Not once did you ever consider rebellion. None of us did, I suppose. Not for a long time. It took a Reaper breaking into Purgatory over and over to make me see that there could be a different path… that I had the same strength.”
I didn’t understand the reference. Myst was confused, too. “What are you talking about?”
“You hadn’t been made at the time,” Hrista replied with an eye roll. “It doesn’t matter, Myst. You will never understand.” She raised a hand slowly, and the liquid darkness trickled across the grass and over to Myst, who tried to get away, but Torrhen appeared behind her and caught her wrists for the second the black mist needed to reach her. Myst was paralyzed, like her sister and Brandon. Torrhen gave me a curious glance.
“Would you look at that?” he muttered, while Dafne, Jericho, and Thayen moved farther away from him. He didn’t care about them, anyway. His attention was focused entirely on me, and it made my skin crawl. “Someone seems to have developed an immunity to the black mist.”
“Hm… I figured. Just one more reason to kill her,” Hrista replied.
“Why are you so desperate to see me dead?” I asked, the air thickening around me. My pink light reacted to Torrhen’s slow and cautious approach. I was glowing menacingly, the energies gathering in a heavy ball in my chest, ready to be expelled and destroy everything in their path. I remembered the time I’d been hit with the clones’ black spray—that had certainly affected me. Torrhen appeared to be right. Something inside me had triggered the development of some kind of immunity against the darkness of Berserkers, for it had been Haldor’s blackness that had fueled the clones’ devices, according to Brandon,
