Chapter 18 #2
Victoria pointed toward the Joell-Rayna mimics, which had started to circle the battlefield, taunting Payne by mirroring Rayna’s voice in increasingly mocking tones.
“We flank. Split into two pairs, but not directly opposite one another. Chaos spells only. No elegance. No harmonics. Just raw, contradictory power. Disruptive frequencies.”
Sahara nodded. “Disrupt the mimic by confusing the hell out of it.”
“And Katie?” Rayna asked.
Katie looked at Bubbles. “We’ll stay behind the Jeep and try not to hiccup you into the apocalypse.”
Rayna looked at each of them, wild-haired and scuffed up, ready to throw themselves into a battle with something they barely understood.
“On three,” she said. “One—”
“Three!” Brianna yelled, and they charged.
Magda and Brianna veered left, hurling wind and static like weaponized weather.
Sahara and Victoria shot right, one casting heat ripples and the other blasting ice shards upward like reverse stalagmites.
The magic clashed midair, tangled into a roiling knot that sparked and groaned under its own instability.
Lioness drew conflicting runes and symbols in the air, spelling nonsense.
The mimic hesitated. Just a blink, but long enough.
Rayna launched herself straight down the center. She didn’t cast. Just attacked. She figured nothing could be more confusing than a witch ripping at her own face.
The mimic turned and met her head-on. Their hands clashed. Its palms mirrored hers. The knot of chaotic magic above them pulsed and exploded. Everything went white. Sound turned into blinding light.
Rayna flew backward. So did the mimic. But something in it tore. Like its shape had been held together by chewing gum. The Joell mimic disappeared into smoke. Rayna hit the ground hard and didn’t get up. Her ears rang. Her ribs ached. She barely registered the shadow rising above her again.
The mimic re-formed, faster this time, but sloppier. One eye in the wrong place. Her mouth smeared across her chin. But it still smiled, like a creepy Picasso.
“I think we know which one is the real mimic ,” Victoria growled.
“You can’t destroy what you’ve created,” it said, voice bubbling like boiling oil. It raised a claw. And Rayna couldn’t move fast enough. But someone else did.
The claw came down. Rayna barely registered the flash of steel before it struck. A blur of motion cut through her peripheral vision, then a thunk as Payne slammed into the mimic like a linebacker possessed. Both figures went down hard, rolling across the dirt in a tangle of limbs and fury.
He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t wait to see if she was okay.
He moved. Payne’s spell-tagged blade plunged into the mimic’s shoulder.
It screamed, and not just in pain, but in confusion.
Payne’s tag flared red, pulsing with a nulling glyph Victoria had scrawled onto his wrist just before they left the mansion.
The mimic writhed, melting beneath him like tar left in the sun. It was still wearing Rayna’s disturbingly rearranged face. Still smiling.
“Get away from her,” Payne growled, voice low and raw. Then he plunged the spear into its side again and again.
It shuddered. Glitched, like something in its mimic-code had shorted.
Real Rayna tried to push herself up, but her body was mud and fire. Her ribs felt cracked, her magic scrambled. The glyphs on her arms sparked once, then flickered out entirely.
The mimic thrashed and caught Payne in the side with a wild, spiked elbow. He grunted, teeth clenched, but he didn’t back off. He drove the blade deeper.
Rayna could see it now. The mimic’s face was slipping. Her features turned to Sahara’s, then to Katie’s, then to… someone unidentifiable. Then a blank canvas. No eyes. No mouth. Just smooth gray flesh trying to decide what it wanted to be. Then it spoke, but not aloud.
Rayna felt the voice in her mind. She recoiled instinctively, clutching her head. “What are you?”
“You opened me. You taught me. I am not your enemy. I am what comes after.” It turned its blank mannequin head toward her again, shapeless and twitching. “Hungry!”
And then, it burst. Not in gore, but in smoke and sound. It detonated in a shockwave of mimic energy, knocking Payne off it and hurling him backward like a rag doll. He slammed into the base of a scorched oak and went down hard.
“Adam!” Rayna choked out.
The mimic reassembled midair, liquid limbs pulling together like mercury.
Rayna forced herself to her knees, vision spinning. The mimic had moved past her, stalking toward where Payne lay in a heap, unmoving.
The other witches moved, like they were about to surround him.
“No, no, no!”
She surged forward, half-crawling, half-dragging herself toward him. The glyphs on her skin tried to reboot. They buzzed and flickered, but her magic was still scrambled. She had nothing stable to fire. No clean spell to throw.
So, she improvised. Rayna flung both hands out and screamed, "No one touches him but me!"
The air around her cracked. A pulse of raw, unfocused magic surged from her chest like a sonic boom. It caught the mimic mid-step and flung it back further into the trees.
Rayna collapsed against Payne’s side, gasping. He groaned. Barely. But he was alive.
“Okay,” she muttered, fingers shaking as she pressed them to his pulse. “Okay, we’re still in this. We are so going on vacation when this is over.”
Payne blinked up at her, blood trickling from his lip. “Did… Did you just yell me into exclusive ownership?”
“I did,” she panted. “You’re mine. Deal with it.”
He smiled, just a little. “Hot.”
A rustling above them broke the moment.
The mimic pulled itself from the treetops, no longer bothering with faces. It had become a full-body distortion. A walking contradiction. Long and short, wide and narrow. Limbs folding wrong. Light ripples around it like heat haze. And it was heading straight for them.
Rayna stood on unsteady feet. “You are seriously pissing me off now!”
Payne started to rise too, but she pressed him back down with one firm hand. “No. I’ve got this.”
“Rayna—”
“I owe you. And I’m not letting you get maimed twice in one war.”
She turned toward the mimic; every spell she’d ever half-mastered flickering through her brain like a slot machine gone rogue. One of them had to hit.
Behind her, the others regrouped. Brianna was limping. Sahara had a nosebleed. Victoria looked like she’d aged a decade.
Rayna whispered to them without looking back: “Time for the finale. Light it up, witches!”
They did. With everything they had.
The mimic was unraveling. Its limbs moved like rope underwater, twitching at wrong angles, fracturing into shapes it hadn’t earned the right to wear. Bits of Sahara’s face. Katie’s freckles. A chunk of Victoria’s long neck. It was trying to be them all at once… and failing.
Rayna raised a shaking arm, glyphs glowing hot, but before she could throw the final strike, Joell stepped forward.
“No!” Brianna grabbed her arm, but Joell pulled free, walking calmly toward the center of the battlefield, barefoot and silent.
“She’s not casting,” Victoria said. “She’s opening a channel.”
Rayna felt it too. It was like a door being unlocked in a room she didn’t know was there. Joell’s power didn’t shout like the others. It hummed, steady and low, like a deep heartbeat under stone and earth.
The mimic paused. It faced Joell, not mimicking, not attacking. Just watching.
Joell knelt in the scorched grass, palms open, voice quiet. “I see you,” she whispered. “Come in.”
Rayna staggered forward. “Joell, what the hell are you doing?”
Joell didn’t answer with words. Her eyes went wide and silver. Her head snapped back, and then she spoke, but not in her voice.
“We are memory,” the mimic said through her. “We are echo. We were once many. Now only I remain.”
The witches froze. Katie gripped her goldfish’s bubble tighter. Even the fish stopped spinning.
Joell’s body vibrated with alien power, skin flickering like concentric circles of water in sunlight. The mimic stayed still. If it had eyes, it would be staring at her.
“Your world hummed,” it said. “So loud. So messy. So full. We fed on patterns. Then the patterns broke. Then we drifted. We took shape to survive. We remember what we were through you. But one by one, we were rejected and fell apart.”
Sahara whispered, “It’s not a monster.”
“It’s a refugee,” Victoria said grimly.
“We did not mean harm,” Joell continued, her voice layered now. Not only hers, but also others, and something ancient. “Your power calls us. We cannot not come. We are hunger, yes, but also fear and history. And…” Her hands began to tremble.
Rayna dropped to her knees beside her. “Can you break the connection?”
Joell’s eyes flicked toward her, and for a second, she looked like herself again. “I can end it.”
“But?”
“It’s lonely.” Her voice cracked. “It doesn't want to fight. It just doesn't know how to be anymore. It doesn’t want to be anymore.”
The mimic slowly moved closer, gently, until its formless smoke hovered over Joell like a shadow of something that used to be real.
Rayna swallowed. “If we let it go, will it bring others?”
“There are no others,” Joell said. “Not anymore.”
A long silence followed. Then Joell’s hand clenched. She looked at Rayna and whispered, “It wants to consume me. It can fight, but you have to cauterize me.”
“What?”
“Do it. Now. While I still have control.”
“No. There has to be another—”
“She invited it in,” Victoria said quietly. “She’s the doorway. The only way to close it is from both sides.”
Joell smiled, soft and full of light. “I trust you, Rayna.”
“But do you trust it to do its part?”
“Yes.”
Then Rayna, shaking, furious, already grieving, pressed a hand to Joell’s chest and released the most beautiful, terrible heat she had ever drawn into her body.
The mimic groaned. Not in pain or rage. In relief. Its shape burst into threads of light, each strand carrying a sound: laughter, music, names in languages no one remembered. The firelight crackled and rose from Joell’s eyes like embers into the sky, then vanished.