Rage of Vendetta (The Vendetta Series #2)

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

A clone. 

This entire time in Vendetta House we’ve been dealing with a clone? No wonder she was so damn heartless. I take a step back. Demons and angels I can accept. Cambions and Nephilum I can accept. But clones? 

Those surrounding the table fall into absolute silence. The noise roars on around the room, but within this circle, you can hear a pin drop. Amanel rushes off, hand clamped over her mouth. She slips through the main door that I suspect leads to the rooms, and leaves in her wake a shocked crowd. 

“Clone?” Sasha whispers, dubious. “So?—”

Mom nods towards the path Amanel furrowed down. “She didn’t have a single clue what was going on.”

A clone. Seriously?

“When was the last time she heard from… her?” I ask. 

“As far as I know, a month or so ago,” Mom says, looking uncomfortable answering details for a crowd. "The double came in contact with Amanel for the first time in years.”

“About what?” Courtney asks, the disbelief at the situation pitching her voice high.

Drumming her fingers on the table, Mom seems to be watching what she is saying now. She rubs the corner of her left eye. “I don’t know. The clone has a sick fascination with what she is doing, spurned by the hatred she was created from. She’s always been intent on getting Amanel to join up: a sense of familial bond, I suppose. Up until today, we had no idea what it actually was that she was doing. She stayed away, and Amanel could never manage to track her down. We assumed whatever it was, it was harmless.” Mom grimaces, pained. “I guess we were more than a little wrong.”

“But why did she reach out to Amanel the last time she did?” Jesse prods. “You said it was a bit more than a month ago, right?”

“I’m really not sure, you’d need to ask Amanel directly,” Mom says tiredly, rubbing the heel of her palm over her eyes. “I know it was about something she’d never seen before. The double wouldn’t elaborate and then Amanel wouldn’t elaborate to me either.”

“Could it have been about discovering Ariel?”

Mom jerks back, bewildered.

On those words, something triggers inside my head. Not quite a vision that rips me into the past; just a simple memory.

I remember laying on the hospital bed, unable to wake after being knocked out from screaming in the store, and only catching fragments of conversation outside my door. I hadn’t known at the time, but my Nephilum hearing had just been surfacing. The words I overheard were something I had forgotten when I properly came to consciousness, and hadn’t bothered to recall until this moment.

"I don’t care. Hell itself can curse me for all it’s worth. …serious. No … her name is Ariel."

If the clone had been on the phone with Amanel that day, and was told her my name, then: “Amanel knew.”

“What?” Mom asks.

I lift my head up, having realized too late I spoke aloud. “Jesse’s right. It was about me. Amanel was told my name. The day I was taken, just before she had walked into the room, I overheard a phone call. They were arguing about something. She may not have known about what Aunt Nelly was doing in Vendetta House, but she knew something was wrong.”

I pause. “Amanel was the one who told you guys to leave, wasn’t she? You disappeared way before you even got my warning.”

Mom slowly nods.