Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (21 page)

I turned to him and ran
into his arms, grateful to be with him again.

“How did they do
it?” Vanessa asked this time, but the voice didn’t really
belong to her.

Red-hot pain racked
through my cheek as the bone shattered. I jerked back awake, in the
dark room again.

“Tell me how they
did it, and we can stop wasting all this time,” the voice said.

I didn’t know
what she was talking about.
How who did what?
I didn’t
understand anything going on. My entire body felt sapped of energy,
and my brain was all muddled.

“Jeana, darling,
don’t be so impatient. You’ve sucked out all her energy.
Give her a chance to wake up, you evil little wench,” a male
voice chastised lovingly. He didn’t sound close, though, but
more like his words came through a speakerphone or a computer.

The woman in the room,
presumably Jeana, grunted, and the peach blob, which I assumed was
her face, moved away, attached to the larger gray blob of her body
below it. She disappeared into the darkness with the
clack-clack-clack of a woman’s heels on a cement floor, but I
could still feel her presence nearby. The sound of running water
carried over to me from somewhere close, but not too close. A moment
later, footsteps approached, and then ice-cold water crashed over my
head and face, sliding down my neck and into my leather bustier.

This woke me up.

The cold also helped
numb the pain in my face, so when I blinked it out of my eyes, the
movement didn’t hurt so much. It still took a moment for me to
focus on my surroundings, but they eventually came into view.

And I so wished they
hadn’t.

I wanted to run back to
the forest, even if it wasn’t real. Because I really didn’t
want to be here, chained to the wall by my wrists and ankles, too
drained of energy to be able to do anything about it. The room was
dark and cool, and I couldn’t see more than ten yards in front
of me as it faded into darkness, but it felt large and cavernous. A
few feet away stood a metal table displaying what my imagination took
to be torture tools, and I was pretty sure they weren’t your
run-of-the-mill Norman torture tools, but were cursed with magical
spells. The kinds of spells that left dark magic in your scars, like
what marred Tristan when he returned from his incarceration with the
Daemoni. Off to the right and several yards away stood a desk with a
computer screen and a bunch of papers on it. And immediately to my
right, a body hung next to me.

The scream started in
the pit of my stomach and exploded from my throat, but only came out
as a choking gasp. I fought against the constraints, trying to
wriggle free, but I couldn’t move enough to even make the
chains rattle.
Oh, no. God, please, no
. Tears stung the backs
of my eyes. He hung there so lifelessly, and I could do nothing to
help him. Nothing! I’d never felt so helpless in my life. I
could barely recognize him through the blood matted in his blond hair
and the streaks of sweat and grime on his swollen face.

“Owen,” I
tried to whisper, but my voice hardly made a croak, and my throat
felt like a cat clawed at the inside. My breath became trapped in my
lungs when he didn’t answer. “
Owen
…”

The salty wetness
burned my injured cheeks as tears streamed uncontrollably.

“He’s not
dead,” Jeana said. She seemed to be the only other person in
the room, although I couldn’t be sure because I couldn’t
see … and because my damn telepathy refused to work. She was
close, but in the shadows, and my eyes found her general shape, but
couldn’t quite focus on her. “Not yet, anyway. But he
will be soon if you two don’t cooperate.”

“
Tristan!
”
I tried to yell his name, praying he was looking for us, trying to
rescue us, but again only a croak came out. The next name was more
like a sad hiccup. “Dorian?”

“The boy’s
okay.” Footsteps came closer again. “The other two,
though—the traitors? They’re being dealt with. The rest
got away.”

The traitors? She must
have meant Tristan and Vanessa. Who did she mean by the rest? Char,
Solomon, and the others?

“Unfortunately,
we caught your flash a little too soon, and the rest of your group
managed to escape. They’re insignificant little cockroaches
anyway and will be stomped out soon enough.”

Yes, she spoke of my
team. So hopefully she wasn’t lying, and they were really okay.
But we—Tristan, Vanessa, Owen, Dorian, and I—were not.
Understanding began to creep into my murky mind.

We’d been worried
the others had been caught by the magic traps when we’d flashed
out of Moscow, but
we’d
been the ones ensnared, like
flies in a spider’s web.

As this truth settled
into my bones, a spark of adrenaline shot through my veins, enough to
clear my mind, but not to give me any strength. This
Jeana-bitch-sorceress must have been draining me of all of my power
while feeding me some stupid vision of a pretty forest and quaint
little town. Panic rose like bile in my throat as I considered what
she might have seen and heard. Had she been sharing the vision with
me? If so, then she’d know the Amadis dissolution was a sham.
What else had she found out? Did any of it matter anymore?

“Why haven’t
you killed us yet?” I asked, my voice scratchy, but no longer
garbled. I didn’t think Lucas cared any longer whether Tristan
and I lived or died, but I could hope he still held out for us to run
to his side, because at least that gave us a chance.

“Because I’m
not quite done with you,” Jeana said, tucking her
shoulder-length, raven hair behind her ears as she came into view.

I expected her to look
older, but her skin was as clear as her dark, sparkling eyes that
told of the evil inside. She wore a see-through, button-down white
top with enough buttons undone to show her voluptuous cleavage
pushing out of her black lace bra, and a tight, black leather skirt
that ended before her knees. With thigh-high, black boots, she looked
like some kind of sexual dominatrix. The clack of her six-inch heels
fell silent when she stopped at the cart holding the terrifying
instruments. I half-expected her to pick up a leather whip, but
instead she chose a shining silver tool with a crescent shaped blade.
She wiggled her red-tipped fingers over the point, and then stepped
right up to me, grabbed my face with her free hand, and squeezed my
jaw.

“I’m tired
of this game,” she snarled in my face, gagging me with her
breath that smelled like she’d been eating zombie flesh …
and cherries. “Tell me how they did it.
NOW!
”

My brows scrunched
together. Why did she keep asking me that? “How who did what?”

She growled and
tightened her grip on my face.

“The soldiers,
poppet
.” She lifted the blade to point to the corner
where I could now see the shape of another person. A very large
person holding a very large gun. “What did Lucas and Kali do to
control them?”

I blinked and
suppressed a ridiculous chuckle. “How the hell would I know?”

Something sharp poked
into my side, right above my hip. “You wouldn’t, but
he
would. Read his mind!”

And the pieces tumbled
together. She’d been torturing Owen all of this time, but he
hadn’t given her what she wanted. I was her Plan B, a way to
dig out of his memories how Kali had created the stones. Of course,
Lucas had told me how he’d used Sasha’s blood to
“improve” the super-soldiers and force their loyalty, but
Jeana obviously didn’t know that. Why did she care what they
did? To create her own soldiers, no doubt. Another sorceress making a
power play for Lucas’s position. The Daemoni thought
we
experienced organizational and leadership problems, but their greed
for power over each other just might be their biggest downfall.

“Do it,”
she snapped, clutching my jaw harder and jabbing the knife into my
skin.

“He’s
unconscious, possibly dead. I
can’t
read his mind,”
I hissed through gritted teeth as a line of searing pain drew across
my lower abdomen.

“These ovaries of
yours are quite precious, aren’t they? How badly do you want to
keep them?” She dug the blade in deeper, causing me to yelp.

But my skin and even my
leathers closed up right behind the knife. I forced a smile through
the lingering burn. She lifted her upper lip in a snarl.

“She heals right
away, Merrick,” she said. Who was Merrick? The soldier in the
corner?

“What
can
we hurt?” the man’s voice from before asked, and I was
pretty sure the voice didn’t belong to the soldier. It still
sounded distorted and came from the direction of the desk. I glanced
over there. Oh, how lovely. She had us on video-chat. “Or
should I say
who
?”

Jeana lifted her red
painted lips into a grin and held her hand in the air as she took a
step back from me. She snapped her fingers, and she suddenly held a
body in a chokehold, the knife against his cheekbone.

“Dorian!” I
cried. Would she really kill him for this? Did she not care about him
and his potential role with the Daemoni as much as Lucas did? Or was
this a ruse?

“Mom,”
Dorian said, and his lips moved with more words, but the crash of
glass and metal and the loudest roar I’d ever heard with my own
ears drowned him out.

A winged wolf the size
of an elephant fell from the ceiling and landed on her paws next to
Jeana and Dorian, her foot-long fangs bared and the fur along her
back raised on end. Her black tiger stripes, normally hidden, stood
out in stark contrast against her thick white fur. She leaned forward
and growled, but she didn’t immediately attack the sorceress
holding her master.

Jeana smirked. “That’s
right. You just stay back, you oversized mutt.”

Sasha snarled and
snapped, but not close to enough to hurt the sorceress. Jeana’s
taunting grin grew. She thought the lykora obeyed her, but Sasha knew
her intentions, and apparently Jeana didn’t intend to truly
hurt Dorian. At least, not for the time being. That could quickly
change, so I played along anyway.

“Okay, okay,”
I said pleadingly. “I need him conscious, though. And I can’t
do anything with this mental block you have on my head.”

Her eyes narrowed, and
she tightened her hold on Dorian. “Do you really think I’m
stupid enough to fall for that? I’m not letting you in my
head.”

“I can’t
read anyone’s mind right now. I can’t even
feel
them. I didn’t know you had that soldier over there until you
pointed him out. Your block is keeping me from getting into anyone’s
mind, including Owen’s.”

Jeana cocked her head.
“You’re lying.”

I tried to shift and
the screaming aches through my arms and the rest of my body brought
back the exhaustion. I slumped in the cuffs, and my hair fell into my
face. I rolled my eyes to look up at her through the strands. “I
guess you don’t want to know badly enough.”

Jeana’s dark eyes
studied my face for a long moment, and then suddenly the stabbing
pain in my brain disappeared. Without letting go of Dorian, she
kicked Owen’s shin with her pointy boot, jostling him awake. Or
to some level of consciousness anyway. He let out a groan. I let out
a mental yell.

Tristan! Where are
you?
I screamed for him, searching for his and Vanessa’s
mind signatures as far as my feeble mind could reach, while also
trying to pull thoughts from Jeana’s mind. My brain felt so
meager, though, along with the rest of me. All I could catch was
something about Sasha, and then she slammed me out, making me gasp
and squeeze my eyes shut from the pain.

“
Alexis,
here
,” Owen whispered into my mind. He shared a thought,
what I could only assume was a spell.

Owen, no.

“
Trust me.
”

I tried to glance
sideways at him, but my eyes were too swollen to see him. I could
feel a certain sureness from him, though, as weak as he was.

My eyes peeled open,
and I glared at the bitch holding my son at knifepoint. “I was
trying to show you something, you stupid bitch.”

Her eyes narrowed to
slits, and then she released the block again. Hoping like hell he
knew what he was doing in his semi-conscious state, I shared Owen’s
thoughts with her. Her eyes began to widen. Her mind opened further,
and she drank it all up. I could practically hear her purring.

“Got it,
Merrick,” she said, and her breath puffed out in white tendrils
in front of her. She pulled back in shock. The air around us grew
chilled, and frost spread across her skin, starting at her hands …
where they touched Dorian. Was
he
doing that? Jeana murmured
some kind of incantation, but it failed to stop the growing frost.

I lifted my head and
gazed in awe at my son. His face was full of concentration, his brows
drawn tight, his lips puckered. The frost spread from his body and
thickened into ice as it grew over Jeana. What a powerful ability
he’d developed, and I hadn’t even known! When her arms
became frozen into place, he slipped out of her grip and flew upward,
through the hole in the roof Sasha had created. I sensed him land
close by and wished he’d go farther … far, far away from
this bitch. And I wished Sasha would go with him, but she stayed
planted in front of Owen and me.

“Jeana?”
Merrick called through the laptop. “What’s going on,
darling?”

The sheet of ice
encasing the figure in front of me snapped and cracked as the
sorceress broke out of her frozen cage.

“Nothing,”
she snapped as she shook off the last pieces of ice. “I’m
on my way. But wait for me before you release the kraken. I want to
watch.”

She turned on her heel
and jerked her head to the side. The pick jammed into my mind again,
blocking everything out and making me scream with its forcefulness.
My knees gave out, and my body sagged, causing the cuffs to dig
against my already raw wrists. Jeana clapped her hands, and a door
opened. Footsteps sounded across the floor on the far end of the
warehouse as I watched her open a portal, step through it, and
disappear. The soldier in the corner stepped out of the shadows at
the same time two of his comrades strode up, all of them dressed in
gray camo and combat boots. The three of them marched in proper form
for the last ten yards. Their glassy eyes stared straight ahead, but
really seemed to see beyond our heads, even as they lifted their
military-issued guns to point at our chests.