Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (22 page)

Sasha growled as she
moved over to stand protectively in front of Owen and me. The
soldiers blinked in unison and furrowed their brows.

“We said to
shoot!” Merrick yelled from the screen in the corner.

As one, the soldiers
moved forward and looked as though they were going to fire. Sasha
growled again and took one step toward them. They stopped and looked
at her.

“Fire, you
imbeciles!” Jeana shouted, now also from the computer. She came
on screen, but her body was turned away from the camera. They must
have had the controller wherever they were, a Summoned son or
descendent issuing the orders. Which meant Lucas had handed the
controller over to the two mages. I wondered if he knew about their
plot against him, or if he was too arrogant to believe they’d
try.

Owen’s hands
flicked above his head. I tried to swing my head over to look at him,
to see if he was giving me some kind of signal. I couldn’t hear
his thoughts, couldn’t sense anyone’s mind signatures
anymore, and the pain in my brain and the rest of my body prevented
me from turning enough to see him well. His hands twitched harder,
though, and a gun flew out of one of the soldier’s hands …
and straight at mine. I grabbed for it, fumbling as I tried to get a
grip on it. The soldiers stepped forward again, even the unarmed one.
My fingers finally took ahold, one of them unintentionally on the
trigger. Shots sprayed at the ceiling and then at the floor, and the
soldiers all dropped then sprang upwards like cats to avoid the stray
bullets as I awkwardly tried to maneuver the deadly weapon. If I
hadn’t already been trembling from pain and exhaustion, my
hands positively quaked now. I was almost glad when the thing fell
and clamored to the floor.

The mages on the screen
yelled all kinds of obscenities, and the soldiers made another
attempt to shoot us, but Sasha stopped them again. They wouldn’t
hurt her. They
couldn’t
hurt her—her blood ran
through their veins and they’d always be more loyal to her than
to any controller. And they had to get through her to get to us.

I tried gathering all
of my strength to break out of the cuffs or even to break the chains
away from the wall, but I still had no power, no energy, no strength.
I yelled for help and the sorcerer laughed in response. Owen barely
moved next to me, apparently having used his only bit of energy to
summon the gun. And I’d gone and messed that up.

“Help!” I
screamed again, ignoring the burning in my throat, at the same time a
body dropped through the roof.

Dorian landed right
next to me and held his hands on the cuffs above my head. Almost
immediately, the cold seeped into my skin, refreshing on the raw cuts
encircling my wrists. The cuffs grew colder, frozen, and then began
to crack. As soon as I broke out of them, I fell over. Dorian
squatted and froze off the cuffs on my legs.

“Get Owen,”
I gasped as I crawled for the lost gun, then pushed myself to my
feet. I stumbled toward the soldiers. “Drop your weapons.”

I sounded and probably
looked very far from threatening, so when they didn’t obey, I
didn’t blame them, and wouldn’t have even if they were in
their right minds. Sasha let out a low rumble. They dropped their
guns and fell to their knees, their hands on the backs of their
heads. I looked sideways at Sasha. Had she ordered them to do that?

I lowered my gun and
freed my dagger from my hip, rubbing my thumb over the stone to make
it appear. “Sasha, I have to get the stones out. It’s for
their own good. Hold them there or whatever you do, okay?”

“I got them,
Mom,” Dorian said from my side.

I looked over my
shoulder, wavering on my weak legs as I did so. Owen, barely
conscious, was freed and propped up against the wall, which he slowly
slid down in a slouch. Dorian held his palm out and blasted what
looked like snow at the Normans. They froze. Literally. Dorian took
their guns, and I lurched over to the first soldier. With what felt
like my last bit of strength, I jabbed my dagger into his chest and
dug the chip of stone out. I let it fall to the floor as I shuffled
to the next one, while the first guy began what sounded like a
confused string of Russian profanity. When I dug the second stone
out, that Norman stared at me with confusion and relief.

“I … very
sorry,” he said in broken English.

I moved to the next,
barely able to hold myself up anymore. When my knife pierced his
skin, doors burst open from everywhere around us. More soldiers
poured in, guns up, shouting at the three in front of me. A new guy
held the barrel of his gun at the first soldier’s temple. He
dropped and scurried on his hands and knees until he found the stone
chip I’d just taken from him. He pressed it back into his
bleeding wound.

“No,” I
tried to shout but only whispered.

Another “NO!”
tore through the room, though, as the second guy jumped to his feet.
Shouting
no, no, no
, he dashed across the room for the nearest
door. Another super-soldier gunned him down.

“No,” I
tried again. I watched him fall, then my mother, then him, then my
mom, the images flashing back and forth until he hit the ground,
lifeless.

I wanted to scream.
Instead, I nearly passed out.

Dorian caught me from
behind as I went down, and the dozen or so new Normans pointed their
guns at us. Someone shot off a blast. Sasha whimpered, and at the
same time, every single Norman’s left shoulder twitched and
dropped. Apparently not severely injured, Sasha grabbed Owen in her
mouth and flew for the hole in the ceiling. All the soldiers began
firing.

Not at Sasha, of
course. At me.

Dorian tightened his
hold around me, and lifted me up, up, up as I fired down, barely able
to see where I shot through the gray creeping in on the edges of my
vision, but nonetheless seeing clearly the men who dropped when my
bullets hit them. My sight blurred and wavered as my mind tried to
black out, but I couldn’t unsee the scene below. Normans dead.
Human blood spilled.

What had I done?

Dorian flew us out of
the warehouse, and the cold air blasted in my face, the only thing
keeping me conscious. We soared several dozen feet in the air across
a snowy field lit by moonlight, to where I didn’t know and
didn’t have the energy to ask.

“Alexis?”
The beautiful, familiar voice called from far away.

“Tristan?”
I murmured.

“Dad?”
Dorian asked.

I tried to pinpoint
where the sound came from.

“Dorian!”
Tristan had spotted us. Dorian turned to our right, and I caught a
glimpse of Sasha following with Owen still in her mouth.

We landed on the snow,
and I fell from my son’s grip into my husband’s arms. And
finally, I allowed myself to pass out.

* * *

“He needs more to
heal.”

“You need to
drink before you give him any more blood.”

“How am I going
to do that? Are you offering up?”

“You can have
some of my blood, Aunt Vanessa.”

I pushed away the
cobwebs in my head, trying to make sense of this strange conversation
going on in hushed tones, not close, but not far away either. My head
ached. My tongue felt five times its normal size and my mouth way too
small for it. And I swore it must have soaked up every drop of
moisture it could to grow so big, because I felt as though I could
spit sand. My eyelids slowly peeled open, feeling gritty over my
eyeballs, and when filtered sunlight greeted me, they snapped back
closed. I groaned from the pain in my head.

“Lex?” A
breeze of air whizzed over me, and a large body dropped next to me—I
sensed his presence but refused to open my eyes again to see, even
though my husband’s beautiful face waited on the other side.
“Are you awake, my love?”

“Mmm,” I
managed to moan. “Thirsty.”

Something hard
immediately pressed against my lips, and I parted them. Wetness
poured in. I could barely swallow, my throat so sticky at first, but
I thought my mouth would simply soak up the water anyway like a
dried-up sponge. Eventually, my tongue shrank to normal size, my
throat worked properly, and I gulped down as much as he would give
me. When he pulled the glass away, I whimpered.

“Too much at once
will make you sick.” He wrapped his arms around me and held me.
I leaned against him, my neck barely able to hold up my throbbing
head. “Are you healed up? Besides the dehydration?”

I mentally scanned my
body. I seemed to be okay. Physically, anyway. “All but my
head. How’s Owen?”

“He’ll be
fine. Your ears were bleeding before.”

I could only respond
with a soft grunt. If Owen was okay, I didn’t care about
anything else at the moment. “Just want to sleep.”

I snuggled closer
against his body, inhaling his glorious scent that made everything
feel better. Well, everything but my head. And my heart.

“You’ve
been sleeping for two days.”

That should have raised
some kind of alarm, but I ignored it. I didn’t want to know. I
didn’t want to be in this world.

“I killed them.”

One of Tristan’s
arms tightened around me, and a hand stroked down my hair and back.
“I know, my love. Dorian said you had to.”

I shook my head, even
though it hurt. “Didn’t mean to. Didn’t want to.”

I pressed my face into
his shoulder and cried.

“You did what was
necessary to protect yourself and your son.”

“If I’d had
any power, I could have—”

“But you didn’t.
You did what you had to do.”

I allowed myself more
tears for the men I had killed, because they deserved more than I
could ever give now. They had families, parents and maybe spouses,
their own children even. The only thing I could do for them now was
to ensure their families didn’t die unnecessarily. To protect
the Normans from the Daemoni.

But they weren’t
the only souls I cried for. “Those poor children.”

“The children on
the train?”

“We killed them.
Brought them to their deaths.”

“We don’t
know that for sure. They could have been rescued.”

I finally pulled away
and peeked open my eyes to stare at my favorite face in the world as
though he were on drugs. “We saw the zombies at the train
station … eating …”

He pushed his brows
together and shook his head. “No. We didn’t get there. We
were caught in the flash, remember?”

My lids opened wider.
“You mean the zombies were real, but we never made it back to
the train station?”

He nodded. “When
the zombies overwhelmed us, I tried to flash us back to the train
station, but no, we didn’t make it. That’s when the
Daemoni grabbed us.”

“That doesn’t
mean the children aren’t dead, though.” I dropped my head
and stared at my hands in my lap. We sat on a thin mattress on the
floor in an otherwise empty room with white, sheer curtains on the
window, where gray light of an overcast day poured in. “And
it’s our fault. We took them all the way there when the train
engineer abandoned them.”

“Vanessa thinks
the Norman engineer had been under Daemoni control, somehow or
another, and was forced to take the children there. To feed them to
the zombies. We thought we were helping them.”

“The hunter
knew.”

“But
we
didn’t. How could we expect such barbarity? We can’t take
that blame, Alexis.”

I forced my lungs to
draw in a long, slow breath to settle the sobs, and then scrubbed the
tears from my face.

“We have to stop
the Daemoni. I’m failing them, Tristan. The Amadis and the
Normans.”

“We’ll stop
them,
ma lykita
. One way or another.”

I nodded, but I didn’t
see how. I’d barely survived one stupid sorceress.

“Our son was
freakin’ awesome,” I said. “If not for him and
Sasha … Owen and I probably wouldn’t have made it. He
can
freeze
stuff, Tristan. And people too. It was so crazy.”

“I think he can
do more than that, but yeah, he’s pretty awesome.”

I sighed. “It
just means he’s that much closer …” I didn’t
want to think about what the future held for Dorian. I hadn’t
abandoned my mission of breaking the curse that led all the sons to
the Daemoni. “Where were you and Vanessa? Where are the others?
Have you talked to them?”

“Vanessa and I
woke up chained up in an abandoned factory right outside of Moscow,
about seventy miles from where we found you. We broke free, figured
out where they had you—”

“How’d you
do that?”

“From the Norman
soldiers, the few minutes they were lucid in between the time we cut
out their stones to when they were forced to put them back in.”

I blew out another
frustrated breath. “That happened to us, too. One of them
refused, and the others killed him. We have to find the controllers
and remove their stones before we can do anything for the Norman
soldiers. We can’t let them kill each other like that.”

“They don’t
know what they’re doing. They didn’t know what they were
doing when they shot at you.”

“I know. Why do
you think I feel so horrible about what I did?” I’d never
be able to erase from my mind the image of those soldiers lying in
pools of blood because of me. I could try folding it up and tucking
it away, but I had a feeling memories like that didn’t like to
stay in storage. They’d haunt me forever, which I deserved.
“Did you find out where Char and everyone else are, too?”

He shook his head.
“The Normans didn’t know. Vanessa and I had to focus on
getting to you as fast as we could. We’ve been hiding out here
since with Baby Cakes until you and Scarecrow recovered. We haven’t
been able to get a hold of them and haven’t heard from them,
either. I’m hoping they’re still waiting for us in
Prague.”