Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (44 page)

With Jeana’s body
trembling under mine, but her eyes hard as steel, I held my palm over
the crimson engraving and shoved Amadis power through the open wound.
Along with it, I used my other hand to push the full strength of my
electrical energy into her, charging her higher than her body could
handle. Dark purple blotches bloomed over her skin and smoke rose,
accompanied by the acrid odor of burning hair and flesh. Merrick’s
cries fell silent. Jeana’s eyes widened at the sight of his
dead body that fell next to her and fear overcame her mind. Along
with revenge.

You wish
, I
thought.
But you won’t have that chance.

At the same moment I
aimed my dagger at her heart, her hand twitched, then lifted against
Tristan’s hold on her. She flipped it up, exposing her palm to
me. If she was asking for help or showing surrender, it was too
little too late. I felt not one smidgen of sincere hope for her soul.
I plunged my blade into her, and simultaneously, her fingers folded
and squeezed into a tight fist.

I keeled over in pain.

It felt as though her
hand had been in my very uterus when she squeezed it. My belly
tightened and cramped, sending waves of agony throughout my torso and
legs. At the same time, the ice pick slammed into my mind again, so
hard I saw lights flashing before my eyes. But with gasping breaths,
I pushed beyond the pain and focused, collecting all of my Amadis
power into a ball and ramming it into her until the life left her
eyes.

The pain in my belly
lessened, but I instinctively pressed my hand against it as though I
could hold it together and keep everything inside, while I freed my
dagger from Jeana’s corpse and stumbled for the closest
Summoned son.

“We have to get
the stones out,” I said through a clenched jaw.

My whole lower body
ached and burned as I dropped to the floor and dug my knife into the
man’s chest, searching for the stone. The tip of the blade
found the solid piece, and I twisted it out. He remained unconscious
as his skin healed up, but his heart held a steady rhythm in his
chest, so I crawled over to the next man. Vanessa, Owen, and Tristan
each went to work. By the time I reached my sixth or seventh one, the
others began to stir. I watched this one’s face as I popped the
stone out, finding it even more familiar than the others. My mind
flashed back to Tristan’s house in Cape Heron, darkened because
of the hurricane blowing outside.

“Edmund,” I
whispered.

His eyes flew open,
glowing bright red. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Faster than I could
react, his hands clamped around my neck and squeezed. I swung my
fists at him, slicing his arms and chest more than once with the
silver blade, but he barely reacted. He began to rise from the floor,
lifting me by the throat as I choked, trying to grab air. A streak of
someone blurred at us, whether Tristan or Vanessa I didn’t
know, and Edmund dropped to the floor again, bringing me down with
him. I crashed to my knees while slamming Amadis power into him until
he fell unconscious.

Tristan grabbed me by
the waist and lifted me to my feet. I wobbled at first, my body still
aching from whatever Jeana had done to me in her final seconds, and I
glanced around the room. All of the controllers had been freed, many
of them waking and looking around with confusion in their eyes. Some
sprang to their feet right away, crouching into fighting stances.

“Amadis,”
one man hissed.

“Do you want to
join us?” I asked, my voice heavy yet hopeful.

He laughed maniacally.
“Never! But it wouldn’t matter if I did. We can’t
convert.”

He sprang into the air
and flew straight toward me. Tristan waved his hand, and he soared
across the room and smashed into the tower of stacking chairs. Others
attacked, too, but they moved slowly, having spent too much time
under Lucas’s control. An arm to the throat by Vanessa, an easy
blocking spell by Owen, or a wave of Tristan’s hand stopped
every single one. Sasha growled and snapped at them, holding them
off. I could barely stand there, hunched over, my arms crossed over
my belly as wetness seeped under my leather pants.

One of the screens on
the wall caught my attention, distracting me from thoughts I didn’t
want to explore yet anyway. The Norman super-soldiers simply stood on
their sides of the monitors, their guns hanging from their hands at
their sides. Chandra slowly approached them, and they didn’t
react, but remained still like powered-down robots. Others followed
behind her. She nodded, and then began to remove one of the soldier’s
stones, and other Amadis there did the same. The scene played out
similarly on all of the screens, some of the Normans joining in to
cut the stones out.

“We did it,”
I murmured, trying to grasp onto the hope of what this meant.

Realizing they couldn’t
fight us—and most looking like they didn’t even want
to—the Summoned and their offspring in the room ran out of the
door and up the stairs. All except those who still remained
unconscious.

“Wait!” I
yelled at the last one to leave. “Let us help you!”

He stopped in the
doorway and looked over his shoulder. “Impossible.”

With that one word, he
disappeared.

“At least they’re
free,” Tristan murmured from my side.

“Now we just need
to break the curse and get them back,” I said, still clutching
at my abdomen as I turned toward him, Owen, and Vanessa. Their eyes
filled with worry when they looked at me. I forced myself to ignore
the pain and straighten up. We didn’t have time for them to
fawn over whatever was wrong with me.

“Right now, we
need to get our butts to the camp,” I said. “Get those
Normans to A.K.’s Angels before the Daemoni beat us to them.”

“And before
midnight,” Vanessa reminded us.

“Do you have
enough strength to make a portal?” Tristan asked Owen.

The warlock nodded and
went to work creating an opening.

“What about
them?” I asked, indicating the few remaining Summoned,
including Edmund.

“If they want to
convert, they’ll find us.” Tristan took my hand and led
me to the portal.

Once we passed through,
though, we didn’t arrive in front of the Norman camp we had
seen from the campus clock tower. Rather, we stood on an expanse of
marble, facing a light-colored building with a row of arched windows
and a series of pillars above them. I craned my neck and stared up at
the tall dome of the United States Capitol building, not lit up as it
should have been, but a light gray against the dark of night.

“What are we
doing here?” Tristan demanded.

Owen groaned. “We
were rerouted.”

“And I don’t
think we’re getting out of here,” Vanessa muttered as she
turned around.

My telepathy had
disappeared again, and I only sensed the Daemoni behind me by the
evil in the air and the stench hitting my nose. Slowly, I turned
around, hoping against all odds to find that the Summoned had
reconsidered. I even held a little hope that they’d come back
to tell us how to break the curse because they wanted to join us. But
that wasn’t who I found standing on the railing of the balcony
against the backdrop of the broken Washington Monument. What had felt
like enough evil belonging to a horde of Daemoni waved off of a
single man in an Armani suit.

Lucas.

“Sasha, hide!”
I hissed before Lucas made a move for her. She didn’t shrink
and hide in my coat, but jumped into the air and flew away.
Unfortunately, I knew she hadn’t gone far—she’d
wait and watch until she was needed.

I grabbed Tristan’s
hand, using him for strength as I pulled up to my full height next to
him, both of us standing with our feet shoulder-width apart and our
shoulders squared. Vanessa stepped up to stand next to me, Owen took
his place on Tristan’s other side, and we faced the man who, in
some way or another, had played a role in creating each one of us.
Even Owen, whose father had been possessed by Kali, the sorceress who
at once had been Lucas’s pet, acting on his orders, while also
trying to overpower him.

“I seem to
remember we already discussed how I feel about others taking what
belongs to me,” Lucas said, his icy voice matching his cold
blue eyes as he stood perfectly balanced on the marble rail. To each
side, a broad staircase descended to street level and the Mall below
Capitol Hill. The moon shone down on the reflecting pool far behind
him that stretched toward the Washington Monument, damaged buildings
of the Smithsonian museums lining each side.

My sperm donor and my
enemy crossed his arms over his chest. One hand twisted and tugged at
his snow-white goatee as he studied us. His gaze barely stopped on
Vanessa or Owen, but it lingered for a long moment on Tristan, and
the blue of his eyes turned a bright red. When they fell on our
clasped hands, his nostrils flared, then his gaze traveled up to me.
I wanted to recoil, to run away, to escape the evil, murderous look
in his eyes. The blackness in him felt so much stronger than it had
the last time I’d seen him.

“You’ve
taken my number-one warrior,” he said with a glance at Tristan,
and then his eyes slid to Vanessa. “And my daughter, too,
although you can have that worthless cunt. And now you’ve taken
my soldiers and my favorite weapon against the Normans.” His
eyes traveled upward and glanced around, likely searching for Sasha,
knowing she wouldn’t have gone far. His gaze came back to me,
glowing with a mix of anger and excitement. “I guess my
payment’s coming soon, though, in the form of your son.”

Tristan growled and
lifted his hand. A flame flew out of his palm at Lucas. Lucas’s
fingers barely twitched, and Tristan’s hand yanked out of mine
as he flew backwards. He crashed into the marble wall of the building
behind us with a loud crack and dropped to the ground. Vanessa and I
ran to his side while Owen shot a spell at Lucas, but again, he
easily deflected it, the green light shattering a window to our left.
Tristan seemed to be okay, although angrier now as he rose to his
feet, shaking off our offers to help.

“He’s
gained strength,” Vanessa murmured under her breath as we
followed Tristan back to Owen’s side.

Lucas laughed. “That
I have! You’re actually right for once, but even a monkey
guesses the correct answer once in a while. Now that evil outweighs
the little bit of good that remains in the world, the Ancients have
grown stronger, and they’ve passed that power onto me,
preparing me. Want to see?”

Not waiting for our
answer, he lifted his hand above his hand and flicked his wrist as
though tossing a ball into the air. A small explosion sounded behind
us. We automatically looked over our shoulders. The top of the
Capitol, including part of the dome, was gone, looking as though a
can opener had peeled it apart. Flames licked at the jagged edges.
Lucas gave us a wicked grin when we turned our attention back to him.

“But fear not,”
he said. “I don’t want to fight you right now. I don’t
want to annihilate you yet. I don’t really need those soldiers
or the Summoned sons anyway. Not anymore. The apocalypse is here, and
you, darling Alexis, weren’t able to stop it. And now you’re
out of time.”

He wiggled his fingers,
and four figures, two on each staircase, blurred up toward us, then
stopped at the landing. They each turned toward Lucas and dropped to
a knee, their heads bowed. When they rose to their feet, they
remained planted at the tops of the marble stairs, guarding them, as
though to prevent us from escaping. Edmund and Rene on one side, and
Victor and Cruz on the other.

Vanessa made a noise in
her throat when she saw her brother—
our
brother—and
her body coiled. Owen grabbed her arm and took her hand, stilling
her.

“It’s not
over yet,” I said, and while Lucas was distracted with Owen’s
gesture toward Vanessa, I shot a powered-up jolt of electricity at
him.

Edmund twitched, as if
to attack, but Lucas stopped him, shrugging off my power and
returning his gaze to me. The Summoned son, the vampire, and the two
were-cats didn’t worry me. The evil man before us did, though.
If only my stupid mind worked right, I could possibly pull his plans
out of his head. Instead, I could only keep him talking, hoping that
in the meantime, Tristan formulated our method of escape. Or better
yet, method of attack. It would be awesome to put this whole thing to
an end tonight.

“Even if it is
the
apocalypse,” I continued, “we have a few years
to stop you. Seven, according to the Bible.”

“Don’t
believe everything you read,” Lucas said with another chuckle.
“Besides, do you even know how long this has been in motion,
young Alexis? Centuries, if you really think about it. I brought on
the Four Horsemen
years
ago. Conquest? My Daemoni army has
been walking the world for millennium, conquering the feeble Normans,
especially over the last several years. War? Well, when has there not
been war? Famine? The wealthy have been oppressing the poor forever,
but how much more so in recent times? Even the ignorant humans talk
about how the rich get richer while the poor starve at their feet.
And now we have Death. Plenty of it, wouldn’t you say? At least
a quarter of the human population, just as the Bible says. That part
is true. So now it’s time for the final battle. Armageddon.
It’s just a matter of me opening the veil and letting Satan and
his Demons in. I’m ready for him! And then I’ll watch you
bow down to me, like all of my followers.”

“Never,” I
spat, and I launched a stream of Amadis power at him this time. He
easily diffused it, dousing it with a wave of evil that made my skin
crawl.

“Oh, you will,”
he said as though it were a promise. “The veil is at its
thinnest tonight, making it easy to rip a few tears into it. Enough
to let the Demons come through first and possess what the stupid
Normans call zombies.” He flicked his hand backwards to
indicate the walking dead on the Mall. “They’re simply
bodies we’ve been keeping functional until the spirits of my
lord can come and save this world from itself. Humans are so eager to
destroy their home and themselves. He will be a good king over them.
The
true
god who will empower them and give them everything
their hearts desire. So I will drop the veil for him, and he will
come and take me.” His voice rose, booming with excitement.
“And
you
two will watch, and you
will
bow down to
me. That’s the
only
reason I’m keeping you alive
this very moment. Because I’ve been waiting for this day
forever.”