Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (17 page)

After a few hours on
the hard, wooden floor with Tristan’s arm as a pillow, my body
felt as regenerated as it would get. I could hardly sleep in the
lush, comfy bed back at the mansion, so enjoying much shut-eye here
was out of the question. As soon as I sat up, Tristan did, too. He
apparently couldn’t sleep, either. We snuck outside, so we
wouldn’t disturb the others. Another few inches of snow had
fallen, and the wind blew the frozen stuff into my face.

“Did you scope
the town out?” Tristan asked Vanessa and Solomon once we
stepped off the front porch. He spoke quietly, barely more than a
whisper, although the vampires stood thirty yards away, in opposite
directions. Neither turned toward us, but kept their alert gazes
outward, surveying the fields and the town.

“Couldn’t
leave you and Alexis without a watch guard,” Vanessa said.

“There’s a
shield over the whole cabin,” I reminded them.

“And we’ve
already seen more than once that a sorcerer can break Owen’s
shields,” Solomon responded. “We’re barely more
than fifty miles from a decent-sized town in Russia and still
uncomfortably close to Hades. The possibility for such a sorcerer
being nearby is quite great.”

“Go check it
out,” Tristan said. “Alexis and I will keep guard.”

Solomon let out a
displeased grunt before they both blurred out of sight.

“What does he
think will happen in the short time they’ll be gone?” I
asked rhetorically.

Less than a minute
later, he and Vanessa returned.

“A lot can happen
in the snap of a finger.” Solomon clicked his finger and thumb
together.

As if in response,
gunfire ripped through the silent night. The tat-tat-tat-tat of an
automatic weapon. Visions of my mom’s body jerking with each
hit tried to obliterate the snowy scene in front of me. I might have
called out her name, but the memory disappeared when someone slammed
me to the ground, driving my face into the snow.

“See?”
Solomon hissed from above me.

I could barely move
enough under his boulder-like weight to twist my head so I could
breathe and see. Vanessa had already crossed the field and attacked
the gunman, knocking the gun away, but he fought her off expertly.
Another man joined the fight, and Tristan blurred over and paralyzed
them both. He swept his hand out, and the two men flew closer to
Solomon and me, and Tristan and Vanessa appeared right behind them.

“Solomon?”
the one on our right asked, his voice thick with a Russian accent.

“Evgeny?”
Solomon responded as he slowly moved to his feet, allowing me up,
too.

Both Norman men were
dressed for the weather in thick snow pants and billowy, grungy
coats. Dark, bushy beards covered their faces. Solomon strode over to
them, and they exchanged some kind of familiar but hesitant greeting,
a slew of Russian words running between them.

My weird mind had a way
of translating people’s thoughts easily, probably because
people didn’t really think in words. At least, not words by
themselves, and definitely not coherent sentences. Their thoughts
came as … well,
thoughts
. With images, feelings,
sometimes all the senses kind of rolled together into one. My brain
morphed those many layered thoughts into my own words, but unless
someone mind-talked to me, that’s not really how I received the
messages. So I could interpret their thoughts enough to understand,
even when any words were in foreign languages. Translating actual
vocalization in a tongue I wasn’t quite familiar with, like
Russian, didn’t come so easily.

Tristan appeared by my
side and paraphrased their conversation.

“They go back a
few years,” he whispered. “Evgeny had been a student
protesting in Moscow when Solomon was there to help bring the iron
wall down.”

“Really?” I
asked with surprise. “Solomon was involved with defeating
communism?”

“Apparently. He’d
served as Rina’s foreign relations diplomat for quite some
time, so it makes sense.” He paused as he listened to the
conversation, and then his head tilted and his brows pushed together.

“What’s
wrong? Tristan?”

He didn’t answer
me, but strode away, over to Solomon and the strange men. He spat
Russian words out angrily, and Solomon’s voice grew harsh, too.

“
They’re
saying they’re hunters
,” Vanessa said. I glanced at
her, not understanding. So what if they were hunters? “
Supernatural
hunters.
”

My brow shot up with
surprise.

“
Yeah,
”
she confirmed. “
That Evgeny dude is saying he found out we
existed years ago, and he’s been hunting ever since. Finding
vampires and Weres who attack humans and killing them. They’re
not the only ones. He says there are hunters throughout the world.
Now these two want to kill us. Tristan and Solomon are trying to
convince them that we’re the good guys. It’s not going so
well.
”

We need to get out
of here.

She gave me a slight
nod, then blurred out of sight. She’d gone inside, silently
waking everyone up and evacuating our group out the back of the
cabin. All of them except Owen, who joined me in front of the cabin,
made their way into town. I mentally followed them, and when they
stopped, I glanced through Vanessa’s eyes at a metal warehouse
with a junk pile outside of it, including a bunch of old, broken down
snowmobiles half-buried in snow. Charlotte and Blossom waved their
hands over them, and three lifted away from the white blanket and
their engines started up.

Owen threw a shield and
cloak over me.

We’re good to
go
, I called out to Tristan as we ran toward the others.

Not five seconds after
Tristan’s paralyzing power lifted from the hunters, more
gunfire broke out, blowing snow at our legs as the bullets missed.
Some kind of knife whizzed through the air not too far from Solomon’s
ear. As fast and as good as these hunters seemed to be, I had to
wonder if they were entirely Norman. Could they have been two of
Lucas’s super-Normans? They hadn’t had that glassy-eyed
look the soldiers had had that night when Lucas took over their
minds.

Owen, help Dorian
,
I ordered as we approached the junkyard and I saw Dorian climbing
onto a snowmobile by himself. The warlock disappeared from my side
and hopped onto the front of the two-seater before Dorian could scoot
up.

Charlotte and Sheree
already sat on another of the running snowmobiles, and Blossom and
Jax waited on the third. They took off, headed for the small city in
the distance, and the rest of us blurred after them. We dropped the
snowmobiles near the train station and snuck through a hole in the
fence that surrounded the train yard.

“How do we know
which one to get on?” Dorian asked quietly as we sidled along
parked trains, crossing over when possible to other tracks.

“The first one
that starts moving toward the west,” Tristan said.

“Like the one
leaving the station this very second?” Vanessa pointed to a
cargo train about two hundred yards ahead of us, pulling away from
the loading platforms.

“If we can make
it,” Tristan said. “Is everyone good for one last run?”

We didn’t have
time to debate. For all we knew, it could have been the last train of
the night, and we could be waiting for hours for another one to head
west. Sitting still in one place was dangerous, especially this place
so close to Hades. So Char and Owen zapped some energy into those who
needed it, and we all took off in a sprint. Tristan reached a car
with an open door before the rest of us and jumped up, grabbing onto
the door handle to swing his body in. Then he helped the others who
needed it. If any Normans had seen Dorian make the jump, they
probably would have claimed he flew. Luckily, no Normans had seen it.

The train car was empty
and loud, echoing the clanging metal of wheels on the tracks below.
Tristan slammed the door shut, enclosing us in a pitch black so dark,
even my excellent vision could barely see through it. He, Dorian, and
I huddled together in a corner. Sasha grew to the size of a pony and
curled in front of us, providing extra warmth. Blossom cuddled
between her and Jax. The others found places, too, and finally, my
team could truly rest.

At least until we
pulled into a station and our car didn’t move for several
hours. We’d stopped at other stations along the way, and the
sounds of Normans working outside hadn’t bothered us before,
but after listening to the thoughts of the ones nearby now, I told
the others we had to get out of there. They’d be loading up the
five empty cars, including ours.

The dark of night
surrounded us when we slid out, and we had no idea where we’d
arrived except in a big depot somewhere between Vorkuta and Moscow.
We weren’t even positive how many days we’d been
traveling since daylight was so short and we’d only seen what
little had leaked through the cracks in the door. Our phones had all
died a while ago, and I’d yet to figure out how to charge them
without destroying them. Our guess had been two days had passed, at
least, but a few of us thought three.

Tristan led us away
from the workers to a tight alley between train tracks.

“We just need to
keep heading west,” he said. “Straight west, northwest,
southwest … it doesn’t matter. Let’s find another
train.”

We didn’t have to
wait long. After identifying the Norman who served as supervisor, I
followed his thoughts until he revealed what we sought. There were no
empty cars on this train, so we climbed into one stacked with boxes,
but with just enough room to fit us all.

“We must be
getting close to Moscow, based on the load,” Solomon said while
we waited for the train to leave. “Only another day or two.”

“I’m
hungry,” Dorian said, not as a whine but as a statement of
fact, punctuated by a growl from his stomach. We’d eaten all of
the food we’d brought, and we were all starving, even the
vampires. The mages couldn’t feed them because their own
energies were sapped.

Sheree sniffed the air.
Vanessa cocked her head and sniffed, too, then nodded.

“Food two cars
up,” Sheree said. “Doesn’t smell like American
food, but it’s edible.”

Tristan edged the door
open and peeked out, looked both ways, and then over his shoulder at
us. “Back in a minute.”

A few minutes
later—during which I couldn’t breathe out of fear he’d
be caught—he returned with his arms full of canned goods. Owen
and Charlotte used magic to open what we discovered to be some of the
nastiest meat I’d ever tasted. The picture on the cans made
them look like Vienna sausages, but they tasted like—

“These taste like
ass.” Dorian made a face as he chewed the rubbery pieces.

“And smell like
farts,” Owen added, and I couldn’t argue.

The gross factor was so
high, it made it difficult to swallow even the bare minimum to supply
us with energy. After the train had been moving for several minutes,
Tristan cracked the door open and threw all the cans outside. We
drained the last of the bottled water we had brought, trying to wash
the taste out of our mouths.

“Doesn’t
Moscow have McDonald’s?” Dorian asked.

“They do,”
Owen said, “and we’re definitely making a stop.”

“If it’s
safe,” Tristan warned.

“We’ll make
it safe,” Owen said. “Ever fought a starving bear?
That’ll be Dorian and me by the time we get there.”

We talked about all the
food we wanted to eat when we finally reached familiar choices,
making ourselves even hungrier, but also distracting our minds from
the long, uncomfortable trip. The distraction only lasted for so
long, though. As each hour and then each day passed, we grew
hungrier, thirstier, and grumpier. And I grew more pissed off at the
Normans for their stupid traps and their refusal to trust us. We
could have been fighting off the Daemoni by now, protecting their
human butts, instead of taking all of this time just to travel
halfway across Russia. Of course, the Daemoni put us in the middle of
nowhere to start with, but I expected them to be conniving assholes.
Not the Normans. By the time we reached Moscow an entire week since
leaving the Amadis Island, I half-wondered why we should even fight
for the Normans who’d been so easily swayed by evil.

When we reached the
outskirts of the city, though, I knew we had no choice. Somebody had
to.

“What’s
that smell?” Dorian asked, gagging worse than he had with the
ass-meat. He covered his nose and mouth with his hand, trying to hold
back vomit. I couldn’t blame him. The horrific stench made my
own stomach lurch, raising bile into the back of my throat.

“That, child, is
the smell of rotting human flesh,” Solomon answered.

When the train began to
slow, we stood and gathered around the door, waiting for a moment to
bail before we pulled into what we expected to be a large and crowded
train station. Tristan held the door open just enough for us to watch
the land pass through a small crack. We’d barely rolled into
the suburbs when the metal wheels ground against the tracks, slowing
the train to a screeching halt.

“Why did we
stop?” Dorian asked. “We’re not at a station.”

Tristan shook his head.
“Can you tell what’s going on, Alexis?”

I searched for mind
signatures, and only found one adult Norman. “A guy’s
disconnecting part of the train two cars down.”

A few seconds later, as
I continued searching the area, a man in white protective gear ran
toward our car, and we all jerked back, out of sight. He continued on
past us.

“Something’s
wrong,” Sheree murmured.

“As long as they
don’t suspect us, I’m sure it’s fine,” Char
said.