Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (19 page)

“Can we get the
hell out of here?” Vanessa demanded.

Still holding Dorian in
his arm, Tristan took my hand again and led me for the flash. I
didn’t argue this time. There was nothing to stay for. Nobody
to save. I followed Tristan mindlessly, and felt Owen right on my
trail, and someone after him. The others were following.

We appeared in a
forest, and I immediately fell to my knees and covered my face with
my hands. And sobbed.

“We brought those
children straight to their deaths,” I cried.

“We didn’t
know what we were doing,
ma lykita
,” Tristan tried to
soothe, rubbing his hand down my back. “And we don’t know
what happened to them.”

“We saw it!”

“I saw animal
flesh and bones,” Tristan said. “If those children had
been attacked, don’t you think we would have heard their
screams?”

I sniffled as I
considered this. Surely we would have …

“And the scene
didn’t look right for an attack,” Tristan continued. “No
blood on the train cars or trailed on the ground.”

I wiped my hands over
my cheeks. “Where did the children go then?”

He gave me a small
shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe Evgeny saved them. He claims
to protect humans, after all.”

I sucked another ragged
breath, followed by several more. We’d only been there for a
minute, at the most, but what I recalled in my mind backed up what
Tristan said.

“Okay,” I
finally agreed, relief flooding through me.

“Where is
everyone?” Owen asked.

I glanced up at the
concern in his voice. Only he, Vanessa, Tristan, and Dorian stood in
front of me. They all glanced around. I stood up and turned in a
circle, too, reaching my mind out. I sensed some signatures half a
mile away, but they were Norman and not familiar. My hand went to my
throat. My relief fled as quickly as it had come.

“Shit,” I
breathed as I sank to my butt again. “They got caught in a
trap.”

“We don’t
know that for sure,” Owen said, but anxiety came clear in his
voice. “Maybe we just got separated.”

“Is there any
water anywhere?” Dorian asked. “I’m dying of thirst
here.”

“Yeah, me, too,”
Vanessa muttered, but her thirst held a different meaning. She hadn’t
fed for days. We’d been too weak and dehydrated to feed her or
Solomon. “I can’t flash again—or do much of
anything—until I feed.”

“I think there’s
a town not too far away,” I said. “There are a bunch of
Norman mind signatures, anyway.”

“I’ll go
and see if I can grab something,” Tristan said. “Stay
here in case the others come into your range, Alexis.”

He blurred away before
we could stop him or I could even tell him to be careful. Ten minutes
later, he returned with paper sacks full of water and food. I didn’t
think I could stomach food yet after what we’d just seen, but
when it came out of the packages and the delicious smells pushed away
the disgusting ones, I couldn’t help myself. It’d been
too long since we’d had food or water. My body’s needs
overcame the images forever burned in my mind and the heavy feelings
weighing down my heart. We tried to be considerate and save some for
the others. We really did. But when they didn’t show after an
hour, we devoured it all. Then Vanessa could finally feed, too.

“I grabbed this
while I was there.” Tristan held up a Russian newspaper. He
skimmed over the front page. “Yesterday’s paper. It says
the military was coming in to decontaminate that part of the city
today.”

“Oh, really?”
Owen asked. “Then where the hell are they?”

“The planes,”
I said. “They burned the city.”

Tristan nodded. “At
least that part of it. This paper says the disease has been fully
contained to a few square miles of Moscow, and that it came from the
health department. An accident in a lab.”

“Bullshit,”
Vanessa muttered.

“Are you sure?”
Owen asked her, and she glared at him with her icy blues.

“I’ll take
Vanessa’s word over the media,” Tristan said.

“Can we get
sick?” Dorian asked, fear lacing his tone.

Vanessa shook her head.
“Supernaturals are protected. Part of his plan.”

“Except Dorian’s
not entirely changed,” I said, new panic rising. “He’s
still very human.”

“He can fly,
Alexis,” Vanessa quipped. “I’m pretty sure that
means he’s not Norman. Besides, I’d be able to smell it
in his blood. Another part of the plan.”

“What plan?”
Tristan asked.

Vanessa rose to her
feet, paced a few times, and then stopped, standing over us with her
hip jutted to the side. “One of the few I knew about. When
planning for the Daemoni to come out and take over the Normans, Lucas
wanted a way to rid the world of the weakest. The disabled. The sick
and the elderly. Some of the youth who didn’t seem ‘viable.’
They couldn’t be turned, and they couldn’t serve as food
producers, so why keep them alive? His words, not mine,” she
said quickly, holding her hands up when I lifted my brow.

“So genocide?”
Tristan asked.

“Yep,”
Vanessa replied.

“By making them
into
zombies
?” I asked with disbelief.

“Well, that’s
different. Sort of. That’s been an ongoing experiment. This was
probably a test, since it’s been isolated to one part of
Moscow, his way of killing two birds with one stone. He probably does
have the disease completely contained. For now. He wouldn’t
want it to get out of control and ruin his people’s food
sources, now would he?”

“Says here there
were outbreaks in major cities in the Middle East and Asia,”
Tristan said as his eyes skimmed over the front-page articles.

“Doesn’t
mean it’s not contained,” Vanessa said. “More
purposeful releases. More tests.”

Tristan read on. “All
contained. All cities decontaminated. No certain numbers of deaths,
but an estimated quarter-million.”

Owen whistled lowly.
“Anything else happen while we were out of touch with the rest
of the world?”

Tristan turned the page
and scanned. “Looks like World War III. Several countries have
fired on others. Those who haven’t are maneuvering into place.”
He turned another page. “The largest tsunami ever recorded hit
the coast of India, with an estimated half-million killed or
missing.”

“Chandra’s
in India,” I whispered. “I hope she and our people are
okay.”

Tristan continued with
the laundry list of horrors. “The worst snowstorms on record
across the northern hemisphere for the month of October. Riots.
Record number of murders, including assassinations of high-ranking
politicians throughout the world.” He flipped the page again.
“Pretty much every economy in existence is tanking or already
crashed. In short, the world’s basically gone to hell.”

“Oh my God,”
I breathed. “All in a week? All works of the Daemoni?”

“Most of it,”
Vanessa said. “The so-called natural disasters, for sure. But
the Normans are pretty damn good at wreaking their own havoc.”

I couldn’t argue
with her there.

“I’m sure
they’re having plenty of help,” Owen said.

“What about
Daemoni attacks?” I asked.

Tristan skimmed over
more pages. “There have been some, but they’re calling
them Amadis, or simply supernatural, attacks.”

I groaned and massaged
my temples with my forefingers. “So according to the Normans,
it’s us versus them. How does that help Lucas and the Daemoni
in taking over the world? How does it make a name for them if all
supernaturals are bad?”

“He has to cut
down the Norman population before he can come in and save the day,”
Tristan said.

“The whole reason
for World War III, tsunamis, and zombie diseases,” Vanessa
added. “And if the Amadis are decimated in the meantime, all
the better for him.”

“So then he’ll
come forward and say something about how some supernaturals are good
for mankind—
his
supernaturals,” I assumed.

“Maybe at first,”
Vanessa said. “But he’s already pulling a Hitler by
charming everyone, so when the time comes, he’ll simply take
over and let his creatures rule with fear. That will be his way of
saving
humans from all the hell they’ve been through.”

Owen rubbed his chin
and squinted his sapphire eyes. “So right now they’re
just making sure the Norman numbers are more manageable.”

“Exactly,”
Vanessa said.

A frustrated growl
rumbled in my chest, and I rose to my feet. “Well then, time to
get off our asses and do something about it.” I checked one
more time for familiar mind signatures and blew out a sad breath.
“They’re not coming.”

Owen stood, too. “Then
it looks like we’re going to Prague.”

“And if they
don’t show up? What if they’re locked up here?”

“Then we’ll
come back for them,” Owen snapped.

I threw my hands in the
air in surrender. “Okay. Sheesh. So how are we getting to
Prague?”

“Good question,”
Tristan said, and when that phrase came from him, knower of best
solutions, it was extra depressing.

“We may as well
start in that town,” Tristan said. “There’s a
coffee shop where we can charge our phones and get back in touch with
the rest of the world. The Amadis might have someone nearby who can
help us.”

“Except they’re
not supposed to,” I reminded him as we set off through the
forest in the direction of the small town Tristan had been to
earlier. “They’re not supposed to have anything to do
with us.”

“We just need to
be smart about it.” Tristan took my hand. “Trust me, my
love. We’ll get out of here and join the war as soon as I can
possibly make it happen. That’s how much I love you. Just keep
your head down so nobody recognizes you.”

I did just that,
letting my hair down to curtain my face, as we walked into town and
to the small coffee shop on the main, gravel road. No cars crunched
over the snow or sat parked on the sides of the street, and the rest
of the town seemed quiet, so the size of the small crowd inside the
dingy little café surprised me. All men with dark hair and
bearded faces wearing plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots
that left clumps of slush and dirt all over the linoleum floor. They
talked to each other while gesturing animatedly at the newspapers in
front of them on the vinyl-laminate tables. The walls were a light
blue that might have been nice many years ago, but was now speckled
with grease stains. Although the sounds of cooking filtered forward
from the kitchen, no delicious smells made my mouth water—whatever
they cooked back there smelled like dirt and I was glad Tristan had
already brought us snacks. Not that we had any Russian Rubles to buy
anything.

We sat in the only
available booth, and thankfully, nobody paid us much attention, not
even a waitress to insist we buy coffee if we wanted to use the
table. We took turns charging our phones in the single outlet by our
table, and monitoring the web for more news. A bogus story had gone
global a week ago, the morning after we’d stopped in Italy
before we’d been rerouted to Hades, saying we’d attacked
innocent civilians in the Rome suburbs.

“Besides this,
there’s nothing about us specifically,” I said. “We’re
the top names on the list of supernatural terrorists, but nothing
here. Why wouldn’t Lucas fabricate more stories about us to
keep the deceit going?”

“Because if
someone spotted us on the other side of the world, he’d be
caught in a lie.” Tristan swiped through some screens on his
phone. “The media would be anyway, meaning he’d have to
fix the problem.”

“I’m sure
he could concoct some evil story to explain it away,” I
muttered.

“Yeah, but why
risk it? Lies are more believable when they have some basis of
truth.”

I thought about the
stories Lucas had delivered about us so far, and indeed, each one was
grounded in some basis of truth about Tristan and me. Leaders of a
secret faction of supernaturals? Check. Faking our own deaths? Check.
Being in Istanbul and setting fire to a home? Check. Fighting in
Rome? Check. To add insult to injury, every truth he used to twist
the story around were choices
we’d
made, either because
of who we were or because of what he’d done, making the lies
all the more infuriating.

And showing once again
that Lucas was a diabolical genius intent on tormenting me …
and humanity. How would I ever measure up to that?

“Well, at least
this means Lucas must have lost track of us after we ran from Hades,”
Owen said.

I nodded. “Yeah,
there’s that. He doesn’t know where we are right now, so
we can get back on track for our plan. So how do we get to Prague?”

Nobody answered me as
they stared at their phone screens. Dorian obviously played a game,
but I hoped the rest searched for solutions.

“I just linked
through to check with the council members,” Tristan said.
“They’d been concerned about our lack of contact and are
glad to know we’re okay. I guess Galina had tried to warn us
about Moscow, and Minh said she’s been dealing with the
necromancy in Shanghai. No word from Chandra, who’d been
visiting our colony in Mumbai, where the tsunami hit.”

Tears pricked at the
back of my eyes as Tristan scrolled down through the highly encrypted
forum—the best way we could keep in touch with my leaders out
in the field without anyone knowing.

“They’re
proceeding as best as they can with keeping Daemoni damage to a
minimum in their regions, but they’re struggling with the
Normans. Every region is reporting outbreaks of war or preparations
for it. Borders are being tightened, and airports, highways, and
pretty much every other source of transportation has been restricted
or closed completely. No fly zones have expanded almost everywhere.”
He paused in his scrolling to read something more closely. “Looks
like some of our people have found the super-sized Normans in their
regions, but nobody knows where their controllers are. They’re
keeping a close eye on the battalions.”