Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (18 page)

A
thousand pound weight sat on my chest. At least, that’s what it
felt like, especially when I tried to breathe. I rolled to the side
on the hard ground, hoping that would help. The smell of leather with
the mouth-watering scent of mangos, papayas, lime, sage, and a hint
of man filled my nose. I tried to inhale my favorite scent in the
world, but air wheezed through my throat, making me cough, which made
my chest feel worse. Was I sick? Why wasn’t I healing? My
eyelids felt glued shut, and I had to force them to separate. They
felt like sandpaper over my eyeballs as they slowly peeled apart.

All pain was forgotten
when I saw the sight in front of me.

“Tristan!”
I tried to say with excitement, but it came out as an underwhelming
grunt.

He sat next to me,
lighting some twigs on fire from a flame cupped in his palm. He
twisted toward me and smiled. I wanted to jump up and into his arms,
but my body failed to cooperate, remaining anchored to the stone
floor with my head pillowed by his coat.

“Shh.” He
brushed his fingers across my cheek. He leaned down and kissed my
forehead. I wanted more than that, damn it. “You’re hurt,
and you’re healing very slowly. I did what I could to help,
but—”

“Bree said it
would be lasting,” I muttered as I gingerly felt my chest with
my fingertips.

My bustier had been cut
open, and a long line of scar tissue stretched from my right shoulder
to the valley between my breasts. I didn’t dare look at it—the
feeling alone told me it was raw and ugly. I did my best to close the
leather over it.

“At least you
are
healing,” Tristan said. “Not as fast as I’d like,
but you’re making progress. Here. Drink.”

He held a water bottle
to my lips, and I drank the cool liquid greedily, reveling in the
feeling as it slid down my throat and pooled in my stomach. I
couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any water. I’d
been parched on the rock island, and the heat of Hell had dehydrated
me further. I drained half the bottle before Tristan pulled it away,
my mouth following after it.

“I don’t
want you to get sick. Let that settle for a moment. I have food,
too.”

My stomach growled in
response.

“Where are we?”
I asked as I glanced around. The dim, square room, lit only by
Tristan’s fire, seemed vaguely familiar with its aged stone
walls, and its musky odor. “Amadis Island? Why aren’t we
in the mansion then?”

His face darkened, and
he looked away from me, towards the fire. I supposed that meant I
didn’t want to know about the mansion … which only made
me want to know even more.

“What’s
wrong?”

His jaw muscle
twitched, then he finally replied, “We’re safe and hidden
here in the dungeons.”

The dungeons—what
I’d called the prison cells under the council hall where they’d
kept Tristan when he’d been on trial, and where we’d
taken refuge during the bombings when the world began falling apart.

“But the council
hall was destroyed.”

“Up top, yes.
We’re completely buried here and can only flash in and out.”

“How did we get
here? Did you—”

“I woke up here,
too.”

“Ah,” I
said after a moment of thought. “Bree. She must have brought
your body here before she took me to Hell. Oh, no! Tristan—”

My jaw snapped shut.
Tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t bear to tell him … but
I had to.

“I think Satan
has Bree,” I said, and I told him the full story.

Well, sort of. I didn’t
tell him about the mishaps with flying. He’d seen the wings in
Hell, but they were hidden now, and I didn’t want to bring them
up. I’d have to deal with his reaction eventually, of course,
but I didn’t have the energy to right now. He handled weird
much better than I did—he’d grown up and lived hundreds
of years with weird—but I still didn’t know what the
wings meant about me. They were feathery, but also dark and not like
Angels’ or even Mom’s and Rina’s. I could only
assume I wasn’t good enough for their colors of light and
purity, but what else it all meant, I didn’t know.

And they didn’t
matter at the moment. Bree and the rest of the faerie folk did.

He rubbed his hand over
his face when I finished telling him what Stacey had said and what
happened with Bree. “We’ll find a way to save her. Them.
Everyone. But right now, you need to build your strength back.”

He finally gave me the
rest of the water, and then carefully lifted me and leaned me against
the wall before feeding me soup from a can.

“Where’d
you get the food and water?”

“There’s
plenty of it scattered across the island.”

“And none of it’s
contaminated?”

One corner of his mouth
lifted in a half-smile. “The Amadis know how to safeguard their
goods. You wouldn’t believe what some of the mages had
hidden—most of it useless or magically protected, and the
majority of it … bizarre. Even for us.”

I chuckled before he
fed me another spoonful. I peered at him closely.

“How are you so
okay?” I’d been a mess when I escaped Hell, unable to
tell the difference between now and then half the time. I thought my
little bit of time at Heaven’s Gates before returning to Earth
had helped—that the Angels had been holding me there for that
very reason—but Tristan hadn’t been granted that relief.

His eyes cut sideways
at me, the light of the flames flickering in them. “My physical
body was here. I felt the pain down there, but it didn’t
actually hurt me.”

“No. I mean,
you
.
Your soul. How are you doing so well after so much time down there?”

He set the can down,
dropped the spoon in it, and lifted a hand to my cheek, his eyes soft
and appraising. He brushed away the hair that was matted to my skin,
and then grasped my chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Because of you,
ma lykita
. You’re here, alive, talking to me. That alone
makes me okay. Makes everything right in my world.”

I gave him a brief
smile, but then let out a harrumph. “Everything in the world is
far from right.”

Although I wasn’t
intentionally listening to his mind, I sensed what he was about to
say—that I would make it all right—but then he changed
his mind in mid-thought.

He said instead, “I
saw Dorian through the veil, when I dove down after you.”

I opened my mouth to
yell at him for that, but he held a finger to my lips.

“I follow you, my
love. Don’t argue with me about that. Just don’t plan on
any more trips to Hell, and we’ll both be okay.”

“Never again,”
I promised.

He took my hand in
between his and folded his fingers over. His words came quietly. “So,
I saw what Dorian’s doing.”

“We need to stop
him.”

He frowned, and I hated
seeing him so sad. “If what I saw while in Hell is true, it’s
too late.”

I clapped my free hand
over my mouth and shook my head slowly. “No. It can’t be.
We can still save him.”

He placed his palm over
my heart, settling its chaotic rhythm. “We will. We’ll do
whatever we possibly can. But we do nothing until you’re strong
enough.”

With no light in the
dungeons, I didn’t know how much time passed while I
concentrated on resting and regenerating my body—a few hours,
maybe a day. My growing restlessness was a good sign I was ready, and
the dark cell was making me stir crazy. In fact, it reminded me too
much of Hell and the horrible days on the rock island. I was so tired
of being underground. Finally, Tristan let me flash outside, and I
went straight to the mansion on the other end of the island.

The light blinded me
for a moment, and then the scene that greeted me made my stomach
fall, my heart tumbling after it.

“Oh, no.”

The grand marble
mansion of the matriarchs, which had been protected by the Angels and
hadn’t been so much as scratched by the Norman bombs before,
was flattened. Decimated. A pile of stone, wood, and broken
furnishings among the surrounding sticks of dead cypress trees.
Everything was coated in the same thick, white dust as the cabin in
the woods, and all color was gone, as though the bombs had bleached
the world, washing out all the hues from the grass, the trees, the
ruined items under the marble rubble.

“H-how?” My
voice shook. “I thought … Ophelia said …”

I couldn’t form
coherent sentences, my mind too shocked as I tried to take it all in.

“Apparently, it
wasn’t entirely indestructible.”

I climbed up on a
boulder-sized chunk of stone and surveyed the debris, my eyes burning
with tears. So much history. Over two millennia of matriarchs had
lived in this mansion and led the Amadis from here. The items inside
were not only antiques amassed over recent centuries, but some of the
furniture, the tapestries, and other items—the very walls—came
from
ancient
times. A collection more valuable than those in
many museums. And now it was all nothing but rock and shards.

Jumping from stone to
stone, I tried to search for anything that might be at least somewhat
salvageable. After poking around for a while, I found the family vine
tapestry covered in dust, but still intact. It took some pushing
around of stones and debris to free it completely, and after
unsuccessfully trying to shake off the thick coating, I folded the
fabric, although I didn’t really know what I would do with it.
The lineage of the Ames matriarchs no longer mattered. There was
nobody left to care but me, so maybe I’d hang it up wherever we
settled after retrieving Dorian.

I found another
tapestry, and for some reason, I folded it, too, although I couldn’t
even tell through the dust which one it was. I placed it with the
other one. All of the beautiful knickknacks Rina had left behind in
her office were destroyed, as were Solomon’s collection of
souvenirs from his past. Just like their owners. Besides the
tapestries, the only other item I found in one piece was one of my
bustiers made with enchanted fighting leather. At least I could wear
one now that hid the ugly scar on my chest. With my back turned to
Tristan, I slid off the ruined one, unable to repair itself because
the damage had been inflicted in Hell, and pulled on the vest.

“That wasn’t
very nice,” Tristan said from behind me as I zipped up the
front. “You couldn’t let me watch?”

I ignored him,
pretending like something had caught my attention, although when I
hopped over to where I figured the Sacred Archives would be, I found
nothing. What had happened to them? Had the Angels saved all of those
books that had lined the shelves? Or were they gone forever like
apparently everything else? Did those in Heaven even care about any
of this? My theory that they didn’t only strengthened at the
sight in front of me, angering me and breaking my heart at the same
time. They hadn’t protected the mansion because it was no
longer needed. Like the rest of the island.

There was no Amadis to
occupy the village or to be ruled by a matriarch. With no matriarch,
there was no need for the mansion or the goods inside. Or,
apparently, to safeguard our history, because there was no future to
appreciate or learn from it.

“I’m sorry,
my love,” Tristan said as he reached a hand up toward me once
I’d gone back to where he stood.

I didn’t need it,
but I took it anyway before hopping down. I forced a smile.

“It’s just
stuff, right? Nothing compared to everyone who’s been lost. I
just can’t believe they tried to con me into believing there’s
anything left here to fight for.”

He bent over behind me
to pick up the tapestries, and a ripping sound tore through the dead
silence. I spun and stared at him with my mouth open, thinking it was
his pants, but when he growled loudly, I stifled the laugh. I knew
immediately something was wrong. The tone of that growl didn’t
indicate anger, but pain.

“What’s—”
I began to ask when Tristan fell to his hands and knees, and his back
arched upward and then down, like a cat stretching. The frrrrp sound
came again, and he snarled. “Tristan! What do I do?”

His muscles tensed and
coiled, and his jaw clenched. The only time I’d seen so much
pain etched into his features was when I’d hurt him. But that
had been emotional pain he’d suffered then. This was the first
time I could remember seeing him in real, physical agony.

“I … I
don’t know,” he said through his teeth before he let out
another growl. “I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s
… my back.”

He’d no more than
finished the sentence when his shirt and skin tore open further, and
two big, dark shapes sprang out of his shoulder blades.

“Oh my God!”
I squeaked as I jumped backwards and out of the way.

He remained on all
fours as they uncurled from his back, growing and stretching up
toward the sky until they reached their full height at least five
feet above him, casting a shadow on my face as I stared in awe. Dark,
silvery gray feathers that became a shiny black at the shafts glinted
in the sunlight as the wings came back down and closed in around his
torso.

He jumped to his feet,
grabbed the pieces of his ruined shirt and tore it off completely,
and then he craned his head to stare over his shoulder.

“What. The. Fuck.
Are. THOSE?” he bellowed.

Then he turned in
circles, like a puppy chasing its tail. The shock worn off, I doubled
over, cackling with laughter.

Not very nice of me, I
knew. I’d felt exactly as he had when my wings first appeared
and surely looked just as comical, if not worse. But something about
seeing my Tristan, whose heart and soul were stronger and more
righteous than almost anyone I’d ever met, with wings as dark
as mine felt like a huge weight had been lifted. I still didn’t
know what they meant about us and who or what we were, but at least
we were alike.