Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (2 page)

“Alexis, my love,
don’t leave me.” My words morphed into some kind of wail
mixed with a howl. A sound of desperation that made me recoil, but I
couldn’t help it. I couldn’t quell it. The pain, the
anger, the overwhelming grief! Emotions that were too violent to be
held inside. They erupted in shouts and screams and sobs. But still,
the agony remained, ripping me apart from the inside.

When I could no longer
muster the energy to yell, I silently rocked her in my arms as I
recalled our lives together. The first time I’d seen her as an
adult—young, barely eighteen and still very human, but
nonetheless the most beautiful sight I’d known in my many
years. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was about her, but
she’d captured me and enraptured me from the moment I set eyes
on her at this very monument. Her laugh had been medicine for my
damaged heart. Her love a salve for my wrecked soul.

And when I thought I
couldn’t possibly hold more love in my heart, I met our son for
the first time. I’d never imagined I could produce such beauty,
but of course, it had come from her. With the many hardships our poor
child had suffered, he’d grown into a fine young man. But now …
Although I’d been expecting this since the day I learned of his
birth, a father could never be prepared to lose his son. I could only
hope, for his soul’s sake, he’d perished in the bombs
before he ever reached the Daemoni.

They were both gone. I
was left alone. With nothing left to live for.

I pressed my lips into
Alexis’s hair and murmured in her ear, praying she heard me. Or
that
someone
heard me. “Lexi,
ma lykita
, I need
you. Don’t leave me here alone. Come back to me, my love.
Please come back.”

I closed my eyes
against the brightening sky of morning and slumped backward against a
large chunk of marble with my wife still in my arms, her head pressed
against my chest as though she were only sleeping. I wanted to sleep
with her. The night of fighting the dark magic of the sorcerers and
Lucas, and then the Demons that had kept coming, combined with more
grief than any one man should have to bear, drained me.

I’d lost my son.
I’d lost my wife and our unborn child. The world seemed to have
lost anything still good in it.

Take me, too.

“Is that what you
really want? Would you come back home if that’s where she is?”
The deep, Otherworldly voice spoke the old language of the Daemoni
Ancients as evil blanketed over me. I peeled one eye open. An
orangish-yellow Demon balanced on the edge of a slab of marble a few
feet away. I was too exhausted to fight. Too drained to give a shit
anymore. “Shall I find her for you?”

My eyes fell closed
again. I tightened my hold on Alexis’s small body. The word
came out as a whisper. “Yes.”

The Demon’s evil
presence disappeared. As the sun rose higher, the odor of burning
ozone filled the air. A distant part of my brain urged me to get up,
to find shelter from the fallout that would likely blow this way from
the mushroom clouds we’d seen near Baltimore and Richmond.
Hell, Lucas probably planned a direct hit here in Washington, D.C.,
at any moment. If I knew him at all, which I did too well, he
certainly had. But I couldn’t bring myself to care. I slipped
off into a doze.

“You will follow
her where she goes?” The Demon’s voice startled me
partially awake.

I sighed. It didn’t
need me to answer. As a spirit, even an evil one, it already knew.

“Even into the
dark?”

Again, it required no
verbal reply. But I knew she wasn’t there. Not my Alexis. She’d
be in Heaven with the rest of the Amadis matriarchs.

“Come with me and
make your choice.”

And I went with the
Demon.

The most
important yet surreal question I’d ever asked hung in the air,
suspended by the multitude of emotions surrounding it, the last word
echoing around me:
Dead … dead … dead ….
The
only response came from my soul mate’s wails, calling like a
desperate love song, piercing the veil that separated the Earthly
realm from the Otherworld.

That separated me from
him.

My mind tried and
failed to wrap itself around this fact, and my soul refused to
believe it. I watched Tristan through the veil as his sobs and my
question swirled together blocking out all else. The warmth of the
tears on my cheeks wasn’t enough to chase away the chill
traveling down my spine.

He held my limp body in
his lap, my face pressed into his chest. My hair flowed over his
muscular arms that appeared unusually tan compared to the white of my
skin. He rocked me back and forth, sobbing my name.

“Alexis, my love.
Please
, God, don’t take her. Please make her okay.”

I wanted so badly to
answer him.

“I’m right
here, Tristan,” I called back to him, but, of course, he
couldn’t hear me.

I tried pushing my way
to him, not for the first time, but the veil held me back, an
invisible curtain that may as well have been a wall as thick as the
universe. I could see and hear through it, as clearly as though I
stood right before him, but in truth, my love, my soul mate, my other
half was in an entirely different dimension.

How had this happened?
How could I change it?

My hand pressed to the
veil and tears streamed down my cheeks as I gazed out to a world that
I was no longer a part of. I should have been relieved for my part to
be over, especially with everything wrong in the picture before me.

Tristan sat among the
boulder-sized chunks of white marble he’d thrown off of me, his
legs spread out before him in a pool of blood. My blood, I assumed.
Or, more accurately, the blood of our unborn child. The ruins of the
Jefferson Memorial surrounded him, nothing more than a couple of
broken pillars rising from a pile of rubble. We’d gone there to
save our son and my uncle when Hell entered the Earthly realm in the
form of Demons, nuclear bombs, and fire.

Across the Tidal Basin
that looked like black ink, as if refusing to reflect the lightening
sky, the Washington Monument resembled a broken toothpick. The once
pyramid-shaped top had been cleaved off, leaving blackened, jagged
edges reaching for the sky. Fire and ice shot through the air and
blasted into the ground. Sparks trailed the fireballs and fell in an
orange and yellow rain that ignited whatever they landed on. Fire
blossomed everywhere and spread instantly, easily traveling through
the trees and grass that had been dried out from the autumn weather,
consuming everything in its path as it went. The ice balls shattered
into shards on impact, and winged creatures exploded out of them.

The colors of the
beings’ mottled skin seemed to change as they moved, like a
separate creature rippling over their somewhat human-like bodies.
They had one head, though horns sprouted from it, some with two and
some with many. Their thickly muscled torsos and powerful limbs—two
arms and two legs—would make a body-builder weep. They had
claws for hands and hooves for feet, a long tail with a barbed tip,
and leathery, bat-like wings that spread out from their shoulder
blades. They were the things of nightmares, but were part of reality
on Earth now.

Demons.

Tristan had been
fighting them when the memorial fell to pieces, crushing me. Now, all
of the Demons flew toward the Mall, where undead Norman corpses had
been limping and shuffling around like zombies, which they’d
essentially become. The Demons’ shapes disintegrated into a
black fog that enveloped the human bodies and then disappeared inside
them, possessing them.

Lucas had brought Hell
to Earth.

His words slithered
through my mind:
“The apocalypse is here, and you, darling
Alexis, weren’t able to stop it. And now you’re out of
time.”

He hadn’t acted
alone, though. With a little encouragement from him and the Daemoni,
the Normans had done their share. They’d gone to war against
each other. Bombed each other’s lands. Even allowed genocide.
Some had committed these acts in the name of protecting their own,
but others had been controlled by Lucas’s hand of pure evil.
And now the Normans had done the ultimate act, resorting to nuclear
bombs that had created a forest of mushroom clouds earlier in the
night.

“
There goes
Richmond.” Lucas’s tone had been sharp, filled with a
demented thrill. “And Baltimore. See what I mean about the
Normans? So eager to destroy. Like I said, you can’t stop this.
… It’s just a matter of me opening the veil and letting
Satan and his Demons in. I’m ready for him! And then …
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. … You can’t stop this. …
You can’t stop this.”

That one phrase echoed,
louder than anything else. Because he’d been right.

We hadn’t been
able to stop him. We’d been too slow, always five steps behind
him. We’d been too naïve. Not even Tristan had anticipated
Lucas would go this far, this fast. Because we’d been too
good
to fathom the depth of evil Lucas possessed. Too
honorable
to
conceive such an outlandish idea as calling Satan to Earth so he
could have the ultimate power over humanity.
Who does that?
My
sperm donor. That’s who. And I was supposed to lead the crusade
to stop him.

And I’d failed.

As morning came, the
sun rose on an unrecognizable world.

My vision through the
veil panned out, and for as far as I could see, the land burned or
was already blanketed in ash. The mushroom clouds had lost their
shapes long ago, but their fallout drifted and settled. Homes and
buildings were destroyed. And worst of all—thousands of
blackened corpses lay in yards and on the sides of roads and
highways. Tens of thousands sat in the shells of burned-out cars.
They’d probably been trying to escape, but there’d been
no place to go. How many more lay in their beds or in shelters not
made for nuclear disaster? I didn’t want to know.

But I already did.

All of them.

Nobody but Lucas and
the Daemoni had been prepared for this final act. And now the only
sign of life came from the Demons.

And my grieving
husband.

I fell to my knees,
clawing at my throat and chest as tears streaked down my cheeks. I’d
failed everyone so miserably—the world and humanity, my people,
my friends, my family, my son. I’d failed the man sitting
before me who’d fought so hard against the evil that had
created him, who’d fought so hard to learn goodness and love.
Who’d loved me like no other being ever could. And I’d
left him. Alone. Heartbroken. Weeping for me.

“How do I help
him?” I asked, sensing the others behind me, although they’d
never answered my first question and apparently weren’t going
to answer this one. “What will happen to him? What about
Dorian?”

My poor son.
What
had I done?
My eyes zoomed in on the broken wall behind Tristan,
where written in dried, dark blood were Dorian’s words, “We
don’t belong with you. I have to do this. Don’t try to
follow.”

“Is Dorian at
least
alive
?” I demanded when no answers came. I could
at least hope for that. Maybe Noah warned him. Maybe they found
shelter somewhere. Maybe there was still hope for him. Or, with the
state of the world as it was, perhaps even better would be that he
was in Heaven. “Is his soul safe?”

Still no answers, and
my stomach dropped. I didn’t know what silence meant!

“Answer me!”

More dead air greeted
me. Not even the whisper of movement. On this side of the veil,
anyway. On the other side, Tristan’s cries had deteriorated to
moans as he scooted back to lean against a piece of marble with me
still in his arms. I watched as his head dropped back, propped by the
marble, and his eyes fell closed. The scene before me disappeared, as
if it no longer mattered. As if Tristan and I and the rest of the
world no longer existed.

“Tristan,”
I whispered.

“Alexis.”
My mom’s voice finally came quietly behind me, dismissing my
string of questions.

“What’s
happening? Where are Tristan and Dorian?”

“Alexis.”
Rina’s voice this time, and I didn’t have to read minds
to know from the tone of that single word that she wouldn’t
answer me.

Ignoring her just as
they ignored me, I stared at the place where my husband sat on the
other side of the veil, now obliterated by a thick mist. When he
didn’t return, I finally glanced around and found myself in a
white, foggy space of nothingness seeming to stretch into infinity.
Where I’d seen Stefan, Solomon, and Winston before, along with
others, nobody remained anymore, as though the fog had swallowed them
up.