Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (23 page)

I wanted to believe
her. I truly did. I wanted nothing more than for the world to be
saved and restored. But even if what she said was true—which I
highly doubted—we didn’t have time to wait.

“That will take
too long. It’ll be too late,” I protested. “Dorian—”

“Dorian is doing
what he needs to do.”

“Ugh! Stop saying
that!” I stomped my foot in the sand like a child.

Mom suddenly appeared
right in front of me, her eyes narrowed.

“Stop dismissing
us,” she said, her voice taking on her mom tone. “You
were angry at us for not providing direction before, and here we are,
providing direction. Giving you the answers you claimed to want.
Telling you what to do. But you fight us every time.”

I huffed out a breath.
“Because I never know if you’re telling me the truth or
not. Or setting me up for failure again. Especially because your
direction is ridiculous. What you want me to do is absurd. You act
like you have no idea what’s going on in this world.”

“Do we?”
Mom asked pointedly. “Or do you? Do you really know what’s
going on, Alexis, or do you think maybe we have a fuller view? Maybe
we have a little more insight. Maybe we’re trying to steer you
the right way because we have a broader perspective.”

I glared at her and
frowned. “Char was right about where I get my stubbornness.”

Rina dropped down to
stand by Mom. “We only interfere when we need to. We are here.
What does that tell you, darling?”

“We are here to
help you, Alexis,” Cassandra said, closing in on me, too, “but
it is up to you to accept it.”

I scowled and looked
sideways at Tristan. He held up his hands and gave me that man
look—that I’m-not-getting-in-the-middle-of-a-bunch-of-women
expression. My scowl deepened. Some help he was.

“How do we have
time for this?” I demanded. “There’s a ticking
clock! In fact, Dorian’s probably already at Hades, and it’s
only a matter of time before Lucas drops the veil.”

“He is not with
Lucas yet,” Cassandra said, and for the first time in I didn’t
know how long, she actually said something I wanted to hear.
Something that gave me true hope. “He is with a neutral party,
receiving objective counsel. He has many difficult decisions ahead of
him. Before you ask, no, we do not know where. Just know that he is
safe. When he does go to Lucas, there will be signs. Watch for them.
The veil will not fall and the Gates will not open the moment Dorian
meets Lucas. There will be time. You will still be able to stop Lucas
from proceeding. First, you need your army.”

And my hopes fell with
the word
when
, rather than
if
.

“There’s
nobody left,” I whispered once again as the heaviness of their
loss pressed down on me.

“We’ve
spent the last several weeks scouring Europe,” Tristan said,
finally speaking up. He must have grown tired of the circles we made
with this exasperating conversation. “Everywhere we’ve
seen is the same—gray and lifeless. The only human life we’ve
found is possessed by Demons or serving the Daemoni.”

“You must look
closer,” Rina said. “Others are here.”

“They’re
just not out in the open,” Mom added. “They don’t
know that it’s safe to come to the surface, and it’s not
in many places. You will have to search for them, but they are
there.”

“I can’t
even find their mind signatures, though,” I said. “There’s
nobody
but Daemoni.”

“Then you’re
not looking in the right places or hard enough.”

My jaw dropped
slightly, leaving my mouth agape. Tristan and I had flown all over
Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Vienna, the Czech Republic, Greece,
pretty much the rest of western Europe and a good portion of northern
Africa. If we hadn’t found signs of life in any of those
places, where else were we supposed to look?

“Search and you
will find,” Cassandra said. “Build your army. The war is
not over.”

With that, the three of
them disappeared.

My hands balled into
fists, I stomped my foot again, and a scream of complete frustration
rose from deep within and erupted like a volcano out of my mouth.

“At least tell us
where to look!” I yelled upward, but no answer came.

I glanced over at
Tristan. He stared at me with his arms over his broad chest and a
brow lifted. I frowned, embarrassed by my behavior.

“They infuriate
me,” I muttered in explanation.

He unfolded his arms
and held his hands up.

“No judging here.
I understand.” One side of his mouth lifted in a crooked smile.
“But your tantrums are … endearing.”

I narrowed my eyes at
him, half-tempted to shoot a bolt of lightning at him, but that would
be
endearing
.

He shrugged. “What
can I say? I’ve always had a thing for your hotheadedness.”

He walked closer to me,
hiding his wings as he did. I made mine disappear right before he
snaked his arms around me.

“Are we doing
this their way?” he asked as he pulled me close against him.

I leaned my head onto
his chest. “What do you think?”

“It’s
probably what we should do. They’re right. They have a broader
perspective.”

I growled. “I
hate it when they’re right.”

I especially hated what
else Mom had to say. I
had
been begging them to tell me what
to do before, but my pleas had gone unanswered. They’d claimed
I hadn’t needed them then, when I’d felt completely alone
and abandoned, facing a war I didn’t know how to fight. But
now, when I knew what to do because there was nothing else left but
my son to fight for, I
did
need them? I sighed as Rina’s
words echoed in my mind:
We only interfere when we need to.

“I guess we do it
their way,” I said with a sigh. “The sooner we prove
there’s nobody left for our army, the sooner we can move on to
saving our son.”

He leaned down and
kissed my forehead. “Maybe they’re right, Lex. Maybe
there’s still hope for this world.”

I didn’t answer
him. The chances for rebuilding this world were about the same as the
odds of me spitting out a bunch of babies: pretty much nil. As long
as I had the family I knew was still alive, though, I was okay with
that.

“Do you really
think there’s any chance Owen and Vanessa and everyone are
still … around?” I asked as I lifted my head to look up
at him.

“I don’t
know why Rina and your mom would lie to us.”

“It wouldn’t
be the first time.” I gnawed on my bottom lip. “Satan
showed me their bodies. Made sure I knew I was to blame for their
deaths.”

“And
he
would have every reason to lie.”

“Would he? What
ulterior motive would that serve?”

He lifted a brow as he
looked down at me. “Are you really asking me if I know all of
Satan’s ulterior motives?”

“He was the only
one who told me the straight-up truth about Dorian’s purpose.
Maybe he’s the only one who’s been honest about
everything.”

“Or maybe he was
trying to make your Demons as big and powerful as possible so you’d
believe you couldn’t slay them.” His hazel eyes caught
mine and pierced into me, driving his point home. “Who do you
think you should believe, Lex? Your mother? Or the Devil?”

I averted my eyes and
pressed my lips together, hoping he didn’t see in me what I
truly felt. Because although the answer should have been clear and
easy, I honestly didn’t know whom to believe. Sure, Satan had
all kinds of reasons to lie to me, and he was the king of deception,
but he’d also told me many truths. And I loved my mom and
grandmother, and I knew they loved me. But I also knew they’d
do almost anything for the cause, including lifting my hopes so I’d
obey their demands. After all, they were at war, too, and war
required deceit.

On the other hand, why
would they lie about my extended family? They loved Owen and
Charlotte as much as I did, if not more. And they may have been
confined to the Otherworld now, but weren’t all of the Amadis
still their family? They would be mourning their annihilation, not
encouraging me to go on a wild goose chase looking for them. I wanted
to believe them so badly, but their previous betrayals made it
difficult.

Ultimately, I could
only trust myself, and Tristan, and the strength of our love.

“The only way to
know for sure is to search for them ourselves,” I said. “So
where do we start?”

“Since we’re
this far, we may as well check on Jelani’s village, but I’d
say we need to make our way back to D.C., since that’s the last
place we saw our group.”

Jelani had been one of
my council members I’d inherited from Rina. The last we’d
known, he’d been in Kenya, so we took off and flew southeast.
What passed on the ground below us sickened me. Besides the gray
dunes of the desert, dried up lakes and rivers, and dead trees and
grasslands, indigenous tribes who’d had no part in any of the
world’s politics had been obliterated with corpses and
skeletons scattered around the remains of their villages. And the
animals. The poor animals. Lions, tigers, hippos, hyenas, birds of
all kinds … and the extraordinary elephants and giraffes. So
beautiful at one time, but now barely recognizable as rotting
remains. What had Lucas done? Why the animals? Why wipe out every
centimeter of Earth and the life on it?

To make Satan feel
at home.

The thought made sense
… sort of. Except, if Satan and his Demons liked Hell so much,
why bother taking over Earth? If he had all the human souls anyway,
why was he so anxious to come topside if it was just like Hell
itself? Was it the destruction that he loved so much? If so, wouldn’t
he have wanted to be a part of that himself? Or did Lucas need to
prove his worthiness or something?

Why am I spending so
much time contemplating Satan, Hell, and Lucas’s motives?

I tried to clear my
mind of such darkness, but that was difficult to do when I saw
nothing else before me.

We found no evidence of
Jelani’s survival or the Amadis village where he lived. In
fact, as I’d expected, we found no sign of anyone’s
survival. No mind signatures, no animals, no life at all. Everything
grayed out and dead. Not even Daemoni were-animals roamed the
land—because there was nothing there for them to hunt.

My heart felt like a
two-ton anvil by the time we stopped for the night.

“Maybe we’ll
find things better in the States,” Tristan suggested as he
curled his body around mine on the gray sand beach we lay on. I
suppressed a snort. If no part of Africa, with its sparse population,
had escaped unscathed, I hardly expected America to have been any
better.

“Do you think we
can fly across the ocean?” I asked as I stared out at the waves
crashing onto the beach, the moon’s reflection off the crests
making the water sparkle. It was the first thing of real beauty I’d
seen on this Earth since my trip to the Otherworld. Besides my
husband’s face, of course.

“I don’t
know. We’ve been flying pretty far stretches, but we’re
over land. The winds over the ocean will be tougher to navigate, and
if we get tired, there aren’t too many places to rest if we go
straight across.”

I rolled onto my back
to look up into his face. “I know you have a plan.”

His full lips curled
into a half-smile and the gold in his eyes sparkled confidently,
confirming my guess. “We’ll go back north, all the way up
to Iceland. Check out the parts of Europe we haven’t hit yet on
our way, and then turn to the west. We’ll hug Greenland and
then Canada, so if we get tired, we’ll always have land nearby
for a stop.”

“Sounds like a
plan.”

Although we were too
close to the equator for it to be cold, I snuggled closer to him as I
gazed up at the sky. With no light pollution anywhere on this Earth
to obliterate their glow, the stars shone like billions of little
pinpricks in the fabric of the sky. This world was but a dust mote in
the universe, and the stars made me feel so tiny and insignificant.
And so lonely. Based on what we’d seen so far, Tristan and I
were the only ones left in the world to appreciate the magnificent
beauty above us. Not a single other soul gazed at these same stars
from this planet. Of course, there were the Daemoni and the Demons,
but they were too narcissistic and uncaring to notice.

Just Tristan and me.

And maybe Dorian? Tears
pricked my eyes as my mind wandered back to him—where he was,
who he was with, what he was doing. I’d gone through all of
this before for six months and had only had him back for a couple
more before he left. And here I was again, a mother whose son had
disappeared. But this time felt different. More final. There was no
one to be angry at but myself. I couldn’t even blame him. He
thought he was doing the right thing. He was no longer my little boy,
but a young man on a mission. Tears burned my eyes at the thought of
his bravery.

I blinked them away and
focused on the sky, pretending that my son lay on the ground
somewhere in this world, gazing at the same stars and wondering if
his parents saw them, too.