Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (24 page)

We took
a few weeks to search for life in Africa and Europe before we
followed Tristan’s flight plan north, scouting the ground below
as we flew several hundred feet over the ground. The scenery should
have changed with different vegetation and architecture as the miles
passed under us, but the trees were nothing but bare sticks pointing
like accusing fingers at the sky and any buildings were in ruins. I
supposed there was some variation to the view, but the grayness of it
all camouflaged the differences. The only way we knew exactly where
we were was when we landed for the night, taking refuge in the
remains of hotels or people’s homes.

Any humanity that
survived remained elusive. For the most part, the only mind
signatures I found or creatures we saw were Daemoni or Demons. The
few pockets of Normans were like the ones we’d found in
Germany—servants to the Daemoni. We hadn’t even found any
Norman farms, and I began to wonder if those people who’d been
in the camps had voluntarily turned to the Daemoni when they realized
there was nothing else left in this world. Hadn’t that been
Lucas’s plan, to become the Normans’ saving grace?

“There must be
somebody left in their right mind,” Tristan said when I’d
told him this theory while he made us a fire.

We’d found an ice
cave in Greenland to spend the night. I hated it here. Winter this
close to the North Pole sucked. There were no nearby towns to
scavenge for food, and we hadn’t eaten since leaving Iceland
this morning. My stomach growled, but it was drowned out by the wind
howling outside that sounded like an eerie whistle. And I’d had
enough of the freezing cold that reminded me of Hell—the real
thing and the time on the rock island when Tristan was only a shell
and my mind floundered in my own private hell. The ice on the air and
in my veins brought back the memories and the visions and made the
scar across my chest ache.

“T-t-tell m-me
how,” I replied through chattering teeth as a tear froze to my
cheek. “B-b-because I have n-no hope.”

He sat down behind me
with his legs around me and wiggled us closer to the fire. Then he
draped his arms over my shoulders, curved his body around mine,
pressing his chest against my back. His breath came warm near my ear.

“Do you love me?”
he asked.

“Of c-course,”
I answered automatically.

“Do you love
Dorian?”

“T-tristan …”

“Where there’s
love, there’s hope,
ma lykita
. And we have enough of
that between the two of us to blanket the world with hope.”

“B-b-but if
there’s n-no one else to f-feel it …”

He tightened his arms
around me. “There is, though. There must be. Why else would
they insist we look for life? Since you’re so skeptical about
their motives, think about it this way, Lex. If the war is that
heated in the Otherworld, why would they send us here if there’s
no benefit? Why wouldn’t they have kept us there to fight? You
said they told you the Angels needed all the help they could get. So
if they were only worried about their own souls and not about
Earth’s, why would they leave us here? Why give us wings and
more powers, only to send us back here for no reason?”

I frowned. “Because
we don’t belong in Heaven
or
Hell.”

“We belong here.
For a reason.”

“Yeah, because
there’s no other place for us to go. We don’t belong in
true Hell, so we’re in this place—because it’s the
next best thing.”

“Or maybe because
this world is not as hopeless as you think.”

I stared at the fire
for a long moment. “I don’t understand how you have so
much hope, after all you’ve been through. You were in Hell
longer than I was.”

“How many times
do I have to tell you? I have you. I’ve been fighting my demons
my entire life, but only because of you have I finally slayed them. I
have faith, Alexis. Faith in us, in humanity, in the Angels …
most of all, in God’s plan. We’re right where He wants us
to be. We only have to believe that He knows best.”

“Hmph. If that’s
the case, then He must think the best thing for Earth and humanity is
to let Satan have it, because that’s where we’re headed.
But I honestly have a hard time believing God cares one iota about us
anymore.”

Tristan sighed, his
breath heating my cheek. “As long as you believe that, you will
always live in the dark,
ma lykita
.”

The defeat and despair
in his voice made my heart hurt. But after all we’d been
through and all we’d seen of the world so far, I couldn’t
help my feelings. If God hadn’t abandoned us, then where was
He? Why had He let the world come to such destruction? I used to
believe in Him. I used to think that in the end, good would win, just
like Owen always said. I doubted even Owen would believe that now, if
he were still alive.

My chest tightened at
this thought. If God really cared, how could He take souls like
Owen’s, Sheree’s, and Char’s out of this world? And
Blossom and Jax, and even Vanessa, who’d never lost her hope
for a better life. Why take them and their faith, while leaving me
and all of my failures? Because He wanted them in His realm. Where
they belonged. And probably the only reason Tristan was here with me
was because he followed me here, just like he’d followed me to
Hell. For that reason alone, I should have tried to believe, for his
sake. But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t find it in me.

As we lay on the hard
ground by the fire to go to sleep, Tristan prayed out loud for me to
see the light. My soul cracked. I’d failed everyone else,
including my son, and now I was failing Tristan, too.

* * *

Two days later, we flew
over New York City. What remained of New York City, anyway. Many of
the skyscrapers had been mowed down with their rubble in mountains on
the streets. No bright signs flashed on Times Square, and the thought
that the ball would never again drop there on New Year’s Eve
felt like a sinking weight. We swooped over 34
^th
Street,
where a banner advertising the upcoming Christmas season half-clung
to the Macy’s building as it flapped in the wind. Christmas had
long passed, but there had been no holiday season. My throat
tightened as I recalled all of the Thanksgiving Day parades I’d
watched on TV, knowing there would never be another. The crowds would
never fill these streets again.

Except for Daemoni.
Vampire nests, mage covens, and Were dens and packs roamed freely as
though they owned the city. I supposed they did now. Their human pets
gazed at them adoringly, practically bowing down and kissing their
feet. When the mages shot spells at us as we flew by, the Normans
laughed. We didn’t bother fighting back, but flew off, headed
farther south.

As we approached
Washington, D.C., my breath became trapped in my lungs. Even from a
distance, I could see that little remained. At some point after the
faeries had rescued our bodies and Lucas must have evacuated his
followers, someone had bombed the hell out of the city. Or maybe
other sorcerers, besides Jeana and Merrick, had been nearby, waiting
on Lucas’s orders to destroy the capitol and everything around
it.

Not until we approached
the university campus where we’d left Carlie, A.K.’s
Angels, and the hunters did I realize I’d been holding on to a
thin thread of hope. Because at the sight of its decimation, that
final trickle drained away. Charlotte, Blossom, Jax, and Sheree had
been here, too, and Owen and Vanessa were headed here when Lucas
brought Hell to Earth. Or, at least, the first wave of Demons.

I thought I’d
already accepted the loss of my friends, my extended family, but I’d
never been so wrong.

Anger exploded in my
chest as I circled the remains of the campus, knowing there was no
way anybody survived what happened here. All emotions burst out in a
guttural scream. My breaths came shallow as grief threatened to shut
me down.

“Why?” I
shouted at the world, at the Angels, at God as my circles became
tighter and faster. “
Why?
”

Sobs tried to push up
from my gut, but I shoved them away while grasping onto the anger. I
flew off, soaring south, far away from this place of death and
destruction.

“
Alexis
,”
Tristan mentally called out as he flew to catch up with me.

I … I can’t,
Tristan. I can’t take any more.

I pushed myself as hard
as I could, soaring south fast enough for the land to become a blur
under me because I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing any
more. The movies and TV shows about zombie apocalypses, nuclear wars,
and alien invasions hadn’t come close to depicting what it was
truly like to see the world void of life. Nobody could ever be
prepared for the deafening silence left behind, the eerie stillness
of the land, the overwhelming loss of billions of men, women, and
children. No animals, no plant life, not even a spark of color except
the blue of the sky. My eyes watered from the wind in them—or
so I told myself, not wanting to admit to the tears streaming over my
cheeks and flying off behind me.

“Damn it!”
I screamed as loud as I could, my fists balled at my sides.

Something crashed into
me, and I careened in the air. I thought it was Tristan at first,
trying to stop me, and I was ready for the fight. I came to a halt
and spun on him, my fists flying. They didn’t meet Tristan’s
body, though. They thudded into the side of a Demon. It pounded a
fist into my back, and I whirled and kicked, my foot slamming into
its head with a satisfying thunk. As I spun and ducked under a swing
at me, I caught a glimpse of Tristan fighting another Demon several
yards away. I didn’t know why the Demons had left us alone
until now. Perhaps these guys had simply been bored when they sighted
us. But they’d attacked at the wrong time. I took pleasure in
beating my fists and feet into the Demon’s thick flesh, even
though I caused no damage, and I welcomed the physical pain it dished
out on me because it smothered the emotional agony in my heart and
soul.

“Fuck you. Fuck
you. Fuck. YOU!” I shouted with each blow that landed.

Its razor sharp claws
scraped over my side, digging through my leather vest and into my
skin. I palmed my dagger at my hip and brought it out, swiping it
across the Demon’s barrel of a chest. It soared away from me,
and a putrid stink poured out of the gash along with an inky ooze.
The Demon let out a long howl before flying headfirst at me. I swung
the silver blade out and carved a new orifice into its face, and then
I spun in the air, away from its outstretched claws, and arced my
dagger around. The entire length of the blade sliced into the Demon’s
neck, all the way through, until my blade broke free at the other
side. Its horned head rolled backwards and hung from the thick hide
at the back of its neck for a moment before falling completely away.
The Demon’s wings formed a V behind it as the body shot down
after its head.

Tristan had already
decommissioned the Demon he’d been fighting, and I’d felt
the weight of his gaze on me. I barely glanced at him before flying
off, back on course going south. I didn’t think I knew where I
headed until the Gulf of Mexico came into view, and I was nearly at
my destination. For some reason, my subconscious must have thought
going to the Captiva safe house would have made me feel better. Or
perhaps returning to our house a few miles away on Sanibel Island.
But both were destroyed. Nothing remained of the structures or
anything else on the islands. They were no different than the rest of
the world.

The adrenaline from the
fight leaked away, and emotional and physical exhaustion began to set
in. But I pushed on, afraid that if I stopped flying, the gravity of
reality would pull me completely under. I flew until I ran out of
land at the tip of Florida. And finally I landed.

In front of the house
Tristan had built for me in the Keys.

I stared at the
structure with a mixture of awe and confusion. Beams from the setting
sun bounced off the gray, metal roof of the three-bedroom beach house
that held so many memories for me. For us. The second-story
screened-in porch remained intact across this side of the house that
faced the water, and hurricane shutters covered the windows,
seemingly unharmed.

“It’s still
standing,” I mused aloud when Tristan dropped to the ground
beside me.

The house still stood,
indeed, but the paint had faded to a dull gray and it curled away
from the walls in many places as though it had blistered up and
popped. The yard had been overgrown so there was no longer
delineation between it and the brush that used to only line the edges
of the property. All of it was dead now. Dead and gray, like the rest
of the world.

I flashed inside to the
island kitchen with the granite countertop that was no longer
cracked, fixed by Owen before we’d left the house for the last
time after my
Ang’dora
. With a mere swish of my hand, I
opened the hurricane shutters over the sliding glass doors to allow
some light in, and then I opened the doors themselves for much needed
fresh air. The inside of the house was dank, having been closed up
with no power to run the air conditioning for months. Although the
shutters had enclosed the interior, the same ashy-dust coated
everything, sapping away from the décor what had been pretty
colors of the ocean and the beach.

After one of the
longest and more miserable days of my life, I strode into the
Caribbean room that should have been renamed the room of blech
because all of the pretty jewel tones on the curtains and accessories
were washed out to grays and whites. I collapsed onto the dusty bed,
wishing I could fall into unconsciousness. But my stupid brain
wouldn’t allow me, forcing me to relive all of the atrocities
of my life since the first time I’d walked into this house on
my honeymoon. Losing Stefan, Tristan’s disappearance, living
without him for seven long years, my first real fight with Vanessa,
the
Ang’dora
, battling the monster inside Tristan …
the trial, Lilith, Martin and Kali, Owen’s abandonment, Rina’s
months-long coma … skirmishes with the Daemoni, the trunks
with Vanessa’s chopped-up body, going to Hades, escaping Hades,
finding Dorian missing and our mages slaughtered … hunting
Dorian, Rina’s and Mom’s deaths … and the war that
started shortly after. When I tried to revert my train of thought and
focus on all of the good parts of life, I only felt worse. Except for
Tristan, none of those people I shared the good times with lived
anymore.