Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (26 page)

“Hold on,”
Owen said as he took a seat next to Vanessa. “Start at the
beginning.”

Tristan and I exchanged
a look, and then he began telling our story, leaving out the parts of
our lengthy stays in Hell. Although we’d never actually
discussed what we’d say if we ever found people, we were
apparently on the same page that we didn’t want to share the
nitty-gritty with anyone. If we mentioned it at all, you could bet
they’d want to know everything about our times in Hell, and
those details were too personal, too shameful for comfort. They
questioned us plenty about the Otherworld as it was.

“I didn’t
see anything really,” I said, and I quickly moved on to the
rest of the story. “We left Amadis Island and flew over
Europe—”

“Whoa, whoa, wait
a minute. You
flew
?” Vanessa asked.

“But we heard
Dorian …” Owen’s voice trailed off, and he looked
away from me. So they knew Dorian had left for the Daemoni.

“We need to save
him,” I said, and we told them what the Demon said about Dorian
being what Lucas needed to drop the veil and open the Gates to Hell.

“So we need to
find Dorian,” Owen agreed.

“Wait. Go back,”
Vanessa said. “How did you fly over Europe and Africa if not
with Dorian?”

Tristan and I exchanged
another glance.

“They’re
going to find out sooner or later,” he said, and I nodded.

Then we both pushed our
chairs away from the table and stood up. We exposed our wings.

“Holy shit!”
Vanessa spat. “I guess that explains the holes in the back of
your vest.”

“Sweet,”
Owen said with awe. They both stood up to inspect our wings, which we
had to hold tightly against our bodies because of the confines of the
space. “You can
fly
? What do they mean? And why are they
dark? I thought Angel wings would be white.”

“Obviously, we
aren’t Angels,” I snapped. Owen frowned, and I
immediately felt bad. It wasn’t his fault the Angels were a
pain in my ass. I hid my wings and sat back down with a frown. “We
don’t know what they mean. Nobody’s explained. We had
them when we came back from the Otherworld, though. I guess the
Angels thought they’d be useful.”

“And they are,”
Tristan said as his wings disappeared, and he also returned to his
seat. He gave Owen one of those boyish
can’t-wait-to-show-you-my-new-toy grins. I rolled my eyes.
“They’re pretty badass. Wait until you see.”

“Wow.” Owen
dropped into his chair, his eyes bouncing between the two of us.
Everything I’d ever accomplished suddenly disappeared, and I
once again returned to my teen years, when everyone stared at me for
being a freak. “Wicked awesome!”

That seemed to be
Owen’s new phrase. Outdated a bit, but then again, the whole
world seemed to have gone back in time.

“So what’s
the rest of the world like?” Vanessa asked. “We’ve
seen some, but not as much as you.”

“Dead,” I
said. “We found no one but Demons, Daemoni, and a few Normans
who think the Daemoni are gods. No plant life. No animals, except
Weres. Nothing.”

“Until just now.”
Tristan lifted his chin in the direction of the brush by the beach.
We all turned to look. Tiny blotches of green stood out against all
of the monotone gray.

Vanessa shook her head.
“I knew your blood was good, but not that good.”

“Yeah, well, it’s
not like I can revive the world,” I said miserably. “So
what good is it really?”

“It’ll
bring hope,” Owen said. “We need that. So will that baby.
In fact, just seeing you and Tristan alive will make a huge
difference.”

I frowned. “A
difference with who?”

A corner of his mouth
lifted in a crooked smile. “Everybody. You’ll see.”

Tristan leaned forward
over the table. “There are others alive?”

Owen laughed. “Well,
yeah, dude. What? Did you think you two were the last ones on Earth?”

His tone made the
theory sound ridiculous.

“Pretty much,
yeah,” I admitted.

He shook his head. “Not
even close. I mean, we don’t have millions in our group or
anything, but we’re growing all the time as we find more
survivors.”

“
Seriously?
”
My jaw dropped open. “But we’ve seen nothing …
nobody …”

“You’ve
been looking in the wrong places. We can show you whenever you’re
ready.”

I sprang to my feet,
knocking my chair over from the force and speed. “Let’s
go!”

We didn’t leave
immediately. We rummaged through the beach house first, collecting
towels, blankets, pillows, soaps and shampoos, and everything in the
kitchen, packing it all into boxes Owen magically created from
supplies around the house. He and Tristan drained the rest of the
potable water from the hot water heater into other containers. Then
we scavenged the other four abandoned houses on our little key.
Hardly anyone knew these homes even existed, hidden from the highway
and view of the general public, so nobody had come and looted them.
Until now.

“Biggest jackpot
yet. We’re gonna be heroes,” Owen said as he appraised
the pile of goods we’d collected, including mattresses and
other furniture. He rubbed his hands together, and then pulled them
apart, opening a portal. “Oh, they’ll be glad to see you,
too, Alexis.”

Vanessa lifted a stack
of boxes into her arms and walked through the portal. Tristan, Owen,
and I used our powers to raise the rest of the pile from the ground.

“Ladies first,”
Owen said when I didn’t immediately move forward.

I hesitated, suddenly
scared for who I’d find there—or wouldn’t find. I
needed to be prepared.

“Owen …
your mom?”

He didn’t answer
me. My bottom lip trembled as I sucked in a jagged breath. “Blossom?
Jax? Sheree? Heather and Sonya? Carlie?”

“Just go,”
he said. “You’ll see.”

I inhaled another
cleansing breath to gather myself, and then pushed my pile through
the portal before I followed it in. On the other side, I arrived at
what appeared to be a garage door set into a hillside, once covered
by trees and undergrowth that were now nothing but gray, scraggly
branches wearing a dirty blanket of crusted snow. Vanessa stood next
to the door, holding the boxes and tapping a foot. Not until I moved
up closer to her did I notice the tiny wings and A.K. initials carved
into the metal jamb, with a line of strange, but vaguely familiar
symbols underneath. Owen ran over to us and tapped the symbols in a
specific sequence, and I remembered where I’d seen them
before—on the trunks Vanessa’s body had once been
delivered in.

“Hold on, before
you go in,” he said, turning toward us as the garage door began
to open from the ground up. “Gotta decon us.”

“What?” I
asked.

“There’s
lots of nasty stuff out in the world,” Owen said as he rubbed
his palms together then held them out toward me. A wave of energy
washed over me. “Don’t want to bring it in to the more
sensitive among us.”

I opened my mouth with
more questions as he did the same to Tristan, but snapped it closed
when I looked behind Owen.

Behind him, just beyond
the mouth of the doorway, a group of eight figures dressed in white
haz-mat suits greeted us with the barrels of automatic weapons
pointed at our heads, a long tunnel stretching out behind them.
Tristan immediately threw his hands up, but not in surrender—in
fighting stance—but as soon as the others saw Owen and Vanessa,
their guns dropped. And when they saw Tristan and me, a few of them
gasped. My eyes landed on these faces and recognized them immediately
as a murmur spread over the group. Those three had been part of the
group of hunters that had been on the university campus back in
Georgetown. The rest of the faces behind the shields of their hoods
were unfamiliar, though.

“Welcome to The
Loft,” Owen said, ushering us and the supplies inside. Once we
were in, he waved his hand at the door, closing it behind us.
Darkness swallowed us for a moment, and then the comparatively dim
light of a single fluorescent bulb overcame the gloom.

Tristan looked up at
the light. “Electrical power? I figured EMPs fried everything.”

“They did,”
Owen said. “Everything above ground or unprotected, but not
down here. I have to do my magic on everything we bring in to get it
to work.” He wiggled his fingers at us before gesturing at the
group of people. “We’ve found more hunters, as you can
see.”

“You got that a
little backwards there. We found you,” a tall, middle-aged man
with dark hair and a graying goatee corrected Owen.

“Yeah, yeah, and
I’m lucky you didn’t blow my head off when we suddenly
appeared by your camp. As if you could.” Owen clapped a hand on
the man’s broad shoulder. “Alexis, Tristan, this is
Shawn. One of the original hunters, so the story goes. You can learn
it later. I think there are others you might want to see first.”

With a flick of his
hand, he lifted the piles of supplies we’d brought and directed
them in front of him.

“Hold up there
just a minute,” Shawn said as he and three others moved toward
the four of us, each of them holding some kind of device with an
antenna in their hands.

“I already—”
Owen began, but he shut up as they moved closer and the small,
rectangular boxes started chirping with a kind of clicking noise. At
least, the ones closest to Tristan and me did.

“Radiation
detectors,” Tristan murmured in explanation.

“Not a good
enough job!” Shawn barked at Owen. “You trying to kill
us?”

Owen set the supplies
down and turned toward Tristan and me. He did his decontamination
spell again, on both of us and then on Vanessa and himself. The
hunters swept the detectors over us again, and the little boxes
remained quiet.

“Where you two
been?” Shawn inquired as his dark gaze studied us.

“Everywhere,”
I said. “Feels like it anyway.”

“New York?
Washington, D.C.?” Shawn asked.

“And several
other cities,” Tristan said.

The man nodded. “Makes
sense then. We’ve figured that only a few cities got the real
nukes. The rest of us just got the dirty stuff.”

Tristan lifted a brow
as he stared at the man.

“I’ll tell
you everything later, bro,” Owen said. “Come on.”

Using magic, he lifted
the supplies again. We left the hunters by the door, presumably to
guard it, and followed Owen and Vanessa down the tunnel that had been
carved into the rocky hill, big enough for a truck to drive through.
The floor had the slightest bit of downward grade, and about every
twenty feet, another fluorescent light flickered from above, the
lamps joined together by a cord that snaked along the ceiling.

“Are you going to
tell us where we are?” Tristan asked as we curved around a bend
in the tunnel.

I wondered the same
thing. Owen and Vanessa had made it sound like they had quite the
encampment here, but the only mind signatures I sensed belonged to
the hunters up by the door. I couldn’t get a feel for anything
ahead of us. The air had a cool, crisp feel to it against my cheeks
and smelled like it filtered through something synthetic with only
the faintest threads of damp earth and stone.

“It’s an
old limestone mine,” Vanessa said.

“Actually, it’s
several mines joined together,” Owen corrected.

“With an air
filtration system and electricity,” Tristan noted. “So
mines that have been reclaimed and developed.”

“Pretty much,”
Vanessa said.

“By who?”
Tristan asked, skepticism and a bit of annoyance lacing his tone. I
didn’t blame him. I was growing impatient for answers, too.

“Almost there,”
Owen said, ignoring the question. “We have the place
double-shielded to keep the Daemoni from finding us. An exterior
shield and an interior one, like they do in Hades.”

“That explains
the lack of mind signatures,” I muttered. “Who’s
‘we’?”

We rounded another bend
and on the other side, the tunnel widened to the left into a space
big enough for three or four semi-trucks to park. Owen moved ahead of
us, magically directing the pile of supplies into the open space. On
the far side of the area was a wall with a door, a sign hanging over
it that said
Intake
. Vanessa headed for the wooden door, and
when Tristan and I passed into the space to follow, the air gave the
slightest bit of waver around us. We’d passed through the
barrier of the interior shield.

And hundreds of mind
signatures popped into my brain.

I drew in a sharp
breath when I picked up the one on the opposite side of the door. My
legs sprang forward, and my feet moved with no command of my own. I
practically bowled Vanessa over to get through that door.

“Hey,” she
snapped.

“Hey what?”
another female asked. The blonde had been facing a whiteboard with
colorful markings all over it and turned around to look at the
doorway, apparently thinking Vanessa had snipped at her. Her jaw
dropped open.

“Charlotte!”
I squealed as I ran for her.

Her arms sprang around
me at the same time I collided into her, holding onto her thin body
as though it had given me life. She could never replace my mom, but
she was the closest I had here in the Earthly realm, and seeing her
alive definitely built on the hope for the possibility of a new life.
A hope that had only sparked barely more than an hour ago.

“I thought you
disowned me,” Char said over my shoulder.

“What? Never! Why
…?” I squeezed her even tighter.

“I couldn’t
stop him. Dorian. I tried, but he’s so powerful, Alexis …”

Her voice trailed off,
and I closed my eyes. I’d never even thought to blame
Charlotte, Blossom, or any of the others whom I’d asked to
watch my son that fateful night. I knew they would have done anything
and everything they could, so Dorian’s escape would have been
no fault of their own.