Read Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) Online

Authors: Kristie Cook

Tags: #Magic, #Vampires, #contemporary fantasy, #paranormal romance, #warlocks, #Werewolves, #Supernatural, #demons, #Witches, #sorceress, #Angels

Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (29 page)

BOOK: Faith (Soul Savers Book 7)
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As I leaned against the
bathroom wall to slow my breaths and heart rate, I considered how it
actually hadn’t been an urge to vomit that had overcome me.
Baby Girl—she
had
to be a girl—inside me had
reacted to the Daemoni’s evil energy just like I had. What had
me worried was that I didn’t know if she responded to it like I
had, with fear and repulsion, or if it had beckoned to her.

“Are you okay?”
Vanessa asked from the sink area.

“Um …
yeah, fine.” I exhaled a long breath as I stepped out of the
bathroom stall. I gave her the best smile I could manage. “False
alarm.”

She eyed me with her
icy blues. “Good thing. You can’t afford to lose the food
you just ate.”

I nodded as I walked up
to a sink and turned the water on. Or tried to—nothing came
out.

“This one.”
Vanessa tapped the porcelain edge of the one closest to her. “There
are all kinds of limits on water here. You get two showers a week on
your designated days. All of the sinks’ taps are only open in
the morning for quick hand, face, and teeth washings. The rest of the
time, water’s only supplied to this one, and the faucets only
let so much out before they shut off for five minutes.”

The last point proved
itself when the faucet I’d been washing my hands under suddenly
went dry. I rubbed the water on my hands over my face before making
sure the handle was turned to the off position.

“And one of their
number one rules for more reasons than one: If it’s yellow, let
it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” She wrinkled
her nose. “Disgusting.”

My nose lifted to match
her expression. “That explains the smell.”

“It’s
awful. So glad I don’t have to worry about that.”

“So how do you
and the others get blood?” I asked as we left the bathroom, and
she led me back toward the dining area where Tristan and Owen still
sat at the large table in the middle of the vast space. I’d
probably help Sheree later, but at the moment, I didn’t think
my body or soul could handle it. Especially my soul. An ironic
thought of how I myself needed faith healing tried to niggle its way
in, but I pushed it out as I listened to Vanessa.

“I’ve been
out a lot with Owen, so he’s been my supplier.” She gave
me a little grin. “My favorite, of course. Well, besides you or
Tristan. But we do have a blood bank here, over there with suppliers
of other goods.” She nodded her head sideways, toward our
right.

“Like a
marketplace? With money?”

“No money.
Everything’s based on need and barter right now. All on the
honor system. If we grow much bigger, though, we’ll need to
figure out something better.”


We
?”
I asked.

“Charlotte pretty
much runs the place, but we all help her with big decisions like
that. Your council at work.”

Huh. I would have never
thought …

“Show me
everything,” I commanded.

Vanessa and Owen
started us back in the kitchen, this time introducing Tristan and me
to the people they knew, who in turn introduced us to the others.
Most were Normans, besides Blossom and two other witches who directed
the rest of the staff. Jax was nowhere to be seen.

“Jax oversees
deliveries,” Owen explained when I asked about him after we
left the kitchen through a door that faced the same bathroom I’d
been in minutes ago. “We’ve decided to save as much power
as possible, so we don’t use the golf carts and forklifts
Brogan has stored up front unless necessary. Don’t need them as
long as we have mages, vamps, and Weres to do the heavy lifting.”

Next to the bathroom
was the marketplace Vanessa had just been telling me about, looking
like a makeshift flea market. The section blocked off for it was
quite large, although most of it remained empty. A few stands were
clustered together alongside the dining area, made up of plastic
tables and cardboard boxes with sheets and blankets hanging between
them to separate the “shops.” The blood bank was here,
along with a kiosk with dried herbs and other reagents for the mages.
A witch and several older, Norman women sat in a larger booth, busy
at work mending clothing and blankets or knitting and hand-sewing new
pieces.

“As long as we
can find them material, they’ll work all kinds of magic,”
Owen said as he pulled out a couple balls of yarn from the inside of
his jacket and tossed it into the basket next to one of the women.
She gave him a wrinkled smile, adoration filling her gray eyes.

“Explains why you
raided the yarn basket at the house next to ours,” Tristan
said. I hadn’t even noticed Owen had done that when we’d
been back at the Keys, looting the homes. “I thought you’d
taken up a new hobby.”

“Har-har,”
Owen retorted.

“This young man
here saved my granddaughters’ lives,” the woman said to
Tristan and me. “I’ll make him anything he ever wants.”

“How old are
they?” I asked her.

“One’s six
and one’s eight. They’re the sweetest things. Their mama
and daddy had gone out for food when the big bombs dropped. We ran
for the old fallout shelter my husband, God rest his soul, had put in
our backyard back in the day. My son and his wife never came home.
We’d eaten our last bite of food two days before this young man
came along.”

“Oh, wow.”
I sighed, my heart hurting for what they’d had to go through.

“They’re
doing as good as can be expected,” the grandma said. “They’re
over at the school with the other kids, many of them in the same
situation—one or both parents gone. But at least the young’uns
made it. Gives us hope for a future.” She shifted one of her
knitting needles into the other hand and reached out to lay her palm
on my belly. “You’re bringing us more hope, child.”

My brows furrowed. How
did she know?

She grinned. “Word
travels fast around here.”

She reached for my hand
now and gave it a squeeze. I noticed she had an A.K.’s Angels
tattoo on her inner wrist. Her smile widened, showing a capped tooth
toward the back.

“I’m a new
fan. Once I learnt how so many of these folk found each other, I was
curious. Especially when they said they learnt how to survive because
of your books. You bet I’ll be making my girls read them as
soon as they’re old enough.”

I didn’t know
what to say except thank you. The shocks to my system were
never-ending today.

We let her return to
her work, and Owen and Vanessa stopped us by the Medical section,
where Carlie and another woman doctor ran the hospital that had a
surprisingly decent setup, if not all of the equipment they needed.

“This was the
residential area where Brogan had originally bunked his guests,”
Carlie explained after we greeted each other with excited hugs and
exchanged the two-minute versions of our stories. “The larger
rooms he used to reserve for families are what we use for surgery and
admin. The single rooms allow the patients privacy.”

“I guess you get
a lot?” I asked.

She nodded. “Enough.
We require all of the humans to spend a few days in quarantine when
they first arrive to make sure they don’t bring in anything
contagious. And we constantly have hunters in here.” She made a
face. “I had to stitch up James’ ass once after he’d
sliced it open on a broken window. It was gross.”

“Ugh.” I
suppressed a shudder. “I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged. “Having
no anesthetic at the time made it better.”

I shook my head and
laughed. “You’re a little evil, aren’t you?”

“Only to
assholes.”

Once we left the
Medical area, we walked around the dining space and entered the
School Zone. Like the marketplace, the section was divided with
cardboard and sheet walls, each with kids surrounding plastic tables
and boxes. In the room with the children about Dorian’s age and
a little younger, a familiar face greeted us.

“Alexis!
Tristan!” Heather jumped up from her four charges and rushed
over to hug us. She looked around, as though searching for someone
else, and frowned. Her voice came out in a whisper. “I’d
hoped the rumor wasn’t true about Dorian. I’m so sorry.”

“We’ll get
him back,” I said firmly while the backs of my eyeballs
pricked.

“I’m glad
you’re both okay.” She looked over her shoulder at the
two girls and two boys at her table. “I better get back to
work.”

“Teacher, huh?”
I asked, forcing a smile. “It seems fitting.”

She let out a small
chuckle. “I guess. I do my best. It’s three parts
teaching and one part grief counseling, though. These poor kids …
but at least they’re still alive. We have hope.”

I bit my tongue,
holding back a sigh while we checked out the rest of the school. We
found Teah and Teal, the cousins who’d been with Heather and
Sonya in Cape Heron, teaching other classes. I counted forty-two
children between the ages of three and fifteen. Vanessa said anyone
over fifteen was put to work, and there were a handful of toddlers
and infants who stayed with their parents. Sure, seeing that children
had survived gave me the tiniest bit of hope, but compared to how
many had died … I couldn’t accept the optimism everyone
here seemed to embrace. The events of the day had improved my
outlook, certainly, but there was a reason I’d woken this
morning with a heavy heart.

“This is the part
you’ll both love,” Owen said as he led us to the area
marked Training. At least three-quarters of the mind signatures in
the entire place were here. “What Brogan had built before.”

“Except this
part. This is the boring stuff,” Vanessa whispered as we passed
by the sections closest to the rest of the compound. Shelves of books
and photo albums lined the cinderblock wall that separated the
Training section from the dining area. “Horticulture and plant
identification, which I guess is necessary for the Normans so they
don’t eat poisonous plants, although nothing grows anyway, so I
don’t know if it really matters.”

“Also so they can
learn how to grow food,” Owen added, apparently hearing her,
and Vanessa shrugged. “Brogan collected a huge library of
information for everything from first aid—” he pointed to
a space where a dummy lay on a card table surrounded by gauze, dental
floss, and other items “—to shoemaking to making your own
batteries to welding. There are classrooms over there to our right
for when something special comes up. Some of the best stuff is how to
recycle the junk we create and scavenge into useful items. Without
magic!”

“Yeah, who knew,”
Vanessa muttered teasingly.

We paused by the gym
area, where several people worked out on treadmills, stair-climbers,
and stationary bikes or lifted weights, before heading toward the
back. The first insanely huge room we entered, the size of four
footballs fields and walled off on all sides, was the archery range.
People of all ages, from sixteen up to sixty, men and women both,
target practiced with compound bows and crossbows. An instructor
walked behind them, adjusting stances and holds for better aiming.
After that, we peeked into the shooting range, which was even bigger
than the archery range and where the walls were padded to absorb a
lot of the sound, but it was still necessary to wear earmuffs.

“I keep a muffle
spell on that place,” Owen said once we left. “Otherwise,
we’d all be suffering migraines.”

“Do they have
silver bullets?” Tristan asked.

“Not for
practice, but in the armory. That’s why we scavenge anything
silver. In the back is a machine shop with a forge.” He stopped
in front of a large, open section covered in mats. “I expect
you’ll be spending some time here.”

Dozens of paired-off
people practiced martial arts, kickboxing, wrestling, and boxing.
Brogan walked among them, stopping now and then to correct someone’s
form.

“He has a strict
training regimen,” Owen said. “He’s pretty good,
and Mum helped for a while, but she’s been too busy with
managing everything and conversions. I think you, Tristan, can do
even better.”

Tristan crossed his
arms over his chest as he watched and nodded. “They’re
not doing badly, but they can do better with a little help. Do they
all train in weapons, too?”

“Of course,”
Vanessa said before she strode off to show a woman how to angle her
hand to hit her partner’s weak spot dead-on.

“Who do they plan
on fighting?” I asked. “They can’t even go above
ground, can they?”

“The air’s
clean in some places,” Owen said. “We’ll explain
when we can all sit down together. There’s a lot to figure
out.”

“I know there’s
a lot we need to discuss,” I agreed, and I lifted my arms to
indicate the Normans surrounding us. “But these people aren’t
a part of it. They need to stay down here, where it’s safe.
Because they really may be the only hope for the future.”

“They want to
fight, Alexis,” Owen said. “Look at them. Look at the
determination on their faces.”

“They can’t
fight our war,” I protested.

“It’s not
just your war,” Brogan said, suddenly by my side. “These
people have lost everything. Their homes. Their businesses. Their
ways of life …. Their loved ones. They—all of us—have
just as much vested in the war against those Daemoni sons-of-bitches
as you do, if not more. You won’t be able to stop us from
fighting with you.”

I tried to push my hand
through my hair, but it got caught up in the ratty tangles. “Those
people
can’t
fight. They’re human. There’s
no way they can defeat the Daemoni.”

“You know that’s
not true,” Tristan said. “If we can train them properly,
they’ll be prepared.”

I stared at him for a
long moment before shaking my head. “No way. We’ve
already lost enough humans
and
Amadis. What are we going to
do? Take the few hundred here to face the hundreds of thousands of
Daemoni and their Demons? I don’t think so. You and I have one
more battle to fight for our son, Tristan, but we’re
not
leading these people into another war that can’t be won.”

BOOK: Faith (Soul Savers Book 7)
9.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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