Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (2 page)

As though the smoke
from the many pyres that had burnt over the centuries had stained the
stone, the faces of hundreds of Ames women were depicted on the
cliff’s wall around this ledge. Including Rina’s and
Mom’s, which were quite a bit darker than the others, because
time and weather hadn’t faded them yet. My fingers traced over
their cheeks and jawlines as I stared at them for a long moment
before turning and sitting, letting my legs dangle over the ledge.

The Aegean Sea spread
before me to the horizon, where the sun began to show itself,
streaking the sky and clouds with bright pinks and oranges. The water
reflected the colors, and the sunrise was as stunning as any sunset
I’d watched with Tristan. Two birds cawed at each other
overhead as they flew by before diving down for the sea to catch
their breakfast. The waves threw themselves against the cliffs and
rocks below, sending spray high into the air, but not quite high
enough to reach me. Still, I could taste the saltiness on my lips and
tongue with each breath I inhaled.

Here in this place, I
somehow felt as though I sat among my mother, grandmother, and the
rest of my ancestors in Heaven, rather than on the other side of the
veil that separated the Otherworld realm from our physical one. Maybe
their portraits behind me provided the comfort or maybe it was
something more Otherworldly, but I didn’t feel quite as alone
here, even though I was the last of my kind on this entire planet. In
this entire realm. The Ames family line teetered on the verge of
extinction, and the Amadis would follow shortly.

Somehow, I was supposed
to prevent that.

“What am I going
to do?” I asked aloud, not for the first time.

Mom and Rina—and
even Cassandra, the very first Amadis matriarch—had promised me
that night on the abbey grounds that I would never be alone. But
although I felt their presence here, I also felt completely isolated.
I wished they could talk to me, give me guidance and direction, tell
me how to move forward. Because I was stuck. Paralyzed. At a complete
loss.

“How do I lead
the Amadis when I still know so little? How do I take on this war
that I know is coming? How do I function without you?” I let
out a guttural cry. “How can I be the mother to all of these
people when I can’t even handle Dorian? Please tell me what to
do!”

Mom and Rina had both
assured me I was ready for this role, but I most certainly wasn’t.
Compared to them, I was still an infant. They’d had
decades—more than a century—to prepare and serve as
leaders. I was still in my twenties with only two-and-a-half years of
living in this strange world no Norman would believe existed. How
could anyone, especially the Angels, think I was ready to take this
all on?

“
You are not
alone.
”

The words whispered in
my head, so quietly, I couldn’t tell if Rina, Cassandra, or Mom
spoke to me. Or perhaps just a figment of my imagination.

“But you’re
not here,” I spoke aloud.

“
But others
are. You do not have to do it all by yourself.
” The sound
came as a mixture of all of their voices, soft and multilayered.

I pressed my lips
together and nodded. “I have Tristan, I know.”

“
Yes, you do.
But not only him. You have people, Alexis. People who want to serve
you.
”

I stared out at the
sunrise as I considered this. My council. They were telling me to
form my council that would serve as my confidants and advisors.

“
Be prepared,
Alexis. The Daemoni are acting. Everything is about to change!
”

“What does that
mean?” I knew the Daemoni had something up their collective
sleeve—Kali and Lucas had given us a glimpse of it at the
abbey. But they’d been quite silent the last several weeks, and
I doubted it had anything to do with them giving us time to mourn.
Lucas didn’t have that kind of respect in a single cell of his
body. They must have been planning something big and were now ready
to execute.

My ancestors didn’t
answer me, and I asked again, pleading. “What do you mean?
What’s about to happen? Tell me what to do!”

I waited quietly, but
still no response came. In fact, even when I changed the subject, no
more answers came to any of my questions, including what to do about
Dorian. My poor son had just been an eight, almost nine-year-old
child when Owen had taken him from the safe house on Captiva Island.
Six months later, he’d returned taller—taller than me
now—and seemingly much older, as though he’d aged four or
five years while we’d been separated, complete with the broody
attitude of an adolescent. I’d been letting him off easy
because of everything he’d been through—from being
kidnapped and kept with the sorceress-bitch Kali to watching Rina and
his Mimi die violently—but I knew deep down his insolent
behavior came from more than his suffering from PTSD. The Daemoni had
changed him mentally and physically. I didn’t know how,
exactly, because he refused to talk about it and stayed to himself,
rarely leaving his room as he claimed he was studying. Studying what,
I also didn’t know. Presumably his schoolwork, but I had a
feeling he was also discovering and growing his powers. And keeping
them hidden from us.
What had Kali and the Daemoni done to him?
Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of me. My baby was no longer
my little boy.

I’d also been
through a lot and couldn’t find the answers of what to do about
him within me. Tristan and I had to figure out something, though,
because if my assumption was right that Dorian’s powers had
developed while he’d been gone, he’d become more valuable
to our enemy, and they’d be after him, convincing him to change
sides like all of the Ames sons before him. With the dark attitude
Dorian had been harboring, it wouldn’t be long before he
accepted their promises and walked off to the Daemoni by choice.

“
Alexis
.”
Tristan’s mental voice tugged at my mind.

Yeah?

“
Are you okay,
ma lykita
?
”

I chuckled darkly. I
often wondered how I’d ever be okay again, but I had him, so I
knew I would be.

I’m fine
,
I answered.

“
It’s
almost time to meet with Scarecrow so we can get the entire lowdown.
”

The sun had risen quite
a bit in the sky by now, and I’d barely noticed, wrapped up in
my own thoughts. Knowing I had to push beyond my grief and take my
role seriously as matriarch, I’d agreed to finally sit down
with Owen today to find out everything he’d learned during his
time with the Daemoni. We had a war to plan, and he had the best
inside intelligence. At least, he’d better, because he had a
lot of making up to do after acting like a traitor and taking Dorian
from us for so long.

I flashed to the
matriarch’s mansion, appearing at the large, double wooden
doors on the west side of the building. I entered through the
three-story foyer with the stone steps that wrapped up the outer
edges and fire sconces casting shadows on the walls. Rina had been a
traditionalist, keeping the mansion in the past except for the media
room that held all of today’s technology. The only change we’d
made so far was to add Wi-Fi to the mansion and electricity to Rina’s
and Mom’s offices—mine and Tristan’s now—along
with all of the devices we needed to run a society and an army in
today’s world.

Owen arrived shortly
after me, and after a quick mind-check on Tristan, I realized he’d
be a few more minutes. He was in the shower, and I briefly thought
about joining him, but instead decided to harass Owen again with an
interrogation. Admittedly, I hadn’t paid much attention to his
previous recounts of why he’d taken our son, too lost in my
grief. But I needed to know, so I asked every question I could
possibly think of as I sat on the edge of Rina’s large, antique
desk and Owen sat in front of me in a wingback chair.

“So let me get
this straight,” I said after he’d explained everything,
trying to make sure I understood. “You took Dorian to show Kali
she could trust you and to be able to protect him since she was
determined to have him no matter what. Kali wanted Dorian to give
herself leverage with the Daemoni Ancients so she could take Lucas
out and assume his position as leader of the Daemoni. You were trying
to set her up with Tristan and me so we could kill her, and I could
trap her soul and deliver on my so-called obligation to the faeries.”

Owen’s
straw-colored hair shook as he nodded his head. “You got it.”

“Except you
didn’t know about Kali’s plan to use Noah as bait to lure
Rina and Mom there.”

He frowned now,
producing three vertical lines between his eyebrows. “No, I
didn’t. I knew she had a vendetta against Rina, but I didn’t
know the plan had been to have Noah reach out to her. Of course, he
wasn’t under his own control, or he never would have.”

Right. Kali had put a
spell on run-of-the-mill stones from Earth to make them emulate a
faerie stone. She’d developed the idea based on the stone Bree
had given to Tristan and he had given to me—it created a
connection between us so he could feel my emotions and keep his own
in check. Kali’s stones were slightly different. She’d
implanted one into Noah, let it soak in his blood to absorb his
genetic imprint, and then broke a chunk of the stone into pieces. She
placed those shards into the hearts of Norman soldiers and linked
them all to Noah.

My fingers absently
rubbed at the cotton cloth covering Tristan’s stone embedded
into my skin. Bree had implanted it into my flesh over my heart so
I’d never lose it to the Daemoni again. “So Kali had
taken control of Noah, who in turn had control over a whole company
of the British Army.”

“Yes,” Owen
confirmed. “But Lucas had his own diabolical plan as far as
those soldiers were concerned.”

Lucas wanted more than
control—he wanted the kind of undying loyalty a lykora gives to
her master. So he’d sent Victor the vampire, Vanessa’s
twin and my half-brother, after Sasha the same night Kali had sent
Owen after Dorian. Right after Owen and Dorian left and before Sasha
could follow them, Victor had taken advantage of the chaos in the
rest of the safe house and popped into the room. Sasha had put up a
big fight, but the vampire had been able to clip her wing and collect
enough blood for Lucas to carry out a most atrocious act of war. He’d
used her blood to create superhuman soldiers with all of Sasha’s
qualities—the ability to grow to monster size, inhuman strength
and speed, and unsurpassed loyalty. Combined with the bewitched
stones, this gave Lucas the ultimate control over all of them. He had
used Noah to create a new army that was better than the Daemoni,
because in his eyes, Normans were expendable.

Tristan finally showed
his beautiful self after we’d gone over the whole story and I’d
taken another chance to throw the guilt on Owen for everything he’d
put us through. Not just Tristan and me, but also poor Blossom, who’d
really pushed her magic doing locator spells and trying to break
through Owen’s cloaks on Dorian.

“Are you done
torturing Scarecrow for the thirtieth time?” Tristan asked as
he came in wearing Norman clothes of khaki shorts and a green V-neck
Polo that couldn’t have hugged his powerful build more
perfectly. The gold in his hazel eyes sparkled with his teasing, and
the corners of his mouth lifted in a sexy smirk. “You know
that’s not the real reason he’s here.”

I shrugged. It hadn’t
really been thirty times. “We were waiting on you. What better
way to pass the time?”

Tristan sat on the edge
of the desk next to me and turned his attention to Owen. “So
you were going to tell us about Noah and those soldiers.”

Owen rose to his feet,
walked a little circle around the chair, and leaned his arms on the
back of it. “Yeah, that. It’s not only about Noah. It’s
much, much bigger.”

He explained how Lucas
had teamed up with the U.S. Department of Defense—as well as
other government entities around the world—to supposedly supply
them with super-soldiers, but intending to keep them for his own
plans. He told us how Lucas and Kali had kept the Summoned sons and
some of their offspring locked up on DoD property, such as the
building where we’d found Dorian the first time in Virginia.
Like they’d done with Noah and his battery of soldiers, they’d
been using the stones Kali had created on
all
of the sons and
many of their descendants, then implanting chips from those stones
into Norman soldiers around the world.

“So we could
potentially have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of human soldiers
under Lucas’s control,” Tristan surmised. “Some of
them, if not all of them, enhanced with Sasha’s blood and
extremely dangerous.”

“And of course,
we can’t kill them,” Owen added. That was part of the
Amadis creed—we couldn’t kill Normans unless absolutely
and entirely necessary for the protection of others. Which it may
come down to if this war really happened.

Charlotte, Owen’s
mother and our second-best warlock, rapped her knuckles on the
doorframe before entering my office, her blond hair swishing over her
shoulders as she crossed the room with long, purposeful strides. Like
me, she gave the outward appearance of being okay, but the pain of
losing her best friend, my mother, lingered just below the surface.

“If that’s
not bad enough,” she said, “you need to turn on the TV.”

Vanessa followed her
in, slowing for a moment to brush her pale hand over Owen’s arm
before coming to my side and draping an arm across my shoulders. I
leaned against her, feeling the silkiness of her white-blond hair
against my cheek as I accepted her sisterly hug, while Tristan jabbed
buttons on the remote to turn on the flat screen in the corner. Every
channel showed the same scene: what looked like a riot at first
glance, but it quickly became obvious we were witnessing a Daemoni
attack. On the Normans. In public.