by Kristie Cook
I didn’t miss what else Cassandra had said, though.
“If you don’t expect him to break the curse, then why are you so willing for him to go to the Daemoni?” I asked.
“That is what he needs to do. It is his purpose.”
I growled. “So much for getting somewhere with the truth.” I turned and stomped away again. “At least tell me this. If there’s nothing worth sacrificing himself for—and nothing worth me fighting Lucas for—where does that get us?”
I waited for an answer, even glanced over my shoulder, knowing they followed me. All three of them looked bemused.
I blew out a breath. “Fine. I’ll tell you. Dorian becomes no different than the rest of the Summoned sons, and ends up losing his soul to Satan because you obviously don’t care about him. And don’t tell me such-and-such will happen and I’ll save everyone, including Dorian, blah blah blah, because you know what? I don’t believe you anymore. I can’t believe anything any of you say. You never tell me the whole truth. You told me I’d save humanity, but that was a lie. And you didn’t help me as you’d promised you would. So you either lied then, too, or you didn’t know that Lucas would do this, which means the Angels didn’t know. And you know what that tells me? God didn’t share that tidbit with them. He walked away. He abandoned all of us. Because He knows there’s nothing left worth fighting for.” I threw my hands in the air. “So like I said before, we’ve already lost. So, please, show me out so I can save the only two people I can.”
“Do you really believe God has abandoned us? That there is nothing worth fighting for?” Cassandra asked me in complete earnestness.
“Based on everything I’ve seen and know, that’s exactly what I believe. How many ways do I need to say it?” I stopped again and turned on them, my patience worn. “Now please tell me how the hell to get out of here!”
Cassandra, Rina, and Mom stared at me for a long moment, and then Cassandra finally moved, waving her hand outwards, and the white mist that surrounded us dissipated. I thought for a moment, she’d opened the veil for me to slip through. Finally! But as I tried to step into Earth’s realm, the veil didn’t give. She was only allowing me to see. And although I pretty much expected it, I gasped at the scene before us.
She’d given us a birds-eye view of what I thought might be the area between Washington, D.C., and New York City, at one time densely populated and recognizable by landmark structures. D.C. looked even worse than the last time I’d seen it, and from there to New York, everything was pretty much flattened and covered in white ash. The Statue of Liberty was noticeably missing from New York’s harbor, and half of the skyscrapers had been diminished to steel-beamed skeletons and piles of concrete. Those still standing, including the Empire State Building, gaped open with huge chunks carved out of their sides and several floors missing from their tops.
Not a single sign of life showed.
No people crowding the sidewalks, of course. No cars on the streets or highways. No animals roaming or even birds soaring in the air. Wait. I focused in on a single vehicle traversing a highway. The occupants must have been supernatural to be able to survive the radiation that no doubt hung in the air.
I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d left Earth—time meant nothing here. On the one hand, it’d seemed like decades, especially my time in Hell. That alone could have been centuries. But seeing this made me think not so much. Maybe days or weeks or months. Not that it really mattered.
“Like I said, nothing worth fighting for.”
“That is what you see on the surface,” Cassandra said, “but come with me. I want to show you something.”
She took my hand, and we walked several steps, the Earth passing by beneath our feet. Then we stopped over what looked like Arizona and New Mexico, and we looked into what appeared to be a dark cellar or perhaps a cave. A rather large cavern, I realized, with tunnels and smaller caves running off of the main one. Several dozen people of all ages, maybe even a hundred of them, had gathered as a community, eating bread and some kind of stew from a bowl, talking in groups and laughing at each other’s jokes.
“This is happening now?” I asked.
Cassandra nodded. “This very moment.”
Then the scene before us blinked away. Not gone, but changed, making me choke. All of the people had become corpses, lying like garbage scattered across the cavern floor, their dead eyes staring at the walls or ceiling. Their clothes were blackened with dried blood, more of which had become dark brown stains on the floor and spatters on the walls. The wounds in the corpses’ flesh were obviously fang bites, although a few were missing entire limbs or chunks from their bodies, meaning Weres had been involved, too. Their screams filled my ears, their souls begging for mercy and asking me why.
I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears before another flashback from Hell knocked me down.
“Why do you show me Daemoni food?” I demanded.
“Alexis,” Mom admonished. “Don’t be so crude.”
“Crude? Look at them!” I opened my eyes, waving my hand toward the scene, but it had reverted to the gathering of people. Live people. Eating and chatting and seeming to enjoy each other’s company, despite their circumstances. “Didn’t you see it?”
“See what?” Rina asked, sounding genuinely bemused. “We see a community of Normans who are trying to make the best with what they have.”
“No. What was just there. The cavern full of carnage.”
They all stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. I scowled.
“When you return to Earth, you can help those souls,” Cassandra said. “You will help them. Right?”
I glanced at the people in the cavern beyond the veil. “If it were possible, of course. But it’s not. In the end, they’ll be Daemoni food. And their end is soon. There’s not enough of them to fight the creatures that are coming for them. Can I go now?”
The women stared at me, blinking, their jaws unhinged.
“These are not the only ones,” Cassandra finally said, and she changed the view.
She showed other clusters of Normans around the world who’d found a place to hide and survive underground, creating their own miniature societies as they figured out how to continue on in this new world. Some focused on food and water, and others on weapons. Some looked well-prepared and might have been crazy enough to try to take on the Daemoni. But all turned into corpses before my eyes, screaming my name, asking me how I could do this to them, weeping for their souls.
When I felt myself slipping into the madness of Hell, though, I put a stop to it. Perhaps a permanent breakdown would make the Angels realize I was not their saving grace, but then they’d probably lock me up in some weird Heaven asylum, and I’d never be able to go after Tristan. I needed him to help me save Dorian because apparently he was the only person left who cared about our son. So I held on to my sanity as best as I could.
“There are still plenty of Amadis, too, working for the cause,” Mom said as Cassandra showed us another scene from Earth—Amadis in Asia working to convert a couple of Daemoni vamps. Yay. Two new souls saved, yes, but when it came to war, they were only two more vamps against thousands … hundreds of thousands. I couldn’t help but imagine their demise that was inevitable.
“Well, at least their souls will be saved, because their bodies certainly won’t be,” I muttered.
Mom scowled at me, growing impatient with what she’d called my stubbornness at one point. But I wasn’t being stubborn. I didn’t want to see all of these people dead. I didn’t want to feel their agony and hear their cries for help. But I saw it and heard it over and over again, threatening to break me once and for all.
“I can’t help that that’s what I see,” I said. “It’s more truth than what you’re trying to throw at me. Going to Hell will do that to you—open your eyes to the horrors your pure souls refuse to believe possible. But they are possible. Lucas proved it.”
Cassandra tilted her head to the side as I said t
his, studying me closely. The light of an aha moment seemed to switch on in her eyes. “You honestly do see only evil happening to these people.”
Hallelujah. Someone finally understood. Except I suddenly wanted to hide. She not only grasped what I’d been trying to tell her, but she saw right through me—saw that dark blemish of Hell stamped on my heart, on my soul that changed everything I knew. But at least now we could move on, to how we could save my husband and son.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. So how can you ask me to forsake Tristan’s and Dorian’s souls for that? I can’t believe you’d do it at all, although it wouldn’t be the first time, but especially not for a world that’s hopeless.”
“Hopeless?” Cassandra pronounced the word as though she’d never heard it before, weighing it on her tongue as though she’d never spoken it either. She glanced around for a moment before her eyes landed on me. “Alexis, you do know the story of how I began the Amadis, yes?”
My brows furrowed at this abrupt change in subject. “Yes, of course. Jordan gave you the potion that he thought had given him eternal life, and the Angels enhanced it, giving you powers so you could start their army on Earth. So instead of becoming evil like him, you remained good. Are you saying you have a potion to give the Daemoni that would automatically convert them?”
She sighed. “No. That would be too simple.”
“Then why are we wasting time on this?”
She ignored me. “You have given the abridged version. Do you remember what set my twin brother and me down very different roads to start with?”
Their story had been in my leather-bound book that told the history of the Amadis all the way up to the present day. I’d memorized everything in the book before it was stored in the Sacred Archives where the Angels, I assumed, kept it up to date. I briefly wondered now if the Sacred Archives even existed anymore, along with the matriarch’s mansion or Amadis Island, for that matter. I realized now that while sharing scenes from Earth, Cassandra hadn’t shown Amadis Island. If the island no longer existed, then that told me there was no future for the Amadis. Just as I’d been saying.
“It started with my father’s death,” Cassandra said when I didn’t answer her.
My full attention landed on her as I realized where she was going with this.
“Right. You didn’t know he wasn’t human until then, when he rose from his bed with wings. And you saw him as an Angel, and Jordan saw him as a Demon.”
“Correct. Jordan’s vision of our father sent him down a road to the Daemoni and Hell, while my vision gave me hope, which kept me going when I thought my world had ended. Without that hope, I would have given up and lived out my days in that hut in the meadow. I would have never found my true love again, given birth to my daughter, or started the Amadis.”
“But you were right,” I said. “Jordan was wrong when he thought he saw a Demon.”
“He would disagree with you. Until the very end, he was convinced he was right. He believed with every ounce of his soul that he saw our father as a Demon. For the rest of his life, that is where he put all of his faith.”
“So you’re saying that seeing is believing. And I know what I saw out there.” I nodded in the direction of the Earthly realm. “And I know what else I’ve seen with my own two eyes, experienced with my own life.”
“I know what I saw, as well,” Cassandra said. “Just as I know that I saw my father as an Angel. In today’s Earth, I see humans who continue fighting for their lives because as bad as everything is, they believe it can be better again. I see Amadis protecting them while also converting Daemoni, because they have hope, too. Whether or not they believe you have left them, they continue to fight. They continue to put their faith in their belief that good will win.”
Mom’s head bobbed. “I see that, too.”
“As do I,” Rina agreed.
I sighed internally. I really wished I could see what they did—my heart and soul ached to believe there was hope for humanity and the world. But I couldn’t just flip a switch and somehow magically believe. Not after all I’d seen and been through.
“I’m sorry that I don’t. If I did see any hope, I’d do everything I could to help them. I swear I would! But I’m not enough. Together, we’re not enough. There is no real hope.”
Cassandra moved closer to me, taking my hands into hers. “Alexis, I ask that you please dig deep in yourself and find that hope. It is there, I know it is, not to be seen with your eyes, but felt in your soul. I beg that you not follow my brother’s path out of refusal to open your heart again. Please be willing to consider that your view might not be the real one.”
Mom gave me a sad smile. “You used to be so full of love, hope, and faith.”
I snorted. “Yeah, well, time in Hell—on Earth and the real thing—will do that to you.”
“Honey, don’t let Satan ruin everything for you. You have the chance to restore goodness in the world. Don’t let him take that away. Don’t let him win.”
I pursed my lips together and looked away from the trio. Conflicting emotions swirled through me, twisting everything up inside.
“Trust in your Father,” Cassandra said, and my eyes flew back to her as I raised an eyebrow. “Not that evil creature on Earth. He was merely a means to an end—you. I mean your true Father. He is taking care of you. Of all of us. He has His will and a plan, and you are part of it.”
Heh. God had left the building. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
“Trust in Him, Alexis, and He will equip you with what you need,” Rina said.
“Or … be like Jordan and place your faith in Satan, and like him, suffer the consequences,” Cassandra said. “Our hope is that you won’t abandon your people and the whole race of humanity when they need you most.”
I suppressed a growl. I’d never abandon my people or humanity! Not if I could believe there was any chance of saving them. But, at least from here, I couldn’t see that possibility. I couldn’t see anyone left to save. I couldn’t even trust that what Cassandra had shown me through the veil depicted any semblance of truth, considering they never fully disclosed anything to me. For all I knew, they showed me nothing more than propaganda.
Cassandra placed a finger on my chest. “Where you place your faith—that is your decision, Alexis, and only yours.”
“I have no faith. You guys have pretty much shot that to Hell. Literally.”
“You believe in something, honey.”
“Like what?” I demanded. “You? The Angels? God?”
She frowned. “Start somewhere, and you will find your faith.”
Yeah, well, I wasn’t sure where to start because I didn’t know what I believed in anymore. Everything and everyone I’d trusted in before had broken their promises. God, the Angels, Mom and Rina, the power of the Amadis … they’d all betrayed me.
Everyone except Tristan.
I still believed in him. In us. In our love.
And our son. I still believed there was hope for Dorian.
Then there was my extended family—Owen and Vanessa, Charlotte, Sheree, Blossom and Jax. Heather and even Sonya. But I had no idea if any of them were still alive. Cassandra hadn’t shown me where they were, so that could only mean one thing, and I didn’t want to see that.
So my husband and my son appeared to be all that was left worth fighting for. Would I fight for others? If I could, I would. Of course I would! But the way things looked, Tristan and Dorian had to be enough for me to believe in to carry me through what I had to do. Were they? My heart nearly burst with the love I had for them. Hell, yeah, they were enough. I just had to figure out how to save Tristan and then our son. As for the rest of the world? Their souls were no less valuable, but I didn’t know what could be done. For now, they were my world.
And I couldn’t save either as long as I was here.
“Okay.” I lifted my hands, palms up. “You’re right. I know what I have to do.”
Mom, Rina, and Cassandra eye
d me carefully.
“You will do what needs to be done to save Earth’s souls?” Cassandra asked.
If there are any left. But I was done arguing with them, so I nodded. “Yeah. But not because it’s my purpose. But because, unlike any of you, I value all of their souls and would never purposely leave anyone behind.”
Rina pressed her lips together. Mom narrowed her eyes. Cassandra only nodded. They couldn’t argue with me. Too many times they’d sacrificed one soul for the “greater good.” Too many times in the past they’d asked me to do the same. Asked me even now. I’d never given in before and never would.
“God is with you,” Cassandra finally said.
“Find your faith, Alexis,” Rina said.
“I love you always, no matter what,” Mom said.
Then the bottom dropped out from underneath me, and I fell.
Chapter 6
When I found her soul down here in Hell, I’d wanted to kill her. My own soul filled with joy to see her, of course, even if it was her essence in the Otherworld rather than her whole self in the Earthly realm. At least we were together. But finding her in Hell made me think she’d gone and done something stupid again, as she was known to do. It wasn’t her fault—she hadn’t had time to learn the rules like the rest of us had. We were born into a different world than her, even Rina and Sophia, who’d come from a different time. We often took for granted what we knew. With new challenges thrown at us nonstop, I’d been unable to give Alexis the lessons I’d gained in my hundreds of years. She’d had to learn as we went, trial by fire, so she was bound to make mistakes.
But to know that her soul’s presence in Hell was not one of those mistakes, but Satan’s doing, was quite the relief.