by Kristie Cook
Wrath
( Soul Savers - 5 )
Kristie Cook
Will a mother’s wrath make her cross the line?
I didn’t want to cry. For once in my life, tears evaded me. Perhaps because I refused to grieve this loss, because it wasn’t a loss in my eyes, in my heart. It was a call for war, yes. But not a loss. I wouldn’t allow it.
Besides, I was too mad to cry, even in my exhaustion, and anger would get me much further.
As I curled my body around Sasha’s, though, I realized the anger within me had changed. I no longer felt irrational and blinding fury that dulled all other emotions. But that was okay. I really didn’t want to be Psycho Alexis. This, what I now felt in every cell of my body down to the core, was better. My anger had condensed and solidified into a cold, hard stone settling within me. Something I could control and hold onto for the long term to keep me going and focused on the goal.
Wrath.
That’s what I felt. And there was nothing worse than the wrath of a pissed-off mother.
Wrath, the fifth volume in the bestselling, award-winning Soul Savers Series, will have you on the edge-of-your-seat-ravenously-devouring-junk-food as you experience the mysteries, magic, betrayals, and passion that you’ve come to expect from Kristie Cook’s writing.
Wrath
Soul Savers - 5
by
Kristie Cook
For Kristie’s Crew, Kristie’s Warriors, and Team #KnightRiders
Acknowledgements
Glory first to God Almighty and Jesus Christ, my Savior. He has blessed me in countless ways, including giving me this book and the story of Alexis and Tristan.
Shawn, Nathan, Austin, and Zakary, once again, your patience, support, and understanding do not go unnoticed. You are my rock and my foundation. Mom, Dad, and Keena, of course I wouldn’t be here without you, but I mean “here” in a variety of ways.
Chrissi, you are my pillar of strength that I’ve needed to lean on entirely too much during the creation of this book. I’m so thankful to have you working by my side, doing everything from arranging our travel to ensuring my family and I eat while I’m in the cave. Here’s to continued success for our little venture. And lots of laughs. We deserve them.
Brenda, my talented friend, I love you hard. And your covers. And your feedback. Julie, Stacey, Debbie, Kate, Inga, Jessie, Rissa, Christina, Heather, Mindy, and Rebecca—aka, my betas who are the bomb—thank you for your valuable insight. I sincerely appreciate everything else you do, as well as the rest of Kristie’s Crew: Claire, Kath, and Lisa. Thank you also to Kristie’s Warriors. We might be new and small right now, but we’re also mighty. I look forward to all of the fun we have ahead of us. Also a thank you to Team #KnightRiders who provide immense support to Tristan (and the rest of the gang) when needed.
Jen and Kristen, because of you, this story shines like a polished gem. Lesley, I’m so lucky to have friends who are beautiful inside and out, but especially fortunate to have one who also looks as good in leathers as you do.
Finally, a GINORMOUS shout-out to my readers. You have come so far with me, and with Alexis and Tristan, and I am actually pretty overwhelmed that you’re still here. I would have written this story anyway, but I’m amazed at how people around the world love these characters as much as I do and are dying to know what happens next. Well, without further ado, I’ll let you find out. I hope you enjoy this installment. But be prepared—you’ll need tissues.
Chapter 1
He was gone. Really gone.
My little boy, my baby, the light of my life. Gone.
No matter how hard I tried, how far I pushed the boundaries of my mind to feel across the sea of mind signatures, I couldn’t find his. Of course I couldn’t. But I knew where I could.
My fingers curled into Sasha’s white and gray striped fur, trying to soothe her, though I had no soothing vibes within me. I sat on my knees in the bedroom part of the safe house suite where I had left Dorian, where I thought he’d be safe when I couldn’t be there to protect him myself. Barely bigger than my hand, the lykora lay on her side in her natural form, her silver blood staining the blue-and-cream Oriental rug under her and coagulating on her back where one of her wings had been severed. Who could be so cruel? Stupid question. I knew that answer, too. He’d left my dagger under her to ensure I knew.
Heavy arms hung over my shoulders, arms that usually gave me comfort but now trembled with sobs.
“Can you heal her?” I asked, my voice sounding rough and distant. When I received no answer, I asked again, each word discrete and deliberate. “Tristan. Can you heal her?”
He lifted his head from my shoulder, but Blossom answered first.
“She’s an Angelic being, Alexis,” she said from behind me. “She’ll heal on her own.”
“Good,” I said. I picked up my dagger, wiped her blood off of it and onto my leather pants, put it back where it belonged on my hip, and flashed.
Tampa. Gainesville. Tallahassee. Rural Alabama and Mississippi. From here, I followed the path Vanessa and I had taken only two days before, barely seeing the landscape of each place before flashing to the next one. Tristan finally caught up to me outside of Kansas City, where the March air was significantly cooler than at home.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tight against his chest, preventing me from flashing again.
“Where are you going?” he asked, his lovely voice distorted with the two primary emotions roiling within me—anger and grief. Mostly anger. The kind that didn’t dissipate but built with each passing moment.
“To Hades,” I answered flatly.
“Alone?”
“Unless you’re coming with me, yes.”
“Alexis, we can’t just waltz into Hades—”
“Not waltz. Storm.” Like the raging storm building inside me.
“Still. We can’t—”
“I guess that’s your answer then.” I pushed a spark of electricity into him and used the moment of surprise to flip my way out of his hold. Then I flashed.
Again and again.
But my power was waning. After flashing halfway across the world once already in the last two days, fighting my way out of Hades and escaping Lucas, the sperm donor, I hadn’t been able to truly regenerate. I had to pause longer between each flash, but each time I did, I envisioned what I would do when I got to Hades. The throats I would slash. The Demons I would fry to a crisp. Lucas’s life I would take, but only after slicing the smirk off his face, and carving his eyeballs out with my silver dagger and stuffing them into his lipless mouth.
The thoughts should have terrified me, but they only pushed me on.
Until Tristan stopped me once again in Wyoming.
“Alexis, you can’t—”
I ignored him and flashed.
“Take them on by yourself,” he finished in Idaho.
“Watch me.” I flashed again.
“But we can’t—” he started again in Washington.
“Damn it, Tristan. I don’t want to hear ‘can’t’!” I yelled, and I flashed again.
And slammed into a wall.
At least, that’s what it felt like. An invisible wall that blocked my flash, causing me to materialize in an empty field somewhere near the Canadian border. I tried again and appeared by a stream, the lights of Seattle not far off. I screamed with frustration.
“The border’s been shielded,” Tristan said from behind me. “And not a normal shield, either, but like an invisible fence we can’t flash through. No one can pass through at all, even Normans, except at guarded border crossings.”
I didn’t reply before I flashed again, farther inland. No mage could have possibly shielded the entire border between the United States and Canada. I would find a way through. F
ocusing on the nearest state highway, I flashed to about two hundred yards outside a border crossing.
Several armed soldiers guarded a barbed-wire-topped steel gate that stretched across the two-lane highway, blocking anyone from simply crossing. Lines of cars waited from both directions. More guards surrounded the first car, pulling the driver and passengers out and training their flashlights on their eyes and hands. Others were searching the car and its contents. I absorbed all of this in a few seconds and knew that gate provided my way into Canada, and then I could resume flashing to Siberia. A steel gate and a few soldiers weren’t about to stop me.
I sprinted for the crossing, planning to blur past them all, hurdle it, and be on my way without anyone noticing. But someone did. Perhaps those soldiers weren’t all Norman. Gunfire tore through the night. Bullets flew at me. You’ve got to be kidding me. I flicked my fingers, and the bullets fell to the ground. As I ran, I lifted my left hand, a blue current already sparking. More gunfire erupted. I shot electricity, not aiming for any particular guard, but simply shooting bolts wildly as a warning. People screamed. More soldiers shot at me, but I was almost there. Almost to the gate.
And nobody—not even a dozen men with automatic assault rifles—could stop me from getting to my son.
Just as I was about to make the leap, though, something hard slammed into my side. The breath whooshed out of my lungs. My vision went dark.
Only for a moment. Like a blink. And when I could see again, I was lying on the ground, face up, sucking in a breath of air. Tristan blocked my view of the night sky, hovering over me with his hands on each side of my head and his knees on each side of my legs. He’d flashed me away from the gate. I guess there was someone who could stop me.
Using only my mind, I pushed him away and sprang to my feet.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I yelled.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled back as he suddenly appeared right in front of me, towering over me. “Innocent people, Lex? What’s the matter with you?”
“I was almost through!”
“And how many would you have killed in the process?”
“As many as it took.”
He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “You need to calm down. This isn’t you.”
No, it wasn’t. But at the moment, I didn’t care. “I just need to get there.”
I flashed again. Hit another wall. Landed on my ass in a foot of snow.
“You can’t get through,” Tristan repeated, grabbing my hands and pulling me to my feet. “I’ve already checked the border from the coast to Minnesota. The Daemoni knew we’d come and must have sent their mages out.”
I yanked my hands out of his grip. “Isn’t this what they want, though? Don’t they want to lure us right back there?”
“They probably want more of a head start. I don’t know. But that’s exactly why we can’t go there.”
“I don’t care if it’s a trap!” I seethed.
“Alexis—”
“That was my house, Tristan,” I yelled. “My safe house to guard and protect! My people! And they somehow found their way in, killed our mages, made a mockery of us. Of me. And they TOOK. OUR. SON!”
A rush of blood thundered in my ears as rage consumed me, the pressure in my head forcing my eyes to squeeze shut. My chest felt like iron crushing every last molecule of air out of my lungs.
“I will find him,” I said, quietly because I had no air to force the words out with the vehemence that made my body quake.
“I know.”
“And I will kill every single asshole who tries to stop me.”
“And I will help you.”
I opened my eyes with this declaration and finally looked at Tristan. He still stood right in front of me, his feet shoulder width apart and his arms crossed over his chest, his muscles bulging with tension. I looked up at his beautiful face hardened into stone with the same fury I felt. His hazel eyes were like marbles, the gold in them sparks of fire.
His vow was what I needed. To know he stood by my side, that he would do whatever it took to get Dorian back and to make the Daemoni pay. I’d been afraid this had broken him. Or that he’d given in because everyone said losing Dorian was inevitable; we just didn’t know when or how. Now we did. But I’d never give up.
I refused to allow this to happen. It wasn’t Dorian’s time. We were supposed to have years still to figure out how to break the curse that sent all Amadis sons to the Daemoni. I would fight for every one of those years, for every day, for every hour I could have with him in the meantime. And I needed to know Tristan would, too.
This knowledge allowed me to finally suck in the breath my body desperately needed.
“And they will be very slow and painful deaths,” Tristan added.
“Damn right,” I said with renewed anger. “So how do we get there?”
“We do it the right way.”
“Which is?”
“Not alone. We need an army, Alexis.”
“We don’t have time for that!” I began shaking as the rage threatened to overwhelm me. “Every hour counts. Every minute. We don’t have time to gather even a small team, let alone an army.”
“You’re thinking in human terms.”
“He is human, Tristan! At least, in a lot of ways. He’s growing and changing all the time. A day feels like forever to him. And I don’t want to think about what they could be doing to him.” I ended my rant with possibly the longest string of profanity to ever leave my lips.
Tristan clutched each side of my face, making me stop and look up. “Dorian is valuable to them. They won’t hurt him. They’ll treat him like a prince. Try to win him over.”
“Even more reason to hurry. I can’t stand the thought of Dorian being exposed to their lies and deceit. To their evil. He’s only a little boy! And, my God, what about Heather? She’s an innocent Norman who shouldn’t be involved. What will they do to her?”
Tristan grimaced, having no answer. At least, not one I’d want to hear.
The feral energy within me couldn’t be suppressed. I strode back and forth alongside the invisible wall, and pressed my hand to different parts of the shield, looking for a weak spot. Although I couldn’t see the barrier except for a waver in the air here and there, the wall felt like stone under my palm. Maybe we could have broken through if Owen were here where he belonged, helping us instead of Kali, the damn traitor . . . . Well, that line of thinking only pissed me off more. If Owen had to go down with the rest of them, then so be it.
I stopped in my tracks with that thought and looked toward Tristan, but without seeing him, lost in my own mind. He must have discerned something in my expression, because he rushed to me and gathered me into his arms.
“I’m no better than them,” I choked out around the lump in my throat. “All I can think about, see with my eyes and in my head, feel with an intense and sickening delight is . . . murder.”
I trembled in his arms, his touch still not comforting me as it usually did.
“I know, ma lykita. I know.” He tightened his hold on me, to the point where it should have hurt but I was too numb to feel it. I would have welcomed the pain. “I felt it, too. But I know from experience it will subside. The irrational rage will eventually dissolve.”
“But I don’t want it to,” I admitted. I wanted Psycho Alexis, with all of her rage. The fury. The irrationality of it. The overwhelming hate.
That feeling drove me to do what needed to be done.
“You can’t let your emotions control you,” Tristan reminded me. One of my weaknesses. One of many.
But I couldn’t afford to be calm right now. To be rational. To think things through and respond rather than react. Dorian couldn’t afford it.
“Otherwise, you’ll go flying into situations you can’t handle,” he continued. “Situations that will get innocents killed. Get you and me killed. And then we’ll be no good to anyone. Including Dorian and Heather.”
M
ore anger bubbled within me. Anger that he was right. Charging into Hades, the Daemoni’s underground city headquarters where the Ancient Demons themselves lived, would definitely get us killed. I would gladly sacrifice my life for my son, but the end goal was to release him from their clutches. I would die trying to do so, but I’d sure rather my last breath be drawn knowing he was free.
Shit. Rationality was already setting in.
I pulled away from Tristan and threw my hands into the air. “So what do we do now?”
“We build an army. Gather intelligence and create a plan. We arm ourselves in every possible way. Then we act. We take every one of them down and get our son. Or at least die trying.”
“So, what? Go to the Amadis Island?”
He shook his head. “We need to go back to the safe house first. That is your house. Our house. We need to take care of it and not leave Blossom to clean up the mess by herself.”
The scene of the crime. I didn’t think I could face it.
But then, seeing it all again would keep the feelings fresh. The rage I needed to hold onto. Just picturing the scene in my mind—the mages’ blood smeared on the walls, Sasha’s feathers strewn about the room—shot more fury through my veins.
“Fine,” I said, still mad, but calming. I peered up at him. “You really checked the border that far already?”
“I’m not running on my last bit of energy like you are,” he said. “And I’m much more experienced. Why do you think it took me a while to catch up with you?”
“So you wanted through, too. You were trying to get to Hades just like I was.”
“At first, yes. But I’m also more experienced at gaining control of my rage than you are.” He grimaced. “I have to be or innocent people would have been dead by now.”
He was too dangerous to be running around like a loose cannon. I obviously was, too. Who knew how far I would have taken it if Tristan hadn’t stopped me? I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I could have killed anyone, including innocent Normans, and not cared. And then I really would have been no better than the Daemoni.