Unholy Torment

by Kristie Cook

  “No choice,” Tristan said as he grabbed my free hand while looping his arm around Dorian. “Follow my trail.”

  “Wait!” I tugged on his hand. “What about those children?”

  He flashed without answering me, taking Dorian with him and leading me. We appeared back at the train station. The passenger cars where the children had been sat empty. A crowd of zombies kneeled on the ground now, tearing bloody chunks of flesh from bone. My brain tried to make sense of the scene, noticing the bones seemed too long to belong to those children, but my stomach didn’t care. It churned, and I had to break away from our group to throw up.

  “Something’s not right,” Owen said as he surveyed the train cars with those three lines between his brows.

  I wiped my mouth. “You think?”

  “I mean—”

  The rumble of a jet sounded in the distance, quickly approaching. We all looked up as several planes descended, barely missing the tops of the tall buildings. Rivers of fire streamed from their tail ends, shooting into the city around us, and the sounds of inhuman screeching filled the air.

  “Can we get the hell out of here?” Vanessa demanded.

  Still holding Dorian in his arm, Tristan took my hand again and led me for the flash. I didn’t argue this time. There was nothing to stay for. Nobody to save. I followed Tristan mindlessly, and felt Owen right on my trail, and someone after him. The others were following.

  We appeared in a forest, and I immediately fell to my knees and covered my face with my hands. And sobbed.

  “We brought those children straight to their deaths,” I cried.

  “We didn’t know what we were doing, ma lykita,” Tristan tried to soothe, rubbing his hand down my back. “And we don’t know what happened to them.”

  “We saw it!”

  “I saw animal flesh and bones,” Tristan said. “If those children had been attacked, don’t you think we would have heard their screams?”

  I sniffled as I considered this. Surely we would have . . .

  “And the scene didn’t look right for an attack,” Tristan continued. “No blood on the train cars or trailed on the ground.”

  I wiped my hands over my cheeks. “Where did the children go then?”

  He gave me a small shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe Evgeny saved them. He claims to protect humans, after all.”

  I sucked another ragged breath, followed by several more. We’d only been there for a minute, at the most, but what I recalled in my mind backed up what Tristan said.

  “Okay,” I finally agreed, relief flooding through me.

  “Where is everyone?” Owen asked.

  I glanced up at the concern in his voice. Only he, Vanessa, Tristan, and Dorian stood in front of me. They all glanced around. I stood up and turned in a circle, too, reaching my mind out. I sensed some signatures half a mile away, but they were Norman and not familiar. My hand went to my throat. My relief fled as quickly as it had come.

  “Shit,” I breathed as I sank to my butt again. “They got caught in a trap.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Owen said, but anxiety came clear in his voice. “Maybe we just got separated.”

  “Is there any water anywhere?” Dorian asked. “I’m dying of thirst here.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Vanessa muttered, but her thirst held a different meaning. She hadn’t fed for days. We’d been too weak and dehydrated to feed her or Solomon. “I can’t flash again—or do much of anything—until I feed.”

  “I think there’s a town not too far away,” I said. “There are a bunch of Norman mind signatures, anyway.”

  “I’ll go and see if I can grab something,” Tristan said. “Stay here in case the others come into your range, Alexis.”

  He blurred away before we could stop him or I could even tell him to be careful. Ten minutes later, he returned with paper sacks full of water and food. I didn’t think I could stomach food yet after what we’d just seen, but when it came out of the packages and the delicious smells pushed away the disgusting ones, I couldn’t help myself. It’d been too long since we’d had food or water. My body’s needs overcame the images forever burned in my mind and the heavy feelings weighing down my heart. We tried to be considerate and save some for the others. We really did. But when they didn’t show after an hour, we devoured it all. Then Vanessa could finally feed, too.

  “I grabbed this while I was there.” Tristan held up a Russian newspaper. He skimmed over the front page. “Yesterday’s paper. It says the military was coming in to decontaminate that part of the city today.”

  “Oh, really?” Owen asked. “Then where the hell are they?”

  “The planes,” I said. “They burned the city.”

  Tristan nodded. “At least that part of it. This paper says the disease has been fully contained to a few square miles of Moscow, and that it came from the health department. An accident in a lab.”

  “Bullshit,” Vanessa muttered.

  “Are you sure?” Owen asked her, and she glared at him with her icy blues.

  “I’ll take Vanessa’s word over the media,” Tristan said.

  “Can we get sick?” Dorian asked, fear lacing his tone.

  Vanessa shook her head. “Supernaturals are protected. Part of his plan.”

  “Except Dorian’s not entirely changed,” I said. “He’s still very human.”

  “He can fly, Alexis,” Vanessa quipped. “I’m pretty sure that means he’s not Norman. Besides, I’d be able to smell it in his blood. Another part of the plan.”

  “What plan?” Tristan asked.

  Vanessa rose to her feet, paced a few times, and then stopped, standing over us with her hip jutted to the side. “One of the few I knew about. When planning for the Daemoni to come out and take over the humans, Lucas wanted a way to rid the world of the weakest. The disabled. The sick and the elderly. Some of the youth who didn’t seem ‘viable.’ They couldn’t be turned, and they couldn’t serve as food producers, so why keep them alive? His words, not mine,” she said quickly, holding her hands up when I lifted my brow.

  “So genocide?” Tristan asked.

  “Yep,” Vanessa replied.

  “By making them into zombies?” I asked with disbelief.

  “Well, that’s different. Sort of. That’s been an ongoing experiment. This was probably a test, since it’s been isolated to one part of Moscow, his way of killing two birds with one stone. He probably does have the disease completely contained. For now. He wouldn’t want it to get out of control and ruin his people’s food sources, now would he?”

  “Says here there were outbreaks in major cities in the Middle East and Asia,” Tristan said as his eyes skimmed over the front-page articles.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not contained,” Vanessa said. “More purposeful releases. More tests.”

  Tristan read on. “All contained. All cities decontaminated. No certain numbers of deaths, but an estimated quarter-million.”

  Owen whistled lowly. “Anything else happen while we were out of touch with the rest of the world?”

  Tristan turned the page and scanned. “Looks like World War III. Several countries have fired on others. Those who haven’t are maneuvering into place.” He turned another page. “The largest tsunami ever recorded hit the coast of India, with an estimated half-million killed or missing.”

  “Chandra’s in India,” I whispered. “I hope she and our people are okay.”

  Tristan continued with the laundry list of horrors. “The worst snowstorms on record for the month of October across the northern hemisphere. Riots. Record number of murders, including assassinations of high-ranking politicians throughout the world.” He flipped the page again. “Pretty much every economy in existence is tanking or already crashed. In short, the world’s basically gone to hell.”

  “Oh my god,” I breathed. “All in a week? All works of the Daemoni?”

  “Most of it,” Vanessa said. “The so-called natural disasters, for sure. But the norms are pretty d
amn good at wreaking their own havoc.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there.

  “I’m sure they’re having plenty of help,” Owen said.

  “What about Daemoni attacks?” I asked.

  Tristan skimmed over more pages. “There have been some, but they’re calling them Amadis, or simply supernatural, attacks.”

  I groaned and massaged my temples with my forefingers. “So according to the norms, it’s us versus them. How does that help Lucas and the Daemoni in taking over the world? How does it make a name for them if all supernaturals are bad?”

  “He has to cut down the Norman population before he can come in and save the day,” Tristan said.

  “The whole reason for World War III, tsunamis, and zombie diseases,” Vanessa added. “And if the Amadis are decimated in the meantime, all the better for him.”

  “So then he’ll come forward and say something about how some supernaturals are good for mankind—his supernaturals,” I assumed.

  “Maybe at first,” Vanessa said. “But he’s already pulling a Hitler by charming everyone, so when the time comes, he’ll simply take over and let his creatures rule with fear. That will be his way of saving humans from all the hell they’ve been through.”

  Owen rubbed his chin and squinted his sapphire eyes. “So right now they’re just making sure the Norman numbers are more manageable.”

  “Exactly,” Vanessa said.

  A frustrated growl rumbled in my chest, and I rose to my feet. “Well then, time to get off our asses and do something about it.” I checked one more time for familiar mind signatures and blew out a sad breath. “They’re not coming.”

  Owen stood, too. “Then it looks like we’re going to Prague.”

  “And if they don’t show up? What if they’re locked up here?”

  “Then we’ll come back for them,” Owen snapped.

  I threw my hands in the air in surrender. “Okay. Sheesh. So how are we getting to Prague?”

  “Good question,” Tristan said, and when that phrase came from him, knower of best solutions, it was extra depressing.

  Chapter 12

  “We may as well start in that town,” Tristan said. “There’s a coffee shop where we can charge our phones and get back in touch with the rest of the world. The Amadis might have someone nearby who can help us.”

  “Except they’re not supposed to,” I reminded him as we set off through the forest in the direction of the small town Tristan had been to earlier. “They’re not supposed to have anything to do with us.”

  “We just need to be smart about it.” Tristan took my hand. “Trust me, my love. We’ll get out of here and join the war as soon as I can possibly make it happen. That’s how much I love you. Just keep your head down so nobody recognizes you.”

  I did just that, letting my hair down to curtain my face, as we walked into town and to the small coffee shop on the main, gravel road. No cars crunched over the snow or sat parked on the sides of the street, and the rest of the town seemed quiet, so the size of the small crowd inside the dingy little café surprised me. All were men, with dark hair and bearded faces wearing plaid flannel shirts, jeans, and work boots that left clumps of slush and dirt all over the linoleum floor. They talked to each other while gesturing animatedly at the newspapers in front of them on the vinyl-laminate tables. The walls were a light blue that might have been nice many years ago, but was now speckled with grease stains. Although the sounds of cooking filtered forward from the kitchen, no delicious smells made my mouth water—whatever they cooked back there smelled like dirt, and I was glad Tristan had already brought us snacks. Not that we had any Russian Rubles to buy anything.

  We sat in the only available booth, and thankfully, nobody paid us much attention, not even a waitress to insist we buy coffee if we wanted to use the table. We took turns charging our phones in the single outlet by our table, and monitoring the web for more news. A bogus story had gone global a week ago, the morning after we’d stopped in Italy before we’d been rerouted to Hades, saying we’d attacked innocent civilians in the Rome suburbs.

  “Besides this, there’s nothing about us specifically,” I said. “We’re the top names on the list of supernatural terrorists, but nothing here. Why wouldn’t Lucas fabricate more stories about us to keep the deceit going?”

  “Because if someone spotted us on the other side of the world, he’d be caught in a lie.” Tristan swiped through some screens on his phone. “The media would be anyway, meaning he’d have to fix the problem.”

  “I’m sure he could concoct some evil story to explain it away,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, but why risk it? Lies are more believable when they have some basis of truth.”

  I thought about the stories Lucas had delivered about us so far, and indeed, each one was grounded in some basis of truth about Tristan and me. Leaders of a secret faction of supernaturals? Check. Faking our own deaths? Check. Being in Istanbul and setting fire to a home? Check. Fighting in Rome? Check. To add insult to injury, every truth he used to twist the story around were choices we’d made, either because of who we were or because of what he’d done, making the lies all the more infuriating.

  And showing once again that Lucas was a diabolical genius intent on tormenting me . . . and humanity. How would I ever measure up to that?

  “Well, at least this means Lucas must have lost track of us after we ran from Hades,” Owen said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, there’s that. He doesn’t know where we are right now, so we can get back on track for our plan. So how do we get to Prague?”

  Nobody answered me as they stared at their phone screens. Dorian obviously played a game, but I hoped the rest searched for solutions.

  “I just linked through to check with the council members,” Tristan said. “They’d been concerned about our lack of contact and are glad to know we’re okay. I guess Galina had tried to warn us about Moscow, and Minh said she’s been dealing with the necromancy in Shanghai. No word from Chandra, who’d been visiting our colony in Mumbai, where the tsunami hit.”

  Tears pricked at the back of my eyes as Tristan scrolled down through the highly encrypted forum—the best way we could keep in touch with my leaders out in the field without anyone knowing.

  “They’re proceeding as best as they can with keeping Daemoni damage to a minimum in their regions, but they’re struggling with the Normans. Every region is reporting outbreaks of war or preparations for it. Borders are being tightened, and airports, highways, and pretty much every other source of transportation has been restricted or closed completely. No fly zones have expanded almost everywhere.” He paused in his scrolling to read something more closely. “Looks like some of our people have found the super-sized Normans in their regions, but nobody knows where their controllers are. They’re keeping a close eye on the battalions.”

  I rested my chin in my hand and tapped my cheek with my fingertips. “So we still have no idea if the Summoned and their offspring are being sequestered together or if they’re spread out with their troops.”

  “Nope.”

  “So until then, we continue as we were. Prague, then wherever else Solomon thinks we should go,” Owen said.

  “Any ideas how we travel?” Vanessa asked.

  Tristan shook his head. “I can’t find evidence of any Amadis nearby, so they’ve either scattered or they’re hiding like they’re supposed to be. I can try to contact my guy, but I doubt he’s in Moscow anymore.”

  “We could steal a car or truck,” Vanessa suggested nonchalantly. “Although by the looks of this rundown town, I don’t know how far any here will get us.”

  “We’ll get stopped at the borders anyway,” Owen said.

  “Which is why we need papers first,” Tristan said.

  As they spoke, a sharp itch started in my palm, and no matter how hard I scratched at it, the tingling wouldn’t stop. The thought of the virus we’d just been in contact with caused me to spring to my feet.

  “I’ll be r
ight back.” I barely spit out the words before running for the bathroom, trying my best to maintain normal human speed, although I was already freaking out.

  I sensed Vanessa right behind me, but it was a one-person bathroom, so she had to guard me from the outside. A look around caused my nose to wrinkle. The germs here couldn’t have been worse than the one possibly on my hand, though. I turned the hot water on and scrubbed the weird-looking soap bar on my hands, lathering up as best as possible. When I stuck my hands under the water, the temperature felt far from hot. Shit. I repeated the lather and scrubbed extra hard, practically taking the skin off, but the tingling wouldn’t stop. With no paper towels, I had to shake the water off my hands while thinking about what I was going to do. What if I’d just infected everyone in this coffee shop?

  I lifted my hands in front of me and stared at my palms as if they’d been the criminals acting on their own. A little rock suddenly appeared in my right hand. No, not a rock—a pearl. It began growing and transforming into a book with a pearlescent cover.

  “Oh!” I said aloud.

  “You okay?” Vanessa called from the other side of the door.

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  I pushed the cover open and paged through to the messages I’d received from the Angels. New lines and curls appeared on the page as I watched with awe. My brows tightened as I tried to interpret the message. I thought I could make out “know” or “knowledge,” “power,” “possess” or “control,” and “journey” or maybe “travels,” but I wasn’t positive. I studied the lines harder and tossed the words I’d interpreted around in my mind. What did they mean?