Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (20 page)

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
right 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?

Vanessa knocked on the
door. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve been in
there a while.”

“Yes,” I
snapped, frowning. “Just hold on a sec.”

So. Close
. I
felt so close to figuring out the cryptic message. And then my aha
moment came. The book dissolved into my hand. I threw open the door,
pushed past Vanessa, and strode over to the table.

“Let’s go,”
I ordered. All three guys looked up at me. Dorian scowled.

“What’s
wrong?” Tristan asked.

“Nothing. The
opposite. I know how to get out of here.”

Before we attracted any
more attention, I walked out of the coffee shop with Vanessa right on
my heels. We headed down the road we’d come from as I led them
out of town. We’d been keeping our voices low enough so most
people didn’t even know we’d been speaking, let alone
able to hear us, but nobody could know what we were about to do. I
didn’t stop until we’d returned to our little spot in the
forest.

“What’s
up?” Owen asked.

“Question for
you,” I said. “How are portals powered?”

“Extremely strong
magic,” he answered easily.

“Who has that
kind of power?”

“Mostly only
sorcerers. I’m probably the only warlock who can create them.”

I nodded, knowing I was
onto something. “So who could possibly block them or change the
destination?”

Owen scratched his
head, ruffling his straw-colored hair. “Only sorcerers, of
course. Why?”

I leveled a look at
him. Was it not obvious?

“A sorcerer had
been in Rome,” I said. “There’s obviously at least
one in or around Hades. I had those same blinding headaches I used to
get when trying to get into Kali’s head.” I looked around
for Blossom, who could confirm this, but, of course, she wasn’t
with us anymore. “I don’t have one now. I’ve
checked several times, and there are no sorcerers anywhere close. I
mean, how many are there in existence anyway? They can’t be
everywhere.”

Owen lifted his head in
a slow nod. “Maybe a dozen or two in the world.”

“What if there
happens to be one where we’re headed, though?” Vanessa
asked. “Couldn’t they block the portal from the other
side?”

“How would they
know we’re coming?” I countered.

“They could sense
the magic, if they’re close enough,” Owen said, “but
we would be through before they figured it out.”

“So we could be
walking straight into their lair,” Vanessa muttered.

“The chances are
slim,” Tristan said. “But it’s still pretty risky.”

“You think?”
Vanessa snorted. “I don’t think we should chance it. What
if we end up back at Hades again? We’d lose another week—if
not our lives this time.”

“What happened
has been driving me crazy,” Owen admitted. “I couldn’t
figure out why and how they were able to mess with my portal in Rome,
after they’d let us get away in Istanbul.”

“Good point,”
Vanessa said. “We know sorcerers had been in Istanbul, and they
didn’t do anything then. So it’s not necessarily a
sorcerer who blocks the portal.”

“Unless they
didn’t know I could create portals until we escaped that
night,” Owen said, finishing his earlier train of thought.
“They assumed Kali had made them all before. They must have
figured it out and decided to reroute us in Rome. And trust me, that
kind of magic—to counter a spell as powerful as a
portal?—requires proximity. I think Alexis is on to something.”

“I think you like
the idea of having an explanation for what broke you,” Vanessa
said, “even if it’s wrong.”

Owen glared at her so
hard, I thought beams might shoot out of his eyes and level her to
the ground. “What’s your problem?”

She threw her hands in
the air. “I don’t know. Maybe the fact that we just
escaped Hades, suffered through starvation and dehydration, faced off
with Lucas’s pet zombies, and barely made it here alive? Or
maybe that your mother and the rest of our crew are missing?”

“Exactly why we
need to get to Prague as fast as possible. So we can find them!”

“Unless we end up
back at Hades,” Vanessa practically yelled.

I stepped between them
and held my hands out against both of them. “Enough. We have to
give it a try. The Angels said so.”

Both Vanessa and Owen
stopped snarling and glaring at each other over my head and dropped
their gazes to me. Tristan looked at me, too, with a brow raised. I
shrugged.

“Yeah, the Angels
gave me a message. This is how I interpreted it. Since they only
intervene if we’re on the wrong track, then I’m assuming
our other ideas of stealing a truck and finding Tristan’s guy
were wrong tracks. And they would have brought serious consequences
if the Angels thought it so necessary to stop us that they actually
sent me my first message.” I paused for a breath, and nobody so
much as tried to argue with me. “So, using Owen’s power
to create a portal is what we’re supposed to do. If we end up
back at Hades, then that’s where they want us to go, whether we
like it or not.”

They all stared at me
with open mouths. Even Dorian, who might not have known about the
whole message thing with the Angels, but also hadn’t cared much
about any of our conversations since the moment his cell phone was
powered up. Their jaws snapped shut at the same time, and Owen and
Vanessa backed away from each other.

“So. That’s
settled?” I asked.

Vanessa muttered
something under her breath that I was pretty sure she wouldn’t
want the Angels to hear, but she nodded. Everyone else gave in right
away. I just hoped I’d interpreted the message correctly and
wasn’t sending us headfirst in the wrong direction.

“We need to wait
until it’s dark here
and
there,” Owen said. “No
reason to risk anyone seeing us.”

“Agreed,”
Tristan said, “but I think we need to stay on the move. I
flashed as far south and west as I could get us from Moscow. Maybe
the others hit the distance wall but appeared farther north. We could
head that way, and Alexis could listen for them. Just in case there’s
any chance they’re still here, and we can find them.”

The suggestion was
something potentially productive to do for the next three hours
before dark, when we’d be gone from this area hopefully
forever, so we began trekking through the forest northward. We ran
for a while, letting Dorian fly with us, although he kept low, below
the trees, but it allowed him to practice maneuvering around the
branches. When I noticed a boulder by the stream that looked awfully
familiar, I slowed down. The others did, too.

“You know,
there’s been something bothering me for a while,” Vanessa
said.

“What is it?”
Owen asked.

“The streets and
residences were all empty in Rome. The businesses were closed. No
cars driving around. No
people
, except the small group that
ambushed us. Same thing when we came into Moscow. Nobody in the
suburbs. Alexis couldn’t sense any human or supernatural minds
in her range. Right?”

“Pretty much,”
I confirmed. “But they’d all been turned into the walking
dead.”

“I know. And the
newspaper said most people fled the city. So what’s been
bothering me is that little town we were just in. This close to a
city infested with what we can only call zombies. In a time when the
world is falling apart. Everywhere else has been like a ghost town
but there.”

“They’re
probably the refugees from Moscow,” Owen said.

“And they were
just having coffee and croissants at a coffee shop like it was any
normal day? Didn’t that seem odd to you? Especially here in
Russia. That’s not normal in normal times.”

My brow furrowed as my
mind recalled the town and the people, and I realized Vanessa was
right. Not only did the people not behave as though the world was
crumbling around them, but they also seemed very American. Their
fashion, their attitudes, even the way they held themselves, all
slouchy and relaxed, didn’t match up to the image I had in my
head of Russians. Granted, my expectations were probably distorted by
our American media, but the little bit I’d seen of the country
and the people here clashed with those in the coffee shop. How could
that be?

And what about the fact
that all the other tables had coffee cups and dirty plates on them,
but I never saw anyone actually eating? Nobody ever came to wait on
us. I’d even noted how the place smelled wrong for a café.
Then there was the bit about Chandra, who wouldn’t have been in
Mumbai, but should have been in Bangladesh.

Befuddled, I glanced
around the forest we traipsed through, studying the trees, the
snow-covered ground, the stream running to our right. Something felt
off with it, too. It was October, which meant autumn, but an early,
record-breaking snowstorm had hit the entire country, Tristan had
said, along with freezing temperatures for over a week now. So why
didn’t I see our breaths puffing out in front of our faces? Why
did the stream run so easily instead of being at least partially
frozen? Why did the trees look like they grew tiny leaf buds when
they should have been losing leaves or been completely bare?

And then my eye caught
it: a wrinkle in the air.

Just a little waver,
like when heat rises from the pavement in the middle of summer. I’d
seen it before. This place wasn’t real.

“Ah, there we
are, poppet,” a strange female voice said, booming from all
around us. Wait. No, from within my head. Followed by the stabbing
pain of an ice pick in my brain.

Our whole environment
suddenly changed. We no longer traveled through a forest alongside a
stream in daylight, but were inside, in a dark place. My vision came
in and out as my head throbbed, and I couldn’t make out any
shapes in front of me. Only blurred blotches of light colors against
the darkness. My whole body, inside and out, ached. My hands were
pulled high above my head, and they must have been like that for some
time because my legs felt too weak and exhausted to hold me up,
causing the metal cuffs to dig into my wrists as my full weight hung
from them.

I tried blinking away
the blurriness, but the movement made my entire face hurt. My skin
felt sore and tight—swollen and bruised. Since I hadn’t
healed, I’d either just been given some kind of bad beating and
didn’t know it, or I’d been given lots of beatings and
didn’t know it.

What the
hell
?

Unable to see much in
front of me anyway, I closed my eyes, which felt much better. I tried
to reach out for mind signatures to find out what was going on, but I
found none and doing so only made my head throb harder, causing me to
whimper.

“Wake up,
poppet,” the female voice said again. Not in my head now. Right
in front of me.

I tried to force my
eyelids open and to focus on the pinkish-tan blob directly in front
of my face, but I couldn’t. They drifted back shut, the pain
disappeared, and I found myself in the forest again.

“How are they
doing it?” Tristan asked from my side.