Unholy Torment

by Kristie Cook

  Some books contained their histories, just like my own book Rina had shown me when I’d first arrived on the island. It floated down to me, and now, I saw, was filled with much more than it had been originally—all of my personal thoughts on my experiences had been added in this language only I could read. And, of course, all of the events since I’d first seen the beautiful book. I stared at the last page that had filled in my history book, hoping to see a glimpse of what would come next, but nothing more appeared. I sent it back to its place.

  The other book lay open on my lap. The symbols in it had also stopped coming. I placed my elbows on my knees and dropped my head into my hands.

  “I know nothing more than I did before,” I muttered. Nothing useful, anyway. I still felt as lost as ever. “I have no answers. No preparation. Nothing to equip me for this awful task you’ve put in front of me. How could you choose me without preparing me?”

  “Oh, He has been preparing you, child. But know that He does not choose the prepared and the equipped. He prepares and equips the ones He has chosen. And you have been chosen.” Cassandra’s voice, I was sure. It sounded clearer than it had the other times, when it seemed like Rina and Mom were in the background.

  “What does that mean? How does that help me now? We’re at war, and I don’t have the slightest inkling of what to do.” I lifted the book—my new book with the messages from the Angels—up in the air. “Please tell me!”

  “The Angels only send messages when you need them. They only interfere when necessary.”

  I groaned with frustration. Rina had told me this numerous times, but I certainly felt like there had never been a more appropriate need for them to talk to me. To give me direction. To interfere and set us on the right course of action.

  But since they didn’t . . .

  Realization dawned on me. The Angels interfered when I, and my people, would not be making the right decision. When we would act when we shouldn’t, or not act when we should. So if they didn’t have anything to tell me, any new direction to give me, that could only mean one thing.

  Our plans were on the right track. We’d been making the best decisions so far. And now, my team needed to leave the island and pursue our mission of finding the Summoned and their offspring so we could begin to end this war. And possibly end the Daemoni—or at least Lucas.

  As I finished accepting this epiphany, new lines scrolled on the page: “We are always here with you.”

  And with that, the book began shrinking in my hand until it became the size of a pearl, a little glowing ball sitting in my palm. Then it disappeared completely, as though dissolving into my skin. I could only hope that meant that wherever I went, I had access to the book and the Angels’ messages.

  Because it was time to leave the island and go to war.

  Chapter 7

  “Are you sure you want to take this risk?” Galina asked through the teleconference device sitting on my desk.

  The core of my team who had been with us throughout the search for Dorian were the only souls, besides Solomon, who remained on Amadis Island, all of us confined to the shelter of the protected mansion. We gathered in my office now, huddled around my desk with the other council members on a conference call. We were back to planning our war strategy after being interrupted the other day.

  I glanced over at Tristan, who sat next to me and gave me a slight nod. He and I had already discussed our thoughts and ideas several times and, to some extent, with those in the room, and we were all together on this. I had to be the one to give the directives to the rest of the council, though. We would show Tristan had worked with me in the formulation of the plans because they would trust him, his experience, and his ability for strategic thinking, but they had to see that I gave the orders. I bit my lip at the irony of this compared to the orders about to come out of my mouth.

  With my fingers tightly woven together, I pressed my palms into my stomach, as though I could calm the butterflies within. It had been one thing to discuss these plans with Tristan and my closest friends. Giving orders to the council felt entirely different. More real. When this meeting came to a close, people would be following my commands that could possibly cause them to kill others and to be killed.

  At the same time, the orders I’d be giving would be empowering them to make these same kinds of decisions themselves. They would have the same responsibilities and burdens. But I would ultimately be held accountable, and I was all right with that. I just had to trust my people. That was the hard part.

  But the only way we could win.

  “Yes, we must take the risk,” I finally said in answer to Galina’s question. “Lucas expects one of two things from us. He thinks we’ll either fall apart with the loss of our matriarch, or we’ll run into a head-on fight. He believes and hopes for the latter. He wants me to fight him. That’s what he’s wanted from me since the beginning. That’s why he killed my mother—” I paused to swallow, my throat dry and thick, before I could go on. “—to spark a desire for vengeance. He expects me to lead you straight into a war he’s sure we can’t win. He expects to annihilate the Amadis right away, and if we survive, he thinks Tristan and I will give in and bow down to him. That’s his plan. Or to kill us all, including Tristan and me. Either way, he wins.”

  Tristan nodded as he gave my thigh a squeeze. “Jumping right into war is our most dangerous option. We are not in a situation to defeat the Daemoni right now, when they have the norms turned against us. Until we can take the norms out of the equation, going to war now is like taking on a two-headed snake.”

  “We won’t fight the norms,” Sheree pointed out.

  “Of course not,” Tristan said. “Which means we’d be battling only one head although both would be striking at us.”

  “And their heads are about a hundred times bigger than ours,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s a setup for defeat if I ever saw one,” Tristan agreed, “and we all know charging headfirst into a war we cannot win is stupid at best and deadly at worst.”

  “So we’re going to be smart by letting Lucas have his way with the Normans?” Minh asked, doubt clearly lacing her tone.

  “We’re going to let him think he’s having his way,” I corrected.

  “We want Lucas to think the Amadis has self-destructed,” Tristan said. “We want him—and the Normans in his pocket—to believe they’ve already defeated us with their bombings. He knows there’s been some internal rumblings thanks to Kali, who planted plenty of seeds of doubt within the Amadis.”

  “He thinks we’re weak,” Owen chimed in. “Kali did everything she could to disrupt the Amadis from the inside, and Lucas knows this.”

  “Exactly,” Tristan said. “He already knows there’s a lack of trust in my character, in Alexis’s leadership abilities, and in many of our loyalties among the Amadis.”

  “He’s pushed every single button of mine he can think of,” I said, “because he wants to see what I will do as matriarch. He wants to see how I’ll react, because he thinks I’ll either fail by getting everyone killed or by leading you right into his darkness. He pretty much said so that night at Whitby Abbey.”

  “He wanted you to react that night,” Vanessa said. “The hope was written all over his face.”

  “Yes, he did,” I said quietly. “Which was exactly why I didn’t.”

  I knew why I hadn’t reacted to Lucas’s abhorrent actions that night—why I’d run to my mother’s side instead of after him. What kept me up at night was the part right before then, when I remained frozen to the ground while the bullets slammed into her body. I’d never be able to overcome the guilt for not using my powers to stop them in midair. Of course, it had happened so fast, and both Char and Owen had been down, meaning the shield around Mom had fallen, too, but I hadn’t realized that. I hadn’t known how vulnerable she’d been. Those felt like flimsy excuses, but they were the truth.

  “That may be the same reason he set the Daemoni loose on the Normans,” Minh said. “To force
you into a reaction. Into war.”

  My heart grew even heavier than it had already been. “Possibly.”

  “No, not possibly,” Vanessa said. “He would have done it anyway. You heard him—his plans have been in motion with the norms for years. He didn’t know things would go down the way they did at the abbey. Only Kali knew Katerina and Sophia would show up, and only Owen knew you, Tristan, and the rest of us were coming. Lucas has had wet dreams about that kind of perfect storm, so when he saw the opportunity that night, he took it. But the rest of this, with the norms? It would have happened even if that night hadn’t gone down the way it did. Maybe not so soon, but it wouldn’t have been long. He’s been planning it forever and put the wheels in motion long ago.”

  “And that’s exactly why I won’t react now either,” I said. “He’s had time to pull all of this together. We’re not going to go off willy-nilly into his fight. We’re going to war, but not in the way Lucas expects.”

  “Explain what that means,” Minh said.

  I looked at Tristan, who’d masterminded this plan, and he nodded.

  “He knows Alexis has me and some of you others who have experience, but he thinks she’ll be impatient and too worried about the Normans. He expects her to be emotional and impulsive, throwing us all into his war. He doesn’t think she’ll be able to hang on to control for long, though, and believes that Alexis will fail as matriarch. So we’re going to make him think she already has. That she and I have already lost control and that the Amadis have disbanded.”

  “And you ousted those others from the council the other day as part of the plan,” Jelani said. It wasn’t a question. He was catching on.

  “Yes,” Tristan and I said at the same time.

  “There’s already been a few small waves of blowback, but we have people making it sound much worse than it is,” Owen said.

  “Why not stage a coup?” Galina asked. “We could make it look like you’ve been ousted.”

  Tristan answered with the same reply he’d given me when I’d suggested the idea days ago. “We don’t want to show any unification among the Amadis. A coup would mean everyone would split into two factions, but they would still have allegiance to the overall Amadis creed. We want Lucas to believe that all but a few so-called fanatics have given up on our cause.”

  “That’s why you had some of our soldiers go out into the Norman world when our weakest left for refuge,” Minh said. “So it looks like they’re all abandoning the Amadis and scattering.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And we need to keep up this appearance. Everything we’ll be doing is with purpose, but it can’t look that way. It has to look the opposite. We have to convince Lucas, his Normans, and everyone else that the Amadis has fallen apart and we’re no longer a threat.”

  “Our intelligence teams will need to do exactly opposite of what they’ve been doing,” Tristan said. “We need spies in the Daemoni, so our people need to come out and show that they’re switching sides.”

  “The Daemoni will kill them,” Chandra protested.

  “Not if they go to the right people in the right way,” Vanessa said. “They’re supernaturals, and the norms are turned against them. Converting to the Daemoni appears to be their only choice if they want to be protected. That’s how the Daemoni will see it, and the right people will see the advantage of having Amadis in their ranks.”

  “Meaning, our people will need to give up some goods on the Amadis to prove they’ve switched their loyalty,” Charlotte added. “Information that looks important, but isn’t crucial to our plans.”

  “We can come up with some good stuff,” Owen said.

  “What about those super-soldiers you spoke of?” Minh asked.

  “We’ll be working on that in the meantime,” Tristan replied. “While the rest of the Amadis looks like it’s disintegrated, we need you and your top people to be prepared for action with those soldiers when we give the go. Removing those stones and breaking the connections between Lucas and the Summoned, and between the Summoned and the Norman soldiers is still a top priority.”

  We spent several more hours going over specific plans for how each council member would lead their region and our people within it. Many of those plans made my heart ache. Some of my own people would think Tristan and I had abandoned them. Others would be asked to leave the Amadis protection on a volunteer basis, although nobody would be truly unprotected as far as we could help it.

  “There sure is a lot of deception going on,” Sheree said at one point.

  Tristan nodded. “Deception is necessary in a war.”

  “There are tens of thousands of Amadis,” Vanessa said. “If they all knew the truth, someone would be bound to slip to the Daemoni or to the wrong Norman.”

  “We’ve all kept our secrets about our very existences for this long,” Chandra pointed out.

  “Because doing so protected their lives,” Tristan said. “Now, if the Daemoni get a hold of them, self-preservation will come from divulging. The Daemoni invented torture, so the less our people know about our plans, the better for them and for us.”

  Once we finally finished with the council members scattered around the world, my core team developed our own plans for hunting down the Summoned and their offspring, destroying the stones, and severing Lucas’s control of them. Then we could worry about how to bring the humans to our side before taking on Lucas himself. Of course, like the rest of the Amadis, we’d be converting along the way. Regardless of how discombobulated we appeared to be on the surface, we’d always be connected by our prime directive: protect souls.

  We couldn’t act yet, though. We needed to give our people time to stage our show and for Lucas to let down his guard. In the meantime, others began gathering intelligence, and Solomon tried to track down any prominent Normans who remained on our side and could possibly use their influence to sway others. I spent time in the Sacred Archives looking for more answers, reading the books and messages the Angels allowed me to decipher. Mostly just history, with a few lessons to gain here and there. What I did come to learn was no matriarch before me had faced war on this scale.

  “Why me?” I muttered under my breath as I headed for the stairs and my suite where my husband waited for me.

  “Alexis,” Blossom said softly as I rounded the corner between my office and the kitchen. She held a large mug in her hands as she fell into step next to me, and I cringed at the smell.

  “Aren’t you out of those herbs yet?” I complained as we continued toward the foyer.

  “Nope. Don’t you worry. We have plenty.” She held the mug out to me, and I pulled back, wrinkling my nose. “Drink up.”

  I reluctantly took the cup from her and tried not to gag from the gasoline smell wafting up from what looked like innocent green tea. “I don’t know why anyone thinks bringing a baby into the world right now is a good idea.”

  “You bringing a baby into the world is an excellent idea. Exactly what we need more than anything.”

  “Her very existence would destroy our plans.”

  “Well, yes, I imagine the Amadis will rally together at the news, despite orders.” Blossom put a hand on my arm, stopping me at the bottom of the steps. She looked directly into my eyes, her brow lifted. “But then we’ll make new plans. Drink, Alexis.”

  I almost made a comment about her sounding like my mother, but the thought hurt too much. In fact, the ache in my heart exploded, and the only way I knew how to rein it in again was by distracting myself with other, different pain. So I held the mug to my lips and tilted my head back.

  “Blech. That shit is nasty,” I said with a full body shudder before I gave the cup back to her.

  “Good.” She gave me a smile, and I returned it with a glare. “The more potent it is, the better. Good night, Alexis.”

  She turned and headed back toward the kitchen. I blurred my way up the steps, trying to outrun the disgusting taste in my mouth. I flew into our suite, right past Tristan, who lay on the bed reading, an
d into the bathroom to brush my teeth while the liquid settled in my belly and the warmth spread. I wondered if that meant the potion was working. Part of me hoped it wasn’t—that my ovaries and other girl parts couldn’t be primed for conception by magic or anything else. I meant what I’d said to Blossom: nobody should be bringing a baby into this world right now, especially not me. Not when we couldn’t promise a future for anyone, including the Amadis.

  Minutes had gone by while I brushed my teeth and tongue, eradicating the gross flavor of the potion from every taste bud, and only now did I notice a bath had been drawn in the pool-sized tub. Candle flames bobbed and weaved around the bathroom. I stepped toward the door and leaned back to see Tristan sprawled out on the bed, wearing only black boxer briefs. He gave me a smile that made my bones melt and my thighs quiver.

  “What’s going on?” I asked hesitantly, returning his smile because I had no choice. He made my body react in all kinds of ways I had no control over.

  In a flash, he stood in front of me, and his hands cupped my jaw. He tilted my head back and leaned in, close enough for me to feel his breath on my lips. Thank goodness I’d just brushed my teeth. Otherwise, I’d be assaulting him with horrible potion-breath.

  “I thought you could use a relaxing soak,” he murmured before brushing his mouth across mine.

  I slid my hands around his neck and up into his hair. “Oh. Is that all? I get to sit in a bath by myself?”

  I pretended to pout, and he sucked my protruding bottom lip in between his. My knees nearly buckled.

  “Most definitely not,” he said as his fingers flew through the tie of my leather corset and down the laces to loosen it. “I’ll be joining you. And there will certainly be more than sitting involved.”

  “If only.” I let out a sigh as I closed my eyes while he pulled the corset away from my body, freeing my breasts. My fighting leathers, worn pretty much at all times now, felt like a second skin—until the moment my boobs were freed from the bustier. Only then did I realize just how confining the corsets were. And normal women complained about bras . . .