Unholy Torment

by Kristie Cook

  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 in earlier. 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 c
lashed 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.

  I turned to him and ran into his arms, grateful to be with him again.

  “How did they do it?” Vanessa asked this time, but the voice didn’t really belong to her.

  Red-hot pain racked through my cheek as the bone shattered. I jerked back awake, in the dark room again.

  “Tell me how they did it, and we can stop wasting all this time,” the voice said.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. How who did what? I didn’t understand anything going on. My entire body felt sapped of energy, and my brain was all muddled.

  “Jeana, darling, don’t be so impatient. You’ve sucked out all her energy. Give her a chance to wake up, you evil little wench,” a male voice chastised lovingly. He didn’t sound close, though, but more like his words came through a speakerphone or a computer.

  The woman in the room, presumably Jeana, grunted, and the peach blob, which I assumed was her face, moved away, attached to the larger gray blob of her body below it. She disappeared into the darkness with the clack-clack-clack of a woman’s heels on a cement floor, but I could still feel her presence nearby. The sound of running water carried over to me from somewhere close, but not too close. A moment later, footsteps approached, and then ice-cold water crashed over my head and face, sliding down my neck and into my leather bustier.

  This woke me up.

  The cold also helped numb the pain in my face, so when I blinked it out of my eyes, the movement didn’t hurt so much. It still took a moment for me to focus on my surroundings, but they eventually came into view.

  And I so wished they hadn’t.

  I wanted to run back to the forest, even if it wasn’t real. Because I really didn’t want to be here, chained to the wall by my wrists and ankles, too drained of energy to be able to do anything about it. The room was dark and cool, and I couldn’t see more than ten yards in front of me as it faded into darkness, but it felt large and cavernous. A few feet away stood a metal table displaying what my imagination took to be torture tools, and I was pretty sure they weren’t your run-of-the-mill Norman torture tools, but were cursed with magical spells. The kinds of spells that left dark magic in your scars, like what marred Tristan when he returned from his incarceration with the Daemoni. Off to the right and several yards away stood a desk with a computer screen and a bunch of papers on it. And immediately to my right, a body hung next to me.

  The scream started in the pit of my stomach and exploded from my throat, but only came out as a choking gasp. I fought against the constraints, trying to wriggle free, but I couldn’t move enough to even make the chains rattle. Oh, no. God, please, no. Tears stung the backs of my eyes. He hung there so lifelessly, and I could do nothing to help him. Nothing! I’d never felt so helpless in my life. I could barely recognize him through the blood matted in his blond hair and the streaks of sweat and grime on his swollen face.

  “Owen,” I tried to whisper, but my voice hardly made a croak, and my throat felt like a cat clawed at the inside. My breath became trapped in my lungs when he didn’t answer. “Owen . . .”

  The salty wetness burned my injured cheeks as tears streamed uncontrollably.

  “He’s not dead,” Jeana said. She seemed to be the only other person in the room, although I couldn’t be sure because I couldn’t see . . . and because my damn telepathy refused to work. She was close, but in the shadows, and my eyes found her general shape, but couldn’t quite focus on her. “Not yet, anyway. But he will be soon if you two don’t cooperate.”

  “Tristan!” I tried to yell his name, praying he was looking for us, trying to rescue us, but again only a croak came out. The next name was more like a sad hiccup. “Dorian?”

  “The boy’s okay.” Footsteps came closer again. “The other two, though—the traitors? They’re being dealt with. The rest got away.”

  The traitors? She must have meant Tristan and Vanessa. Who did she mean by the rest? Char, Solomon, and the others?

  “Unfortunately, we caught your flash a little too soon, and the rest of your group managed to escape. They’re insignificant little cockroaches anyway and will be stomped out soon enough.”

  Yes, she spoke of my team. So hopefully she wasn’t lying, and they were really okay. But we—Tristan, Vanessa, Owen, Dorian, and I—were not. Understanding began to creep into my murky mind.

  We’d been worried the others had been caught by the magic traps when we’d flashed out of Moscow, but we’d been the ones ensnared, like flies in a spider’s web.

  Chapter 13

  As this truth settled into my bones, a spark of adrenaline shot through my veins, enough to clear my mind, but not to give me any strength. This Jeana-bitch-sorceress must have been draining me of all of my power while feeding me some stupid vision of a pretty forest and quaint little town. Panic rose like bile in my throat as I considered what she might have seen and heard. Had she been sharing the vision with me? If so, then she’d know the Amadis dissolution was a sham. What else had she found out? Did any of it matter anymore?

  “Why haven’t you killed us yet?” I asked, my voice scratchy, but no longer garbled. I didn’t think Lucas cared any longer whether Tristan and I lived or died, but I could hope he still held out for us to run to his side, because at least that gave us a chance.

  “B
ecause I’m not quite done with you,” Jeana said, tucking her shoulder-length, raven hair behind her ears as she came into view.

  I expected her to look older, but her skin was as clear as her dark, sparkling eyes that told volumes of the darkness inside. She wore a see-through, button-down white top with enough buttons undone to show her voluptuous cleavage pushing out of her black lace bra, and a tight, black leather skirt that ended before her knees. With thigh-high, black boots, she looked like some kind of sexual dominatrix. The clack of her six-inch heels fell silent when she stopped at the cart holding the terrifying instruments. I half-expected her to pick up a leather whip, but instead she chose a shining silver tool with a crescent shaped blade. She wiggled her red-tipped fingers over the point, and then stepped right up to me, grabbed my face with her free hand, and squeezed my jaw.

  “I’m tired of this game,” she snarled in my face, gagging me with her breath that smelled like she’d been eating zombie flesh . . . and cherries. “Tell me how they did it. NOW!”

  My brows scrunched together. Why did she keep asking me that? “How who did what?”

  She growled and tightened her grip on my face.

  “The soldiers, poppet.” She lifted the blade to point to the corner where I could now see the shape of another person. A very large person holding a very large gun. “What did Lucas and Kali do to control them?”

  I blinked and suppressed a ridiculous chuckle. “How the hell would I know?”

  Something sharp poked into my side, right above my hip. “You wouldn’t, but he would. Read his mind!”

  And the pieces tumbled together. She’d been torturing Owen all of this time, but he hadn’t given her what she wanted. I was her Plan B, a way to dig out of his memories how Kali had created the stones. Of course, Lucas had told me how he’d used Sasha’s blood to “improve” the super-soldiers and force their loyalty, but Jeana obviously didn’t know that. Why did she care what they did? To create her own soldiers, no doubt. Another sorceress making a power play for Lucas’s position. The Daemoni thought we experienced organizational and leadership problems, but their greed for power over each other just might be their biggest downfall.