Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (12 page)

I awoke
with a start, my arms and legs spread out to catch myself and my
heart pounding in my throat. The sensation of falling backwards for a
great distance lingered from my dream. I blinked as I stared at the
ceiling, taking in the familiar sight of gossamer fabric draped
between the tops of four stone pillars at each corner of the bed.
After a moment, my brain associated the view with our suite at the
matriarch’s mansion on Amadis Island, and my heart finally
returned from my throat to its normal place and speed. I blew out a
big breath of relief to know it really had been a dream. I couldn’t
remember the last time I’d been able to sleep so hard and long.
My body must have needed the lengthy regeneration, because it’d
never felt as strong and powerful as it did now.

Once my muscles
uncoiled from the abrupt return to consciousness, I rolled over the
thick mattress that lay atop the stone dais of our bed, and onto my
side, facing my husband. He lay on his back, the silky sheet pulled
up to just below his hip bones, his bare abs, chest, shoulders, and
arms a sight to behold. I wanted to explore every mountain and valley
of his body, preferably with my mouth, but his beautiful face was so
peaceful, his long lashes resting against his cheekbones and his full
lips slightly parted. I decided not to wake him. Yet. Just to be sure
he was indeed asleep, I brushed my thumb over his scruffy jawbone and
then across his bottom lip. I lifted myself up on an elbow and leaned
in to kiss him. His breath came soft on my lips, but he otherwise
didn’t so much as twitch. He’d been dealing with my
nightmares for so long, he must have needed the deep rest as much as
I had.

So I slipped out of the
covers and treaded softly to the en suite bathroom, where I found my
fighting leathers—a corset and pants—clean and folded on
the stone counter, waiting for me. The pool-size tub always called to
me, but I couldn’t remember what we had planned for the day, so
didn’t know if I had time for the luxury of a bubble bath. So I
took a quick shower and dressed.

When I came out and
passed through the bedroom to the front room of our suite, the sheer
curtain hanging in the doorway to the balcony caught my attention.
Something about it wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t
pinpoint the problem. I shrugged and slipped through the door,
closing it quietly behind me. Before leaving the suite, I reached out
with my mind to identify who was in the mansion and where.

There was nobody.

No, I had to take that
back. I couldn’t tell if there was nobody because something
felt odd in my mind as it tried to reach out. As though something
blocked me. Had Tristan asked Owen to muffle our suite again so we
could make love last night?
Had
we made love last night? I
hadn’t noticed any bruises on my skin when I showered. And
surely I’d remember! But I honestly couldn’t remember a
thing about last night or yesterday or … My brow furrowed as I
tried to recall my last memory, because my mind kept bringing forth
events from my nightmare.

“I seriously need
coffee,” I muttered aloud as I left the suite.

I stopped at Dorian’s
room, but there were no signs of him or Sasha, so I made my way
downstairs. Ophelia, the mansion’s head of staff and bringer of
breakfast, was nowhere to be found either. I sat in the fancy dining
room where everyone staying in the mansion usually gathered for
breakfast and dinner and waited until the sound of my own fingers
drumming on the tablecloth drove me crazy. A mental search for her
found nothing in the entire building. However, when I entered the
gourmet kitchen, I discovered a hot pot of coffee waiting for me.

As I leaned against the
granite counter and sipped my nectar of the gods, I stared hard at
the rack of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling over the giant
kitchen island. I could have sworn Ophelia used black-as-night,
cast-iron pots, but these were the kind I preferred, covered in
ceramic that was painted burgundy. Had she finally acquired new
cookware? Seemed unlikely at her age, especially when hers had been
so beautifully seasoned over the years. Then again, I couldn’t
recall at the moment if she’d actually been the one who did all
of the cooking or if someone else did. Who had it been? Had they been
replaced?

Why was my recent
memory so freaking cloudy?

When I finished my
coffee and still nobody had shown up, not a single mind signature
coming into my range, worry needled its way under my skin. I searched
the entire bottom floor for people. Owen, Vanessa, Charlotte, Sheree,
staff,
someone
. But the mansion was like an empty museum, with
sun streaming through the foyer and dust motes dancing in the rays.

“They must be in
the village,” I said, knowing full well I spoke to myself, but
the silence was unnerving and I’d needed to break it. “Are
we
supposed to be in the village?”

I tried to think if we
had a council meeting or special event we should have been attending,
but I couldn’t remember anything at all.
Nothing.
My
memory was more than cloudy; it was downright
gone
. I glanced
up at the ceiling, as if I could see two stories up to Tristan, but
decided to let him sleep a bit longer and make the trip myself. Just
a quick flash to the village to make sure everything was okay, and
then I’d come back to wake him.

But when I tried to
flash, I went nowhere.

I tried again and
again, until I could only imagine how ridiculous my face must have
looked with the concentration I put into it.
What the hell?
I
strode over to the double doors at the front of the foyer and pulled
on them. They refused to budge. I went to every door that led to the
outside on the first floor, and none would open. And at that moment,
I realized what had been off with the sheer curtain on our balcony:
It had been hanging still and shadowed. It didn’t billow inward
as it usually did from the breeze off the Aegean Sea, and the light
behind it hadn’t been right. Neither was the light here in the
foyer—there were no windows in the foyer for the sun to shine
through. The only light usually came from the fire sconces on the
wall.

“What’s
going on?” I called out as worry blossomed into concern. “Where
is everyone?”

Nobody answered.

“HELLO?” My
shout bounced off the stone walls, reverberating back to me. Concern
exploded into panic. Something was wrong. I ran through the entire
first floor of the mansion, throwing open doors to offices,
bathrooms, staff rooms, parlors, the media room, closets … all
except the doors to the Sacred Archives, which wouldn’t open.
“Dorian? Owen? Vanessa? Blossom?”

I yelled all of their
names as I ran. I thought I caught a flash of pink and then a glimpse
of white hair.

“Ophelia! Is that
you? Are you here?”

Still no reply. I ran
up to the second floor, throwing more doors open, and finding nobody.
And then to the third story, even daring to enter Rina’s wing
for the first time since she’d died.

“Solomon?”
I called. “Where are you?”

Not only was nobody
around, but there were simply no signs of anyone being here. No
coffee cup left on a side table. No hand towels in the bathrooms
looking like they’d ever been touched. Not a single piece of
trash in the bins—not a tissue or balled up sheet of paper to
be found.

Adrenaline shot through
my veins, and my heart sprang into a gallop. I ran back to our suite,
throwing the doors open with a bang.

“Tristan, wake
up! Something’s wrong. Everybody’s gone.”

He didn’t so much
as stir, so I launched myself at the bed and gave him a shake.

“Wake up. Come
on.”

He continued to sleep,
which wasn’t like him. If anything, he should have shot
upright, fists flying in natural reaction. But he did nothing except
lay there.

“Tristan,
please,” I begged as anxiety turned to fear. I straddled him,
grabbed his biceps, and gave him a violent shake. His head only
lolled side to side. I peeled back an eyelid, and still no response.
His pupil didn’t even constrict. “What’s wrong with
you? Wake up, Tristan!
Please
.”

I yelled at him, jumped
on him, hit him with a pillow. A shiny, royal blue stone that had
been on the pillow under his neck slid to the side. Another one on my
side of the bed caught my eye. I picked them up and studied them, but
had no idea what they were. Faerie stones, maybe? Had a faerie who
favored the Daemoni done this to my husband?

I took off again,
screaming for help. Still nobody came. I ran for the media room and
picked up a phone, but dead air greeted my ear. No power in the media
room at all.

“What’s
going on?” My frustrated screams echoed through the halls.

I blurred back to the
Sacred Archives and tried the doors again. I yanked on them, punched
at them, kicked at them, threw my shoulder into them, and then my
whole body. I blasted a stream of electricity at them, and only then
did they finally budge. With another shove, they flew open. Into a
dark room no bigger than a coat closet.

Where were the shelves
and shelves of books? Where was the sunshiny scent? Where was the
Otherworldly glow that usually illuminated the room—which was
usually at least five times this size?

I slowly turned and
left the room, then made my way down the corridor in a daze as I
tried to solve the current puzzle of my life. My surroundings faded
out as my mind strained to figure out what had happened to my
husband. To my son. To everyone else. To my memories. Without
realizing it, I meandered into the front sitting room, where the
hearth was dark and cold for the first time I could ever remember. My
head tilted as my gaze traveled across the small tapestries on the
wall. They weren’t quite right, either, like so many things in
this house. I shuffled around to face the big one. The tapestry that
stretched from ceiling to floor and wall to wall. The one that
depicted the Ames Family Vine with the green silvery leaves for the
women and the brown ones for the sons, each of those with their stems
broken from the vine, showing how they’d defected to the
Daemoni. All of the leaves for the sons were like that except
Dorian’s, whose had been brown, but had remained attached to
the vine.

Until now.

“No!” I
cried out when my eyes landed on his leaf at the top of the vine. It
was no longer fully connected, only the tip of its stem still
touching the branch. “Oh, Dorian. What did you do? What
happened?”

I tried to focus on the
last time I’d seen him, tried to figure out what events might
have transpired to make his leaf pull away from the vine. The only
answers came from my dream, a nightmare actually. One where Lucas had
essentially brought Hell to Earth, where Dorian had freed Noah and
taken off, where I’d died and gone to Heaven and then to Hell,
where Tristan had followed me, but when we’d tried to escape,
only I had made it. I’d left him behind in Hell. But that had
only been a dream. He was upstairs this very moment, still sleeping.

Right …?

Reality slammed down on
me, caged me like a monstrous Demon claw, capturing me within its
talons of Hellfire that burned from both heat and cold at the same
time.

“NOOOOO!” I
screamed at the top of my lungs, the wail sounding like those from
the suffering souls in Hell. I collapsed in a heap on the floor, and
something in my corset poked me between the breasts. My fingers
grasped the corners of thick paper stuffed into a hidden pocket
inside, and I pulled it out, smoothed out the folded postcard, gazed
at the picture of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in springtime, cherry
blossoms blooming all around the tidal basin. Tears filled my eyes
and dropped onto the creased postcard. My head shook violently. “No,
no, nooooo.”

The visions of fire and
black ice, of Satan in both his suave and beastly forms, of Demons
swinging their weapons and monsters pushing through the walls,
obliterated the scene around me. The howls and shrieks of burning
souls filled my ears and mind. I sank into a crouch and fell
backwards as my hands grabbed at my hair. This couldn’t be
happening. Everything from my dream—the war, the losses, the
trips to Heaven and Hell—they
couldn’t
have been
real. The memory of Mom, Rina, and Cassandra with their Angel-like
bodies in a white, foggy space flashed in my mind.

It was all real. So
very damn real.

“How could you do
this to me?” I screamed at them as I rocked up to my knees and
lifted my face upward as tears streamed down. “You sent me here
to do this
alone
? What am I supposed to do? I can’t even
leave!”

Exasperation brought
another angry scream that started in my belly, tore through my
throat, and launched itself out like a dragon finally set free. The
power was so great, my back even arched, cracking and popping, and I
cried out again, this time with pain. It passed in a moment, and then
a big shadow loomed over me.

I shrieked and jumped
to my feet. Something very large and very dark was behind me. I spun,
landing with my knees bent and my hands out, ready to fight. But it
had moved with me. I twisted around again, and it followed. And when
I knew this familiar game, I could no longer scream out my
frustration. I could only double over with a fit of insane laughter.

“You’ve got
to be fucking kidding me.”

One side of the thing
lifted and spread out as if to prove that it was there, the tips
hitting the wall four feet away, and it wasn’t even fully
extended. My eyes cut sideways, looking at it out of curiosity,
although most of me fumed over its very existence. Well. At least it
was pretty. The other side spanned out as well, then they came
together behind me, then back out, creating a breeze and a fluttering
sound. The scents of baby powder and sunshine wafted in the air.