Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (14 page)

After what could have
been a day or a month—just like in the Otherworld, I had no
concept of time—the illusion of the Amadis mansion around me
disappeared, leaving Tristan and me in a cold, dark room with a low,
rounded ceiling and rocky walls. He lay perfectly still in his black
leathers on a stone slab while I sat in a ball on a dirt floor.

And I knew then that
Stacey wouldn’t be returning.

The
realization that we were completely alone and on our own snapped me
out of my personal darkness. If we wanted out of here, it was all up
to me now. The sense of purpose gave me a rush of adrenaline.

After I pushed myself
to my feet and stumbled around for a moment, I gained my bearings and
an idea of our surroundings. Based on the dirt floor and rocky walls
and ceiling, I assumed that Debbie and Stacey had hidden us in some
kind of cave. Feeling my way around the room, I found a small pile of
packaged food, but no openings, no exit except a tiny, irregularly
shaped fissure several feet above my head, where the wall curved into
the ceiling. Low gray light seeped through it. Was that outside?
Based on the wind howling through the cracks in the dirt and stone
walls, I assumed it was. What sounded like great forces of water
splashing against a hard surface also came from the other side of the
rocks, although I couldn’t be sure if waves caused it or rain
from a storm. Wedging my fingers and toes into crevices and pushing
away the image of scaling the wall in Hell, I climbed up to peek out
and saw that I could fit myself through the hole.

I wiggled my way out
and found myself on the top of a mound of huge, gray boulders that
made up an island as tiny as our suite back at the mansion. An
infinite, dark sea heaved and rolled all around the island, with
massive waves crashing onto the rocks and spraying foam and droplets
high into the air. Dark clouds hovered low enough to kiss the sea,
and wind gusts nearly knocked me off my feet. My hair slapped and
stung my eyes, and ice crystals blew in my face. A small cloud poofed
out of my mouth with each exhale into the below-freezing air, and
snow quickly piled up on the boulders. Standing at the top of the
mound, I turned in a complete circle. No land could be seen on any of
the horizons.

Nothing at all to tell
me where we were except in the middle of a cold, raging ocean.

My mood as dark and
tumultuous as the sea, I squeezed myself back through the hole and
dropped to the floor below. Darkness had fallen outside and swallowed
me in here, where Tristan still lay completely unaware on the stone
slab. The cold didn’t usually bother me, but this was like the
cold of Hell, seeping deep into my bones, making my body tremble and
my teeth chatter. I almost wished for Hell’s fire. Almost. If
only I could shoot a flame out of my palm like my husband and son
could, because sparking a web of electricity around me did nothing to
warm my body. So I climbed up on the stone slab, lay down on top of
Tristan, let my wings come out, and enclosed us within them to hold
the heat in.

And my mind churned
over ideas of how the heck we were going to get out of here.

Flashing was probably
too high-risk. The Normans’ traps would likely be defunct now
from the war, and even if a trap caught us, there were no Normans out
because of the radioactive fallout. But according to Stacey, the
Daemoni could roam freely and would likely be the ones to catch us.
And me against all of them, while trying to protect Tristan’s
body, didn’t make for good odds. Besides, flashing required a
destination, and since I had no idea where we were, I had no idea
what was in flashing range.

Tristan was the
mastermind with this kind of stuff. He’d seen all parts of the
world so many times, he could probably pinpoint exactly where we were
and also be able to determine the best place to flash from here. But
nobody was home in Tristan’s body, and there was no way I could
save him while stranded on this island. I had to figure out a way to
go back to Hell to help his soul and bring him back.

“Mom! Rina!”
I called desperately. “I need you. I need to go to Hell!”

My pleas echoed noisily
around the cave with no response. Or, more likely, the lack of reply
was
my response. They still refused to help me save Tristan.
Which meant I really was on my own. What were the faeries thinking,
stranding us here? Or had that been their plan all along? If so, that
meant Stacey had been lying to me about needing my help, which didn’t
feel right. But I couldn’t care about her or the faeries. Get
off the island. Go to Hell for Tristan. Save our son. Those were my
objectives.

And Hell would probably
be the harder part. I doubted I could walk up to a Demon-possessed
zombie at a bus station and request a ticket downward when I had no
intent to stay there. On the other hand, the Demons didn’t seem
too bright, so maybe I could convince one to take me. But since I
hadn’t noticed any flying around the island in their native
form, I was back to my other problem of getting us off this mound of
rocks.

Flying around the
island …

Oh! My breath caught.
I’d provided my own answer … assuming these wings could
fly.

“I’m going
to get us out of here, Tristan,” I whispered against his chest.
“I’m going to take care of you like you always take care
of me. I’ll make you proud, baby. Just stay strong, okay?
Promise me you won’t give up, and I won’t either.”

I lifted my head and
rested my chin on his chest, staring at his face. How I missed his
sparkling hazel eyes and the way I’d get stupid when he winked
at me. His glorious grin that still made my knees weak after all this
time. His way with words, always knowing what to say to calm me, or
excite me, or make me feel better about all the hell we’d been
through and still had to face. He wasn’t my Tristan like this.
Just a shell with a heartbeat.

“Please come back
to me.” Thinking that maybe he needed to feel my love like he’d
had in the past, I pressed my fingers to the stone in my chest while
kissing his soft, cool lips. I tried to push love and Amadis power
into his body at the same time. He didn’t wake up. “Guess
you aren’t Sleeping Beauty, are you?”

I prayed for his soul
next, that it would stay strong enough to escape from Hell, but then
I chastised myself for thinking prayer would help. Nobody was
listening. So I returned to my plans for learning what these wings
could do until I fell asleep laying on my husband.

After what felt like
several hours of sleep and regeneration, I stared upward at the
fissure between the rocks, waiting impatiently for the morning light.
It seemed to take forever, making me wonder if the sun would ever
rise. Had I not slept as long as I thought I had? Were my hours
turned around? Finally, dark gray light came through the hole. I’d
barely scaled the wall, squeezed through the opening, and explored
the little island when it began to fade again. That and the blizzard
that still blew full force clued me in that we were near the North
Pole in winter. Or were we? Without knowing how much time had passed
while I’d been in the Otherworld, I didn’t know the
month, or even the year, here on Earth. So for all I knew, we could
have been off the coast of Antarctica, near the South Pole, in June
or July.

Only one way to find
out.

“Here goes
nothing,” I muttered as I brought my wings out of hiding.

Although they were
enormous and covered in feathers, I could barely feel their weight. I
even looked over my shoulder to make sure they were actually there.
They kind of cupped against my back in a vertical position, the tops
of the arches about an inch over my head and the bottom tips by my
feet laying on the cold, wet rocks under me. As they spread out
seemingly on their own—it took me a moment to realize I’d
commanded them to do so in order to see them better—the shock
slammed into me like a freight train.

I had wings! Freakin’
wings
!

How was this even
possible? I knew I was far from being an Angel, but these weren’t
Demon wings either. They were thick and feathery, and I was unable to
help myself from admiring their purple and black beauty, even when
their presence shocked and confounded me. What did their shape and
colors—their very
existence
—mean about who and
what I was? I considered this question only fleetingly before telling
myself not to go there. I probably didn’t want to know the
answer.

“Wings,” I
said aloud, although my voice was lost on the wind. I just needed to
speak the word because some weird part of me thought doing so would
somehow make this moment less surreal. It didn’t. “Well,
let’s see what you can do.”

I thought of my wings
opening up further and spreading out to my sides, and they responded
like any other part of my body would. The tips lifted from the
ground, stretching out and away, each feather reacting and moving
appropriately. I hadn’t even fully extended them yet, and they
each reached over a foot beyond my fingertips, making my wingspan at
least seven feet across.

“These are kind
of cool,” I had to admit.

I’d been assuming
I could fly with them, but it occurred to me now that maybe I
couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t work like that. But what
other good would they be? What other purpose would they serve?
Perhaps none except to be an annoyance, but that made little sense.
I’d received them in the Otherworld, so surely they’d
been given to me for a reason. Cassandra had said I was there to be
prepared, so the wings must have been what she meant. Even if I
didn’t believe in the Angels’ purpose for me anymore, I
knew firsthand that their gifts didn’t come lightly. So unless
this was a punishment, which it very well could have been, I’d
go with my first assumption that they were useful. This had to mean
they’d allow me to fly.

I just wasn’t
sure how. Did I jump in the air and flap them like a bird? Did they
somehow lift me off the ground on their own? Testing my control, I
wiggled my back and shoulder muscles, pulling them in and pushing
them out, and then I stretched them further outwards, imagining how
birds spread theirs wide when they took off for flight. I made them
as big as possible.

Then the wind gusted
up, caught my wings like sails, and launched me off the boulder.

“Ack!” I
yelped as my feet caught against the rocks, and then in the crevices
between.

I stumbled backward,
stepping on my wings several times, unable to figure out how to catch
myself because the wings kept getting in the way. I tripped and
rolled all the way down the mound of rocks, the momentum and the wind
working together to push me along with no chance of grabbing onto
something. My breath flew out of me as I stopped right before
plunging into the angry sea. I lay facedown with a jagged rock
jutting into my stomach, salty spray hitting my face, and a string of
profanity spewing out of my mouth back at the water.

“Son of a
mother-effin’ witch,” I swore as I pushed myself up with
my hands.

I couldn’t help
the glance around to make sure no one had seen that. And then I
wished someone had, because I desperately missed all of the people
who would have been laughing at me. Tristan, Owen, Vanessa, Dorian …
Where were they all now? Would I ever see them again?

Rather than letting it
bring me down, the feeling of loneliness gave me a surge of
determination.

“Nobody can save
Tristan but me, and I have to do that before I can worry about
anything else.”

I stomped up the pile
of rocks again, stood at the top, and turned my back to the wind this
time before spreading the weird, feathery appendages emerging from my
shoulder blades. This time when the wind gusted up, I sprang up and
out, away from the rocks. I thrust my shoulders back and forth, and
then undulated my whole upper body in an attempt to flap my wings.
They didn’t respond, and I could only imagine how ridiculous I
looked. If not for the howling wind, I’d probably hear the
shouts of hilarity from the Angels watching me through the veil. My
body did move, though—about five feet from where I’d
been, but only because gravity brought me down lower on the mound of
boulders.

Why couldn’t I
just lift off like a rocket and soar upwards? Wasn’t that how
the Angels did it?

And with that thought,
my body jetted into the air.

Ice and snow pelted
into my face as I shot twenty-five feet above the top of the rock
island before I even realized it. With another thought, I spread my
wings to slow my ascent and gain some control. Thinking of Dorian and
birds in flight, I leaned my body forward. And I soared.

“I’m
freakin’ flying!” I shouted, fist-pumping the air as I
sped over the violent sea below. I’d figured it out. I’d
done it. I would get Tristan and myself off this island in the middle
of frozen nowhere.