Power (Soul Savers) (28 page)

The effect I’d had on Heather before was nothing compared to
now. The sour smell of pure fear filled the room.

“Get her out of here,” Tristan shouted even as I dragged
Heather out of the room.

I glanced over my shoulder at them. Sonya, fangs out and
eyes glowing red, pushed against Tristan and clawed at his shoulders as she
tried to get to her sister. As if Heather wasn’t already afraid. As loudly as
her heart pounded now, every vampire and Were on the island would hear it.
Tristan paralyzed Sonya, but a feral growl still rumbled from her chest, and
her upper lip curled in a snarl. Sheree rushed to us and helped me get Heather
out of the house and safely away from both vampires.

“I’m so sorry,” Sheree murmured as we deposited a trembling
Heather into the passenger seat of her own car.

“Don’t,” I said, shutting the car door and hurrying around
to the driver’s side. “It’s not your fault. Don’t blame yourself.”

“But I—”

I held up my hand. “You suggested what you thought best, but
I made the ultimate decision. Now get inside and see who needs you more. My bet
is on Sonya.”

I couldn’t believe I’d said that, but it was true. Perhaps
by willingly giving her soul up to become immortal, she’d sealed the deal for
herself. Or perhaps we weren’t trained well enough to do what we needed for
her. With that thought, I couldn’t help but blame Charlotte and mom and Rina,
too, for this fiasco.

I jumped into the driver’s seat, fished Heather’s keys out
of her purse and drove her back to my house. Blossom and Dorian were just
setting the table for dinner when we walked in. By now, Heather’s fear had
dissipated, replaced by anger. She spun on me as soon as I closed the backdoor.

“What was that all about?” she demanded. “One minute we’re
having a good time, and the next, you’re dragging me out of the room.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to ignore the stares from
Blossom and Dorian, who both stood on the other side of the kitchen island. “I
had to get you out of there, though.”

“Why? She was fine! You freaked out for nothing. You could
have at least let us say goodbye.”

 
“It wasn’t for
nothing, Heather.” I wanted to tell her the truth about Vanessa being there,
too, but I couldn’t for everyone’s safety, including hers. “You have to trust
me. I did everything for your best interest.”

“Whatever,” she huffed before turning on her heel and
heading for the family room.

“Don’t walk away,” I said to her back.

“You’re not my mother. Don’t tell me what to do.”

I stared after her in shock. She’d never spoken to
me—to any of us—like that before.
She’s a teenager. She’s hurt. She misses her sister.
I looked at
Blossom, who looked back at me, and Dorian, who stared toward the door Heather
had left through.

“Let’s eat,” Blossom said with a smile too big to be real.
“I made lasagna.”

The three of us had barely dished out the food and begun
eating when Heather decided to join us. She ate quietly at first, probably
embarrassed by her outburst, but eventually joined in the conversation. By the
time she left for home later in the evening, she was over it all. She didn’t
even ask me when she could see Sonya again. That made me sad for both of them.

Tristan arrived home much later, and I sat at the table
again, watching him eat lasagna at ten o’clock at night.

“So if you got them both settled down, what took you so
long?” I asked after we updated each other on everyone’s status. As expected,
Vanessa had calmed down quickly, and Sonya took a little longer. Like her
sister, now she held contempt for us for cutting the visit short.

Tristan swallowed the bite he’d been chewing and took a swig
of wine. “I had a couple of beers and a talk with Owen. We’re taking a trip to
South Beach.”

“South Beach?” I asked, bewildered. “Wait. Oh, no, you’re
not. You’re not going anywhere near there and the Daemoni!”

“It’s not as bad as we’d thought, remember?”

“I don’t care! It’s bad enough. Do you
want
them to take control of you?”

“Of course not. But I’ll have Scarecrow with me this time,
and he can shield and cloak me. They’ll have no idea I’m even there.”

I gnawed on my lip as I considered this—a much better
arrangement than what Tristan and I had when we went there. “I still don’t like
it. Why do you even need to go?”

“Vanessa had a place in South Beach when Owen met up with
her again, before, well, before he brought her here.”

Although Tristan had tried to avoid bringing up the gruesome
memory, my stomach clenched at the reminder of Vanessa’s arrival and what Owen
had done to her. I just couldn’t imagine my Owen—my sweet, protecting,
normal
Owen, anyway—slicing her
into pieces.

“What do you mean when he met up with her
again
?”

Tristan shrugged. “I guess they’ve had an on-again-off-again
thing going for a while. That memory you’d seen of Victor’s—they were on
then. But Owen left for a while and Vanessa went back to the Daemoni, tried the
South Beach gig but her heart was elsewhere.”

“You mean with Owen?” My nose wrinkled as my mind tried to
visualize them together. The idea of them as a couple was still too absurd for
me to accept. Obviously for Owen, too, since he still flirted with every female
in sight.

“With Owen. Maybe with the Amadis, even. You were
right—she’d been wanting this for a long time, but she had a hard time convincing
Owen that she meant it. He didn’t bring her here on a whim, Lex. You need to
cut him some slack.”

“I know,” I admitted as I stared at my hands in my lap. “I
worry about him, though. I’m glad you had a chance to talk to him. Does he hate
me?”

“Of course not. But I think he’s having a hard time figuring
out how to handle you. A lot has changed with both of you since the trial last
year.”

I sighed, feeling bad for my behavior toward Owen. I loved
him like a brother, and I’d let my frustration with his choices get the better
of me, rather than loving him unconditionally.

“So,” I said, “why on earth do you two need to go to South
Beach? What’s so important at Vanessa’s old place, assuming her stuff is even
still there? I mean, we’ve bought her new clothes. If she needs anything else,
we’ll get it, too. Everything’s replaceable. Nothing warrants this risk—”

“Except your pendant.”

“What?
Really?
Did
Vanessa finally admit to having it? Did Owen find out where it is?”

“No, but we’re going to search her place. We’ll go in
undercover, find the pendant and get out as fast as possible,” Tristan said
before he took another bite of pasta.

My excitement deflated. “But Owen told me he looked
already.”

“He said he tried to look, but didn’t have time to go
through everything. He thinks, as possessive as he’s seen her with it in the
past, that since she didn’t have it on her, she must have hidden it somewhere obscure.
She wouldn’t take the chance of someone else finding it.”

“She’s definitely hiding something,” I agreed, and their
plan started sounding better to me. “You’re all right with Owen? I mean, you
trust him?”

“With my life, Lex. I know he’s different than he used to
be, but he’s still Owen.”

“Then you trust him with mine?”

He placed his fork on his plate, crossed his arms on the
table and leaned closer to me. “You’re not going.”

“Why not? You need my telepathy.”

“No, we don’t. We don’t plan on coming into contact with
anyone.”

“Yeah, well, plans go awry, remember?”

“You’re not going, Alexis. For once, don’t argue with me.”

“I can’t just sit here, waiting for you to return. I’m not
doing that again! Last time you did that to me, you didn’t come back,
remember?”

He grimaced. Then he reached his hands across the table and
took hold of mine. “You promised me you wouldn’t be reckless anymore. I need to
know you’re safe here and that Dorian is, too. Besides, someone needs to stay,
in case anyone comes sniffing around for a long, lost vampire. Or two.”

“Then you stay, and I’ll go with Owen. It’s not me the
Daemoni are trying to control.”

“Sonya and Vanessa need
you
,
my love. Owen and I can’t do what you can for them.”

I stared at him for a long moment, but no further argument
came for me. My breath huffed out with resignation. I would be left behind.
Again.

***

The following week, I paced my office at the safe house, my
hand twisting and pulling at my hair. Giving themselves plenty of daylight to
work with, Tristan and Owen had left at dawn this morning and said they’d be
home within a few hours. Winter’s early dusk was only an hour away now, and
they still weren’t back.

“This isn’t good,” I muttered to Sheree, who sat on the
couch, chewing on her nails. “There’s no way it should have taken this long.”

“Think positive, Alexis. They’re virtually unbeatable,
right? I’m sure they’re fine.”

“But they’re not invincible!” My voice had risen several
octaves with the panic growing in my chest. I couldn’t stop thinking about the
last time they’d left me for enemy territory, when Owen had come back but
Tristan hadn’t. My chest tightened and tears filled my eyes. “They shouldn’t
have gone, not by themselves, what were we thinking? I should have never
let—”

I froze. The agitated mind signatures appeared on my mental
radar at the same time crashing and banging echoed down the hall from the main
part of the safe house. The Were and I exchanged a look and then I was gone. I
blurred to the foyer and skidded to a stop in the doorway of one of the common
living areas. My heart stuttered at the scene.

Owen and Tristan were apparently in a standoff.

Tristan’s arms wrapped tightly around his own torso as if
bound in an invisible straightjacket, and murderous flames filled his eyes. He
growled and thrashed about, throwing his body at Owen, who dodged each attack.
Tristan’s body kept hitting the walls and crashing into furniture, destroying
everything in his path. Owen circled him, his hands up, working his magic
against Tristan.

“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded.

“He’s flipped a freakin’ switch!” Owen answered while
keeping his full attention on Tristan.

As if noticing me for the first time, my husband turned his
enraged eyes on me, growled again and threw himself at me. But I didn’t duck
away. Instead, I wrapped my arms around him and rolled with him, doing my best
to diminish the impact for both of us. The Daemoni obviously had control of
him—which meant distance was no longer a factor—so I pushed my
Amadis power into him. He didn’t react as expected.

“That won’t work!” he snapped, but I couldn’t tell if he
mocked me or actually tried to help.

Tristan!
I yelled
into his mind. His body calmed. It trembled violently, but he no longer fought
me. Again I tried sharing Amadis power.

“
It’s not Daemoni
power doing this
,” he said. “
It is …
but … not in me.
”

The strain in his mental voice scared me. He could barely
fight off whatever controlled him.

Just don’t forget you
love me and I love you. No matter what. You don’t want to hurt me. You don’t
want to hurt anyone here.

He nodded. His body relaxed even more. But as soon as I
released my embrace and moved to get up, he started thrashing about again.

“
You lie! You’re a lying
whore,
” he silently yelled.

My head snapped back as if he had physically smacked me.
What are they doing to him?
He moved as
if to attack me again, but Owen held him back with his magic. The muscles in
the warlock’s neck and shoulder strained with the effort, so I raised my own
hands and did what I could to help. I didn’t have Tristan’s power to paralyze,
but I could control objects to a certain extent, almost to Owen’s level. We
couldn’t back off in the slightest, though, because Tristan could easily
overpower both of us if he wanted to.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Owen.

“We can’t hold him like this forever. I can bind him to the
fridge again,” he said, reminding me of a similar situation two years ago at
the beach house in the Keys, right after I’d gone through the
Ang’dora
.

I shook my head. “I can’t do that to him again. Besides,
this is different—”

“Yeah, he’s not only after you this time. He seems to hate
all of us.”

Sheree appeared in the doorway, and Tristan’s body jumped
against our power, trying to lunge for the were-tiger. Owen and I were able to
hold him back, which told me Tristan fought the impulse, too. If he’d given the
attempt his full potential, we’d never been able to hold him off.

“Get out,” I yelled at Sheree before she got hurt. She
simply stood there with wide eyes. “Go!”

Her eyes snapped to me, then she scrambled off.

“We can’t do this forever, Alexis,” Owen said. “Decide.”

Decide? Decide to tie my husband up? How could I do that?

The smell of burning flesh interrupted my thoughts. My eyes
bugged at the sight of smoke rising from Tristan’s sides.

“What’s he doing?” I cried, though it was obvious—he
was shooting himself with fireballs.

“Owen, make him
stop
,”
I shrieked. “Do something!”

Owen flicked his hand, and Tristan’s arms jerked away from
his body and lifted to his sides so that now he looked as though we were
crucifying him on an invisible cross. A lone fireball fell from his hand to the
tile floor, no power behind it. Without looking away from Tristan, I stepped
forward to stomp the flames out. Tristan’s flesh stopped sizzling. Through the
holes burned into his shirt, I noticed his skin already healing. Tears stung my
eyes.