Power (Soul Savers) (36 page)

We’d apparently appeared right in the center of a makeshift
military installation, and at least thirty rifles pointed at us from all
directions. At least they were all Normans.

“Looks like we have our proof, boys,” someone said. “
Humans
don’t just appear out of thin
air. I knew the Russians were hiding them.”

“What do we do, sir?” someone else asked, but I already knew
what the first guy was thinking. I gathered him to be the commander and what he
wanted to do with us wasn’t good.
Crap,
crap, crap.

“Lock ’em up for now,” he ordered, and the circle of men
moved toward us.

“
Let’s get outta here,
”
Vanessa’s voice rang in my head, just as my own thought came to mind.

Wait! No. I have an
idea.

Vanessa glanced sideways at me, her eyes lit up. “
We’re gonna fight them?
”

I didn’t have time to lecture her about not fighting Normans
unless absolutely necessary. I only had a few seconds as the men crossed the
fifty yards to reach us, and I needed that to share my idea, sparked by Rina’s
plan with my books—to expose just enough truth to ignite a little fear in
the Normans so they’d learn to better protect themselves.

“Don’t do anything stupid now,” the man in charge said as
the group moved as one, closing their wide circle around us.

Show them what you
have
, I told Vanessa.

Her eyes flicked toward me again with questions in them, but
she shrugged. “
If you say so …
”

In a blink, she had her jacket unzipped and her fingers were
working the buttons at the top of her bustier.

What—No! Show
them your fangs. Let them see what they want to see. Scare them—just
don’t bite.

She stuck her bottom lip out. “
Where’s the fun in that?
”

“We don’t want to hurt you,” the commander continued as his
men came dangerously close to us. “Just be good—”

I shot a small bolt of lightning out of my hand, and it hit
the ground in front of the commander. All of the men jumped back a pace.

“Now, see, that was stupid,” the commander said. “That’s not
being good.”

“
We
don’t want to
hurt
you
,” I said, keeping my hands
held up, palms out, as they started closing in on us once again. Bluish-silver
electricity crackled over my fingertips to give them a good show.

With fangs fully extended, Vanessa blurred around the edge
of the circle, stopping a couple of times to half-lunge at the line with a
threatening hiss. The men paused. She returned to my side, her lap completed in
maybe two seconds, and I thought we’d shown them enough to believe whatever
they’d heard. I was about to tell Vanessa to flash.

But, unfortunately for us, they were either avid fans of my
books or, as Vanessa suspected and much more likely, someone had fed them
secrets. Because they knew exactly what to do to protect themselves.

Shots cracked loudly through the air. A moment passed before
I realized what they were as smoke trailed out of the barrels of several guns
and the smell of burnt gun powder filled my nose. Vanessa’s body jerked in response,
and four soldiers were on top of her before she even hit the ground. From her
screams, I knew immediately those were no ordinary bullets and no ordinary
handcuffs they tried to clamp on her flailing wrists.

They knew to use silver.

For a moment that felt like minutes but probably lasted only
a second or two, I watched the soldiers trying to overpower the vampire. The
silver might have weakened her, but she wasn’t going without a fight—she
was mad as a, well, as a vampire who’d been shot with silver. Two more men
joined their comrades, trying to pin Vanessa down, while others trained their
guns on her.

Had they forgotten about me? Should I use this distraction
to flash away and save myself? She was a vampire. Surely she could overpower
them, especially with my blood in her, and escape. Besides, she was likely
setting me up anyway, leading me to my own capture or death. Perhaps this was a
blessing.

Vanessa snarled and growled, and her body bucked against the
captors as she tried to fight her way out. Another shot cracked the air. The
vampire screamed with pain. And I had no decision. There was only one right
thing to do.

“Vanessa!” I shrieked as I blurred to the frenzy. I grabbed
a soldier by the jacket and threw him off, but the sounds of rifle chambers
clicking into place stopped me from grabbing the next. All twenty-something
guns were now trained on me. I froze, hands in the air.

They shot me anyway.

White-hot pain seared across the back of my calf. Again in
my thigh. Too shocked at first to react, two bullets hit me. I didn’t wait for
more. I dropped and rolled, then sprang to my feet and ran at them in a blur.
Adrenaline pumped through my veins as I shot electricity at some of the men and
waved my hand at others, sending them flying through the air. My fists grabbed
the coats of two more men, one in each hand, and I yanked them off of Vanessa
and threw them to the side. They landed with simultaneous thuds in the snow
about ten feet away.

Another soldier swung his gun at me. I caught it in one hand
while flipping around in an aerial cartwheel, knocking him out when my boot
collided with his temple. He crumpled to the ground. I grabbed Vanessa’s hand.

Can you flash?

“No!” she screamed as her body jolted from the ground just
as another round of gunfire cracked through the air. The barrels had been aimed
at me. Vanessa took the hits, her body wrenching with each one. She fell into
my arms.

Hoping my flash with Tristan from South Beach wasn’t a
fluke, I held the vampire tightly and flashed. I targeted right across the
Strait, to the island I had seen from the shore. We appeared—both of
us!—at the top of a snow-capped cliff, the sea far below us. Nobody
around.

As soon as I let her go, Vanessa collapsed in a heap. The
searing pain finally registered in my mind, and a scream hurled out of my
mouth. I dropped to my hands and knees next to the vampire, clamping my jaw
shut against more cries. The wounds healed immediately, and the pain began to
recede. I blinked away the tears so I could inspect Vanessa’s body. They’d only
been trying to incapacitate her the first time with shots to the legs that were
already healed. But three more holes patterned her leather jacket—the
bullets that had been meant for me. Blood leaked from these, but not nearly as much
as expected. A closer inspection showed the wounds already closing.

“I need … your dagger,” she gasped. “Gotta … cut … these
out.”

“I’ll do it.”

“No! Just … give it to me.”

I pushed myself around to sit next to her. My calf and thigh
still throbbed, but the bullets must have only grazed my skin because I felt no
foreign objects lodged underneath.

“Vanessa, you can’t do surgery on yourself,” I said,
exposing the dagger and removing it from its sheath as I leaned in closer.

“Watch me.” In one swift motion, she’d snatched the blade
from my hand and had discarded her jacket. Her eyes squinted and her lips
curled in a grimace as she dug the tip into her right shoulder.

“The
silver
,” I
said, not knowing how she could stand even more than what had already peppered
her body.

“A perk to being Amadis now,” she said through gritted teeth
as she maneuvered the dagger around until the bullet popped out. She sighed as
her skin closed right up.

“It doesn’t hurt you?”

“Oh, it hurts all right.” She gasped as she dug the blade
into her side. “Hurts like a motherfucker. But if I were still Daemoni, I’d be
wishing to die to escape the pain.”

She removed the bullets quickly and expertly, as if she’d
done this before. I made sure to return my dagger to my side before we both collapsed
on our backs.

“We should have flown after all,” she mumbled as we stared
at the star-studded sky. There seemed to be more stars here than there had been
in the Australian Outback. And they were so big, so close.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Why didn’t we? Oh, wait. Something about
this way being faster? And safer?”

“Shut up,” she muttered.

“Bite me,” I said.

“Don’t tempt me.”

We lay in silence for a while, neither of us particularly
wanting to move on yet.

“I think we would have been better off showing our boobs,”
Vanessa finally said, breaking the silence.

“Maybe.” I laughed. “I can’t believe that’s what you thought
I meant. As if …”

“Trust me, it works. You’ve been given beauty and a hot
body, why not use it?”

I blinked. “Never crossed my mind, actually.”

“The Angels gave it to you for a reason. Well, you get it
from your vamp DNA—the Ancients gave us physical beauty to better attract
our prey. But the Angels enhanced yours for a reason, right? Because Normans
respond to beauty. I mean, even before the
Ang’dora
,
you were—”

“
What?
” I’d never
forgotten her words when we’d first fought in Key West. “You were disgusted by
me.”

“Yeah, because Se—I mean Tristan still wanted
you
. And you didn’t compare to
this
.” Her hand flipped off the ground,
waving at her curves. “How could he
not
want this?”

I kept my mouth shut, but could hear Tristan’s voice saying
something about
that
not being his
style, especially everything that came with it. Even now. He’d picked me.

“I’m sorry you went through all that with him,” I said quietly.
“I don’t know what it’s like to not be with someone you want—”

“Of course, you don’t. You always get what you want.”

“Oh, please. You think I
wanted
to be the freak growing up? To move around all the time and never have any true
friends and no family that I knew of? That I
wanted
to be thrown into this crazy world with supernatural
creatures that shouldn’t even exist? To have my husband taken from me for seven
freakin’ years and to know that he may never be completely free from his
creators who want nothing more than my head? That I want to someday lead an
entire society that depends on every decision I make? Whose future won’t exist
if I don’t have a daughter against all possible odds? Oh, but wait. I must have
wanted
to have a boy so I could just hand
him over to the enemies and lose him forever. No, Vanessa, I don’t always get
what I want.” I paused, then couldn’t resist adding, “If I did, you would have
been dead two years ago.”

My rant was met by pure silence. And then a musical laugh.
“Touché.”

“But, no,” I said quietly, “I’ve never had my heart broken
in the same way you have. And I’m sorry about that.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter now.” Vanessa cleared her
throat. “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with using what you’ve got. It’ll make
your life a lot easier. Men don’t usually go around shooting beautiful women
unless provoked. Such as
you
had us
do.”

I ignored her spot-on jab. “We’re Amadis, though. We don’t
use
any
of our gifts unless there’s a
good reason.”

“And getting out of there alive so we can retrieve the stone
is a pretty damn good reason.”

She was right once again. Another weird moment for the
night:
Vanessa
teaching
me
how to fight like an Amadis.

“Of course, I don’t recommend that with the Daemoni,” she
added. “Rape is one of their favorite past-times. You don’t need to worry about
Normans—you just proved you could handle them—but Daemoni …” Her
voice trailed off, and then she sighed. “I can’t believe I stayed one for so
long.”

Statements like these made me wonder whether she really was
setting me up or actually helping me, especially because her thoughts and
emotions always corroborated her words. In fact, as I thought about it, I
couldn’t remember a time Vanessa had actually lied to me. I didn’t always like
what she said, but at least she’d always been truthful.

Maybe she’d give me an honest answer to my question about
our current topic of conversation. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Tristan
because I didn’t know if I could stand to hear the truth from his mouth. I’d
been trying to dismiss the nagging thought, telling myself I really didn’t want
to know, that it didn’t matter because it was in the distant past. But I
couldn’t let it go, especially when the topic kept coming up.

“Can I ask you a question?” I finally blurted. “About Daemoni
and rape … I think I should know … if Tristan…”

I stammered, as if my tongue didn’t really want to ask the
question.

Vanessa turned her head to look at me. “He never raped, as
far as I know. He never
needed
to—women were practically raping him.” She chuckled, though no humor
colored the sound. “To be completely honest, he drove Lucas nuts when it came
to anything with women and children. Seth claimed he was too much of a warrior
to be bothered with them, that having anything to do with them was a waste of
his time and power. He would only take on the big guys in battles because the
younger ones weren’t worthy. But I knew—and I’m sure Lucas
knew—Seth had a soft spot. That’s why I fell in love with him.” She let
out a sad sigh.

I gulped down the lump in my throat. “But I’ve seen his
memories—women and children’s faces …”

“Did you actually see him hurting or killing them directly?
Him personally?”

I tried to remember the visions I’d seen on that balcony at
the beach house in the Keys, when I’d been trying to convert Sheree and Tristan
had taken the evil into his body.

“He burnt down whole villages. There was blood on his hands.
And lots of their faces … the faces of his victims.” Tears burned my eyes,
blurring the stars above into smudges of light.