Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) Read Free Page A

throw the guilt on Owen for everything he’d
put us through. Not just Tristan and me, but also poor Blossom, who’d
really pushed her magic doing locator spells and trying to break
through Owen’s cloaks on Dorian.
    “Are you done
torturing Scarecrow for the thirtieth time?” Tristan asked as
he came in wearing Norman clothes of khaki shorts and a green V-neck
Polo that couldn’t have hugged his powerful build more
perfectly. The gold in his hazel eyes sparkled with his teasing, and
the corners of his mouth lifted in a sexy smirk. “You know
that’s not the real reason he’s here.”
    I shrugged. It hadn’t
really been thirty times. “We were waiting on you. What better
way to pass the time?”
    Tristan sat on the edge
of the desk next to me and turned his attention to Owen. “So
you were going to tell us about Noah and those soldiers.”
    Owen rose to his feet,
walked a little circle around the chair, and leaned his arms on the
back of it. “Yeah, that. It’s not only about Noah. It’s
much, much bigger.”
    He explained how Lucas
had teamed up with the U.S. Department of Defense—as well as
other government entities around the world—to supposedly supply
them with super-soldiers, but intending to keep them for his own
plans. He told us how Lucas and Kali had kept the Summoned sons and
some of their offspring locked up on DoD property, such as the
building where we’d found Dorian the first time in Virginia.
Like they’d done with Noah and his battery of soldiers, they’d
been using the stones Kali had created on all of the sons and
many of their descendants, then implanting chips from those stones
into Norman soldiers around the world.
    “So we could
potentially have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of human soldiers
under Lucas’s control,” Tristan surmised. “Some of
them, if not all of them, enhanced with Sasha’s blood and
extremely dangerous.”
    “And of course,
we can’t kill them,” Owen added. That was part of the
Amadis creed—we couldn’t kill Normans unless absolutely
and entirely necessary for the protection of others. Which it may
come down to if this war really happened.
    Charlotte, Owen’s
mother and our second-best warlock, rapped her knuckles on the
doorframe before entering my office, her blond hair swishing over her
shoulders as she crossed the room with long, purposeful strides. Like
me, she gave the outward appearance of being okay, but the pain of
losing her best friend, my mother, lingered just below the surface.
    “If that’s
not bad enough,” she said, “you need to turn on the TV.”
    Vanessa followed her
in, slowing for a moment to brush her pale hand over Owen’s arm
before coming to my side and draping an arm across my shoulders. I
leaned against her, feeling the silkiness of her white-blond hair
against my cheek as I accepted her sisterly hug, while Tristan jabbed
buttons on the remote to turn on the flat screen in the corner. Every
channel showed the same scene: what looked like a riot at first
glance, but it quickly became obvious we were witnessing a Daemoni
attack. On the Normans. In public.
    “It’s
happening in several major metropolitan areas around the world,”
the reporter announced as vampires tore open the throats of Normans
nearby and a Were changed on the fly.
    Then Ian’s ugly
ogre face and dull red hair filled the screen, his crooked yellow
teeth showing in a nefarious grin.
    “Guess what,
mates?” he said into the camera. “Vampires, werewolves,
witches, and warlocks—we’re all real . And we’re
coming for your blood … for your flesh … for your souls .”
    I gasped, and my hand
flew to my mouth.
    “They’ve
come out to the Normans,” Sheree said from the doorway, her
voice full of disbelief, and her brown eyes wide and round. She
lifted a long finger to her mouth and gnawed on a fingernail.
    Vanessa slapped her
hands on her thighs. “It was only a matter of time. Lucas has
been planning it for ages.”
    We remained glued