him that Kali would use Rina the way she did so she could enter the sacred grounds. We decided that Kali had altered her plan for revenge when Tristan and I showed up and she realized Owen had double-crossed her.
Rina’s and Mom’s deaths changed me, and I’d do anything to have them back, but Owen’s plan could have gone even worse. We all could have died in a bloodbath. He’d been right about Kali being too arrogant to call in other Daemoni for back up, but she’d still had a lot of firepower at her fingertips. Firepower that now belonged to Lucas.
Which was the real reason we’d gathered in my office right now.
“So you were going to tell us about Noah and those soldiers,” Tristan said as he sat next to me on the edge of my desk.
“Yeah, that,” Owen said. He inhaled a deep breath before diving into it. “That really was a DoD building where you almost caught us, and that’s a Lucas thing, not a Kali thing. Not entirely, anyway. Lucas got fed up with the so-called weakness of the Summoned brothers and their offspring. I guess he also finally used up his patience with trying to replicate Jordan’s Juice. So when he made ties with the U.S. military, they came to him with the idea of creating these super-soldiers using Daemoni blood. They said they’d give him more infiltration in the higher ranks if he could give up some of his people and their blood, and not just to the U.S. Several countries are involved. He gave them the brothers and a bunch of their descendants.”
“That’s who’s locked up in there?” I asked, my teeth on edge. I shouldn’t have been surprised—this was
“There and in other places around the world. And Kali wormed her way into the project with her promise of the stones. She implanted the stones in the Daemoni who went to the DoD, let them soak, as she put it, then broke up the stones and implanted them in all the soldiers who had their blood. Then not only would those soldiers be stronger and maybe have certain extra abilities, but they’d be able to control them, too. The
“You mean Kali would have the control,” Tristan clarified.
“Like I said, it was supposed to be Lucas—that had been
“But . . . she’s gone,” I said. “Who has control now?”
“Well, obviously Lucas,” Tristan answered for Owen. “As Scarecrow said, Lucas trumped Kali with the lykora blood.”
“But he couldn’t have taken that much of Sasha’s blood,” I said.
“Couldn’t he have?” Owen asked. “I don’t know how long he had her. I don’t know how much they need to be affected.”
“If his primary goal is control and loyalty, he wouldn’t need to give the blood to everyone,” Tristan said. “We saw it used on the Norman soldiers, but he doesn’t
“Right,” Owen said. “All of the Norman soldiers with stone-chips in them would feel the same thing their so-called masters do. So Lucas only needs to control the masters—the brothers and their descendants. Oh, and Martin. Kali gave him Martin, too, but I don’t know if Lucas bothered using him or not.”
Tristan steepled his fingers together and rested his chin on the tips. “So we could potentially have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of human soldiers under Lucas’s control. Some of them, if not all of them, extremely dangerous.”
Owen nodded, his face grave. “And of course, we can’t kill them.”
“If that’s not bad enough,” Char said as she walked into my office with long, purposeful strides, “you need to turn on the TV.”
Vanessa followed her in and brushed her hand over Owen’s arm, but she came to my side. She propped herself against my desk and draped an arm across my shoulders, and I leaned against her, into her hug. What can I say? I’d been wrong about her. She was Amadis through and through. She was also my sister. And I needed her.
We all turned our eyes toward the flat screen in the corner. I didn’t want to make too many changes to the Amadis mansion so soon after Rina’s passing, but Tristan and I insisted we have electricity in our offices, along with computers, Internet service, and access to the news networks. Tristan picked up the remote from my desk and turned the television on. Every channel showed the same thing:
“It’s happening in several major metropolitan areas around the world,” the reporter was saying as the screen displayed what at first glance looked like anarchy in a city’s streets—like a riot after a big sporting event or a controversial court case. But when I watched the action more closely, I saw.
“Oh, my God,” I gasped, clapping my hand over my mouth. “Those are . . .
As if to demonstrate my words, a vamp’s mouth clamped over a Norman’s throat, blood spilling down the woman’s white blouse.
Then a naked man ran into view, and as he lunged for the camera, he exploded into a wolf, were-goo raining all over the street and onto the camera lens. The camera banged around on the ground for a minute followed by blood-curdling screams that caused my stomach to clench, and then the camera came upright. A familiar face with pale red hair, crooked yellow teeth, and an ogre’s grin came on screen—the same face that had sat across the table from me years ago and told me the man by my side didn’t really love me.
“Ian,” Tristan muttered.
“Guess what, mates?” Ian said into the camera, sending a chill through my veins. “Vampires, werewolves, witches, and warlocks—we’re all
Kristie Cook is a lifelong, award-winning writer in various genres, from marketing communications to fantasy fiction. She continues to write the Soul Savers Series, a New Adult paranormal romance / contemporary fantasy, with
Besides writing, Kristie enjoys reading, cooking, traveling and riding on the back of a motorcycle. She has lived in ten states, but currently calls Southwest Florida home with her husband, three sons, a beagle, and a puggle.
