Eight Souls: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part TWO

by Akeroyd, Serena

  I had to wonder if she was drawing my creature out of me as she had with Dre. Although, with Dre, she’d done that before she’d received the mark.

  We had no theories as to what the fuck was going down, but we knew Eve was beyond special, and that something tied us all together. Something which was priceless and in need of protection yet would be frowned upon by the faculty.

  I tilted my head to the side, aware she was standing there in a pair of sleep shorts and a shirt. She wasn’t dressed provocatively in any way, but she was my Chosen. She didn’t have to do anything provocative to entice me. She did that by fucking breathing.

  Licking my lips, I asked, “Eve? Are you going to your room?”

  She’d been sleeping here since I’d left the sickbay, and though it was both torturous and delightful, I was kind of sad at the prospect of her leaving.

  “No. C-Can I get in with you?”

  My cock hardened the instant she let the words out, but my head told me to be cautious. “Are you okay?” I rasped, even as I moved to the side so she could climb in next to me—sure, she could have rounded the bed and climbed in there, but she hadn’t done that. She’d moved toward me, and the prospect of her lying on sheets that were warm from my body made everything inside me clench and release in an endless surge of emotion that was as ceaseless as the tide itself.

  “No, I’m not,” she whispered as she clambered into bed beside me.

  My body still ached, but I didn’t need help moving now so that was something. Shifting across the bed hadn’t hurt too badly, either, and the very lack of pain was not helping me focus when Eve was here, in bed with me. Her words helped, of course. Like a dash of cold water on my face in winter.

  “What’s wrong?” I inquired, hating the uncertainty in her voice.

  “I’m aching and sore and thinking about today’s classes.”

  Surprised by the list, I murmured, “When you work out tomorrow, some of the aches will go away.”

  She grumbled, “Well, that doesn’t help me now, does it?”

  My lips curved. “No. Sorry.” A huff escaped her, which had me grinning into the darkness. “What did you learn in class?” My breath caught in my chest as she turned into me, then wiggled closer, so much so that I could feel her heat against my side.

  Jesus.

  “That in 1974, Ghouls tried to take over a town in Wales.”

  “The Ystwyth Massacre.” I hummed under my breath. “Damn shame. Small village wiped out, and the human authorities never even knew it. We got there too late.”

  “Hard to believe the nest is still there.”

  “Yeah. It is.” We monitored nests which had been established that way, nests that earned the title of ‘colony.’ That was what Juliet McAllister’s intent had been in Aboh. To establish another colony in Nigeria. “What else did you learn?”

  “Stuff about Ghouls. It made me wonder how a creature connected with me enough to realize I was there. The compound…it was a backwater settlement. I don’t understand how anyone could have found me.”

  “Let’s be grateful they did,” I said with a sigh, loving how she nestled into me, even as it fucking hurt. Not just my aching body, but my dick too.

  I took it as a good sign that I was getting better, but still, it sucked.

  “Yeah. You’re right.” She fell silent. “Nestor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s June twenty-first.”

  Whatever I’d expected to hear, it wasn’t that. I’d expected her to be concerned about the fact she’d done the impossible, that she was somehow capable of granting wishes. Nope, her worries weren’t grounded in that, but on the date?

  Would I ever understand this woman?

  “Yes, it is. Summer solstice,” I conceded.

  She curled onto her side, and the fact my gouille could see as well in the dark as it could in the light, meant that I saw the plump surge of her tits as they bunched together, and the way she rubbed her thighs as she pulled them up to her chest.

  Dear lord.

  “I didn’t know that before I came here, but that day is important to us. I mean, it was important to the compound.”

  “It was?” Some days, talking to Eve was like wading through doce de leite, a type of caramel.

  “Yes. June twenty-first and December twenty-first were special feast days.”

  Ironic that the uber-Christian place, where Eve had been reared, relied upon Pagan dates of worship. I barely refrained from rolling my eyes at the hypocrisy.

  “Why were they special?” I prompted gently.

  “It was when we celebrated our birthdays.”

  My mouth worked for a second and I recalled what she’d told us that very first day she’d arrived. “Christ, you already told us this. You have mass birthdays there.” Guilt churned inside me, but it was swallowed up by excitement.

  Eve was eighteen.

  Most here had sex before that, but Eve? Hell, I wasn’t even sure if she’d have sex at eighteen, never mind earlier. Of course, now was seriously not the time to be thinking with my cock.

  Ashamed of myself, as well as the fact we’d all fucking forgotten, I whispered, “Happy birthday, Coração.”

  “Thank you, Nestor,” she whispered back, and she shuffled closer until there were a scant few inches between us.

  “Don’t you want to be eighteen?” I asked, wondering if that was why she sounded so confused and sad.

  “I’m not sure it matters.”

  It mattered, just not for the reason she thought it didn’t.

  Wait a second…

  “You told us this in front of Lori, the housemistress, didn’t you?”

  She tensed at my side. “Yes.”

  “She’ll have told Nicholas. With Merry and Damon going, I bet that’s another reason why your classes started today. Because you’ve turned eighteen.” I had to admit; the news filled me with relief. We’d been concerned that someone on the faculty had picked up on Eve’s numerous oddities. Instead, they just thought she needed to quicken the pace where her education was concerned.

  “That makes sense,” she whispered, but her tone seemed despondent, and that hurt me deep inside.

  Something occurred to me, and I blurted out, “Are you homesick?”

  A snort escaped her, and it was chased by a giggle that had me relaxing. “No!”

  “Are you sure? You must miss your parents?” I queried tentatively, but she shook her head, and her mouth turned down at the edges in a way that loaded me with regret.

  “No. I don’t. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Not really. I don’t miss mine.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they abandoned me,” I told her earnestly, and was surprised when she reached over and cupped my chin.

  “I won’t abandon you, Nestor.”

  My lips curved. “I didn’t think you would.” I reached up, clasped her hand in mine, and kept it right where it was. “My parents were just as religious as yours in their own way.”

  She bit her lip. “They were?”

  “Yes. They thought I was possessed.”

  “Mine would have thought that too,” she commented, then nodded when she tacked on, “If they’d known…”

  Humming under my breath, I said, “Your control is remarkable, Eve. I’m not sure if that’s because of the eighth soul or if it’s just a survival mechanism.”

  “I think it was probably that. I was terrified I’d be found out. As it was, I spent so long being scared that it dampened all my traits. There were flare-ups, but nothing major. Nothing like I’m seeing here now that I’m free.” She swallowed, and her fingers squeezed mine. “I didn’t realize your parents were religious.” I heard her relief; knew she didn’t feel so alone now we had something we both shared in our past. “What happened?”

  Nodding my understanding, I sucked down some air that was loaded with her scent, and with the thought of easing her, whispered, “When it first started showing that I was unusual, they dragge
d me over to the church every day. I hated that church. Hated it so much. I swore my knees used to ache from the cold because they had me praying so much to be normal that I was on them all the time.” I winced at the memory, uncertain why I was dragging up a topic that would probably give me nightmares later on. But, the truth was, I just wanted to make it so that Eve didn’t feel so alone. I also wanted her to know me better.

  Knowing me better meant becoming aware of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

  “I’m sorry, Nestor,” she whispered when I fell silent, but her words stirred me.

  “Don’t be. It’s not your fault, Eve. They were looking for a divine solution, and they didn’t get one. When I was thirteen, I was even worse. I was out of control to the point that I was scaring myself, never mind them, so when I had an all-out episode—my Hell Hound was in charge that particular day—they dragged me to the church as they usually did, only this time, they left me with the priest.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Padre Joan Jimenez.”

  She repeated the Portuguese name for John with just the right inflection.

  “You have a good ear,” I praised her, then murmured, “I hated him, but he took me in when they said they couldn’t deal with me anymore. At first, it was just more of the same. Prayers. Then, as I grew worse, so did his punishments.”

  Her brow puckered. “What did he do?”

  “You know what exorcisms are?”

  She shook her head. “No. Stefan tried to make me watch a movie called The Exorcist, but Eren said it would give me bad dreams.”

  My lips curved. “It probably would.” She didn’t realize it, but we’d moderated the stuff we’d been watching around her.

  I loved my documentaries, and we’d been watching more of those than ever, so she’d have a deeper understanding of the real world while also not being too freaked out about the horror-shit Dre loved watching. Not that I could judge, considering I liked watching zombie movies while I was studying.

  Still, stopping us from watching action movies, however, was impossible. Eve had quickly adapted to the sight of blood, though, which was to our benefit. We hadn’t been acting cruelly, just with the knowledge that at some point, Eve would have to get used to the kind of life that was normalized in action films.

  Packs in Caelum were thrown onto the frontline from an early age. Before we were thirty, we were often engaged in battles that would number in the hundreds.

  Ghouls were a pervasive threat, and they were like cockroaches—except you couldn’t kill them from the source like you could with those insects. You could only kill them when they’d manifested.

  “It’s a Catholic thing,” I informed her. “Padre Joan believed I was possessed by a demon, and to get the demon out of me, he used to try to call it out of me. That’s an exorcism.”

  “We had that too, except when that happened, we never walked out of Father Bryan’s cabin.”

  My brow puckered. “He killed people?”

  “Many people,” she confirmed softly, her throat thick from emotion. “Young and old. For being too sick for us to care for, or for being… disabled. Mentally or physically. If you became a drain on the compound, you were dealt with. It was a part of life there.”

  “Cristo,” I whispered, my stomach churning with how close we’d come to losing Eve before she’d even made it here. “Thank fuck you managed to contain yourself, Coração, otherwise you might not be lying here with me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she replied, and her tone was stark.

  I further entwined my fingers with hers—she was still cupping my cheek and I’d been, up until then, holding onto her hand—and drew them to my lips. Kissing her knuckles, I whispered, “As crazy as our life is at the moment, Eve, and with as many things that are going wrong, the one right thing in all of this is that you found us. You Chose us. Never doubt that, meu amor.”

  She swallowed. “I’ve caused so much strife, Nestor. What with Dre, and then my other mates. Then this wishes thing…” Her head drifted from side to side, and I saw her close her eyes, but it didn’t stop the tears from trickling out of the tight way she’d squeezed them shut. “I’m just going to get you all killed, and I’m scared. I don’t want you to be hurt or to die because of me.”

  Another kiss to her knuckles was all I was capable of at that second. Not because I was speechless, but because I wasn’t sure what I could do or say to take her hurt away.

  “Eve, I know you’re frightened, but the idea of you going through all this alone? That scares the shit out of me. Maybe things are crazy right now, but everything will settle down.”

  “How can it?” she rasped. “How can things settle down? Eventually, we’ll have to leave Caelum. I was going to try to do it myself before I hit twenty-one, but that was me just putting my neck on the line. Now? I have seven of you to worry about—”

  The notion of her trying to leave Caelum by herself scared me shitless. Because of it, I acted rashly, and though later I might regret it, at that moment, I was working on instinct. Pure animal instinct. Something that was sourced not just in my gouille, but in my human half too.

  We’d evolved from beasts, after all, and both sides of my nature were at war after her whispered words.

  I didn’t think, just moved, grabbing a hold of her and hauling her into me. I tightened my arms about her until she squeaked and didn’t let up until her face was scant centimeters from mine.

  “Promise me, Eve, you won’t try to leave without us,” I grated out, panic whirling around inside of me like a cluster of leaves in a hurricane.

  She tensed then and said, “I can’t promise you that.”

  I wanted to rail at her, wanted to demand she not be so stupid. How the fuck did she think she’d get off an island without us? If she managed that minor miracle, how the fuck would she survive in the real world?

  But I didn’t utter those harsh words, instead, I ground out, “You want to break our hearts?”

  This time, her tension tripled. “N-No,” she stuttered. “But I couldn’t—”

  “Bullshit,” I told her fiercely, pressing my forehead to hers. “You Chose us, Eve. I know you didn’t grow up knowing this stuff, but this week… surely you’ve seen what that means?

  “Frazer, Reed, and Samuel were men we considered our fucking enemies, but we’re getting cozy with them on the regular because of you. You saw how often we fought, with words and fists. We loathed each other. But we’re making this work because of you. Because you Chose us and that means something to us.”

  “I don’t want you getting hurt because of me, because of this craziness I’ve brought into your lives.”

  Her tears began to fall, and I tilted my head to the side so I could press my lips to one tiny diamond-bright trail. The saltiness on my tongue felt bittersweet. I was sure that, until her, I’d been half alive, and here she was, focused on my death. On the deaths of the men I considered brothers, and of those whom, because of her and with time, would become the same to me.

  “Our destiny is to be hurt,” I told her quietly, and when she stiffened and tried to pull away from me, I hauled her close and stopped her. “Hush. I’m still sore,” I informed her, playing on my injuries for all they were worth. “You don’t want to hurt me more, do you?”

  When my sly comment had her forcing herself to relax, I watched as she gnawed on her bottom lip for a second before stating, “That was a mean thing to say.”

  Perhaps. But it had worked.

  Her desire to not hurt us would be her downfall. If we were bastards, that is.

  “What you still don’t understand about Caelum, meu amor, is that we’re being raised to be soldiers. Soldiers go to war. They don’t stay at home and count sheep for a living. They go out to the frontline and they—”

  She whimpered. “No. Don’t say it.”

  “Don’t say what?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  Her eyelids fluttered. “You kill people,” she whispered, and the pain on h
er face had me hurting for her.

  “Yes. We do.” How did I tell her that by the time I was fourteen, I already had blood on my hands?

  “It’s like in the movies you make me watch,” she rasped.

  “Yes. Sometimes, it’s worse. Ghouls are evil beings, Coração, you have to understand that. Whatever we do to them, they’ll do worse things to us.”

  Her throat worked as she swallowed, and she pushed her face away from mine. For a second, I thought she was pulling away, and that pained me worse than anything I’d experienced since my return from Aboh. Then, she soothed that ache by burrowing into me, her face pushing into my throat with an ease that made me feel like we’d known each other for a decade or more, not just months.

  “Death is a part of our world, Eve,” I told her. “Not just Caelum’s world, but the human world. You know that. You saw it on the compound. You dealt with it there, and you’ll deal with it here.”

  “But you’re different.”

  I knew she meant ‘you’ in the plural sense. “Because you Chose us.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t know how I did, but my souls… they seemed to know what I needed.” She shivered. “Who I needed.”

  “Yes, they did. You need us, Eve. Not just because we can keep you safe, but because we’re the only ones who can balance you.” I sucked in a sharp breath. “You know the Ghoul population is like sixty-five percent female, don’t you?”

  Her tension reminded me of a cheese wire cutting through a thick block of Cheddar. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Well, it is. Females… you don’t have the control we do. And that sounds super chauvinistic, but it isn’t meant to be. It’s the truth.

  “I know I’m not the only one hoping that because you found us so early on means we can ground you. Stop you from turning Ghoul. If that’s even a possibility with this eighth soul of yours.”

  She pushed her face harder into my throat. “I don’t understand why you don’t hate me.”

  My lips curved. “How could I? You brought a little bit of madness to my life, Eve, sure, but you brought peace too.”

  “How? How have I done that?” This time, she pulled back so she could look at me. Her confusion was so genuine I had to sigh.