Eight Souls: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part TWO

by Akeroyd, Serena

  “They’re not going to push her through the classes unless she shows more aptitude than that, and let’s face it, I know from experience she packs a mean punch,” Samuel noted with some disgust, as Eve failed to cut off another uppercut to the chin.

  It was like she was asking to be beaten on her birthday.

  As far as I was aware, she wasn’t a masochist.

  Before any of us could say another word, Samuel stalked off and headed over to Coach. A few bitten off retorts and Coach grunted but nodded, and Dre and I watched as Samuel walked over to Eve. They, too, spoke and the kid who’d been whipping our girl’s ass made herself scarce when Samuel glowered at her.

  Eve tilted her head to the side in confusion when he raised his hands in a fighting stance, and her mouth worked before she shot me a look. It warmed me that she looked to me for confirmation when her Chosen was at my side.

  Nodding at her, I tried to load my smile with some encouragement, but wasn’t sure if it hit the mark because her taped hand immediately went to the necklace I’d gifted her that morning, and she began to fiddle with it as she turned back to Samuel.

  “I’m surprised you gave that to her.”

  Dre’s comment had me shrugging. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “It was your mother’s.”

  “So?”

  “So, I know you carried it with you all the time. If it wasn’t so girly, you’d have worn it.”

  “It is girly though, and Eve can wear it for me.”

  “You think she’ll Choose you?”

  “Samuel and I think it’s likely, yes.” If I sounded formal, it was because I didn’t need Dre needling my ass over this.

  If I didn’t hope that Eve would Choose me at some point, then I’d just be depressed, and I’d spent far too long being depressed over the circumstances life had a habit of throwing my way.

  He hummed but didn’t say anything else, just watched as Samuel taunted Eve. There was no other way to describe it, and I shook my head. “What is it with you two? Why do you find it so easy to antagonize her?”

  “We don’t all think she sweats perfection,” Dre grumbled, but I knew he was watching Samuel’s mouth move, and the words that tumbled from him edged up Eve’s temper until she was bouncing on her heels.

  The boxing rings were filled with kids a year or two younger than us, and technically, we had other places to be, but shit wasn’t as strict for us now. Mostly, we had to train and study, learn as much as we could about strategy, research nests so we could handle whatever might come our way. There was a lot of theory to recall too. Past battles that we studied so we could understand how Ghouls worked.

  But since it was so shortly after Aboh, there was a brief respite until the games began again—and games seemed like a childish word, but it was true nonetheless. Before the faculty began pitting Packs in our year against one another to ascertain who’d be going out on a mission, we had a chance to wind down and recuperate from any injuries we’d incurred on said mission.

  That meant watching Eve and Samuel bicker wasn’t eating into our schedule any.

  Her hair was in a taut bun that had to tug on the roots, and her face was a mixture of pink, white, and red from where the other girl had been hitting her. She wore an oversized shirt that could be used against her in a fight, and leggings that had my hands itching to shape her ass through them.

  Against the other girls in the class she was training with, she looked like a woman, mostly because she was one, but also because she was all curves. All round and soft where they were edges.

  Her feet were bare against the soft surface that took up a large chunk of space against one side of the gym. It was meant to make landings less painful, but in my opinion, it just made it harder to train. Unless you were in real-time conditions, it was hard to know how you’d respond in a fight. If someone smashed your face into the ground, there wouldn’t be a bounce or some padding to cushion the blow, now would there?

  “He has a death wish,” Dre commented when Samuel said something that had Eve’s hands curling into fists.

  “Like someone else I know,” I retorted, the barb aimed his way, but he didn’t bother replying because one of Samuel’s evidently hit home and Eve’s control broke as she charged Samuel.

  Now her soul was in charge, her hesitance bled out, and the accuracy of her hits surprised everyone because most of the class stopped what they were doing to watch. I knew that was helped by the fact that Samuel was one of the top fighters in his year and a girl was slapping him hard, but Eve wasn’t as weak as my Pack seemed to think she was.

  Her souls were strong. The woman might be vulnerable, fragile in some ways, but she wasn’t afraid to throw down when things went to shit.

  Samuel worked hard not to hurt her, while letting her practice on him. I had to applaud his control since the way he fought ensured she had a true workout, one that tested her instincts as well as her body’s reflexes, instead of having her stand there, allowing someone to elbow her in the face over and over.

  Why Coach thought that was an appropriate way for her to learn, I’d never know, but there was no arguing with the asshat sometimes, and I’d been hoping he’d learn the error of his ways just by watching Eve.

  No such luck.

  Even as I thought about whether involving Nicholas was wise or not, a half-hour later, Eve was limping toward me. Her face was damp with sweat, her temples had beads of perspiration gathering on the hairline, and she was flushed all over. Her clothes stuck to her, and though she looked tired as she hobbled over to me, her words were bright when she asked, “Can we have the cake you made now?”

  I grinned at her eagerness, and Dre snorted at her words, but she ignored him and focused fully on me.

  “If you want,” I told her, inordinately pleased that she wanted to taste something I’d made for her, but also, delighted that I could share some of my culture with her. We tended to lose that at Caelum. Merging into the creature’s culture while losing our family’s heritage. Some kids were glad about that, but ones who’d loved their parents like Samuel and I didn’t want to dismiss everything from our pasts.

  “Of course, I do,” she retorted with a huff.

  “As the lady commands,” I told her, smirking as she rolled her eyes at me. “Go get washed up and meet me in the kitchen, yeah?”

  She nodded and took off. The second she did, Samuel took her place. He was armed with a towel he was using to wipe down his face, and he had a bottle of water in his other hand he was taking huge gulps of.

  “She can fight,” he said, confirming what we pretty much knew. “But her soul needs to be engaged.”

  “We figured that out already, pretty boy,” Dre snarked back, making Samuel’s top lip curl, revealing blunt fangs that were just waiting for his Vampire to mature.

  “I’m curious how she knows some of those moves. It’s like her souls are—”

  He broke off, but where Eve was concerned, I wanted to know everything. “Like they’re what?”

  Samuel shrugged. “Older than her somehow. Like what the human knows and what the souls know are two separate entities. It’s odd.”

  That did sound odd, but fuck, Eve was weird.

  Which was why I knew she’d appreciate the fact that the treat I’d prepared for her wasn’t completely done yet. And when she met me in the kitchen about twenty minutes later, her hair wet and body still stiff from fighting, her eyes gleamed with joy as she looked at the setup on the counter.

  “What is this?” she questioned, staring at the dough I’d been rolling out for what felt like a lifetime.

  “It’s going to be something called baklava.”

  A door slammed shut and she jerked at the sound. The kitchen was industrial, meaning that every space inside was utilitarian without a hint of appeal. Stainless steel counters lined the walls and several large islands armed with sinks and stovetops were dotted here and there. There were industrial-sized ovens and fridges and freezers, as well as a smaller refriger
ator that was loaded down with snacks for kids to eat if they were hungry outside of mealtimes—creatures ate a shit ton. Our metabolisms burned fast and hot.

  Because of the way the kitchen was designed, however, the slamming of the door echoed around the space, and her head whipped around to find its source.

  I didn’t like Brendan, thought he was a prick even if he did make the best cookies this side of the Atlantic. The guy ran the kitchens, and though he didn’t like us being in here, there was no hard and fast rule about it. We were allowed to make ourselves snacks and to prepare food in here so long as we cleaned up after ourselves and weren’t wasteful.

  When Brendan stalked into the kitchen with a glower on his face, I just nodded at him in greeting, hoping he’d move on by.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, he grumbled, “You’re making a mess.”

  “You won’t know we were here when we’re done,” I countered, not bothering to argue with him. There was no point.

  Some creatures were born to be warriors, and some were born to support the warriors. We all started off as soldiers, though, until Nicholas or someone else on the faculty decided we had better uses.

  Brendan was exactly that.

  He could feed an army, but he wasn’t built to be on the battlefield, and his attitude stank to high heaven because of it.

  “See that you do,” he ground out, shooting Eve a nasty look before he flounced out of the kitchen.

  “Who was he?” Eve asked when he disappeared, her eyes wide with surprise at the other man’s antagonism.

  “He runs this place,” I explained, adding, “It’s only quiet at the minute because the evening service begins in a few hours.”

  “I’m surprised it’s not more chaotic.”

  I shrugged. “They have their schedules, and I wanted to fit this in beforehand.”

  Her lips curved. “Before we were interrupted you were saying this is called baklava?”

  Grinning at her curiosity, I murmured, “It’s a traditional pastry. Lots of Mediterranean countries have it, but this is my mother’s recipe.”

  “You made it from scratch?”

  I lifted my arm, flexed my bicep, then with a grin, kissed it. “All with these muscles.”

  “You’re too kind,” she retorted.

  “A fish by any other name…”

  Her nose crinkled. “A fish? Don’t you mean a rose?”

  Laughing, I told her, “I meant something, that’s for sure. Didn’t realize you’d delved into Shakespeare by now…”

  What the hell was the faculty thinking? They’d thrown her into Shakespeare but hadn’t loaded her up on Ghoul Theory? The most basic tenet of life at Caelum?

  I wanted to ask when knowing Shakespeare had become an integral part to living in the twenty-first century, but instead, I just murmured, “I need to grab some sugar and pistachios from the pantry.”

  She blinked at me. “Okay.”

  Baklava was a pastry that consisted of fine layers of filo dough baked together with a stuffing of nuts. It was then loaded with sugar syrup tinged with rosewater and would blow any diet out of the water in one fell swoop. But it was her birthday, and I knew Eve liked tasting new foods. She was a bit like a toddler when it came to food. Hadn’t tried all that much, but was willing to dive headfirst into anything that wasn’t green and came from the earth.

  Having rolled the sheets of homemade dough into fine layers and placed half of them in a baking tray, I was ready to chop up the nuts and make the syrup. It would have been easier to grab everything and prep like my mom would have, but I’d had to make do in this kitchen.

  When I’d been making the dough, I’d had to work hard not to get under the staff’s feet, so I’d used one of the tiniest countertops and tried to contain the madness when making baklava from scratch was a time-costly and effort-heavy feat.

  Trudging over to the pantry that stored enough food to feed us for weeks at a time—Nicholas was a Doomsdayer and had been before it was even a thing—I opened the door and glowered at the darkness beyond.

  There was a master switch at the back of the room, the height of inefficiency, but Caelum was old, and inefficient was how it rolled. That was why my bedroom had one single plug point and about a thousand extension cords.

  Only trouble was, this wasn’t my bedroom, and my phone was back on the counter with Eve.

  Walking into the pantry shouldn’t have presented a problem. The light was on all day because staff trudged in and out… That dick Brendan, even knowing my issues, had turned the fucking thing off.

  My neck popped as I jerked it to the side. Fisting my hands, I moved them to the doorjamb and gripped the wood. Feeling like the Hulk, I wanted to tear it off, rip into the wood and smash it to smithereens—better that than Brendan’s face.

  Why the fuck had he switched off the light?

  That was the noise we’d heard earlier. Brendan had shut the pantry door after he’d tried to mess with my head.

  My jaw tightened as outrage swirled inside me. This was a petty power play. Trying to show me that I was weak like him too. I wished like fuck I could go and find the prick, show him just what it meant to mess with a soldier from an Alpha unit, but instead, I just glared at the darkness beyond.

  Crossing the threshold was beyond me.

  Seriously beyond me, and the shame that hit me then was enough to make all my BS about being a soldier from an Alpha unit disappear into dust.

  I’d felt helpless for most of my life since I’d hit eleven. When the souls had converged on me en masse, and when the doctors had revealed my ‘sickness,’ my world had gone from bad to worse after the terror attack that had seen my home shatter into a million, tiny pieces like a glitter bomb had been let off in my face.

  My mother’s whimpers and my father’s howls of pain rang in my ears like it was yesterday and not years before. They’d died in the rubble, waiting to be rescued. I’d heard them. Praying to Allah, begging for me to be safe. As each moment had passed, I’d slowly become numb until I was frozen. Even when they’d called my name, trying to find out if I was okay, I hadn’t been able to utter the words.

  The souls had taken over me that day in a way nobody could understand. I’d shut down for survival until I’d realized no one would find us if I didn’t do something at all. So, I’d sung. For the first time in my life, I’d called upon the Lorelei’s powers and within moments, a rescue team had been with us.

  If I’d used my voice earlier, if I hadn’t locked down, I could have saved my parents, and that was something I’d never forgive myself for.

  I knew the mental shutdown had been to save my sanity, to save me from dying. The imam from my mosque had told me that Allah had spared me, that my survival was a testament to a destiny that wasn’t completed. I didn’t know if I believed him, but it was the first time I’d been trapped in the dark with no way out, and it wouldn’t have been the last before my brother-in-law was done with me.

  My throat tightened and I began to croon a song to myself. It was an old one my mother had sung to me as a child, and I used both the Lorelei and the memories to calm me down.

  The sound of my breathing almost swallowed the song, and as my heart began pounding in my ears, I tried to step forward, to step into the darkness, but I hovered on the threshold, unable to head farther away from the light.

  The whooshing of air from my lungs didn’t seem to help me. I felt like I was oxygen starved, like I wasn’t actually breathing, even though my chest was billowing like a boat with a large sail on the open sea.

  My fingers ached as I clutched the doorjamb, as I tried to use that to launch me into the pantry.

  The irony was, of course, that I had good night vision. All creatures did. But it might as well have been a Stygian gloom for all I cared, for all my subconscious would let me into what was, essentially, a large cupboard.

  “Eren?”

  My eyes shuttered. Just what I needed.

  Eve. Seeing me like this.

/>   “Why are you singing?”

  Shit, had the Lorelei’s song called to her?

  I didn’t reply because I couldn’t. My throat felt tight, and I knew if I spoke my voice would be scratchy and raspy and would sound exactly unlike me. Only the Lorelei made the song escaping me sound smooth and unctuous, like spreading Nutella on warm toast.

  A hand touched my arm and the heat from her palm had me releasing a sigh and coming to a halt mid-song. The hand moved, trailing up and over my arm toward my shoulder where it squeezed then moved down, gently patting me before she curled into my side, curling her arm around my waist and pressing into me like she was born to be there.

  Hell, if she wasn’t, then nobody was.

  A shaky breath escaped me, and I realized her touch had broken the panic I’d fallen into. The cage in my mind that reminded me what I’d felt like trapped in the hundred-degree heat on a summer’s day in Istanbul, surrounded by flies that chased my parents’ corpses, with the pressure of a house weighing down on my body… it opened somewhat with her presence.

  And then she sang.

  I shuddered in response. It was a song I’d never heard before but from its content, I knew it was a hymn. The words were soft, but the melody was harmonious, and it seemed to seep into my bones, making them feel liquid.

  It made no sense because Nestor had commented on the fact she was Succubus today. After the evening meal, she and Stefan were supposed to train together so she could present a more ‘normal’ front to the faculty. But the way her voice was tuned? It was Lorelei through and through.

  Another shudder whipped through me as the song reached a piercingly sweet, high note, and I shivered into her as she pressed her face into my arm. The action muffled the lyrics, but I heard them in my fucking soul.

  Closing my eyes, I picked up on her song. Loreleis were pitch perfect and could pick up any instrument and play most songs on it as though they were prodigies—it came in handy when Nestor played on his guitar, and the two of us could have a chilled jam session together. Catching her melody and staying a few words behind so I could sing almost in tandem with her wasn’t difficult.