Food was placed in front of everyone, and mine seemed to hit with an extra clank of attitude. I almost lifted my tired head to glare at whomever splashed my creamy spud dish off the side of the plate, but it was just too much effort. Besides, I did understand their reluctance to serve me. I was a dweller, not a special sol. I didn’t deserve all the extra privileges.
“Eat up, Soldier. You’re going to need your strength.” Siret’s words were enough to shoot some adrenaline through me.
“Why? What’s happening?” I glanced around a few times, but everything seemed normal.
Normal for Blesswood, anyway. Hundreds of blessed sols, sitting around being served by equal amounts of not-so-blessed dwellers. I was the only one to mingle with the gifted ones, and plenty of sols were as unhappy about it as the dwellers seemed to be. Most of them were glaring at me. A female sol caught my attention, standing in the entrance to the hall, her arms crossed over her chest. Her focus was firmly locked on me, the smallest of smiles on her face. A really creepy smile. I knew her face, and it was enough to have my heart pattering a little harder against my ribs.
I didn’t take my eyes from her as I said, “Karyn is back.” I sensed more than saw that for the Abcurses, this was not happy or unexpected news. “Didn’t she die?”
I swung around again, taking in their reactions. My rapid blinking was starting to become a problem. Maybe I was developing a twitch—it would make sense with the amount of stress that I was accumulating in my life. Aros shook his golden head, and not even the mesmerising effect of his gaze settling on mine could distract me from the sol who had pretended to be me so that she could seduce my guys.
He leaned in close, and for a moment, I forgot that Siret was sitting between us. When he spoke, his words were projected quietly. “She didn’t die, and that’s part of what we have to talk to you about. We received a message from Rau. No more deaths or he’ll go to Staviti and we’ll have our time extended on Minatsol.”
I could actually see the disgust that crossed their faces, and I was reminded again that they weren’t really sols. They were gods. Real, true to life—or death … or whatever—gods. They had done some bad things, well Siret had done some bad things, and he had received exile to Minatsol. A land which weakened the gods if they remained there for too long. His brothers all came along with him because they were a team. A team I was now weirdly a part of.
“Seriously, why would Rau care about sols dying?” I sounded a little blood-thirsty, but Karyn scared the crap out of me, and at the same time, I wanted to punch her stupid face again. It was a confusing feeling, and I didn’t deal well with confusing feelings.
Rome leaned far back in his chair. His body was so huge that it knocked everyone around him out of the way. “Rau doesn’t give a shit about sols, he just wants to make things harder for all of us. For you. He knows Karyn is a problem, and problems cause chaos.”
“He’ll go to D.O.D. or Staviti and we don’t need our punishment to be any longer.” Siret confirmed Rome’s words. “We’re already sick of slumming it here.”
Coen shifted in his seat; his shimmering eyes locked on the shape-shifting sol still standing at the entrance. He also had his scary-murder-face thing going on.
“Don’t worry,” Yael bit out. “We’ll play by Rau’s rules for now, but if that sol steps one foot out of line, I will end her. Period.”
Siret’s mirth spilled across his face in a broad grin. He loved conflict. And it was very clear that Rau’s Chaos was starting to take effect across Blesswood. There was dissension in the air, and soon enough, we’d all find ourselves swept up in it.
“Dissension can kiss our asses,” Siret answered my thought. “We get swept up in nothing.”
I pointed my finger at him. “Get out of my head!”
Rome reached out and captured my finger in his massive hand. “Yeah, about that, Willa. It’s time we had a talk.”
“Seriously? You have to be kidding me! Tell me this is just one of Siret’s tricks!” I stared between the five of them. I was on the bed in Siret’s room and the boys were standing around me, doing their wall-of-muscle thing.
I was now almost positive that it was an intimidation tactic.
“You can’t be naked anymore,” Rome informed me, his voice stern. He had covered me in one of his massive shirts as soon as I entered the room—not that I had been naked to start with.
“Your nipples are a distraction and we made the pact to keep you safe,” Aros added, his golden eyes practically glowing. “We have no idea how our powers might react in close proximity to you. You’re not a normal dweller, but you also aren’t a god. We’re a lot to handle.”
A sex talk!
Those moronic morons were trying to have a sex talk with me! I knew what nipples did; my mother had been more than willing to flash hers around and I saw exactly how it had affected the men in our village. The difference was that I wasn’t deliberately doing it. I couldn’t be bothered acting like a blushing little ninny every single time they got uncomfortable.
They needed to learn to deal.
I stood slowly, no longer content to have them towering over me. They had been going on about the pact and my boobs since we stepped into the room. All of them except Siret. He had simply crossed his arms and declared that my boobs were his favourite part of every sun-cycle on Minatsol, and that he was not okay with them being hidden. He was going to get slapped twice the very next time I found a chair so that I could reach his face. For now, however, I was content to let my rage flow free through words, with my right pointer finger jabbing at each of them in rapid succession. One after another as I tried to fit everything I wanted to say into one sentence.
“Firstly, I’m not always naked! Most people have never seen me naked and they never will.” Kind of a lie—a lot of people had seen me in some state of undress. In fact, most of the dining hall that morning had seen my nipples. “Secondly, none of you can tell me what to do with my body. If I want to be naked all the time, I’ll damn well be naked all the time.”
Aros groaned then. It was this low rumbling sound which had my voice wavering and my knees weakening. “She’s impossible. I swear to those asshole gods, she was sent here as part of our punishment.”
A twinge of hurt in my chest followed those words. Only a twinge because I did understand what he meant. Most people considered me to be nothing more than an annoyance. A nuisance. But I never wanted to be a punishment to those five. They were my guys. My people. The outcasts and misfits of the worlds. I just wished … my soul wasn’t tying us all together. Deep down my fear that they were secretly hoping and waiting to get rid of me would not fully dissipate.
Coen reached out a long arm and scooped me up, pulling me into a hug against his body. “You’re not a burden to us. He didn’t mean it that way, dweller-baby.”
Yael’s voice sounded from over his shoulder. “We actually like you. That never happens. You should consider yourself to be one of the more interesting people we’ve met in this world.”
“Thanks, Four.” My voice was muffled against Coen’s chest. I probably could have lifted my head and pulled back to speak but … why would anyone do that?
Yael’s voice was suddenly so much closer when he said. “One, Willa-toy. I am number one.”
I was set on my feet, and turned immediately to glare at Yael. Coen remained pressed against my back, and I let the sensations of his touch soothe all of my broken pieces. Breaking up a soul into several pieces was not a thing that I recommended, but when the reward was the Abcurses, well … I couldn’t complain too much. Yael was still giving me the look where he said he wasn’t moving until I changed his number, but I’d already been pushed around too much for one sun-cycle.
I took a step closer to him, mourning the loss of contact with Coen. “You are Four until such a time as I give you another number. So. Suck. It. Up.”
His nostrils flared just slightly, and I knew right then that I’d made a big mistake. Yael stalked closer to
me and I wanted to stand my ground, but I couldn’t. He was too big. Too intimidating. And really, really hot when he was mad. His hair and eyes shimmered, and power gathered around him like a cloak. How I never suspected them to be gods in the first place was beyond me. They didn’t look like the shiny sols. They were so much more than that.
And shit … I’d just pushed him a little too far. Standing up for yourself was overrated anyway.
I ran, turning as fast as I could and diving between Rome and Siret to get out of the room. I couldn’t get far from them, because my soul started whining like a little girl, and everything was painful, but I could hopefully find somewhere to hide out until Yael calmed down. I was out the door and halfway down the hallway when a sol stepped out in front of me.
Karyn. Fakey. Bitch-face.
I skidded to a halt, backtracking a few steps. I’d been on edge ever since my last kidnapping; Fakey had been a fundamental part of that plan, and so she was Enemy Number One. Well, actually, Elowin had been Enemy Number One, since the whole plan to kidnap me had been hers in the first place, but she was dead now. Which pushed Fakey to the top of my hate-list.
“Well hello there, dirt-dweller.” Fakey’s voice was all sing-song. Light and airy to match her pretty face and shiny hair. Sols were genetically blessed, not like the gods but closer than dwellers. They were also assholes. Just like the gods.
“What do you want?” I didn’t bother with pleasantries.
She grinned, and there was nothing friendly about it. It was the grin of a girl who thought she knew everything about you, and looked down on all of it.
“You and I have unfinished business,” she snarled. “You messed with the wrong sol and now you’re going down.”
Two more sols approached then, stopping either side of her. The three of them were almost the same height, which was much taller than me. The one on the right had long, shiny red curls, and the one on the left was blonde. Both of them had huge eyes, in varying shades of cobalt.
Welcome to the mean-girls gang.
The ache in my chest was easing, and I knew that the Abcurses were coming my way, but I couldn’t turn away. I would face my attack head-on this time.
Fakey’s eyes flicked up over my head and then back down to me. “This is just a warning, dweller. You won’t have your bodyguards with you at all times and they can’t police everyone in this academy. Your life is about to get very difficult.”
She left, taking her friends with her and in almost the same instant, Yael’s arms wrapped around me. I found myself turning and pressing into him, already forgetting that I’d just run from him.
“What did she say, Willa-toy?” His low voice was comforting, and I lifted my head back to see him better.
He hadn’t used Persuasion on me, and he didn’t have to. I really wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell them all that Karyn was going to be a problem, that she was going to try and destroy us all. But I couldn’t. The boys would kill her. I knew that, and I would not have their punishment extended. The weakness they experienced here—and a knife in Siret’s chest—was enough to warn me into silence. I couldn’t go through everything that we had been through a moon-cycle ago all over again, so I would protect them with everything I had.
“She was just being a bitch,” I finally said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
I forced my mind to go blank in an attempt to block my thoughts, but judging by the five sceptical expressions they wore, I wasn’t very successful. Thankfully, though, none of them challenged me. Instead, they simply stared down the hallway after Karyn. That was enough to tell me that my lies had totally not been bought.
Two
The next morning I sat on the floor of the small sitting room attached to Coen’s bedroom. I had claimed it as my ‘space’ over the last moon-cycle, since it had been so empty, and I had been in serious need of a place in which to have alone time that wasn’t the cleaning closet in the hallway. Coen hadn’t seemed to mind, but I also hadn’t really asked his permission. I was taking cues from the way they acted with each other. They entered each other’s rooms without knocking; wore each other’s clothes without asking. They stole each other’s books, weapons, and other personal items—I assumed it was okay for me to do the same, so I had claimed the mostly-empty space.
Originally, there had only been a single chair pushed up against shelves half-filled with books, and a dark-toned rug on the ground. Now, one of the shelves had been cleared off to hold my things: a rock, with an imprint of Rome’s knuckles; a tiny, jewelled beetle crawling around in a jar, with a few lettuce leaves stuffed in there for sustenance; a wrapped medical pack; and a scrap of purple cloth. It was all I had left of the dress Siret had used his power to fashion around my body. Maybe it was a weird collection of things to be possessive over, but they were mine, and that was the end of that.
I leaned backwards, allowing myself to stretch out against the rug so that I could stare up at the ceiling. One of the guys was nearby—I didn’t know which one, but the pain in my chest wasn’t threatening to tear me apart. They always left someone with me for that very reason. I frowned at the ceiling, going over our awkward conversation from the sun-cycle before.
Those morons actually gave me the sex talk.
It was niggling at me on so many different levels. Why did I have to make their pact easier for them? That was stupid. I never agreed to the pact in the first place. A hesitant knock on the door brought me out of my thoughts and I jumped up, wrenching it open to reveal Emmy, standing there in Coen’s bedroom, her eyes wild and skittish, her hands wringing in front of her.
I laughed. “I wouldn’t have told you to come at this time if any of them were going to be here,” I tried to reassure her, pulling her into the little room and shutting the door behind her.
She sat down on my rug immediately, as though it might help her go unnoticed if anyone burst into my part of the room. “One of the dwellers refused to do his chores this sun-cycle,” she told me, her voice a whisper.
“Oh?” I prompted.
“Yeah.” She nodded, her lips twisting into a grimace. “He said he wasn’t going to go back to work until all the dwellers started pulling their weight. Apparently, he’s been doing double shifts on one of the sol bathrooms because other dwellers have been slacking.”
I frowned, wondering if that was somehow my fault. “What happened? When he refused to do any of his chores?”
“They sent him back to his village in disgrace.”
I winced. Those villagers took their service to the sols really seriously. The poor guy was probably going to get strung up in the village square … and it might have been my fault.
“I’m going to do my chores,” I announced suddenly, springing to my feet and knocking my elbow against one of the shelves.
I rubbed at it absently as Emmy jumped to her feet with me, her eyes widening. “But you can’t. You tried that. The Abcurses refused to go with you.”
“I didn’t really try that hard.” I twisted up my face into a guilty expression. “You know I hate cleaning, Em. You didn’t actually expect me to fight for cleaning privileges, did you?”
She rolled her eyes, before giving me a brief hug, and then quickly backing out of the room. “Good luck!” she whispered, leaving the door open as she took off into the hallway.
Since I was in Coen’s room, I moved to the second room, raising my fist to knock on the door. I paused just before my knuckles hit the wood, indecision seizing me.
Rome was probably going to be the hardest one to cajole into anything. He seemed to act significantly cooler towards me than the others. I dropped my hand, glancing at the other doors. There was no way that Rome would offer to be on Willa-duty anyway. He considered it a personal affront that my soul had latched onto him. I leaned back up against his door, wondering which of the other three had stayed behind.
Screw this, I thought, projecting my thoughts loudly with the next word. Abcurses!
A micro-click later, the do
or behind me swung inwards. The movement was swift and strong, and much too fast for me to stop myself from falling backwards. Luckily, there was a second door behind the first; huge, imposing, and ridged with muscle.
“Hey.” I tilted my head back as Rome’s chest caught my fall. “I was just … um …”
He glanced down, and my voice seemed to die in my throat. He was caught off-guard, which made his face a little less like a stone than usual. A massive hand settled against my stomach, as though to steady me.
“What have we told you about doors?” he asked.
“They move … so I shouldn’t lean on them.” My words sounded husky. It was embarrassing, but my whole body had turned traitor the moment that curse crashed into my chest. Now it wanted to get as close to the Abcurses as possible at any moment in time, and then once I was close, it seemed to set off a bomb inside my bloodstream.
He didn’t acknowledge my answer. Only stared at me. Probably because my body was curling back against his, pushing upwards as I raised onto my toes. I didn’t know why I was raising myself up, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Rome was so tall, I wanted to make us fit better together. He grunted just as I slotted in perfectly against him, and then his hand swept down over my stomach, hooking into the waistband of my pants and pulling me forward, away from his body.
He stepped with me—his grip still forcing me at arm’s length—and slammed the door to his bedroom shut behind him. “Let’s go for a walk. I need some air.”
“Speaking of walks …” I swatted at his arm until he released me, pretending that I hadn’t just plastered myself to him. I was great with denial. “Do you think we could walk by the arena? I apparently have cleaning duty there, and I’ve never once cleaned anything there.”
Persuasion (Curse of the Gods Book 2) Page 2
