I saw him looking me up and down, his eyes seeming to pause over certain areas, before saying, “I know it’s going to be cold for you, but we are going to have to take the bike. There aren’t any roads where we are going.”
“I’ll manage,” I said as I followed him upstairs. I could hear the music pumping from the bar as we exited through a back door.
Sitting in the alley waiting for us was a Harley Davidson Motorcycle in complete black. Even the chrome was blacked out, and not a shiny black, but a matte that would fade into the night, not even throwing off a reflection of a street light.
He gave me a helmet even though he went without. I got on behind him, trying to keep some space in between us, but he grabbed my hands and moved them around his sides and into his jacket pockets. It felt strangely intimate to have my arms encircling him.
We took off, swerving in and out of traffic at a break neck pace, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. All thought’s of keeping my distance fled as my arms circled tight against him and my face pressed into his back. His body was giving off so much heat I barely felt the cold.
The street sounds had started to fade and the jarring bumps had increased so I knew we had left the city. The speed made me nervous so I still kept my eyes closed. I could feel twigs whizzing past grazing my legs and arms.
As I felt us slow to a stop, I finally opened my eyes and looked at where we were. We had pulled up under a massive oak, and I could see the full moon blazing through the canopy of branches above, its light reflecting against the patches of snow on the ground.
He signaled for me to follow him. He was walking briskly and it was hard to maintain the same pace, he had to continually pause for me when I lost ground. As we walked, I could just make out a small flickering light in between the trees in the distance. The air had the faint smell of smoke.
“Is that where…”
He turned back to me, holding a finger to my lips, and shook his head slightly. Maybe I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. I decided at that very moment, that from this point forward in my life, I would trust my gut. My gut told me Caden wouldn’t bring harm to me intentionally. My gut wasn’t so clear on anything else about him though.
We had been walking for about ten minutes, getting closer and closer to the fire. I could now see the top of a large flame reaching up wildly into the night, flickering beautifully against the starry sky. Once we got about seventy feet away, I could see the silhouettes of bodies appearing like black smudges against their flaming backdrop. The fire had to be at least twenty feet across and was monstrously high.
Caden grabbed my arm and brought me with him to a spot just beyond the clearing. We crawled low into some shrubs just out of sight, and I looked to him, asking with my eyes, what it was we were looking at?
He silently mouthed, “just wait,” to me. I turned back to watch as a group of about thirty men circled around the flame. Scanning the faces, I saw that one of them was Carl and my breathing hitched a notch quicker.
If we were discovered, there would be no way out of this for me. I went from lying perfectly still to frozen.
I realized my fear hadn’t even begun once I saw what came next. Two men were walking to the side of the clearing out of view. When they came back, they had a struggling man in between them. It looked like he was in his early thirties. They slowly walked closer to the huge fire, dragging the struggling man with them. The other men started to holler and cheer them on as they formed a closed circle around the fire.
Sympathy overrode my own fear and I frantically grabbed at Caden motioning that we should try to do something to stop it. With a stone look upon his face, he shook his head no. I couldn’t just lay there and watch the man burn to death so I started to get up, but I couldn’t. Caden, anticipating my movement, wrapped a hand around my waist pulled me close to him pinning me partially beneath his own body. I had no choice left but to be a witness to the carnage.
The two men slowly stepped into the flames dragging the struggling man with him. What I heard next would forever be etched into memory. Howling screams of agony, that didn’t sound human, screeched through the air and the smell of burning flesh was so thick I thought I would choke on it. But, that wasn’t the end of it. I could see the two other men standing in the blazing fire, holding the man’s still struggling burnt flesh and they both had their heads thrown back in laughter. Their clothing had fallen off into ashes and they stood naked but unharmed, holding the burning man until there was nothing left but a charred skeletal frame.
When they finally did step out of the flames, they stood naked with dark smudges of ash and what I sickeningly realized was some of the remnants of the dead man. What were these things? They weren’t human, of that I was now convinced. At least in this, Caden had been telling me the truth.
I motioned to Caden that I was ill and I must have looked the part because he readily removed his weight from me. I crawled backward from our hiding spot and ran as far as I could before I bent forward and emptied my stomach of all its contents.
I saw his boots next to me.
“Can you walk?”
I nodded my head yes, but I couldn’t yet find the strength to actually move. His arm went around my waist to assist me. When it quickly became clear I was going to slow him down he swept me up in his arms. We moved quicker with him carrying me then when I was just following him and we managed to get back to the bike in what felt like seconds, instead of the ten minutes the trip had initially taken.
“Will you be able to stay on the back of the bike?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Let’s just go.” I wasn’t fine. I knew it and so did he, but I didn‘t want to stay here a second more than necessary. My hands shook as I reached around him. I was glad for the roar of the engine as we took off back to the bar. I hoped it hid the sound of my crying. Now that I was away from the immediate danger of being discovered, the force of what I had just seen struck me hard.
This is what was coming for me? I was doomed. They weren’t even human. What could I do and where could I possibly even go? Maybe to Canada or Europe? Mexico? We made it back to the bar before I had decided if it would be an island in the Mediterranean, or if I’d be safer in some cold tundra in Russia.
He left the bike in the back and we went inside. He was right, I didn’t want to know anymore, but now I felt like I had to know.
“Why didn’t you help him?” I accused him the moment we were inside the building.
“It wasn’t my fight.”
“They burned him alive!”
“That man wasn’t an innocent angel.”
“It doesn’t matter. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”
“And how do you know? Who are you to decide? He was a dirty cop that had tortured and killed people for them. I don’t fight for people like that.”
“If he worked for them, why did they do that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not my problem.”
The steam completely went out of me. We made it down into his place and I collapsed onto the couch. “I have to leave here. I’ve got to get a visa or whatever it is you get to move to another country and I have to leave.” I knew my voice was on the verge of hysteria.
“You can’t outrun this,” he said matter of fact.
I turned to look at him as he stood in front of the bar counter while he poured a whiskey.
“What is this? What kind of people stand in a fire and don’t get burned?” I couldn’t shake the vision of them standing in the blazing fire. The screams of their victim were still echoing in my brain.
“The world isn’t what you think.”
Now if that wasn’t the biggest understatement of the year. Nothing that had happened as of late fit into my world.
“There are things that would make tonight seem like a boy scout outing. The one thing you have to know is that you are in this now. There is no running, no turning back. When you asked what kind of people they are, that was your first mistake. They aren’t people.�
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“What are they then?”
“They are called Drauths. They are the descendents of demons.”
“You’re saying they are the children of the devil?”
“No, not the devil, demons, and it’s not offspring like you would think. When a Demon has sex with a human woman very early in her pregnancy, they can corrupt the fetus. Mutate it if you will. It very rarely happens, but when it does it changes the DNA.”
My brain started to spin. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he was crazy, but then what human could stand there, laughing in a fire like that? Gruesome thoughts of horned creatures were running through my brain at lightning speed. I wanted to know more, but as it turned out, he was right; I didn’t even know what to ask. Luckily or perhaps unluckily, he continued.
“Demons having offspring doesn’t happen often. It only occurs about once every hundred years or so.”
“Then how are there so many of these Drauths?”
“Drauths live for thousands of years. If that Drauth has a child, you can’t really predict how long it will live, but it’s going to be longer then a normal human life. Some of them that were there tonight weren’t full Drauths. Some are only a quarter or an eighth. They get significantly weaker every generation.”
“Why are they so intent on getting me? Why would a Drauth want me? I’m not evil? If anything, I’m really good person. Or at least I try to be.”
“This has nothing to do with good or bad. You could be an angel or a mass murderer. It would make no difference.”
“Why then?”
“This is going to be difficult to hear but Drauths can sense demon blood, or something inhuman, in other beings.” He paused, just looking at me, as if trying to gauge a reaction to something he hadn’t said yet.
“I don’t get it?” I did, but I needed to hear it.
“You are at least part demon. You’re something else as well, but I can’t get a good read on you.”
“Well you’re wrong. I have normal parents. How would you know anyway?”
“Lex, things aren’t black and white like you think. You could be the child of a rapist, that doesn’t mean you would be evil.”
“A rapist is human at least! You’re trying to tell me I’m not even human!”
“You are, just partly, well… at least I think.”
“And how do you know this?”
He shrugged in a way that didn’t need words. He was one too.
“I’m not. I have two very, very normal parents and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to me. Your weird senses are off! I’m not like you and I’m not like them!”
“We aren’t all bad.”
“No! I don’t care what you say. I know what I am.”
“I can prove it to you. I was hoping to avoid the cheap demon tricks but if we must we must.”
“Fine! Prove it.”
“Come over here.” He waved me over into the kitchen.
Even though he was the same man I had wrapped my arms around less than an hour ago, I now felt the need to keep a greater distance apart.
He reached across the distance and grabbed my wrist, pulling me closer to him and he turned on the gas burner to high. He pushed back the sleeve of my shirt and I knew what he was going to do.
“Stop, you’ll burn me!”
“You’re part demon, you won’t burn.”
“Yes, I will!” I pulled at my arm, but it was clear that I would pull it out of its socket before I was able to get away from his grip. “Please, I believe you, I swear!” That was a whopper of a lie and he knew it.
He moved my hand right into the center of the flame and pressed it against the grill of the burner. I screamed, and kept screaming, as tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Lex.” I barely heard him with all the screaming I was doing. “Lex!”
That got my attention.
“Is it actually hurting?”
I looked down at my hand sitting in the middle of the flame and realized it felt a little warm but didn’t actually hurt at all. He let go of me, and I pulled it out, still expecting to find some melting and blistering skin, but it was perfect. Even my nails were okay, although the nail polish hadn’t faired so well.
“Holy shit,” I said staring at my hand still in disbelief.
“Holy might not be the best word, but yes, you are a demon. Or part demon anyway. Even the tiniest trace of demon blood in your system will make you immune to burns. Whatever else you are, I don’t know.”
“What else do you think I might be?”
“Not sure. Some pieces to this just aren’t making any sense. First, you are female. Drauths only affect male fetuses. The other issue is I’m picking up on something that is demon but not the way it usually comes across.”
“What is it?”
“I have no idea. I can just sense it. This is probably not the best analogy, but it’s sort of like walking into a restaurant and being able to smell the food. You can pick out certain scents like bacon, but not others, even though you know there food. I know a part of you isn’t human, but I don’t think your all demon. There is something else at play.”
“Does that mean my mother slept with a demon while she was pregnant with me?” the idea of my mother having sex was distasteful enough but to think she was having sex with a demon was just too freaky. Before I could even stop myself, an image popped into my head. UUUghhhh.
“She might have but she probably didn’t know. Usually the women think they dreamed it, that’s only if they remember it at all.”
“So they are normal? My parents?”
“Yes. If they were different, we would have found them by now and just on the slim chance that they had fallen through the cracks, I had one of my guys go out and check. Look, the bottom line is, I’m not even sure what you are. All I do know is that you aren’t one hundred percent human, you are at least part demon.”
I was on information overload. Leaning forward, resting my head in my hands hoping somehow, I could forget some of the horrible things I had just learned, or better yet, never even have ever learned them. What kind of monster was I? Where did I go from here? Could I go on with my life and be a normal part of society? What about family? I hadn’t exactly been running down the aisle, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t in my long term plans. I always figured it would happen when I met the right guy. We would get married and have a couple of kids. The sort of life most people expected to have. Maybe even took for granted as your due in life. How naïve I’d been.
“So what happens now?” I asked completely at a loss.
“This isn’t the end of the world. It’s just a different world.”
It felt like it to me. I didn’t want to be in a world where I was a monster and I said so.
“I’m not sure why you look like you are on the brink of a breakdown. It’s not like I just handed you a life sentence. You’re the exact same person you were last week. Just a little less clueless is all. ”
“Can’t I get a minute? I’m supposed to find out I’m some sort of crazy demon and who knows what else and I should just smile and be happy? Oh great! Everything I had wanted for my life just got flushed, life’s great!”
“What you need to do is take it in and deal with it. Not wallow. If you sit there like a victim, you’ll become one. You no longer have the luxury of feeling bad for yourself. You need to toughen up and do it quickly or they will chew you up alive. I’m not being mean to you. I’m trying to kick your ass into someone who’s a survivor.”
“Go screw! I’ve survived years on my own just fine!”
“Survived what? Because you couldn’t get the new shoes you wanted? Your life’s been a cake walk up until now. Your parents probably held your hand all the way through college. You think your tough, but you don’t have a clue. Your world was butterflies and rainbows. You’ve never had a clarifying moment, the kind that tests the very core of who you are.”
“How do you know what I’ve been through? Y
ou don’t know me!”
“Because moments like that change who you are. They strip you down. It hones you or it breaks you. Anybody that has ever really lived can spot it within minutes.”
What did he know? He was one of them! I was tough. I had steel at my core…. didn’t I? Why did I even doubt it? Of course I did. A person, or whatever it is I am, was allowed a few moments to adjust. It didn’t mean I was sulking.
I might need him now but I wouldn’t always. I would take every ounce of knowledge and skill he had and then get away from him. I would find a way out of this on my own terms.
Chapter Eleven
“I need you to teach me to fight.” He wasn’t paying me any attention and I had to follow him as he walked to his room the next afternoon. “I’m strong and I have good reflexes!” He wasn’t even paying attention to me let alone taking me seriously. “You think I’m soft? Then help me to be tougher.”
He stopped suddenly, and I literally bounced off him. He grabbed my arm to steady me before I fell backward. Finding my footing, I quickly pulled my arm away. I always felt slightly out sorts when he was touching me.
“Okay. You haven’t developed yet but it’ll be good to start. It certainly won’t hurt.” Thinking we were finished, he went toward his desk where he started to sort through papers.
That was something no one had ever said to me. “I think I’m developed.”
He glanced over at me and actually smiled. “That’s not what I meant. You’re going to get stronger, but it hasn’t started yet.”
“How much stronger will I get?”
“It’s different for everyone and you’ve got other things going on that I have no knowledge of. First being that you’re also a female. I’ve never seen a female Drauth, ever, so I’m not sure if you’ll get as strong as a male. I don’t know when either. It’s different for everyone. Most of the time it starts in the late twenties, but it’s far from an exact science.”
“When can we start?”
“Tomorrow.”
As far as I was concerned, I was in this alone. Yes, he was giving me a roof and protection but for how long? Could I really depend on him? He had been right last night. I needed to toughen up, but I would do it my way.
Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) Page 6
