“Pride is a sin,” my mother whispered, also sounding strange.
Normally, she’d have barked the words, but this time it was soft. Gentle. Like when she was falling asleep while she knitted on the settle and mumbled something under her breath.
My mother was the antithesis of gentle. She was harsh, quick to anger. She’d slap me if I mentioned pride, but here she was, the comment sleepily tripping from her lips as though…
It hit me then that the voice was lulling them to sleep.
How was that even possible?
You couldn’t talk someone to sleep, even if Father Bryan tried to every day from his pulpit. I couldn’t be the only one fighting boredom throughout his sermons, could I?
“There are so many delicious ways to sin, though, aren’t there?” purred the woman. The stranger. My body responded to her remark like she’d hugged me. It sent the tiny hairs upon my body surging upward in reaction.
“The Devil will dance on our graves,” my mother muttered.
“Hardly,” came the voice. “There is no need to fear Eve’s sinning. She is a good girl, and I wish to make her a better one. The Academy will teach her things that you’re unable to. She will learn how to take control of herself, how to become the woman she ought to be. Don’t you want that for your daughter?”
“Going…to…be…Father… Bryan’s…wife.”
I flinched at that. My father said it so matter-of-factly, even if he did sound like Brother Matthew had before he’d been punished for drinking the wine we used for sacrament.
I’d known that the New Order’s leader had his eyes on me, but having it reaffirmed made me long for my eighteenth birthday all the more. The time for burying my head under the blankets while I burrowed in bed was long gone. Those who should protect me were willing to sell me to the wolves. I’d heard it with my own ears.
Thus far, no arrangements had been spoken of. But in this place, words weren’t the only language that was understood.
The fact that Father Bryan was allowed to touch me, to speak with me on his own? Those two facts had made me realize what was happening without my parents having to utter a word. Hearing a verbal confirmation had me shuddering in reaction, my body’s visceral response to my disgust, as I faced what he was saying.
My family wanted me to marry a seventy-eight-year-old man all so that our status would improve.
Bottom lip quivering and eyes pricking with tears, I strained to hear the rest of the conversation. This Academy the stranger had mentioned… I had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded a thousand times better than being Father Bryan’s wife, but more importantly, it promised me a chance to escape before my eighteenth birthday.
“Oh, my dear, no. Why waste her as a wife? She will be far more powerful on her own.” A laugh sounded then. “No, no. You must agree to relinquish her to my care. She will be well looked after, I can assure you. Her safety and her future are guaranteed with me.”
What a bizarre guarantee.
I hovered outside the cabin, unsure whether I wished to go in or not. The woman was doing something to my parents; she was promising something—freedom—that I’d been waiting for since my eleventh birthday when I’d begun to change. But her voice… What she could do with it…
I couldn’t trust that, could I?
A face appeared in the window of the cabin. The woman stared at me, and I realized she hadn’t been speaking to my parents, but to me all along. There was no surprise on her beautiful features, her porcelain skin held no heat from embarrassment, and her eyes showed no mercy or pity.
It was then I realized she’d made me feel revulsion. She’d taken what was there, my inherent distaste for Father Bryan, the knowledge that deep down my parents would sell me to the old man as a means of bettering their lives, and had shoved power into it. My revulsion morphed with my desperation, making me feel panicked. My heart was speeding once more, loading me with the urgency I felt, the sheer need to be away from this place. These people.
People who were supposed to love me but were willing to sell me for a new cabin and a pew closer to the pulpit at church.
The woman’s gaze was fixed on my frozen self as she said, “The school will help her in ways the compound simply cannot. Her control will not last forever. She must decide which she will become.”
My bottom lip trembled.
My control had to last forever, because if it didn’t, if I let the moods overtake me…
Dear God, that couldn’t happen.
Not when there were days when I craved blood. When there were others where my skin felt so tight I could burst through it. The days, like today, where I felt a kindred spirit with the stranger when my own voice changed, and could suddenly make men stare at me as though I was some kind of treasure, a gift they wanted to unwrap. There were more. Eight distinct moods. Each one more disturbing than the last. And this woman was telling me that the control I had honed to contain these moods wasn’t going to last forever?
The stranger shook her head as though she could read my mind. This time, there was pity, but it was merciless. She wanted my fear, had cultivated it, and she would continue to use my emotions against me until I did as she wanted.
Escape the New Order.
My mouth worked as words surged to the surface and tumbled back as she urged, her voice a song that did nothing to me, but had my parents snoring behind her on the settle, “Come with me.”
I knew what true terror felt like. It was with me all the time, after all. But that was nothing compared to now.
I was scared. Not of the woman. Not of her promises. But of myself. Of what I could do.
Of what she was because I was her too.
Though my lips quivered as I stared at the woman, I nodded.
There was no alternative.
1
Eve
“Welcome to Atlantis.”
The addition of Merinda’s snort after her comment told me she was joking even though, as I looked at the building that was the sole structure on the island, I wondered if this truly was the legendary place—a legend that had even managed to filter its way to me in the backwater compound I’d been raised in.
It would make sense.
It was where we truly belonged, or so Merinda had assured me yesterday. Where our true selves were revealed and where we could spring forth like we’d been reborn into a whole new world. Of course, that didn’t mean the old one had perished. We’d never be fully accepted, not like we would be on this island, but it was somewhere we could at least blend in without everyone thinking we were crazy.
Having believed myself possessed for the last six years, my relief was gargantuan at learning I wasn’t insane. The revelation that I wasn’t human, on the other hand, had come as a rather large surprise.
“You’re not going to freak out on me again, are you?”
I frowned at Merinda’s choice of words—she spoke so oddly and so quickly that I sometimes found it hard to understand her. “This is a lot to take in,” I replied after a few seconds.
Merinda was five-foot-nine, and dressed in clothes that made me wonder how she’d managed to make it onto the compound at all—a black leather mini skirt, a red bustier, and shoes she’d called high heels that I had no idea how she walked in.
Had any of the Brothers seen her, they’d have called her Jezebel, all while looking at her the way they looked at me on those days when my voice had them circling me like a vulture would a fallen animal in the wilderness.
Lust.
I knew what it was, even if no one had ever outright said it to me.
Merinda was lust walking. Each step she took, the way she moved her head, every inch of her screamed it. Although I’d been programmed to believe that she was a Jezebel, I didn’t judge her for it. How could I when I had eight different beings living inside me? Just as she had at my age. Just as every minor here did too.
I wasn’t alone.
That was the most winsome factor about being here.
There were others like me.
Others that were lost and had been found, just like me.
“It might be a lot to take in,” Merinda retorted, “but it’s all good news, isn’t it? You’re not crazy. You don’t have schizophrenia, and in a few years’ time, when you’ve decided what you are, you won’t be stuck on that compound popping out babies for all those old perverts.” She shuddered in revulsion, and I couldn’t blame her.
Gnawing on my bottom lip, I whispered, “Father Bryan won’t ever be able to touch me, will he?”
Her eyes softened as she shook her head, her fiery auburn hair dancing around her shoulders, as wild as her spirit. “Never,” she assured me gently, and her tone was all the reassurance I needed.
In the short time I’d known her, I’d come to learn that Merinda was tough as nails. She wasn’t very sympathetic when I cried, instead she told me to suck it up—I had no idea how to do that, and she’d rolled her eyes at me and told me to check out something called ‘Urban Dictionary’ when I received my phone.
I had no idea what that was either, no idea how a dictionary could be urban nor how it would teach me how to suck it up, but she said that all the kids spoke like her, and I’d soon learn how to talk like a person from the twenty-first century and not the eighteen hundreds if I checked out that website.
Most of the things she said confused me if I were being honest, but I knew better than to reveal that, lest she think I was stupid. If I was stupid, maybe she wouldn’t bring me here, and after we’d escaped the compound when she’d lulled the almost four hundred-strong congregation to sleep with a song that had made me cry with its beauty, there was no way I was about to return to a life of misery and drudgery.
I’d had faith that God would help me, and He had. Just not how Father Bryan had preached He would.
“Come on, Eve,” Merinda snapped, when I lingered just outside the gates, feeling small as I stared up at the twenty-foot plus tall fencing. “We have to get you inducted. You’re already two years behind.”
“What damage will five minutes of dawdling do then?” I snapped, goaded when she spoke to me like it was my fault I was late. It wasn’t. I’d been busy trying to survive the New Order, and if I could have arrived here two years ago, I sure as goodness would have!
She cocked a brow and folded her arms across her chest. “The virgin sacrifice has fangs?” She laughed at her own joke, and I wasn’t even sure why. “They’re going to eat you alive in there if you don’t grow a pair.”
“A pair of what?” I asked, annoyed enough to scowl at her and stupidly reveal, “Why do you talk like that? I don’t understand half of what you say.”
She huffed. “Look, we haven’t all been tucked away in a sect since birth.” Her impatience showed as she began to tap her toe against the ground. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The second you walk through the gates, things will change for you. You’ll be among your true people.”
And there was the concern. True people? I terrified myself with my moods, so to be around a lot of people like me? That was hardly reassuring.
Everything about these past two days was terrifying in truth.
I’d had to climb into a contraption called a car, which had been in the non-urban dictionary I’d memorized when I was barely five, but my imagination and reality hadn’t collided. This particular car moved at horrendous speeds. The faster it went, the louder Merinda had hollered out her glee, whereas I’d clutched at the chair, praying God wasn’t about to smote me for escaping the compound.
After three hours of non-stop driving, we’d arrived at a field. The field was innocuous enough, except for another contraption. It was larger than the car and it was shaped like a tube. Merinda informed me it was called a plane.
I’d never seen one before, but had allowed myself to be hustled into the cabin. When we’d taken off and soared like a bird in the sky; I had fainted. I hadn’t known it was possible to do something like that.
The next time I’d awoken, I’d been fed something called a burger, and the fries that went with that meal made my stomach rumble eagerly at the thought of having some more soon. We’d been on board for hours, crossing the Atlantic Ocean until we came to an island called Paradisus Peccatorum—Caelum for short.
Such an abbreviation made no sense to me, but Merinda called it Caelum more than she did the other wordy name, so I was going to call it that too even if Paradisus Peccatorum ran along the banner above the gates I was peering up at.
As we’d begun to land, I looked out the window of the plane, and I’d seen there was only the one building here, and that it took up the entirety of the island.
It was a hodgepodge of different buildings that were all joined together. There were many different roofs in hundreds of colors, making it appear like an overlarge patchwork quilt from the sky. It was surrounded by barren land that intermittently housed tracts of vegetation before giving way to fields of black rock, but what enchanted me the most was the ocean. The way the waves tore into the cliffs as we approached was of endless fascination to me. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the sea, but it had never looked like that where the compound was.
After traveling for many hours here, we’d landed on a long track of land that had been covered in something the color of gravel but was more tightly packed. I’d tried to bounce on it, but there was no give beneath my feet. Merinda assured me it was something called asphalt and that was what the roads we’d driven on yesterday were made of too.
It was a short walk from where we’d landed to the gates of the Academy, and as I stared at the building Merinda assured me housed my future, I knew I had little alternative but to step through them. I hadn’t come all this way to stand outside, after all.
The building up ahead was made up of a gray brick that had been weathered to a dull black over the years. There were many windows, each with a stone monster guarding it. The door was large, had a sharp arch formed from stone, and appeared carved with more of the monsters that decorated the building on its many corners. The monsters were like stone guards, and the thought had unease whispering through me.
Could they see us?
I’d have said no until two days ago, but now? I wasn’t sure. This world was not what I’d known it to be.
Seeming to have lost patience with my dithering, Merinda released another huff then she grabbed my arm. I tensed, waiting for her to drag me across the aperture, but she didn’t.
“Remember what I told you,” she mumbled. “Just let it happen. Don’t fight it.”
I’d heard my mother tell my sister that before her wedding ceremony to Brother Adam, who was approaching his fifty-second year. Merinda’s words didn’t inspire me with confidence, but I allowed her to drag me across because I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to do so myself.
With a shudder, I felt it the second I stepped from one side of the gates to the other.
Though I’d only taken a single step forward, it felt like I’d been dragged a mile. The wind seemed to fling me into its embrace, mixing with water that tried to overwhelm me. I felt like I was being tossed around like the apples in the bucket we’d dive into at the harvest festival. Juggled around in a vat of water, gasping for air, with no solid ground beneath my feet even though I’d moved barely a foot in front of me.
“Don’t fight it!”
I heard Merinda’s words, and although everything inside me told me to struggle, to not allow myself to be hauled under the tidal wave that appeared before me and me alone, one that felt like it was drowning my soul, I knew that I had to listen or I might not survive. I needed, I realized, to have faith in her.
She’d taken me away from the people who would hurt me when they came to learn what I truly was.
She’d brought me somewhere I would be safe and could learn better control.
She’d gone to great lengths for me to find the community of people who would become my true family, not one who’d sell me off to a man older than my grandfather just so their rank at the com
pound would improve.
I had to trust her.
The second I stopped struggling, the wind and the water let go of me. My personal storm disappeared, but the earth beneath my feet seemed to tug at me, drawing me down even as flames emerged around me in a tight circle. They licked at my skin, burning hotter and hotter while I sunk deeper and deeper into the earth.
I looked up, desperate to see the sky, but saw nothing but the flames. A gasp escaped me, and I knew I was struggling once more. I forced myself to calm down, to stop fighting, and the second I did, the flames engulfed me, but they didn’t hurt. The ground stopped trying to swallow me, and I was tossed out of whatever it was that had held me and released back into Merinda’s dubious care.
She smirked at me when I caught her eyes, but there was a flicker of something deep inside her gaze that belied her next words, “Not too bad, was it?”
Not too bad?
Dear Lord.
Gaping at her, I rasped, “You mean there’s more to come?”
“Now that you’ve passed, there is.” She shrugged. “Don’t worry, you’ll like the rest. You put up a fight then, kiddo. I’m surprised. You keep up that kind of fight then this place won’t swallow you whole.”
Even as I wondered what she’d seen, what I’d done when the battle I’d just engaged in had to be in my mind since I saw no remnants of the destructive force, I realized something.
“We’re not speaking English anymore.”
That had her head tilting to the side. “How do you know that?”
I frowned at her. “Why shouldn’t I?”
She licked her lips, and more surprise bubbled to the surface before she cast a look at the building beyond. “We speak in tongues here.”
My eyes widened at that. “Like the Apostles?”
That had her snorting. “No. Not like them. Like us. It’s what we call our language. What just happened to you…” She motioned at the gates. “It changes us. Let’s us speak our true language.”
I gnawed on my cheek for a second. “I am a demon, aren’t I?”
Seven Wishes: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part ONE Page 2
