Something flashed in his eyes that had me sitting straighter in my seat. “What? Like a competition?”
He shook his head. “If only it were,” he said on a sigh, as he headed over to the table and took a seat opposite me.
The tutors rarely sat. It was almost as though they were too edgy to rest even for a second.
“Okay, so why then?”
“When you’re twenty-one, the main soul will surge forward. It might be before your birthday or after it. It’s just around that time. One soul decides it’s had enough of sharing its space, and poof, it cannibalizes the others.”
My eyes widened. “That sounds painful.”
His grin was sheepish. “It is. But it’s just as bad as being punched in the face by a girl on a Were day.”
I snorted. “Touché.”
Though he smirked, it swiftly died as he carried on explaining, “The portal you passed through, it’s special. Unless you’re like Merry or me, creatures only go through it twice in their life.”
“When?”
“In and out. In, when they’re ready for the protection and education Caelum offers. Out, when their main soul is in full power.” He sighed. “Even creatures with as much knowledge as we have can’t really explain why the portal exists, but it’s why Caelum was built here. Back in the eighteen hundreds, a ship meandered this way on a scientific mission and they discovered the island as well as the fact we’re on an oceanic trench. Some say that’s what fuels the portal, but—”
“You don’t agree?” I prompted, intrigued by what he was telling me.
“No. It’s not magic, but I don’t know what it is. I just know that it spits you out one way and you can speak tongues. Then, when you’ve just the one soul to worry about, it spits you out onto the other side and suddenly, that soul can manifest.”
I studied him for a second. “What are you, Damon?” I’d never asked, not wanting to be rude. Damon was intimidating sometimes. Nicholas was the same. I had a feeling he was a Sin Eater but wouldn’t know for sure until I built up the courage to ask him.
He made a face that let him reveal his fangs. I reached up and touched my own teeth, and he nodded. “The fangs appear after you’ve crossed through the portal. As does the animal if you’re a Were or a Hell Hound. Then with the gouilles, they can pull that freaky shit with their skin. Sin Eaters can do their business and so can the ‘Buses.” That was what most people shorted the Incubi and Succubi down to.
“Only the Lorelei can sing and use their voice to the max pre-portal?”
“Yes. We don’t know why. Another mystery. While there is much we understand about our species, there is a lot we don’t and although we investigate our beginnings as much as we can, we don’t always have the time to.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re at war.”
I jolted back in surprise. “We are? With who?”
His smile grew pained. “Ghouls.”
“Like ghosts?”
He shook his head. “No. Not like ghosts. I wish they were.” I watched as he reached up and rubbed his brow, and realized that something had happened with one of the Ghouls. Something that had affected him personally.
“What are they?”
He was silent for a long time until he rasped, “What happens when we hit twenty-one, Eve?”
I frowned. “Our one soul cannibalizes the others.”
“Exactly. A Ghoul is a creature with no dominant soul and, as such, is our enemy and needs to be destroyed.”
For a second, the words wouldn’t penetrate and when they did, my mouth worked because I knew I had eight souls, not seven like everyone thought. And if I was weird in that, what if I was weird when I turned twenty-one, exactly like I’d been imagining?
My plan had always been to escape Caelum at some point. Once I’d figured out how the real world worked, I’d intended to find a way back onto the plane that had brought me here. I hadn’t known how I’d do it exactly, but desperate times required desperate measures.
But, if what Damon was saying was true, even if I did escape, there was no escaping myself.
I reached up and rubbed my temple. “What happens if you have more than one soul?”
“You become a monster.”
“The portal… it makes sure you only have one soul, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “It does.”
“And if you don’t, what? It eradicates you?”
Another nod. But it wasn’t his silence that was irritating me, it was the way he was looking at me. That sadness was back. Was it aimed at me or was it aimed at someone he’d known who’d turned into a Ghoul?
Confused, I asked, “Why do you consider them monsters?”
“At the moment, each soul plays nice. They let you adapt, they want you to evolve with them. So each day, you get to handle one of them. Each day, you get to experience the quirks of the soul you’re handling. Of course, you don’t get the full hands-on experience, like with a Were you don’t shift, and when you’re a Vampire, you need blood but you have to use a knife to cause the cut, but it’s enough. It’s a learning curve.
“After you’re eighteen, the souls converge en masse. One of them ekes it out as the dominant one, and over the next three years, that dominant soul begins to take power. The Academy is a good place for our kind. We’re safe here, at peace. It’s a good place for that to happen. But in the outside world?” He shook his head. “It’s not so easy. Creatures who deal with this alone are usually eating crap loaded with chemicals and are taking medication for their supposed mental health issues.” He shrugged. “It messes with them. The battle for dominance just doesn’t happen, and instead, all seven souls just rage on endlessly. They say that it’s equivalent to a cerebral war.”
“But they survive… Obviously, it doesn’t kill them, otherwise they wouldn’t be at war with us. So, how?”
“They eat undead flesh.”
Having watched a show about a forensic pathologist who was a zombie with Nestor the past few days, I blurted out, “They’re zombies?”
“It’s a name for them, but they’re not. They’re Ghouls. They rely on human flesh because humans are grounded in a way we’re not. They’re connected to this earth in ways we’ll never understand. The more flesh they consume, the quieter the din in their head is. The longer they live. The smarter they are.
“Ghouls can live as long as we do so long as we never catch them. They live in nests with others of their kind and run around causing destruction wherever they go.”
My mouth wobbled as I contemplated what he was saying. Would that be me? Would that be my ultimate end? A monster?
I wanted to ask Damon about my eighth soul, wanted to ask about its bizarre power, but I’d seen no mention of it in any of the textbooks. And I’d scoured them for knowledge, reading them like each one would be burned and forever forbidden to me so that I could attempt to be on the same level as my peers, but also so I could begin to understand why I could do what I could do.
But this? There was no amount of wishing or praying or dreaming that the truth would go away.
I was different.
I knew that. Was just fortunate that it was still hidden from everyone else. Barely. My eighth soul had already been busy at work, but no one had noticed.
Yet.
If I was different before I hit twenty-one, I saw no reason for that to change after.
My future had started to appear bright, but now?
It was darker than I’d ever anticipated, and even though knowledge was power, I wished I’d never let this conversation go down this road, because the options open to me were suddenly far bleaker than they’d been even back at the compound.
Even as fear began to turn my blood to ice, I realized something. Something major.
This was the first time I’d learned about any of this stuff. Ghouls were a new concept to me. The fact we were waging war on a subspecies? That was also new.
What books were they keeping from me?
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What information were they withholding?
They obviously were keeping me in the dark on some matters, introducing it to me on a need-to-know basis. I had a feeling my eighth soul wouldn’t appear in any textbook but I couldn’t lose hope yet. If I did, then I might as well just toss myself off one of the cliffs, and that was something I’d never do.
For too long, I’d been passive. For too long, I’d let life whirl on around me.
No more, and that was a promise I had to keep because if I didn’t? The portal would see to it that I paid for my sins anyway.
❖
Frazer
Sin Eating was no fun.
In fact, of all the souls, it was the hardest.
There were no advantages to it, no extra abilities that were perks. We could do one thing and one thing only: eradicate Ghouls.
To many, that probably seemed like the best gift of them all. But it wasn’t, and as Ghoul goo covered me from the last son of a bitch that had exploded when I’d gone hunting for its soul, I wished like fuck I was a Hell Hound.
Shit, I’d even settle for Incubus. That had to be better than this shit.
Even though the body of the male on the ground before me looked like it had gone a round with an AK 47, with more of the dude’s insides on the outside than should be possible, I still had to go hunting.
A Ghoul wouldn’t die until its sins were eaten. The guy on the ground was awake and aware even though his body was a mass of blood and entrails. It was fucked up, but I was used to it.
It wasn’t like the zombie movies. The SOB wouldn’t be able to get up and walk around with half a torso missing. But he’d just lie there. For an eternity.
It creeped me out to think about how many Ghouls were currently buried alive in crypts around the world. In fact, it did more than creep me out. It made me feel fucking sick.
The souls resided in the brain. Not in the heart like the religions wanted you to think. There was the cerebral equivalent of a storage locker where they were contained and the reason this motherfucker had exploded was because he was rocking three souls.
The second one, a Vampire because they were stubborn motherfuckers, had clung on so tight to its host that it had triggered the body’s explosion. The soul had fucked with the man’s brain to the extent that his heart had exploded and his arteries too.
Which was why I was currently looking like an extra from a horror movie.
Fuck, makeup artists wished they were this good.
The third soul was easier to get a hold of. Loreleis didn’t like letting go, but they weren’t as centric on the body. Vampires ate blood, were of the body, and so they tended to cause the most Ghoul goo.
My brain whirred and an ache stirred in my temple way too early on in the night, as I sought to connect with the Lorelei.
Sin Eaters were unusual.
We were the weakest link in a team, but without us, there was no Pack.
My gift only stirred to life at this moment, when I attempted to eradicate a Ghoul, and my soul basically mimicked the one I was putting on the chopping block.
I reeled off the Latin words that would entice the Lorelei to the surface, and I knew it had worked when, through the destroyed throat and mouth, the Ghoul tried to speak. Tried to entice me.
When it was out in the open, I hovered over the male’s mouth and tried not to vomit at the stench coming off of him.
Baring my teeth, I inhaled deeply, sucking on the soul, drawing it out. The Ghoul struggled, well aware of what I was doing, but it was too late. The Lorelei reacted to me like I was a magnet.
As I sucked it into me, swallowing it down like I’d swallowed a steak earlier, I jumped up and headed onto the next one.
It was disgusting, dirty work but somebody had to do it.
A gargling sound grabbed my attention, and I quickly scanned the Ghouls. Holding onto my tazer in case one of the motherfuckers was going to wake up and go on the hunt with me in its crosshairs, I saw none of them stirring.
In the shadows up ahead, in front of a wooden building, I saw something wriggling on the floor.
Concerned it was a stirring Ghoul that needed to be contained, I rushed over and grunted when I saw the torn out throat, aware it was one of our own.
Lifting my receiver to my mouth, I rasped out, “Man down.” Quickly looking at my phone for my location, I blurted that into the receiver too, but as I stared down at Nestor, one of Stefan’s Pack, I knew it was too late for outside help.
It was down to me or the dude was going to die.
Squatting at his side, I grabbed a hold of his hands. His muscles were weak, and I knew he’d been trying to stem the blood loss, but with that level of damage as well as the beating he’d endured, it wasn’t going to happen.
“What soul are you today?”
“Vampire,” he rasped. The two-syllable word was drawn out into four.
Relief filled me. “Then it’s your lucky day, you jammy son of a bitch.”
12
Eve
Two days later
Nerves filled me as I waited for the plane to land.
I wasn’t even sure if they’d want me here, waiting on them, but I wasn’t back at the compound now. I had free will, and after what Damon had told me, I felt like I needed to be around people who I thought gave a damn about me.
I needed not to be alone.
My throat felt tight and itchy as I stared up at the sky, waiting on the glinting body of the plane to appear in the distance.
I wasn’t even sure which direction it was coming from, so I could have been totally looking the wrong way, but it felt so much better than just staring into space as I pretended to read.
All those years alone at the compound, I’d thought I’d known what it was like to be lonely. But at Caelum, I was alone. Unless I had those four guys around me—even Dre would do at the moment.
He was mean, but I could handle him. At least, I thought I could. If I could deal with Samuel, then Dre’s horrible attitude could be remedied with a smack at some point in the future. Better that than to be ignored by everyone.
And I meant everyone.
It was like I was invisible.
Since they’d gone off, the only people to interact with me were my tutors and the faculty. Why that was, I didn’t know, but it hurt.
Made me feel even weirder than I already was… a Ghoul in the making.
Shivering at the thought, I tried not to recall what I’d been reading in the two days since the boys had gone and Damon had decided to reveal all about the Ghouls.
My future had always been bleak, but the prospect of having to eat humans was just so beyond me that I was…
No.
Suicide was a sin.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t supposed to believe in that anymore. I had a few years for something to change, and in that time, maybe I could do some good.
Everyone had a purpose in life. Even if mine would be short, I could influence someone or do something that made my existence have meaning.
At least, I hoped so.
Swallowing the nerves that had been with me since my conversation with Damon, I kept my gaze up, uncaring that the sky was so blue it made my eyes water. I stared for so long and so hard that I almost missed the plane when it appeared in the near distance.
Rushing out of the common room where I’d been waiting, I headed past a few clusters of people who’d been studiously ignoring me since the boys had left. I was so close to the doorway that I didn’t take note of my surroundings.
Of course, there was no taking note when that leg definitely hadn’t been in my way until now.
I went flying, headfirst, over the guy who’d kicked out his calf to trip me. When I landed on my knees, I tipped forward, my hands scraping on the rug as I came to a halt.
There was dead silence for a handful of seconds, and then, there was anything but.
The laughter had my palms burning as hotly as my cheeks, and I lay there for a good fiv
e seconds, just processing what had happened. Processing what was going on deep inside.
My heart was thumping in my chest. Both from shock and from anger, and though I wished it wasn’t my Hell Hound’s day, I knew that beast was the difference between me running out of this room in tears and getting my own back.
Before I could get a handle on my emotions, I felt the Hell Hound lunge to the surface. It had me rolling up onto my knees then getting to my feet.
I stared down at the smirking boy, wondering what had changed. Why the students had gone from ignoring me to trying to intimidate me in one fell swoop.
But even as I questioned it, the beast didn’t. It was there, burning away deep inside me, and when I reached for the boy, someone whose name I didn’t even damn well know, I could tell he was surprised.
He’d expected me to run.
To flee.
Like a coward.
But he was the coward.
Or he would be soon.
My hand snapped out and I grabbed him by the throat. My Hell Hound was there, strengthening me even as the people around him began squealing and shrieking as he clawed at my hands, trying to escape me.
I was weak in so many ways. Terrible in the gym. Useless when it came to fighting. Yet the souls that were going to be my downfall possessed a strength I felt certain was unusual.
Maybe it was because there were eight of them. Seven of which I knew from the boys’ descriptions, the eighth that was still lingering there, undeclared, hidden away, and only coming out at the mention of a few simple words…
Maybe it was that particular soul, though, that tipped the scales in my favor.
I didn’t know, probably never would, but at that moment, I was grateful. So grateful for the oddities in my nature that let me lift the guy off the couch by his throat. That enabled me to be strong when I could have been weak.
“I’m not a violent person,” I rasped, my voice deeper than usual, telling anyone within hearing range that my soul was in charge. “You ever do anything like that to me again, and I’ll tear your head off and make a mockery of what I just said. Do you understand me?”
Seven Wishes: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part ONE Page 22
