Page 67 of Caelum
EIGHT
NESTOR
While I'd expected a lazy night after a shitty day of traveling, instead, I was watching my woman kick Ghoul ass Wonder Woman-style.
After landing and driving to our digs, I'd anticipated nothing more than getting a bath. I knew people said that shit was for chicks, but fuck that. I liked baths. I even liked bubbles. Not from the soap that smelled of flowers and old ladies, but the ones that smelled like fruit I could get with.
After an hour in the tub, I'd have contemplated getting into bed with Eve and carving out some 'us' time. Ever since Reed and Samuel had claimed her—I wasn't sure who was more shocked about how at ease Eve had been with that, and I thanked God for her Succubus every day—she'd become a lot more chilled about sex, and I was glad about that. Really glad because she did things to me that set me alight and had me reveling in the burn.
Case in point now.
Watching her take down three Ghouls, alone.
Either she was corrupting us or we were corrupting her. I seriously wasn't sure anymore, but no way was I about to complain.
She'd stunned me when she'd frozen us in place, controlling our souls as though we could be taken charge of like we were tuned into a remote. Even more so when she had beaten the shit out of a Ghoul by using an amputated leg as a missile and had somehow managed to slice a female Ghoul down the middle. Sure, that was all worthy of a Valium, but when she'd eaten their souls ?
That was literally my mic drop moment of the night.
In fact, screw that, the year.
What the hell was she?
Female Sin Eaters existed, sure they did. But they didn't kill that way. In fact, male Sin Eaters didn't kill that way either.
They didn't start chanting in some creepy old language that made the hairs at the back of my neck stand on edge. They didn't sing along as they beat the shit out of a Ghoul.
Sin Eaters worked on downed Ghouls and entranced them. Although Eve might have been doing that with her singing, I didn't think so.
Yet another puzzle.
When the Ghouls were dead, and we were left with just under a dozen dead bodies in an alley, I was the first one to grunt out, "We're going to have to set them on fire."
It was more relevant than discussing just how weird Eve was, yet again.
We should really be used to her throwing this kind of shade our way, and there was zero point in even being huffy with her because I knew for a fact that she was as in the dark as we were where her talents were concerned.
Every day with her was like watching a toddler take their first step.
On repeat.
Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, he’d never met Eve. We'd go around the bend if we ever imagined that Eve could be in any way normal.
"On fire?" she rasped, her nose wrinkling as she dumped the Ghoul on the ground as easily as another woman might puff up a cushion on the sofa. "That's gross. And what if it stirs more interest in what's happening?"
"You'd prefer the authorities to find a bunch of dead bodies in a back alley?" I retorted, folding my arms across my chest as I stared her down.
It was then I realized she wasn't coated in blood.
How the fuck she'd managed that, I wasn't sure.
Because that was suddenly more important than anything else, I spluttered, "Why aren't you covered in blood?"
She blinked then stared down at herself. "I don't know."
"The song," Dre rasped, and he was back in his human form once more, the bear having been as controlled by Eve as the rest of us. "When she started singing it, the blood went away."
Samuel frowned. "I feel fed. "
Eren rubbed his eyes. "You mean to tell me she used the Lorelei's song to take the blood to you?"
"How the fuck is that even possible?" I rasped. Did that break the goddamn laws of physics?
"I don't know," Stefan admitted, "but it's damn handy."
I gaped at him. "That's creepy."
He shrugged. "I've seen worse shit on the streets."
Eve released a pained sound and she stepped toward Stefan, moving around corpses as though they weren't even there in an effort to reach him. She didn't stop until she was snuggled against him, and he stared at us, as bewildered as the rest of us as he curved his arms around her waist and held her tight. "I'm so sorry you had to go through that," she whispered.
He patted her on the back gently then smoothed over her hair in a way that seemed to soothe her. "It's all in the past," he crooned, then, after a few seconds, he tugged her ponytail around his wrist and, shooting us all a look, mumbled, "You shouldn't have done this, Eve."
She stiffened. "Done what? These bastards needed killing."
Considering that was one of the worse curses I'd heard her use, I knew I wasn't the only one taken aback.
"No. Of course not. I meant you should have let us handle the killing. You don't need to be stained with this shit, pui . It's not... this isn't what you're supposed to do."
Though I agreed with him, his speaking Romanian had my eyes widening.
"I've never heard anything more chauvinistic in all my life and I'm mated to Dre!"
"Hey! I'm not a chauvinist!"
"No, you're just a prick," Eve snapped, twisting in Stefan's hold to glower at him.
I knew she was pissed at the way Dre was evading her, and I could empathize. Though being on the boat had been shit, the only bright spot had been the fact that all of us had finally been Chosen, all our souls were declared, and we’d been hanging around as a Pack.
Well, save for Dre who’d hung around with the rest of us but had only allowed himself to hang out when Eve was there every now and then. Like he was rationing his time with her or something.
I wasn't sure what his game was, not when I'd watched him cling to her like she was a pacifier and he was a toddler when we'd escaped the Academy and had slipped into the cave for shelter before we'd been taken to the yacht .
Between then and now, he'd barely been in her presence unless we were all in the same room.
Dre had his issues, we all knew that, but still. This was weirder than usual, and considering our standard for weird had changed since Eve had made an appearance in our world, that was really saying something.
Dre growled under his breath at her statement, though, but she ignored him to glower back up at Stefan. Slamming her hands against his chest, she groused, "I was more than capable of handling the situation."
"And we'd know that how? Hell, since when did you know how to fight like that?" Reed threw in, folding his arms as he glared at her just as hard as she scowled back.
In truth, it would have been funny as fuck if the situation weren't so disconcerting.
"He's got a point, Eve," I inserted softly, not particularly wanting her ire when I wanted her to understand our concerns. She tensed at my words, but I raised a hand to hold her attention. "We've seen your outbursts, meu amor , but they haven’t happened often enough for us to know your skills in a fight." I shrugged. "You froze us in place without even warning us then dealt with a situation that could have gotten you killed. Do you know what that would have done to us? How that would have wrecked us?"
Her eyes widened at that, and she began to gnaw on her bottom lip. She stopped tugging at Stefan's hold and, instead, sagged in his arms. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
Because I hadn't expected an apology, I blinked at her. I wanted to sputter, 'Erm, what?' but I didn't. Couldn't. Because I knew that would irritate her again. Uncertain now, I murmured, "Please, just don't do it again without warning us."
"I'll try." Eve shrugged. "It wasn't really me.”
“Then who the fuck was it?” Dre growled, earning himself another glower from her.
She cleared her throat, on edge at the question, but even uneasier with the answer if my guess was right. “I don’t know. It’s like there are two Eves sometimes.” Her brow puckered. “That’s the only way I can explain it.”
Though she made no sense, equally, it made complete sense . We’d seen enough of Eve’s Jekyll and Hyde nature to realize that something shady was going on, and truth be told, it scared the fuck out of me.
Sure, she had eight souls, but did that mean she was more unstable than sane?
What if, when she hit twenty-one, she’d turn Ghoul? What the fuck would happen to us when our woman, the woman who Chose us, turned into the monsters we’d been trained to hunt down and slaughter since we were kids?
I’d felt despair several times in my life: when my parents had dumped me at the local priest’s house, when the bastard had put me through another exorcism with no fear for what it was doing to me, and when I’d slit his throat to escape him and, like Stefan, had found myself out on the streets, except being homeless was a thousand times better than living with a man who thought I was infested with demons. Still, none of that matched the terror I felt at the prospect of losing Eve.
But I knew she was right. There were two sides to her, and what was that if not crazy?
Her words shook us all, and I knew I wasn’t the only one unsettled by her revelations since we were silently processing her words. As we broke out of our thoughts, we hustled into action, forcing our minds to focus on anything other than Eve and whatever was going down with her.
Though she was right about it drawing attention, without being able to call in a cleanup team from Caelum’s UK HQ, our options were limited. Setting fire to the corpses felt wrong, considering the women were innocents and deserved a decent burial, but the damage to their bodies had to be hidden. Most Ghoul attacks were covered up, declared serial killings by sick fucks. Sick human fucks.
Not just by us either.
Sure, we dealt with the cover-ups, but so did high-ranking Ghouls.
This massacre would be chalked up as some kind of occult attack, and it would be in the news for a week or two before being replaced with some stupid shit a royal did or some celebrity’s coke addiction. That was how human society worked.
With the scent of charring flesh filling our nostrils, we ducked out of the alley and back toward the main street. As the scent grew stronger, Eve began to gag, and I couldn’t blame her. The smell was unique and all the more repulsive for it.
By the time we hustled her into the limo, she’d buried her face in Samuel’s arm and was gently weeping. It didn’t take a mind reader to know her sorrow was for the innocents who’d died tonight.
The journey to our accommodation was quiet and somber after that. Whatever we’d expected in the first hour on British soil, it wasn’t to walk face first into a Ghoul attack. And it sure as hell hadn’t involved Eve taking control and killing three Ghouls while we just hung around and watched.
As we drove down a narrow, cobbled street, I wasn’t the only one who breathed a sigh of relief to be at our destination .
Not having brought anything with us save for a handful of things we didn’t want Caelum to toss in the trash, we needed to go shopping, so there was no need to wait on getting our luggage out of the trunk. Dragging Eve out of the limo while Sam gave the driver a tip and helped him ‘forget’ our stopping nearby Ender’s Greasy Spoon—a Vampire’s ability to mesmerize came in damn handy at times like these—we found ourselves on a street that belonged in some cutesy British rom-com.
The cobbles were old, but the houses were short and looked like expensive cottages. They were painted white, had bright colored doors and low roofs, and this particular street seemed to have an explosion of plants and potted trees decorating the sidewalks.
“It’s a mews cottage,” Sam explained as he headed toward the door to our place. He wiggled the key in his hand at Eve and, handing it to her, said, “The driver gave it to me—he works for the company who looks after this place for us.”
She stared up at him and whispered, “It’s so cute.”
His lips twitched. “I’m glad you think so, sweetheart.” He rubbed her back and murmured, “Let’s get you cleaned up and in bed. You need some rest. What you did—” His smile made an appearance this time, but it was tight and taut with worry. “It took a lot of energy.” I knew how hard those words were to form because, fuck, what else could he say?
Eve averted her attention to the door and stuck the key in the lock while we shot each other looks, glances that said we’d be discussing this shit out of her earshot later.
The place was small and cramped for eight of us, but for three or four people, it was more than ample. The hall opened up into a lounge and kitchen/dining area. There was a large L-seater sofa in front of a big screen TV. The kitchen was mostly silver, from its metal cabinets to the fridge and oven. Shit like the kettle and toaster were the only bright spots of color in the space, and they were a green so bright it hurt my eyes.
Dre, Frazer, Reed, and Stefan sank onto the sofa, while Eren, Sam, and I peered around the place on the hunt for the stairs, which happened to be next to the kitchen. As I followed Eren and Sam, my brother turned back to me and said, “Go and talk with the others. We’ll get her settled.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t particularly happy about being dismissed. Eve needed her Chosen, and though she was depending on Eren and Sam for shit that she should be relying on us all for, I figured now wasn’t the time to get into it.
So, I stayed quiet, even though it burned me to do so, and decided that falling into this discussion was priority enough to turn on my heel and head to the fridge.
Though I empathized with Eve about the stench of burning flesh, I was used to it. We all were. So, hitting up the fridge to see if it had been stocked up might have seemed cruel, but it was just the way of it. Tonight wasn’t our first Ghoul attack, nor would it be our last.
More’s the pity.
The second the rest of the Pack realized I had my head stuck in the fridge, they got to their feet and sauntered over to the counter, which separated the kitchen from the lounge and acted as the table. It had high counter stools that they slouched on, watching me haul shit out of the thankfully full fridge.
I scowled at their eager faces and grumbled, “If you think I’m feeding you, you’re fucking stupid.”
They grumbled back but made their own sandwiches from the stuff I put on the counter, and we were quiet as we chowed down. We’d last eaten on the boat, so we were fucking starving anyway, but I thought we’d all noticed that we were eating more now that Eve had worked her wiles on us.
Halfway through sandwich number three, I mumbled, “You think she’s dangerous?”
The four words sank into the atmosphere like bullets into flesh. They probably caused as much pain as those bullets would too. The fear was hitting us all, and trepidation had us lowering our sandwiches as we stopped stuffing our faces to contemplate exactly what was going on with our female.
Reed rubbed a hand through his hair then mused, “Do you know of any Ghouls who are mated?”
His question resonated. “No. Not as far as I’m aware. They don’t mate, do they?”
“How would we know?” Frazer countered. “The whole point is that they don’t get to be around others of their kind, so they have no chance of becoming anything other than Ghoul.”
Dre shook his head. “That’s BS. Not every child like us turns Ghoul.”
“No, just most of them.”
We shared a grimace because the statistics were pretty shit. Without Caelum, without people like us around, and forced to depend upon the human meds that exacerbated our symptoms, there was little to no hope of a child not turning Ghoul.
Before Caelum, it had been a sixty-thirty chance. The sixty being in our favor. But now? The tides had turned, and the trouble was, the humans were overpopulated. They kept on reproducing, creating a glut for the scourge to feast upon.
The sandwich churned in my belly.
“I doubt they’re capable of procuring a mate,” Reed said eventually, his gaze on the OJ he’d poured himself. “I mean, how could they? Everyone knows what it’s like when the souls start fighting. Imagine that on a constant basis. It’s enough to drive anyone insane on a regular day. For them, it’s no wonder they look for anything to dull the pain.”
At the heart of every creature was the ingrained mixture of pity and revulsion for a Ghoul. We could so easily have been them, and that stirred our revulsion. But our pity was born from understanding the torment they’d had to endure.
“Eve isn’t like us,” Dre added eventually, his tone as heavy as lead. “She has that eighth soul, and we had front-row seats to what she did today. She’s morphing the powers of all our souls.”
“What was that shit with Samuel about?” Reed rasped, evidently preferring the direction of this conversation to the one mine had taken—none of us wanted to think about losing our mate.
Eve had wandered into our world and like Little Bo Peep, we were her sheep, and no way in fuck was she getting rid of us.
Just thinking about losing her made my soul rebel. The gouille had been calm ever since she’d Chosen him, ever since she’d made him hers that day on the stairs as she’d pushed me out of the sickbay in a wheelchair. And when, on the yacht, during our first lesson together, she’d made me a true Gargoyle? Both man and soul were beyond grateful for her.
But more than that, we needed her.
Each of Eve’s seven Chosen did.
“The blood stuff?” Frazer nodded. “That was weird. She had to get blood on her. No way she couldn’t with that shit she pulled with the leg.”
My nose crumpled. “That was gross.”
“Cool though,” Dre pointed out with a wicked grin.
“Only you’d think that,” I retorted, but I smirked back at him because it was beyond badass. Like something from a zombie movie or some shit. “But yeah, she should have been covered with the way she was fighting the fuckers.”
“So, what? She transferred the blood to Samuel by diffusion?” Frazer questioned skeptically.
Dre snorted. “I can’t believe that. Shit doesn’t work that way.”
“Aren’t we learning that nothing works how it should where she’s concerned? Maybe the eighth soul was behind it,” I reasoned uneasily. None of us liked calling the eighth soul the djinn, even though, with the whole wishing shit, that was pretty much an apt name for it.
“Could be. All it makes me grateful for is the fact that Professor Anheim can see us tomorrow,” Reed murmured and blew out a sharp breath. “We need help. We need to understand what’s going on with her arms, and we need to know what to do next.”
“I can’t help but feel like we’ve crash landed in a movie with a treasure map or something. Those marks have to be a clue,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“X marks the spot?” Frazer quipped with a faint smile.
“Maybe,” Reed retorted, his eyes narrowing at Frazer’s mocking tone.
“I think we should get some sleep too,” I suggested, glancing between the pair of them. The last thing we needed was for them to get into a fistfight while Eren and Sam were helping Eve get ready for bed.
My words were the key we all needed to break the tension, because I knew everyone else was just as exhausted as me and tempers could easily run high.
“Should we leave the food out for Eren and Sam?” Frazer asked, running a hand through his hair.
“No. They’ll crash with Eve, and if they’re starving, they can raid the fridge. No need to let food go to waste,” Stefan replied.
My lips curved at his predictable reply, and I began gathering the stuff we’d eaten and, with the others, began to store it away.
Within five minutes, we were all heading upstairs, and though the cottage was small, there were five bedrooms, each with twin beds.
I’d have preferred cozying up to my mate for the night, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. And, where Eve’s well-being was concerned, I was glad she had Eren and Sam by her side. Eren, because it was unlikely he’d sleep and could watch over her, and if she had a nightmare, he’d wake her up. And Sam, because there was something so solid about him, so rational, and after what Eve had done and seen, she’d need a dose of both if the memories plagued her nightmares.