Page 78 of Caelum

NINETEEN

SAMUEL

“Did that seem too easy to anyone else?” I asked once we were safely back in our vehicle and heading to our digs.

Eve blinked at me. “Easy? Were you in the same room as me?”

I snorted. “We just walked in and killed his ass. I expected more action.” After weeks of planning, of building up to this moment, it was all over. Pretty anti-climactic, in my opinion.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she retorted with a huff as she folded her arms across her belly. But I spotted the wince.

“Is it sore?”

She pulled a face. “A little.”

“When we make it back to the hotel,” Reed said, “we’ll take a picture so you can show Bartlett and Avalina. They can translate what we need to do and where we need to go.”

“I hope we get some action next time,” I stated on a grunt. “I didn’t even get to feed.”

“If my blood isn’t enough for you…”

The twinkle in her eyes told me she was teasing, not that my Vampire appreciated the joke.

I grumbled, “There’s a difference. The blood of a mate and the blood of an enemy.” I smacked my lips. “Nothing better.”

“Love and hate are on the same taste spectrum, are they?” she countered with a pout that had me grinning at her .

“I think I preferred you when you were quiet and didn’t understand half of what we had to say.”

She snickered but shoved me in the side. I pressed my lips to her temple, hiding a grin. Around me, my brothers chuckled in the confines of the SUV Frazer was driving like he was on a NASCAR track, but there was a definite levity in the air, a joyousness that came from a job well done.

In less than five minutes, we’d eradicated a huge threat. How couldn’t we be proud of our achievement even if it had gone easier than anticipated?

And what Eve had done? The way the branches had appeared like that? Man, that was beyond intense. It was like something from a movie and it had me wondering if the motif on her belly would do the same thing.

Clue, script, and weapon all in one.

Talk about multitasking.

I rubbed her arm as I said, “You know, when I looked up Drekavac, he was listed as a Slavic demon.”

“So, in this area, they’ve always known to fear him,” Eve mused.

“I’d never heard of him,” Stefan countered stiffly, but that was him at the moment. Stiff . He’d been in a mood since we’d landed in Romania, and that mood stank.

Still, I got it. This was not the home London was for me.

“Doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t, to be honest. He’s in the old tales. But the legends had him nicknamed as the Screamer, said he could lure pretty girls into sinning, and, some say, he could shift into a canine,” I offered.

“Traits that are based on creatures,” Frazer mused.

“Exactly.” I laughed. “Does that mean all the demons in the world are Ghouls?”

Eve shuddered. “Don’t talk about it. It creeps me out.”

I snorted at her words. She’d just killed millions and had ‘creeped out’ a few billion more. The nightclub had borne the brunt of Eve’s Jannah half. When we walked out, we saw that a lot of humans had been injured in the fires that had started when Drekavac’s line burned to ash, but I believed, more than anything, it was the spontaneous combustion of hundreds of people that would disturb them a little more.

And I had to think that the rest of the world was just as concerned if this had happened on a mass scale, and there was no reason to think it hadn’t.

“We might have to get in touch with Caelum,” I stated, speculating out loud. “I have to think that Nicholas would prefer to be kept in the loop now that we’ve done what we have. ”

“That would involve telling him about his parents, wouldn’t it?” Eve questioned, sounding uneasy on Bartlett and Avalina’s behalf.

I shrugged. “He has to know at some point. Plus, now we’ve rid him of a third of the world’s Ghouls, he should be grateful for our assistance. We did in five minutes what he hasn’t been able to achieve in a lifetime.”

And his lifetime went beyond the average four scores and ten.

“I don’t know,” Frazer stated warily. “Nicholas holds a grudge. You and I both know that.”

I shrugged. “I’m not going to give him our location, Fraze. I just mean that we should keep him in the loop. This one was relatively easy?—”

“Easy? The fuck? You weren’t the one who had to break into a fucking bank!” Dre growled, twisting in his seat in the SUV so he could glower at me.

“No, I was the one that had to hack into the bank’s mainframe, security, and client systems,” I snapped back. “You think you guys were sweating bullets?—”

Before I could finish, Eve’s hand was on my thigh, and she was rubbing the muscle there, kneading it almost like my cat, Greta, had when I was a kid. The memory popped up out of nowhere, and I had to stop myself from smiling or the others would have thought I was insane for just smirking in the middle of an argument.

“Let’s calm down, everyone,” Eve said, but I noticed her tone had changed. The Lorelei was in play today, but more than that, there was steel behind each word too. Sometimes it was easy to think Eve was the same ingénue who’d traipsed into Caelum all those weeks ago in a white sack for a dress and a mud-brown cape, but she wasn’t.

She was so much more than any of us had anticipated.

At her statement, her demand , everyone huffed. The tension had brewed quickly among us in that moment, and I knew that was from a blend of adrenaline and stress.

We’d knocked off one Original, but we still had two to go and we didn’t even know how difficult the next ones would be to find. With a third of the Ghouls gone, security would have increased, surely? This one had been easy, but the rest… not so much. That was why I wanted to contact Nicholas. He had teams, systems in place that would help us.

But I understood my brothers’ unease. Caelum had a habit of eradicating those who didn’t fit in, and Eve was the antithesis of ‘fitting in.’ Even if she was Jannah , like Nicholas’s father, that didn’t mean the principal of Caelum would embrace her with open arms.

With a sigh, I decided to wait to see how hard it would be to solve the next clue on Eve’s markings. There was no point in going to war with my Pack over something that might not be required.

But, if Eve’s markings had told me anything, it was that roots were important. We’d already had to return to my home city and Stefan’s on our path. I couldn’t see that changing any time soon, and I knew the rest of our Pack would have to face their origins as well.