Page 85 of Caelum

TWENTY-SIX

EVE

The helicopter ride set me on edge.

I didn’t like cars, hated boats, loathed planes, but helicopters? Worst of the bunch.

Unfortunately for me, my preferences weren’t considered, and since the situation was rather dire, it made sense.

Caelum’s jet enabled us to get to Ankara, and from there, one of its helicopters was waiting to take us to Kayseri, a thirty-minute ride from where we needed to be. But helicopters, with their god-awful vibrations that managed to offend everyone in the vicinity, would ruin our cloak-and-dagger approach.

Nicholas had a car waiting for us where the helicopter landed in a dust-strewn field atop crops that, had the farmers been tending, would have been destroyed.

As it stood, like everywhere else, it was a ghost town.

That was to our benefit, but it was creepy, and I was grateful for the backup Nicholas had insisted on as his price for helping us in this final battle against Erlik.

Of course, that wasn’t all he’d asked for, and in his shoes, I would have asked for more too. Didn’t mean I was going to give him what he wanted, even if he accepted us back into Caelum afterward.

Mouth pursing with disgust at his request, I let Reed enfold my hand in his. He tugged me along to the waiting SUVs and hefted me into the middle seat where he soon joined me .

It didn’t sit well with me that we were going to be split up. My Pack was made to be together, forged as one unit, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. These SUVs didn’t seat eight people, simple as that.

We set off down a regular road but swiftly turned off onto a dust-lined track. It was easy to see why the three-vehicle cavalcade had all looked wrecked. For all I knew, there could have been brand new vehicles hiding beneath the red mud spattered on the tires, the fenders, and lower halves of the bodies.

The track grew rocky and even messier as we traveled the thirty minutes from the helicopter’s drop off point to Derinkuyu. The driver was a local, a creature, and he glowered at us with an intense dislike that went above and beyond someone being pissed at being called in for a job on short notice.

“I can’t believe they blamed us for the infiltration when we were the ones who saved their asses,” Samuel grumbled from behind me.

“In their position, we were the easiest to blame,” I replied easily, turning my face to the side to stare out the window and onto the rocky terrain, which had been half-civilized for modern living but was still rough and raw.

“You told him we weren’t behind it, didn’t you?”

I snickered at my control freak Vampire and turned to look at him. “You think Nicholas would have helped me if I hadn’t told him exactly what happened?”

His brow puckered. “Everything?”

“Everything,” I drawled, amused. “What did you think I was going to talk to him about? The weather?”

He shrugged. “Thought you’d hold some things back.”

“Nope. He even knows we’re a Pack now.”

“He does?” Stefan’s voice was high-pitched.

“Does that bother you?” I inquired, my cheeks turning pink in the face of his embarrassment. Anger began to whirl inside me, and only when Reed tutted and squeezed my thigh did I feel like I had an escape valve.

His Hell Hound butted alongside mine, calming me down, and when I looked at Stefan again, I knew it was without anger, making my eyes gleam.

“I just?—”

“You have to understand, Eve,” Eren replied. “Nicholas is important to Stefan. The whole Academy is. If Stefan hero worships anyone, it’s Nicholas.”

I blinked. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Because he’s stoic?” Eren said with a snigger, which earned him a shove in the side from Stefan’s elbow .

“Fuck off,” Stefan grumbled, but his pink ears said Eren was spot on with his comments.

“I mean, I didn’t tell him we did threesomes and stuff,” I mumbled, dipping my head so the driver couldn’t hear.

“Jesus, I should hope not,” Reed retorted, but he was laughing as he spoke and I shot him a grin, happy he was amused. “He didn’t ask for the specifics then?”

My lips twitched before I could control them. “Nope. He didn’t ask if any of you touched either.”

Silence fell at my words before I began giggling, slapping my belly to contain my glee at their horrified glances at one another.

“We don’t cross swords, babe,” Samuel replied with a disgusted shudder.

“Never say never,” I said in a singsong voice.

“I will,” Eren retorted, sticking his tongue out and making puking sounds.

“Spoilsports,” I teased, but I gave them a wink that encompassed them all and turned back, feeling surprisingly lighter than I’d anticipated.

Of course, our amusement gained us glowers from the driver, and though I knew it was bad, I couldn’t stop myself from spitting, “If you don’t want to be here, then get the fuck out of the car and we’ll take over.”

The man jerked in response, the wheel going with him before he got the vehicle back under control.

He’d heard the Hell Hound in my voice, and it satisfied me deeply that he responded to it.

Reed mumbled, “Since when do you say ‘fuck?’”

I shrugged. “You guys all say it when you come.”

“We do?” he asked with a snort.

“Yep. I hear it often enough…” I gave him another shrug and a quick grin that had him laughing.

“You’ve got game, girl,” he replied.

“Maybe.” I schooled my features, robbing them of all amusement as I turned back to shoot a poker face the driver’s way.

I didn’t appreciate how he’d been glowering at us, and though I could empathize, he was supposed to listen to his leader and be on our side. Not make us feel like pieces of human trash.

Trash who’d literally been the ones to annihilate two-thirds of the world’s Ghouls.

So, the guy was lucky I hadn’t told him to suck it.

Folding my arms across my chest, I stared out onto the road ahead and sighed as Derinkuyu unfolded. I didn’t need the GPS to tell me we were almost there. Not after all the pictures Samuel had shown me.

There was an official entrance, but Samuel had discovered there’d been a landslide about eighty years ago in the area. He believed that if we traveled past the area of Derinkuyu that was known to the tourists, we’d potentially find another entrance Mother Nature had revealed.

In doing so, we had to pass a lot of ramshackle buildings that were scrawled with graffiti. It was remarkably like Hidalgo, truth be told. The same low-level poverty rubbing shoulders with angry people who thought writing on walls would ease their anger at the world.

What couldn’t be ignored were the bizarre rock formations that the region was known for. These spiky monoliths were like huge stalagmites. They blended into the face of the mountain at their back, shielding them from the eyes of their ancient enemies.

It was a sea of stone, broken up only by patches of terrain that had been farmed and black holes that were windows in the rock.

When we eventually came to a halt, I was relieved.

Though my body wasn’t as sore as it might have been if the gouille hadn’t softened my fall from the temple two days ago, being jolted around for hours on end was making me feel the burn.

I wanted terra firma .

Now.

When we climbed out of the vehicle, the other SUVs appeared and relief flushed through me as Frazer, Nestor, and Dre hustled over to my side. From the tension on their faces, I assumed they might have been arguing on the ride over, but when they greeted us, each of them finding a way to touch me, I saw the strain disperse and recognized that they’d disliked being separated from us as much as we’d hated it too.

Well, I could only speak for myself, but being back with my Pack definitely made me breathe easier.

“Now that we’re here, what’s the plan?”

It was the driver who spoke, and though he wasn’t glaring at us anymore, I heard his disdain and fought with the need to get in his face.

Today was not the day to be throwing shade my way—as Reed would call it.

I didn’t need his BS, nor did I want it.

There were bigger fish to fry, so wasting time and energy on him was stupid, but it didn’t make his attitude any easier to take.

Plus, it sucked that if we made it out alive, and were welcomed back to Caelum, it might not be with a hero’s welcome but with disdain and distrust.

Sure, Nicholas was now looking into what had happened that night and was looking for a traitor in the Academy’s midst, but as Dre would say, shit stuck. And he wasn’t wrong.

Ignoring the driver, I turned away from the cluster of men around the SUVs and stared out at the land ahead.

Samuel approached me, and really, this was on him. This was his plan, but I knew my input was important to the guys because my body was a walking, talking compass.

Not of my own making, of course. But that was neither here nor there.

“How far out is this from what most people call the underground city?” Samuel asked the driver, who was the leader of his six-strong Pack.

He and his brothers moved forward to join us at the edge of the ridge where we stood. They were as dark as him, but although they might have blended in as Turks, they weren’t. One was too light, another had blue eyes that were hidden by contacts, and the last looked more Hispanic. His coloring was like Nestor and Dre’s more than Eren’s, whose skin was just a hint darker. Like burnt papyrus rather than ripe olive.

“Not far. Under here is the tunnel that connects Derinkuyu with another cave system a few miles away.”

“When I looked online, I couldn’t see any mention of the landslide damaging the city,” Samuel replied.

The driver, a guy who’d been impolite enough not to introduce himself, shrugged. “There was damage, but a lot of the underground city isn’t open to the public, anyway.”

“What do you think, Eve?” Frazer inquired, his hand coming up to cup my shoulder. “Do you get a good feeling about this place?”

Though the other Pack sneered at his question, I thought about it. Thought about that internal compass I’d been gifted and pondered if we were in the right place.

As I stared up at the sun, which was high in the sky, I realized that different points of the old city weren’t cast in shadow. At all. It was a spiky vista that lay ahead of me, but it gave me no clues. I didn’t know if this was the right place or not.

Biting my lip, I wondered how I could help narrow things down. Samuel had been working on instinct, so why couldn’t I?

Just because I wasn’t comfortable in my skin, was totally ill at ease with the creatures under my control, didn’t mean I hadn’t called on the Lorelei to bring those Ghouls to me in the parking lot. And today, hadn’t I used the Hell Hound to scare the driver?

I just had a feeling that this went deeper than that.

Touching upon the seven souls was easier than holding on to the eighth. That elusive eighth soul that had been the bane of my existence since I’d come to know how unusual it was.

Sucking down a breath, I tried to center myself and do as Dre had taught me back at Caelum. I called upon the Hell Hound because that one was closest to the surface after my contretemps with the douchebag driver.

She purred at my approach, and I felt Reed tense at my side. For some reason, they were linked, connected in a way I felt sure was unusual. Even to a mated pair.

They were a bit like piano keys as I strummed my touch along each of my souls, feeling the jolt in my mates’ souls as they responded to the caress. I felt their response deep inside me—Stefan stiffened; Eren softened. Each of them gave me their undivided attention as I used the awakened souls to reach the eighth.

Deep inside me, in that tiny space where they were resting, I called upon what I now knew to be the Jannah . I felt like I was climbing walls inside me, trying to go above the nook where the souls usually lay to reach the last one. The holy one.

I didn’t know if I could do it, didn’t know if it was even possible. Only when a wish was uttered did I feel its presence?—

My eyes flashed at that. “Make a wish. Something important enough to count but easy enough to happen now.”

Silence fell at my words and then the driver snorted. “How about this… I wish to be anywhere other than here?”

The words were uttered with scorn, but they were enough.

Deep inside, I felt the Jannah stir to life, its purpose of granting wishes being triggered by the disdainful driver’s words.

The light inside me was like the one that made the marks glow, and when I tried to touch it, a soft laugh sounded inside me.

“It will burn you.”

My body tensed as I heard the words in my head.

Communicating with the souls wasn’t something we did verbally.

“But I’m not a soul. And you’re not majnūn. You are Jannah.” A sigh came, gusting through my mind as though it were a stiff breeze. “I’ve waited a long time to speak with you.”

“ You have?” The words were tremulous and also spoken aloud.

I felt my mates shuffle around me, sensed their unease over me speaking to myself, but I’d found the Jannah deep inside and wasn’t about to let go—this voice, however, wasn’t Jannah .

Was it God?

Was God speaking to me through my eighth soul?

“Of course I have. You’re My child, but you were locked up so tightly that I could never get to you. Seven wishes was all it took,” the voice teased. “And now, here we are. The beginning of the end.” A hum sounded. “You’re in the right place, Eve. What you’re about to see will be disturbing but have faith. You’re My soldier, guided by My hand. We will see this through until the end.”

I felt the Jannah retreat into the background where it had always resided, so I opened my eyes and saw that my men were clustered around me while the others weren’t. Only one of the SUVs remained, and for all of us to get in there would be a tight fit—probably a good thing that the laws were a little loose at the moment.

“Where did they go?” I queried, rubbing my arms that suddenly felt cold, even in the intense heat of the summer’s day.

“Nicholas called them back to Ankara. Some dicks took advantage of the chaos and hit the city with a bomb.”

Reed rubbed the back of his neck. “We told them we could deal with whatever happens here.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I stated grimly, thinking about the other man’s wish as I looked over the terrain once more. “We’re in the right place.”

“Who were you talking to?”

Samuel’s voice was hesitant, careful . Like he knew he could offend me and totally didn’t want to.

“The Jannah ,” I informed him somewhat absentmindedly.

“You can talk to it?” Eren blurted out, and I shot him a look then nodded.

“First time today.” I stared at the tumbled walls, which were half-designed by man and half-designed by God, then I added, “It’s time to grant the first wish.”

The guys cut each other a look then nodded.

It was time.