Forfeit Souls (The Ennead Book 1) (2 page)

“Well
Jo
.” He said the shortened version of my name with a slight sneer. “I guess you can call me
Dem
if you want.”

I could tell that Demetrius didn’t like me. It was evident in his tone; he was annoyed by my very presence. His relaxed manner was a charade. I could tell by the rigidity of his shoulders and his unwillingness to look directly at me. What’s more, he was
scared
of me.

I laughed before I could control it. It was a strange laugh – foreign to me, darker than I had heard from myself before – but somehow I enjoyed it.

“I will call you what you wish to be called.” I tilted my head to the side. “And I think you prefer your full name.”

Demetrius didn’t say anything; he just stood and walked to the door. His entire body became rigid when he turned his back to me. Why was this man scared of me? I smiled at the thought, amused at the absurdity of it.

A strange wind rustled through the room, and I could have sworn I heard the words,
we’re waiting
.

“We need to go.” Demetrius seemed agitated now, and I could tell that it was not my doing. “Father will be… unpleasant if you dally much longer.”

He opened the doors and the light of the hallway seared my eyes. There were sconces every ten feet. Each one was a taxidermied head from an animal of the Cervidae family, I saw several moose and deer heads, their antlers replaced by pewter candelabras.

“Appetizing isn’t it?” Demetrius asked, a sadistic smile coming to his face. I suppose my face was holding a bit of a sneer now.

“Not in the least.” I contradicted. This place that I was in was beginning to seem like a hall of horrors. At least that’s what it seemed like to me, a devoted vegetarian for the past fifteen years.

He just continued to smile, his black eyes narrowing as though there was a joke that I was missing.

The halls were all a dark stone; I could barely make them out from the glare that bounced from them. It was as though every crack between them was a chasm, spewing that vibrating light. The floor was the same slate tile as the bedroom and bathroom had been but it was covered by a long red runner – vivid in every fiber.

I tried to focus on Demetrius. He was the least glaring thing in my environment at the moment, and so my eyes hurt the least when I was looking at him.

“Why is he called Father, Demetrius?” I asked, hoping that my guide would be forthcoming.

He just laughed at the question, and then turned to me as we walked. Taking in my expression, a realization dawned on him – it was evident in his face – and a smile parted his lips as he squinted one eye. “You really don’t know?”

I looked at him blankly. Know what? Why should I know who he was? “Is he a priest?”

The question received a snort. “Not in the least.” The face of my guide softened now, as though a preconceived notion had been the only thing causing him to harbor ill will toward me and he was now moving past his initial conceptions.

I could tell that he wasn’t going to divulge his information outright. “Then a physician?” I asked, it would explain how I was still alive when I had been certain that the savage man that had attacked me had succeeded in killing me.

“Nope, you’re cold.” He laughed as he said the words, turning around to walk backwards down the hall. He stared openly at me, like someone staring at an animal they had never seen before as they stood behind the fence at the zoo. His smile was a mixture of awe and wariness.

“I’ve never met a convert that hadn’t known Father at least briefly before hand.” He looked at me appraisingly now. “You are a finer specimen than most he’s brought in.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. He wasn’t making sense. “I’m a specimen?”

“Don’t worry, there’s no experimentation that goes on here, unless you elect to experiment on yourself.” His eyes darted to the floor and a malevolent smile came to his lips. “Most who come into the fold choose to experiment. It’s one way to stave off the boredom.”

All that he was doing was confusing me. Specimens and experimentation? Converts, the fold? What on earth was this man talking about? He offered no more explanation and so I could only assume that his intention had been to confuse me.

He continued to stare at the carpet with his mischievous smile. I was certain that he would trip over something if he didn’t pay attention to where he was going, and soon. But he never faltered. His steps were fluid along the red shag. He looked as graceful as I felt.

“You know,” he said as he broke free of his staring match with the floor, “most people ask if he’s God.”

I did not laugh at that. I had entertained the thought of him being an angel for a brief moment… and then I had seen his eyes. Those were not the eyes of God, or even of a godly creature. “I would have been more likely to guess the Devil.” I said skeptically.

“That is a common misconception as well.” His smile did not change.

“What is he then?” I asked, annoyed by his dodging of my question.

“Father is a little something different to all of us.” His smile faded. “To me he is the boss-man. For the moment he is your host.” He stopped in front of me and turned to the large double doors to his left.

We had passed many such doors, I hadn’t meant to count – there were fifty three before this – but it had just been so easy to do in the back of my mind as I passed them. They were all the same dark mahogany with the pewter handles that had been in the first room. They were all exactly the same.

That is, they were all the same until we came upon these. The massive wooden portals in front of me were black. They were not painted; the wood they were made from was simply a deep black, it appeared that the wood had been severely burned, but its integrity was still intact. Their handles were much more ornate than the others, though they were the same pewter.

“The rest of your existence awaits.” Demetrius said in a dark tone as he pulled open the doors.

The room on the other side was not the dark and foreboding entrance to Hell as I had begun to expect, but a very bright – my eyes were searing – and very open hall. Demetrius handed me a pair of glasses with small, dark round lenses. They reminded me of a pair of pince-nez. I gladly accepted them, placing them over my eyes before I turned to give him an appreciative smile. My gesture was met with a worried look, and though it didn’t last long, I was certain that Demetrius’ opinion of me had changed. His saddened face turned from me to the hall before us.

I looked in and with barely a glance I knew that there were seven people in the room before me. The three women all seemed to be dressed similarly to me, though I was the only one whose hair was not pulled up, and the four men all seemed to be dressed similarly to Demetrius. I could not tell for certain because they shined with the reverberating light that seemed to come from everything. Only their faces were visible to me.

None were smiling.

They stared at me with appraising eyes.  Eyes that were the same as Fathers – so different from the eyes I saw when I looked to Demetrius at my left. It was clear in their vacant black eyes that I was not welcome in this room.

“Joellen!” a voice boomed from the back of the small crowd gathered in front of me. That voice seemed to part the group like Moses had parted the waters of the Red Sea.

Father walked toward me through the scowling gauntlet. His face was the same, but I had not previously noticed his attire, or his stature. He was a small man and looked to be in his late forties. He was dressed entirely in black with a long cord hanging around his neck. At the base of that cord was a light like none I had seen before, it was a brilliant and gleaming red, the glasses did little for it.

“I am so pleased that you were able to join us,” he said with the smile I did not trust. “I hope that Demetrius has been pleasant.”

“He has been a most amiable guide.” I spoke to him in the same tone he spoke to me, “I am honored to be your guest, Father.”

I had taken from the way that Demetrius spoke of him that Father was the one in charge here. I assumed his bad side was somewhere I wanted to stay far away from, and his entourage told me that he thought of himself as some sort of royalty.

His smile showed me that he was pleased with the humility of my tone, and I was more than happy to appease him for now – at least until I knew what was going on.

He held his hand out to me, and I fought back a grimace at his long, pointed yellow nails as I took it. Demetrius was quickly lost as the crowd grew together once more. I turned to look for him, but was only met by vacant eyes in the disapproving faces of those behind me.

“I am, truly, so very pleased that you are our newest guest.” Father said to me in a hushed tone, as though he were speaking only to me. “I am sorry that you had to be delivered to us in such a manner. Usually we would have given you a choice, you see, but there are monsters out there with no respect for the living.” The way that he said the words monsters and living made my skin crawl. “We shant discuss the dark details tonight though.”

He stood up on a slightly raised platform at the head of the room. “Loved ones!” he said to the other six in a loud voice. “This is Joellen, the newest member of our fold. She did not come to us as the rest of you have. I did not find her as I found you. But she is under my protection and no one will harm her. Is that clear?”

There was a faint murmur through the group, but no one dissented.

“Now Joellen.” He said to me. “You should go rest, you are not fully recovered from the ordeals of your… accident.”

It sounded like he had wanted to use a different word. As though he did not feel what had happened to me had been an accident.

“Demetrius.” He said it barely louder than a whisper and the young man was there. “Take our lovely guest back to her room. She needs her rest.”

Demetrius bowed to Father and began to lead me away.

“I want you to stay with her Demetrius. I trust that you will not harm her, but there are others here who are not as disciplined.” He glanced to his left and right before quickly returning his gaze to us.

“It will be done.” Demetrius took my hand and whisked me from the large room.

When we were in the hallway again, he loosened his grip on my hand, but did not let go until I looked down at it.

“Why does Father think I need protection?” I asked. Demetrius seemed to be the only one that was willing to speak to me about anything important. Moreover, he was the only one, it seemed, that I would spend any time with.

“I thought that he had spoken to you. I’m sorry that I was rude earlier.” He did not look at me during his apology, he kept face forward, his jaw set, looking down the hallway, but I could see the pained expression that covered it. “The people in that room are his… children, for lack of a better word.” His voice was very quiet, as though the walls had ears. Perhaps they did. This place was extremely loud. “They are unerringly loyal to him, but the way that he treats you is different. You are not one of his children so he should not express the same care for you as he does for them.”

“He thinks one of them would want to harm me?” I asked, searching through the faces that I remembered vividly now. None had been happy about my presence, but I had not sensed any outright hostility.

“At least one of them wants to be rid of you this second. The rest are simply untrusting. You scare them.” His answer was flat, emotionless. He stated fact, not opinion.

“They are scared? Of me?” I laughed at the thought, it was once again that beautifully menacing laugh that was completely foreign to me.

“You’re not one of them.” His tone was apologetic again. “Carla, at least, will never truly accept you – as she has never accepted me – but in time the others might.”

“If you are not one of Father’s children, why are you here?”

A small smile came to his lips then as though a fond memory had returned to him. “Father and I have simply been… friends, for lack of a better term… for a very long time.”

“Why do you call him Father then?” I realized that my inquisitiveness was probably verging on rude, but, at the moment, I was more concerned with answers than I was with propriety.

“It is the name he had given himself when I met him. Only Lilith calls him by his Christian name.” He said the word Christian with a derisive laugh.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment. It was too easy to come up with questions, but I didn’t want to ask the wrong ones, and before I knew it, Demetrius was holding a door open in front of me.

I stepped in assuming that it was the same room I had been in, and stopped when I saw the rows of books that were stacked on shelves that disappeared above my head into the darkness.

“Are we in a library?” I asked without thinking. The enormous bed on the far wall told me that it was not.

“No. This is my room.” Demetrius said curtly. “It will be safer for you here – easier for me to protect you.”

“Oh.” I said as I looked at the massive space around me.

It was easily three times the size of the room I had first been in, and was divided into four distinct sections. The area to my left appeared to be a study; the massive bookshelves were a backdrop to a large desk that was piled high with papers and notebooks. The bed was directly in front of me, designating the sleeping area, and the area to my right held a large seating area, a grouping of comfortable looking chairs and a sofa were arranged around a hearth that was ablaze. In the far corner, next to the fireplace was a massive black grand piano.