Forfeit Souls (The Ennead Book 1) (6 page)

The one thing that placed all of them apart from Demetrius and I was their skin. It had a luminescent quality, like there were small streams of fiber optics that were undulating under their skin. It made their skin seem to move, like clouds stirred beneath the thin layer.

They all seemed oddly welcoming now, as though my six month absence had been the time they had needed to chew over the idea of my presence. All except for Carla. She watched me unerringly. I don’t think those lavender eyes left me for more than a few seconds from that point on.

“There is one other person that you must meet,” Father said, clapping his hands together out of excitement.

He lead me to the back of the room, his face lit up with joy at who he was about to show me. I wasn’t sure whether that would be a good thing or a bad one. There was a door, just as tall as the others, that was hidden at the back of the hall. Its wood was a reddish purple like unfinished cherry. Father pushed both doors open and Demetrius and I followed him in.

-Paul-

I felt the massive creature pummel me from behind and to the left. I had braced for the impact moments before he hit me and easily turned and met my attacker, pushing against the weight of the beast.

“He’s good,” I heard Carlo say from behind me. “He’s still only a pup and he’s already doing better than Mike.”

“Go suck an egg,” Mike said to the dragon-headed man next to him.

Carlo and Mike, I had come to learn, had a very tumultuous relationship. Since I had arrived they had been at each other’s throats, in the most metaphorical of ways, but I wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t end up fitting the term in a more literal sense, and soon.

Carlo hissed at Mike through his dragon whiskers and I saw the scales, on his neck and trailing down his back, as they bristled. Mike was not in much of a better mood. He wore the head of a giant black bear and his fur was on end too, but he did not seem so menacing. Carlo often called him a teddy bear, much to Mike’s chagrin, and I had idly wondered why Mike chose to remain with the bear’s head. We could change our alternate appearance at will.

Perhaps Mike and Carlo’s quarrels were caused by their age difference, Mike was the youngest of the Asakku after myself, and Carlo was over six hundred years his senior. Perhaps it was the societies they had grown up in that caused their discord, Carlo had lived in fourteenth century Italy, joining Gallu in 1335, while Mike had lived through the 1960s and 70s of American culture. Whatever it was that had them in such conflict would surely come to a head soon, and I was pretty sure that Mike would find himself on the losing end of that fight. The thought of that really didn’t disappoint me. Mike had been a constant annoyance; it was like he had a Napoleon Complex without being “vertically challenged.” Mike got on everyone’s nerves, and tempers among Gallu’s retinue were short.

I turned from their problems and back to face the red eyes of the spotted jaguar-demon that was braced against me. We were locked in a stalemate; neither of us would back down from this willingly.

“Come on pup.” Sasha growled at me behind his sharpened fangs. “Give up. You know you won’t beat me.” That wasn’t true.

I knew that I couldn’t beat him in strength or tactics – we were equals in a fight – but I could be much more patient than he was.

Sasha was the second oldest. He had told me once that he thought he was 811 years old, but he couldn’t be sure. Sasha seemed to feign memory loss when it came to his living years. The little he had been willing to share was still fascinating. He had grown up in what is now Russia and he remembered that he had died during the battle of the Kalka River in 1223, though he still cursed Genghis Khan to this day. His curses were futile. He had been given the honor of claiming Genghis when the time came for his demise. It was, according to him, his fondest memory, which was probably why he never shut up about it.

The Russian was the least of my worries. As I said, we were equally matched in both strength and cunning. It was perhaps the reason that he was the one that most often sparred with me. Mike had quickly found that he was no match for me and hence forth denied me sparring matches, claiming that it was beneath him. His refusals had caused a vast amount of snickering amongst the other Asakku, and while it was fun knocking Mike down a few pegs, there was also the aggravation of being that close to him, so I didn’t mind the lack of interaction between us.

Carlo and Jack fought me only when they felt that I needed a good beat down, when they thought I was getting to cocky. In truth, I was fully aware of what I was and was not able to do. I could out strategize Carlo, but I couldn’t beat him in strength. If there were steroids in the afterlife, he was on every one of them. And Jack… well, Jack I couldn’t get past in strategy to begin with, so it didn’t matter that he was ridiculously stronger than me.

There was only one other member of the Asakku, and I had only seen him once: Ryan.  He was a solitary member of the group. He kept to himself as much as humanly, well… demonically possible, so I had no idea which of us would win in a fair fight. Not that fair fights are the standard in the demonic world, but we tried to be as fair as possible here in the training room.

I had been warned about the other demons in the world and their lack of fighting fair, but I’d never experienced it before. My skin had stopped glowing three months ago – not that that kept Mike from calling me glow worm still, but I hadn’t yet left the cavernous underground dwelling of the Asakku, the place they called “The Basement.”

I had learned why the walls were so glassy when Jack took me to make my own room. It was an odd day, but I was beginning to get used to that word: odd.

He took me to the middle of a hallway and made me face a wall…

“Alright, here’s what you’re going to do.” Jack said as he held his hand out, palm up. “Just think about the heat. Don’t try to form a fire in your hand, just think about the heat.” As he spoke, a flame formed in his hands and slowly grew into a large ball that he held with two hands.

I watched, a little wide eyed when the ball of fire grew too large for his hands, and he suddenly thrust the flaming mass at the wall. It seared through the rock eating out a tunnel that was just barely smaller than the one that we stood in now. The fire seared the walls, melting them to the glass like quality of the halls that had surrounded me since I had arrived here.

“You control the fire. It doesn’t control you.” Jack said with a menacing chuckle.

“No… you control the fire… I just watch.” I said dumfounded by the disappearance of the wall in front of me. This wasn’t something I was sure I was going to easily be able to wrap my head around. “Blimey,” I said under my breath. I was beginning to see the upside of death, and I was beginning to feel a little like a super hero… but without the brightly colored tights, which was definitely a plus.

“You have the exact same ability that I do.” Jack said, roughly grasping my wrist and positioning my hand in the same position his had been in. “Heat,” he said as he let go.

“Heat,” I repeated, staring at my upturned palm,
just think about heat
, and as I did a small flame burst to life on my palm, and immediately snuffed itself.

“Concentration is necessary to keep the flame lit, and to help it grow.” Jack said in a bored manner, crossing his arms as he leaned against the wall behind me.

I concentrated again and the flame reappeared. Then I thought one simple thought.
Grow
. And the flame became a ball of fire the size of a basket ball.
Grow
, and it was like an oversized beach ball.
Grow
, and it was the exact size of the hall in front of us. I pushed it forward and it ran into the wall and kept going.

“You’re going to want to stop that.”

“What?” I asked, and as soon as I stopped thinking about it the flames disappeared and the tunnel ended.

“If you hadn’t stopped that, nothing would have.”  Jack said with a smirk. “You can control more aspects of it than you would expect.”

“What’s the point of this exercise, though?” I asked, amused by the new trick I had learned, but still less than trusting of my new environment and its inhabitants. “I can bore holes in rock.  I’m not seeing this as a marketable skill for my future career path.”

“It’s not exactly necessary, per se.” Jack said with a deep laugh, he seemed to be the only one here that understood my humor. “But it’s a lot of fun.”

I just rolled my eyes. I couldn’t always tell if Jack was genuinely amused when he laughed. There was definitely something to his mannerisms that seemed bought and paid for. But perhaps that’s just how one acts after they hit a few century marks.

“Believe me, fun is necessary for the length of our existence.” Jack shrugged his shoulders slightly, as though he wasn’t sure that I’d actually need that bit of information. “Here’s what you can use it for right now…” he moved in front of me. “I want you to think very carefully about what you would want in a room… bed, shelves, chairs…. Whatever you want, it’s going to be your room. Then think about all of those things being made from the rock of these walls.” His claw-like hands swept through the air in front of me, like he was mapping out his own thoughts.

I thought about all of those things and then I mentally placed them in a room where they were made out of the same substance of the walls and floors that surrounded them.

“Alright, now all you need to do is think of the heat and that room at the same time.”

I looked at the end of the tunnel, and focused on the heat as well as the room that had formed in my head. A flame grew in the distance until it filled the space available to it in the hall and then expanded, leaving only the cut-out version of the room I had envisioned: the cut-out platform for a bed, the chairs and table that grew out of the floor, the shelves that were carved into the wall.

“Good work kid, most people don’t think of vaulting the ceiling, and the chandelier is a nice touch!”

I hadn’t realized that I had envisioned the glimmering chandelier that hung from the ceiling by its rock chain… it was only missing candles to be a functioning fixture.  I looked away from it toward Jack, he was walking to the table and chairs.

“Impressive,” he said as he picked up the chair. It was as though he had thought it would be attached to the ground. “Most of the guys forget to do that, and their chairs are stuck in place until they right their mistake, or break them off of the floor.”

I just smiled, a bit smug I’ll admit, and lit the chandelier with six flames that burnt without a wick.

Jack and I had spent quite a bit of time together since my inception. It was kind of like having an older brother. He constantly made jokes at my expense, but would kick the crap out of any of the others that tried to do the same. It was interesting, like a school yard, and I was friends with the biggest, baddest kid.

Sparring was the only time that he let any of the others come anywhere near me, and then it was all business. I only knew what I knew about the others from Jack’s descriptions of them, and from the way that they interacted during our training sessions. They boasted about their past – the only other way I learned about them – but many of their grandiose claims were quickly negated by one of the others and I chose to ignore a vast amount of the tales they tried to spin.

I had learned a lot about the demonic under and outer worlds, but I had yet to go back to the world of the living and find some of the answers I sought. I wondered how my parents were taking my disappearance, and what Ellie was doing now, if she’d been saddened by my loss. I hoped that she didn’t blame herself, she had said some things to me that night that she probably now regretted, as I had, and I hoped she wasn’t dwelling on them.

She was too kind of a person; she always found ways to blame herself for the wrongdoings of others, or for misunderstandings… I doubt that I had ever deserved her in life. I couldn’t possibly deserve her in death, and perhaps it was for the best. She had never seriously considered me as a beau, as much as I had wanted her to. My mind suddenly switched back to my present situation.

I felt Sasha shift his weight ever-so slightly and remembered where I was. He slipped out of my grip and to the side, trying to strike my flank or back, but I caught onto his ploy and quickly found a new position for my footing, tripping him as he tried to get past me.

Placing my foot on the back of his neck I laughed. “Check mate,”  I chuckled and  heard a grumble as it bounced off the floor and I added, “patience is a virtue.”

“Demons, as a rule, don’t have virtues.” Carlo said, mockingly, as he moved to better see Sasha’s expression.

I had to laugh at that. “Demons, as a rule, break the rules…”

Carlo just nodded his head. “I think we’re done today.” And he disappeared in a burst of flames, Mike followed shortly after him.

Sasha grumbled something and I felt my foot fall to the ground as he vanished also. Only Jack and I were left in the room.

“Go rest. Sasha will come back twice as eager to beat the crap out of you next time….” He walked away, and I was left alone in the room. I stood there only a brief minute before I walked toward my room. They still hadn’t told me how to do this “Flame On” impression and disappear.

My short journey through the tunnels would reassure me of my misgivings about my new brothers. As I walked through the main hall I heard the quiet echo of Jack’s voice coming from an antechamber. I would not have stopped had his voice not been raised at just that moment.

“Listen to me, I tried to do my duty, I had tried to kill the girl, it may have been Gallu’s second choice, but it was my first, and I failed us both.”

“You failed us all,” I heard Carlo say derisively. “She was supposed to bring about a new age for the Asakku, and now she’s in the hands of the wind demons.” He hissed at Jack.

Jack growled back, “is it my fault the mate showed up just before I was able to finish her? One bite to change, a second to kill; I wasn’t even enjoying myself and that rat had to show up and make me look like a fool.”

“I’m just amazed that she didn’t take your flame for this failure.” Carlo sounded annoyed now.

“Frankly, I don’t know why Gallu wished for that feeble girl to join the ranks of the Asakku, but I would rather rot in hell’s fires for an eternity than to see a woman in the guard. You and I have been around long enough to know that there is little that keeps an Asakku’s temper in line. Are you ready to find out how a woman would fare in our society?  I would have killed her if Adam hadn’t arrived in time to save her.”