Forfeit Souls (The Ennead Book 1) (8 page)

“Can I ask you to do something?” Lilith looked at me with an unsure glance. “I wouldn’t force you to do it. But it would help us.”

“What is it?” I was wary, yet curious. What would they want form me?

“May we share the memory of your attack?” Her mouth turned down sympathetically.

What did that mean? I was confused, but I didn’t think it wise to deny my host something so trivial as this. I nodded.

Smiling she took my hand, and reached for Demetrius with her other. “I want you to think back to the day that you were attacked.” She said quietly as Demetrius took my other hand. “Close your eyes if it will help.”

I closed my eyes and thought back to the cool June morning.

-Paul-

This was officially boring.

I had never done so much walking before in my life, not that it really mattered, I didn’t feel any strain or anything… I was just ready to have this over with. We were still in a fairly crowded part of London, and I had no clue how we were going to find whoever it was they were looking for.

There were strange smells in the air, and I was beginning to feel mad, though I couldn’t account for it. It was like I had suddenly been pumped full of adrenaline, I was so on edge. I could feel my arms shaking and hoped that the people we passed would assume it was just from the cold.

“Paul?” A girl’s voice called out from behind me. “Is that you, Paul?”

I froze in place, if I had a heart anymore, it would have stopped beating for the full minute before I turned to face the girl who called my name.  The other three stood staring straight ahead, their hoods covering their glowing red eyes from those around us.

And I turned to face the small blonde girl who called me by name. I let out a small sigh of relief when I saw that it was only Julie. A girl I had gone to school with.

Something in me wanted to lash out, irrationally, and slap her across the face, but I turned back in the direction that we were heading. I forced my thoughts to understand that I was deciding to just walk away, but she followed us.

“Paul, don’t be like that, it’s me Julie.” She called after us. “Stop!”

I felt the hand on my shoulder and in a split second I had turned to her, grabbing her arm and snarling in her face with bared fangs. Every impulse that I had compelled me to sink my teeth into her throat, to tear her limb from limb, but there were people less than a hundred feet away and I pushed her away. I heard the sobs as we walked into the dark of the street.

“You did the right thing.” Jack said as we walked.

Sasha laughed, “You’re quite tame, aren’t you.”

Carlo turned, walking backwards, “Yeah, Mike would have killed her, and that would have been a fun thing to deal with Gallu about.”

“Mike’s always been the runt of the pack…” Sasha said with a growl. “We should cut him out like the canker he is.”

“We don’t do anything with respect to Miguel until Gallu says.” Jack said in a low voice.

I was still disturbed by my behavior toward Julie. She wasn’t worth my time, but I would have never thought of hurting her. I couldn’t think and so I quoted a bumper sticker I had once read, “Some people are only alive because it’s against the law to kill them.”

My statement was met with two snorts and a laugh. “Gallu is definitely the only reason that Mike is still alive.” Carlo said through clenched teeth and then abruptly stopped. “Your girlfriend sent out the hounds.”

I would have asked what he meant if I hadn’t heard their angry voices approaching from behind. I winced as whoever was driving scrapped the curb. I turned to the car that was just rounding the corner a block down and was instantly infuriated that the driver didn’t know how to drive his car.

The gigantic car that drove towards us was a master of American engineering. I hadn’t seen one in London before, and I was sad that this was the state that I had to see it in now.

“A 1961 Cadillac sedan DeVille…” I said as the car approached. “The only thing I didn’t like about the car was that its owner had decided to paint it a God-awful Pink. I had never seen the appeal of a “pink Cadillac” and I wasn’t impressed now.

“How do you know that?” Sasha asked flatly. “The year I mean.”

“Subtle differences,” I replied off hand. It was the sound of engine that told me, but the tail lamps would have been an indicator too.

They pulled up to the curb, scraping the car’s rims again and I clenched my fists. Even in that grotesque shade of pink the car was a classic. The driver got out of the unfamiliar left-hand drive car and stumbled on the curb. I don’t know if they had been informed of the size of my companions and I, but there was little they could do about it now. One of them held a cricket bat securely in his hand, while the others had their hands balled into tight fists.

I looked to the others. Carlo had a sadistic smile on his face, and Sasha licked his lips, but Jack seemed less pleased about the five inebriated louts that stood on the opposite curb. “Don’t kill them.” Jack said quietly so that the approaching ruffians couldn’t hear.

Carlo and Sasha practically flew into the street. Sasha grabbed two of the men and I heard the humerus of the one in his left hand as it snapped clean in half his arm contorting above his elbow, and I saw the other’s skin depress at the base of his neck where Sasha’s elbow shattered his clavicle.

Carlo had already sent one of his three to the ground, screaming bloody murder about the bloody stub that had once been his nose.  He held one down with a firmly placed foot on his throat and the other he suspended in the air with one hand around his neck while he broke the three bones of each arm and then the lower bones of his legs. It was a strange double crack as he squeezed the trousered leg until both the tibia and fibula snapped nearly simultaneously.

Sasha picked up the cricket bat that the one with the busted nose had been carrying, and tapped the bloodied man on the back of the head with it. “It’s not wise to start something you can’t finish, laddie.”  He said in English with a strange, almost Irish, accent, and swung backwards before letting the full force of his the bat connect with the man’s face.

He whistled as he walked back to where Jack and I stood, Carlo was still toying with the last one. “That was fun.”

“A little one sided don’t you think?” But even as the question left my mouth I wished that I could have been in the fray with them. It had been all that I could do to restrain myself… there was some primal urge that seemed to be wanting to surface.

Carlo arrived with a souvenir, one of them had been wearing a thick platinum ring, “Have we become muggers now too?” I asked, with a laugh.

“He won’t be needing this anymore.” Carlo said with a smile that faded when he saw Jack’s disapproving scowl. “What… I didn’t kill him. He’s just going to need an amputation if the ambulance doesn’t get here soon.”

Sasha interrupted… “did you like my English accent? It was ‘spot on’ wasn’t it?” He hit Carlo with the bat. It splintered as it connected with his head, but the Italian just turned to his Russian friend with a smile. “You were off by an island.”

“You’re heads not that big.” Sasha broke into a hissing laugh.

Carlo just leered at him. “The accent you idiot, you were on the wrong island.”

I just shook my head. This was a very strange world I had fallen into.

“Let’s go. We shouldn’t have wasted time with that,” Jack said gruffly and we continued on.

Carlo and Sasha may not have yet transformed into their animal-headed, more demonic-looking forms, but they were already acting very animal-like. They slunk through the dark streets of early morning London, seeking out the humans who were meant to die. It was as though they had let their animal sides take over. There was something primal about them, and I found myself – inexplicably – envying them.

Jack and I could have been mistaken for any two normal blokes walking through Hyde Park during the day if it weren’t for our eyes – and the fact that the clock was just now striking two in the morning – while Carlo and Sasha, who were acting like dogs, would have been collected by the nice men in white from the sanitarium.

“We only collect souls at night,” Jack said quietly to me as we walked. “We have no fear of the humans, but if they knew about us, they would fear us less.”

I heard a hissing laugh in front of us. Carlo definitely enjoyed that the humans feared us. He’d have been the kid who stole the other children’s lunch money in primary school. From the moment I had met Carlo he seemed like the type of bloke who had been a bully. Then again, they all did.

My musing was interrupted by a strange pulse. It was like an electric current had run through all of us, the rigidity in the group was palpable. I looked behind me for a moment, a habit from my human days, and when I turned back, Sasha and Carlo had transformed to their more demonic forms. I could hear their heavy breath and see it as it rose in steam like clouds.

“Gallu has called them. They know exactly where to go now.” Jack explained. His arms shook and I could tell that it was as hard for him to remain composed as it was for me.

Sasha’s ears were laid back against his head and I could hear the low growl that rumbled from behind his teeth. It was echoed by the hiss that came from Carlo. There was a strange smell in the air. I couldn’t place it. It was an odd, metallic taste, and yet, my mouth was suddenly watering. Though I hadn’t eaten in months, and knew I had no need of food, I suddenly found myself starving for whatever was attached to that smell.

“That is the smell of death,” Jack explained through clenched teeth. “Mouthwatering, isn’t it?”

I swallowed to keep from drooling, “is it always this enticing?”

Jack just nodded. “It’s more potent when she calls you, but being in the vicinity of a call is always this intense.” He closed his eyes, rolling his neck to the side as if to stretch out his muscles, “actually, I think it gets worse with time….”

And then it was gone. The maddening scent was gone and my mind was clear, but Carlo and Sasha did not seem to have been released from its effects. They were still half crouched in the street when they took off after some invisible target. Their heavy footsteps fell silently on the cobbled back alleys, as they deftly jumped fences two and three times our height.

It wasn’t difficult to keep up with them, although I paused at the top of every fence and wall that we jumped. This was a part of London I had never visited in my twenty-nine living years; the seedy underbelly where the vermin of the human race congregated, at least the English portion.

It was during one of these pauses, perched atop a cinderblock wall, that Jack held me back. His hand secured firmly around my elbow, he growled, “they’re here.”

As Carlo and Sasha ducked into doorways on either side of the alley it began to snow again. The soft white flakes fell on my hands and immediately evaporated. Small streams of smoke-like steam rose from my shoulders and I looked to Jack, seeing the same streams coming from his shoulders and scalp.

Jack leered at me menacingly, “show’s about to start.”

Perhaps the humanity slowly left reapers as they aged. Why else would they consider killing fun? I was beginning to feel that I was far from ready for my new occupation. However, in the brief minute that I was held by that strangely delicious metallic scent, I could have seen myself killing, even without warrant.

I looked down into the alley. Carlo and Sasha had vanished, but two men dressed in ill-fitting clothing, with brown paper sacks in their hands were entering it, singing drunken songs and blessing the Queen Mother.

They had just passed the first door in the left building’s wall when Carlo stepped from it and followed them silently.  At the second door, Sasha joined his dragon headed friend, and the drunken men’s fates were sealed.

Sasha let out a low growl and the taller man looked down at his stomach and then back up, squinting one eye toward his companion. “Di’ you ‘ear tha’?” he asked.

“‘Ear wuh’?” his friend turned around to face him, and I could no longer read the emotions that crossed his face, but he staggered backwards while sharp gasps escaped his throat.

The tall one was not yet aware of the demons that stood behind him; he was too focused on his friend’s strange behavior. He started to take a step toward the friend, who was now backed up against the wall we stood on, but Sasha grabbed him and sunk his razor sharp fangs into his neck.

I heard the tall drunk’s neck snap after a second, and the gurgling noise that escaped his lips. His friend was frozen, staring wide eyed at the man dying before him. I saw Carlo’s sneering smile exposing his silvery, needle-like teeth, and his forked tongue quivered as his jaw opened.

I heard a feminine scream that I thought came from the condemned man below me, and then Jack was off of the wall. Carlo was jaw deep in drunkard, and I saw Jack’s jackal head as he flew down to the alley’s entrance. A scantily clad woman stood in the crux of the street and alley with her hand clutched over her mouth. Fear was the only thing in her brown eyes.

Jack came down on her with such a force that even a hundred feet away, I heard her skull crack on the pavement. The three in the dark alley below me tore at their victims as though they would have to physically rip their souls from them. I turned away from the carnage below me and tried to ignore the crunching of bones.

I wasn’t supposed to be disgusted by this, right? I was a demon now. Killing should be a second nature to me. Shouldn’t it? If that metallic smell still hung in the air I might not have been able to restrain myself, I might have jumped down into the alley myself; I might have done a lot of things that made my stomach turn as I thought of them now.

I felt the presence on the wall next to me and looked toward Carlo, escaping the thoughts of what I
might
have done.

“Too much for you?” he asked, with a flash of smugness crossing his face as he wiped a trickle of blood away from his mouth. His dragon head was gone, but his teeth were still stained red.