by Con Template
“His soul will burn in the pits of Hell for what he did to you. I’ll personally make sure of that,” he responded instead.
Though I did not want Eclipse to kill him because it would be too much on my conscience if I were to get my entire soul back, inwardly, I felt satisfied. The bastard deserved to burn in the fiery pits of Hell for what he did to me.
“Let him die naturally,” I told him quietly.
“Why?” Eclipse questioned brusquely. “He’s going to die anyway. Why can’t I kill him now?”
“He has to live,” I argued, wishing that Eclipse would just let it be and stop purging me for reasons as to why I wanted Sony’s dad to live.
My wish for Eclipse’s understanding was not granted.
“Why?” Eclipse demanded, clearly wanting to know what was coursing through my mind. He didn’t understand why I was hell-bent on making sure that my attacker continued to live instead of dying under his hands.
“Because he’s Sony’s dad, and we do not need his blood on our hands.”
Eclipse tilted his head at me. His observant eyes studied me for a long moment. Then, as if knowing my sadism far too well, he bluntly asked, “What’s your true reason, Gracie?”
I stared at him quietly, not wanting to tell him.
After several long seconds passed, I finally concluded he wouldn’t let it go until I disclosed the true reason to him. My face turned cold and I finally answered him.
“If he dies now, then he will be free of pain—even momentarily—before he goes to Hell. I want him alive. I want him to continue to breathe so that he can feel pain, so that he can be punished for what he did to me. I want him alive, I want him wishing for death, and I want to enjoy his misery while he’s on earth with me.”
Eclipse smirked, satisfied with my unfiltered answer and the true display of my sadism. “As you wish, Gracie.”
“Now back to the question,” I incited, feeling completely awake now. I was no longer interested in talking about the pitiful bastard’s life. I had more important matters to focus on. “Did you see everything that happened?”
“No,” he answered, getting back on topic as well. Sincerity radiated from his voice. “I got here near the end, when everything was finishing up.”
I studied him while the cold wind billowed around us. “Why didn’t you come in sooner then?”
“The blood boiling around you,” he explained, his expression hinting of annoyance, “it prohibited anything from being near you. I tried to walk in to get to you, but the barrier around you was inflexible. No matter how much I tried to fight it, it wouldn’t let me through. I was stuck outside the barrier until the boiling ceased.”
I attempted to ignore the fear that washed over me when he told me that the boiling around me wouldn’t let him through, like it had a mind of its own. I purged on to quell the emerging fear by asking, “How did you find me in the first place?”
Eclipse cast his attention down to OinkOink, who had been so obedient and quiet that I had forgotten he was there. He was seated beside us, his expressive black eyes staring dotingly at me.
“If you were to scream out for me, then I won’t be able to hear you or find you.” He smiled, petting OinkOink with affection. “But he can sense me and he can find me. When I returned from my Kingdom to try and find you, I couldn’t. Fortunately, while I was searching, he came to find me and almost immediately led me back to you.”
Shock molded my eyes.
“Was this the reason why you gave me OinkOink as a gift?” I asked a breath later. Everything started to fall into place for me. “So that you can find me if I were to be somewhere else?”
Eclipse smiled faintly at me, scratching OinkOink’s head. The puppy closed his eyes in bliss while he did this, happily lying down beside Eclipse.
“Dogs are very intelligent creatures. Their senses are unmatched. If you have their loyalty, you have it for life. Though it isn’t always guaranteed that he could find me and lead me to you if you are in danger, there’d still be a chance to come to your aid nonetheless.”
I glanced at the puppy who now appeared like a glorified tracking device. So the puppy didn’t abandon me after all. I thought he had ditched me before, but as it turned out, he was only trying to find Eclipse to help me. The bitterness I harbored for OinkOink dissipated as soon as I came to this realization.
Almost immediately though, it hit me that Eclipse gave me this puppy as a precaution, thereby meaning that he had already anticipated danger to come to me.
“The other night, when you told me that you were spying on me while I was doing yoga,” I began, staring at him with wide eyes, “you purposely told me that so I’d get mad at you, didn’t you? So that the next day you could give me OinkOink as an ‘apology’ gift?”
The curves of his sinuous lips grinned bashfully. “Well, I was admiring the view regardless, but I needed something to set you off. Unfortunately, I knew far too well what could set the fire.”
I inhaled deeply, letting the flow of this conversation bring me back to the original question I posed to him. “So you anticipated even then, before we met your brother, that I was going to be in danger?”
Above me, I could feel the hue of the traffic lights glow from green to yellow then to red.
An ominous silence befell him at my query.
“Your brother . . .” I incited again, unfazed by his blatant display of secretiveness, “was this what he meant when he said that you’re protecting me from something?”
Eclipse shook his head, relenting, but only slightly, with his evasiveness. “This isn’t what he meant, but it is the prelude for everything that’s coming for you.”
Goose bumps materialized on my body from his cryptic words. My body shivered, but not from the cold or misting rain that was beginning to drizzle around us. “What do you mean?”
When he said nothing, I grew angrier.
I was sick of his secrets.
I had nearly gotten stabbed to death and just went through the most bizarre event I had ever experienced in my young life. I deserved some goddamned answers.
“You knew that all of this was supposed to happen to me tonight,” I provoked, my eyes accusing. “You knew all of this beforehand, didn’t you? You allowed this to happen to me—”
“Not tonight,” he interrupted, breaking out of his silence. “I was protecting you and I anticipated something like this to happen, but it wasn’t supposed to happen tonight. If I knew it was supposed to happen tonight, then I would’ve stayed with you the entire time to prevent it.”
I gaped at him with mystification. “When was this supposed to happen?”
“Sometime after your twenty-first birthday,” he answered quietly. He swallowed tightly before adding, “It’s a birthright of sorts and something I was doing my best to protect you from.” He looked around, smiling dryly to himself. “Obviously the fates are a bit more resilient to my attempts of changing some of the courses in your life.”
“What,” I breathed out when he pretty much verified that although he didn’t know something like this was supposed to happen tonight, he knew it was supposed to happen to me regardless. “What’s happening right now?”
He fell silent, and once again the silence became deafening for me.
I stared at him, my determined eyes telling him that he wasn’t going to keep me in the dark any longer. In the past, I allowed evasive behaviors like this because I didn’t want to deal with it. Now that it concerned my safety, it was a completely different ballgame. I had to know what was happening in my life, what he was protecting me from, and the question that had always mattered: why he was here with me in the first place.
“Since I’ve met you,” I launched, my gaze imploring his to finally give me some answers, “I knew that there was a reason, a big reason why the Prince of Hell would risk his entire existence for my soul. Regardless of what other reasons you gave me, I knew there was something else to it, yet I never pushed for it because in the deep recess of m
y mind, I knew I’d rather be in the dark than be enlightened.” I breathed in heavily and looked at my surroundings. “But I can’t be oblivious any longer, not when something like this just took place.” Fear embalmed my eyes. “What happened earlier . . . that’s the reason why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Another thought then battered against my psyche, distracting me while concurrently bringing me more on target than I had ever been. I peered at Sony’s father and turned back to Eclipse, remembering our conversation about the soul of Sony’s father and the soul of humans in general. If he could easily wait for Sony’s father to die before he could own his soul in Hell, then why couldn’t he do the same for me?
“Why are you so hell-bent on getting my soul now when you could just wait for me to die?” I asked, voicing my thoughts out loud. “Surely I’m going to Hell for being so sadistic. I don’t understand why you would be hanging around, wasting time right now unless . . .” My eyes expanded when it hit me. “Unless I’m not going to Hell. Unless I’m going to Heaven—”
“Who says your soul is going to either Heaven or Hell when you die?” Eclipse interrupted at once, his indiscernible gaze resting on mine. I shut up, allowing his voice and his enlightenment to pour over me as he went on. “As I’m sure you’re aware, there are three things that can happen to a living entity when they die. They can go to Hell, Heaven, or—”
“Disappear for all eternity,” I breathed out, stunned as to why I didn’t come to this conclusion sooner. There would be no reason for Eclipse to hang around me unless he absolutely could not own my soul in Hell—unless my soul was only on Earth for a limited time. Much like Eclipse’s fate, if I were to die, then I would cease to ever exist again.
My heart clenched while I stared at him, completely thunderstruck with horror.
I was beginning to see the road that he was painting for me. A human soul could go to either Heaven or Hell. If my soul couldn’t go to either, then it must only mean one thing.
“You’re not just here for a human soul, are you, Eclipse?”
An eerily icy and anticipatory wind swam through us as my words streamed over him. Judging by the expression on his face and the silence emanating from him, I knew I had hit the bull’s eye with that question. He wasn’t just here for a human soul—not by a long shot.
“Have you ever felt different, Gracie? Like you don’t belong?” he finally prompted long seconds later. “I asked you this that night when I told you that I wanted your soul. I’ve already told you that you don’t belong in this world, that you’re better than anything in this world because it’s true.”
I recalled my blood boiling and slithering back into my body, returning to me and making me healthy again. I looked at him, dreading the answer he would give me.
“Am I . . . am I not human?” I drew in a sharp breath, thinking about my sadistic tendencies and how different I was from the average human being. “Am I a Demon or an Angel?”
“No, you’re human,” he told me quickly, quelling any doubts in my mind that I was anything but. “You’re very much human, and you are most certainly not a Demon or an Angel. Your existence is far more powerful than an Angel’s and your lineage is far more ancient than my Demonic lineage.”
My mind was spinning in circles. “Wh-what am I then?”
Poignancy teemed in his captivating brown eyes. At long last, he finally relinquished with his secretiveness and began to share with me the secret of who I was.
“The blood pumping in your veins is pure, uncontaminated evil in its rawest and most potent form. This in itself makes you one of the most powerful humans to walk on God’s green Earth.”
I gawked at him, besieged with growing confusion.
“What am I?” I breathed out, finding it hard to control the hammering of my heart.
A soft smile outlined his lips. “You are a Source, Gracie.”
“A Source?”
“A Source of Evil,” he elaborated, and I could feel the chills turn my blood into ice. “An ancient evil that came before Angels, an ancient evil that predates Demons, and an ancient evil that has been anointed by the Creator himself.”
“God?” I asked in disbelief.
He nodded. “Yes, Gracie. There are two types of evil in existence: one that my father created and one that the Heavenly Father himself created. I happen to be the evil that my father created, the conditioned sins that have come to ravage the earth. And you, Gracie, are the evil that has been in existence since the dawn of time. You are the evil that bears root to the original sin and the evil that is inherent in all creations. Basically, your caliber is slightly above mine in this informal hierarchy because as it would appear, your lineage is from the Original Evil that gave wisdom to my father.” He let out a quiet chuckle. “In short, you’re a pretty big deal, Teacup.”
“God,” I choked out, “created me to be like this?”
Eclipse shrugged offhandedly. “Well, he merely created the Original Evil to balance the Original Good out. Your existence—or the existence of the Original Evil that you stem from—was merely utilized as a tool to keep everything balanced. But as with all of God’s creations, like my father and like the human race, the Original Evil began to form a mind of its own. The consumption of the forbidden fruit was the first misery it enjoyed. It relished in the demise of humankind and it took pride in being able to bear witness to God’s favorite Angel’s fall from grace. All of this was said to be what ignited the fire within the Original Evil and caused it to rebel against its once stagnant state. In essence, it no longer wanted to be the balance scale it was created to be. It wanted to live a life of its own.”
He observed me intently, assessing my frozen visage.
“Do you not wonder why you are so sadistic and why you feed on the misery of others, Gracie? You enjoy feeding off of their misery because that is the evil within you taking form. That is the evil within your human self doing what it does best: enjoying the misery of others simply for entertainment.” His voice took on a reverent-like quality. “That’s why you’re human, Gracie. You’re completely human. When the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was consumed, the Original Evil had actually wrapped itself within it. When humans ate from that fruit and were cast from Eden, the Original Evil went right along with them, binding itself to the race of humans. And much like humans, over the millennia, the Original Evil had split apart from its original form, replicating itself in larger numbers as the ages passed.”
He canted his head at me. “Gracie . . . you are a hybrid of something so powerful, so human, so inherently evil, and so rare that several lifetimes can come and go and the rest of creation would never be able to witness the existence of a Source like yourself.”
However stunned I was with the gravity of everything he was telling me, my congested mind was still vigilant enough to ask questions it needed clarification for. “Rare?”
“You are a once-in-a-lifetime gift, Teacup—quite literally,” he explained. “Millenniums can come and go and someone of your caliber will never grace the world with their presence. Sources from the Original Evil are rare and they seldom come into existence. For the majority of the time, the Original Evil can only live within a human being as the Original Sin; it is nearly impossible for an actual Source to be born where it is completely evil and also be completely human—a true evil incarnate, so-to-speak. It is rare, but these once-in-a-lifetime beings do come into existence.” His eyes illumed with amazement for me and my status in life. “Everything that makes up your entire existence is raw and untainted evil in its purest and most renowned form. You are quite simply the most powerful and most desired human soul to grace the soils of Earth, hence your notoriety in the world down under and the heavy weight everyone has placed on a powerful soul like yours.”
“The most . . .” I paused, struggling to absorb everything. “But you called me a Source. So that means there are others like me, right? I’m not alone?”
“There are others who came before you, yes,
but none of them made it past the Age of Enlightenment.”
“Made it past?” I shot him a befuddled look. “Wait. What does that mean? Are you insinuating that the Age of Enlightenment only pertains to Sources?” My eyes rounded. “I thought you said it applied to humans too?”
Eclipse flashed a bashful smile that was reminiscent of a kid getting caught in a lie. He shifted uncomfortably, taking the opportunity to give me one of his pre-apology faces before saying, “Well, I guess the addendum that should be made to what I told you about the Age of Enlightenment was that it only applies to Sources—not humans.”
“So you lied to me,” I deadpanned.
“Just a little bit,” he amended lightly.
I gave him a brief, “fuck-you-for-lying-to-me” glare—to which he smiled apologetically at—and then resumed with more pressing thoughts.
“None of them made it past the age of twenty-one?” I swallowed nervously, hating where this was going, but knowing that I had to keep going in that same direction so I could be educated in every aspect of my life. “Why? What happened to the rest?”
“Dead,” he said simply.
“Why are they all dead?”
“Sicknesses . . . like the one coming for you,” he told me carefully, his expression becoming grim. “Sources of Evil are not created to live long and have prosperous lives as humans. They are created to enjoy their reigns as superior beings, to elicit misery and enjoy all that they can until their Age of Enlightenment comes. When their time comes, they will fulfill their full purpose by dying at some point after their twenty-first birthday.”
I gawked at him, utterly flummoxed. Then, my eyes swelled up in realization. “Is this what Sloth was trying to warn me about? Is this what he told you to inform me so that I’d give you my soul?”
Eclipse nodded, his expression darkening with an admonishing shadow. “A Source is a very rare breed and a very powerful Ancient Evil, but the distinction that should be made about Sources is that they are also 100% human. It is merely the blood pumping within you that makes you superior to other humans. In that regard, you are not only looked upon as one of the most powerful humans on earth, but you are also viewed as one of the most vulnerable as well.”