Samuel couldn’t meet the other man’s unblinking gaze for long and stifled his emotion of relief when the man finally began to talk.
“I see you’ve had some custom changes made. Very, very nice. We should race later.” He returned his attention to the bike.
“Samuel,” Thalya said. “I’d like you to meet Adam.”
“Adam,” Samuel blurted, somewhat taken aback. The biblical connection wasn’t lost on him; he glanced at Thalya. “You’re kidding.”
Adam didn’t bother looking up; he moved over to the engine and opened the casing. “Yeah, I get that a lot. And I know what you all have come looking for. But I’m not sure I have the answers you want to hear.” Even his voice mesmerized.
Adam shut the casing and with one last stroke of the bike, straightened.
Samuel took satisfaction they were at least the same height.
Adam grinned like he’d plucked the thought from Samuel’s mind.
Samuel clamped down on his thoughts and emotions. He didn’t want to be read. Not by any soulless, especially this one.
“Come on,” Adam urged. “We might as well get comfortable. I’m not expecting anyone else for a little while.”
“You live alone here?” Samuel asked, already having guessed from the size of the exterior structure the interior to be over ten thousand square feet, perhaps much larger since he couldn’t really determine the length along the sides.
“For the most part. I need my space. But from time to time, someone or someones will show up looking for a place to disappear for a while. They know they won’t be bothered here. The only rule is while they’re here, I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.”
Although he didn’t say it, Samuel got the impression at some point, Thalya must have been one of those someone’s who’d stayed with him. The thought crossed his mind she spent time here in Adam’s bed. He didn’t like it one damn bit and took her hand in a show of possession.
Adam moved like a man comfortable and long familiar with his surroundings. It seemed odd to think of a soulless one as a creature understanding the concept of comfort and home. It almost made him human. Almost. The aura emanating off the being in front of them radiated enough power for even the ignorant to pick up on. Adam led them into a grand black and white marbled entryway, wide enough to park a semi in. Samuel looked up at the ceiling about three stories high and a mural of Christ painted during the last super gazed down on them. Damned if it didn’t seem an exact rending of Leonardo De Vinci’s painted on the wall of the Covent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan he’d seen.
Thalya’s tug on his hand had him moving again as they followed their host down another hallway, past a few closed doors until they came to a set of open French double doors. Samuel thought he’d seriously underestimated the square footage, more like fifteen thousand.
They entered what appeared to be a music room and Samuel released Thalya’s hand. A shiny black Steinway piano sat at the other end of the room, behind it a wall of heavily curtained windows and on the other side, a long white high backed couch invited you to sit and listen for a while. As did the four matching chairs and tables placed around the room. In fact, everything in the room was white. Only the textures changed. The only color in the room, the black piano.
“Please, me casa es su casa.” Adam bowed, holding his hand over his heart and extending the other for them to enter. “If we’re going to have this conversation, I will need my music.”
“I didn’t know the soulless could play,” Samuel said, surprised. Much less appreciate music, but Thalya certainly enjoyed the theatre. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d been surprised to find much existed about the soulless he did not know.
Adam echoed his thoughts. “There’s a lot about us you don’t know. As to my playing, well judge for yourself.”
Was he reading me?
“Don’t be humble, Adam, it really doesn’t suit you,” Thalya scolded.
Adam winked at her, striding over to the piano.
The exchange confirmed what Samuel feared; intimacy existed between the two. But, the intimacy between friends, or lovers? Samuel took Thalya’s hand again, to feel her touch as much as to guide her over to the couch. They sat shoulder to shoulder in the center and leaned back.
Adam began to play.
Shit, of course the man played beautifully. Samuel didn’t recognize the piece, perhaps an original composition. He didn’t know how long he sat there holding Thalya’s hand while the complex notes Adam played wove around him, tugging at his soul. Adam created a sound of pure wonder, sadness, and the need for love or rather a lost love. Every note spoke of his quest for love. Finding the one soul to share himself with. Because don’t we all want that? Though mournful, the music also gave him, not so much hope but, the will to survive it all. Alone.
Then the music changed to something more modern, still an original piece but not quite as soulful, yet no less poignant. Adam played it in a low key and began to talk. “So, you know. Yes, for whatever it’s worth, we were once angels.”
“You did know. But how is it I did not know this?” Thalya demanded. “How is it the rest of us are unaware of this?”
He raised his head to look at her. “I thought it best.”
“You?” Thalya cried, squeezing Samuel’s hand. “How the hell could you do that? And why?”
He returned his attention back to the piano keys. As he continued playing, the notes seemed to sigh for him. “I did it because I could. I didn’t do it right away. Believe me. It was not supposed to be this way. At first, we all tried to live under the terms of the banishment but that didn’t last very long, at least in our terms of time, before I realized it wasn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Adam,” Thalya prompted, “A straight answer please.”
Again, the notes of the music changed, this time to remorse and a little anger. “At first, we couldn’t survive the loss of our souls, our emotions. A few went mad in those early years and I had to hunt them down. You think the bloodsuckers are bad. Those first few became real demons, demons let loose on earth with no parameters other than me to control them. I had to destroy them. The rest of us tried to figure out ways to deal with the hunger for emotion and redeem ourselves, so we did what we had always done. We tried to protect, comfort and ease some of life’s burdens. Damned hard to do, though, when you can feel no emotion. We only knew the unending gnawing pain of emptiness where our souls once were.”
Thalya nodded, as she seemed to agree with this part.
“We hungered for anything to fill it. So, more of us went over to the dark side.” He grinned, and the higher notes in the music became more whimsical, perhaps to echo the statement. While the soulless might not feel a full range of emotions, Adam certainly used his music as some sort of substitute.
Samuel understood the notes reflected perhaps what Adam could not.
“We may have been banished,” Adam continued, “But I could not allow the uncontrolled mayhem to continue. It didn’t take us long to figure out we could survive here, even without our souls, if we could drain a little bit of emotion from humans. For a while at least, the emptiness was assuaged.”
“So, you fucking stole emotions to feed your hunger,” Samuel stated angrily.
“We have a right to survive like any other creation. Early on, we only chose those who were already suffering and drained them of their agony, taking away the emotional pain while taking in some of the host’s emotions. After all, that’s what angels do, relieve suffering. Unfortunately, some of us took in a little too much and like a junkie needing more and more, took on the more destructive types of emotions. Without the positives to balance it, well…It got to the point some of us were no longer looking for those we could help but causing the harm to begin with. Remember, we’re also self-serving creatures. The sin for which we were all banished. Well, at least one of them.” He looked up and winked. “Some of us might have had others.”
“I have no idea why we we
re banished,” Thalya said.
Throughout Adam’s story, Samuel remained constantly aware of the music in the room. Adam used the notes to wrap them up in comfort. As a way to ease the story he told them, make them accept it. At first, he tried to block out the power of the music but it caused no real harm, so he gave in, but he also suspected he didn’t have a choice. Still, Samuel accepted it as a way Adam showcased emotion.
“Sorry, forgot,” Adam continued. “It’s a long boring story we don’t have time for. The reasons for taking your memories, well, suffice it to say, I came upon a scene I have no wish repeated. It involved an entire village, too many soulless and not a human left alive. I’d had enough. I stripped our memories and I bound all of our wings. Lessening our powers. For all the good that did.”
Thalya sat up. “Wings. We have—had—wings?”
“Well, most of us. Some I outright hunted down and clipped.”
“Wait a second. How many are we talking about here?” Samuel asked.
“Not many. By then, we had lost quite a few of our kind. There were maybe less than two hundred left.” The strains of music rose and fell as though his shoulders did in the parody of a shrug, but only his hands and arms moved smoothly across the keyboard.
“That can’t be,” Samuel said. “There’s a hell of a lot more of you around than that.”
“At any given time there really aren’t that many of us. It’s a way to keep the balance. so earth isn’t overrun and don’t forget your hunters take some of us out. Every so often, another angel does something to piss somebody off but show they might be able to be redeemed, so they’re banished here to see what they can make of themselves. But very few of us and I do mean few, ever get our souls back.”
“You mean…” Thalya spoke up, wonder ringing in the tone of her voice. “I really had a soul once and it was taken away from me?”
Samuel heard the dread in her words. He squeezed her hand between both of his.
Adam did shrug his shoulders this time, and his hands moved across the keys in a soothing melody. “We were all created with a soul. But what He giveth He can taketh away.”
“I don’t remember ever having a soul,” Thalya confessed, a tinge of regret in her voice. “I don’t even remember what I did to lose it.”
This time, Adam’s sigh made a vocal sound. “Unfortunately, I do.”
“How dare you?” She tugged her hand lose from Samuel, rose to her feet and approached Adam, coming to a stop in front of the piano. Her fist clenched at her sides.
Adam raised his head and answered her, “I thought it the right thing for us all, at the time.”
Thalya shook her head. “What did we do? What?”
“Most of us were not part of the original rebellion led by the Deceiver, but we knew about it and chose not to act. We did nothing to stop it.”
“Indifference, our sin was indifference?” Thalya asked.
Samuel glanced at Thalya. Her mouth opened in what he would describe as shock before she snapped it shut. He would have smiled but there was nothing funny about any of this.
“Yes, for some,” Adam replied. “Complacency. We were only interested in our own missions, our own satisfaction and ignored what was happening around us. We did not care when we should have most, or thought it was someone else’s problem when it was our own. For that, we forfeited our souls, our emotions. We became lost.”
“I want it back. I damn well want my memories back.”
“Sorry, no can do. You see like everything else we too, can evolve and we have. We are something else now, someone else. Soulless. We have to look forward; we can’t go back. Even if we do redeem ourselves and reclaim our souls, even fewer will return to angel status. Most of us have tarnished ourselves too much and can no longer be angels, but if we find redemption, at least at death our souls would be welcomed back into heaven.”
“You mean we are bound to earth?”
Samuel couldn’t blame Thalya for her anger. It flowed hot above the surface, its heat warming his senses, just like the music, which suddenly shifted again. So much for soulless not having emotions. Adam’s music kept them both calm. He wondered if she’d experienced emotions before without feeding. Power infused Adam’s music—perhaps even enough to allow her to feel. Samuel returned his attention to Adam just as he shook his head in response to Thalya’s question. The tone in his playing turned regretful.
“So reclaiming our souls also means losing our immortality?” Thalya asked
“For some of us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He’d been quiet until now, letting Thalya ask her questions, but he needed answers too.
“Don’t worry about it. It really doesn’t concern you—for now,” Adam stated. The music continued on, both soothing and aggravating in turn. “I knew your father, you know. We were friends.”
“What?” Samuel asked. Adam’s casual comment issued without warning shocked the hell outta him. “You knew my father?”
“Yes. Once Derry and I were as close as brothers. We were banished together. You look like him, you know. You have his eyes, but you have your mother’s hair color. She saved him.”
“You knew my mother, too?” This guy had a way of delivering information guaranteed to shock.
“Yes, and that bitch of a sister of yours. Some people are born beyond redemption. I might be the one that has no soul, but your sister’s was tainted, dark.”
“Don’t you dare talk about my sister that way!” Samuel’s hand curled into a fist.
Thalya immediately returned to his side. She sat down and placed her hand over his, forcing him to relax.
“She loved me,” Samuel continued but his body remained tense and he gripped Thalya’s fingers. “And she had cause to hate my father. My God, she was only a child when she saw my father brutally murder her own. But she loved me from the day I was born until the day she died. So, don’t you dare say shit about her.”
Never once did the volume of the music raise, but the notes changed. It made Samuel’s heart hurt to listen to the tone and rhythm. It spoke of half-truths and twisted lies.
“Just come out with it. Tell me whatever the fuck it is you want me to know,” Samuel snapped.
“Adam, tell him,” Thalya insisted. “You owe somebody the truth.”
Chapter Ten
“I was with your father when we came upon your mother, Sasha, her husband Neill and their daughter. Even at ten, something appeared to be wrong with Aaline. Her eyes were almost as dark and dead as that of us soulless, except for the spark of hatred that seemed to always burn brightly within her depths,” Adam paused to gather his thoughts. Changing to a softer and more melodic key, he allowed the music to help smooth the things he had to say.
It didn’t matter. Samuel sat there forcing the air in and out of his lungs as he listened to Adam’s damning words.
“Aaline was always a willful child. Neill let her run wild. He never truly cared about her. The man spent more time drunk and sleeping it off than he did anything else. But Sasha’s dowry of land was her only worth to her husband. Not that Neill was much of a farmer to begin with. Too lazy to do more than barely get by.”
Samuel couldn’t disagree with that, no one ever mentioned much about Aaline’s father. Not even Aaline, he’d often wondered about it.
Adam continued, “The fact is, your mother was little more than a slave to farm the land, but Neill doted on your sister from the day she was born. But to him, the child was really a thing to be manipulated for his own amusement and in time, he would have married her off to the highest bidder. He separated mother from daughter very early and taught Aaline to treat Sasha the way he treated her. Like shit. It didn’t help at night, Neill couldn’t leave your mother alone. When Aaline was but a babe that might have been fine, but as she got older, well it was a one-room hut. Lazy stingy bastard, he never saw the need to make the place bigger.”
Samuel couldn’t let the last go unchallenged. “That’s a lie. Our home
was large for the area. We had two floors. My sister and I had our own rooms upstairs and my parents had separate rooms at the end of the hall.”
Adam tilted his head to the side. “Your father built that house. This was not the house you grew up in. But in the one-room shack, Aaline heard it all. And maybe came to resent your mother. Freud would have had a field day with them.” He snorted. “On the day I met this little dysfunctional family, Neill had already beaten your mother pretty badly. She had a split lip and her face was swollen, all black and blue. He had his hands wrapped around her throat and your darling sister…” he paused to snort again. “…She jumped up and down beside them screaming, ‘Kill her, Father, kill her. We hate her.’ No doubt in my mind he would have done it too.”
For the first time since Adam started playing, the volume in the song rose to match the feeling of fear rising within Samuel’s breast. “No,” he heard himself whisper.
“Oh, yes. Derry yelled for him to stop and when he didn’t, we ran over. He had to pry your father’s hands from around your mother’s throat. When he let go of her, she sank to the ground. I knelt over Sasha first and checked her injuries. Derry asked if she lived. I told him she did. Your sister walked over and started screaming at us to leave them alone. She ranted about how her mother had a demon in her and she deserved to be punished. Neill had stepped aside but started shouting at us then, too. Derry ignored them both and knelt beside me. He took one look at your mother. Blood ran down her face from a deep cut over her eye and through the rips in her dress, we could see bruises on her neck and arm. I think at that moment your father fell in love.”
“How would you know?” Samuel asked.
“Because love is the emotion he craves,” Thalya answered his question.
Adam didn’t comment on what Thalya said, but Samuel felt the truth of her statement, and Adam’s music confirmed it.
All this time, Adam continued to play the piano, the sound of something lost in the past. “We could tell the cut would leave a scar,” Adam said. “Her face, though misshapen because of the swelling, still held great beauty.”
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