Nine Lives: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part THREE

by Akeroyd, Serena

  “I guess that makes sense. You would have grown bored as you did in Eden, would have stopped appreciating the gift He’d given you, and the cycle would begin again,” I concluded.

  Ava’s lips twitched. “You are wiser than I was at that time. I was very resentful and was a horrible woman to be around. Especially when I had my first child and, though I wished for relief from the pain, I was never granted it.”

  “Woman’s punishment,” I whispered, then quoted from Genesis, “I will intensify your labor pains; you will bear children with painful effort.”

  “Yes,” Avalina grunted. “The punishment was very real and very horrendous. I’d never experienced the like before or since. That first dose of pain was a wake-up call, I suppose. When my first son was born, it almost marred the joy of the moment. And when I was pregnant with my second son, I was terrified. It wasn’t as bad, but only because I was prepared for it.” She sucked down a shaky breath, and I felt for her, wished I had the right to reach for her hand and hold it, squeeze it with mine to give her comfort.

  She’d done wrong, and though God had protected her in many ways, he’d still punished her. Still found ways to ensure that man was tested.

  “It’s important that I clarify something. We weren’t the first children on Earth, but we were the first of God’s children with his intent inside us. We didn’t create the first township on the planet, nor did we give birth to the first child to walk these lands. At the time, there was early man. Evolution played a huge part in the creation story, and that is who our own children had congress with. With whom they bore the first of the children who would truly populate this realm with the inference of creating a society,” Bartlett explained.

  “We didn’t look as we do now,” Ava joked. “Let’s just put it that way. Evolution does and always will play a huge role in all we do.”

  As we nodded our understanding, Bartlett sucked in a breath and carried on, “So, while we believed that all was well, it wasn’t. We bore seven sons, no more and no less, not in this incarnation or any other. Just seven. They were well. Hale and hearty. Beautiful creatures that continue to make me proud to this day for they still live. Most of our nearest kin do.

  “When Avalina and I merged together, we created the majnūn. They were the first of your kind,” Bartlett said, gesturing to the men. “Each one was the first Were, the first gouille, the first Vampire, etc. Because they were the first, we never thought anything of their abilities. There was no war in them, not like there is with creatures today. They were perfect, and now, I realize that was how each of God’s children was supposed to be. Majnūn. Before we corrupted everything, God’s plan was for us to sire only creatures.

  “But our infested seed, you see, was sowed in their children. Eve, when she bit into the apple, took the devil inside her. He infected the life giver with his taint, poisoning the root of God’s children.” He swallowed again, his sorrow clear. “The war was inside our sons, and the first Ghouls were born of them.

  “In the eighteen children sired by my boys, the damage to the rootstock began to show. Two of those were humans—Cain and Abel.” Pain flashed in his eyes. “They were our grandsons, not sons, and we all know how they ended up. And a further three of those eighteen babes were Ghouls. They were the very first.” His tone quieted. “All save the humans live to this day.”

  “Wait, three Ghouls started the whole world’s population of them?” Frazer rasped.

  Bartlett’s mouth tightened. “No, it may seem that way, but no. Every single Ghoul in creation has ties to those three because they are tied to us. We bore the fruit that will poison the Earth in its entirety. What we have spent thousands of years crafting will be decimated thanks to our mistake.” He squeezed Avalina. “The devil is inside every majnūn and it was, once upon a time, God’s will that saved them. Spared them, but then, the devil began to win. His evil began to overtake everything the humans did, damaging the majnūn with their industry and capitalistic ways.” He shuddered. “We live now as punishment. When first we died, we thought that was it for us. We saw the cycle of life, knew everything came to an end, and expected to pass over, for that to be our time on this plane…”

  “But that didn’t happen?” Nestor prompted, and I heard the intensity of his curiosity in his tone—that was my man, curious about everything and nothing. In another life, he’d have been a scientist. Instead, he was fighting a war.

  Life sucked like that sometimes.

  “No,” Avalina said in a low tone, her eyes downcast. “Being cast from Eden, our line forever tarnished, wasn’t punishment enough. To seek atonement, we had to make good on our mistakes.” She bit her bottom lip. “That has yet to happen, and this was our final chance.”

  “How long does a life last?” Reed drawled. “I mean, early man are hundreds of thousands of years old…”

  Bartlett shot him a look. “Incarnations don’t work on a timeline.”

  That had Reed squinting back. “Huh? You’re incarnated, but your kids aren’t. Nicholas doesn’t look like a Neanderthal—”

  “He just acts like one when Janvier is around,” Frazer mocked, and though I didn’t understand what he meant, the others snickered.

  The words brought a surprising levity to the serious mood, which had overtaken the study. I wasn’t sure if that was for good or ill. Not when the tension wending its way inside me made me feel like I was on the brink of implosion.

  “We weren’t the only ones handed nine incarnations. The sins of the fathers and all that…,” Ava explained with a grimace. “We’ve all been working to resolve the Original Sin, but it’s difficult when the majnūn are unstable.”

  So, wait. Each incarnation had the potential to last tens of thousands of years?

  My mind felt like a car wreck at the thought. How much had they seen? They’d been a part of evolution itself, so what hadn’t they come to know?

  “Why are you telling us this? I mean… I know we came here for answers, but this is information you can’t share with anyone you just meet. Why us? What makes us worthy?” I whispered, my voice low and husky as the ramifications of what they were telling me hit home.

  They’d probably never shared this story, yet here they were, opening up to me like I was a chat show host or something. And this was no lie.

  I felt their truth.

  In my bones.

  My eighth soul throbbed dully in recognition, and that more than anything, terrified the life out of me.

  Then, when Avalina looked me square in the eye and told me, “Because you are Jannah, and you are our means of salvation,” I wished I’d never asked.

  ❖

  Reed

  Eve looked as though she were on the brink of passing out, and I couldn’t blame her.

  This was a lot for anyone to process, but for me, I was just relieved to have answers.

  There was plenty of shit in this life that didn’t make sense, and in our world, there was even more because we knew there was more out there and still didn’t have answers.

  Where did mates come from? Who even picked them out for us? Why did Caelum have a portal that infused us with a goddamn internal translation system? Why did that portal act as the literal gatekeeper for graduates of the Academy?

  Yet, we’d also just received some answers to those unanswered questions.

  According to this duo, and if they weren’t telling us a complete and utter furphy, they were our creation story. Our beginning. A story we’d never heard.

  There were theories, of course. But this wasn’t a theory. Not according to the professors.

  If I was eying them with suspicion, that’s because I was suspicious. This was a level of information that wavered between impossible and bullshit.

  Before I was a believer, they’d have to come up with some proof, something that made these claims a lot more solid than the hot air they were currently spouting like kettles that had been on the stove for too long.

  But, one thing was really pissing me off,
so I told them, “Creatures aren’t religious. Caelum tells us to recant our religions at the door.”

  Avalina’s mouth pursed. “That’s because God isn’t religious. Man made religion. God is God. Trust me, we’d know. Sometimes he’s nice, sometimes he’s mean. He’s not Catholic, nor is he Buddhist. He just is. You either have faith or you don’t, but regardless you came from somewhere, and it started with us.” Apparently done with a conversation I’d only just started, she pushed herself off Bartlett’s lap and walked over to Eve. The second she approached, I tensed, waiting on an attack that didn’t happen—she just held out her hand and said, “May I see your arm?”

  Eve, still looking shell-shocked, blinked but did as asked. Soft fingers, which were far too youthful, traced over the leaf on Eve’s hand that curved around her wrist, then curled about her forearm. Some were large, some were small, but all were made out of letters.

  “Caelum is founded on territory that Nicholas discovered a hundred years or more ago. In his last life, he did well, and God was pleased, and gifted him Caelum as a result. The gates act as a barrier. God set his sights too high, didn’t realize the perfidy of the devil. Ghouls were beginning to outnumber creatures a long time ago, and when Nicholas did him a service, his reward was a means of helping others with a place that would become a majnūn’s haven.

  “More than that, it was a means of building an army. Something that had the capabilities of tactically undermining the growth in the Ghouls’ population. It came in many ways, but one of the most important was bridging the gap in knowledge. Language is at the heart of all knowledge. When you cross through the portal, you speak the common parlance among majnūn but also, it means you can speak with anyone on this realm and be understood. Something of that nature is beyond the means of any man.” She cast me a withering look, then shared it out among my brothers. “You can choose to believe we speak false, or you can recognize the hand of something that is larger than us all.” She traced the leaf on Eve’s hand with her thumb. “Studying and lecturing what we do, we get a lot of kooks coming through our door. But the second we saw this in the pictures you sent? We knew what you were.”

  “That language is the first we ever spoke,” Bartlett informed us when Avalina’s words waned. “It is known only to Eve and myself, and our sons.” His lips tightened. “You are not the first, Eve, but you will be the last.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I demanded, my Hell Hound’s temper surging to the fore at the implied threat in his words.

  Bartlett grunted. “Calm yourself, Hound,” he drawled. “She is the last for there is little chance we will survive to see another. Jannahs are rare. So rare they are taken on as prophets by religions around the world, but in the past, there was never any means for us to connect with them.”

  Frazer blinked. “Wait a second. Jesus?” Bartlett nodded. “You mean to tell me that if Jesus had Google, we wouldn’t be having this problem with the Ghouls?”

  My eyes widened at Frazer’s question, and fuck, it was beyond hard not to laugh. Avalina was apparently the queen of withering glances, however, because she snapped, “Have some respect!”

  Frazer shrugged. “I have respect, but you’re trying to tell me that the prophets were Jannah, and, what? That my woman is too?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re saying,” she bit off. “Or aren’t you listening?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, and I could see he was starting to get pissed—Frazer did not like being questioned by anyone save his Pack. I knew it came from his shitty relationship with his parents, but it always put us at a disadvantage when we were in situations that required diplomacy. And Hell Hounds? They were the antithesis of diplomatic.

  Maybe God did exist if he put a Vampire in our Pack… Samuel, being Samuel, threw water onto the flames by murmuring, “We’re listening, ma’am, but you have to understand how difficult this is for us to understand.”

  Avalina’s lips tightened, but the politeness, the politesse, in Sam’s voice, would have been enough to satisfy the Queen of fucking England. As much as I loved him, the dude could kiss ass like no other.

  And he wasn’t even into rimming. I’d know, considering I’d watched him work over more than one girl in our year at Caelum.

  Eve, of Adam and Eve fame, tipped her head at us with all the regalness of Lizzy the Second, then murmured, “The Jannah are rare, and their abilities are often exploited if discovered. Most spend their lives in seclusion, hiding from others so their talents can’t be used or manipulated for the gain of strangers. That makes our connecting with them incredibly difficult.”

  “I don’t mean to be dumb,” Nestor interjected with a frown, “but why don’t you just wish to connect with them?”

  Bartlett shook his head. “I’m no longer Jannah.” He winced. “That’s not right. I’m different. I’m the first. My abilities died when I died that first time, and I was punished further. There is only one Jannah living at any one moment in time, and even then, one doesn’t die and another is born.” He shrugged. “It just doesn’t work like that. There is no way to discern when next a Jannah is born.”

  “Is there a way of creating a pattern with the births? Sensing where the line might lead?” Nestor questioned, his tone eager with interest.

  Again, Bartlett shook his head. “There is one link—me and Avalina. Everyone in this room has a direct connection to us, and yet it has been watered down so many times over the millennia that it’s barely there, which is why some families bear a majnūn, and others don’t. But ‘barely there’ is still a link. The Jannah fall where they fall, and we cannot anticipate their birth. It is not supposed to be easy. Absolution and forgiveness never come without a cost.”

  “A cost to humanity,” Eren argued. “It’s humans who are suffering. The Ghouls’ numbers are growing and they’re killing innocents.”

  “And their deaths weigh on our souls,” Avalina whispered. “But we can only do so much, and even then, it can cause issues. Bartlett calling Merinda to help with Eve was a huge misstep. We may still be punished for that. It is a punishment we are willing to handle, but God decides where his wrath may fall.”

  An uneasy silence fell among us as we thought about God smiting us. Great. Something I seriously wanted on my bucket list.

  Rubbing the back of his neck for the tenth time in less than half an hour, Frazer muttered, “And the ink? Do you understand it? Can read it?”

  Avalina nodded. “It’s been a long time since I saw this language. Mostly it was spoken, not written. Early man was not capable of this level of communication.”

  “Do you know what it means?” Eren questioned.

  She tilted her head from side to side. “For the most part.”

  What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

  I blinked. “Okay. So… are you going to tell us?”

  “It depends on what you’re going to do with the information.”

  Stefan snorted. “Those tattoos glow like Eve is plugged into the grid. The second we veer off course, she falls asleep.”

  Bartlett frowned. “Veer off course?”

  “When we intended on hiding her from Caelum because of her abilities, she passed out. She only truly woke up when our plans to understand the ink manifested and we found you.”

  Avalina shot Bartlett a look that didn’t take much to translate—concern.

  “What is it?” Nestor asked, his fingers fidgeting with his unease.

  “That has never happened before. The glowing part.” Bartlett studied my mate. “Is it possible to make them glow now?”

  “She doesn’t have an on-off switch,” I argued, but Eve shot me a look that I tossed back her way. “What? You don’t!”

  “Calm down,” she ordered, her tone flat. “Or I’ll make you.”

  The threat hovered in the air, and I knew I wasn’t the only one stunned.

  Or turned on.

  Fuck, who knew a mate telling you what to do could be a turn on?

&nb
sp; I seriously wanted to fight her then, to ‘make’ me calm down, but I didn’t. Not in front of Bartlett and Avalina. If they decided to leave the room for some reason, I’d be on her faster than Vegemite oozed into hot toast.

  Maybe she saw the effect her words had on me because she blushed, turned back to Avalina, and murmured, “As far as I can tell, there’s no way of controlling the glow. It just comes in fits and starts.”

  “That’s a shame. How did the markings come to pass?” Bartlett replied, sitting forward, the scientist in him evidently curious.

  “We crossed the portal prior to her graduation,” Dre muttered, speaking out for the first time—dude seemed to have left his voice back on Caelum. Considering he was usually an ass, that wasn’t much of a hardship, though.

  Avalina turned her focus to him. “You crossed the portal? All of you?”

  “It’s a long story,” I drawled.

  “I have all the time in the world. Literally,” Avalina retorted, releasing her hold on Eve’s hand so she could fold her arms across her chest and glower at me.

  I cut Frazer a look. He huffed and explained, “About a month ago, we were involved in a mission in Nigeria. The McAllister Nest had set their sights on a small town on the delta. The town had oil reserves and a company was coming to discuss terms with them.”

  “That was when the Ghouls decided to take over, hmm?” Bartlett inserted.

  “Yeah, seems you’d be the ones to know what they’re like.” Frazer ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “Anyway, we went in, got the job done. Handled the situations, but they were mostly pecus-level Ghouls. Nobody high-ranking, just the sheep.” He tugged at his ear. “McAllister obviously worked with someone at Caelum to get the drop on us. Before we left, we were drugged. The only way was to get to our water or our food, so it had to be someone on the inside.” When the professors sucked in a sharp breath, Frazer quickly stated, “No one was hurt. At least, not that we know of. The drugs didn’t affect Eren as much.” He pointed to Eren. “He managed to save us.”