Nine Lives: The Caelum Academy Trilogy: Part THREE

by Akeroyd, Serena

  She rammed through our control, cutting close to the bone.

  That I hadn’t already blown my load as quickly as Nestor had was a testament to the fact I wanted her to come again, and even though she was pulsing around me like she wanted that as much as me, I wasn’t about to leave her hanging.

  Not when she was Claiming me.

  I pressed my forehead to hers, our breath mingling once more, as I fucked her, getting as deep as I could, as fast as I could. My dick didn’t want to be out in the open, it wanted to be cosseted by her body. By her warmth.

  It wasn’t until I felt that warmth spreading inside me that I knew why Nestor had come so quickly.

  If she’d done this to him? Fuck, how hadn’t he exploded the second he’d gotten inside her?

  I’d figured her messing with our souls would be a one-time thing. But she kept on surprising us, and now, my Incubus could feel her caress. Her warmth surrounding him as she dragged him to the fore. I felt it as though it were happening to someone else, though. Like it wasn’t me and that I was on the outside looking in. Which, if my ‘big’ brain had been working, made perfect sense.

  I was on the outside, and the Incubus made me me.

  As I fucked into her, she fucked with my soul. Drawing my Incubus forward, bringing him toward her heat, and I felt that touch like a caress to my cock. It was the strangest sensation and yet, the hottest I’d ever known.

  I pulled from her reserves, beginning to feed from the energy she gave off. It was my first time feeding as a full Incubus, and it was nothing like before. Not just because before, I’d fucked random hookups and this was my mate, but because with the other souls in residence, I hadn’t been able to feed as well.

  She gave off an energy that was unlike any other woman’s. The Jannah was like the Incubus’ equivalent of a juicy filet mignon. All other women had been a fast food burger. I wanted to suck her dry, drain her of this intoxicating energy that was light and dark combined, heat and cold united.

  Her sexual energy nourished my soul, nourished me, made my senses brighter, had me feeling like I was a single glowing light bulb in the pitch-black dark.

  I felt like I could go climb Everest. Kill a thousand Ghouls. Destroy a nest. All with the power of the energy that flooded me from my mate.

  But when the Incubus seemed to grow inside her, almost with the faint muscular spasms my cock would experience as I came, I climaxed, and things began to change.

  I felt like I came for a lifetime, and each moment of that was spent buried in her gaze. The dark amber hue seemed to glitter as she stared at me, and when the power flooded her from our union, I could sense her Succubus draining me dry.

  It was a weird sensation. I was used to it happening, used to doing it to others, but the way she pulled on me seemed to make her eyes glitter as though the amber was gold.

  It snared me in her trap until I knew she could suck me dry and I wouldn’t care.

  I’d welcome it.

  “Eve!”

  Nestor’s bark had me blinking, pulling back for a second, then slumping on top of her. Her hips rocked sinuously, and it told me that she was satiated.

  Not in a way a human would ever understand though.

  The Succubus had fed and was nourished. That feeling was better than an orgasm.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice sounding scared.

  “Your Succubus drained me dry,” I rasped.

  “She’ll only do that with Stefan,” Nestor warned. “So, you need to have someone with you when you fuck.”

  I’d forgotten about this magnetic pull. Incubi were stronger than Succubi, but when it came down to fucking? She’d pull everything from me whereas I’d only ever get a surface buzz.

  It was our equivalent of the Black Widow…

  She could kill me after sex, and if it made me weird that it got me hot?

  Well, I was happy being weird, so long as I was buried in Eve’s pussy at the same time.

  ❖

  Dre

  Two weeks later

  Geneva, Switzerland

  Seven wishes to destroy the Screamer,

  Solomon’s ring to lure Drekavac to you,

  Bucegi where he sleeps.

  The translation hit us all in different ways.

  The whole ‘seven wishes’ shit just confirmed that what we’d done at Caelum was actually a weapon we were going to have to use again.

  And from what Bartlett and Avalina had told us, a potential three further times.

  Why?

  Drekavac was their grandchild.

  One of the three original Ghouls.

  Who was, apparently, on our ‘to kill’ list, because that was what we were doing now. Not just killing Ghouls, but Ancient ones. Ones that went so far above even the ductores we’d thought ran the roost but who, in fact, answered to one of the three Originals.

  There was only one aspect of this entire shit show I couldn’t complain about—I’d feared my purpose would die the second I left Caelum. It hadn’t. I now had a deeper purpose. One that involved eradicating the world itself of Ghouls…

  When it boiled down to it, this was taking my purpose to the max.

  So, yeah, most of us were freaked out, a little wired about what had happened when ‘Adam and Eve’ had translated every single leaf on our Eve’s body and had come up with a riddle worthy of a treasure map, but for Stefan, it had knocked him down with the force of a Mack Truck.

  We hadn’t even had to Google Bucegi because, I shit you not, that was where Stefan had been born. Or, to be precise, a town near the Bucegi mountain range. This wasn’t going to be a pleasant drive down memory lane for my brother, and he’d been affected ever since our initial meeting with Bartlett and Avalina.

  Said translation, however, was why I found myself in a bank vault, two weeks later in the heart of Switzerland. Around me were steel walls, with doors thicker than the Hulk himself, and more security and firewalls than the Pentagon. My bear didn’t appreciate being lumped in here, stuck inside, but neither did Eren’s Lorelei or Stefan’s Incubus.

  The things we do for love, I thought with an internal eye roll.

  “Which one is it?” Eren whispered into his mouthpiece as he eyed the vault, which was surprisingly boring except for the thick walls and tech that secured the place.

  “Just give me a minute.” Sam’s voice was low but throbbed with tension. He’d been working non-stop for fourteen days, and though the pressure wasn’t getting to him, I knew sleep deprivation would and could knock him on his ass if he wasn’t careful.

  The last thing any of us needed was to get stuck in here because Sam needed a nap.

  My potential prison had a low ceiling, and in the background, there was a hum that, without Sam’s input, would have told me the oxygen was controlled in here. When we’d walked in, we’d come face to face with an L-shaped room. There’d been a huge pile of gold ingots in the corner of the ‘L,’ and to its right, there was a wall of lockers each around a square foot in size, with four to a row and eight to a column. There was a shelving unit that looked surprisingly flimsy, but one I hoped was reinforced with tungsten or titanium or whatever, which was loaded down with stacks of cash. I’d seen Stefan eye it a time or two, his pickpocketing tendencies twitching to life in the face of where we were, but thus far, he’d behaved.

  Behind the shelves was a wall of smaller lockers. These were six inches by six inches, tiny in the grand scheme of things, and where Samuel, after he’d shown us the blueprints of the vault, had said Edgar Wassermann was more than likely storing some of the goods his father, a leading Nazi, had stolen from the Jews he’d helped ship to their deaths at Dachau.

  I felt no guilt in stealing from a piece of shit like that, but I just wished Sam would hurry the hell up so we could get on with the stealing and get out of here.

  “Okay, I’m through the firewall.” Then, he grumbled, “This place needs to work on their security.”

  “Now’s not the time for a critique,
S,” I growled, not using his full name just in case there was a layer of security Sam hadn’t managed to access.

  He huffed. “It’s in one of the smaller boxes as I expected. Number 232.”

  With the knowledge in mind, our attention switched to Stefan who, as he’d been for the past two weeks, was looking twitchy as fuck. Still, I was relieved when he didn’t flake out on us and without even a glance, headed over to the lockers, dropped down to a crouch, grabbed his gear from his pocket, and got to work picking the lock.

  It blew my mind that this was how they guarded the shit inside the lockers, but it figured if you spent forty million on security, you didn’t think there was much to worry about.

  Idiots.

  Old-world thinking like that was why teen hackers kept getting the better of ancient politicians. Still, as I’d told Samuel, now wasn’t the time for a critique.

  Within two minutes, Stefan had picked the lock and was pulling open the door. Inside, there was an internal drawer that he dragged out. The lockers were small in size, but were over three feet long. The baubles we found within the unit had my eyes flaring wide in surprise, and had Eren grabbing the bag from my hands and holding it out for Stefan to shove the gear into.

  It took less than an hour to break into the small vault housed within a Swiss bank beloved by the very crooked. But it had taken weeks to set our plans into motion.

  The con, I was relieved to say, was on.

  Now we just had to get out of here.

  “You have the gear?” Samuel rasped in our ears, his fatigue sounding even more evident to me. Eren too, I thought, because he shot me a concerned look after he shoved the diamonds in my backpack.

  We’d decided I was the safest carrying the stolen items. Mostly because I could stun the shit out of any police or security by shifting into a bear. Shock value would hopefully give me time to get away.

  Gone were the days where we hid among the shadows, where our races mingled silently among the humans. Change was coming, and we’d signed Drekavac’s death sentence as well as millions of Ghouls’ tonight.

  Sneaking out was easier than getting in, but no less fraught with tension.

  The bank was in a shopping mall of all things, an ancient one in the center of Geneva, but a mall with neighbors nonetheless.

  We’d broken into the coffee shop beside it—a place that also stole from customers with coffee at ten goddamn euros a cup—had taken advantage of the ancient plumbing this unit shared with the bank, and had torn through the bathroom wall to make it into the bank itself. All the while, Samuel had been fiddling with the security systems so that when we made it inside the building, we could get through the nine-strong levels of security the alarm system, Inferno, likened to the nine circles of hell in the eponymous Dante novel.

  That whole ability to code Malbolge came in handy tonight. Seemed like part of the security system had been written in it.

  With the gear stored away, Stefan, Eren, and I nodded at one another and made our way out of the vault. As we headed to the bathroom, we came across the three security guards Stefan had lured our way and that Eren had then sung to sleep at the beginning of our journey.

  Stepping over them, we made it back into the coffee shop, and within three minutes, were in our getaway car that Frazer was manning in the area the mall used as a loading dock for its tenants.

  All was going according to plan, until, of course, all hell broke loose.

  Behind us, Samuel had finally triggered the alarms and the sound had my bear whimpering in dismay, which was exacerbated by the tires squealing when Frazer shot off from our hidden parking place and down the street.

  “Couldn’t you have waited a few more minutes?” I snapped into the headpiece we were still wearing.

  “No.”

  Well, that was short and definitely not sweet.

  Rolling my eyes at Samuel’s curt response, I grabbed the backpack and settled it between my feet in the back seat of the car. Now we were away from the built-up area, Frazer suddenly turned into a frickin’ speed demon. As he drove, he released a bark of laughter that went in time to his overloading the engine and us hitting a hundred-twenty on the speedometer.

  Stefan, Eren, and I all jerked forward then back as he ramped up the speed.

  Sadly enough, I was getting used to this treatment.

  The man drove like he intended on dying today. That made being his passenger very goddamn uncomfortable, but his propensity for speeding was what made him a good getaway driver.

  More’s the pity.

  “Everything go according to plan?” the lunatic asked, his eyes catching mine in the rearview mirror.

  “Couldn’t have gone better,” I replied, tugging off my balaclava as my brothers did the same.

  “Good.” He released a breath and his shoulders sagged slightly with relief. “Should hit the news within the hour.”

  “How long until we contact the fence?” Eren questioned, though we all knew the plan backward and forward, so I didn’t know why he bothered wasting his breath.

  “Tomorrow. We need to give it some time to make the theft look authentic.”

  I snorted. “Nothing more authentic than breaking into a fucking bank to steal something that isn’t there in the first place.”

  For whatever reason, Frazer grinned at that. “That’s the beauty of the crime.”

  Though I rolled my eyes, I had to agree with him.

  Seven wishes to destroy the Screamer,

  Solomon’s ring to lure Drekavac to you,

  Bucegi where he sleeps.

  The treasure map inked onto Eve’s body had given us some answers, but it had mostly led to an epic to-do list that made the workload at Caelum look like a walk in the park.

  Once she’d revealed the translation’s meaning, Avalina had explained that Solomon’s ring had been used to seal ‘written commands of good and evil.’ She’d posited that Drekavac might be lured by its abilities as Solomon had been able to command the Jannah with them. Which gave us a whole host of nightmares to deal with.

  Did Drekavac know that a Jannah had been born?

  If he did, and if he ever got his hands on the ring, did that mean he’d be able to call Eve to him?

  Of course, we’d gone the easy route first—had tried uttering the wish back in Bartlett and Avalina’s office, but when the world hadn’t gone to hell, we’d figured nothing had happened, and we’d realized we needed a plan.

  Could nothing ever be simple? I thought grumpily.

  Leaving the first of the first truly mind blown, Samuel had immediately gone on the hunt for more information. He’d run several searches on Solomon’s ring which was, apparently, forged of iron and brass, but—thank God for Google—his searches had heralded more than just a Wikipedia page, and thereafter, with a theory in place, Sammy had turned to the Dark Net.

  An article in the New York Times that was the basis of this theory recounted the tale of a certain businessman, Mihai Adamescu, who had an obsession with religious artifacts—Solomon’s signet ring, in particular. Subsequent research gave us what we needed to know.

  Adamescu had mafia ties, and his base was in Ploiești—the Bucegi mountain range overlooked the damn town. In certain circles on the Dark Net, there was talk of a reward if someone came across Solomon’s ring, and there was information on how to go about receiving that reward.

  What had sealed the deal?

  When Samuel had looked into the guy’s past, he’d come across a bar that was in the businessman’s name.

  That bar?

  It was called Drekavac.

  That was what had started this crazy as fuck ‘adventure.’

  We had no idea where the ring was, just knew that it truly had existed because after explaining our intentions to the professors, Bartlett had emailed us a drawing of it—the guy actually remembered what it looked like—because Samuel had come up with the notion that we didn’t have to possess it to use it as a lure. And so, our hustle had begun.

>   Our to-do list was:

  Steal from the son of a Nazi officer purported to have robbed from his Jewish prisoners at Dachau.

  Create a fake ring that was good enough to pass the test of Abraham Ibramovicz, a fence with a rep that was beyond repute.

  Big up said ring and sell it as Solomon’s signet ring.

  Lure the apparently obsessed-with-religious-artifacts Drekavac to come to us.

  Simple.

  Ha.

  Scraping my hands through my sweaty hair, I mumbled, “I need a shower. I sweated buckets in there.”

  Eren laughed. “I’m relieved to know that even you are scared of bank robbery.”

  “Not scared of the robbery,” I argued, but I grinned at him. “Just getting caught. Especially with so much at stake.” We both sobered at that.

  The stakes were beyond high. They were everything.

  Just thinking of what we had to do was enough to make me feel nauseated.

  “Do you really think if we kill Drekavac, it will decimate his line?” Stefan’s voice was pensive enough to make me gnaw on my bottom lip. I wanted to answer but couldn’t. Had nothing to say really. No way of replying in the positive or negative.

  Frazer, on the other hand, did—bighead. Hey, just because he was a brother didn’t mean I thought the sun rose and set on his ass. “If what Bartlett and Avalina had to say is the truth, and if their translation was accurate, I don’t see why not.”

  “If it is the truth,” I retorted. I was still on the fence, even if it was only out of obstinacy. Their tale had resonated with me in a way that discomforted me, and the fact Bartlett had handed us a drawing of Solomon’s ring? Meaning that he’d been in Solomon’s court? It just blew my mind.

  And the change in Eve was remarkable too. It was like what they’d told her had strengthened her somehow. To the point where it was difficult to explain how she’d changed.

  I had to admit; she was no longer as useless as she’d been back at Caelum.