Page 273 of Caelum

“Doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t, to be honest. He’s in the old tales. But the legends had him nicknamed as the Screamer, said he could lure pretty girls into sinning, and, some say, he could shift into a canine,” I offered.

“Traits that are based on creatures,” Frazer mused.

“Exactly.” I laughed. “Does that mean all the demons in the world are Ghouls?”

Eve shuddered. “Don’t talk about it. It creeps me out.”

I snorted at her words. She’d just killed millions and had ‘creeped out’ a few billion more. The nightclub had borne the brunt of Eve’sJannahhalf. When we walked out, we saw that a lot of humans had been injured in the fires that had started when Drekavac’s line burned to ash, but I believed, more than anything, it was the spontaneous combustion of hundreds of people that would disturb them a little more.

And I had to think that the rest of the world was just asconcernedif this had happened on a mass scale, and there was no reason to think it hadn’t.

“We might have to get in touch with Caelum,” I stated, speculating out loud. “I have to think that Nicholas would prefer to be kept in the loop now that we’ve done what we have.”

“That would involve telling him about his parents, wouldn’t it?” Eve questioned, sounding uneasy on Bartlett and Avalina’s behalf.

I shrugged. “He has to know at some point. Plus, now we’ve rid him of a third of the world’s Ghouls, he should be grateful for our assistance. We did in five minutes what he hasn’t been able to achieve in a lifetime.”

And his lifetime went beyond the average four scores and ten.

“I don’t know,” Frazer stated warily. “Nicholas holds a grudge. You and I both know that.”

I shrugged. “I’m not going to give him our location, Fraze. I just mean that we should keep him in the loop. This one was relatively easy?—”

“Easy? The fuck? You weren’t the one who had to break into a fucking bank!” Dre growled, twisting in his seat in the SUV so he could glower at me.

“No, I was the one that had to hack into the bank’s mainframe, security,andclient systems,” I snapped back. “You think you guys were sweating bullets?—”

Before I could finish, Eve’s hand was on my thigh, and she was rubbing the muscle there, kneading it almost like my cat, Greta, had when I was a kid. The memory popped up out of nowhere, and I had to stop myself from smiling or the others would have thought I was insane for just smirking in the middle of an argument.

“Let’s calm down, everyone,” Eve said, but I noticed her tone had changed. The Lorelei was in play today, but more than that, there was steel behind each word too. Sometimes it was easy to think Eve was the same ingénue who’d traipsed into Caelum all those weeks ago in a white sack for a dress and a mud-brown cape, but she wasn’t.

She was so much more than any of us had anticipated.

At her statement, herdemand, everyone huffed. The tension had brewed quickly among us in that moment, and I knew that was from a blend of adrenaline and stress.

We’d knocked off one Original, but we still had two to go and we didn’t even know how difficult the next ones would be to find. With a third of the Ghouls gone, security would have increased, surely? This one had been easy, but the rest… not so much. That was why I wanted to contact Nicholas. He had teams, systems in place that would help us.

But I understood my brothers’ unease. Caelum had a habit of eradicating those who didn’t fit in, and Eve was the antithesis of ‘fitting in.’ Even if she wasJannah,like Nicholas’s father, that didn’t mean the principal of Caelum would embrace her with open arms.

With a sigh, I decided to wait to see how hard it would be to solve thenext clue on Eve’s markings. There was no point in going to war with my Pack over something that might not be required.

But, if Eve’s markings had told me anything, it was that roots were important. We’d already had to return to my home city and Stefan’s on our path. I couldn’t see that changing any time soon, and I knew the rest of our Pack would have to face their origins as well.

TWENTY

EVE

SEVEN WISHES TO DESTROY THE CROW,

The feathered serpent where Raum rests,

Old ‘souldiers’ shall fatten your ranks.

As I looked at the pictures on my screen, because it was easier than peering down at my belly, I recognized two things.

One, I seriously needed to work out more. My tubby belly distorted some of the letters etched into my skin, and when I thought how all the men seemed to have metal beneath their stomachs, whereas I was all soft and squishy, it made me uncomfortable. Especially when I thought about how all the other girls at Caelum were the same.

Toned and taut was the fashion there.

---