Page 5 of Caelum

I couldn’t trust that, could I?

A face appeared in the window of the cabin. The woman stared at me, and I realized she hadn’t been speaking to my parents, but to me all along. There was no surprise on her beautiful features, her porcelain skin held no heat from embarrassment, and her eyes showed no mercy or pity.

It was then I realized she’d made me feel revulsion. She’d taken what was there, my inherent distaste for Father Bryan, the knowledge that deep down my parents would sell me to the old man as a means of bettering their lives, and had shoved power into it. My revulsion morphed with my desperation, making me feel panicked. My heart was speeding once more, loading me with the urgency I felt, the sheer need to be away from this place. These people.

People who were supposed to love me but were willing to sell me for a new cabin and a pew closer to the pulpit at church.

The woman’s gaze was fixed on my frozen self as she said, “The school will help her in ways the compound simply cannot. Her control will not last forever. She must decide which she will become.”

My bottom lip trembled.

My controlhadto last forever, because if it didn’t, if I let the moods overtake me…

Dear God, that couldn’t happen.

Not when there were days when I craved blood. When there were others where my skin felt so tight I could burst through it. The days, like today, where I felt a kindred spirit with the stranger when my own voice changed and could suddenly make men stare at me as though I were some kind of treasure, a gift they wanted to unwrap. There were more. Eight distinct moods. Each one more disturbing than the last. And this woman was telling me that the control I had honed to contain these moods wasn’t going to last forever?

The stranger shook her head as though she could read my mind. This time, there was pity, but it was merciless. She wanted my fear, had cultivated it, and she would continue to use my emotions against me until I did as she wanted.

Escape the New Order.

My mouth worked as words surged to the surface and tumbled back as she urged, her voice a song that did nothing to me but had my parents snoring behind her on the settle, “Come with me.”

I knew what true terror felt like. It was with me all the time, after all. But that was nothing compared to now.

I was scared. Not of the woman. Not of her promises. But of myself. Of what I could do.

Of what she was because I was her too.

Though my lips quivered as I stared at the woman, I nodded.

There was no alternative.

ONE

EVE

“Welcome to Atlantis.”

The addition of Merinda’s snort after her comment told me she was joking even though, as I looked at the building that was the sole structure on the island, I wondered if this truly was the legendary place—a legend that had even managed to filter its way to me in the backwater compound I’d been raised in.

It would make sense.

It was where we truly belonged, or so Merinda had assured me yesterday. Where our true selves were revealed and where we could spring forth like we’d been reborn into a whole new world. Of course, that didn’t mean the old one had perished. We’d never be fully accepted, not like we would be on this island, but it was somewhere we could at least blend in without everyone thinking we were crazy.

Having believed myself possessed for the last six years, my relief was gargantuan at learning I wasn’t insane. The revelation that I wasn’t human, on the other hand, had come as a rather large surprise.

“You’re not going to freak out on me again, are you?”

I frowned at Merinda’s choice of words—she spoke so oddly and so quickly that I sometimes found it hard to understand her. “This is a lot to take in,” I replied after a few seconds.

Merinda was five-foot-nine and dressed in clothes that made me wonder how she’d managed to make it onto the compound at all—a blackleather mini skirt, a red bustier, and shoes she’d called high heels that I had no idea how she walked in.

Had any of the Brothers seen her, they’d have called her Jezebel, all while looking at her the way they looked at me on those days when my voice had them circling me like a vulture would a fallen animal in the wilderness.

Lust.

I knew what it was, even if no one had ever outright said it to me.

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