Page 92 of Caelum

He was silent for a long time until he rasped, “What happens when we hit twenty-one, Eve?”

I frowned. “Our one soul cannibalizes the others.”

“Exactly. A Ghoul is a creature with no dominant soul and, as such, is our enemy and needs to be destroyed.”

For a second, the words wouldn’t penetrate, and when they did, my mouth worked because I knew I had eight souls, not seven like everyone thought. And if I was weird in that, what if I was weird when I turned twenty-one, exactly like I’d been imagining?

My plan had always been to escape Caelum at some point. Once I’d figured out how the real world worked, I’d intended to find a way back onto the plane that had brought me here. I hadn’t known how I’d do it exactly, but desperate times required desperate measures.

But, if what Damon was saying was true, even if I did escape, there was no escaping myself.

I reached up and rubbed my temple. “What happens if you have more than one soul?”

“You become a monster.”

“The portal… it makes sure you only have one soul, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. “It does.”

“And if you don’t, what? It eradicates you?”

Another nod. But it wasn’t his silence that was irritating me; it was the way he was looking at me. That sadness was back. Was it aimed at me or was it aimed at someone he’d known who’d turned into a Ghoul?

Confused, I asked, “Why do you consider them monsters?”

“At the moment, each soul plays nice. They let you adapt, and they want you to evolve with them. So each day, you get to handle one of them. Each day, you get to experience the quirks of the soul you’re handling. Of course, you don’t get the full hands-on experience, like with a Were youdon’t shift, and when you’re a Vampire, you need blood but you have to use a knife to cause the cut, but it’s enough. It’s a learning curve.

“After you’re eighteen, the souls converge en masse. One of them ekes it out as the dominant one, and over the next three years, that dominant soul begins to take power. The Academy is a good place for our kind. We’re safe here, at peace. It’s a good place for that to happen. But in the outside world?” He shook his head. “It’s not so easy. Creatures who deal with this alone are usually eating crap loaded with chemicals and are taking medication for their supposed mental health issues.” He shrugged. “It messes with them. The battle for dominance just doesn’t happen, and instead, all seven souls just rage on endlessly. They say that it’s equivalent to a cerebral war.”

“But they survive… Obviously, it doesn’t kill them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be at war with us. So, how?”

“They eat living flesh.”

Having watched a show about a forensic pathologist who was a zombie with Nestor the past few days, I blurted out, “They’re zombies?”

“It’s a name for them, but they’re not. They’re Ghouls. They rely on human flesh because humans are grounded in a way we’re not. They’re connected to this Earth in ways we’ll never understand. The more flesh they consume, the quieter the din in their head is. The longer they live. The smarter they are.

“Ghouls can live as long as we do so long as we never catch them. They live in nests with others of their kind and run around causing destruction wherever they go.”

My mouth wobbled as I contemplated what he was saying. Would that be me? Would that be my ultimate end? A monster?

I wanted to ask Damon about my eighth soul, wanted to ask about its bizarre power, but I’d seen no mention of it in any of the textbooks. And I’d scoured them for knowledge, reading them like each one would be burned and forever forbidden to me so that I could attempt to be on the same level as my peers, but also so I could begin to understand why I could do what I could do.

But this? There was no amount of wishing or praying or dreaming that the truth would go away.

I was different.

I knew that.Was just fortunate that it was still hidden from everyone else. Barely. My eighth soul had already been busy at work, but no one had noticed.

Yet.

If I was different before I hit twenty-one, I saw no reason for that to change after.

My future had started to appear bright, but now?

It was darker than I’d ever anticipated, and even though knowledgewaspower, I wished I’d never let this conversation go down this road because the options open to me were suddenly far bleaker than they’d been even back at the compound.

Even as fear began to turn my blood to ice, I realized something. Somethingmajor.

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