Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) (9 page)

             
“I’ll manage,” I said as I followed him upstairs. I could hear the music pumping from the bar as we exited through a back door.

             
Sitting in the alley waiting for us was a Harley Davidson Motorcycle in complete black. Even the chrome was blacked out, and not a shiny black, but a matte that would fade into the night, not even throwing off a reflection of a street light.

             
He gave me a helmet even though he went without. I got on behind him, trying to keep some space in between us, but he grabbed my hands and moved them around his sides and into his jacket pockets. It felt strangely intimate to have my arms encircling him.

             
We took off, swerving in and out of traffic at a break neck pace, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. All thought’s of keeping my distance fled as my arms circled tight against him and my face pressed into his back. His body was giving off so much heat I barely felt the cold.

             
The street sounds had started to fade and the jarring bumps had increased so I knew we had left the city. The speed made me nervous so I still kept my eyes closed. I could feel twigs whizzing past grazing my legs and arms.

             
As I felt us slow to a stop, I finally opened my eyes and looked at where we were. We had pulled up under a massive oak, and I could see the full moon blazing through the canopy of branches above, its light reflecting against the patches of snow on the ground.

             
He signaled for me to follow him. He was walking briskly and it was hard to maintain the same pace, he had to continually pause for me when I lost ground. As we walked, I could just make out a small flickering light in between the trees in the distance. The air had the faint smell of smoke.

             
“Is that where…”

             
He turned back to me, holding a finger to my lips, and shook his head slightly. Maybe I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. I decided at that very moment, that from this point forward in my life, I would trust my gut. My gut told me Caden wouldn’t bring harm to me intentionally. My gut wasn’t so clear on anything else about him though.

             
We had been walking for about ten minutes, getting closer and closer to the fire. I could now see the top of a large flame reaching up wildly into the night, flickering beautifully against the starry sky. Once we got about seventy feet away, I could see the silhouettes of bodies appearing like black smudges against their flaming backdrop. The fire had to be at least twenty feet across and was monstrously high.

             
Caden grabbed my arm and brought me with him to a spot just beyond the clearing. We crawled low into some shrubs just out of sight, and I looked to him, asking with my eyes, what it was we were looking at?

             
He silently mouthed, “just wait,” to me. I turned back to watch as a group of about thirty men circled around the flame. Scanning the faces, I saw that one of them was Carl and my breathing hitched a notch quicker.

If we were discovered, there would be no way out of this for me. I went from lying perfectly still to frozen.

             
I realized my fear hadn’t even begun once I saw what came next. Two men were walking to the side of the clearing out of view. When they came back, they had a struggling man in between them. It looked like he was in his early thirties. They slowly walked closer to the huge fire, dragging the struggling man with them. The other men started to holler and cheer them on as they formed a closed circle around the fire.

             
Sympathy overrode my own fear and I frantically grabbed at Caden motioning that we should try to do something to stop it. With a stone look upon his face, he shook his head no. I couldn’t just lay there and watch the man burn to death so I started to get up, but I couldn’t. Caden, anticipating my movement, wrapped a hand around my waist pulled me close to him pinning me partially beneath his own body. I had no choice left but to be a witness to the carnage.

             
The two men slowly stepped into the flames dragging the struggling man with him. What I heard next would forever be etched into memory. Howling screams of agony, that didn’t sound human, screeched through the air and the smell of burning flesh was so thick I thought I would choke on it. But, that wasn’t the end of it. I could see the two other men standing in the blazing fire, holding the man’s still struggling burnt flesh and they both had their heads thrown back in laughter. Their clothing had fallen off into ashes and they stood naked but unharmed, holding the burning man until there was nothing left but a charred skeletal frame.

             
When they finally did step out of the flames, they stood naked with dark smudges of ash and what I sickeningly realized was some of the remnants of the dead man. What were these things? They weren’t human, of that I was now convinced. At least in this, Caden had been telling me the truth.

I motioned to Caden that I was ill and I must have looked the part because he readily removed his weight from me. I crawled backward from our hiding spot and ran as far as I could before I bent forward and emptied my stomach of all its contents.

             
I saw his boots next to me.

             
“Can you walk?”

             
I nodded my head yes, but I couldn’t yet find the strength to actually move. His arm went around my waist to assist me. When it quickly became clear I was going to slow him down he swept me up in his arms. We moved quicker with him carrying me then when I was just following him and we managed to get back to the bike in what felt like seconds, instead of the ten minutes the trip had initially taken.

             
“Will you be able to stay on the back of the bike?”

             
“Yes, I’m fine. Let’s just go.” I wasn’t fine. I knew it and so did he, but I didn‘t want to stay here a second more than necessary. My hands shook as I reached around him. I was glad for the roar of the engine as we took off back to the bar. I hoped it hid the sound of my crying. Now that I was away from the immediate danger of being discovered, the force of what I had just seen struck me hard.

             
This is what was coming for me? I was doomed. They weren’t even human. What could I do and where could I possibly even go? Maybe to Canada or Europe? Mexico? We made it back to the bar before I had decided if it would be an island in the Mediterranean, or if I’d be safer in some cold tundra in Russia.

             
He left the bike in the back and we went inside. He was right, I didn’t want to know anymore, but now I felt like I had to know.

             
“Why didn’t you help him?” I accused him the moment we were inside the building.

             
“It wasn’t my fight.”

             
“They burned him alive!”

             
“That man wasn’t an innocent angel.”

             
“It doesn’t matter. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

             
“And how do you know? Who are you to decide? He was a dirty cop that had tortured and killed people for them. I don’t fight for people like that.”

             
“If he worked for them, why did they do that?”

             
“I don’t know, but it’s not my problem.”

             
The steam completely went out of me. We made it down into his place and I collapsed onto the couch. “I have to leave here. I’ve got to get a visa or whatever it is you get to move to another country and I have to leave.” I knew my voice was on the verge of hysteria.

             
“You can’t outrun this,” he said matter of fact.

             
I turned to look at him as he stood in front of the bar counter while he poured a whiskey.

             
“What is this? What kind of people stand in a fire and don’t get burned?” I couldn’t shake the vision of them standing in the blazing fire. The screams of their victim were still echoing in my brain.

             
“The world isn’t what you think.”

             
Now if that wasn’t the biggest understatement of the year. Nothing that had happened as of late fit into my world.

             
“There are things that would make tonight seem like a boy scout outing. The one thing you have to know is that you are in this now. There is no running, no turning back. When you asked what kind of people they are, that was your first mistake. They aren’t people.”

             
“What are they then?”

             
“They are called Drauths. They are the descendents of demons.”

             
“You’re saying they are the children of the devil?”

             
“No, not the devil, demons, and it’s not offspring like you would think. When a Demon has sex with a human woman very early in her pregnancy, they can corrupt the fetus. Mutate it if you will. It very rarely happens, but when it does it changes the DNA.”

             
My brain started to spin. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he was crazy, but then what human could stand there, laughing in a fire like that? Gruesome thoughts of horned creatures were running through my brain at lightning speed. I wanted to know more, but as it turned out, he was right; I didn’t even know what to ask. Luckily or perhaps unluckily, he continued.

             
“Demons having offspring doesn’t happen often. It only occurs about once every hundred years or so.”

             
“Then how are there so many of these Drauths?”

             
“Drauths live for thousands of years. If that Drauth has a child, you can’t really predict how long it will live, but it’s going to be longer then a normal human life. Some of them that were there tonight weren’t full Drauths. Some are only a quarter or an eighth. They get significantly weaker every generation.”

             
“Why are they so intent on getting me? Why would a Drauth want me? I’m not evil? If anything, I’m really good person. Or at least I try to be.”

             
“This has nothing to do with good or bad. You could be an angel or a mass murderer. It would make no difference.”

             
“Why then?”

             
“This is going to be difficult to hear but Drauths can sense demon blood, or something inhuman, in other beings.” He paused, just looking at me, as if trying to gauge a reaction to something he hadn’t said yet.

             
“I don’t get it?” I did, but I needed to hear it.

             
“You are at least part demon. You’re something else as well, but I can’t get a good read on you.”

             
“Well you’re wrong. I have normal parents. How would you know anyway?”

             
“Lex, things aren’t black and white like you think. You could be the child of a rapist, that doesn’t mean you would be evil.”

             
“A rapist is human at least! You’re trying to tell me I’m not even human!”

             
“You are, just partly, well… at least I think.”

             
“And how do you know this?”

             
He shrugged in a way that didn’t need words. He was one too.

“I’m not. I have two very, very normal parents and absolutely nothing out of the ordinary has ever happened to me. Your weird senses are off! I’m not like you and I’m not like them!”

             
“We aren’t all bad.”

             
“No! I don’t care what you say. I know what I am.”

             
“I can prove it to you. I was hoping to avoid the cheap demon tricks but if we must we must.”

             
“Fine! Prove it.”

             
“Come over here.” He waved me over into the kitchen.

             
Even though he was the same man I had wrapped my arms around less than an hour ago, I now felt the need to keep a greater distance apart.

             
He reached across the distance and grabbed my wrist, pulling me closer to him and he turned on the gas burner to high. He pushed back the sleeve of my shirt and I knew what he was going to do.

             
“Stop, you’ll burn me!”

             
“You’re part demon, you won’t burn.”

             
“Yes, I will!” I pulled at my arm, but it was clear that I would pull it out of its socket before I was able to get away from his grip. “Please, I believe you, I swear!” That was a whopper of a lie and he knew it.

             
He moved my hand right into the center of the flame and pressed it against the grill of the burner. I screamed, and kept screaming, as tears rolled down my cheeks.