The Bell of Freedom (King and human romance)✔

Chapter Sixteen

I wake up panting and breathless against something soft and uncomfortable. Arabella's face is stuck to my mind, her descent towards the ocean, her desperate need to kill me. I can't remember what happened after that. Did I pass out? I sit up, looking around to see a long stretch of beach. I'm outside a cave entrance, the sun is low and I can hear the waves from the ocean meeting the shoreline. Cain is standing in the water with his back to me, I use the rock from the cave to pull myself up and I check I'm not going to pass out again before I start walking over to him.

As I get closer, I notice that he has the blade in his hand. He's staring down at it, deep in thought about something. He suddenly shakes his head and turns around. Our eyes meet and I fold my arms before sitting down in the sand. My head is still aching and I rub my temple as he slides down next to me.

"I haven't done it yet," he says, as though I should know what he's talking about. "I've been here hours just staring at it and. . . I can't bring myself to do it."

"Collect her souls?" I ask.

"Collect her soul," he says, scowling back to the ocean. "Arabella may have seemed cruel to you but she was important to me. She was right. I'd kill my own to protect you. It's very difficult to decide what kind of world she deserves."

"Do you have to take her?" I say.

"What do you mean?"

"Can't you just let them go?" I whisper. "Release them all?"

"I've never considered doing that," he says, glancing back to the blade. "I've always collected them."

"I knew some of the souls in there," I say, tears welling in my eyes as I picture their faces, the last time I ever saw them, embraced them, told them everything would be alright. "They've been suffering for a long time and you can set them free."

"Do you think there's something better out there for them than my worlds?" he asks me.

"I don't know, Cain. Nobody knows. That's the point. Maybe wherever they go, there will be family there, familiar faces. Ancestors. Maybe they'll end up exactly where they should be."

"Arabella too," he says, his gaze shifting back to the blade. "When I bid for new souls, I have to trade old ones. I have to cast them out of my worlds to keep feeding. I hate that part of my existence."

"Then why do you make it a law?"

"Because otherwise the humans would be extinct by the end of the year," he says. "Bidding is the only way to keep things fair, to stop the most powerful from consuming all the pure and to stop the less powerful from rising to higher positions. It's the way we've always done things, just like humans bought food with money. Nothing is free or there would be chaos."

"A few days ago, you said that you didn't know if Bella was deserving of one of your worlds. What did you mean by that?"

He smiles to himself and picks up some sand that falls through his fingertips. "Not every soul that I consume gets a world. When I first landed here I was too hungry to care about good or. . . 'evil' as you put it, I killed as many as I could because I couldn't stop. But over time, I became more aware of human desires and those that were selfish or selfless. I stopped killing as quickly and dragged the process out over months to really know the human I was consuming inside and out, because I learned that environment changes can alter personalities. I wanted to give them at chance. But Bella is selfish to the core, she doesn't care about anyone, she doesn't even care that her parents died. When I feed from her, all I can taste is her desire to have a world where she gets anything she wants. This has become quite common with many of the pure souls."