Chapter One
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
Elizabeth Cromwell snapped the book shut when she read the line. Jane Eyre had always been one of her favorites. Along with all the women that wrote proper dark romance in the gothic eras, full of powerful women pretending to be male. Elizabeth lifted her chin and looked over the stale, ancient library she’d been trapped in for over a year. The decrepit convent which housed a secret order of priests and sisters who combated evil at its core; evil which she knew she’d brought with her when she came to them.
Lonely, desperate, and leaving all her dreams of the future behind—Elizabeth stepped through the heavy oak doors of the convent in Italy and handed her life over to them.
Maybe I should just pretend to be male.
Letting out a strong sigh, she rose from her chair and headed back over to the enormous bookshelves. The library resided on the ground floor, and it was normally icy cold. The cool night of Italy and the stone that built up this place made it the worst, and most calming place in the whole convent.
Elizabeth enjoyed her solace. If she couldn’t go back to school and her friends, she figured she would wallow until she found a way to break this horrible ‘deal’.
A deal that had marked her soul before she’d ever been even a thought on the radar. Then again, wasn’t she fated to exist? Sucking in her bottom lip, she slipped Jane Eyre back in its spot and went back to work. The library housed volumes upon volumes on everything from every translation of the Bible all the way down to exorcisms. She’d exhausted all of her means so far. She’d made a very proud attempt at the age of nineteen to exorcize the devil out of her life.
Elizabeth wasn’t possessed. She was owned. By the purest form of evil known to all of creation—the devil. The Beast had taken every first born female before her. They all went, willing and obedient. They were educated on him, groomed to become his. When their time came at eighteen years of age, they embraced their fate.
Elizabeth was an exception to this ‘deal’.
The moment her parents told her when she was fifteen about the family’s past—how they were so wealthy, and how they maintained wealth through every depression and the rise and fall of the stock market—Elizabeth had been in denial.
Until the first dream.
It wasn’t terrible. She just somehow knew. Deep down inside, Elizabeth knew exactly who the male was visiting her in her dreams. It felt like she was in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. As she got older, the dreams got more intense. He stopped talking and started touching. It was then Elizabeth pushed sleep to only three, four hours a night, if that. She would take powerful antidepressants which seemed to ward him off, and read that fennel plant staved off evil. She started to drink a cup every night before she slept and the dreams stopped.
She felt free. For the first time in two years, hope surged inside Elizabeth.
She should have known better.
College started, and she had a few boyfriends here or there. She was a year off graduating from UCLA when she saw him, leaning against her car. The threat was silent, disturbing, and very real—just the glimmer in his eye, and the wicked smile that curled his lips. So close to a sneer of triumph. He’d found a way around her teas and herbs, and had come to claim her.
She drove back home to Malibu that day and demanded her parents do something, anything. They called a priest and performed her first of three exorcisms. The devil came to her that night in her dreams. He popped up as her professor in one of her classes. He knew every which way to get to her and it was then she realized she needed to discover more.
Forum searches on the web led her to a faceless friend.
Jared253.
A religious studies minor, majoring in anthropology.
Elizabeth never knew the guy’s actual name. He’d helped her through everything she was going through. He even found this convent, where she now lived.
Reaching for a large, rough-looking tome from the mid-shelf, she went back to her seat. The steaming cup of tea looked delicious in that moment. Elizabeth breathed in the calming steam of chamomile. She’d given up on the fennel when the devil started making appearances in her life.
Flipping through the seemingly endless pages, she scanned through all the known documentations of deals with the devil. They had mountains of these books. It would appear that nearly every successful person this earth had, more than willingly, signed over their souls and that of their families to the devil. Her family seemed to be the only one that signed over the females. They were his breeding ground. His whores.
Elizabeth knew one thing for sure. She was not going to be a slut to the devil. She was her own person with her own soul. Some fucktard from the past couldn’t make a choice for her future. Her life was her life. She was nearly done with her education. She was majoring in computer sciences and she wanted to get a normal job, have a normal relationship, and have babies—babies that wouldn’t be owned by the devil.