The Ballad of Aramei (22 page)

Rachel is on top of me before I can get up. My body stings and burns as her razor-sharp claws slash away at my skin. Blood from gashes on my face drains into the corners of my mouth. “You don’t belong here!” Rachel shrieks between blows, each sending a hard ringing through my ears and bouncing around inside my skull. “You. Weak. Stupid.
Bitch
!” she yells out and this time I manage to push her off me.

Her body skids across the floor and I leap up so fast that it’s as though she had never hit me, and I lunge at her. Both of us roll across the basement floor in a mass of claws and blood. I can hardly see anything but her raven hair crowding my face and the whites of her eyes looking down at me. I grab her by the back of her hair and swing my body around on top of her, pinning her to the floor.

Just as my skull starts to split and the rest of my ribs start to break as the Change begins to take hold, I feel a set of hands slip underneath my arms from behind and pull me off of Rachel.

It’s Harry. And now more than ever I appreciate his power to calm my emotions, to help me tame my beast and keep it inside. I feel his unnaturally warm hands on my face as he presses his palms down on me and a tingling sensation engulfs my body.
“Calm,”
I hear his voice say in my mind. And I know that he’s doing this as covertly as possible so that no one else in the room will know.

I have to play along.

Within seconds, between Harry’s power and my own desperate efforts, I’m already calm enough that I know I’m not going to Turn. But I pretend for a few moments longer to be struggling with it.

“You can tame it,” Harry says out loud, pretending to be simply my friend who is trying to help. I keep my eyes closed as I lay across the floor with my head in his lap. He carefully strokes my face with his fingertips. “You can do this, Adria. Don’t wolf-out on me, especially not in my lap, alright? These are my favorite jeans.”

I let my breathing steady and then slowly open my eyes. Harry’s looking down at me with a crooked smile.

“Where’s she at?” I say, rising up quickly from the confines of his lap.

Rachel is sitting against the wall across the room, her friends surrounding her. The red-haired girl, squatting in front of her, reaches out to help her up, but Rachel smacks her hands away. “I don’t need your help,” she barks. The girls slowly back away from her and Rachel reaches up and wipes a gush of blood from her mouth. She glares across the room at me, but I don’t care about her right now.

I look over to my right and see my sister gazing at me through a heavily bruised and bleeding face; her long, dark hair is falling down all around her face in bloody strands clumped together and wild.

I run over to her and fall to my knees at her feet.

“Alex,” I say desperately, reaching up to touch her face, but I hold my fingers just inches from her cheek.

I can’t believe that she’s here…and right now I have to put aside my distrust. I know that she’s not like me and that she could be a danger to me, but my human heart won’t let me be anything to her other than her sister, even if only for this initial moment. Tears stream down her face. I’m smiling and frowning and am wholly confused all at the same time.

“I’m sorry, Dria,” she says weakly and I cup her beaten face fully in my hands. “I’m so sorry for everything…,”

A tempest of emotions and questions whirl around inside of me. “What are you doing here?” is the only thing I can pull together to ask.

“She was spying,” Rachel retorts somewhere behind me. “I caught her hanging around the woods behind the house.” She adds after a few seconds, “And she’s a Vargas bitch, so that’s all we need to know.”

I jerk my head around, “
You
, Rachel, are a Vargas bitch! Do I need to chain
you
to this wall and beat you like you beat my sister?!” Hatred swirls heatedly in my eyes and I know she can see it from across the darkness of the room.

Rachel’s expression stiffens. She had no idea that I knew the truth about her, that she had also been Turned by the Vargas family and had been betrayed by them. After a long and tense eight seconds with her eyes boring into mine, Rachel gets up from the floor and walks toward the basement stairs. She stops before she rounds the corner, “But
I’m
not a spy,” she says glancing at Alex next to me, “and not even Isaac will allow her the freedoms that I have.”

“If you go anywhere near her again,” I say with the purest threat in my voice, “I’ll kill you myself. Even if my sister can’t be trusted, she’s mine to deal with—is that understood?”

Every set of eyes in the room falls on Rachel: Harry, the six girls who follow Rachel like the Queen Bee, even Zia, Camilla and Daisy who I am only now realizing are here, too. The silence in the space is so thick that the sound of cars driving down the main road in the far distance is well-defined.

“Yes,” Rachel forces the word through her teeth, “it is understood.”

I am the Alpha female. I have been since I was Turned, but only right now in this eye-opening moment when Rachel submits to me, do I see it.

And it is very…sobering.

Rachel and her minions disappear up the stairs, leaving me with my sister and my friends.

“Make us all leave,”
Harry says telepathically.

Without even glancing at him, or questioning his reasons, I look up at everyone, “I’m sorry, but I need to be alone with her. Please.”

Daisy, already knowing that this is probably Harry’s doing, nods and gestures for Camilla. They leave together.

“If you need me,” Zia says, “just yell.” She looks at Alex once and then at me again with that distrustful look in her charcoal-painted eyes.

“She’s chained to the wall,” I say to Zia, “She won’t be able to hurt me. I’ll be fine.”

Hesitant, Zia finally leaves too, and Harry pretends to follow her up, but I have a feeling that he hasn’t really gone anywhere at all, but only made everyone believe that he had.

“I’m right here,”
he says in my mind, confirming it.

I turn back to Alex. “What happened?” I want to ask if she’s alright. I want to run upstairs and grab a First-Aid kit and some peroxide, but I know she’s fine and that in no time her wounds will heal.

“I’ve…been trying to warn you,” she says and I’m completely suspicious of her. “I’ve been trying for months.”

“Warn me about what?” I sit down in front of her and move away some strands of hair adhered to the side of her face by dirt and blood.

“You won’t believe me, Dria,” she looks away, defeated, letting her head fall to one side near her shoulder. “And I can’t blame you if you don’t.”

“I can’t say that I will,” I whisper, “but I want to hear what you have to say. I’ll at least listen to you.”

She raises her head again and tries to sit up straighter, positioning her back against the wall, the sound of the chains bound around her wrists clanking against the floor.

I won’t remove them. I’m not stupid.

Her blue eyes meet mine and all that I see in them is pain and shame and desperation. I want to hold her and tell her everything will be alright, but I know I can’t do that, either. For a moment she glances around the room as if to make sure we are alone and then she looks back at me.

“Someone in your pack,” she begins, “someone in this house, is a fledgling of Viktor Vargas.”

I don’t say anything, but I just look in at her intrusively, my eyes creasing with perplexity.

She goes on, “I don’t know…it’s really strange….”

“No,” I urge her, “just tell me whatever it is, no matter how strange it might seem.”

She nods a few times, comforted by my assurance.

“This girl met with Viktor several times while I lived with them,” she says, still showing signs of pain, “and Viktor…well, I get the feeling he’s afraid of her—that’s one reason why it’s strange.”

I nod but remain quiet, hoping I won’t have to continuously coax her to go on. I just need her to tell me everything she knows, whether she’s telling the truth, or not.

Her breath is unsteady, but slowly it’s becoming smoother.

“I don’t know everything…I-I don’t know much of anything about her or what she and Viktor are involved in, but…Well, it took a few visits for me to realize that she wants you dead.
You
, Dria…and I don’t care that we’re bound by enemy blood, you’re my sister and that blood connection is stronger.”

Not believing this, I rise to my feet and step away from her, completely out of her reach. Continuously, I shake my head. I’m not going to let her manipulate me with her deadliest weapon: sisterly love.

“Dria, I don’t care if you keep me down here forever,” she says, her voice hardened and trembling with grief, “but I’m telling you the truth. I’m not here to—”

“Just stop,” I say, putting up my hand. “I don’t even want to talk about us, alright? Just tell me what you know about this girl. Who is she, Alex? What does she look like?”

The truth is that I do want to talk about us, but I can’t let her know that. And it’s not the important topic right now as much as I want it to be.

Alex glances down at her bound hands, coiling her fingers around one another, maybe out of nervousness, maybe because she wants me to believe her and I’m not letting her in like she had hoped. She looks back up at me, “She’s not anyone I’ve seen here. She’s tall and strange-looking with bright white-looking eyes and long, white hair. Dria, she’s not human.”

“Don’t say anything,”
Harry says,
“just let her talk, but don’t elaborate about my kind.”

“Okay,”
I say, though I had no intention in bringing up to Alex that this girl is a Praverian, and is probably the one we’re after.

“But you said she was Viktor’s fledgling?”

“Yes,” Alex nods. “I overheard them talking once—no, actually it was a fight. Viktor said something about giving her a gift—the power of a Black Beast—and that she owed him.” Alex laughs a little under her breath, shaking her head. “Oh, she didn’t like that much. They went at it, like fists and claws at it, y’know? Last thing I heard her say was that if anything, Viktor was who owed
her
and that if he ever said anything about her to anyone that she’d kill Aramei.”

Something Eva said once suddenly flashes through my mind and I start to piece this puzzle together. I glance toward the wall, plunged deeply into the memory and then I turn back to my sister, my eyes full of realization. “It was you,” I say, gently pointing towards her, “You were the one that went to Trajan to warn him about someone dangerous living in this house.”

Alex nods. “Yeah, I went to him and he almost killed me.”

“She’s telling the truth,”
Harry says in my mind.
“I haven’t sensed an ounce of dishonesty in her yet.”

Alex goes on:

“I was doing it to protect you,” she says. “I really didn’t care about Aramei, but I knew if I tried to come to you or to Isaac, that no one would believe me. So, I went to Trajan to tell him that Aramei was in danger and that the threat was living inside this house. It didn’t really turn out like I planned. He was going to kill me there in the cabin, but changed his mind and decided to use me instead.”

“Use you how and how did you know for sure the girl lives in this house?”

I squat down in front of her again, but stay out of her reach.

“She said a lot of things that made it obvious,” Alex answers, looking into my eyes. Already her wounds are healing and I see that she’s getting her strength back. “She talked about how she hated sleeping here, pretending to be everyone’s friend when all she wanted was to watch you suffer.”

I turn away from her and look to my left where I assume Harry is standing judging by that odd sensation I feel on that side.

“And the way Trajan planned to use me was that he told me to go back to Viktor and try to get more information about this girl. He wanted me to go back to the cabin and tell him, but I never went. I know he would’ve killed me after I gave him the information.” Alex drops her head; her chin lies near the top of her chest.

After a tense minute, she raises her head to see me again and she just looks across at me like the human sister I grew up with. Those eyes, they look exactly the way they did the night I sat with her under the giant oak tree in Georgia when she was explaining to me why she was going to move out of our house and in with Liz and Brandon. She wanted me to understand that she was only doing it because it had to be done, but she didn’t want to see me get hurt by her leaving. I try to look away from her eyes because I’m afraid I’m going to cave and let her manipulate me with lies. But I can’t look away. I can’t because I know in my heart that this time she really is telling the truth.

“I know I messed up,” she says, her voice trembling again, “I don’t know what was wrong with me. I blame it on the bloodline, because a part of me felt like it wasn’t really me saying those things to you, but the bloodline. It was like my body was possessed by something evil and I couldn’t control it.”

Tears are choking the back of my throat and my eyes are starting to burn. But I don’t say anything. Not yet. I couldn’t get any words out even if I tried.

Alex reaches her hands out to me, pleadingly; her dirty, bloody face contorted by anguish. “You have to believe me, Dria…I had no control over my own mind! It wasn’t until after a few full moons, after I started to adapt, that I started to feel my human emotions again.” Tears streak their way through the dirt on her face, leaving discolored lines down her cheeks. “Finally, I came to my senses and left the Vargas pack in Massachusetts and ran back here.”

She drops her voice and stares out ahead of her. “I’ve been in Hallowell since April. I’ve been sleeping in the barn at Uncle Carl’s house.”

Stunned by this information, my tears stop falling. Now I’m just in shock. Alex has been at the house for the past
four
months
? Oh my God…And how could I not have known? Aunt Bev and Uncle Carl might’ve been in danger all this time and I never knew a thing.

“Harry?”
I say,
“Please tell me you still think she’s telling the truth.”