The Ballad of Aramei (41 page)

“I’m proud of what you did,” I say as I make my way across the dimly-lit room towards her. I sit down next to her on the edge of the mattress pillow. “It took a lot of courage and compassion to do it.”

She stares at the dancing flame cast upon the wall next to her; the candle it comes from is nearby on the floor.

I reach out and brush a lock of hair away from her face.

“I know it had to be done,” she says, her voice distant. “And I feel that even though she’s gone, she’s grateful.”

Finally, she turns her gaze on me; the flickering light of the candle flits across her irises making the blue of her eyes appear faintly golden. She sniffles away a few lingering tears. “It’s just something I have to get myself through. And I will. In time.”

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of strength in my girl. She’s been through so much and is going through so much more that sometimes I can’t comprehend her strength, like it’s something entirely foreign to me.

She
should be Alpha. She’s stronger than I could ever be.

I crawl over and move around to lie behind her, my knees fitted into the backs of hers, my arm draped over her arm where I knit my fingers between hers to hold her hand against her side. Her free hand comes around to touch my face. I shut my eyes and kiss her fingertips.

“If we die,” she says and my eyes creep open, “do you think we’ll still know each other in the afterlife…if there is an afterlife?”

I nestle my face into her neck and squeeze her hand. “I believe that no matter what happens, or where we go, or if there’s an afterlife, that we’ll always be connected. Not even death can make me forget you, or forget that I love you.”

I feel her smile. I don’t have to see it.

A quiet few seconds pass between us and then she turns her body just enough to see my face.

“Promise me that if we die, you’ll look for me,” she says and kisses my lips.

Her words wrench my soul, but I hold my composure and nod gently, looking into her eyes. “I promise.”

I take her into my arms and kiss her. And then I make love to her as if it were the last time.

~~~

Half of us leave the cave by midday. Alexandra, Rachel, all four of my sisters and Harry stay behind with Adria. At first, the girls were offended, mainly Rachel and Alexandra who didn’t hold back their opinions about how ‘leaving all the girls in the safe cave’ was ‘totally sexist’ and us guys should ‘really pull our male egos out of our asses’. But Daisy spoke up to diffuse the situation:

“You really think my brother feels that way about you?”

“Umm, yes?” Rachel said with a venomous sneer. “We’re the ones told to hide in the stupid cave while they—” her hand shot out beside her to point at us, “—get to go out into the danger zone. It’s bullshit.”

Daisy smirked and rolled her eyes. “Think about it for a second: Isaac would never leave Adria with the weakest of the pack.”

Adria smiled. “We’re all female. Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

Rachel’s sneer melted into a proud grin.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said, changing her tune. “Okay, maybe he’s not so sexist, after all.”

Women. The rest of us gladly left the cave and them to their girl power.

~~~

We arrive back in Hallowell before dark and head to The Cove on the Kennebec River to meet up with the other packs. Fortunately, we didn’t have to make the trip to New Jersey to find Treven and his pack. After calling three of Treven’s last known phone numbers, by the fourth, his mate, Isis answered.

Treven told me that day he brought one of his pack members, Darren, to challenge Nathan for control of the Maine territory, that if I ever needed him for anything that he’d be there.

And he held true to his word.

“Isaac,” Treven announces enthusiastically as Nathan and I get out of the Jeep in the Cove parking lot.

He’s a tall, broad-shouldered black guy almost as huge as Big Raul.

Treven grabs my hand into a fist and we pull toward each other, patting each other’s backs with our free hands. He does the same with Nathan and then Xavier and Sebastian as they get out of Xavier’s red and black Dodge Challenger.

“So it’s finally going down?” Treven says, turning his attention back to me.

I nod.

He drops the greeting smile and joins the rest of us in the serious moment, shaking his head in that knew-it-was-coming sort of way.

Isis, Treven’s girlfriend, waves at us from their car.

Six more vehicles pull into the lot; all of them from Treven’s pack by the way they greet each other when they get out.

“Look, man,” I say to Treven, going right into the inevitable, “I just want to say up front that I won’t hold it against you if you don’t want any part of this—you know what my father is capable of and I don’t want to leave anyone with any delusions.”

Three more vehicles arrive.

Treven’s big, toothy smile returns. “I wouldn’t miss this, man,” he says and his voice rises so that everyone, even those walking toward us can hear him. “Over six hundred years of fucking tyranny—I may not have been here for most of it, but…man, did you know that your father killed
my
grandfather?”

No, I did not know that….

Treven goes on, still smiling, “I’ve never held anything against you or your brothers—been kinda’ waitin’ on this day, to be honest. I think everybody knew it would be one of his own sons who would dethrone him.”

“The only thing about this that I don’t like,” someone from the growing crowd says, “is that it took so long!”

A tall, blond-haired guy speaks up, “Your father scares the shit outta me,” he says with his hands buried in his pockets, “but count me in.”

“So why now?” Treven says and all of the voices carrying around on the air become still.

Nathan and I glance over at one another, knowing the answer might not be what any of them are prepared for.

I take a very deep breath, “The truth?”

“Yeah, out with it,” Treven says.

“Adria killed Aramei.”

The smile drops from Treven’s face and every other face staring back at me just freezes in a shocked mosaic of wide eyes and open mouths and immobile limbs.

It takes Treven all of twelve seconds to blink. “You’re fucking serious?” He turns his chin in a sidelong glance.

Isis gets out of the car and struts over in her high-heeled black boots. “What did you just say?” She’s not smiling anymore, either, and her heavily-ringed finger points upward at me.

“Isis, baby, don’t do this,” Treven says, taking her by the waist.

“No, Trev,” she argues, pushing his hand away, “if he said what I think he said, this won’t be a battle, it’ll be a
massacre
—the Sovereign is crazy enough without
this
, but it bein’ about the murder of his
wife
?” She draws in a deep, abrasive breath and shakes her head over and over.

“It doesn’t matter how or why it’s happening,” Nathan speaks out beside me, “because it’s going to happen no matter what and you all can either fight with us, or die fighting with him.”

It sounded like a threat to me, but I’m not going to rebuke it.

“Look,” I say, putting up my hand—(Isis hates me now; if looks could kill)—like I said, I won’t hold it against you if you don’t fight, but Nathan’s right: if you choose his side over mine, we will
treat
you and
kill
you as one of them.”

Isis pushes herself angrily away from Treven and walks back to the car. “Lunatics,” she hisses just before the car door closes off her voice.

Two more cars enter the lot and one giant monster truck.

“We’re with you,” Treven says with a solid, devoted nod. He reaches out his hand to me and we shake on it.

In the next couple of hours, the other packs and their Alpha’s arrive and we go through the same riotous defense as we did with Treven. Rhode Island decided to back out when they heard that it was because of Aramei’s ‘murder’. But I won’t call them cowards for it. The truth is, they’re right to back out. Nothing like this has happened since my father killed my grandfather for the throne over six hundred years ago. Some have tried. All of them have died trying.

If it were me in Rhode Island’s shoes, I couldn’t back down. But I still can’t bring myself to hold it against them.

Maybe this just proves they’re the sane ones.

HARRY

31

WOW. FATE THREW ME a friggin’ curve ball, that’s for sure. But y’know what? I have to admit that I’m glad it turned out the way it did.

Yeah. I’m glad….

I love Adria; she’s like a sister to me, and being what I am has never been easy, especially when it comes to the humans we become involved with, Charge or not. It’s one of our biggest weaknesses: the relationships we develop. We’re born into the human world the same way as any other human, we go through diapers and those kick-ass baby swings that play music—my mom swears by that contraption; said it knocked me out in under a minute whenever she’d put my screamin’ ass in one. We bond with our ‘foster’ families like anybody else and when that day comes that we go through our Becoming and learn all over again what we really are and why we’re here, it rarely makes us less human emotionally. Those bonds with our families and friends never go away.

This is why Zia turned Dark.

I feel bad for Zia, I really do, because I can totally relate and understand and emphasize with her.

It almost happened to me once. I was fifteen-years-old, the bastard son of King Edward VII and Lady Susan Pelham-Clinton. In
that
life, I was born in 1871. My mother, Susan, died when I was four, but I didn’t know she was my real mother until much later. The midwife who delivered me was who cared for me and commissioned to act as my mother. I loved her deeply. She was later murdered—it was very hard for me. But that was just one of my many pasts, the only one where I almost went rogue, myself. So yeah…like I said, I can understand Zia’s pain.

If only we weren’t cursed to be what we are, we could live one life like everybody else and not be subject to a thousand lifetimes of pain.

Just picture it; you go through life watching people you love die, you go through unimaginable hardships and grief, you grow old and inevitably tired of living because that’s what humans do. They live one life.
One
. Not me. When I Become, when I ‘wake up’ in each new life, I don’t have the luxury of forgetting all of the past lives that I’ve lived, all of the horrific deaths that claimed me and thrust me into the
next
life so that I can just die all over again. I remember
everything
. Every last infinitesimal detail: the guillotine that took off my head in 1794, my lost battle with tuberculosis in 1906, Amelia Winters, the girl I fell in love with in 1919. We were as young as I am now though I long outlived her. And I outlived the daughter I had with Sarah Marie Devereaux about fifty years ago. Of course, I was someone entirely different then, at least on the outside. And my birth certificate, which I earned, by being born, said: Edmond James Belrose. And my hair was
blond
! Hey, I like my girls blond, but it’s definitely not my personal hair color of choice.

Anyway, a person, a
Soul
, even one as powerful as mine, can only take so much.

And a lot like Evangeline, I’m getting tired of it.

Sometimes, a small part of me kinda wants to hop inside one of Minna Abrahamsen’s jars, or speak aloud the name of my kind so one of the others will find and reap me once and for all.

But I have Daisy now and things don’t feel so lonely anymore.

But back to the whole fate-threw-me-a-curveball thing; Adria was supposed to sire Aramei. I didn’t lie to her when I told her that Aramei was special and would live through the transformation despite her mother being killed by it so long ago. Aramei would’ve become werewolf; the most powerful Black Beast their secret world would have ever known.

Unfortunately, she would’ve also been a hundred times more unstable than she had been for the past two hundred years, and unpredictably dangerous beyond imagining. Trajan would not have been able to control her and inevitably, that would’ve been the cause of the war.

But this…wow…I never thought that Adria could actually
kill
Aramei. I saw her future, the way it was
supposed
to be, the way my kind
needed
it to be. But the fate of our Charges are never written in stone. They can easily take another path and it’s our duty to make sure they don’t. Because my kind have an agenda and our Charges are the keys to fulfilling it.

It’s why Minna Abrahamsen and the rest of the Harvesters hate us so much, why it’s their lifelong burden to reap us all and to stop us….

“Harry?” Adria says standing over me. “You seem really tense.” She lowers herself into a squatting position in front of me.

I sit on the cool stone floor with my back against a jagged piece of rock and my knees drawn up, my wrists propped on the tops of them. I force a goofy smile that I know isn’t fooling her.

“I’m nervous, too,” she says and then sits down fully, crossing her legs.

“I—.” she starts to say, but holds onto the thought for a second longer, “—I feel like I should be apologizing to you, but…I’m not sure if I should. I don’t really understand any of this. What you are and what I, being your Charge, has to do with…well, anything. I-I, well—.”

“I know, Adria, and it’s not your fault. You’re right; you shouldn’t apologize.”

“But I didn’t do what you wanted me to do.”

She looks genuinely sad, but not necessarily regretful.

I smile and nudge the edge of her shoe with the toe of my boot.

A faint grin cracks in her face, but then it dissolves quickly.

“Harry,” she says carefully, “do you really think Aramei would’ve lived if I infected her?”