The Ballad of Aramei (45 page)

In a split-second that feels like slow-motion, they charge one another and I instantly lose sight of Daisy. I can no longer tell her apart from the others. The ground shakes beneath my feet as another large group of werewolves come charging over the burning hill, some dive right through the flames and come out the other side, on fire but unfazed. I can smell the burning and singed fur all around me mixed with the burning trees. I can’t control fire. Air is my element and that power is as useless against fire as water is to a flood. I feel so powerless!

There must be more than one hundred beasts fighting below and on every side of me; enormous, beastly bodies charging and crashing into one another like bulls with demonic growls and roars more terrifying than a lion or a grizzly. One beast swats another one across the forest like a fly. The body crashes through dozens of small trees before hitting a wall of rock embedded in the side of an incline. A huge beast in my peripheral vision lunges at a smaller one and takes off its head with one deadly swipe of its massive, razor-sharp claws.

I stumble backward into a tree, gasping for breath. My eyes are wide as they can be in the sockets; my strained lips pulling away from my teeth in recoiling terror.

The severed head thumps against the leaf-covered ground and rolls several feet away from its body. I don’t have it in my heart to see whose head it is. I just can’t do it, even though I can tell that the head and the body both have shifted back into their human form.

I can’t do it. If it was Daisy….

The tree behind me snaps off just above my head and crashes to the ground. I’m left instinctively crouching, covering my head from the falling branches. Finally, I look up to see a colossal beast bearing down on me, blood dripping from its teeth.

I can’t use my powers or Adria will be unprotected!

I start to crawl away on my ass and my hands and just as I hit the top of the hill and find myself falling down the side of it, another beast comes in behind the one after me and backhands it past my rolling body. As my body rolls once, I see it flying across the space and the other beast lunging out after it. I manage to break my fall the rest of the way down the side of the hill when I hit a rock jutting up from the ground. Pain sears through my back and I cry out. The smoke is choking me now; it’s so thick closer toward the bottom of the hill. But beasts are everywhere and I can’t figure out which danger is more pressing, them or the raging fires. I just sit here and watch the slaughter, holding on dearly to Adria in my mind and hoping that by some chance I can figure out who is who out there so that I can help them. Even if I can only make out which one of them is Daisy.

I should’ve known not to leave the cave and that I would be making everything harder on Adria and Daisy and myself.

I watch in horror as more beasts are taken down, as more are killed and their beastly bodies give way to their naked human forms as they succumb to death. Tears coat my eyes, but I can’t actually cry. I’m too much in shock for tears and my power over Adria is diminishing. My mind keeps going back to her, seeing her body lying helpless behind the rock. I feel her struggling against me, pressing her mental hands into the deepest recesses of my brain.

Suddenly, Adria’s face snaps out of my mind as my body is sent hurtling through the air. At first, I think I’ve been hit in the stomach because there’s so much searing pain there, but then I realize I’m hurtling because I’m being carried and the pain is coming from a beast’s massive arm tight around my waist. It feels like my ribs are pressing down on my lungs, the beast is holding me so securely.

But it’s not Daisy. I would know if it were her being this close.

I start to panic.

“It’s Raul,”
a voice says in my mind and I realize it’s coming from the beast racing with me through the forest.
“Protect Adria!”
And that’s the last thing I hear as he drops me hard on the ground several feet from the cave entrance and hurries away just as quickly, out of sight.

They’ve switched sides…Raul and his men have sided with us!

The realization numbs me, but gives me hope.

I crawl on my hands and knees closer to the cave and all along the way the ground rumbles and shakes as beasts bound through the forest violently like a stampede of buffalo. Trees—full-grown scaling trees—fall all around me, crashing down against the earth from both the fires and the violence. Plumes of smoke rise high into the sky and smoke crawls its way across the forest bed, making it harder to see even six feet in front of me. But it’s also starting to rain and if I believed in God, I would think it was a miracle because the rain couldn’t have come at a better time to help put out the fires. No lightning and no thunder, just a steady, heavy downpour of cold rain. Already my clothes are soaked and my hands are muddy as I continue to push myself toward the cave entrance, but now that the rain is taming the smoke, I can get to my feet and run again.

I push myself up and just as I reach the cave entrance, Trajan appears in front of me and embeds his boot in my chest, knocking the breath from me and me on my ass many feet away. My back hits something; it could be a tree or rock, I don’t know, but it snaps Adria almost completely from my power. I hold on to her as tightly as I can. I can’t let her fight him. He will kill her.

Trajan says nothing to me as if I’m as insignificant as an insect, and his tall, menacing figure clad in an old leather trench coat and leather boots, disappears into the darkness of the cave.

My head is spinning. I can hardly breathe or see straight or think straight, but I know I have to do something.

I shut my eyes and let my head relax against whatever it was that I hit and I calm myself. The sounds of the battle go on all around me: the growls, the roars, the howls, bones breaking, flesh ripping, teeth gnashing, and beasts dying. I hear the fires sizzling as the rains pound on the flames and I hear Trajan’s footsteps echoing off the cave walls as he makes his way inside. Every little sound is amplified in my head as if I’m a werewolf, too, and somehow have their magnified sense of hearing.

But I can’t focus on anything anymore, not when I have to localize all of my efforts into Adria’s mind, using all of my power to tame her beast and keep her from Turning.

My God…she is
so
powerful….

My chest shudders to a halt and I take one more deep breath and do the only thing I know to do: I envision Adria’s death. I picture Trajan finding her out in the wide open because my power is no longer strong enough to hold her back and keep her hidden behind the cave walls. I picture her facing Trajan in her last moments.

And then I see him kill her….

ISAAC

34

TRAFFIC AND STOPLIGHTS AND light poles rocket by me like long, rods of light snaking through some infinite space beyond. Buildings and houses and churches and gas stations look like nothing more than one-dimensional structures sprawled out across the landscape; those closest to me I don’t even see, I’m moving so fast. I have to get into the mountains. I have to get to Adria before my father does.

And when my heart tries to tell me that I’m too late, I have to stop myself from reaching inside my chest and ripping it out just to cease its sacrilegious cries.

I push on harder and faster, feeling the earth grind beneath my feet each time my boots thrust against the ground. We rarely get tired and we rarely ever feel the effects of exhaustion when running, but right now and for the first time in my life, I feel it. I feel every muscle in my body tightening beyond their capabilities in this form. I feel my bones heavy with enervation and excruciating pain. I feel the blood surging so hard through my veins that I wonder if my heart might explode.

But I just push harder.

Every town and small city I run through is nothing but a blur, a stain seared into the back of my mind. Several parked cars I know I destroyed when I covered their distance, using their hoods and tops as a means to propel me farther into the air as I leapt onto a train bridge just beyond them. And from the bridge, I find myself dashing into the outskirts of the mountain as I speed lightning-fast through the first layers of trees.

Deeper into the mountain I run, only picking up speed instead of slowing down when for any split-second my mind attempts to tame my legs. I defy all reason; cast aside anything that might hold me back from getting to her in time.

I smell smoke.

And by now I’m running so recklessly fast that it is by sheer luck that I don’t run smack into something and crush my skull flat. Because I have tossed away my reason and supernatural instincts and have traded them for full and uninhibited speed.

I smell death.

My heart sinks like a stone and tears choke me. But I keep running and the closer I get the more death that I smell.

But I can’t run that fast anymore.

The world funnels back into my sight all around me as my pace begins to slow. Bodies. There are bodies lying naked and bloody and dead, everywhere. I try not to look at their faces, because I can’t bear it. My fists tighten at my sides as I run past them; blood oozes from the palms of my hands. My mouth is open, seeking breath that my lungs aren’t getting anywhere else. My eyes burn from searing tears and choking smoke and the reality of the death surrounding me. My vision is fogging.

Smoke rises from the blackened earth where a fire had recently burned. Pockets of burning brush are still aflame here and there, but quietly going out as the rain continues to lick them. My eyes glimpse the extent of the damage stretching father than I can force myself to see in this moment. I press on, stumbling through scorched trees and past more bodies and I inadvertently see that one of them is my sister, Elizabeth. She lies naked against the wet ground, her body twisted horrifically as if her back had been snapped in two and the only thing holding it together is her flesh.

I push past her, trying to hold down the wailing scream that wants to force itself from my lungs.

I stumble to the front of the cave and fall against the opening, thrusting my hands against the slick wet rock as I try to hold my body upright and the pain and exhaustion catches up to me.

I sniff the air and I can smell Adria inside.

I can smell my father….

I stop long enough—two seconds—to catch my breath and I run into the cave and through the snaking tunnel until I burst out the other side and into the main room.

When I see the two of them there, I feel my body trying to move, but my mind is trapped between my conscience and my will. I can’t move and I can’t find my voice or my heart. My blood has become like acid in my veins. My heart has stopped. It utterly died the second I saw Adria lying dead upon the massive stone table.

My father sits at the head in the high-back chair and he looks across at me with absolutely no emotion in his face.

I’m shaking from the inside, but I still can’t move. Tears are burning down my face. My voice is still caught somewhere within me.

Adria lies with her legs hanging over the side of the table, one arm twisted behind her head, broken, the other curled up near her chin. Her eyes are open and lifeless. Blood seeps from her nostrils and her partially-opened mouth, pooling into a puddle below her lips. The lower-half of her body is warped as though my father’s hands had been around each end of her and he twisted her like a dishrag until every bone and muscle in her body snapped.

It feels like my eyes are trying to shut, but they can’t. Shock and anguish have completely numbed my body and my mind. I feel like all that I can move are my eyes and even those I don’t think I’m actually moving myself.

“You would have done the same,” Trajan—because I can never again call him my father—says from the chair.

I look up, though I never recall actually moving my head, to see him from the chest-up over the top of Adria’s body.

“Now you know the true complexity of the kind of pain that love can cause.”

I can’t speak. I’m still shaking from the inside-out; my bones feel like metal, my muscles like burning hot mush, tightening and constricting in some inner struggle to keep me on my feet.

Trajan reaches out his hand and touches a lock of Adria’s dark-brown hair. I watch his bloody fingers move slowly through the length of it.

I still can’t move. Am I even really here? Is this real? This can’t be real…I-I can’t be without her. She can’t be dead….

Trajan stands from the chair and looks down upon Adria.

I fall against the rock wall behind me, finally gaining some sense of control over my own body. Tears rock my chest and for a moment, crying is all that I can bring myself to do. And then I scream out amid the cave walls and my vision turns very dark as my eyes shift color.

Trajan looks across the room at me still showing no signs of emotion. Nothing. I could fully shift right here, right now and something tells me that he wouldn’t react to it at all. He doesn’t care. The only thing, the only person in this world that he cared about is dead and gone. Aramei is dead and gone. And Adria, the one who took Aramei away from him, is dead and gone…he has nothing else to live for.

No…I can’t be without her!

I scream out again, pulling my fisted hands back against the stone and hitting it with such force that it quavers loosely from the surrounding wall and falls in pieces around me. “BASTARD!” I cry and rise to my feet; my voice booms around the walls of the cave.

And then from the corner of my eye, I thought for a moment that the room…blinked. The sheer strangeness of it catches me off-guard. It happens again, but this time even Trajan notices. He looks up from Adria’s body and at me with a vague sort of curiosity in his eyes.

Then suddenly, Adria’s body…disappears, leaving us both dumbfounded and scrambling inside our minds for something to make sense of what just happened.

It hits us both at the same time as our wrathful, vengeful eyes lock from over the table and across the room.