The Ballad of Aramei (The Darkwoods Trilogy 3)

“You came here for bread cake?” Aramei tries to hide the smile in her voice. She’s weary of him, but isn’t ready to dismiss him just yet.

Viktor’s charming close-lipped smile widens as Aramei finally looks at him, but her eyes dart off here and there every few seconds to keep from meeting his.

“Bread cake,” he says, “and a beautiful young woman.”

Aramei’s body stiffens and she gazes downward at her muddy sandals.

“I do apologize, Milord,” she says, “but I believe all of the women who make bread cake here are too old for your tastes.”

“You do not make bread cake?” he says with hidden, yet obvious meaning behind his inquiry.

Aramei bows her head and says, “I do, Milord, but….” She looks up toward the top of the hill expecting to see Filipa come running toward her any moment now, but she can’t decide if that’s what she wants or not. Only one man has ever showed interest in her. Aramei is very beautiful, but her father had always been somewhat of a bully towards potential suitors when it came to his daughters. This man, Viktor, somehow gives Aramei the feeling he might not be as hard to scare away.

Viktor waits patiently for her to continue, his face beaming and somewhat dark.

“…I shouldn’t be seen with you, Milord.”

“Why not?” he asks, stepping up closer to her. She takes two steps back to retain the distance. “Is it the woman?”

Aramei looks up again, finally meeting his eyes. “The woman?” she says.

“Yes, the one who pulled you out of my sights just yesterday?”

Aramei smiles bashfully, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers. “Filipa is no woman. She is my sister.”

Viktor coughs a small laugh and Aramei can’t help but join him, realizing too late what she had said.

“Well, I just mean that—”

“She is a man?” Viktor teases her with a very serious face, but Aramei can easily detect the smile behind his fine green eyes.

In the following days, Aramei snuck out to meet Viktor and they walked in the forests together, swam in the lake hidden between the North and South Hills an hour away from the village and once he even took her on a hunt. Viktor was an expert bowman. The two shared a meal over an open fire in the late afternoon before Aramei had to slip away from his company and head back home. Filipa and their father had their suspicions—Filipa more unforgiving of Aramei’s lies, but their father knew nothing about this stranger and Filipa felt it best not to tell him anything. Days became weeks and Aramei grew closer to Viktor, but he mistook Aramei’s affections and her willingness to be out with him as something more than what it was.

Aramei had lived a sheltered life, having experienced little outside of her village and village life was quaint and uneventful most of the time. Aramei found a sort of freedom in Viktor, but she was slow to develop a real attraction that went beyond the one she had for him when he first approached her as she washed the laundry in the pond that day.

And Aramei had no experience with men. She had never been with a man in any sense and had no idea that all this time with Viktor she was setting up her own demise.

Present Day – In the cabin

I wake up lying next to Aramei in the center of the bed; Eva is sitting next to us, swabbing a cold, wet cloth across my forehead.

Lifting up slowly, I brace my weight against the mattress with my palms and try to pull my head together.

“Did I pass out?” My head is throbbing, my vision slightly blurred. I reach up and massage my temples with my fingertips, bridging the palm of my hand across my face.

“Not exactly,” Eva says, dabbing my cheeks with the cloth once more. “You went under.”

I open my eyes and look right at her. “Under what?”

“You were in Aramei’s mind,” Eva says softly so as not to wake Aramei, “living what she lived and knowing what she knows.”

I lift farther away from Aramei and decide to get off the bed altogether. “How is that possible?” I say, pacing across the floor barefooted. Eva must’ve taken off my shoes. I stop and turn to face her, my gaze penetrating hers from the foot of the bed. “That felt completely real to me…it wasn’t a dream, it was real, like I was right there watching her.”

Eva nods once, smiling faintly.

“You have been connected to Aramei in this way since the day you were bonded to Isaac,” she says, standing from the bed, too. She walks over to the table next to the balcony and places the wet cloth in a bowl of water. “Those who have been bonded by blood are often connected, but some connections are stronger than others.” She walks over and stops in front of me, folding her hands together resting on her pelvis. “But now that you are a Black Beast, and female, your connection to Aramei is strengthened ten-fold.”

I don’t know what to say because I’m too stunned by this information to understand it just yet. So, I just let Eva continue.

“She is trying to tell you something,” she says. “What did you see?”

“I-I…,” I move away from Eva, letting her hands fall away from my shoulders and I approach the bed again. “I saw Viktor Vargas…and I think—.” I gaze down at Aramei sleeping; a few strands of her silky hair move gently in time with her breath.

“You think what?” Eva says from behind.

I turn around to face her, but still all I really see is the scene with Viktor and Aramei still fading from my mind. “He was in love with her….”

Chapter 6

I STAY WITH EVA and Aramei for several hours, but Aramei remains sleeping and I can’t seem to get inside her head again. I even tried waking her at one point, taking both of my hands and shaking her body gently back and forth but it’s like she’s in a coma.

To think I could’ve been like this….

I’m anxious to get back inside her mind, but it looks like what I saw is all that I’ll be seeing on this visit.

“Aramei will not able to hold the connection for very long at a time,” Eva says while lighting a lantern on the other side of the room. The afternoon is quickly slipping away into the evening hours, and the cabin, shrouded by a thick forest, is becoming dark fast.

I sit at the table overlooking the downstairs floor, watching servants come and go, dust and mop and stand quietly until they are called for by Eva for any number of duties. One brings up a plate of fresh fruit and vegetables with Ranch dressing and some other weird-smelling sauce that I really have no interest in. I’d like a Black Angus burger or a melted ham and cheese sandwich, but I don’t expect I’ll be getting anything like that around here.

Before long, the area is bathed in orange light from the lanterns; the shifting shadows on the log walls slow and deliberate. Everyone here is so orderly, taking their time in every little thing they do as if to make sure they get it right the first time. They never speak. Never. When I think back on it, even when I saw Aramei in the cave so long ago, the servants didn’t speak then, either. At least not to one another. Just thinking about it makes me anxious. I could never live like they live, so submissive and disciplined and seemingly without any sense of self-determination or freedom.

But even still, not anything nor anyone else can hold my thoughts more than Aramei, who still has not moved or whimpered or fluttered her eyes since I came out of her mind.

I can’t believe I was even in her mind. Or rather, I do believe it. It’s hard to push extraordinary things like this away anymore. I am a werewolf, after all, and if that doesn’t help me believe that there are many strange things in this world that I didn’t know before, then nothing will. But regardless of believing it, some things are and probably always will be hard to understand. This is definitely one of them.

As I begin to wonder when I’ll be able to leave, I hear a vehicle pulling up to the front of the cabin. And before I think to head downstairs and see who it is, the front door opens and Trajan is walking inside.

Eva’s demeanor shifts back to that solid, quiet manner as she walks over to stand against the wall.

Trajan’s footsteps coming up the stairs make me edgy.

I take a deep breath and go to sit at the little table. When Trajan makes it onto the upstairs floor he doesn’t say anything to me at first. He walks right over to Aramei, leans over and brushes his strong fingers through her hair and then walks over to the nearest lantern, turning the little knob to raise the fire.

“I don’t think you…want to know what I saw,” I say to Trajan, jumping right in rather than letting it linger.

Trajan stops in the center of the room and folds his hands together in front of him. He peers across at me, his deep blue eyes piercing into mine and that fixed, expressionless look on his face makes me all the more nervous. He wants to know everything, like he said before, no matter how much I think it will anger him.

I tear my gaze away from his and say cautiously, “Viktor was in love with her. It was a long time ago.”

Trajan moves toward me and my muscles tense every inch he draws closer. His steps are calm and gradual until finally he makes it to the table where I sit and he stops directly in front of me. I feel the warmth seething off his body; his shadow looming over me like a mountain.

Carefully, I look up at him.

“She told you this?”

I hate it that I can’t read him, that there are no distinguishable emotions on his face, or anything in the tone of his voice to indicate how I should react.

I shake my head once. “No,” I say cautiously, “I saw it.”

A flicker of curiosity blinks across his features. “You saw it how exactly?”

I let out a sharp breath and softly hit the palm of my hand on the table. “Do you mind not standing over me like that?” I say, fed up with being too intimidated to think straight. “Really, I…it’s making me uncomfortable.”

A tiny, almost unnoticeable snarl ruffles the side of one nostril and the corner of his lips. He’s obviously irritated with me, but thankfully not intolerant. He moves back and takes the empty seat at the table with me.

I sneak a sideward glance over at Eva to my right and catch the slim smile she flashes me so fast that if I were to have blinked in that half a second I would’ve missed it.

“It was like I was there,” I finally go on. “It was as real and vivid as I’m sitting here with you right now.”

Trajan nods slowly, as if taking in my explanation with the utmost attention. “Interesting.”

I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t.

Geez! I don’t know how anyone can stand being in the same room with him. He’s about as interesting as a block of wood.

I turn around, pulling my legs underneath the table and I look across at him. “How is that interesting?” I fold my hands together out in front of me on the table.

Trajan takes his time about answering, casually tending to his attire, smoothing an invisible wrinkle in his shirt, dusting an invisible something-or-another from the leg of his jeans.

Finally he says, “I can read her mind because she is connected to me, but I cannot peer as deeply into it as you apparently can. The things I see are indecipherable, flashes of thought about she and I, or things that have happened in front of her recently.”