The Ballad of Aramei (The Darkwoods Trilogy 3)

“Please just be good,” I say, encouraging peace instead of Rachel ‘getting hers’, which I really would rather see.

But I quietly take a step back inside myself to remind me that I still don’t know if she can even be trusted. It wasn’t long at all and I had already fully committed to her without realizing. I can’t do this; let her manipulate me if that’s what she’s here for. I have to find that balance that’ll allow me to be kind to her and be a sister to her without handing over too much of my trust.

I loop my hand around Alex’s elbow and walk with her toward the basement stairs. Nathan zips up them first so that he can go lay down the law in advance.

Aside from the dirt-stained short cotton varsity shorts, I briefly notice that Alex is bare-footed and I reminisce about the beat up flip-flops she used to wear. I look over at her and smile stupidly.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing, I was just thinking.”

“About what?” Her eyebrows crinkle.

I shake my head, beaming. “You look terrible.”

“Well, thanks,” Alex scoffs, reaches up with her knuckle and frogs me hard on the arm.

“Ahhh!” I yell, trying to hold in my laughter.

She smirks over at me.

Harry finally speaks up, “I’m Harry,” he says stepping in front of Alex and it seems a little unnatural. His face breaks into a wide, dopey smile. “I’m the only human around here, so uh, can you please not eat me or anything like that because that would seriously ruin my day.”

Alex’s eyes roll over to look at me beside her as if to ask me if he’s for real, then she looks back at him. “Okay….well, for the record, Harry, you’re probably the only one around here I’m going to like because you’re human.”

Harry blushes and buries his hands deep inside his pockets and falls back behind us as we head up the stairs.

“Are you coming?” I say, looking back at him.

“I’ll be up in a minute,” he says. “Going to check out the new construction on this wall—hey, tell Daisy to come down.”

“Alright!” I shout from the top of the stairs and Isaac opens the door, letting the light from the kitchen flood into the stairwell.

As I walk with my sister through the kitchen and the den, it’s obvious that everyone knows about Alex because everyone is watching as we pass by them. Rachel and the girls who helped her catch Alex are lounging around on various pieces of furniture in the den with grins and sneers. But Alex keeps her cool; just a solid, expressionless glance and I know that all of the girls see the dangerous retaliation in her eyes. The only one that doesn’t stop grinning is, of course, Rachel.

We shuffle up the stairs; Isaac behind us and Alex in front. The chains around her ankles knock against the steps and then drag ominously across the hardwoods on the upstairs floor. I can’t wait to get down the hall so I can get Alex away from all of the eyes staring at her as if she’s a sadistic serial-killer walking Death Row.

“I really don’t want to leave you alone with her,” Isaac says telepathically and I open up my mind to him fully.

“But you have to,” I say. “Harry will be around, maybe even inside the bathroom without me knowing it—I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, so now you think I’m some creepy peeper,” Harry says and it makes my head snap around because I thought he was still in the basement. Of course, I don’t see him anywhere.

“You’re going to have to stop doing that, Harry!”

We make it to the bathroom door and stop just outside of it; Alex looks at me curiously.

“Ah, I see,” Alex says, “talking about me in a way that I can’t hear.”

I look at her sadly, hoping she’ll understand.

Alex shrugs. “It’s alright. I guess it just depresses me a little because I no longer have anyone to communicate with telepathically.”

This comes as a mild shock to both Isaac and me.

“What happened to Ashe?” I say.

Isaac is just as curious.

Alex’s gaze strays toward the floor. She looks both dispirited and indignant. “He became Alpha of his own pack and went to Nova Scotia.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?” Isaac asks, more interested in the information on his enemy than her love-life.

Alex narrows her eyes at him, but doesn’t answer.

“Can we go in now?” she says, looking at me.

I know my sister and that reaction was definitely an embarrassed one only masked by an outer layer of animosity.

Isaac looks at me briefly before I slip inside the bathroom with Alex.

I run the bath water for her and leave her in there alone long enough to go across the hall to Isaac’s room and grab her something of mine to wear. She’s already sitting in the tub when I come back. Her tiny shorts, underclothes and white t-shirt are ripped in half and lying on the floor.

“I was going to unlock you so that you could undress.” I set the clean clothes on the counter.

Alex shrugs and leans back against the deep tub, resting her arms over her chest awkwardly since the chains confine them to about one foot apart. She stares up at the ceiling for the longest time as the water gushes from the faucet into the tub. Eventually, I’m the one turning the water off because it’s getting so close to the top that if she makes any heavy movements it will run over the sides and soak the floor. I twist the knob lastly on the cold and it squeaks off, leaving a constant drip, drip, drip.

It’s kind of weird being in here while my sister takes a bath; not like I’ve never seen her nak*d before, but we’ve never hung around and watched one another bathe. At first, I had been looking only at her face and how filthy the water is becoming so fast, but I can’t help but notice and blatantly gawk at the number and size of scars she has all over her body.

“Alex…what happened to you?”

She doesn’t even look down, or directly at me for that matter, but she knows what I’m referring to. She sighs and stares at the ceiling for a moment longer.

“Fights. Turning. Same thing that happens to you.”

I shake my head slow and solemnly.

“No,” I say, “I don’t have scars like that. And the first fight I’ve been in with someone non-human was the one you saw today with Rachel.” I move closer and sit on the edge of the tub, looking down at her, heartbroken and knowing. “How did you really get those scars?”

I notice the center of her throat move as if she’s swallowing down the truth and her eyes can’t seem to stay on mine.

“I wanted to get away from Mom,” she says going back a little further than I expected, “and I planned to run away once before my fourteenth birthday, but I didn’t want to leave you behind.” She stops abruptly and locks her eyes on mine. “Dria, I’m not blaming you for anything so don’t look at me like that.”

Maybe I was starting to feel like she was blaming this on me. I straighten my face and let her continue.

“For a little while, I thought Ashe was the best thing that ever happened to me. He was so protective and I felt like I was on a pedestal. He worshipped me. But I started to see what was really going on not the first or fifth time he attacked me, but…,” her nostrils flare all of a sudden and her eyes turn black. I start to move away from the tub, but just before I do, her nak*d body calms and she closes her eyes, taking in a deep breath. When she opens then again, her eyes look natural.

Alex looks dead at me. “I always worried you’d be the one who turned out like Mom,” she says. “I guess I was wrong about a lot of things.”

“You’re here now,” I say. “And maybe I’m giving myself too much credit in thinking I can read you because you’re my sister, but I get the feeling you were the one that left Ashe.”

She nods reluctantly and looks away from me again, plunged into thought. “Yeah,” she says, “I looked in the mirror one day and saw Rhonda Bradley. That was the day I left.”

I smile down at her.

“Then you’re not like Mom at all. You’re Alexandra, my sister and my best friend.”

She smiles carefully at me and a few tears stream down her face.

“Here, let me help you wash up,” I say, standing up and moving to the end of the tub where her head is. I take up the nearest bottle of shampoo—pricey salon stuff, so it’s probably Zia’s—and squeeze a little into my hand.

Alex leans up to let me get all of her hair and I work the shampoo into a lather.

“I punched him in the face last month,” I say.

“Who?”

“Jeff. He beat her up again and I rushed to Georgia to see her in the hospital.”

Alex never turns around. She just listens as I scrub her hair with my fingertips. This kind of news is nothing out of the ordinary so she understandably finds no reason to be shocked by it.

“He showed up with apologies and the same old shit, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, “and flowers, too—I don’t ever want to see her again, Alex.”

This, however, does provoke extra interest in her. She turns her head to the side enough so that she can see me.

I look down at her soapy hair and can’t bring myself to face her. What I said about our mother made me feel like a horrible person, so I can only imagine what she’s thinking about me right now. But what I said is the truth. The last time I saw my mother as she was laid up in that hospital bed and was more excited to see the man who beat her than to see her own daughter, was the day I knew that I never wanted to see her again.

“You’re right to feel that way,” she says and casually turns her head away again.

The air is rife with silence, except for the steady dripping of water. For a moment, I even stop scrubbing her hair because the quiet in the room has caught me off-guard.

“Dria…I really am sorry for everything. I feel like I haven’t slept in four months. Not peacefully anyway. I was supposed to protect you like I tried to do when we were kids, but when it came down it, I was weak and I’ll never forgive myself for how I turned out.”

My fingers stop moving in her hair and I say behind her, “You didn’t try. Alex, you did take care of me when we were kids. And you can’t blame yourself for how you turned out. It was forced on you.”

I take the cup on the nearby counter and fill it with water to start rinsing the shampoo from her hair.

“So you punched him, huh?’ she says with a smile in her voice. “Did you bloody his face? I hope you drew blood.”

I laugh gently behind her and pour more water over her hair, tilting her head back a little to keep from getting soap in her eyes.

“I’m glad you’re here, I really am,” I say.

“Me too.”

I move away from the tub and walk to the window overlooking the tree-enveloped backyard of the house below. Daisy waves up at me. I nod subtly, glad she’s where I secretly told Harry I needed her to be just in case Alex decided to try sneaking out the window.

Then I walk over to the bathroom door.

“I’ll let you finish without me,” I say, placing my hand on the doorknob. “Clothes and towel are over there—yell at me when you’re done and I’ll unlock you so you can get dressed.”