The Ballad of Aramei (30 page)

Great. Just great!

From the corner of my eye—and I do a double-take—an old figure with leathery-brown skin and deep-set wrinkles around her eyes emerges from the path on the other side of Zia. Harry and Zia both stop cold and the ground stops shaking in an instant.

Minna Abrahamsen.

And then in the snap of two fingers, Harry is gone.

My head darts all around every which way and Daisy runs out of the crowd to the place he last stood. She runs over and grabs me by the shoulders, “Where did he go? Adria!”

“I-I don’t know!” I look across the space at Minna, fearing the absolute worst.

“Not him!” I say, pushing Alex and Isaac away from me and running towards Minna. “What did you do?!”

I stop just short of Zia’s barrier. My chest heaves with breath, my eyes are wide and panicked.

“Good to see you, too,” Minna smiles crookedly, “And I appreciate the confidence you have in my abilities, but I didn’t do nuthin’ to the skinny one.” She shrugs her old, decrepit shoulders. “He saw me and did what they all do and got the hell outta Dodge.”

She dismisses me and shuffles right up to the edge of Zia’s trap; a purse hangs from her right shoulder.

“Well hello there,” Minna says, wriggling her bony fingers at Zia.

Isaac and I share the same look of utter shock—how did she know where to find us? Nathan can’t seem to move his muscles anymore and he looks like he’s just come down with a stomach bug.

“Get away from me,” Zia warns with her teeth clenched. She backs away from Minna, but keeps her pearl-colored eyes on her.

Minna chokes out a laugh and crosses her arms over her chest. She cranes her neck; the rope-like muscles in her throat stretch bizarrely. She begins to walk the length of the invisible barrier as if inspecting it. “I guess it did work, after all.”

Isaac and I look right at each other and he’s probably thinking the same thing: What? Was she not sure it even would?

Zia backs up farther until she can’t anymore and her sadistic, grinning face has fallen victim to trepidation. When Minna reaches down inside the purse she carries and pulls out a jar, Zia presses hard against the back of the barrier like a frenzied cat trying to scratch its way out of a box. “I WILL KILL ALL OF YOU!” Zia roars and with it the wind seems to blow, shaking the leaves of the nearest trees. Her pearl-colored eyes are swirling with white-hot light, the shimmering tips of her hair dance madly in the breeze behind her.

Isaac and Nathan both push Alex and me safely behind them. We hold our arms around each other so tight that I can feel Alex’s ribs grating against mine. The cold silver of one shackle still locked around her wrist sends painful shivers up my spine.

Minna begins to chant strange words into the night; her eyes roll back in her head.

“Don’t let her do this to me, Adria,” Zia yells out to me. Fear has dominated all of her features. “You were my best friend. And I lost my sister just as you did! You should know how I
feel
!” She screams out the last sentence hoarsely. “Stop her, Adria! Don’t let her do this!”

My
best friend
? I shake my head at her, my eyes wide and unbelieving and scared of what will happen to her just the same. I feel the wind drying out my front teeth as I inhale small, rapid breaths through my parted lips. “No, Zia…,” I can’t stop shaking my head and the more I think about everything she’s done, the more rapid my head begins to move side to side. “No…you tried to kill me. You tried to kill Alex and you—.” I look a few feet away from Zia at Phoebe’s dead body lying on the ground, her eyes still open peering at me, lifeless and cold and empty.

I look back up at Zia, not having to say the words I had started to say about Phoebe.

When Zia sees that nothing she can say will save her, her fake pleading face becomes something more hateful. Her white hair begins to move in a frenzy above her, like snakes on the head of Medusa, and she brings her arms back behind her, fists clenched. She opens her mouth and an ear-shattering scream is forced from her lungs, sending all of us scrambling farther backward with our fists pressed against our ears. All  except for Minna, who remains standing close to the trap, chanting her strange chant. The trap barrier absorbing the movement of the intense sound starts to become visible. It begins to fade in and out like a dull fluorescent light constantly licked by a short in its wires.

Zia falls to the ground, gripping her head in her tightly-clenched fists. “Cras es Noster!” she says to Minna, pushing the foreign words through her teeth. “You’ll never harvest us all!”

My eyes grow wider as Zia’s form becomes wispy and transparent. Three, five, six duplicates of her appear and disappear like wind blowing through intricate swaths of smoke, each one of her ghostly faces screaming out into the infinite night.

I feel my fingers pressing and shaking against both sides of my face; tears barrel from my eyes.

And with a great and loud whooshing sound, Zia’s smoke-like body is sucked into the jar in Minna’s hand and all sounds cease to exist except the small clinking of the lid being placed back on the jar and tightened.

The barrier blinks out indefinitely and all that is left inside the trap is the stirred dirt falling down softly against the ground and around Phoebe’s body.

No one can speak. Or move. Or do anything for several long, silent moments.

Isaac breaks the quiet.

“How did you know?”

Minna carefully slides the jar swirling with reddish smoke, down into the bottom of her flowery purse. For a brief second, even amid all that has happened and is still happening, I think about how tacky that purse is.

She tucks the purse back under her arm and pats the side of it once. “Young people amaze me,” she says. “Why don’t you ask that delicious man-cake standing behind you?”

Everybody looks at Nathan, who still looks sick and depressed. When he realizes everyone is staring at him he shakes off the stun of the moment and holds up his hands, palms up, “What?” The creases between his eyebrows deepen.

Minna rolls her eyes and whips out a cigarette, placing it between her cracked, leathery lips and it dangles there precariously until she lights it with a Bic. Inhaling deeply, Minna closes her eyes and savors the moment as if that cigarette is the most pleasurable thing she’s ever experienced. She drops her head and opens her eyes as she exhales; smoke filters up and around her lips and creeps into her eyes.

“Ahhh,” she breathes with a smile. “Knowing that I can smoke forever and it’ll never kill me makes each one taste better than the last—I smoke three packs a day now!” She says this triumphantly.

“You look like you smoked
four
packs a day
before
the Blood Bond,” I say, snarling.

I find myself constantly looking to the spot where Zia last stood and back and forth to Minna’s purse where she is now and it makes me sad.

Zia….

“Well, you’re welcome,” Minna says, pursing her lips haughtily. “I save your asses from that Praverian scum and this is the thanks I get.” She takes another toke of her cigarette, leaving bright pink imprints around the filter.

“Just get to it, alright?” Isaac says. “Tell me how you knew where to find us.”

Minna smirks. “The Bond, of course—how is it that I know more about it than you do?” She clicks her tongue.

“I closed my mind off to you,” Nathan says and he looks truly appalled. “Believe me, I know how a Blood Bond works. It was bad enough I had to bond you to me. Y’think I’d leave the link open?”

“Of course not,” Minna says with smoke billowing between her lips and slipping into the night air, “but when you’re asleep and dreaming, you seem to have no control over your mind wall.”

Nathan breathes in deeply and his eyes shut softly with regret.

“You have a lot of dreams about a pretty black-haired girl,” Minna teases and I see the muscles in Nathan’s arms harden and his nostrils flare. “You know, I could pretend to be her for you if you’d like.” Her rough lips lift into a carnal grin.

Isaac’s arm swings out horizontally to stop Nathan in his livid steps forward.

“You’re going to leave our friend alone,” he says in a low, stern voice. “Harry isn’t like Zia, the one you reaped here. You’re going to get in your car, or whatever it was that brought you here, and go back to Providence to your miserable existence. And if any of us ever see your face again, you will be killed.”

Minna twirls her hand around with the cigarette between her fingers. “You can threaten me all you want,” she says, “but it will never change what I am and what I do. Maybe I won’t be the one to harvest that Soul, the one you call Harry, but one of us will. In due time.”

Daisy lunges on Minna, knocking the cigarette from her fingertips and they crash to the ground; her purse with the jar inside falls a couple feet from her hand. Before Minna can get a word out, Daisy starts to transform sitting on top of her. I stumble backward into someone, I have no idea who. Her transformation is so fast. She doesn’t go through the waves of pain or the seemingly endless, torturous minutes it takes us all to shift. In a matter of seconds she is fully transformed, rising many feet above Minna’s splayed body and she leans over her, blade-like teeth dripping with saliva. Isaac, Nathan and all of their siblings left standing outside jump on Daisy together, all of them in their mediate forms with swirling black eyes and long, black fingernails and graying skin. But they look like birds attacking a bear. Elizabeth is tossed past me, soaring inches from my head. Xavier is thrown to the ground and just misses being crushed by Daisy’s beastly foot. Isaac and Nathan struggle to hold onto her and I just watch in horror.

Amid the carnage, Minna rolls over onto her hands and knees, grabs desperately for her purse and scrambles as far away as she can.

I keep my eyes on her, just in case she tries to run, but she seems too traumatized to let her mind tell her legs what to do.

What looked like a mound of bodies starts to shrink toward the ground as they finally get Daisy controlled. Isaac and Nathan pull her giant arms behind her back and it takes all of their strength combined. Daisy starts to calm; her enormous body is pinned against the ground, each breath forced from her nostrils stirs the dirt around her snout.  Gradually, her skin and hair begins to change; the golden-blond replacing the wiry black fur, the black-grey flesh turning creamy-white again.

She lies naked against the earth with Isaac now holding both of her wrists still.

“I’ll take her inside,” Xavier insists, waving Isaac away from her. Xavier, looking concerned and furious, bends down and takes his twin sister into his arms. And as he goes to leave with her he points at Minna and says to Isaac, “Kill that crazy old bitch, or
I
will!” And he and Daisy slip into the trees down the dark path leading back to the house.

Nathan runs over and picks up Phoebe’s body.

He and Isaac stare down at Phoebe ceremonially. Isaac reaches out his hand and brushes the blood from the corner of her mouth.

I literally choke on my tears, bursting into an uncontrollable sobbing fit. I bury my face in Alex’s chest and she holds my shuddering body tight against hers.

“So what now…,” I hear Isaac say and I lift my head from Alex, “…you take Zia back in a jar—I can’t believe I just said that in a literal sense—,” he looks back at us momentarily, “—and hide her away in your serial-killer basement safe? I’m sorry, but something about that just doesn’t give me much peace of mind.”

Nathan disappears with Phoebe through the trees following the same path that Xavier just took.

Minna sucks on her cigarette and flicks the long ashes on the ground. “They’re perfectly secure,” she says. “The ones you saw have been there for a very long time—I told you, the safe is protected.” She moves closer to Isaac a few steps. The fully smoked cigarette falls to the ground at her feet and she crushes it with the toe of her granny-boot. She just looks at him for a moment, studying his face. “You people are so blind,” she says pursing her mouth sourly. “But one day you’ll know—if you were smart, you’d leave people like me alone and turn your misguided disgust towards the ones you call friend.”

I step away from Alex and stand next to Isaac. “Nothing you can say is going to turn us on Harry. He said you’d try that. It won’t work.”

Minna smiles a chilling smile and I hate her even more for it actually having an effect on me. I swallow down the doubt that her manipulative words have brought to the surface. “You got what you wanted, now leave.” I glare at her with all the revulsion I can squeeze out of my face.

Minna smiles and readjusts the purse strap on her shoulder. She looks behind us at the small crowd of people still watching and listening and probably still trying to understand everything that happened. Then she turns her gaze back on Isaac and me. “You know…I will need werewolf blood sometime,” she says and Isaac tenses up next to me.

I take a hold of his contracting hand.

“You won’t be getting it from anyone here,” Isaac growls. “Not even my brother.”

The corner of Minna’s wrinkly lipstick-stained mouth lifts into a subtle, shrewd grin. But she doesn’t respond. She turns and walks away, disappearing into the cover of the trees in the opposite direction of the house.

I can only wonder what that grin meant, what kinds of tricks and scams her wicked mind is conjuring up.

Alex runs up behind me. “Okay—.” She pauses in mid-sentence and holds up a finger. “What the hell was that?”

My shoulders finally relax as I let my breath out. I didn’t know I had been holding most of it in the entire time.

“I’ll explain it inside,” I say.

Feeling an intense pang of grief, I realize that it’s coming from Isaac and I turn to him, grasping his hand. “Baby, what is it?”

He can’t look me in the eyes, but stares down at the ground instead. I curl both of my hands around the curvature of his jaw, gently forcing his absent gaze and even though he’s now looking me right in the eyes, I sense that he doesn’t really see me.

“Phoebe’s dead,” he says, seemingly more to himself, his own callous guilt. “I can’t believe she was Avril’s sister. Phoebe is dead because of me.”