The Ballad of Aramei (46 page)

And the world blacks out in an instant as our beasts are unleashed.

HARRY

35

UNABLE TO MAINTAIN THE illusion any longer, my body is hurled backward and away from the cave as the power explodes completely out of me. I land hard on the ground and skid a few feet before I come to a stop, gasping for air. My head is spinning; the trees above me are moving around so fast that I double over forward and puke my guts up, my back arched in an embarrassing display. I even manage to puke on my hands.

A thunderous
crunch-crash
resounds through the forest as Isaac and Trajan, in full-fledged Black Beast form, burst through the cave entrance, sending shards and chunks of rock outward in every direction as if dynamite had been set off inside the cave. And when they slide across the landscape, their massive bodies take a few remaining trees down with them.

I get my head together and run behind them as they fight their way viciously through the forest and towards the opening in the trees that leads to the top of the hill.

I don’t even care to stop long enough to turn around and see who’s behind me, but I know that others are following. I had heard more than two dozen sets of legs sprinting in after Isaac and coming from the same direction.

Enemy or foe? In this moment, it doesn’t matter to either side.

Trajan, obviously the larger of the two, grabs Isaac up by his mammoth neck and batters him against the ground. Isaac hits with so much force that I’m knocked from my feet as though a small earthquake had just shook the ground beneath me. I get up just as quickly and follow still, running out over the top of the hill where the fires had scorched the ground to blackness and tree stubble and I see them roll down the side and into the opening.

Others are watching from the top of the ridge where I stand.

I glimpse Daisy’s naked form, staring at me from the other side and I’m momentarily overwhelmed that she’s still alive. But right now, neither of us moves to go to one another.

I hurl myself farther down the blackened hill, sometimes having to break my fall by pressing the palms of my hands against the slope and I skid the rest of the way down practically on my butt and my hands. I get about twenty feet away from Trajan and Isaac and decide this is as far as I should go.

Isaac, seven-feet of blade-like teeth and a massive beastly head, charges Trajan in the wide open. In two seconds, he’s crashing into him, plunging them both onto the ground. All the way down, Isaac slashes his father, hand after hand; blood splattering with each and every blow. Their demonic roars ricochet off every tree and every rock. But Trajan manages to hurl Isaac off him and he leaps up so quickly that I barely see him move. Trajan swings around full-circle and comes at Isaac, crushing his skull with his giant iron clawed fist. I hear the blood-curdling
crunch
when it makes contact. I never even noticed when my hands came up to cover my ears from the sound. Isaac hits the ground hard and falls on his side. Slow to get up, his body twitches horrifically as though the force of the blow had connected with the neurons in his brain. A God-awful grunt rumbles out of Isaac’s chest as he jerks his head side to side, trying to shake it off.

Trajan charges him.

I brace for the impact, every bone and muscle in my body rock-solid, rendering me motionless and unable to breathe.

As Trajan’s giant foot comes down to finish the job on Isaac’s skull, Isaac rears back and out of the way, swinging out his arm to catch Trajan in the lower stomach. His great claws rip through the black fur and thick flesh, leaving five crimson fissures slashed across Trajan’s abdomen. Blood trails behind Isaac’s hand like liquefied ribbons of red floating on the air and Trajan’s colossal form stumbles back several feet to catch his balance.

Standing five feet apart from each other, Isaac and Trajan pull back their arms; their hands balled into fists. Their chests protrude outward as they crane their thickly-muscled necks in a display of dominance. And at the same time, their heads come down to face one another and two horrific, wrathful roars bellow out; their full set of razor-sharp teeth unsheathed by their wide-opened jaws.

The roars shock masses of birds from trees several miles away and for a strangely quiet moment all that any of us watching can hear are the cries of the flocks and the flapping of hundreds of wings as a swath of black dots move through the gray, cloud-filled sky in the distance.

And then a gruff grunting cry ripples through the air.

Trajan has Isaac in a lock; his deadly teeth clamped around Isaac’s throat and right shoulder-blade. The snapping of tendon and the crushing of bone fills everyone with frenzied dread. I see Daisy and many others watching from the top of the ridge, all in their mediate forms, climbing the sides of the trees. Some are trying to contain themselves, to tame their beasts by gripping their heads in their hands. Daisy is one of them. I want to run back up and across the expanse of the ridge to get to her, but I can’t move….

Isaac roars painfully as Trajan lifts his body from the ground—Isaac still trapped within his jaws—and shakes him back and forth violently like a fight-dog would its prey. Isaac falls from Trajan’s teeth and hits the ground hard.

Struggling and clearly in tremendous pain, Isaac still gets up.

Trajan goes to deliver one last blow to Isaac’s skull and just as his claws come down within inches of him, Isaac’s arm projects outward and he buries his hand inside Trajan’s chest cavity.

Trajan freezes in a shocked tableau and all of the others watching from the ridge suddenly cease their movements and stare out at the scene wide-eyed.

As Trajan begins to fall to the ground with Isaac’s hand still inside his chest, his form begins to change.

In seconds, both of them are human.

Without hearing my own feet shuffling through the burnt leaves, or my breath wheezing as I run, I make my way closer to them and I stand just feet away in the wide open, watching with absolute relief and sorrow as the rain mists down around their seemingly unmoving bodies.

Isaac lies over his father, peering deeply into Trajan’s dark blue eyes glazed over with moisture. His naked body—like Isaac’s—is covered in mud and blood and cuts and gashes and black-blue bruises. His long, dark hair lays disheveled about his head; tiny pieces of leaves and burnt twigs are tangled in the mess. He gazes up into Isaac’s eyes and for the first time in probably hundreds of years, there is a true sense of love and regret and respect in those eyes. I think death has given Trajan back his sense of being and his memories of life before he met Aramei and became the madman that he became.

Tears pour from Isaac’s eyes and fall upon his father, but there is still anger and retribution in his face. He looks down at Trajan with an unbreakable stare; his lips are twisted into a teeth-grinding mass, his eyes pulled together harshly and his rigid eyebrows twitching as the tears shudder through his body.

“Forgive me for all I have done…,” is all that Trajan can force out of his fading body.

Isaac tries to hold back both his anger and his forgiveness, but in the end he can’t hold either of them down.

In a quiet and peculiar moment, Isaac leans over and places his lips against his father’s forehead and holds them there for a devastating moment. And then he pulls away. The air is rife with emotion and darkness. Not even one like me would be able to repress these emotions on this day. Isaac stares into his father’s eyes and wrenches his hand firmly inside his chest, crushing Trajan’s heart. Trajan’s body locks up, his eyes flaring horribly as he peers upward at the sky, and then as the last breath escapes his lips, his body goes slack.

No one moves or breathes or makes the minutest of sounds. I believe that for a brief moment, their thoughts even freeze in time. I don’t hear anything except for the rain.

Covered in blood and mud, Isaac raises his body farther away from his father’s. He sits there, held up by his naked knees, surrounded by rain and filth and blood; the ground beneath him is as black as coal. He stares longingly at the face of the man who gave him life, the one who Isaac had always loved and admired and sought to impress and please. But also he stares at the face of six hundred years of tyranny and death. But he was still his father and that part of Isaac that loved him can’t be hidden away.

Isaac throws his head back and looks upward at the sky, letting the rain mist lightly upon his blackened and bloody face. And then he wrenches back his arms and screams out into the atmosphere, letting the pain and the truth of what his life has become to course through him.

All becomes quiet again as he lowers his head back down. He only looks up when he hears Adria’s footsteps running through the puddles of water and towards him.

“Isaac!” she cries out as she gets closer. She can hardly speak, the tears are suffocating her.

She falls to her knees beside him, wrapping her arms around him. She kisses his head and cheeks and his filthy hair and finally, his mouth. When the painful moment finally runs its course through him, Isaac slowly looks into Adria’s tear-filled eyes and then he grabs her, forcing her into his arms.

Neither of them can speak; it’s as if the moment has stolen all the words from the air, but they cry and laugh and embrace each other knowing that it’s finally over and that a new beginning has just begun.

ISAAC

One year later…

36

THE DARK, SECRET WORLD of the legendary Black Beasts embraced my emergence as Sovereign with open arms. Alpha’s all over the world heard of the fall of my father, Vukašin Prvovencani—Lord General, Sovereign; he carried many titles—and celebrated me proudly with grand festivities and ceremonies in my honor. Of course, I didn’t attend even a fraction of them because it’s impossible to be in a hundred different places at once, but I know about each one in heavy and vivid detail. Deep in the mountains of Serbia, a statue of me was erected and I’ve heard rumors of my Name being protected by law within the first three days of my reign.

Seth, my younger brother is Alpha there now, appointed by me. And his cruelly devoted mother, Nataša, was grateful for that. In an uncanny, yet not-so-unexpected twist, Nataša declared her unwavering allegiance and loyalty to me as her leader. It was not-so-unexpected because Nataša is and always has been eternally loyal to any Sovereign. She has lived her entire life to serve the One leader of our kind and she will die serving him, whether it be me, or someone after me.

Nataša was the one rumored to have passed into law the protection of my Name in such a short time.

And I believe the rumor to be true.

My name…I should probably explain how I got the name ‘Mayfair’ seeing as how neither my father, nor my mother, Sibyl, carried it. When we were brought into the United States, the Elders found it necessary that we blend in as smoothly as possible and so we were given a name that resonated with humans—and Americans—more than the name of my father. Mayfair was chosen by the Governess, the Elder werewolf who raised us and taught us the ways of our politics and heritage. I could have chosen to take the name of my father, or any other powerful name that I wanted to carry in my reign, but I decided—also because of a very contentious Adria, who refuses to carry a last name she can’t pronounce—to keep the name simply: Isaac Mayfair. I don’t carry a title and I would never ask or expect my brothers and sisters and friends to bow to me or to call me Lord. Outsiders? That’s a different story. But I am still Sovereign and I am still Lord General and I will be until the day I retire, or when my own son comes along and decides to dethrone me.

But Adria puts her metaphorical fingers in her ears whenever I bring up the whole heir-to-my-throne topic.

I find it hilarious, but one day….

For now, she has so happily agreed to accept my offer giving her certain rights as a female Alpha. She passed into law that all females are given the right to be financially independent if they so wish, but she was more adamant about changing that Lord title to something less… chauvinist. Nataša is still trying to adjust to being called Lordess. I think she hates it, but she’ll get over it.

I intended to appoint Nathan as Alpha of the Maine territory, but he had to decline for reasons that I am fully aware of, but am not at liberty to reveal.

I will say, however, that it has to do with a girl.

For now, Nathan is still my Right-Hand and he will always be within my reach whether by phone or any other means of communication, but he will be leaving Maine soon. And so Xavier, next in line, I happily appointed as Alpha of Maine just four months ago. Xavier gladly accepted and I know he’s capable of pulling it off, but I also know that he’s unpredictable and as Adria might put it: a man-whore. So far he has done well as Alpha, but I think sooner than later, his wicked rebel ways and his tumultuous past with women will be his undoing.

I travel all over the world, doing the things that my father did before me, but with more respect from those who follow me. They fear me, but they respect me because I don’t rule with intimidation and cruelty and an unforgiving heart. And the one who travels with me everywhere I go is Raul. Big Raul, Adria calls him. I think he could kick my ass if he ever wanted to, but we’re like brothers and even during my father’s reign, Raul had always been partial to me. I named Raul the General over my entire army. If I ever go to war again, Raul will be at the head of my army where he belongs. He is as old as my father was at the time of his death and the battles and wars that Raul has fought in and often led, are too many to count.