Nathan throws his hands up in the air, his dreams crushed, and Daisy laughs under her breath as he leaves back down the hallway.

Isaac looks back at me, takes me by the hand and we quietly move back toward the hall leading into the kitchen.

“What just happened?” Camilla says still standing at the den entrance where we left her.

“I’m going to eat my sandwich,” Isaac says. He leans over and pecks me on the lips. “I think Rachel just solved our babysitting problems, babe.”

I nod absently, still not quite believing how things just happened. “I think you’re right….”

Isaac slips back down the hall and into the kitchen.

“…You’re frickin’ serious?” I hear Rachel say as I listen in on the middle of a conversation. “Well, I totally believe it. The second that Lyla girl joined the pack, I was last week’s news. Stupid blond whore.” Rachel’s nostril’s flare again.

“Lyla?” Alex laughs. “Well, I guess you can say she got what was coming in the cycle of paybacks because when Ashe sired me, she was last week’s news.”

Rachel smiles first before bursting into laughter.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rachel actually smile. At least not in the happy, spirited sense.

It’s kind of freaking me out.

Camilla and I look at one another simultaneously, both a little baffled.

“Come on,” Rachel says with the nod of her head, “I’ll show you my room.”

As Alex walks in short, confined steps with Rachel toward the staircase, she looks back at me and winks before heading upstairs.

A smile breaks in my face and I just shake my head. Alex always was as slick as oil, but in this situation, I couldn’t be more impressed. Not only did she refrain from all-out war with Rachel right there in the den, but she just became Rachel’s new best friend all in a matter of a few minutes.

After thinking on it for a while, I decide to head upstairs to talk to Zia. I stand outside her bedroom door and knock a few times, knowing she’s inside because I hear her talking plain as day. It’s when her voice stops abruptly and then rises even higher that I realize she knows full well that I’m out here, but she’s not ready to talk to me. My shoulders fall over in a slump and I start to walk back down the hall when I hear her door click open.

Sebastian steps out and closes the door behind him.

“She hates me, doesn’t she?”

“Nah,” he says, shaking his shaved head. “She’ll get over it.”

I sigh and lean my back against the wall. The red-haired girl who apparently used to be Rachel’s number one sidekick shuffles past, smiling at me. Positions in Rachel’s little clique are shifting fast with Alex here; already Rachel’s ‘old’ friends are looking for sides to change loyalties to. I smile back faintly as she slips down the stairs, hoping not to give her any hopes. I really want no part of that.

“I want to tell Zia everything,” I say to Sebastian as he leans against the opposite wall, crossing his arms, “but I can’t. Like really can’t. I have no control over it. I wish she understood.”

“Between you and me,” Sebastian says quietly, looking back once toward Zia’s door, “Zia is dealing with a lot of rejection lately.”

“Rejection?”

“Yeah,” he says, “even her brothers have pretty much blown her off and she never sees them anymore. They’re too busy doing their own things, y’know?”

Zia’s brothers, Damien and Dwarf, are rarely ever at the Mayfair house anymore. I haven’t seen much of them since Seth’s going-away ceremony the day Nataša was here and I fainted in front of her. And even before then, it was like they had moved out of here and only stopped by on occasion. New girlfriends are to blame. But I admit that I kind of miss Damien’s dark natured playful attitude and Dwarf’s big mouth.

“I wish she would talk to me.”

“Just give her time to cool off,” Sebastian says. “It’s really not about you, so don’t put too much into it.”

He looks towards the door once more and moves over closer to me and whispers, “What is this thing you guys are looking for anyway?”

I pause, suddenly untrusting of him, or just being paranoid again.

“A Praverian,” I say. “Like Genna who had been following me. And Malachi, the one I met when we were all in Portland last month.”

Sebastian nods, but doesn’t say anything.

“Why do you ask?”

He shrugs. “Just looking for something to tell Zia when I go back in there.” He smiles and runs the palm of his hand across his bald head. “I hope it grows back soon.”

“Seriously?” I say, looking surprised. I’m glad the topic has shifted. “It’s a good look for you, like I said before.”

Sebastian crinkles his nose a bit. “It makes me feel nak*d—Well, I better get back in there with the…,” he holds up his fingers in quotations, “…info, before Zia has my head.”

“Ah, so she sent you out here?”

The right side of his mouth lifts into a confirmation, “Yeah.” Then he leans in and adds quietly, “So if you could help me out with a little more than what she already knows, that’d kick ass.” He leans away, grinning.

“Hmmm…,” I purse my lips and mull it over for a moment, “well, you can tell her that I wouldn’t tell you jack because I’d tell Zia before I ever told you.”

His grin gets bigger. “Very smart,” he says, nodding.

And then he disappears back inside Zia’s room.

I want to go see my sister, but I think I’m going to give her and Rachel time to hang out and get to know each other. It’s important for both of them, I think. They technically are the outcasts here, if I think about it. Both of them of the Vargas bloodline. Both of them pretty much rogue, but strong enough not to give into rogue behavior completely. Now I actually feel bad for Rachel, realizing that she’s been the way she is because she can’t help it. But she’s never done anything to lose the Mayfair’s trust; in fact, she attacked and beat Alex because she thought Alex was a threat to us.

As much as I want to catch up with Alex and do all of the things two long lost siblings might naturally do after being reunited, I know that Alex fitting in is important right now. But more than that, I’m still not sure she can be trusted and I’m not going to jump into anything with her too soon. I need to feel her out. We need to trap the traitor. There are several things that need to happen before I can commit my heart fully to my sister again.

And Aramei is one of them.

Chapter 19

Balkan Mountains – Eastern Serbia – Winter 1761

FIRES HAVE BEEN BURNING on the horizon for six days; plumes of smoke spiraling into the heavily overcast sky. And at night, the fires are more frightening as the flames lick the black sky all over the mountainside and throughout the vast valley and beyond. A war is spreading. It’s drawing closer to Aramei’s village and everyday life here has all but come to a halt. The people have boarded up their homes and stables. Families sit huddled around a low, inadequate fire for fear of too much smoke rising from their chimneys and drawing attention. “Maybe it’ll pass us up and head west,” a man said during the village meeting earlier this morning.

But none of the villagers believes that. Aramei doesn’t believe it. She knows more than anyone about what is coming and although she doesn’t truly understand the extreme of it, she still knows more than they do. She’s afraid to tell anyone about Viktor. She committed murder and if they knew, she would be ripped from her family and hanged. But this hasn’t stopped her from doing everything in her power to convince the people of her village to prepare. It was because of her they decided to board up early rather than later. She had told her father how afraid the fires on the horizon had made her and begged him to call a meeting in the village.

“I have a terrible feeling about the fires, Father,” she said on that day. “Nightmares attack my sleep every night. You must warn the people! Please, Father!”

And he did because he felt it, too.

While most of the villagers in the beginning let themselves believe this strange unknown war that had nothing to do with the Turks would pass them by, Aramei’s father knew it might not. And so after a two hour debate, it became unanimous that the village must protect itself.

Aramei and Filipa have been sleeping huddled together on a bed in Filipa’s room since that night.

“Filipa,” Aramei whispers lying next to her, “I have to tell you something.”

Filipa rises to sit upright on the bed. “What is it?”

Aramei lifts from the bed, too, and pulls her thick robe tight around her to keep in the warmth. She gazes toward the window where she can see a single fire, far off in the distance, dancing victoriously against the sky. But at the last minute, Aramei decides against confiding in her sister. It never goes the way she hopes it will and if Filipa knew anything about Viktor’s murder, she would be in as much trouble as Aramei. Guilty by association.

She lets out her breath and lies against the cot, staring up at the low wooden ceiling.

“I’m just afraid,” she says; her voice distant.

“So am I, sissa. So am I.”

They lie together, curled against one another’s body as the night falls into an eerie, silent darkness. A howling unlike any they have ever heard before carries on the bitter winter air. But both of them are too afraid to speak of it, neither of them willing to admit they heard it because it truly sounds more monstrous than natural.

They tremble and shake against each other.

Silently, Aramei cries into her pillow. But she doesn’t cry because she’s afraid. She cries because she killed a man.

Finally, after hours of lying awake, the sisters fall asleep, but Aramei’s sleep remains tumultuous throughout the night, her dreams rife with horrifying images of Viktor’s face. She wakes with a start, sweat soaking her cotton gown and pillow. She presses her hand against her breast and waits for her heartbeat to settle. But soon she realizes that it wasn’t a nightmare that had woken her. The low mooing of the cow in the barn sounds frightened and the sheep are…silent. Aramei looks over at Filipa lying next to her. Filipa is out cold, sleeping on her back with her mouth hung open. Carefully, Aramei crawls out of the bed and slips her feet down inside her boots. She takes Filipa’s heavy fur coat hanging on the back of the door and wraps herself inside of it, pushing the hood over her head.

Her father is passed out on the chair in the front room; a low fire burns behind the hearth in the fireplace, but it needs more wood; it’ll burn out soon. As Aramei goes toward the front door, she stops when she stands in front of it, placing her outstretched hand upon the wood. Slowly she pushes it open after sliding the lock away with her other hand and the wind licks at the flames in the fireplace as it escapes into the room.

Her father stirs, but doesn’t wake up and Aramei slips outside into the cold night and makes her way to the barn. The snow crunches underfoot as she draws closer and it and the cow are the only sounds that she can hear.