Chapter Two Aria

Chapter Two

Aria

It was the dead of winter in Albany, New York. Forever cold and dreary. At this time of morning, darkness still clung to the house. Heat hummed from the vents, but it was no match for the chill that seeped in from outside.

I eased downstairs slower than I normally would. My long, black hair was still wet from my shower, and the strands fell around my shoulders and dampened the fabric of the black sweater I wore.

It was baggy enough to cover the makeshift bandage I had fabricated out of an old white tee and duct tape. It wasn’t like I could keep industrial-size bandages under the counter for times like these.

Mornings when I woke with a burn were always hardest. When the physical pain was so great that the only thing I wanted to do was turn around and climb back into my bed and sleep for days. The exhaustion was close to overwhelming, the toxins I could feel thudding through my veins with each beat of my heart, making it nearly impossible to face the day.

But I would.

I had no other choice than to protect this secret with every breath that I had.

To remember my purpose.

To accept it for everything it was.

The blessing and the curse Ellis had promised it would be.

I hit the first-floor landing to the clatter of activity that carried from the kitchen. Voices shouted and laughter echoed through my childhood home.

My chest tightened in a rush of affection.

These sounds? They were always a buoy to my spirit.

A spirit that could so easily be crushed if I didn’t hang on to the things that mattered. If I didn’t recognize the price that was paid for this peace.

No, my family could never understand it. I’d accepted that years ago. But the life of a Laven could not be understood. When I awoke each morning in my bed, I hardly understood it myself.

Hell, there were so many times that I questioned it.

When I wondered if the therapists and the doctors were right.

If my sanity had been stripped.

But I felt the truth of it pierce me like an arrow as I moved through the living room and stopped at the edge of the kitchen to take in the familiar scene.

A perfect chaos.

To the left of me, my mother stood at the stove, scrambling a giant skillet of eggs, frazzled the way she always was. She wore pajamas and her robe, and her brown hair was tossed in a haphazard knot on top of her head.

“All of you, get to the table. Breakfast is ready.” She might have yelled it, but there was a tenderness to her voice. One she always possessed.

My gaze traveled the kitchen.

My sister, Brianna, was on the far side of the room, and music blared from her phone, which she had propped on the island as she practiced the routine for her dance troupe. She’d been working on it for the last four weeks, and she spent every free second trying to perfect it.

My little brothers, Mitch and Keaton, were off to the side of her, in the middle of a wrestling match, scrambling around to one-up each other. Mitch was seven and Keaton was ten, so I knew how that would turn out, even though Mitch always gave it his best.

“You didn’t even pin me!” he shouted over the volume of Brie’s music, kicking his legs and flailing his arms and trying to knock Keaton off from where he was straddling Mitch and sitting on his chest.

“You wish, dumbo. You’re already down. I win. You gotta give me your Nerf Blaster.”

“Hey,” Mom chastised as she carried the skillet around the island toward the breakfast nook beneath the window that overlooked the front yard and street. “No names. Both of you, up.”

“Tell him I pinned him, Mom,” Keaton whined instead of listening.

“No way.” Mitch shoved him, taking the opportunity to send Keaton toppling back while he was distracted. The motion knocked Keaton into Brie’s path, and she stumbled to the side when he got under her feet.

A screech of annoyance left her as she bumped into the island. “Would you watch it?”

Keaton didn’t even respond to her. He dove right back in for Mitch, and in a flash, they were scuffling around again.

“Mom, would you tell Keaton to stay out of my way?” Brie complained. “This has to be perfect, and they always mess me up. It’s totally their fault if I get kicked off the team.”

“Ugh, you guys, would you knock it off?” Mom groaned. “One morning of peace is all I ask.”

Except I knew she loved every second of it, and soft laughter rolled from my mouth as I moved into the kitchen. I went straight to Brie and dropped a kiss to the top of her head. “You are not going to get kicked off the team.”

“And how do you even know?” She rolled her warm brown eyes up at me. They were the exact same color as our mother’s and brothers’. Anxiety played through her features, a new self-consciousness that had cropped up in her over the last year, which she tried to cover with sass.

It was rough being thirteen.

“Um, because I’ve seen you and you’re amazing.”

“You really think so? Or are you just trying to Mom me?”

My chest shook with a laugh, and I hugged her tighter. “ Mom you? Never. That’s just rude.”

I sent Mom a playful glance, and a hint of amusement tugged at the edge of her mouth as she heaped spoonfuls of eggs onto the plates already set on the table.

Brie blew out a sigh, and I could feel her smile as she squeezed me back, her arms tight around my middle. I tried not to wince when a stab of pain shocked across my back. Ignoring the burn, I embraced her for a long moment before I released her and turned to my brothers.

“Come on, you two. Up you go. It’s breakfast time, and I’m totally not walking you to school if you miss the bus. It’s freezing out there.” I let the tease wind into my voice as I stretched both hands toward them. Reluctantly, they each accepted one, popping to their feet as I gave them a little yank.

“I still get your blaster,” Keaton mumbled.

“How about you two share it?” I offered.

Simple solutions that were never so simple when it came to these two.

Mom chuckled. “If only it was that easy.” Her gaze softened as she looked at me. “Thanks for stepping in. I don’t know what I’m going to do without you here.”

Sadness and nostalgia whispered through her features, and it sent a wave of guilt pinching deep into my chest. I hated how much thinner and sallower her face was than it should be. The lines that were creased into her brow and at the edges of her eyes.

She was only forty-three, but she looked as if she’d aged a decade in the last two years.

All compliments of me.

Finally, things had seemed to settle around here, but only because I’d learned how careful I had to be. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t constantly on edge, in fear of a slipup.

Clearing the roughness from my throat, I pinned on the brightest smile I could find. “I’m still here for four months.”

Until graduation. Then I would go. I knew I had to. I couldn’t stay here a second longer beneath my parents’ scrutinizing stares. I knew it was done out of love, but that didn’t make it any easier.

My mother and father were always watching me, waiting for me to snap.

To suffer another schizophrenic break. At least, that’s what the doctors had diagnosed me with the last time I’d been hospitalized.

The wound I’d sustained last night burned on my back.

If they knew what I was hiding right then? I’d immediately be back in that place. Terrified and alone. Doctors prodding into my mind like they could find a solution—a cure—for who I was.

“But you’re eighteen in four days. How is my baby going to be an adult?” Affection hitched her voice.

I tried to shift the attention away from me. “Well, you’ll have these three yahoos to keep you company.”

“Names,” Mitch peeped up from where he’d climbed onto his chair.

Laughter rolled from my throat. “Sorry. These sweethearts?”

I lifted my brow at him with the ribbing.

“‘Sweet,’ my ass,” Brianna mumbled out of Mom’s earshot as she moved by me. I gave her a gentle swat to the upper arm, and she sent a smirk my way as she took her seat.

I turned back to Mom. “What can I help with?”

“Can you grab the plate of toast?”

“Sure.”

I wound around the island to the stack of toast on the counter. Mom had just had her dream kitchen put in. The cabinets were sea blue, and the countertops speckled silver and blue and white. The old laminate floors had been replaced with tile that looked like gray wood.

A sharp twinge of discomfort snagged inside me. I wanted to shun the thought that it’d been a bribe from Dad for being a jerk, but I couldn’t shake it.

He’d been one a lot lately. More and more.

Protectiveness swelled from the depths of me. It was the part that hated the idea of leaving here once I graduated from high school. The part that wanted to shield my mother and my siblings.

Not that he’d become violent or was a danger to them.

He was just . . . different.

Had changed after I’d turned sixteen.

When the first wounds had shown. When I’d awakened screaming in my room the first time after I’d been burned. Unable to stop or to contain it. He’d burst through the door and had roared when he’d seen the wound slashed across my chest.

He’d demanded to know who’d done it. Ready to go on a rampage. To hunt down the monster who had dared to hurt his little girl.

But he didn’t know the types of monsters that truly existed. Ones he couldn’t protect me from.

I’d been in so much pain, so unprepared, so in shock that I’d told them what had happened while I was asleep, in Faydor, unable to keep the confession from tumbling free.

I’d taken them back to the dreams I’d been so foolish to share with them as a little girl. Dreams of playing in a sanctuary, in a paradise with others who had the same strange-colored eyes as mine. Ones who were like me, too young to grasp the warnings that had been hammered into my mind a million times by Ellis that I couldn’t share what happened when I fell asleep.

Only what had happened that night—the first night I’d been burned—was so different. It was then they’d come to believe my imaginations as a child had changed and developed into psychotic delusions.

They’d thought I’d done it to myself.

Nerves rolled through me when I felt the air shift from behind, and I peeked toward the entryway as my father strode in. He was tall and thickly muscled beneath the suit he wore. His blond hair was wavy and had begun to gray, though he cut it short in an attempt to keep it tamed, and his eyes were a lighter shade of brown than the rest of the family’s.

He sent a glance my way.

I wondered what he thought when he looked at me.

When he caught sight of my black hair and my eyes, which were the palest gray.

An unnatural gray that should never exist.

Ice cold and raging with fire.

When he contemplated the fact that I looked nothing like their other children—or like anyone else they had ever met, for that matter.

But it was more than just the strange color of my eyes. There was an energy I emitted, as if I’d brought a remnant of the supernatural with me into the human realm. Most got an unsettled sense whenever I came into the room. It was rare someone didn’t shy away from it when they met me, or at least try to take a closer look to discern what was different about me.

I so often wondered how my parents couldn’t see it. How they refused to believe.

I carried the toast to the table and set it in the middle.

“Thank you,” Mom said.

“No problem.” I glanced to my right as I took a seat. “Morning, Dad.”

His gaze appraised. Speculation and distrust.

Apprehension crawled down my spine. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I was afraid that he would find out. That he could see right through me to what I had hidden under my sweater.

“Aria,” he grunted as he tucked himself closer to the table.

Mom took her seat next to him, though she had her attention on me. “What would you like to do to celebrate on Saturday, Aria?”

Before I had the chance to respond, her gaze coasted to Dad, her words filled with love and support and the remnants of the fear I was sure she would forever feel for me. “Can you believe it? We have a child who will be eighteen. How did that even happen?”

Air huffed from his nose as he reached out and grabbed a slice of toast. Annoyance curled through his voice. “We’re celebrating her now?”

Mom winced, though she lifted her chin. “It’s your daughter’s birthday, Cal. And she’s been doing great.”

She looked at me in what could only be construed as a plea. Begging me to be okay .

Cured.

Or at least medicated enough that I was no longer a threat to myself.

“Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” I forced out, hoping to avoid what she’d just said and what my father had implied.

All while my love for her bound my heart in a fist.

Devotion and loyalty.

But it was also riddled with the grievous knowledge that I would never be understood.

My life as a Laven would be an isolated, lonely one.

Pax’s face flashed behind my eyes.

My balm. My comfort. My Nol.

Forbidden.

But I would sacrifice it all for the small pieces of him that I would forever possess.

I crawled into bed that night. Exhaustion weighed me down, no doubt thanks to the wound that would take me at least a week to fully recover from, even though the scar would forever remain on my back.

Another of the many I was covered in.

Chest and stomach. Arms and legs. A jagged one that marred my right cheek.

I curled my arms around my pillow, and my spirit shivered, angling toward the one place where I truly belonged. Where I didn’t have to hide or pretend.

My eyelids fluttered, and my breaths shallowed out as I began to drift.

There was always a bare space in between. A sense of anticipation.

One of joy and fear and purpose.

Weightless.

Timeless.

Light and darkness flickered at the edges of my sight.

Then my soul flashed, and I flew.