Page 24 of Aleko
Émile Bernard ’93.
She thought that the Kavala Art Museum had a smaller Émile Bernard. According to the plaque at the museum, he was a French impressionist who had visited Greece in 1893.
Slowly, she rolled over and sat up. There was a wardrobe and an open door at the far end of the room that led to a bathroom. There were expansive windows covered in wafting white curtains. There was another chair by the window, and she could see her backpack on it. That was reassuring. She looked down at herself. She’d been wrapped, burrito style, into a verysoft blue blanket, but she was still wearing her black shirt dress. It was now torn and stained with what was probably blood. Her legs were scraped, and both shoes were gone. She didn’t know if they had been lost the previous night or if someone had removed them.
She swallowed hard, remembering the previous night. Gingerly, she lay back down and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
So… magic was real?
She remembered the way Anuket had puppeted the dead body of the woman. Magic was definitely real.
Magic was real, and Alekos Ash knew about it. He had not been the least bit shocked by anything he’d seen. He and the naked Green brothers had moved straight into managing the situation. You could only do that if your brain wasn’t busy freaking out over the fact that the dead were walking. Also, why had they been naked? And where did the man with the gun fit into any of it? Lia twisted her head to look at the painting again. That was a very expensive thing to have in a spare bedroom.
Lia returned to the reassuring white ceiling with hints of texture from trowels. It was a nice ceiling. Very soothing.
Magic was real. What did she think about that?
She poked the idea in her head, but it was like a recalcitrant piece of clay that refused to take shape. It insisted on staying exactly what it was. Lia sighed. Yes, that was the way of it. So many of the things in her life right now were simply what they were. She had little to no control over anything, and opposing reality took too much energy. If magic was real, then it was real, and she might as well get used to it. The sooner she accepted the unacceptable, the sooner she could get to things shecouldcontrol. The real question was why had Alekos Ash put her in his spare bedroom, and what was she going to do about that?
Lia tried sitting up again, and that seemed to go relatively well.She managed to get upright and into the bathroom. She blinked at the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. Blood, smoke, and make-up smeared her face, her hair was a rat’s nest, and the dress looked even worse than it had on first inspection. The counter had a stack of fluffy white towels next to the sink, and an even fluffier white bathrobe hung next to the shower.
Lia eyed the shower. The accommodations at the hostel were expensive and lukewarm. Usually, she took a morning swim in the ocean and then used one of the free beach showers. Most of the refugees had warned her that she would get harassed by the police if she tried that, but most of the refugees didn’t have blonde hair and a bikini. She looked like a guest if she used one of the resort showers. She just had to keep them on rotation. However, no beach-side shower was actually warm, let alone hot. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a hot shower.
She stripped out of her dress with fumbling fingers and stepped into the marble-tiled confines of the shower box. Moments after starting, the water was steaming. It stung every scrape and cut on her body, and Lia embraced it, reveling in the pain of each injury as well as the hard smack of heat on her skin. When the shower was so steamy that breathing was difficult, Lia reluctantly exited. She wound one of the towels around her hair and then pulled on the bathrobe. Her dress still lay on the bathroom floor like shed snake skin. She stepped around it and went back to the bedroom. Outside the window, she could see that the house was perched on a terraced cliff side that dropped down to a white beach where a small boat house and dock could be seen. If she craned her head, she could see balconies protruding from various parts of the house. From the bit she could see, Lia got the impression that the place was quite sprawling.
She opened her bag and peered nervously inside. It seemed to be missing some items. She reached in and felt for the secretcompartment and unzipped it. Her envelope was still in place. She quickly counted out the stacks of bills and breathed a sigh of relief as she put the cash back. Then she realized what was missing—her spare pair of shoes and swimsuit. Why would anyone take those and leave the money? She looked around the room, hoping they were tucked away somewhere.
Finally, she pulled open the dresser, and her underwear and swimsuit were in the top drawer. Puzzled, but seeing the pattern, she turned to the wardrobe. Inside was an entire rack of clothes. Her old things looked droopy next to the brand-new dresses, tops, skirts, and shorts, all with the tags still on.
Lia scratched her head, dislodging the towel from her hair, and it dropped onto the floor with a damp plop. They had put all of her clothes away. As though she were staying.
Lia put out a hand to get her other dress out. The one that needed the repair on the hem and her hand brushed up against a white cotton sundress. She pulled out the dress. It was precisely the kind of thing she’d pictured wearing when her family had planned the vacation in Greece. It had a halter top and yards of skirt, with bands of eyelet lace that showed extra skin without actually revealing anything. She wanted the dress so much it made her dizzy. She slid the dress off the hanger and stood for a nervous minute, handling the fabric, afraid that she would get it dirty because she was always slightly dirty these days. Only today, she wasn’t. Today she had just come out of the shower. And the dress was next to her clothes. Someone must want her to wear it.
Lia dropped the bathrobe on the bed and slid the dress over her head, the soft folds of the cotton caressing her skin. It fit perfectly, and wonder upon wonders, it had pockets. Lia did a little twirl and then shivered as her wet hair slapped against her back. She went back into the bathroom. The mirror was still foggy, but a quick search of the drawers turned up a hair dryer.She retrieved her brush from her purse and set to work taming her hair.
Lia’s hair seemed ridiculously long to her. She’d always kept it around her shoulders, but she’d been running late for a haircut before vacation, and she certainly wasn’t going to spring for one now, so it just kept growing. When left to its own devices, her hair curled into fat bouncy spirals that one of her girlfriends, back in high school when she’d had friends, had described as romantic. Lia thought thatromanticwas probably code foralways a disaster. Getting her hair to look anything resembling sleek and professional took serious effort and usually gobs of product that she couldn’t currently afford, which was why she’d taken to putting it up in a bun. But the shower had come equipped with shampoo and conditioner, and Lia brushed through it effortlessly for once. Her hair was nearly dry, and the mirror had finally defogged when she could finally see the results. Her reflection didn’t look like her. She was thinner and more tan than she remembered, and her hair was longer than it had ever been. She also looked a little… wild?
Lia frowned and then raised a skeptical eyebrow at her reflection. The dress looked hot. Maybe if she put on make-up and pulled her hair back, she could tone down the wildness but still keep the dress. She went back to her backpack and rummaged through. It was only when her hand reached the bottom of the bag that she realized what else was missing. She upended the pack and began to paw through the debris.
Her phone—her lifeline to work and sanity. The only thing that really mattered, besides the cash, was missing. Lia blinked her eyes, battling the urge to cry, as her skin went clammy. They couldn’t do this to her.
Lia ran to the door and opened it. Outside, a hallway ran in either direction, with doors opening here or there. She took a few hesitant steps in one direction and saw stairs. She bolted forthe stairs and hurried down them. But the further she went, the more worried she became. Alekos Ash, if that was whose house she was in, had been fierce, and the last time she remembered seeing him, he’d been carrying a sword. The other men had been carrying guns. There was a good chance they could do whatever the fuck they wanted to her and her phone. She reached the next level. It had dark wood floors and high white ceilings and crept down the hall. One wall was packed with family photos, and her eye snagged on various pictures.
Alekos with a little boy. Alekos and four or five other men on a fishing boat were all grinning and holding up fish. They had the carelessly happy look like they were on vacation, but Lia recognized the harbor in the background as Kavala. Her eye caught on a black and white photograph showing a group of people in military uniforms. One of the men looked enough like Alekos Ash that she looked closer. It wasn’t him—the nose was wrong, and the jaw wasn’t quite as square, but the resemblance was close enough that they had to be brothers. There were two women in the group, both wearing the same fatigues as the men. She’d never seen that before. The third man in the group was sitting down, and she noticed how his long thin fingers casually held a knife, dangling it by the tip of the blade. The group looked only half-posed, as if they had been standing there and the photographer had told them to smile. It was an odd photo to be so prominently displayed on the wall.
She entered a living room. It was ringed with floor-to-ceiling windows to take in the view of the water and scrubby cliffside, and she could see boats and ships further down the coast in the Kavala harbor, but nothing else moved. The bright sunshine streaming through the windows made everything indoors seem darker. The décor was eclectic and seemed to be ruled only by preference and not by any design sensibility.
The gulls cried out, angry and raucous, and Lia heard thesound of quick feet as if someone were jogging upstairs, along with the sharp click of animal nails on wood. Through the pair of wide-open doors to a deck, she saw a shaggy brown wolf. Then Alekos Ash walked through the door immediately behind it, as if walking with wolves was the most normal thing in the world.
Episode 17
The Living Room
Alex
Her hair was down—a riot of wheat-gold curls that he wanted to bury his fingers in. The white sundress set off her tanned skin, but her feet were bare. She looked untamed, and his wolf immediately wanted out to meet her wildness with his own.
He had gone through her bag the previous night, spreading her belongings on his desk. Touching everything like a stalker or an archaeologist trying to divine the nature of a newfound deity. In truth, it was a pretty pathetic collection, although he’d found himself treating every item like a treasure. A cell phone with a cracked face, a small bag of toiletries and make-up, a wallet with a student ID to Columbia University in New York, a pre-paid cell minutes card, a swimsuit, cellphone charger, a small first aid kit, some protein bars, and a box of tampons. The school ID had expired over a year earlier but declared her to be Eliandra Smith. All ID pictures were terrible, but this one barely looked like her. She’d been rounder, softer, and smiling. Although, to his eye, the smile looked forced.
