Alpha's Solace (Black Moon Saga Book 1)

Visitors in the Woods - Part 1

Two mornings later, Kylie is sleeping in the back bedroom while Adam is standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window. Kylie told him about how her Mama used to do this, and he too is trying to figure out what she was looking for as she stood here when he notices an unfamiliar car pull up in the driveway. He tenses and moves to the side of the window, out of sight of the new arrivals, and continues to watch as a man and woman get out of the car and start to make their way toward the front door. He relaxes somewhat as he recognizes the two contacts from The Council who are quite familiar to him because they were assigned to the Silver Moon Pack and their Solace Hotel location back when his father was Alpha.

Though he knows these people are friendly and not intruders, he still can’t help but feel anxious to find out why they’ve come. He moves to meet them at the front door and decides to step outside out of earshot, so Kylie won’t hear their conversation if she wakes up. “Tian, Anya,” he greets the man and woman, respectively, reaching out to shake their hands. “What a surprise, and you came by car. What brings you here?”

“Hello, Adam,” Anya, The Council’s representative for witches, greets him. “Alpha Marcus contacted us because he is concerned for Kylie. He asked for me specifically, hoping that I might be able to use some healing magic to help the girl. I told him that interfering with humans is not generally something we do, but since she is your mate, I suppose I can make an exception. I can’t promise that I will be able to do anything, but I agreed to at least come see her.”

“And I wanted to come along,” chimes in Tian, the vampire emissary to The Council, “because your son mentioned that you’ll be staying here with her, and I wanted to take the opportunity to talk to her again about her parents. I thought maybe being in this house again might trigger some memory of something we might have missed before. We came by car because suddenly appearing in your bedroom seemed like the sort of thing a human would get suspicious about.” Adam laughs at the imagery Tian provides, agreeing with him about that at least.

“I haven’t actually met her yet, though Tian has told me about her,” Anya continued. Tian had been the one who came to erase and change her memories anytime she started to become suspicious when she was younger. “He must see something in her to have allowed her to stay as long as he did, and I have to admit I’m curious.”

“Well, she’s inside sleeping,” Adam explains, feeling a bit uneasy about allowing them access to Kylie. He worries that Tian’s true purpose for being here might be to wipe memories of whatever Anya is about to do and he doesn’t want his mate to lose even a second of her time with him. On the other hand, if Anya can help her, he doesn’t want to be the one to prevent it. “Alright, come on in,” he finally decides as he opens the door and leads the visitors inside.

“There is powerful magic in this place,” Anya declares as soon as she crosses the threshold, holding a finger to the side of her nose and appearing to be seeing something neither of the men with her can sense. Her eyes glaze over and change in color, becoming an unnatural shade of lavender that seems to glow slightly.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Adam acknowledges. “David was a shaman and rather obsessed with studying and learning magic.”

“No, I was here after their disappearance and searched the place then,” Anya argues, as her eyes shift back to their normal blue. “All the magical artifacts he possessed were removed then. None of it was particularly special or powerful, and the place was cleared of all lingering magic. No, this is new. In fact,” she inhales deeply and takes a closer look at whatever she is seeing, her eyes once again shifting, “it’s coming from in there.” She points toward the doorway that leads into the back bedroom where Kylie is sleeping.

Adam’s heart feels like it jumps into his throat as he begins to panic, worrying that he might have brought Kylie to someplace unsafe. He mentally kicks himself for not considering that this cabin might still be compromised, but he pushes his anxiety aside as he hurries into the room to check on her, Tian and Anya right behind him. It is not until he confirms that she is still sleeping peacefully in the bed where he left her that he exhales in relief.

He turns to Anya and notices her eyes are glowing lavender again. She steps toward the bed and pulls out a smooth, glossy, palm-sized turquoise stone and waves it back and forth over Kylie’s body. It begins to glow slightly as she moves it over Kylie’s left shoulder, and she pauses.

“Permission to touch your mate?” Anya’s eyes shift back to blue as she looks at Adam across the bed from her. “I just want to move her shirt out of the way and see if there are any markings or other indicators on her skin.”

“Sure,” Adam agrees, now eager for Anya to examine Kylie, “and I can tell you she has a birthmark on that shoulder. It’s kind of a vaguely wolf-shaped blob. Well, I think it looks like a wolf, but I’m probably biased. It could be argued that it looks like any four-legged creature. She said she was born with it and told me her mother has one similar to it as well.”

“Hmm,” Anya purses her lips, lost in thought. She reaches out to gently pull back the top of Kylie’s night shirt to expose her left shoulder. Her eyes shift and begin to glow again. As she moves the stone over Kylie’s shoulder, Adam watches as the birthmark changes to look more like a tattoo which is definitely a wolf. Unlike the birthmark, which features a large central blob with vaguely leg-shaped extensions and a smaller blob that appears somewhat like a head with ears, the tattoo shows a clearly defined wolf which appears to be leaping gracefully through the air. The wolf is blonde, the same ash-blonde as Kylie’s hair, with darker areas of brown and black fur lining her paws, legs, and face, similar to the point coloration of a Siamese cat.

Adam gasps. “What does this mean?” He worries that Kylie has carried hidden magic on her body for so long.

At the same time, Tian smirks and remarks, “Well, isn’t this interesting.”

“Quiet,” Anya demands, her voice lower and raspier while her eyes still glow. “I’m not finished here.”

A few moments later, Kylie begins to moan sleepily and turn over in the bed. She opens her eyes and looks at Adam, who has moved to sit on the bed next to her. Then she notices the woman standing over her and gasps, a brief look of panic crossing her face. “Uh … what’s going on?” she asks, looking back to Adam for an explanation. Her eyes widen as she notices the other new person in the room, Tian holding position just behind Adam.

Adam reaches out to take her hand. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. These are old friends of mine. That’s Anya,” he points to Anya, who abruptly shifted her eyes back to normal and stowed away the stone when she noticed Kylie stirring. Now she appears as a normal, though somewhat eccentrically dressed, woman with vibrant blue eyes and long chestnut brown hair just starting to turn gray. She smiles warmly at Kylie, attempting to reassure her that she means no harm.

“And my name is Bastian, but most people call me Tian,” the tall, pale, slender man with neatly trimmed dark hair and gray eyes introduces himself with a slight accent and a small smile. He now leans casually against the wall just beside the bed.

“Okay,” Kylie acknowledges with an amused smile on her face as she sits up in the bed. She is still offput by there being two strangers in the room who were likely watching her sleep, but her tendency to find humor in even the most uncomfortable situations is shining through once again. “Nice to meet you both. In the bedroom. Where I’ve been sleeping. Yeah, not weird or awkward at all.”

The corner of Tian’s lips turns up slightly, but Anya laughs out loud, impressed by Kylie’s reaction and decision to just roll with the situation. “It’s not as strange as it seems,” she begins to explain. “I am a holistic healer, and a frequent guest at the hotel in town. Your friend Marc mentioned to me that his old friend was having some health troubles and asked if I wouldn’t mind coming out to look you over and see if I might be able to help. And Tian is a friend of mine who tends to accompany me on my travels.”

“I am also an investigator who works closely with the authorities in town,” Tian adds, “and was assigned to the case of your parents’ disappearances. I’ve been looking into it for many years and am always eagerly seeking out new leads or clues. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to come back here and look around a bit more, especially with you here to show me around.”

Kylie takes in this information with interest, looking at each of them as they speak, then looks down at her attire and realizes she is not exactly dressed for company. “Alright, cool. Makes a lot more sense now. But if you don’t mind, I’m going to step in the bathroom for a moment and take care of my morning business and get dressed.”

Tian and Adam excuse themselves to the other room while Anya takes a seat on the bed to wait for Kylie to return. Once she comes back, wearing soft black leggings and a mauve tunic top with a hood in place of her pajamas, Anya smiles and pats the spot next to her on the bed. Kylie limps awkwardly over to the bed, still struggling to use her crutch with her cast.

“Any chance you know a spell that could take care of this?” Kylie jests, pointing at the cast. Then she considers that she doesn’t know this woman and whether she would appreciate a joke about her profession that likens it to witchcraft and wishes she could take it back. “Sorry if that was offensive or insensitive. I must admit I don’t know much about holistic healing. I shouldn’t joke about it like that.”

Anya’s eyes twinkle as she regards the young woman sitting next to her, beginning to get a sense of why Tian likes her so much. She reaches out a hand to gently squeeze Kylie’s leg in reassurance, covertly attempting to make direct contact with her to get a better sense of all the magical and mundane processes at work in her body. “That’s okay, I’m not offended. You’re not that far off about what I do. ‘Holistic healing’ is kind of a general term I use because it sounds friendly and familiar to most people, but what I do is basically like spellcasting. I kind of tune into the natural world and manipulate it, to a certain degree. It’s hard to explain, but if you want to view it like spellcasting, that’s fine with me.”

“Fair enough.” Kylie decides she likes this woman, even if what she does is completely foreign to her. “If you had offered me your style of healing a decade ago, I would have chased you off. But at this point, I’m open to pretty much anything. It probably won’t help, but neither does what my doctors have to offer me, and maybe it will surprise me.”

“I admire your spirit,” Anya compliments her. “Okay, basically I just need you to lie down on the bed on your stomach, and I’m going to run my hands over your whole body. I also have a stone that helps me identify what I need to do that I might hold over you. You might feel warmth in some places.”

“Got it,” Kylie acknowledges as she begins to move into position as Anya instructed. “Go ahead. I’m ready.”

Anya kneels on the bed next to Kylie but pauses before she begins. “It occurs to me that I should warn you. Conditions like yours are tricky. I might not be able to help you, so I don’t want to get your hopes up. Your broken arm I can do something about, even if it is just helping with the pain and alleviating the itching from the cast. The rest, I’m not so sure.”

“I expected as much,” Kylie sighs, used to all sorts of medical professionals using a similar disclaimer to keep her expectations in check. “I still appreciate you trying. No hard feelings if nothing comes of this. But the thing about my arm? That would be amazing. You make it sound like a little thing, but it’s not. Every little bit helps.”

“Well, alright then. Here we go.” Anya places the palm of her right hand over the back of her left hand and passes her hands over Kylie’s body, starting with her feet and moving upward.

She senses the twisted joints of her feet and ankles and frowns, wanting desperately to heal them but restraining herself. She knows that without solving the problem which causes all the other symptoms, she would only be setting Kylie up to have to endure this all happening over again. She makes multiple passes over her body, locating many ailments but never finding an overall source. She lingers over Kylie’s abdomen, sensing heightened energy that she easily identifies and smiles, making a mental note to be sure to talk to Adam about that. Then she moves to the cast on her right arm and discreetly casts a bone-mending spell that should heal the injury within the week.

The only other oddity about Kylie’s body is that birthmark, so she turns her attention to studying it further. She takes out the stone once again and continues the work she began earlier. She lets her mind tune into the energy of the stone, easily identifying the outer layers of the magic at work on this body but struggling to break through the power of the underlying spell. Just as she feels she might be making some progress, she hears Kylie grunt and notices her wriggling on the bed a bit, as if from discomfort.

“That’s starting to feel pretty hot,” Kylie interrupts. “I’m all for trying new things, but that might fall under the category of causing more problems than it solves.”

“Yes, sorry.” Anya disengages her connection with the stone and returns it to her pocket. “I thought I would give it one last big try, but the energy got away from me. I don’t think I can do much more, but your arm should be feeling better soon. I would suggest returning to the doctor for some x-rays in a few days. It might be that you can get rid of that cast much sooner than you expected.”

Kylie senses that their session is over and rolls over to face Anya. “I will do that. If it turns out that your spells heal my arm like that, you’ll make a believer of me, that’s for sure. If I can get this cast off, it will make getting around a heck of a lot easier.”

Anya reaches out and strokes Kylie’s cheek affectionately. “I wish I could do more for you, but I’m glad to have helped at least that much. Plus, my methods allow me to empathize with you more than most. I felt your pain, even if only a fraction of it and just for a few moments.”

“Oh, well now I feel bad. You shouldn’t have to experience that. In a weird way, though, that’s comforting that you kind of get it. Thank you so much for giving it a try and putting yourself through that.”

“You’re so welcome. And please, don’t feel badly about that.” Anya stands up from the bed and offers a hand to Kylie to help her up as well. “I think we have done what we can here. How about we join the men in the other room now?”