Alpha's Legacy (Black Moon Saga Book 3)

44. A Vamplock's Dilemma: Grayson

Ah, Anna Jade. I never quite know what to expect with her. I really did not know what I was getting myself into when I made the snap decision to take her with me. Although a spellcaster myself, I don’t have a lot of experience with other casters. I mostly know what I learned from my mother, as well as the things I’ve picked up along the way. I haven’t experienced the best of the caster-world, that's for sure.

My mother always warned me about other casters and did her best to shield me from that world when I was young. She wasn’t wrong about how competitive it can be, especially among warlocks, and she was spot-on about the self-serving nature of most casters. Even other witches, who are supposedly “good” by nature, seem to also be haughty and judgmental by default.

Oh, you’re a warlock? They seem to say with how they stand when I’m in their presence, not to mention the way they look at me. Warlocks are guilty until proven innocent, in their eyes, and there was never much I could do to sway their opinion. And that was before Raja. After her, well, I can’t even say that I blame them for being appalled at the stink of me. I am as well.

But Anna Jade, she is someone else entirely than who I expected her to be. On the surface, she’s all witch. She suddenly finds herself in captivity, and the first thing she thinks to complain about is that I’m not addressing her respectfully enough to suit her tastes? Really?

She did try to resist my power at first, bless her heart, but she wasn’t prepared for someone like me. She’s a powerful little witch, that much I could tell, but she didn’t know that she must battle both my spellpower and my vampiric power to be able to fight against my spells. Lacking vampiric power of her own to take care of the second part, she never stood a chance. But it was impressive that she tried.

It was even more impressive how she tried. With never a word spoken and with her arms restrained by my own vampiric-enhanced strength, she somehow managed to produce a protective barrier and attempt to push me away from her. Then she attempted a teleport at one point, though I can’t even fathom what she intended with that, considering that even if she had succeeded, she would have dragged me with her.

But after all that fuss, once she was alone with me in a strange new place and quite obviously my captive, she never protested. Never fought me. Never attempted an escape, unless I count the first night. Upon reviewing the video footage the next morning, I did discover that she didn’t immediately come to me when she went wandering in the night. She tried the “door” first. Little did she know that the only way to get through that door is with a teleport. I bricked it over years ago.

Neither did she know that the lack of door was the very conundrum we were facing that first night. The amount of power that I had to burn through in the entirety of that day very quickly depleted my stash of blood rations and left me needing more. I miscalculated there, and it was my mistake to puzzle over. Attempt a short-range teleport back into the tunnels, or risk reaching out to Enrique for an assist?

Enrique, the one and only other living person in the world who knows my secret besides myself (well, and Anna Jade now, though I intend to remedy that soon). I worried that informing Enrique of my compromised state may very well have been the end of me, and her. He’s held the knowledge of what I am and what I’ve done over my head for decades now, chasing me out of every place that I’ve attempted to settle. Each time, he wasn’t satisfied until he once again had me backed against a wall, applying the pressure and squeezing me out of whatever life I’d managed to build for myself in some new place.

Always with the same tired threats, too. Outing me to The Council. Cutting off my access to food sources, forcing me to feed from the living. Blackmailing me at every turn to let him in on however I’d found to make a living, forcing me to share my contacts with him, my territory, my livelihood.

Again and again, I’d flee like the fugitive that I am at the nearest opportunity, leaving him to inherit it all. I couldn’t tell you why it never seemed to be enough for him, to take everything from me again and again, to capitalize on my hard work, to reap the fruits of my labor. All he ever would have had to do was stay. Continue my endeavors. Take over my new life and force me to find somewhere else to try again.

But no, it seems to be my actual life that he’s always been after. Me. He can’t kill me, and he also doesn’t seem to be able to live without me. Time and again, he steals my business and my life from me, but he doesn’t seem to be willing or able to keep any of it going without me there to do the actual work for him. Over and over, he’s driven my name into the ground.

Well, my names. Fake, all of them. Because you see, that’s what he really has on me. He knows who I am. He knows my true name and all about the life I lived before Raja. Actually, he’s partly responsible for taking that from me too. He is her creation as well, though not one like me. She turned him, she made him what he is as much as she did the same to me, but he was just a lowly human before her.

There was nothing special about him, nothing that she could build upon with one of her experiments. He was just her grunt laborer. She sent him to do all the dirty work, including acquiring her test subjects and food sources to keep them both fed in the meantime.

When he found me, it was actually my mother they were after. She was quite powerful, though nothing like some of the notable greats out there, but still a rather skilled and versatile caster. What was most extraordinary about her, though, was not her talent or her power. It was that she fought her own nature, choosing to become solitary instead of joining a coven or working for The Council.

That’s a trait that’s common among dark witches, but exceedingly rare for someone with light magic and a natural calling toward law and order. She had her reasons, my existence chief among them, but none of that was what appealed to Raja. It was her free spirit, her individual nature – but mostly because that meant that she’d likely be found alone. An “easy” target.

I was a surprise that Enrique found out about only after he’d arrived, and though my mother was away and it was her that he sought, as a snap decision, he took me instead. Though Raja was initially upset about having to settle for a weak copy of what it was that she wanted, she soon realized that her sidekick had made an intelligent choice.

I was nothing impressive for a warlock, but that turned out to be to her benefit. My will was weak, unlike my mother’s, and I was easier to mold to her design. My mother would have fought off the vampires until her last breath, but not me. I succumbed without putting up much resistance and pretty quickly became one of them.

I’ve never liked that fact, but it is a fact. It happened. I can’t do any more about it now than I could then.

For decades, my mind was not my own. It belonged to Raja, and both my mind and my body were hers to use as she pleased. I don’t even remember most of that time, and I’m sure that’s the only small blessing I’ve been granted from the whole ordeal. What little I do remember will haunt me for the rest of eternity.

Eventually, she stopped spending so much of her time at the location where she’d been holding me in a prison of sorts. A lair, I suppose you could say. I didn’t come to learn until after her death what it was that had suddenly drawn most of her time and attention away from me. But her death had the fortunate side effect of releasing her hold on me once and for all, and then I was able to start piecing things together.

She’d drifted south and hooked up with a pack of werewolves. I’ll probably never fully know or understand why or what drew her there, but I’ve heard plenty about what she did there. There, in Anna Jade’s home pack, though it was during a different time and under a different Alpha. If I had to guess, it was the discovery of the tunnels beneath the pack’s territory that drew her there.

Raja did have a thing for tunnels, especially of the sort where some of the original vampire bloodlines once nested. Such tunnels are always rife with ancient and terrifying artifacts that most people with any sense would scoop up and lock away somewhere safe, but not Raja. She liked to turn ancient and terrifying old vampire lairs into her playgrounds, where she could create and experiment on her playthings. The woman was twisted, even for a vampire.

I’ll always be glad that I failed to keep her interest. When her visits became fewer and farther between, it gave me the chance to start to break free of her influence. Bit by bit, my mind came back to me. What was left of my memories returned. My ability to think and make decisions was once again my own, at least while she was gone. When she’d return, I’d have to fight her for control.

Back then, Enrique and I, we were allies of a sort. Companions even, maybe. He’d been under her influence the same as I was, and he liked it about as much as I did. But though we worked together in plotting her demise and our eventual escape, something happened between us when she died. With her influence gone entirely, the camaraderie that we’d built over the years that we endured isolated in that prison together seemed to go right along with it.

Unfortunately for me, he held onto a lot of intact memories from the time he spent with her, so I knew that I couldn’t return to my former life. He remembered who I was and where he’d found me, so he would have known to look for me at my family’s home. I could have ended things quite quickly and simply, being the far more powerful of us two, but I soon discovered that I cannot kill him. It’s part of my programming. And so began our decades-long game of cat and mouse.

Until a few years ago, when he came to me not with threats and intent to oust me from my current life that time, but with a proposition. That was when I realized that I had managed to remain in the same place for some years undisturbed not because he hadn’t found me yet, but because he wasn’t interested in me just then. Not until my mother passed away, and he came to deliver that news to me and extend me an offer that he knew would be hard for me to refuse:

Join him in his current undertaking, and be allowed to freely return to my family’s home, which he’d had my mother magically relocate to a place that was both convenient and rich with lucrative business opportunities.

Because you see, for years he’d been personally watching over my mother for me, and helping her attend to her affairs. Looking out for my best interests, or so he claimed, by making sure that she was well and happy, keeping her company and entertained, and even watching over the house that had belonged to my family for generations, the place I was raised, along with the vast collection of magic that so many generations of casters had amassed.

In my absence, he had become my stepfather and spent my mother’s final years whispering in her ear and charming her into making reckless decisions that mostly only benefitted him. That’s what he came to tell me.

My stepfather, for crying out loud. No wonder he’d been leaving me alone for a while. He didn’t need me when he was busy draining my mother of everything she was worth. Oh, and not to mention swindling tourists and townies alike by peddling his magic act all up and down the Vegas strip. His magic act. A vampire as a magician. What a joke.

But with her gone, he needed some way to replenish his access to a steady flow of income. He could have sold the house and everything in it, and I’m glad that he didn’t, but I’ll never thank him for it. I know why. It was his bargaining chip, his way of drawing me in.

He’d recently gotten involved with another sort of shady character, a fellow by the name of Miles Dawson, the Alpha of the Riptide werewolf pack. They had some sort of black-market supply deal going on, and they needed a powerful dark caster for it. Fortunately for their burgeoning underground empire, Enrique knew just the guy. Me. His very own stepson.

And now here I am, his prisoner once again. I have finally resolved myself to accepting the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter where I go or how hard I work at disappearing, he’ll always find me. He’ll always rip everything out from under me. Now with my mother gone and him in a position to quite literally take everything that truly matters to me, of course I’m staying. It’s my house, my life, and he can’t have it. Not this time.

Enter Anna Jade, my ticket to buying my life back. The original plan was to try to work something out with those hunters and put them on Enrique’s trail, which I knew was a huge risk with little chance of succeeding. They work with The Council, and if they got even a whiff of there being anything off about me, I’m sure it wouldn’t be long until I was back in cuffs, this time in Council headquarters with no hope of ever being released.

Someone like me, something like me, can’t be allowed to exist. I am darkness incarnate. They’ve executed casters and vampires with fewer stains on their records, and I am both at once. But to my knowledge, there’s no way to kill me. Enrique has tried. He’s hired people who have tried. Those people have hired people who have tried. But vampiric power can’t get the job done because of my magical essence, and casters can’t penetrate my vampiric power. I am an enigma, and a massive problem for those who value control and balance.

So, the instant that I saw Anna Jade with the hunters, I knew that I was looking at the solution to all my problems, if I played my cards right. I knew that she must be one of the Black Moon hybrid twins. The girl has her mother’s face, and the stench of that lighter than light essence of hers is a dead giveaway too. I’ve heard so much about the “pure light” of her mother that I knew it must be her offspring I was looking at. Hers and that warlock she’s taken as one of her mates, which would explain the girl’s power.

The wheels in my mind were spinning in that instant, and though my plan hadn’t fully formulated yet, I followed my compulsion to grab the girl. My first thought was that she’d make a great insurance policy to get the hunters on-task, on my task anyway.

I needed them to stop messing around with deciding which vamps are redeemable and which aren’t, taking some of the feral ones back home to train or whatever it is they do with them, and taking the more sentient ones as prisoners for The Council to deal with. I needed them to find Enrique and have every reason to kill him rather than risk giving him a chance to talk and try to bargain for his freedom. He has one hell of a get out of jail free card tucked away in the form of a vampiric-caster hybrid that isn’t even supposed to exist, and I know he wouldn’t hesitate to give me up.

Though that was the plan when I decided to try following the hunters back to their home base, I expected them to make me work for it a little. I anticipated having to search and dig for something that I could use as leverage, but no. I wasn’t even there for a full five minutes before I started to smell the stench of pure light magic, and once I caught sight of her, I knew I’d struck gold. But by the time I left with her, a new idea was already sprouting.

Alpha Miles. I don’t know all the details, but I know that the work I’ve been doing for him involves some plot that he’s hatching against Black Moon and its allies. I know that he despises Alpha Kylie and her pack, and that he’s overly ambitious in ways that are as likely to be his downfall as they are to make him the ruler of the empire he sees in his mind. I also know that Enrique works for him, but that he has similarly been growing too ambitious. Too brazen. Too willing to overstep and try to make grabs for power and authority that aren’t his to take.

The abundance of feral vampires overrunning the tunnels where we both work? They’re his. They’re intentional. They’re partly meant to be his weapon against me, which is as stupid of an idea as it is a successful one.

The tunnels below Riptide territory being flooded with hostile vampire drones was never part of the deal with Alpha Miles, and I know he’s been agitated about it. Enrique keeps telling him that it’s necessary because the newborns boost his own power and ability to work, which is true in part, as it is true for any vampire with the ability to create more of his own kind. But the boost in power is insignificant enough to not be worth the risk of the trouble that uncontrollable hordes of newborns tend to create.

There have been enough incidents involving the vamps escaping the tunnels and wreaking havoc on the surface that The Council has reprimanded Alpha Miles and demanded that he do something about the problem, which is how the vampire hunters have gotten involved. He called them in, and he told Enrique and me to be on the lookout for them. He also asked me to do what I could to protect our business ventures below the surface, knowing that vampires aren’t so great at defeating magic, but the joke’s on him, because I can’t.

Or couldn’t, I should say. Not until Anna Jade helped me learn how. The wards that I’ve set should be enough to keep any vamps from discovering our operations, though I’m well aware that my fledgling efforts with anchoring spells will prove to be worthless against pretty much any caster. I have no idea how to weave more power into the anchors, and the books I’ve been working from are far from recent.

It’s a problem, but as far as I’m concerned, not my problem. I don’t much care if our work is discovered. It’s filthy work, and I despise it. I’d love for someone to stumble upon it and put an end to it.

It's a continuation of some of Raja’s work, in fact. I did mention how she loved her tunnels, and these ones are no exception. I don’t know who was responsible, but somebody stumbled across another of her experimental lairs at some point, and Enrique seems to have wandered into the thick of it. Whether intentional or not, I couldn’t say. Perhaps he spent long enough with Raja that he misses the work that they did together, because here we are again.

The good news for Alpha Miles is that Raja always secured her workstations by weaving powerful vampiric wards that are quite draining for most vampires to even attempt to break through. I would be the exception, hence Enrique’s insistence on flooding the area with newborns. My baseline of power far exceeds his, but with the boost that comes from having so many others in the area, the difference is astounding.

I can easily maneuver her wards and still have plenty of power leftover to put in a full day of work. And as a bonus, for him at least, having so many uncontrollable vampire drones that refuse to stay in one place means fluctuating power for me to draw from, which makes my work very tedious and unstable. In his mind, that will keep me tethered to my work with too little time or energy leftover to cause any trouble for him, but he underestimated the power of my problem-solving skills. I simply choose to work during the day, when they’re sleeping.

As for him, I have no idea what work he actually does or where he even does it, nor where he lives, which is my main problem. How can I eliminate him when I can’t find him? I was hoping that the hunters might be able to track him somehow, and with them working for me now, they’ll have no choice but to kill him when they do if they want their precious Anna Jade back.

That is, until I had a better idea. Alpha Miles knows where Enrique lives and works, and he’s been deliberately withholding that information from the hunters for obvious reasons. He thinks that the fool is valuable to him, though that’s because he doesn’t know the truth of it. It’s me who does all the work. I don’t need him for the vampiric bits of our project. He spends his time sleeping, screwing around, and feeding, when he’s not off performing parlor tricks for gullible humans anyway. Maybe that’s even how he lures so many of them down here, his magic tricks. Despicable.

But if I can bring something to Alpha Miles that he might find to be more valuable than his vampire lackey, then perhaps I can entice him to give up Enrique and have the hunters take care of him. As a bonus, I’ll also be able to prove my loyalty to the Alpha and perhaps earn some favor with him. Maybe he’ll even trust me enough to let me take over the project, once I assure him that I can continue filling his orders without anyone’s help.

He already knows that I haven’t turned on him by stealing the hunters away to work for me instead. I told him that I was monitoring them and might even pay them a visit to check up on them, and I informed him when I returned home with a prize. We mutually agreed that I should lay low with her for a bit and let him feel out the situation, pretending to help her friends and family search for her when really, he’s just keeping on their good side so he can stay in the loop. They keep him updated on the search party’s progress, and he's supposedly running his own rescue operation as well.

But yesterday, when he alerted me of the search party drawing alarmingly close to my location, despite their only rescue so far consisting of a room full of humans that Enrique had been keeping, we decided that it was time to negotiate terms and prepare for an exchange. I named my price: Enrique. The Alpha protested at first, of course, but only until I laid out the facts for him.

I don’t need Enrique or any other vampire to continue my work. Enrique has been lying to him, and I’ve been working alone this entire time. Even better, without Enrique around anymore, we’ll no longer have to deal with the messy hordes of feral vampires, which will bring down the heat from The Council.

Then I pointed Miles to a wealth of evidence that I’ve been collecting about my rival and the ways in which he betrays the Alpha on a regular basis, listed off the ways that Enrique compromises and jeopardizes our operation, not least of which is by doing things like kid-napping alarming numbers of humans from the surface and holding them hostage down below, and oh yes, what better way to prove compliance to The Council than by producing the culprit behind the vamp infestation as a show of good faith?

When he eventually agreed, we came up with a plan. His “rescue” operation is much the same as theirs – a team of hired spies, thieves, bounty hunters, and mercenaries who he’ll send to retrieve Anna Jade from me. He can’t be seen making the exchange himself because he hasn’t entirely decided what he plans to do with her. But knowing that I’ve collared her to suppress her magic, he wants the key, and if possible, he wants me to come up with some replacement for her memories that leaves her with the impression that he doesn’t have it and cannot simply take it off and release her to return home.

Though concerning for her sake, I can’t say that it’s all that surprising. Nothing is ever as simple as it should be with him. But alright, I can do that. All I need is a cover story to leave her with so that when she wakes, she’ll view him as an ally and forget everything she knows about me.

That only leaves me with one problem: I kind of like Anna Jade. I knew all along that she would be a blameless, innocent, undeserving pawn being passed around the board of a game she has no stake in, but I didn’t expect to grow fond of her. She’s a witch, there’s no denying that, but she’s also unlike any other witch I’ve ever encountered. In fact, she’s unlike any other person I’ve met, and it cuts deep to know that I’ve put her in this position.

A position that I feel powerless to back us out of. There is no way forward for me until I eliminate Enrique from the board, and the only way I see to accomplish that requires Anna Jade.

With a heavy sigh, I lift myself from the easy chair where I’ve spent the night and morning pondering my dilemma, and start trudging my way back up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom, where I left the witch in question the night before.