Alpha's Legacy (Black Moon Saga Book 3)

42. Too Late: Pete

We never did find Anna Jade that first day, although we managed to cover a lot of ground, and we also never ran into any traps, explosions, or alarms. Other than a couple more of those sigils, all we came across was vampires and more vampires. Well, the hunters did anyway. We mostly came across their messes and even managed to waste some time releasing a room full of human hostages that were probably being kept for food.

Okay, that part wasn’t a waste. I never would have forgiven myself for handling that any differently than we did, even if we did have to deal with Alpha Miles in the process. I really do despise him, but as much as I hate the fact of it, he is technically in charge here.

After that whole mess, Bria managed to talk us into quitting for the night. My team, I should say. I did not agree to it, but she got to them.

“You’ve had an easy time of it all day,” she claimed. “The vamps have been sleeping. But they’ll be awake soon, and you’ve just stolen their food stores. That means they’ll be hungry and eager for a taste of anything that moves.”

All good points, but she left out a big one. Anna Jade is down there too, and I bet those vamps can smell her. Willow tried to put my mind at ease by assuring me that Grayson’s twisted magic will keep them at bay because of how it’s all vampirically corrupted or whatever, and she even seems to think that might be why he does it that way considering his choice of location, but I don’t trust it. I don’t want to leave Anna Jade anywhere near the hungry masses, and I don’t trust some warlock to keep her safe.

I knew I should have fought harder to keep us going, and once we finally get back down there, I really regret relenting on it. We’ve lost almost all the ground that we gained the day before. Even if the hunters did put a serious dent in the vamp population, they’re still there, and they’re back in their usual nesting spots.

It feels like we’re starting all over, even if we can teleport a little bit closer now. I regret that too, letting Willow stop deactivating those sigils when she did. We could have gone in closer this time if she’d kept going with it.

“There has to be a better way,” I insist, pounding a frustrated fist against the wall of where we’ve been paused, waiting for the hunters to get their head start going again.

Phoebe looks at me like I’m crazy, and maybe I am. The vibrations could wake some more of the sleeping pests and alert them to our location.

“It just makes no sense,” I go on, ignoring her. “If it’s magic, why can’t Willow’s crystal ball see through it? And if it’s vampiric power, then why can’t your team do something about it, Bria?”

“It doesn’t even feel vampiric to us,” she explains, just the voice in my headset again. “And it doesn’t smell vampiric. Honestly, I never would have thought ‘vampire’ until Eramund said it. He claimed that it would have to be to embed itself into Caz’s arm the way that it did.”

“And it’s magic, but it’s twisted like I said before,” Willow adds. “The essence is magical, as dark as I’ve ever come across. The feel is magical, and in a lot of ways, it responds just like normal magic. But there’s that underlying feel of something else, too. Something foreign and unrecognizable, and though I never would have speculated that it could be vampiric, that feels right.”

“Well, we need a better location,” I insist. “A closer one. You know where she is, right? Just take us there already.”

“I suspect an area where she could be,” she corrects, pausing to think. “It’s admittedly larger of an area than I’d like, and we’ve been circling it unproductively because of the labyrinth-like design of these tunnels. I agree that we need better.”

“So ...” I prompt, hoping that she intends to offer more than just her agreement. Like, you know, a suggestion or a way through.

“So, I keep thinking about what your Bria said about Grayson yesterday, when we were puzzling over his sigils,” she tells me.

She keeps saying stuff like that, calling Bria “mine,” a suspicion that is apparently shared by pretty much everyone here, but I don’t know what more to say to dispute it. I’ve corrected them countless times, but no one seems to believe me, especially not since Bria called me “lover boy” yesterday. They don’t know about Anna Jade being my mate, and they seem to assume that Bria meant I was her own lover, not that I was unreasonably upset with her in that moment because of who we’re here to retrieve.

I don’t know which is worse, letting them all think that I have something going with Bria, or revealing the truth and risking them ousting me as leader for fear that this mission is too close to home for me. I know I can handle it, otherwise I’d willingly hand over the reins myself, but no one else will see it that way once they find out. I know I wouldn’t, if the roles were reversed.

But it isn’t the conversation that needs to happen right now, so I ignore that too, listening while Willow explains what she’s thinking.

“She made a comment about automatically assuming that he’s made sure to leave himself out of the nasty effects of his potentially trapped spells, and that got me to thinking. Even if we haven’t come across any such traps yet, they could still exist. Maybe we’re just not close enough. And if he has left any traps or effects to be triggered, then it would make sense for him to exclude his location from that.”

“Yeah, I’m with you so far,” I tell her encouragingly.

“Good. Well, since we’re stopped for the moment anyway, I was thinking that maybe I should try scrying again, except not for Anna Jade this time.”

“So, you’re saying that you just carry your crystal ball around with you in that thing?” Bruno asks, pointing to the satchel at her hip. “Isn’t that, like, I don’t know, bad luck or something if you break it?”

She laughs and shakes her head, seeming amused by that even if she doesn’t answer him directly.

“I was thinking that I should try searching for his twisted magic this time,” she reveals excitedly.

“Brilliant,” Nolan grumbles sarcastically. “News flash, though, Willow. It’s everywhere.”

“Which will allow me to see whether there’s some pattern to it, and maybe even spot if there’s anywhere that it isn’t or that there’s less of it,” she points out. “Because news flash, Nolan. There’s a chance that the shielding might actually be weaker wherever he is keeping Anna Jade. Just enough to keep me from teleporting there, but not enough to hurt anyone if a trap gets triggered.”

“I like how you’re thinking there, Willow,” Bria compliments her. “And I’ll go ahead and take credit for the assist too.”

“You really must like my idea because you’re even using my name now,” Willow retorts.

“And I like how you put that prick in his place,” Bria adds affirmatively. “Because news flash, Nolan. You’re kind of an i***t sometimes and you had it coming. It’s in my nature for magic to give me the heebie-jeebies, and even I don’t grumble about it as much as you do.”

“You give me the heebie-jeebies,” he mumbles back at her.

I let them go at it for a few rounds like that because I know that Bria wouldn’t be mouthing off if it was getting in the way of her work, and nobody’s yelling. We have nothing better to do but wait anyway, other than Willow, who is already working on setting up a mobile scrying station in the corner.

“I can’t do anything about how this is going to light this place up, though,” she warns as she removes the crystal ball from her satchel.

Although honestly, I think she only did it that way for Bruno’s benefit. From my angle, it looked more like she produced it out of thin air right next to her satchel, but I’m sure that his eyes are bugging out of his head behind his nightvision goggles anyway.

She’s still working at it when Bria gives us the signal to head out, and that sets Nolan back to grumbling again.

“Is it just me, or does this seem to waste more time than it saves?” he complains, pacing with impatience.

“You’re welcome to head out if you don’t want to wait,” Phoebe tells him, mirroring his annoyance. “Leaving her behind is your favorite thing to do, after all.”

“Alright, guys. That’s enough. We’re all on the same side here,” I remind them, finally feeling a need to step in. “This is exactly what I was worried about, and exactly what we all agreed to not let happen. All that personal drama stuff lives out there, on your own time. Here, we’re trying to save a young woman from an evil warlock, and none of that matters.”

“Geez, took you long enough,” Bruno complains. “But thanks for finally saying it. I think my head will literally explode if I have to listen to any more drama. You guys need your own reality TV series or something.”

“I don’t disagree, but I am heading out,” Angel adds. “Radio me if she zeroes it in any further, but I think I’ve got enough to work with for now. The spots she’s looking at are where the blueprints get a little fuzzy anyway, and it’s where I was trying to get us to yesterday. I think something might be back there but just hidden from record.”

“Can we trust you here with her, or do you want to go with him?” I ask Nolan, trying to throw the man a bone and give him the option instead of just sticking him with his ex like we did yesterday.

“If she’ll come for the magic stuff,” he agrees, nodding at Phoebe. “You can hate me again tomorrow, but today I need a caster, and your mom’s busy. Teach me the system. I’m a fox too, you know.”

“Whatever. Let’s just go,” Phoebe mutters, obviously not happy about it. “Just remember that Pete kills the people who try to kill me, so I hope you’ve gotten that out of your system.”

Nolan’s heavy sigh is the only response he gives her, and when the three of them leave the alcove where we’ve been waiting, it’s dead silent between them. That’s normal for Angel, though.

“And then there was air again,” Bruno whispers once they’re out of earshot.

He’s not wrong. The tension and heaviness seem to have left with them. I hate that this is how it’s been, but I also know that I need every single one of these people for this job.

Even Phoebe. She’s right. We have a system, and working together feels natural. Tense, but natural.

I just wish they could all knock it off, though. Honestly, Phoebe and her dad are like the same person when it comes to being stubborn and petty the way that they’ve both been. No, strike that. Both of her parents are like that, which explains a lot about her. When they’re mad, they make sure you know it. They make sure you feel it.

But I’m already stressed. My mate is in these tunnels somewhere, and to be honest, I’m about ready to just make a run for it. Me, Angel, Bruno, the end. Take the chance on there continuing to be a lack of magic, and just get it done. Leave the family drama in the dust. I just want this done before we have to quit for the night again.

But I know I can’t do that. Having the two teams really has made the process a whole lot faster, and we’re going to need that speed today. Plus, if Willow can’t find a closer way in, we won’t be making the same mistake of just leaving those sigils in place. The magic is coming down so we can just zoom in and pick up where we left off the next time.

But Goddess, there had better not be a next time. That means leaving this place for another whole night and not coming back until tomorrow. That’s too much time.

I’d say it’s about another ten minutes before the glow of Willow’s crystal ball finally dies down and she stows it away again. I think I’ve chewed off every single one of my fingernails by then and paced my own footpath into the masonry of the floor. Bruno, he’s been … honestly, I don’t know. He’s been quiet and still, which is weird but also appreciated.

“I’ve found an area where his magic is thick and a bit chaotic, which probably means that it’s trapped to high-heaven,” Willow informs us, much more enthusiastically than she should sound about the prospect of encountering Grayson’s traps. “But better yet, at the approximate center of it is a dead zone. Very minimal magic, and I don’t recall it being on the blueprints either.”

“I just hope you’re not about to start listing off coordinates that are anywhere near us,” Bria chimes in, her voice strained as if she’s kind of busy and maybe even engaged in a fight. “We’ve run into a sector where the vamps are thicker than we’ve ever seen down here.”

When Willow gives her the coordinates, sure enough, that’s where we’re headed now. Or where we will be headed once a path is cleared.

We decide to regroup and stick together since according to Bria, once she gets us access, she can’t guarantee that the path will stay open for very long. And though I advise against it, Angel insists on keeping pace with the hunters. He suspects that where we’re trying to get to won’t be accessible from the main paths, and he’s looking for hidden access points.

“Should be minimal vamp activity where I’m going,” he tries to assure me. “The red-eyed buggers don’t really do hidden doors and secret passages.”

“Minimal isn’t none,” I argue, dreading seeing another shifter meet a fate like I once did.

Anna Jade only has the one mate, and I’m it. She can’t do for anyone else what she did for me, and I wouldn’t even let her try. Nearly losing her the once was once more than I can stomach.

“Living, unliving, they all go down the same,” he says nonchalantly. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing, and you’ll thank me for it later.”

That’s about all the arguing I’m willing to do with a grown man, a highly skilled professional no less, so I send him on his way. The dude obviously knows and accepts the risks. And if he really does find us a way through, then he’s right. I will be thanking him for it. I might even kiss him. Doesn’t make me less worried, though.

As we inch our way ever closer to the coordinates that Willow has us heading for, it turns out that she was right. The traps we haven’t been coming across start springing up more and more, just as crude and basic as the shielding sigils.

“This Grayson certainly has a fascinating style of doing things,” Willow comments, frowning in annoyance at one of his traps. “Quite honestly, I’m wondering if he has someone else do this for him. How could the same guy who covertly injected a receptacle full of his essence into a vampire’s arm be responsible for this mess?”

“You know, he kind of reminds me of me,” Phoebe adds. “Especially when I was just starting out with Pete and his crew. I was so out of my depth. Setting traps and enchanting people and places at a moment’s notice are entirely different than brewing potions, which was all the experience I had then. You’d just started my lessons when I ran off.”

“I remember,” Willow answers wistfully.

“But this isn’t that,” I point out. “If this is his hideout, then he has the home turf advantage and he’s had plenty of time to prepare. Quickly cobbling together a rudimentary defense system makes no sense here.”

“True, but I just mean that maybe tricks and traps aren’t really his thing,” Phoebe explains. “Maybe he’s more of a powerful boomer kind of caster, or a conjurer, a summoner, who knows. Anything but this.”

“Quiet,” Bria whisper-barks into our earpieces.

And we know that means that she also wants us to find some crevice or nook to hide in because vamps are headed our way, so we do. For maybe the third or fourth time, I end up pressed up against Nolan and I think Willow, judging by the softness of her.

Once we get the all-clear, we head back into position with Nolan and I guarding her back as she resumes her work on the traps in this section. Bruno and Angel are working as quietly as they can on busting through something that Angel thinks might be a false wall, and Phoebe is scurrying around, sniffing out more magic.

“Phoebe might be right,” Willow muses as she works. “I’ve been thinking about what she said, and now I’m wondering if she’s solved the mystery. Either illusions and enchantments aren’t his strongsuit, or making them into traps isn’t really something that he has much experience with. It might explain it, though I couldn’t reconcile that with the advanced nature of what I assumed was a trap that got the vampire in the arm, but maybe that wasn’t a trap at all. Maybe it was him.”

“You mean like him in the flesh?” Nolan asks, sounding curious about something she’s said for what I think might be the first time in days. “Just standing there waiting to poke someone in the arm?”

“Well, yes,” she chuckles. “Invisible, of course, using one of his twisted spells that even Bria can’t detect. Maybe he saw them coming and just reached out and stuck him with … I don’t know what injures a vampire, but some sort of enchanted weapon. Living down here, I’m sure that he knows plenty about how to hurt vampires.”

“Maybe it was even the artifact that he uses to twist his spells,” I offer, agreeing with her theory and blending it with Bria’s about him stealing something of Raja’s to give his magic that vampiric twist.

“Could be,” she agrees. “Could be that this all started because he was simply curious about who was trespassing in his home and wanted a way to follow them and find out.”

“He knew who they were,” I tell her confidently. “He wanted to follow them, sure, but not to find out who it was. It was a flex. He wanted to use them for his own purposes, though we still don’t know exactly what it is that he does want. He says it’s just that he wants the tunnels cleared, but the hunters were already doing that.”

“There’s a weird sort of door behind the wall we’ve been working on,” Bruno reports in, cutting off our chatter. “Angel wants Willow’s take on it, if she’s not too busy.”

“Of course,” she agrees. “I’m finished with this one now anyway.”

We grab Phoebe and meet Bruno at the given coordinates, and he shows us how to bend and turn to shimmy our way through the narrow passageway that they’ve opened for us.

“Back here,” he says, tapping on a wall to show us that it sounds hollow.

Then he disappears from view, and though it takes a moment to figure out where he went, Nolan eventually spots the crevice that he ducked into. It’s a tight squeeze for me and Willow, but we manage to make it through. There’s not much room in the empty space beyond, but it’s tucked away enough that I feel comfortable pulling out my headlamp so we can get a better look at the walls.

“Magic?” Angel asks, gesturing at what looks more like a slight depression in the wall than a door.

But that’s why he’s the expert for this stuff, not me. Willow’s got that excited look about her that tells me he’s right about the magic.

“Definitely,” she agrees. “It’s sealed, and not from this side. As much as this probably makes no sense considering that it seems to be the entrance, we’ll have to be on the other side for me to open it. Which is admittedly clever on Grayson’s part if he is truly an amateur at creating sigils to lock his spells in place. I can’t dismiss it if I can’t reach it, and considering the nature of the spell, I can’t reach it until I dismiss it.”

“Then how does he even get in there?” Bruno wonders, staring at the space where the door should be as if it might hold the answer.

“I’m sure he made an exception for himself when he created the shield,” she explains. “Which means that only he can get in there.”

“Only him and me,” Angel declares, turning and grinning at us mischievously. “I’ll be back soon. Just wait here.”

I’ve learned not to ask him how he does what he does, already knowing that he won’t tell us, so I just watch him go until he disappears into an impossibly small hole that he’s made at the base of the wall. We won’t see or hear from him again until he either finds a way through or gives up trying, so we do our best to get comfortable while we wait.

Phoebe and I take up positions sitting on the ground with our backs leaned against the same wall, our packs filling the space between us. Willow doesn’t seem to be finished with studying the door, and though they claim to despise each other, Nolan never lets himself wander all that far from her side when we take little rests like this. Not when they’re not actively arguing, anyway. Bruno paces restlessly for a little bit before eventually plopping himself down beside me, sighing heavily.

“So, this girl that we’re trying to find. You know her?” he questions, though I think it’s curiosity born of boredom more than anything.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen her, but yes,” I answer him carefully. “She’s one of Alpha Kylie’s hybrid twins, a healer in fact.”

“The one that fixed you?”

“The very one,” I confirm, chuckling at his description.

“So, there’s a thing I’ve been wondering that might sound kind of dumb or insensitive,” he admits, and though I can’t see his face without blinding him with my lamp, I’d be willing to bet that he’s looking a bit sheepish about it.

“So, ask anyway. At worst, we’ll just laugh at you,” Phoebe tells him.

“Well, this girl’s part-witch, right? So, why hasn’t she just teleported on out of there?”

“I’m part-witch, and I can’t teleport,” Phoebe offers in explanation. “It takes a powerful caster to do that, and hybrids aren’t usually as powerful as pure-bloods.”

“Oh, well, I was just thinking that if she got rid of whatever sort of disease it would take to knock this guy out of the game, then she must be pretty powerful. But I don’t really know all that much about magic.”

“That’s actually a good point,” Phoebe admits thoughtfully.

“She’s powerful,” Willow confirms, still messing with the door. “She’ll be studying with Anya after her birthday, and Anya speaks of her often. I’ve heard lots of talk about how powerful she is over the years. But she’s been waiting for her wolf before she trains in magic, so despite having the power, she likely doesn’t know how to teleport yet.”

“Oh,” Bruno and Phoebe respond almost in unison.

“I hate to even think of it let alone speak it,” Nolan starts to say, glancing my way uncertainly, “but since this isn’t the first time that I’ve worked a kid-napping of a caster, I’ve seen how it can be. Any captor who manages to keep a caster in custody for more than like an hour is smart enough to know that he needs to suppress her power if he intends to keep her. She might be shackled, collared, bound, poisoned, or drugged to prevent her magic from causing him any problems.”

I knew that too, but I hate hearing it in no uncertain terms like that. I prefer imagining her in there sleeping peacefully through the whole ordeal or something, but I know that isn’t usually how it goes. And being a caster himself, Grayson knows how powerful she is. Suppressing her magic was probably the first thing that he did.

“That makes sense,” Bruno says glumly. “I was kind of afraid of something like that being the case. I think Angel had better hurry it up in there.”

I couldn’t agree more, but fortunately, it’s only about another half hour before we see Angel again, and to my relief, he’s grinning when he squeezes back through his little mouse hole.

“Her scent is all over in there,” he reports, to everyone’s relief by the sound of it. “But it’s not fresh,” he adds, frowning. “It’s been at least a day since she was there, and the trail gets cold past the first room. No sign of which way he took her either.”

“He knew we were coming,” I realize, groaning.

We were as careful as we could be and avoided what cameras and monitoring devices we could find, but that doesn’t mean we found them all. It also could have been the magic. It still might have been meant to look simple when it wasn’t. Maybe not disabling some of the sigils left some undetectable alarms in place or something.

“He knew we were coming,” I repeat for emphasis, “and he moved her.”

“So, now how do we pick up the trail?” Bruno wonders. “I doubt that he moved her right across the hall or something easy like that, so now what?”

“If her scent is only in the one room and it seems like there’s no physical trail to indicate where they went, then my guess would be that he used his magic. He teleported to some other location, and did it only yesterday,” Willow surmises, seeming excited. “Get me in that room, and if it’s recent enough, I might be able to track it. I should at least be able to give you a likely search radius based on the lingering hints of how much power he used, assuming that he stayed local, anyway.”

“No offense, but you’re a lot bigger than I am,” Angel points out, looking Willow over.

And he’s right. She’s got a good eight inches on him in height, and she’s a little on the plump side. By contrast, he’s a small guy. Short, thin, and able to bend and twist and maneuver impossible spaces. I doubt that Willow shares that particular talent with him.

“None taken,” she assures him, smiling. “But Phoebe might be able to get through and disable that shielding, and then I just need coordinates. Get me some for a different spot than the room you’re talking about, though. I wouldn’t want to muck up the trail with my own teleportation magic.”

“You got it,” he agrees, nodding to Phoebe to invite her to join.

Unlike him, she has to shift to get that tiny, but luckily, she’s an itty-bitty fox when she does. Smaller than mine, even. He wiggles back through his hole, and she follows, probably feeling kind of excited to finally be getting a glimpse of how Angel does his thing. I know I would be.

Instead, I’m sitting here feeling pretty disappointed that we messed up so badly by giving Grayson a heads-up somehow, but I’m also trying to stay hopeful. If Willow can figure out where he went or even how far he went, then that’s a start. Plus, we’ve learned our lesson, and next time, he won’t see us coming.

Just hang in there for a little bit longer, Anna Jade. We’re right behind you.