Alpha's Legacy (Black Moon Saga Book 3)

30. Rantings of a Mad Man: Tian

“She’s gone, Tian. He took her.”

The very words that I feared Bria might say, but had hoped I’d never actually have to hear from her. They’re right up there with “She’s hurt, Tian,” and “She’s run away, Tian,” or even “She thinks Bo is her mate, Tian.”

No jest. He’s my creation, but he’s nothing but trouble as a partner or lover, and he lives the same dangerous life as the rest of them. But he’s quite charming, and it wouldn’t be the first time that he’s set his sights too close to home for comfort.

With those simple words, declaring Anna Jade’s disappearance into the custody of some unaccounted-for danger at the hands of some unknown foe, Bria has unleashed a flood of emotions and racing thoughts that is truly unlike anything I’ve experienced before. I’ve never had a child of mine be put in such peril, and I especially never suspected that I’d be the one to put her there.

I’m angry and scared in a way that I never thought possible, but in a way, I’m also not surprised. I suspected that something like this was coming. I didn’t know when, and I didn’t know what, but I sensed it from the moment that I returned home.

It was Eramund who I came across first, sitting alone in the kitchen and seeming to have an incomprehensible disagreement with the mug of coffee set before him. I didn’t make it but two steps into the room before he turned and glared directly at me, drawing me into whatever dispute he’d been having with himself.

“You know, it’s been so long since I’ve done it that I’m not even sure I remember how to actually sleep,” he declared, bypassing the expectation to greet or welcome me home in any fashion.

And by the look of him, I suspected he might not even be exaggerating. He had aged since I last saw him around a month ago. His hair was long and disheveled, his eyes puffy and framed with dark discolorations. Even the beard that he usually keeps short and neat had grown out, and the look of it told me that he had been incessantly pulling on and fretting with it for days.

That’s when I had my first clue of something being terribly amiss. I knew from the last time we had spoken that Anna Jade had been the primary subject of his dreams and visions for some time now, the very same young woman that I had just left in someone else’s care. I suspected that whatever had agitated him so greatly had something to do with her, despite the encouraging and reassuring words that he spoke to me just before we parted and went our separate ways the previous month.

“Is it Anna Jade who troubles you?” I asked him gently, carefully making my way over to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Of course it is,” he snapped at me, though he seemed to regret it almost immediately, and apologized. “I’m sorry, Tian. That was uncalled for.”

“It was, but I do understand. I'm worried too.”

“She’s the one, you know,” he told me cryptically. “It’s exactly like Dorian warned me of. He said that for the most part, my dreams and visions would feel distant and far away. I might not always be able to even make much sense of them because it’s not always people I know or places I’ve already been that I’ll be glimpsing pieces of. And more often than not, the dreams are more like abstract metaphors. That’s all been true for the most part, except when I dream of Anna Jade.”

“Well, she is your daughter. I suppose that it makes sense for you to concern yourself with her future more than most others.”

“I have a son, too, you know, and I rarely ever dream of him,” he seemed to feel the need to remind me.

He has commented on that through the years, and though we’ve all agreed that it is a bit strange, we’ve also cautioned him against reading too much into it. Just because he dreams of one more than the other doesn’t mean that he favors her over him. I personally have always suspected that it’s because he worries for her more than him. She’s gentle and meek, and she has yet to discover her own strength.

The same cannot be said of Emerick. In fact, I’d even say that he overestimates his own strength, and perhaps that is why we should worry for him, though it is irrelevant to the point.

“I just wish I had caught on sooner, is all,” he went on, still speaking about his dreams of his children. “I thought at first that it was as you said, but right around when you told me of Anna Jade’s interest in Magnus’s son, that was when it clicked. Finally, after all the years of warning I’d had and ignored, I realized that it’s not just because she’s my daughter that I dream of her so much.”

It felt like he was about to arrive at his point there, but he adopted a faraway look in his eyes and went silent instead, seeming to get lost in his thoughts. Understandable, considering how his mind works, not to mention the fact that he hasn’t been sleeping, and yet I grew impatient with waiting.

“Then why do you dream of her?” I asked, deciding to prompt him into continuing.

“Because she’s the beacon. She’s the one. Everything important that will come to pass in the near future, it starts with her. It follows her.”

If I were human, my blood would have run cold at that revelation. But since it’s already cold, and I don’t have the sort of nervous system that is required to experience most of the sensations that signify fear and anxiety for other humanoid creatures, the feeling that came over me was more of a heaviness. My blood turned to sludge, I suppose you could say.

I recognized what he was saying. I’d had this conversation before, with Dorian. It was about some obscure woman in the future at first, but eventually, the future became the present. He was late in sharing with me who it was that he had been dreaming about, but I eventually figured it out on my own. It was Kylie, my own mate and Anna Jade’s own mother.

I thought that having lived through and personally experienced the rise of not one, but two exceptional women of that caliber, born centuries apart, that we’d have more time before the next. It hasn’t even been two full decades since the war, so how is the next already upon us?

How could it be Anna Jade? It’s always been an Alpha female in the past. The girl is exceptional, that much I already know, but she’s no Alpha. Nothing else about this is the same, either.

But even so, his declaration set my mind to whirring. What dark forces and events will soon be coming our way? Who will emerge as the villains? And then eventually, the question that every father is loathe to ponder, who will her mates turn out to be?

Because that’s always been the way of it. There has always been three. We already suspect the first, though Eramund refuses to comment on whether he knows it for sure. We all know he does, though. There’s no other explanation for how he’s behaved toward him over the years if he doesn’t.

When it finally sunk in that I, myself have always been the second, it took everything in me to resist the urge to ask him. I had to know. As much as I love that girl like she’s my own, or more specifically, because I love her like a father and not the way that a mate should, I couldn't bear the thought. It’s Kylie who holds my heart, not her daughter.

My only solace came from remembering the way that Eramund reacted to Pete after waking from one of his more troublesome dreams of Anna Jade’s potential future. He would never say it outright, but his insistence on separating the two lest we found ourselves becoming grandparents only a few short months after her sixteenth birthday said everything that we needed to know. That coupled with Anya’s suggestion that a healer would only risk her own life to such an extreme to save another if it was her true love helped to solve that particular mystery for us. She told us that eight years ago, and she hinted at it again when I took Anna Jade to visit her, which tells me that my dear and wise old friend has only grown more certain of it over the years.

We’ve all long suspected that Pete will turn out to be Anna Jade’s true, fated mate, but no one has ever suspected that I’d have that sort of a connection to her. Eramund has also never threatened to have my head or tried to banish me from the pack, so my guess would be that he hasn’t seen any hint of me being involved in her destiny in that way. Thus, I successfully fought back the urge to ask him about it. It would only have deterred him from explaining what troubled him, and I felt that I had managed to arrive at a satisfactory answer on my own.

“I’d have thought that it would be Margot, as she’s the future Alpha,” he said, interrupting my troubled thoughts and reminding me that we had been having a conversation before I got sidetracked. “Or honestly, I didn’t even think that it would be any of the kids, or maybe not even anyone we know directly. Dorian made it seem like a ‘beacon’ is a generic thing. It can happen, or maybe it won’t, but if it does, here’s what it’s like. ‘Look out for the beacons,’ he wrote to me. Because apparently, once you discover one, then the visions that follow tend to become more frequent and focus mostly on the events and people surrounding said beacon until whatever significant purpose they are meant to serve has come to pass.”

“What do you think it means that it might be Anna Jade?” I questioned him rather tentatively, not knowing whether I wanted to hear his answer.

I’ve lived a lot longer than he has and have seen a great deal of darkness come and go, and even I can’t guess at what it might mean.

He sighed and took a moment to slide out of the stool he’d been perched on, apparently deciding to abandon the troublesome mug of coffee entirely.

“I’m not sure that I should share my theories, but I suppose that what I can say is I fear it might be my fault. Or perhaps Dorian’s, who could say,” he postulated, waving his hand about as if it was all very inconsequential. “All I know is I hate it, and I understand now why Dorian always said that the visions were tools but shouldn’t be viewed as the sort that can control the future. They’re the sort that helps you prepare for it. You know, hammers, nails, a bit of plywood to cover the windows. Things like that more than things like time machines.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, the butterfly effect, just for starters,” he scoffed, as if I was behaving preposterously for even asking.

“No, why is it that you now understand what he meant by that?” I clarified, careful to keep the impatience out of my tone. “What has happened?”

“Oh, well, nothing really. That’s the point. We must fight the urge to intervene is what I’m saying.”

“Like you did with Lee?”

That heavy feeling had returned. I was suddenly worried that he might be suggesting that our meddling there had somehow changed things for the worse.

“No, that’s more of an example of a hammer and nails intervention,” he explained. “I had to step in there. No outcome was desirable down that path. But that’s what I mean. That was the example that solidified it for me that I’ve been doing well at managing the responsibility without taking advantage of the power. We mustn’t intervene until we must. We don’t get to decide which little things matter.”

If I hadn’t spent so many centuries at Dorian’s side, most of that wouldn’t have made much sense to me. But I already knew what he meant perfectly. I’m rather glad that he seems to be such a quick study, and that Dorian is proving to be just as valuable of a mentor from beyond the grave as he was on this side of things.

“I just hate that we have already found ourselves to be backed against the precipice again,” he returned to his ranting, his expression darkening again. “And it just has to be my little girl teetering at the edge of it, doesn’t it? She’s only a teenager, and only just now opening her eyes to the world, not yet having tapped into her full potential, and yet it’s her who must make all the monumental decisions for us all? If we follow her down this path, it will be darkness, destruction, chaos. Down this way, it’s light, but of course this way’s the hard way. This is the way that leaves the four of us biting our nails and tearing our hair out night after night because it looks dark and bleak, and yet it’s light.”

And that was the moment that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d tricked me into leaving Anna Jade with the hunters after I’d begun to second-guess the wisdom of it. “We have to let her go,” he’d said to me before, and I knew even then that he was alluding to something much greater and darker than just allowing her to visit friends for a weekend. That’s why my instinct was to turn back and cancel the plans that had been long in the making.

It was only when Anna Jade managed to convince me that her father would never allow her to be put in danger that I reversed course again. It reminded me both that her father is an overbearing worrywart and that he is, in fact, her biological father. If he wanted her to go, then I shouldn’t have been preventing it. That didn’t help me feel much better about it, though, especially not after returning home to her overbearing worrywart of a father behaving that way on the very day that I left her behind.

“But why not me again? I’m still youngish,” he went on ranting, seemingly at the universe, even as I was standing there with nothing but the heaviness of ice and dread running through my veins. “Or how about Lizaine? Let’s let her be the next caster in the family tasked with saving the world, hmm? But no. We can’t have that. It must be my teenage daughter.”

He shook his head and groaned with frustration, and then raised both hands to run and tug them through his hair the way that it looked like he'd already been doing for days straight.

And my mind began whirring in a whole new direction. Perhaps he wasn’t even speaking about what I assumed. He may have been speaking about the casters involved in these sorts of situations rather than the Alpha female who usually leads the charge. But if so, then who would turn out to be the Alpha female in charge? Or was I getting lost down the wrong trail of thinking entirely, unable to see beyond the past and open my eyes to some new sort of future?

“That’s the way of the fates, though, not to mention Fate herself, that b***h,” he scoffed, continuing what seemed to have turned into a monologue that no longer required my input. “They all enjoy laughing at my wishes and then going ahead and doing whatever the hell they damn well please.”

I wasn’t even certain whether he was still aware of me being in the room with him by then because in the next moment, he slapped the counter with enough force that I was surprised that neither he nor it seemed broken, and then he turned and stormed off down the hall. It was as if he’d forgotten that his ranting had originally begun as a conversation, and the coffee that he’d sloshed out of its mug also didn’t seem to register with him in the slightest before he left.

“He’s been like that for a few days now,” Adam spoke up from the far corner of the room. I had sensed when he’d joined us part of the way through, though he hadn’t announced his presence before then. “He’s said that his visions are plaguing him even while he’s awake now.”

I turned to look at him and replied, “The same used to happen with Dorian here and there through the years. He could never tell if it was caused more by conditions in the world or the storms raging in his own mind, but it always seemed to coincide with major events within the supernatural world, especially those that would prove to have a profound effect on our own pack and family. Though Dorian’s personality was far tamer and more muted, so it took him revealing his troubles to me before I ever noticed anything was amiss with him.”

“Eramund is definitely a more spirited fellow,” Adam chuckled, though he failed to hide the concern etched in his face. “But I figure since he’s the only one of us with any sort of direct line to Fate, we should probably at least try to make some sense of what he’s saying and maybe even listen to him, if he’ll let us.”

“That’s the true challenge now, isn’t it?”

It turned out that Eramund had marched himself straight to bed, not bothering to announce that to any of us. Kylie did what she could to calm him down and allow him to get some rest, and the three of us who remained spent some time discussing his visions, his mood, and what could potentially be on his mind to trouble him to such an extent.

All the while, I insisted on sticking close to my secure line, the very one that the hunters use to communicate their confidential reports to me. Something in me knew that I’d be hearing from Bria soon, and though Eramund tried to assure me before he went to sleep that I had absolutely nothing to worry about and I should most definitely not bother with going and checking in on Anna Jade already, I chalked that up to him forcing my adherence to his advice from before. We mustn’t intervene until we must.

But now that I’ve received that dreaded call and heard Bria’s report, I know that we must.

That is, until on my way to relay the news to Kylie, I hear Eramund call out from the bedroom, “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, Tian, don’t. You can’t just bust into Vegas with a half-c****d plan and go stirring everything up. Not unless you want to start a war that you’re not prepared to fight, that is.”

“Then what do you propose I do, Eramund?” I shout back at him, the rage within me threatening to spill out and dump all over him, who I hold partially responsible.

It’s obvious now that he not only knew that something was going to happen to Anna Jade once she got to the hunter house, but he also knew exactly what it was going to be. And yet he said nothing then, and still wants me to sit back and do nothing? The man has obviously lost his mind.

“First of all, trust Bria, and have faith in our daughter,” he answers, far more calmly than I feel is appropriate. “You know that Bria will do whatever she needs to do to prevent the situation from escalating too far, and you know that Anna Jade is smart and doesn’t tend to antagonize people. She’ll keep it together.”

I’ve reversed direction and am heading back to the bedroom now so that we can have this conversation properly, even if I mostly just want to ignore this madman and continue on my way to my mate.

“And secondly, do what any sane supernatural who needs to sneak into arguably the most dangerous city in the world would do,” he advises me vaguely, appearing at the doorway now so that he can look me in the eyes as he adds, “Call Pete.”