Alpha's Legacy (Black Moon Saga Book 3)

32. Girl: Anna Jade

I feel a hand brush against the back of my neck, and my eyes fly open on their own, startling me awake. The scene before me is completely unfamiliar, and it takes me a few moments to regain my bearings and remember what happened.

The warlock, Grayson Donovan. He was restraining me and threatening to take me from Bria. Judging by how I’m slumped against someone in an unfamiliar room and sitting on an unfamiliar bed, I’m guessing he succeeded.

“Grayson?” I wonder aloud groggily.

“Ah, you remember. Good,” he answers from behind me, and I can feel the vibration of his voice against my back.

I don’t like being in that close of contact with him, so I try to sit myself up and scoot away from him.

“Just a moment,” he says, tugging on something around my neck.

That’s when I realize that he’s in the process of putting some sort of necklace on me and reach up to touch it with my hand.

“Suppression collar,” he explains just as I hear and feel the back of it snap into place. “That way, there will be no more of your little tricks, and we can get a handle on that abhorrent stench of yours.”

Which is an odd thing for a man who smells like a dead animal to say, although pretty much as soon as the collar clicks closed, the stink of him is gone. But I also don’t feel right. It’s a passive thing usually, but ever since my magic awakened, there’s been this sort of low vibrating hum coursing through my body. I’m used to it, so I don’t even notice anymore, but it’s gone now. I feel so strange without it, and my body feels sort of rubbery and weak now too.

I can’t help but lift my hand and hold it in front of my face, turning it over as I study it to see if it looks different as well.

“You’ll adapt,” he assures me, patting my shoulder as he slides out from behind me.

“Is that really necessary?” I ask him, feeling strangely offended by him for stealing my magic from me.

I’m a caster. Magic is literally my essence. Without it, I feel off. Empty, unbalanced, and maybe even drained. I just woke up, but I still feel tired and sluggish. And he’s a caster too, so how dare he. He knows what magic means to our kind.

“Yes, without question,” he answers matter-of-factly.

He’s moved on to fiddling with the floor now, marking out some lines around the bed that I’m sitting on. Before I’ve even had a chance to slide off the mattress and stand up, he’s finished his marking and muttering, and a murky grayish barrier springs up from his markings and rises up around and over the area that contains my bed. I can still see him on the other side of it, but it’s as if I’m looking at him through a dirty, foggy window.

“I know that you already know that spell, girl, so I don’t even need to explain it,” he comments, smirking at me through the barrier.

Then he turns and strides across the room to place his spell materials in a drawer.

I don’t think it’s worth mentioning to him that I don’t actually know the spell because my barrier just sort of happens on its own. In fact, it’s probably better that he doesn’t know I can do that. Let him think that I have some rudimentary spell knowledge and wonder how I did it without even being able to talk.

“What I will say, though, is that this extra precaution is for your own good as much as mine – for your safety and my peace of mind. That barrier will not only keep you in there, but it will keep everyone else out here, and eventually, you might come to thank me for that,” he explains as he meanders about the room, opening and closing drawers and cabinets and gathering supplies for something.

Then he goes to the far corner of the room and sits himself at an antique writing desk, dropping his supplies on top of it. He’s quiet for a bit as he works, and from the sounds he’s making, I think he might be writing something. It’s a bit too foggy for me to tell for sure through the barrier, but what I can see is that he has his back to me now.

“Oh, and I suppose I should warn you about that collar,” he speaks again after a few quiet minutes have passed. “Whatever abilities you have as a witch, they’re gone now. That means all your magic and spellpower, your innate talents, even your scent has changed slightly. So, don’t go trying anything stupid, counting on something you’re used to being able to do. If a human can’t do it, then assume that neither can you now.”

He’s droning on dryly as if he’s just a professor giving a lecture and not my captor. There’s no hint of threat or intimidation to his voice, or any emotion at all really.

“And don’t bother with trying to break it or take it off,” he lectures. “Not only is it nearly impossible without the key or the proper tools, but even if you succeed, you won’t like the result. There’s only one way that it’s meant to come off, and only I have the key that’s attuned to it, so don’t go getting any ideas. The collar stays on until I decide it comes off.”

Then he’s quiet again, and the only sound in the room is of his pen scratching against his paper as he writes. There’s not even a clock ticking or a furnace periodically kicking on or anything. Just silence and his pen.

Well, and the humming of the barrier. I can’t say that I hate it, either. The sound that it makes and the buzzing sensation from being so near it help make up for the lack of my magic. It’s not the same, but at least it’s familiar.

But even so, the quiet eventually gets to me, mostly because I haven’t yet accepted my situation. I don’t even know what he plans to do with me or for how long he’s intending to keep me here in this tiny little cage. There’s not even bedding on the bed, only a bare mattress and a musty old pillow.

“What do you want with me?” I finally decide to just ask him outright.

Not that I expect him to tell me anything more than he told Bria, but I feel the need to ask on the off chance that he might just be feeling more forthcoming now that we’re alone.

“You’re a pawn to me, girl. Nothing more, so don’t bother worrying your pretty little head about it,” he says flatly, not even bothering to turn around to talk to me, as if to prove to me how little I mean to him.

I don’t know where it comes from but a sudden wave of boldness washes over me, straightening my back and steeling my resolve. It’s beyond irritating that he keeps calling me “girl” when I know that he must have heard Bria say my name while he was still invisible. Or at the very least, he should have asked me by now. As a caster himself, he knows the importance of a name. I think he’s deliberately avoiding using mine or is trying to insult me by showing that he doesn’t even respect me enough to ask. Somehow, that’s just irritating enough to override my better judgement.

“Anna Jade,” I tell him firmly, with determination.

“What?” he wonders, finally laying his pen down and turning around to look at me.

“My name is Anna Jade,” I repeat for him.

It’s only then that I falter slightly, swallowing heavily while questioning the wisdom of giving him any scrap of information about myself, though I suppose it’s too late to reconsider now. Plus, I’m fairly certain that he already heard it back in the basement and is purposely ignoring it.

“Cute,” he scoffs, waving his hand dismissively as he turns back around. “Is that because of your wolf?”

It takes me a second to process what he means by that, mostly because I’m startled that he can even tell that I’m a hybrid. Casters don’t have the sensitive senses that werewolves and vampires do, and I don’t even have my wolf yet. He shouldn’t be able to smell it on me, and with my wolf still dormant, that’s the only way to really tell. But even assuming that there’s some reasonable explanation for how he knows that, I still don’t know what he means.

“Is what because of my wolf?” I question in answer, mentally kicking myself when I realize that I confirmed that I am a hybrid without meaning to.

“The two names,” he explains, back to scribbling away at whatever he’s working on at his writing desk. “Is one for your wolf?”

I mean, it’s a reasonable theory. All I know about the process for naming a caster I learned from my father, and he never touched on whether it’s different for hybrids. I remember asking him if the two names were significant, though, and I remember him telling me that they are, but that it remains to seen what significance they might hold. If it was just as simple as one of them being for my wolf, he would have told me, right?

Oh, plus wolves have their own names. Duh. I won’t learn my wolf’s name until she awakens and can tell it to me herself.

“No. My wolf will have her own name,” I inform him. “Both are mine.”

“I see,” he says, sounding suspicious. He puts his pen down and turns around again. “It’s rare for a caster to be given two names, you know.”

“You have two names,” I point out before I’ve thought better of being so sassy with him, even knowing that his second name is likely a surname. “Grayson Donovan. I heard her say it.”

“Touché,” he concedes, smiling tersely. “By her, you mean your vampire friend? What’s her name then?”

“Hmm, I can’t seem to remember.”

I’m not going to reveal anything about anyone besides me, that’s for sure. I might be taking uncharacteristic risks with my own information, but I’m not giving him anything that could hurt anyone else.

“Look, girl,” he says, impatience creeping into his voice.

And yet, I can’t seem to stop myself from cutting him off. Why’d I bother telling him my name if he isn’t even going to use it? I’m getting pretty sick of people doing that to me.

“Anna Jade,” I remind him, annoyed myself.

“Yes, of course,” he sighs, shaking his head slightly. “Anna Jade, then.”

“Thank you.”

He pauses, giving me an incredulous look and seeming to appraise me a moment before he continues with what he was saying before I interrupted him.

“As I said before, you’re a pawn,” he goes on. “I saw an opportunity present itself to me, and I took it. I mean you no harm, as long as you do not interfere with my plans. So, my advice to you would be to sit there, quietly, and do as I say. Eat your food when I provide it for you, take advantage of the restroom breaks I offer you, and for the rest of the time, sleep. Daydream. Do whatever you need to do to pass the time quietly and compliantly. Don’t try anything with me, and we’ll get along just fine. Understand?”

It bothers me beyond measure, but I don’t know what I can feasibly do about it. The collar he put on my neck is suppressing my magic, and he already warned me about doing anything stupid like trying to remove it. I’m not a strong person, and my magic is my only real way to defend myself. So what am I to do but what he asks of me?

“Perfectly,” I agree, smiling at him sweetly.

He sighs and shakes his head again. “I should have expected as much. Your mother is a born troublemaker, so of course her apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.”

Well, that’s alarming. I haven’t told him anything that would give away who I am or where I’m from, not to mention my family connections, and I know Bria didn’t say anything revealing either. So, how does he know who my mother is?

“Yeah, that’s right. I know who you are,” he says, answering my thoughts. I guess my panic must be that noticeable. “It isn’t hard to figure out, you know. I may have never heard of Anna Jade, but there isn’t a supernatural alive who hasn’t heard of Alpha Kylie and learned the tale of how she became the first female Alpha this continent has ever seen. She certainly didn’t do it quietly, either, taking over such a powerful and influential pack in the way that she did. And this may surprise you to learn, sweetheart, but she’s made herself some enemies in the process. Enemies who will be interested to learn that I’ve acquired one of her pups for myself, and enemies who will pay dearly for the chance to take you off my hands.”

“You just said you mean me no harm,” I remind him, the fear and panic that I’ve been fighting off creeping in with force now. “And you told B-, uh, her that you’d return me to her in the same condition as when you took me. How will you do that if you trade me to someone else?”

“I don’t mean you any harm, but I can’t control the actions of others,” he claims, pausing as a fit of laughter overtakes him. “Well, actually, I suppose that’s not strictly true, but I don’t bother controlling people who aren’t trying to interfere with what I’m trying to do. Your vampire friends, though, they’re no threat to me. My creator made sure of it. Besides, I have a feeling that they’ll be the ones to blame when someone finally comes to take you off my hands. They don’t seem to know better than to trust the wrong people, even though that’s something they really should have learned to be more careful about by now.”

My blood runs cold as a shiver of dread and fear climbs up my spine, leaving me trembling and hugging myself in a feeble attempt to make me feel warm and safe again. I think I regret starting this conversation with him. It probably would have been better not to know anything, because now I’m left fretting over the implications of what he’s said.

Particularly the part about his creator. Unless he’s a religious man, which I highly doubt, then he seems to be suggesting that someone made him what he is, whatever that is. Casters are born, not made, so is he alluding to that not being what he is?

And then there’s the bit about the hunters trusting the wrong people. Could he be suggesting that whoever the hunters are working with to try to rescue me will turn out to be an enemy and betray them? I don’t even want to think about what someone might do to me to try to hurt my mother.

“That’s enough chit-chat for now, though. I imagine that you’re feeling pretty exhausted with your magic locked away. Have yourself a rest, girl.”

I can’t help wondering if he’s doing something to me or if it really is just from my lack of magic, but I am feeling sleepy now. It seems like I didn’t do anything to cause it, but the next thing I know, my body is slumped over with my head resting against the musty, lumpy pillow. It had to have been him. I hate being this pliable and easy for him to control.

Maybe tampering with this stupid collar isn’t such a bad plan after all, or at least there's a small part of me that kind of wants to cling to hoping that he may have only said that it's dangerous and impossible to remove it to scare me off from trying it. But maybe I should. I could really use my magic right about now.

My eyelids are getting too heavy for me to be of much use, though, and as much as miraculously escaping this stupid thing is satisfying to fantasize about, I do realize that it's just that. A fantasy. I'm not an experienced caster, but even I know enough to recognize that what he said before was probably true. It makes sense that there's really only one safe way to get free of it, and I'm far too drowsy and weak to be thinking about that now. For the moment, that nap that he suggested seems like the better plan, so I finally stop fighting it and give myself over to the urge to close my eyes and drift away.