Chapter 174

Sarah POV

Waking to a new day was awkward. I had, for a moment, truly believed Zane and I had a future, and now I was back to the waking world where we simply didn’t, and I couldn’t settle. After I left Zane’s bed before dawn, the morning should have kept me busy, but it was a Saturday, so I didn’t have my usual jobs of waking the girls and getting them ready for school.

Zane wasn’t in the kitchen when I grabbed my coffee, and I left before I had to face him. Up in my study, I didn’t even open the French doors to the balcony to look out over the estate. But sitting there at my desk, doing any sort of work was also just impossible.

I tidied my desk instead, and under some invoices I found one of Olivia’s journals. It had been weeks since I read one, and the cover seemed to stare at me in accusation. I grabbed the little book and opened it randomly.

In a moment, I just know someone’s going to ask me about Cheryl, but what am I supposed to say? She has a problem with her perfectly well-behaved cat scratching her son because he pulled her tail? Little boy had it coming, if you ask me.

No, I didn’t want to read about Cheryl’s cat. I flipped forward a few pages.

So, we met again today, just coffee and some talk. Z is lovely, strong, and dedicated to the pack. He’s everything I’m supposed to want, but my lack of choice is starting to get to me a bit.

I laughed aloud, a little bitterly. The woman who could have Zane didn’t want him at first. The irony was a bit much.

We spoke about children, of course. We’ll have to have at least five, I suppose. Twins show up a lot in my family, so with luck we’re only talking three pregnancies. Cheryl says she knows a beta woman had triplets. I can only imagine.

“Hey there, Ms. Beta Whoever, looks like we’re done but—whoops! Here comes another one.” I’d try to shove the last one back in, I swear.

I laughed aloud. It was the first time Olivia’s voice sounded like a real person to me. She was still difficult to imagine, though, this alpha woman raised and groomed to be Zane’s mate.

I read through a few more pages of their early dating and then found an entry marked 3 a.m.

I had that damn dream again, the one where I’m hunting with Z and we both jump off a cliff like proverbial lemmings. But this time there was a strange woman there to catch me. She was hazy against the black forest canopy like the sun through the fog, and she held her arms out for me to drift right down into them, unharmed.

Then she said, “Your children will walk with the moon.” What’s that

I stopped reading, breathing out, “What the hell?” But then I couldn’t catch my breath back, and I ended up dropping the journal to the desk and resting my head down on it.

I was shaking. My arms and legs felt cold.

What the hell could that mean? Had I read it wrong? It was difficult to look at the journal again, but maybe it hadn’t said what I thought, and I had to know.

Then she said, “Your children will walk with the moon.” What’s that supposed to me, I ask you? And the way she said it was so odd, like there was some sort of chorus talking with her one voice.

Even in my dream, but more so as I write this, I’m reminded of my visit to the Luna Temple, the first one where they told me about my destiny as a mate to the Pack Alpha. I admit, I hadn’t been impressed. Everyone knew at that point the person I was going to marry; it’s why I was at the temple in the first place.

But while the Oracle’s words hadn’t awed me, her voice had. It reminded me of The Voice, which I’d heard a few too many times from my father growing up. Seriously, why was it so impossible for him to understand that he only had to tell me like a regular father not to do something and that he didn’t need to use The Voice every damn time I did something wrong?

But the Oracle’s voice hadn’t been The Voice, more like The Voices.

Anyway, thank the goddess I woke up after she said that. “Your children will walk with the moon.” If she’d said “on the moon,” well, at least I could have understood that. We’ve had astronauts do it before.

The entry ended at that, and I spent a long time staring at the half-blank page.

OK. I breathed in and out a few times, slowing everything down. In and out.

Zane and Olivia had been the ones to truly share the dreams. Then Zane had told me about his dream, and my subconscious took that and came up with a dream of my own. That was my connection to Olivia’s dream.

Just that.

I looked at the little clock on my desk and saw it was long past breakfast time. “Damn,” I muttered and got up. I hadn’t been there in the kitchen when the girls ate. Some goddess-mother I was.

The kitchen was empty, and there was no sign of Zane. I went to the girls’ room to find neatly made-up beds, I turned my feet to the playroom.

Stay Out, Pease.

I stared at the little sign on the playroom’s door, easily recognizing Chloe’s handwriting. Huh.

I would have worried they were angry about my not being there at breakfast, but the “Please” didn’t sound angry. So, as much as I wanted to knock on the door and make sure they were all right, I knew they were at the werewolf equivalent of the dawn of puberty and were making a perfectly reasonable request for some privacy.

I ended up returning to my own room and putting on some walking shoes. In a few minutes, I was standing at the entrance to Mavis’s poppy garden, which was beginning to look like its old self. I knew it would be years before all signs of the fire had gone, but it was comforting to walk around the circular path and see so much new growth.

The little shed had been painted again with white walls and sage-green trim, and I nodded at it like an old friend restored.

I set off next for the bowling green garden, which meant (no hardship) walking through the rose garden, which was heady with scents. But at the last minute, I veered off and walked the farther distance to the Zen garden.

I hadn’t known much about Zen gardens, so, naturally, I did some research not long after I found it that first time. But for once, the words on the page did nothing to really help me understand the experience of sitting there looking at the large rectangle of sand racked to look like water with seven much larger rocks sprinkled around like little islands.

I had read that the seven principles of a Zen garden were austerity (koko), simplicity (kanso), naturalness (shinzen), asymmetry (fukinsei), mystery (yugen), magic (datsuzoku), and stillness (seijaku), but that didn’t help me understand the feelings that washed over me along with those little ripples in the sand.

For the first time since I had read, Your children will walk with the moon, I felt, if not at peace, at least calm.