by Dean Murray
"Okay, let me know if you need me to come hold her down while you give her mouth-to-mouth."
Jace had continued to hold onto my hand, and I could feel him doing something, feel tingly energy feeding into my hand. Whatever it was helped, but ironically the first sign that I wasn't going to die was the strong urge I had to strangle Ari. I was pretty sure she was just trying to break the ice, but it was having the opposite effect. At this rate he was never going to invite me back.
Only he didn't have any choice because I was his long-lost Awakened love…who didn't have a single memory of him, but who couldn't deny the bond we seemed to share.
"No need for mouth to mouth here, but if Jace or Kat feels the need to lock you in their dungeon I'm totally not going to tell the cops where you are when Dad reports you as missing."
I was still gasping as I forced the words out, but I got them out despite that.
Ari looked back at me and rolled her eyes. "Whatever, they don't have a dungeon."
I stuck my tongue out at her. "How would you know? You haven't got the full tour yet."
"Even if you're right I'd take their dungeon over sharing a room with you any day of the week. Based on the rest of this place, their dungeon has cable and a day spa."
Kat snapped her fingers. "A day spa! I knew we were forgetting something. Jace, can you please call the contractor first thing tomorrow and ask them to put a day spa in downstairs? I would hate to miss out on our chance to be on the cover of Better Homes and Dungeons…"
"Sure thing. The balance in your trust fund has been getting a little too big and it's past time you started pulling your weight around here."
"Hold on. A deal is a deal. You are supposed to pay for all of the boring stuff like cars and houses so that I have enough liquid capital to pay for the necessities of life—you know, shoes and motorcycles."
Ari shushed them both. "You're ruining the movie and I'm pretty sure that the main character is about to jump over two semi-trucks in his Ferrari before bailing out at the last second to hitch a ride on a helicopter."
Kat reached for the TV remote. "Well, that's that. Ari has figured out the ending of the movie—there's no point finishing it now."
"If you touch the stop button I'm going to tickle you mercilessly the next time I'm riding behind you on your bike."
"What makes you think she's going to ever give you a ride again, runt?"
"Because I'm adorable and people can never get enough of me. Besides, she promised to take me camping tomorrow night."
"You don't even like camping, Ari."
"No, I don't like camping. This is camping with a motorhome and jet skis."
Kat gave me a repentant look. "Sorry, Selene, I did kind of promise to take her out to the lake tomorrow night."
"Ari, you know that there's no way Dad is going to agree to that…"
"He might if you agree to come too."
"Really, you think he's going to be okay with the two of us heading off into the wilderness with Kat, Jace and no adults? I don't know what bizarro world you're living in, but it's not going to happen."
"So leave Jace behind. There's a chance that he'll agree to it if it's just us girls."
"Ari Jane Jenkins. That is incredibly rude even for you. Do you really think it's right to tell Jace he can't go to the lake and use his own things?"
Kat was making a time-out signal. "Hold on everybody. What if the three of us go to the lake and camp overnight in the trailer, and then Jace can meet up with us the next morning? Do you think your dad will agree to that?"
"Yes—"
"No—"
Ari gave me a dirty look. "Why do you have to be such a negative nelly?"
"Why do you have to be such a brat?"
Jace grabbed the second bottle of water and tossed it to Ari. "You're missing your show. You watch; Kat and I will see what we can do to talk some sense into Selene. You want us to bring you anything back?"
"Yeah, only like a dozen candy bars."
"You're never going to make it through a dozen candy bars before the movie ends, runt."
"Fine. Jace, please get me one candy bar to eat during the remainder of the movie and eleven for the road."
"Roger that, oh tiniest member of the Jenkins clan."
By that point I was spoiling for a fight. I took a step towards Ari, but Jace casually wrapped his arm around my waist and picked me up. With anyone else I wouldn't have let them get away with that, but Jace still hadn't found time to put a shirt back on, and as soon as I touched his bare skin I practically swooned.
I didn't come back to myself until we were outside of the theater and he set me down. "Are you ever not going to be able to shut me up just by touching me?"
Kat shook her head. "No. It's actually pretty sickening. The two of you are practically made for each other. Even after decades together you were still all sugary sweet. In fact you only ever fought about…well, that is to say there was only ever one thing that made the two of you fight."
"Do I get to know what that one thing was?"
Kat shrugged. "Not if I have anything to say about it, but Jace will end up telling you sooner or later despite all of my advice to the contrary. He's just that much of a goody-goody. By the way, you're handling all of this much better than I expected…unless Jace hasn't told you anything other than the whole reincarnation bit yet."
"So the reincarnation stuff is the truth? And the whole Awakened demigods bit who trade their memories in order to vaporize people? That's true too I take it?"
"Yes, but the proper term is smiting. Vaporizing just sounds too New Age and techy. We don't vaporize our unrighteous followers, we smite them."
"And am I really, I mean…"
"You mean are you a little embryonic goddess fully capable of realizing the normal smiting powers gifted to our pseudo-omniscient badass selves?"
"Yeah, all of that."
"Yep, that's true too, which is why we need you to go along with this trip out to the lake, Selene. You've got all of the potential, but none of the practical skills required to keep yourself alive. Ari is acting all cool when it comes to you and Jace—well, mostly cool—but she's not. She's watching the two of you like a hawk and she'd like nothing better than to rat you out to your dad."
I literally saw red for a second, but Kat grabbed hold of my arm with more strength than anyone her size should have been able to muster.
"I'm going to slap her into next week."
Kat shot Jace, who was laughing, a dirty look and then waved her finger at me.
"You're going to do no such thing. Right now she doesn't know that we're onto her and she not only trusts me, she's all wrapped up in fantasies about Jace. That's about as good as things are going to get for us, but it means that we need valid reasons for the two of you to be together, preferably where she can see you both, but while she is distracted by something fast and shiny. This trip is perfect for that."
Jace nodded. "You're right, I should have seen it already. You can keep Ari busy on the jet skis while the two of us sit back at the beach and train. It won't work once we get into the more advanced stuff, but it will at least let us get started."
"Right, especially if you speed yourselves up to double or triple time. I'll keep her at the far end of the lake so she can't register the occasional flicker, and you'll be able to get the better part of a full day's worth of training in."
I held up a hand. "No, I don't want Jace using his abilities. He—both of you really—have already sacrificed too much for me."
Kat gave Jace an exasperated look. "You overplayed the 'these miracles come at a price' card, didn't you?"
"I'm not going to let her go into this blind to the realities of how our gifts work."
With someone else I might have thought they were pissed, but something told me that Kat was just trying to make a point. Of course, if I knew that even after dying and being reborn, then there was a very good chance that Jace knew it too.
"Look, Jace, I get it. Yo
u don't want to see the same thing that happened to Kyle happen to Selene. It's understandable, but the only way we avoid using our powers is if we're dead. She's going to have to use and that's the end of it."
I looked back and forth between the two of them and suddenly I wasn't so sure that it was all just for dramatic effect. Kat's face was all flushed and she'd stepped well into Jace's personal space.
Jace still looked calm, but he'd developed a tic above the right side of his mouth. I could feel tendrils of energy reaching out from both of them, but this wasn't the warm, friendly energy I'd come to associate with Jace, it was cold and prickly.
"Hey, who's Kyle?"
"Yeah, Jace, who's Kyle? Are you ready to tell her that yet, or is that another card you were planning on playing close to your vest until it's too late?"
"Don't push me, Kat."
"Somebody needs to push you or all three of us are going to end up dead, Jace, and you know it. This isn't the seventeen hundreds anymore. Kids these days end up with hundreds of their pictures on the internet before they make it out of high school. Even if they don't have a social media account of their own they'll still end up in a picture posted on their friend's account."
"I understand all of that, Kat."
"Do you, Jace? It was sheer dumb luck that none of the others thought to hire a team of programmers to try and hunt her down. Hell, for all we know one of the other pantheons is looking for her already. If so, the mimic effect will slow them down a little, but it's still only a matter of time before they work through the other potentials and arrive here."
"I get it, Kat, now shut your mouth."
"Really? Or what, you'll continue to act like a spineless piece of crap? You need to get it together, because we both know a group like the Chicago pantheon isn't going to just stroll into town and watch her for a little while in an effort to decide whether or not she's one of us. They'll just start killing any girls who match her description and worry about the fallout later. This is our last chance, Jace, if we can't save her now they'll farm her. Every fifteen or sixteen years they'll go through and wipe out every female on the planet who looks like her, and she'll come to a tragic end again and again without ever knowing why."
Jace's expression turned dark, and he raised his hand almost as though intending on hitting Kat. "You're going to scare her."
"Good. I'm terrified. She should at least be scared. Nearly every single scenario we're up against results in all three of us dead or wiped before Christmas."
I knew it was a futile gesture, but I couldn't stop myself.
I turned and ran.
Chapter 11
I only made it to the kitchen before Kat suddenly materialized in front of me, her back against the garage door.
"It wouldn't have worked, Selene. The locks still don't have you down as an authorized thumb print."
I laughed. It came out bitter and with a touch of hysteria, but that wasn't entirely surprising. "Honestly, I never expected to make it even this far."
"Why'd you run then?"
"Because apparently it's all I know how to do. I can't fight back, can't even see the threats coming, all I can do is just run away and hope that will be enough to keep me alive for another day."
Kat winced. "I'm sorry about that. I shouldn't have sprung so much on you so quickly. Jace just made me so mad. He promised he was going to tell you everything, that we weren't going to let another day go by without starting to prepare you for what's coming."
"No, you're right, I needed to know. I'm off with my heads in the clouds, wrapped up in little schoolgirl fantasies while people I don't even remember meeting are hoping to find and kill me before I get old enough to figure out that I'm even more of a freak than I always thought I was."
Kat grabbed my arm and pulled me towards the solarium. "Come on, I need some air and you need some distance from all of this."
"Is it safe? I mean, out there where people are hunting me?"
"Honestly? No, but right now there isn't really any safe place for any of us. It's as safe as anywhere else, and that will just have to be enough for both of us."
I followed her out into the cool night air and immediately started shivering. I'd hoped that she was going to close up the solarium and turn on a heater, but she didn't even slow as she led me out into the darkness.
"How far are we going? I don't even have any shoes on."
"Me neither, princess. Don't worry though, we're almost there."
'There' turned out to be a heated reflecting pool that was surrounded by rose bushes and a few small solar-powered lights. It was late enough in the year that the rose bushes were all bare, but in the pale moonlight there was still a haunting elegance to the scene.
"Wow, this place is amazing."
"Yeah, I'll let you in on a little secret—this place is my absolute favorite spot here. It gets better though. Roll your pants up and put your feet in the water."
"No way, I'm already cold enough as it is."
"Do it, you wuss."
I sighed, but I did it. That was the crazy thing about Kat, it was rare that she couldn't get me to do exactly what she wanted me to. The water wasn't just warm, it was hot enough that I kept thinking it should be steaming.
"This is actually new. We had something like this a couple of houses ago and I've had the same kind of thing put in all of our places since. The details change, but there is just something about sitting in the cold with your feet in a warm pool that relaxes me."
I just nodded. The feeling of all my stress melting out through the soles of my feet was just too perfect to spoil it by talking if I didn't have to.
"Okay, now hold still and don't freak out."
"What do you—?"
Between one heartbeat and the next the water turned hard. Not like a rock exactly because there weren't any sharp edges, more like mud that had dried and become unyielding. Given my current company, there wasn't any way to know for sure what had just happened, but I had a pretty good guess.
"You just sped us up."
"Yep, somewhere around fifteen times normal speed, which should mean that we have plenty of time to talk while Jace keeps Ari distracted. That's the new plan, by the way. Sorry, it's going to suck for both of you, but you and he are going to be spending a lot less time together for a while. That's actually what I was about to suggest right before he and I got into our big shouting match. Ari isn't going to rat you out to your dad if she's the one who's spending the most time with Jace."
My objections were piling up faster than I could get them out. "No, Kat. First of all, slow us back down to normal speed. I don't want either of you burning up your memories for me. Second of all, even apart from how I feel about Jace, I don't want him playing with Ari's emotions. It would be cruel for him to get her hopes up and then dash them."
Kat gave me a tired look, and I wondered just how long her day had been. My time sense was all kinds of screwed up, but I was reasonably sure that it was past eleven. That was a long day for just about anyone, but she'd been adding to it every time she sped herself up. An hour when she'd forged the note from Sandra, a few minutes when she'd jetted downstairs after her shower to talk to Jace, at some point it added up to a twenty-four-hour stretch without any sleep.
"Jace is right to warn you about the dangers of over using your gift, but the kind of low-level stuff we've been doing for you lately doesn't burn peak memories, it just burns the routine background stuff."
"What do you mean by peak memories?"
"A peak memory could be a first kiss, or bungee-jumping, or drag-racing down Main Street. A peak memory is any time you were feeling especially high or exceptionally low. It's the kind of stuff that most people spend their lives subconsciously chasing, but allow themselves to get so tied down with a job and mundane tasks that they only rarely find. You've been gathering a lot of peak memories over the last two days."
I started to agree and then one of the pieces clicked into place for me. "The drive over to pick up
Ari in the Viper—you were purposefully trying to scare me."
"Scare you, no. Create a peak memory, yes."
"How come?"
"Because that's part of what a pantheon does. We help each other create peak memories because that's the bank we draw on when things get really rough and we have to do something major with our abilities. Your power hasn't manifested yet, so you don't have a photographic memory right now, but when it does you'll be that much further ahead because you've been living it up over the last two days."
"The food was part of that too, wasn't it?"
"Smart girl! Yep, the food was definitely designed to be a peak memory that you could burn if it came to that. It helps that Jace really is a good cook, but there was more to that burger than you realized."
"Oh, no. You guys put a drug into it, didn't you?"
I got another eye roll. I shouldn't have been able to see that well in the darkness, but I could. Maybe it was a side effect of being an Awakened, a benefit that came even before my ability fully manifested itself.
"No, we didn't drug you—at least not in the conventional sense. You've heard of ambrosia?"
"The food of the gods?"
"Yeah, that's the stuff. You just had your first taste of ambrosia. It was invented by the Greek pantheon before they were destroyed by the Roman pantheon. It was part of their advantage for a while there. Back then you couldn't go skydiving or bungee-jumping, so mostly the gods had to look for other more dangerous ways to build peak memories. You've heard of the running of the bulls?"
"Wait, that was started by you—by us—too?"
"Yep. Of course it isn't much of a challenge if you can speed yourself up, but I don't think the pantheon that started it had figured out how to bend time. The Awakened who did it later on all swore that they wouldn't use their abilities so as to still create the kind of adrenaline rush they needed."
Kat reached down and put her palm flat on the water, pushing against the warm, perfectly smooth surface.
"Did you know that it's actually possible to run across water if you bend time far enough? Of course if you're moving that fast nobody can see you do it, but it is possible. Anyway, ambrosia was the Greeks' secret weapon because it let them build a store of peak memories without having to put themselves in jeopardy."