by Dean Murray
It was almost physically painful to ask the question, but it needed to be asked. "Is that why Jace has been the way he's been—you know, touching me and making me feel all melty inside?"
"Melty?"
"Yeah, you know, weak knees, racing heart, a sudden desire to start taking clothes off."
"Ah, melty. I'll have to remember that. Can I quote you?"
"Not to Jace or anyone you think might eventually talk to him."
Kat pouted. "You really suck all of the fun out of life."
"Is that a new development?"
"No, you've always been a fun-sucker. Who knows what it is that the two of us see in you." Kat studied the palm-shaped imprint that was slowly forming on the top of the pond and then sighed. "No, Jace isn't consciously trying to generate peak memories in you, he's just having a hard time keeping his hands off of you. It's always like this when the two of you are together…unless there are other considerations."
I felt a little thrill of warmth shoot up my center. I already had evidence that Jace liked me, but I still craved reassurance where he was concerned. Craved it the way I craved air.
"Well, you've given me a lot to think about."
"I hope so. It really is important that we get you started training right away. I know you're not comfortable with us bending time to speed the process up, but given that we have perfect memories when we aren't using them to fuel our powers, it really ends up just making us a little more human."
"Meaning it's just like what happens to us—I mean, humans—as they age. They forget the mundane stuff and only remember the high points."
"Yeah, except that humans forget the high points too—it's just part of having a porous mind."
"Does it bother you?"
"Honestly? Most of the time I just accept it as a natural part of life. The past just kind of evaporates and drifts away. Sometimes I can remember back a hundred years, sometimes I can remember back a hundred and twenty. When things get really bad I might only remember eighty years. Individually the memories I give up really don't matter much. It's just boring crap like going to the post office or having coffee with someone while we are both lost inside our own heads."
"But in the aggregate?"
"In the aggregate those stupid, unimportant memories are a big chunk of what defines me as a person. More than that, they are what define the people I've lost. You're here with me now, but I still remember what you used to be like twenty years ago before you were killed. So full of life, so in control, the best friend a girl could ever ask for. I worry that this time you'll turn out differently, and then when I've lost all of the old memories of you, you'll really be dead, permanently dead, but I won't even remember enough to mourn you."
"Do you wonder what else you've lost, things that happened four hundred years ago, things that might have been life-changing at the time?"
"Every damn day."
That nearly succeeded in killing the conversation. We sat there in silence for several seconds, but in the end my knowledge of what it was costing Kat to keep us out of sync with the rest of the world compelled me to ask my questions and get as much benefit as possible out of her sacrifice.
"So what's the deal with the Chicago…was it pantheon?"
"Yeah, pantheon—the proper name for a related group of gods."
"Related like family, like you and Jace?"
Kat's laugh had an edge to it that could have etched steel. "Jace and I aren't actually related. It's incredibly rare for two Awakened to be born to the same family, and even when it does happen, there is a certain amount of debate as to what it really means.
"None of us remember all of the way back to when we were all created, so all it means for two Awakened to be born into the same family is that they start out with a chunk of similar DNA—most of which disappears when they hit puberty and they undergo a more accelerated change back to what they were before they died."
Kat pulled her hand away from the surface of the pond and waited as the water slowly filled back in the impression she'd left there.
"By the time the two of them turn eighteen all they have left in common is some memories of growing up in the same house together, which sounds all warm and fuzzy, but you're a bright girl—you've got a pretty good idea by now just how little value memories have for people like us."
I swallowed, unnerved by the bleak picture she'd painted, but I forced my question out anyway. "You said it's rare, but what does that mean? How many Awakened siblings do you know about?"
I think a tiny part of me must have been hoping that Ari would turn out to be an Awakened too. I was already terrified of the things that were going to happen to me, but it would have seemed less scary if I'd known that I was going to be facing it together with Ari rather than just with Kat and Jace.
That hope died when Kat finally responded. "I only know of one time that it's ever happened, Selene, and being siblings has brought those two nothing but grief and heartache."
Something tore inside of me, and tears started to pool in my eyes as my body began shaking. Ari and I had our share of arguments, but Kat was saying that I was going to have to watch her grow old and die while I remained seventeen until another Awakened caught up with me and managed to put me down.
As hard as it was to think of Ari growing old and dying, it was even harder to think of my dad dying. By the time you're eight or nine you understand intellectually that you're going to outlast your parents, but that doesn't mean that you understand it on an emotional level. That understanding hit me like a wrecking ball and I felt myself start to come apart at the edges.
Kat reached over and put her hand on my knee, somehow calming me with just a touch before I could get worked up enough to go into oxygen debt and start hyperventilating. I would have thrown myself against her shoulder, but my feet were still encased inside of almost a foot of cement-like water.
"How do you stand it, Kat? You must both feel so alone. Everyone you meet comes with a built-in expiration date."
"It's not as bad as that. Don't get me wrong, it's tough. Any kind of relationship between an Awakened and a normal human is generally only good for a few years. After that they start noticing that you aren't aging and things get tricky. Occasionally you run into someone who can handle knowing what you are, and when that happens you can spend decades as friends or even lovers, but eventually they either die or grow to resent the fact that you're still young and beautiful while they've become old and decrepit."
"You're right, that doesn't sound so bad."
Kat just smiled at my tone. "Just because a relationship has an expiration date on it doesn't mean that it can't be fun while it lasts, but you're right, if that was all there was to it, there wouldn't be enough to keep me going. In the end it's our pantheons that keep us relatively sane.
"That's what Jace and I are. We're not family in the sense of sharing blood, but we're closer than most human families ever have a chance to be. Before you died, you were part of our pantheon too."
"So what, a pantheon is just a family that isn't going to die from old age, a family that will maybe even last as long as you do?"
"That's part of it, but it's a lot more than that. For as long as humans have been able to communicate they've realized that forming into groups makes them more powerful than they could ever be individually. We aren't any different in that regard. If one Awakened is powerful, then two Awakened are twice as good. A pantheon provides a measure of protection and safety. Even if sometimes you hate each other, you still know that your group has your back if an outsider shows up and tries to take you all down.
"It's more even than that though. A pantheon functions a lot like a miniature research group. In theory, if we are in the grip of a strong enough emotion, and are willing to burn up enough of our memories, there isn't much that we couldn't accomplish, but it doesn't really work like that."
Now she was messing with the vision I'd started crafting of nearly omnipotent beings who had nothing to fear but each other
.
"What do you mean?"
"The reality is that a lot of what we do is knowledge-based. If your power manifested this instant and someone was trying to kill you, you could probably bend time, but you wouldn't be very good at it. You might only get up to two or three times normal speed, you wouldn't know to amp your body up to where it could function at those speeds, and you would have to burn peak memories to do it rather than just the base memories that Jace or I use to power such a minor effect."
"So the more I know, the more efficient I can be with regards to burning my memories."
"Right, and the more power you'll ultimately have access to. Not everyone has the right mindset for research, so most pantheons only have one or two researchers, but they make a huge difference because the things they teach their members can easily make the difference between life and death."
"Wow, that's a pretty hefty responsibility. Anything else?"
"Yeah, pantheons tend to serve as a kind of grounding point for their members. Memories tend to make up a big chunk of who we are, but how our peers react to us also helps to make up our self-image, and that can be incredibly valuable if you've just lost a big chunk of memories and are adrift in the world. Sometimes a member of a given pantheon will be caught separate from the group and be forced to burn nearly everything they have in order to get free.
"Having a pantheon means that when you get back you'll have people around to help you find your way back to being the person you were before you lost your identity. The pantheon's home base also serves as a safe place for an Awakened to store journals that can be used to at least partially piece themselves back together."
"That's what you're trying to do for me."
"Yeah."
"And the leather books in Jace's bedroom are his journals, the records he uses to try to keep himself from drifting into becoming someone else."
"Right again."
The memory of the leather book contained in the box I'd given Jace before I'd died last time seemed seared into my mind. It had seemed so innocuous nestled there in between my old jeans and shirts, but now I knew it for what it was.
A message from my past self, a message from the person Jace and Kat wanted me to become.
Chapter 12
The conversation between Kat and I didn't go much of anywhere after that, so a few minutes later she let the time effect lapse and we headed back into the house.
It shocked me how cold it was once we were back to normal speed. Kat tried to explain it to me through chattering teeth as we walked, but I wasn't sure I really understood. It was something about our temporarily-faster-moving blood drawing heat up into our bodies from the pool at a faster rate than the cold air could suck it away, which kind of made sense, but by that point my mind was getting so stretched and stressed that I just tried to nod in all of the right places.
We made it back into the house as the movie was ending. I expected Ari to ask me where I'd been, but she was so over the moon about having had Jace all to herself that she barely seemed to have noticed that Kat and I had been missing.
Before we left, Jace took Ari and me back to the security room and scanned our fingers so that we would be able to get in and out of the house on our own. I thought Ari was going to start hyperventilating, which turned out to be a good thing because it meant that she didn't notice that Jace gave the two of us different levels of access.
Ari was going to be able to get into zone one, which consisted of the kitchen, great room, guest bedrooms and exercise facilities, but not the master bedrooms or garage. I on the other hand was assigned full access to the entire house.
The sheer amount of trust involved in that gesture would have blown my mind even before I'd understood what was going on, but now it left me speechless. They weren't just giving me access to their fabulously expensive things, they were giving me access to their journals, which was the one thing connecting them to the people they'd been hundreds of years ago.
The trip back home went by faster than I'd expected it to. I caught glimpses of a pair of familiar-looking headlights a couple of times, but by the time I turned off into our neighborhood they were gone, so I didn't think anything of it.
We managed to make it home and into bed before Dad came home, but not by much. I was still awake when I heard him open the door and make his tired way upstairs so he could shower.
I fell asleep worrying about what Dad was going to say when we asked him about going camping. I still hadn't come up with a solution by the time I woke up.
Breakfast was an odd affair. Ari alternated between being effusive about how awesome Kat and Jace's house had been and giving me worried looks, like she expected me to turn catty over the fact that Jace had spent the last part of the evening with her rather than with me.
It was going to be a problem at some point, but I didn't know how to handle it. I had a sneaking suspicion that Jace and Kat would have been more than happy to pack me up and take me to some secret lair in order to continue my training, but I wasn't ready to just disappear on my dad and Ari. That meant I needed Ari to go along with me spending so much time with Jace and Kat. As much as I wanted to believe that Kat had been wrong about what Ari was thinking, I was becoming more and more certain that she was right. Underneath all of the suggestive jokes, Ari was jealous of the fact that I had met Jace first.
Dad came limping downstairs a few minutes before we were supposed to leave. Ari and I jumped out of our chairs to go help him, but he waved us away.
"It's fine, I just slipped at work. It wasn't bothering me this bad last night, so it should loosen up once I get warmed back up and moving around again."
Ari seemed to take his explanation at face value, but I wasn't so convinced. "Are you sure, Dad? Is it your leg or your back?"
"Both, but don't worry about me, honey. I really will be fine."
"Maybe you should go see a chiropractor, Dad."
He shot me the same look he'd used the other day, the one that said that he didn't want Ari knowing how dire the monetary situation was getting. I almost kept on despite that, but he was the adult. If he said he was fine I wasn't going to be able to convince him otherwise.
It did get me thinking though. If I'd been alive for hundreds of years before giving Jace that box full of clothes and a secret leather journal—which still terrified me—then there was a decent chance that I'd had money back in the day, maybe even a lot of money.
I wasn't going to ask Jace and Kat for charity, but maybe they knew what had happened to whatever money I'd had before I'd died. I made a mental note to ask Kat today in school. When you added in the fact that I probably needed to know how I'd died last time, and questions about when I could expect my ability to activate, my list for Jace and Kat was getting pretty long.
I came back to the present just in time to hear Ari ask Dad if we could go camping.
"…it wouldn't be a big deal. Just the three of us spending the night out next to the lake with Kat in her motorhome and then riding their wave runners that afternoon."
Dad gave Ari a suspicious look. "Just the three of you?"
Ari nodded enthusiastically. "Yep, just the three of us, no boys."
"That's an interesting response, Ari, especially since I was really asking whether there were going to be any adults there to keep an eye on the three of you. I have to wonder why you were so excited to establish that there weren't going to be any boys around…"
Ari, the great—expert even—liar, looked like she'd just bitten into something sour. It was the first time I'd seen her at a loss for words in a long time.
Dad turned towards me. "What about you, Selene? What do you have to say about this proposed boating trip? Does this Kat really think she's going to be able to convince her parents she doesn't need any supervision this weekend?"
I was getting so tired of lying to my family, but Kat and Jace had said that this trip was important, so I gamely played along.
"Actually, it doesn't seem like Kat and Jace's parents
are around. As far as I know she doesn't need to get permission from anyone to take the jet skis out."
Dad frowned. "That sounds like a recipe for trouble if I've ever heard one. Two young kids on their own with more money than sense. So Kat is your age, and Jace is the one that's Ari's age?"
The lies just kept piling up, but there wasn't anything to do but plow forward. "Yep. I think Jace is old for the grade he's in, but yeah, he's going to school with Ari."
Dad poured himself a glass of milk while he thought, and then sighed. "I'm sorry, girls, but it's just not safe. I know you'd like to be able to go out on the lake like everyone else, but the thought of the three of you out there all by yourselves just doesn't sit well with me."
Ari looked like she was about to throw a fit, but I beat her to the punch. "Would you be willing to at least talk to Kat, Dad? If you still say no then we'll of course abide by your wishes, but I'd like for you to meet her before you make a final decision."
"I don't know how we'd even make that work, Selene. You've got to stay late so you can pick up Ari from school and I'm probably going to have to go to work a little earlier than normal today…"
"Kat and I will come straight here after school so the two of you can talk, and then I'll go back and pick Ari up."
"Okay, if it means that much to you both, then I'll at least talk to her."
"Thanks, Dad."
A couple of minutes later we were in the car and on our way to school. Ari pouted the entire way there, apparently convinced that I'd given in too easily, but I figured that if anyone was going to have a chance of convincing Dad to let us go camping it was going to be Kat.
I dropped Ari off and headed over to the high school. It wasn't until I was almost there that I realized the reason my heart was racing and my palms were getting clammy. I was going to see Jace again, maybe even spend time alone with him for the first time since I'd found out that he was some kind of semi-omnipotent demigod.