by Dean Murray
I looked at the door for several seconds before gingerly reaching up and spinning the big wheel that locked it closed.
There was a secret here. More than likely it had to do with Kyle's research, now I just needed to decide whether it was safe to ask him about it. Probably not.
I headed back up the stairs, passing the bedroom level and not stopping to open any of the closed doors until I was nearly up to the top level where the kitchen and living room were located. Surprisingly enough, the door to the second to last level wasn't shut. I was starting to realize just how badly my little snooping expedition downstairs could have gone, but I couldn't help myself. I took a deep breath and then stepped across the threshold.
I felt a flicker of surprise as I took in the comfortable space arrayed in front of me. If the top level was the formal receiving area—not that Kyle actually entertained—then this was the family room.
One side of the room was taken up with a massive exercise area, everything from free weights to stationary bikes and wrestling mats. Another quarter of the space was dedicated to a large desk, an array of computer equipment, and several floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
The last quarter of the circular space included a small kitchenette, a couch, and a television that had some kind of gaming system hooked up to it. The most surprising thing of all was the fact that Kyle was sprawled out on the couch, asleep.
I walked over, taking care to avoid making noise, and reached down to cover Kyle with the blanket half-draped over him. A second later I found myself on the floor with Kyle kneeling on my chest, his hand around my throat.
"What were you doing?"
He relaxed his grip around my neck just enough to permit speech. I was shaking, but I managed to get an explanation out.
"You were cold—I was going to move your blanket so that you weren't so uncovered."
"Are you sure you didn't decide this was your chance to end me?"
"No, I decided against killing you—remember?"
Kyle's eyes were deep pools and I was drowning in them. It was different than how I felt when I looked into Jace's eyes, but it was just as strong. Whatever I'd felt for Kyle back in the day must have been incredibly intense.
"Did you?"
"Yeah. I did."
It wasn't like I could have said otherwise—not when he was half a heartbeat away from crushing my throat—but as the words tumbled out I realized they were true. I couldn't have said exactly why I'd decided against killing him, but I had.
Kyle looked into my eyes as though trying to weigh the truth of what I'd just said. I wondered if he had amped up his powers of observation, if he was paying attention to slight changes in my respiration and pulse. It was possible, but I hadn't caught any trace of an effect. He seemed to be gauging my sincerity the old-fashioned way.
It didn't make sense. Jace had said that any given Awakened was doing well if they managed to hold onto a hundred and fifty years' worth of memories.
Kyle had spent the last several decades locked away inside his bunker. It was possible that his isolation had allowed him to burn fewer memories than our contemporaries, but I'd gotten the feeling that Jace and I had been together for something like two hundred years.
Maybe I was off on the timeline, maybe Kyle did somehow remember our time together. It was unlikely, but there certainly seemed to be something behind his eyes, something that said he knew me better than I knew myself.
"I almost believe you, Selene."
"Well, I'm sorry that you're one of those people who have a hard time accepting the truth."
My response was more sarcastic than I should have risked, but I couldn't seem to help myself. Amazingly, he smiled rather than getting angry.
"Maybe I was wrong about you. The sarcasm fits you better than I'd realized."
He let go of my throat and shifted so he wasn't on my chest anymore. I slowly sat up, never taking my eyes off of him. It was like being caged with a wild animal. There was no telling what he was going to do from one moment to the next.
"Great, so now that you're starting to believe me when I say that I'm not going to kill you, can we start talking about you letting me go?"
"My letting you go wouldn't make any difference, Selene. As long as Fenrir and Mephistoles are out there, I'm just as much a prisoner here as you are."
"For some reason I'm having a hard time buying that. The only way that would be true is if you are willing to let me leave once it's safe for me to do so. Otherwise I'm a different kind of prisoner than you are."
He hadn't blinked while I was talking. Normal people blink. It should have been creepy that he wasn't, but it somehow didn't bother me. Instead I got the feeling that he was forcing himself not to blink because he didn't want to miss out on anything I was saying. It was like catching every change in my expression was a survival-level need. Like it was as important to him as breathing.
I swallowed and told myself that I was misreading the signs. It was all too ludicrous to believe.
"I've learned that it's foolish to rely on the future unfolding a certain way, Selene. This conversation is pointless. We can discuss it again if we manage to take care of our unwelcome visitors."
He stood and offered me his hand. I almost took it. It would have just been one person helping another person to their feet, but it didn't feel like that was all it was. It felt like that would be a betrayal of everything I had with Jace.
I expected Kyle to lash out when I didn't take his hand. His fingers curled into fists as I used the couch to get back to my feet, but he didn't yell. He just turned away from me and walked over to his desk.
"I think you're probably going to want to see this."
"See what?"
He didn't answer. Instead he just sat down at the desk and started clicking away on the mouse. I waited for several seconds hoping that he would thaw and tell me what I was in for, but it was like I'd ceased to exist.
I finally walked over and stood behind his chair so I could watch the monitor. As soon as I was in position behind him, he started the video that he'd queued up while I was walking over.
"What am I looking at?"
"Video feeds. The bottom one is just behind my first ward, the one that keeps everyone from being able to detect the stronger wards behind it."
"The one that they took out on their way in?"
"Yeah. The feed on the top is the second ward, the one where we fought them a little while ago."
"You mean the one where you fought them."
Kyle's hand tightened slightly on the mouse, but he just nodded wordlessly. The video was playing by at four times normal speed, but not much seemed to be happening. Several seconds went by before I saw Fenrir wander back into the field of view.
It was hard to say for sure on such a grainy, black and white image, but it looked almost like he'd gotten bigger since we saw him last. Fenrir shook himself as though psyching himself up, and then leaned into the ward. The cameras weren't capable of detecting the ward, but they were able to pick up the discharge of power as the ward tried to throw Fenrir into the rock wall behind him.
"What's going on?"
"He's draining the ward. It's dangerous, even for a fae as powerful as Fenrir, but he already took the measure of my defenses earlier during the fight so he knows it's not powerful enough to destroy him instantly. That means if he's careful he can cause it to discharge power without triggering it fully. It's painful, but each time he presses up against the ward he absorbs part of the energy that is discharged."
"You mean he's using your defenses to get stronger?"
"Yeah. That's the other reason why turtling up hasn't ever worked for very long. Erecting wards is a good deterrent for other Awakened and for weaker fae, but they're like a nine-course meal for the more powerful fae."
Kyle had slowed down the footage as Fenrir touched the ward, so I was able to count the seconds until the massive wolf stumbled away from the wards and collapsed against the far wall. A moment later, a shadow detach
ed itself from the wall. Mephistoles stepped forward and shot a bolt of light at the ward that caused the feed to stutter. By the looks of things, he'd very nearly burned the camera out.
"They're working together to try to bring down the ward?"
Kyle nodded as the image from the camera started to coalesce back into something other than white snow.
"More than that, it looks like they managed to take it down."
He brought up two more feeds with a couple of clicks as I realized that I couldn't see any sign of Mephistoles and Fenrir at the second ward.
"I thought you said it would take them two or three days to bring it down."
"Yeah, I did say that. It appears that I underestimated just how desperate my taunts would make Mephistoles to get back to his lair."
"So what, we've got three days now before they'll have taken all of the remaining wards down and then we're screwed?"
"Just watch."
Kyle sped the feed back up to the point where it only took a few seconds for the two intruders to make it onto the third feed. At that point he slowed it down slightly, but the two of them still moved with a speed that would have been comical if not for the fact that every second that passed brought them that much closer to knocking on our front door.
I watched Mephistoles gesture repeatedly at the ward before Fenrir finally edged into the ward and then stumbled away with his fur smoking.
"The third ward is more powerful than the other two?"
"Yes. There is only so much you can do to hide the effects of a powerful ward inside of a weaker ward, but distance helps a lot. The first ward was really just designed to mask all of the other wards. The second ward was meant as a deterrent. Only someone who was really determined to get at me would go to the trouble of taking the second ward down, so the third one is as strong as I could make it without having it burn through the masking effect of the first two wards."
I was only listening with half an ear. The rest of my attention was glued to the video feeds, but even so I felt like I must have missed something when I saw Mephistoles turn and walk away.
"Wait, what's going on?"
Kyle didn't answer. Instead he sped the feeds back up for several seconds before slowing them back down to regular speed.
"There, that should do it."
"Do what?"
"Just watch."
Even as the words left his mouth I saw what it was he wanted me to see. Mephistoles appeared on the first feed, the one that watched the location where the first ward had been positioned. He appeared, walked through the tunnel and disappeared.
"Wait, he's gone?"
"Yeah, it sure looks that way. I'll know for sure once I'm on the other side of the third ward and can sense his presence—or lack thereof."
"But why would he do that?"
"Because the stronger Mephistoles gets, the more fearful he becomes."
That one left me scratching my head, but apparently seeing half of our competition leave had Kyle in a good mood.
"Mephistoles is a third-rate researcher. He's smart, but he's missing the spark that would let him really accomplish something. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—he's figured out his limitations. He stopped trying to do real research centuries ago. Instead he's become one of the world's foremost thieves of real research. He's long since identified everyone with any real ability and he stalks them. He lives in constant fear of someone else realizing that he's not home and breaking into his lair so that they can steal all of the research journals he's amassed."
"That's why he was after Kat and me eighteen years ago…"
"Yes. It was common knowledge that you and I were the two who pioneered time shifts. You were brilliant and powerful, but you only had Kat and Jace supporting you. The three of you were staying mobile, but even so you were at the top of a very short list of targets. If you'd been younger and less powerful he might have tried to capture you, but you weren't. He wanted your journals, but you were too careful for him to steal them while you were still alive."
"So he killed me."
"Yes. To be honest I was surprised that you didn't manage to at least take him with you."
"That's why you agreed not to interfere. You thought he and I would kill each other off and that would leave you perfectly positioned to take over everything."
There was something in Kyle's eyes that I couldn't read. In someone else I would have said it was regret, but there was no trace of anything like that in his voice.
"Yes. That was my plan exactly. I figured that once you and he were both dead I could swoop in and take your journals and with a little bit of luck get my hands on the knowledge he's spent the last few centuries looting. Then I could disappear down here in my refuge for however long it took for me to solve the problem I've been working on."
"Do you expect me to be okay with that, Kyle?"
He shrugged—which just made me angrier.
"I'm dead because of you."
"Except you aren't dead. You're standing here next to me."
I wanted to hit him.
"I'm standing here, but I'm not the same person. The other version of me is gone—because you killed her."
"I didn't kill her."
"You're arguing semantics. If you hadn't given Mephistoles your blessing he wouldn't have come after me."
Kyle turned his chair so he was facing me and leaned back so he could look me in the eyes without bending his neck.
"There isn't any way to know that for sure. My withholding my blessing from Mephistoles might have made him back off, but it might not have. He might have gone after you anyway—or even worse, he might have come after me."
"And that would have been worse?"
"Yes."
I gave him the kind of sugary sweet, totally insincere look that I'd always hated so much from Sandra. "I rest my case. You agree that you dying is a bad thing—you can't be mad about me being bent out of shape when it was me who ended up dying."
"You're missing the point, Selene. What does it matter if one of us dies? You, me, Jace, Kat, the end result is the same. We come back. We don't stay dead, we don't remember the pain."
"That's the point! Dying deprived me of memories, memories I no doubt valued."
"Did it? Those memories would have just been fodder for some fight."
I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, but there was something in his eyes that stopped me. This wasn't just an argument to him, this was his religion. A religion of facts and logic, but a religion nonetheless. I wasn't equipped to fight this fight. Not anymore.
"I don't know why you're wrong, but you're wrong."
"Am I? I ask it sincerely. I've looked at that problem again and again. What are we but a collection of memories? Memories that we routinely sacrifice for terribly small ends. If we aren't snuffed out at the time of death, what have we really lost—what thing of substance have we been deprived of?"
"You're skating on very thin ice, Kyle."
He gave me a sad smile. "That's what you said to me when you abandoned me and threw yourself into Jace's arms. At one point those words would have ignited a terrible rage in me, but the memory of that time is long gone now. All I have left of it now is journal entries."
I wasn't sure if I wanted to slap him or hug him. He looked like a lost little child, but he also looked like an arrogant demigod who was far too powerful and callous to be allowed to meddle in people's lives.
In the end I chose neither course because I realized he'd given me the answer I needed to refute his argument.
"It was wrong because you deprived me of all the things I could have accomplished during the last eighteen years. You talk of nothing but your precious research, but what about my research? Who knows what I could have accomplished?"
"That's just it, Selene. All of the signs indicated that you lost the gift after you left me. You dumbed yourself down to Jace's level so that he wouldn't feel threatened by you and you've spent every year since then d
oing nothing more than refining the research that you and I had already pioneered together.
"I had to balance your limited, shrinking contributions to the world against what I could potentially accomplish over the next several decades. I had to weigh the loss of your memories against the knowledge I was uncovering in the city above us. I had no choice but to choose the way I did."
"You had no right."
"I not only had the right, I had the obligation."
I slapped him and then I turned and walked out of the room.
Chapter 7
I couldn't have said what instinct caused me to go up rather than down when I hit the stairs, but a few minutes later I found myself in the kitchen, where I cried for nearly an hour.
More than anything I just wanted to be back home with the people who I knew loved me. My dad, Ari, Kat…Jace. I had only Kyle's word that they were all okay, and that was scant comfort given that he was cold-blooded enough to let Mephistoles kill me in return for a few more decades of undisturbed work.
As much as I worried about what was going to happen to me, I was even more worried about my friends and family. It had been long enough now that my dad knew I'd disappeared. I was sure he was freaking out with worry.
The best possible situation was that Jace and Kat had told him what was going on and that I'd been abducted while fighting a figure from Norse mythology, but even that wasn't a very good outcome. Poor Jace. He and my dad would both be blaming themselves for what had happened to me, and while they were both powerless to find me right now, I suspected that was going to be a hard thing for Jace to acknowledge. Jace was used to being in control of his surroundings—sitting around, passively waiting for some kind of ransom note wasn't going to sit well with him.