by Dean Murray
"He's running Ari down to the vault in our basement. We only have the one ward because we didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention, but it should still be enough to keep her safe from Mephistoles while we are gone."
"How long before he'll be back? I'd like to talk to him."
"I don't know. Where are you located?"
I pulled up a web browser and did a web search. "It says that my internet provider is in Southern Wyoming. Will that be enough?"
"I'm not sure. It will at least be enough to get us started moving though. Once we are closer we'll probably be able to feel the ward, but given how short our timetable is for getting back down here to save your dad, we could probably use some directions."
"Right, I'll work on getting you some better directions the next time Kyle wakes up."
There was silence on the line for several seconds.
"Well, if that's all, we'll just wait for you to call us back with directions."
"That—well, that isn't everything, but I guess I'll call back later when I can hopefully catch Jace."
"You kissed Kyle, didn't you, Selene?"
"How did you know?"
"I've been your friend for more than four centuries. I don't remember most of it, but I know what it means when you break out that voice. That's your serious guilt voice. You don't use that for anything small."
"Yeah, I kissed him. I don't know what I was thinking, it just kind of happened. I need to talk to Jace about it though. It doesn't seem fair for him to come risk his life without knowing what I did."
Kat sighed. "I should have seen this coming. All right, here's what we're going to do. You aren't going to tell Jace anything until after we've dealt with Fenrir. It would be even better if you could keep your big mouth shut until after we've rescued your dad, but I suspect that's going to be asking too much.
"We'll put Fenrir down, or more likely disembody him, then you and Jace can have your big blowup in the car on the way back here. It will be uncomfortable as hell, but it's a better option and I don't think that Jace is petty enough to let your dad die out of spite."
"No! Kat, I can't hide this from him. I need to tell him—as soon as possible. It's the right thing to do."
"No, Selene, this is about more than just you and Jace. That isn't the right thing to do, it's just the thing that's most likely to give you a shot at fixing the mess you've made. The right thing to do is kick some wolf butt and then save your dad. Once that is done, you and Jace can try to salvage whatever is left of your social life."
"You can't stop me, Kat. I'm going to call him back."
"Correction, you're going to call his phone back, a phone that is going to conveniently be off for the next hour or two. Trust me when I say that it's going to stay in my pocket for that entire time."
"I'll call your phone."
"No, you won't. If you do that you'll just be forcing me to turn my phone off, which will drastically reduce the odds of us actually finding you in time to save your dad."
"I guess you've thought of everything."
"Yeah, I guess after three hundred years of watching you make a mess out of your social life I've gotten pretty good at damage control. You can thank me later, once you've had a chance to see that I'm right. Don't bother calling me until you have directions."
Chapter 22
It was probably a good thing that I was calling using Kyle's computer rather than on a cell phone. It was a lot harder to throw a computer across the room. I could've amped my strength up to the point where it was still possible, but it wasn't worth the effort. Besides, I was going to need all of my emotional reserves if I was going to survive what was coming my way.
I left the office and headed back downstairs. Kyle was still sleeping, but he wasn't shivering anymore. I warmed up the hot packs again and slid them under the covers.
I considered climbing back in bed with Kyle, but there wasn't any desire behind the thought. I just felt like I was supposed to be under the covers with him because that was what I was used to doing.
I couldn't do it though, not without making things worse with Jace, and I didn't want that—just like I didn't want to lead Kyle on any more than I already had. I didn't understand how I'd gotten here. I'd always thought I was a good person; I wasn't so sure anymore.
There was an element of risk to leaving Kyle there by himself, but I couldn't bring myself to stay there with him, watching him sleep. I couldn't stand the idea of being there when he woke up and having to face him.
Just going upstairs and watching a movie didn't seem appropriate. Besides, I wouldn't be able to concentrate on it even if I'd wanted to. Instead, I ended up going back out to the stairwell and heading down.
I'd had vague thoughts of going to the garden and harvesting the ingredients for one last meal with Kyle, but that didn't seem right. It was playing house with him that had helped put me in my current mess. Taking care of him, pretending he was truly mine, even just for a little bit, was just going to make things harder.
Instead, I ended up in his workshop. I couldn't have said for sure what drew me into that room with its shimmering ward and its countless blackboards, but something made me push the door open and sit down on one of the hard metal chairs.
I looked at Kyle's egg-shaped creation, the device that sped us along at twice the speed of the rest of the world, but I didn't know how to plumb the depths of its secrets any more than I knew how to read the equations on Kyle's blackboards.
Instead of doing anything productive, I just sat there and stared at the equations and wished that I knew why those last two boards looked so wrong to me.
I lost track of time. It might have been two hours or it might have been four, but in the end it didn't matter. Enough time had passed that I needed to go back upstairs and wake Kyle up so that I could ask him the best way for Jace and Kat to find us.
I stood to go, but instead of walking over to the door, I went over to the second-to-last blackboard, one of the two that seemed so wrong. I smeared out two of the letters, swapping them, and then changed four of the signs scattered around the board.
As soon as I realized what I'd done I started freaking out. I reached up, intending on changing it back, hoping that I would be able to remember everything I'd changed, but my smudges looked just like Kyle's smudges.
It wasn't going to be enough, but I could at least change the two letters back. Hand shaking, I reached back up to make the correction, only Kyle had somehow managed to enter the room without me hearing him.
"Wait. Stop."
"I'm sorry, Kyle. I wasn't thinking—it just didn't look right. Please tell me you can fix it!"
He looked at the board and I couldn't read the expression that crossed his face. Despite all odds, I held onto hope right up until he shook his head.
"I can't fix it, Selene."
I turned away from him. I couldn't meet his eyes, knowing that I'd ruined countless hours of work. I expected him to lash out at me—even despite his promise.
I jumped when I felt his hand on my arm, but his touch was gentle. "You don't understand, Selene. I can't fix it because it wasn't right before, but it is now. You fixed it. You solved one of the fundamental problems that has been stopping me from progressing my research beyond its current state. You fixed it."
"How is that even possible? I don't know what any of this means."
"I don't know how, but you weren't working on an advanced form of time amp or a better shield or a new way of healing people. All of those rumors were just that. They were rumors so that people wouldn't realize what you were actually working on. You probably didn't even tell Jace and Kat about your actual research."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you were trying to come up with the theoretical underpinnings that would allow you to create new artifacts. You and I were pursuing the same research and—at least in some ways—you were ahead of me."
He hurried over to the last blackboard, obviously weak, but too excited to let that st
op him.
"What about this one? Do you know where I'm going wrong with this one?"
I slowly shook my head. "I'm sorry, Kyle, but I don't. I don't even know how I was able to fix the first one. I thought this was impossible."
That pulled him up short. He was just as capable of losing himself in the excitement of the moment as anyone else, but I'd just pointed him towards an even bigger mystery and he latched onto it like a pit bull.
"You're right, it doesn't make any sense. I've never heard of anyone pulling memories through a death like that. Then again, you seem to be picking up new effects much more quickly than you have any right to."
I debated not telling him the rest of the oddness we'd detected so far about me, but if he was going to be any help then he needed to know everything.
"That's not all, Kyle. When I first awakened, I got the normal crystallization of my memories and the increased vividness that comes with that, but it didn't just happen for the memories from that point forward. I nearly lost myself in a memory from before awakening. It happened to all of my memories, even stuff that I thought I'd forgotten."
Kyle stumbled over to a chair and shook his head. "That shouldn't be possible. If it was someone else, I'd suspect them of lying, of trying to waste my time by sending me down a false lead. I saw you fix my equations though…"
For several seconds he didn't say anything. "Are you sure that you really died? Maybe Jace and Kat faked your death to get Mephistoles to leave the three of you alone."
That made me laugh. "I remember growing up. We still have baby clothes at my house—in fact, I think we've still got every outfit I ever wore growing up packed away up in the attic."
"Maybe your research wasn't actually designed to let you create new artifacts. An understanding of memories is integral to creating an artifact, but maybe that was just a happy coincidence. Maybe you were researching ways to manipulate memories. Maybe you wanted to drop out of sight and knew that it would never work if you behaved like yourself."
I grabbed Kyle's arm and pulled on it to get his attention. "You're going off half-cocked. Faking my own death doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't have accomplished anything. Mephistoles didn't want me, he wanted my journals. Faking my death wouldn't have done anything to take pressure off of Jace and Kat."
Kyle grimaced slightly at my use of his brother's name. It was interesting that he hadn't reacted at all when it had been him using Jace's name.
"It wouldn't have done anything to take the pressure off, but it could explain how the two of them managed to stay one step ahead of Mephistoles for nearly two decades. Nobody expected them to last this long. Maybe you faked your death but continued to run with them until very recently so that you could take your enemies by surprise…"
"And my family? My dad and Ari, what about them? You think that I just grabbed a couple of people off of the street and wiped their memories too, implanting some kind of shared history?"
"Yes."
"That wouldn't do anything to hide my presence from any Awakened who passed by. It would have just made me a sitting duck for anyone who happened to drive through town."
"Maybe you found a way to mask your ability, a way that made it so you couldn't be detected by others of our kind."
"You're reaching, Kyle. In order for your hypothesis to work, I would have had to have made two fairly unrelated discoveries. If I knew how to shield my presence from other Awakened it would have made a lot more sense for me to just sneak up on them and assassinate everyone who gave us any problems."
"That's a fair point. I'm out of ideas though. I don't know how you're doing this."
"Yeah, that makes two of us."
Chapter 23
Kyle wanted to feed me one last meal, but I refused to let him. He was stronger than he'd been up to that point, but still too weak to waste his strength on pointless tasks. Instead I convinced him to let me help him up to his office so that he could show me how to work the video feeds and provide me with written directions that would get Jace and Kat from the road to the Lost City as quickly as possible.
I checked the feeds and confirmed that Fenrir and the other two hadn't managed to bring down the third ward yet. Ironically, having the other two fae around seemed to be slowing down Fenrir's progress. He wasn't as willing to push himself as hard now that there was a chance one of the other two might attack him while he was incapacitated.
Then I called Kat and gave her the directions to the third ward. The trickiest part was going to be making sure that we all attacked at the same time. I promised to go out to the third ward and wait just behind it so that I could follow Fenrir if he made a break towards the surface in an attempt to kill my friends before they could link up with me.
By the time my call to Kat was done, Kyle was shivering again. I tried to help him back down to his bedroom so he'd be close to the bath in case his fever kicked back up, but he wordlessly pushed my hands away and started down the stairs by himself.
I watched him slowly make his way down to the next level and tried to come up with something to say, something that would make everything right. In the end I just stood there, unable to speak. Kyle turned back and looked at me just before he disappeared, but it was like there was a stranger looking out of his eyes. He'd already started distancing himself from me.
I understood that he didn't want to get hurt. I even recognized that I didn't have any room to complain—not when I was the one who couldn't seem to make up her mind—but that didn't make it any easier. There was so much potential good inside of Kyle, but he'd spent centuries pushing that part of himself away.
I waited until I heard his door clang shut and then I started upstairs to the kitchen. My shoes hadn't taken the kind of time-amped punishment that Kyle had dealt to his, but they still looked like they'd been through a small war. Unlike Kyle, I didn't have spares stockpiled, but I knew I needed to do something.
I ate a couple of oranges as I tried to come up with a solution. I ended up finding some duct tape in one of the kitchen drawers and used it to reinforce my shoes. I didn't know how well the tape would grip on the rock floor of the city, so I left big chunks of exposed sole as I wrapped the tape the short way around my feet. The result was ugly as sin, and I was going to have to remember to stay on the balls of my feet, but I was hopeful that it would let my shoes last for at least one more fight.
It took me another half an hour to dig up a flashlight and a lantern. I was getting antsy about the amount of time I'd been stuck waiting inside of the bunker, but by my calculations I still had plenty of time before Jace and Kat would be arriving. Besides, there wasn't any way I was going back out in the darkness by myself without something to help me find my way to the third ward.
I experimented with the lantern until I was able to get it working and then grabbed it, the backup flashlight, and a small can of extra fuel before heading over to the outside door. Both of the swords I'd left at the door when I'd brought Kyle back to the bunker were waiting for me, and I was faced with a tough decision.
Taking my sword wasn't a problem. I could leave it just inside the third ward after the battle was over, and even if that didn't work out, Kyle wouldn't care. Taking Excalibur would be a different matter entirely.
It was sitting there in its leather scabbard, beckoning to me, a powerful artifact that would allow me to keep hold of my memories, an artifact that could make all of the difference between winning or losing.
There wasn't anything to stop me from taking it, either. Kyle was downstairs, locked behind his bedroom door, barely strong enough to shuffle up one or two sets of stairs. I could grab it right then and there, and by the time he wondered what had happened to it I would be too far away for him to stop me before I made it to the third ward.
I told myself that it was just temporary, that I would just borrow it, use it to fight Fenrir, and then leave it waiting for Kyle just inside the third ward. Looked at in that light, it felt no different than what I was doing with the lantern, b
ut I knew that wasn't the case.
The lantern could be replaced with an infinitesimal fraction of the proceeds from selling just one bar of platinum. Excalibur was one of a kind and if something happened to me during the fight Kyle would never get it back.
There was nothing stopping me from taking it other than the knowledge that doing so would be wrong—that and the fact that Kyle would never forgive me for taking Excalibur. If I was really going to take it then I should just walk downstairs and use it to slit Kyle's throat.
If I took it, then he and I would forever be at odds. One of us would have to die if I betrayed him like that, and I wasn't willing to do that, not even for my dad—he wouldn't have wanted me to.
I reached down and stroked Excalibur's hilt, marveling at how warm it felt despite having been sitting there for the last two days.
"You're a magnificent weapon. I wish I could take you with me, but you're not mine to take. Please take care of him. Even if he and I don't end up together—even if I end up a lonely old woman with no friends at all—it will be a little easier knowing that he's got you to help keep him safe."
I put my flashlight into my back pocket, slid the hilt of my sword through the handle of the fuel can, and then balanced my sword across my shoulders. Two minutes later, even the door to the bunker had slipped away into the darkness like it had never existed.
I half expected to get lost on my way to the third ward, but it turned out that I had a better sense of direction than I'd given myself credit for. A surge of fear crashed through me as I crossed the fourth ward and realized there was a chance that Fenrir had taken down the third ward since I'd last checked on it, but there was nothing to do but keep walking and hope for the best.
Somewhere between the fourth and third wards the time-bending effect disappeared. It had been keeping pace with me up until then, moving with the same erratic fits and starts. Honestly, I was surprised that it stayed with me as long as it did. It was programmed to surround Kyle. There was no reason to think that it would stick with me for long enough to fight Fenrir, but as I stepped right up to the edge of the vivid colors that marked the edge of the effect, I felt a sense of loss. I wasn't just crossing a line, I was returning to a different state of existence, a state that was lacking some of the magic that had defined my time with Kyle.