by Dean Murray
Bethany rolled her eyes at him. "You suck at motivational speeches. Let's get this show on the road."
We left the house a couple of minutes after that. Kat and I carried one end of the vault while Jace carried the other. It would have been a simple matter for any one of us to amp up our strength and carry it by ourselves, but apparently we were all worried about depleting our emotional reserves.
We walked for more than a mile and a half through the forest, and I felt like I could feel Mephistoles' eyes on me the entire time. It was disturbing in ways that I hadn't been expecting. Kregor buzzed around, always within sight of the rest of us, but obviously making sure that we weren't going to walk into some kind of ambush.
It made a lot of sense. Kregor probably didn't want to be disembodied any more than the next guy, but he was old enough and powerful enough that it wouldn't be the end for him if it happened. Bethany, on the other hand, just rode on my shoulder with one hand knotted around a lock of my hair. I suspected that she was starting to second-guess her decision to come with us, but I wasn't going to call her out on it.
I couldn't blame her for being scared; I certainly was.
Three-quarters of the way to the rendezvous I realized that we'd been angling around a large hill. That was smart, it meant that Kat and Jace's house was less likely to be caught in the crossfire. That wouldn't matter if we all died in the next few minutes, but it meant that there was still a chance that we'd survive and get to go back to it once this was all over.
A few minutes later we dropped into a natural amphitheater. Mephistoles was waiting for us at the far end.
"You brought the journals?"
Jace hefted the vault a little higher and nodded. "You brought Selene's dad?"
"Open up the crate first."
"No. Show us Peter or we'll just turn around and go home."
Mephistoles gave Jace a cold smile and pointed back behind us. I turned and saw my dad standing there at the top of the hill with his hands tied in front of him. He looked tired, bruised and half-starved, but he was still alive, and that was such a relief that I almost didn't even register the identity of the person standing next to him.
I should have known that Sandra would end up involved with Mephistoles. Jace and Kat had been so insistent that she was nothing more than a mimicry, that the odds were just too steep against the two of us being born here at the same time, but part of me had refused to believe them.
Her dislike of me had been too instant, too strong to be anything other than something carried over from a past life. That was supposed to be impossible, but it was happening to me, so maybe it was happening to her too.
"You've seen him, now open up the vault and let me see the journals."
We set the vault down and Jace flipped the lid up. I didn't know what that was supposed to prove to Mephistoles other than that we'd crammed it full of a bunch of black, leather-bound books that might or might not be my old research journals, but his eyes got big, like an addict who had just spotted his next hit.
"Kill the father and take them!"
Everything exploded into violence with such speed that I would have been killed if not for the fact that I was standing so close to the journals.
Kregor darted up and to the side, his sword—little more than a long knife for someone my size—held at the ready. Jace had left his ax with the Lady, but he instantly amped himself and drew his sword, dashing away to the right even as Kat moved the other direction.
Kat had grabbed a trio of short, throwing spears from the armory before we'd left along with a slender sword for me, and the first of the spears shot towards Mephistoles at more than a hundred miles per hour.
Jace and Kat hadn't held back at all on their augmentation. I finally managed to get myself amped up to about five times normal speed, but they were still moving faster than I was. I caught all of that out of the corner of my eye as I turned back towards Sandra and shot up the hill.
I'd wasted nearly a second trying to come to grips with the idea that Mephistoles had just casually ordered Sandra to kill my dad. I suspected that I was going to regret that delay.
There was a brief instant where Sandra didn't move—as if she'd been shocked by Mephistoles' order to kill my dad—but then she slammed the knife she was holding into his side and charged down towards me.
My dad crumpled, falling to his knees, but there wasn't anything I could do to help him. I didn't know how to heal, and my minuscule first-aid skills weren't going to keep him from dying. There was only one way to save him. I had to kill Sandra and then help Jace and Kat kill Mephistoles. If I was fast enough then maybe there would still be time for Jace to heal my dad.
Sandra cut loose with an attack that looked like a black shockwave made out of heavy smoke. I threw myself to one side, trying to get out of the way of the attack, but I wasn't quite fast enough. I managed to avoid the darkest part of the attack, but the fringes still caught me, and I felt a section of my shirt tear away just above my right hip.
The pain didn't hit me until an instant later, but when it did it nearly brought me to my knees. I managed to keep moving, but it staggered me, stopping my forward progress, and that was bad enough.
"Keep moving, Selene!"
Bethany's yell and the feeling of her hand against my neck were the only anchors left for me to grab hold of, but they were just barely enough to keep me from going all the way down. I shot a sun lance at Sandra—more to buy myself time than because I actually expected to kill her with it—and pushed myself forward.
I didn't remember drawing my sword. It seemed useless given that both of us were capable of killing from a hundred yards away, but it was in my hand and I raised it into position as we clashed into each other.
It seemed impossible considering that just a few days ago Sandra had still been unawakened, but she was better at this than I was. The air in front of her pulsed and knocked my sword out of the way and then her knife licked out and cut me in the shoulder.
I reeled back away from her, nearly overcome by shock, but she didn't give me time to get set again. I caught a glimpse of the other fight as she closed again, moving almost as fast as I was. I saw Kat launch a sun lance at Mephistoles that the old man turned without noticeable effort in the split second before he launched a pulse of darkness like Sandra had just used on me.
Jace was faster than I was, but Mephistoles' attack covered easily twice the area Sandra's had, tearing a massive furrow in the ground along the bottom edge of the effect. Jace dodged to the right, but he wasn't going to be able to get all the way clear. My breath caught and then a pulse of white light cut through Mephistoles' effect, clearing a hole in the attack so that Jace could slip through it and continue forward towards Mephistoles.
The force of my sword hitting Sandra's shield had knocked it free of my hand, but Sandra's rush back towards me didn't leave me any time to arm myself with anything else. She slashed again—this time at my neck—but I finally understood what it was that I'd done wrong during our first exchange. I was faster than her, I needed to use that advantage rather than trying to slug things out in the kind of fight that Mephistoles excelled at.
I leaned back just far enough for her knife to miss me and then shot forward and slammed my hand into her stomach. I'd expected my attack to maybe double her over at best, but I was willing to take whatever strikes I could land on her—however ineffectual.
Despite the thick refusal of the air to fill my lungs like I wanted it to, I'd still somehow forgotten just how amped up my strength was. My punch—poor form and everything—didn't just fold Sandra in half, it launched her backwards down the hill. It was devastatingly powerful. As she crashed into the ground, I realized that I probably would have paralyzed her if not for the fact that her bones and muscles were amped up.
I was so shocked that I forgot for a second to follow up on my attack. I remedied that a second later and ran down the hill towards her, but I'd waited too long. Sandra rolled with the impact from hitting the gro
und, and came up spitting mad.
She'd lost her knife somewhere along the way, so she launched another of the shadowy ripples at me. I was moving too fast to dodge, instead I threw myself upwards, sailing over the worst of the attack as I threw another sun lance at her.
This time I almost hit her with the bar of molten gold, but even as she dodged to her right she was moving exactly to where I wanted her. The shockwave from her attack had destroyed my shoes and the bottom third of my pants. The pain was once again intense. It felt like all of the flesh below my knees should have been torn off of my bones, but when I looked down it was all still there. It was bruised like someone had taken a baseball bat to me, but it was still there and still responding to my will.
My feet caught Sandra in the chest as I came down from my jump, and this time I knocked her into a tree that was more than six feet around. She mewled in pain as we both dropped to the ground and went rolling down the hill.
She probably should have come up on top, but was apparently too disoriented. I flipped her over and straddled her. I was going to hit her, but I caught a flash of movement and leaned back as her hand—glowing with some kind of crackling white energy—passed mere inches in front of my face.
I'd turned slightly to one side at the last second to try and buy myself a little more room, and was glad I had because even with a near miss, the energy surrounding her hand burned my skin. I screamed out in pain as the entire left side of my face felt like it had been set on fire.
I fought past the pain and grabbed her arm, trying to keep her fist away from me. I succeeded in slamming her hand into the ground, but all that did was cause an explosion of debris as her energy effect shredded the leaves and sticks under it.
The same effect blinked into existence on her other hand, but I'd been expecting that and I grabbed her left arm as well, pinning her arms above her head, squinting my eyes against the hail of fragments as her effect destroyed another patch of ground.
"You should just give up now, Selene. You've been off making out with Jace while I've been back here spending every spare minute practicing new effects. I'm a natural—you've been outclassed from the start and you didn't even realize it."
I opened my mouth to tell her to go to hell, but her energy field was expanding, working its way down her arms so that soon there wouldn't be anywhere for me to hold onto her. Right as the skin on my hands started to tighten up from the destructive power inching towards it, Bethany landed on my shoulder again and I remembered that this was about more than just Sandra and me.
The maelstrom of emotions that swept through me was like nothing I'd even believed possible. The rage that had been powering me doubled and then redoubled again, but even it was overshadowed by the happiness and love that raced through my being.
The love was easy—I loved my family and friends. The rage was easy too—I'd hated Sandra for years now, hated her with a fury that I'd kept hidden away even from myself for fear that it would break free and consume me.
The happiness was something else altogether. I didn't understand where the emotion was coming from until I realized that things didn't have to end the way that Sandra wanted them to. I might not survive, but I could still make sure that she didn't get up and go after Jace and Kat; I could make sure that Bethany made it out of here. I still had a chance to make a difference.
I reached for another peak memory, planning on building the same kind of heat that I'd used to kill the pooka, but what came in response was something different, a crackling energy that broke through me like a tidal wave and then surged off my skin at the precise instant that Sandra's effect was about to touch me.
I'd never learned how to create the effect she was using, but somehow that was exactly what I did. The two fields struck with power that tried to throw us apart, but we were each pressing towards each other with amped muscles that would have put an Olympic power lifter to shame.
"You're not taking this away from me, you bitch!"
The pure venom in Sandra's voice should have shocked me, but it didn't. Somehow I'd known all along that her feelings went beyond anything the rest of the world could have expected. Only teenage girls could feel emotion with complete abandon, and Sandra was a teenage girl with centuries of history egging her on, a teenage girl who'd spent the last decade hating me with every ounce of her being.
Sandra's field surged out from her entire body, becoming brighter and denser. The hillside around us seemed to explode. Fist-sized rocks, jagged from being shattered just a split second previously, flew at me with enough force to go through a car, but that was nothing compared to the destructive potential of the crackling field coming off of Sandra.
It should have torn me apart. It almost did, almost made my field flicker out. I reached for more power, hoping to be able to feed more memories into my effect, but expecting to find out that I was completely out of emotional reserve.
I was working a powerful time amp and all of the various effects that made that possible, and I'd already shot out two sun lances. There shouldn't have been anything else left, but when I reached for more memories they responded and effortlessly slid out of the invisible hole in my forehead.
What was going on was beyond burning a peak memory, it was beyond anything I'd thought possible, but I didn't analyze it, I just stoked the blue, arcing energies of my effect higher and higher.
It was like having my soul torn away. I could feel myself become thinner, more transparent…less. The memories that defined who I actually was streamed out of me like water from a fire hose, and it still wasn't enough.
The rage behind Sandra's eyes wasn't entirely sane, but she matched the strength of my field and pushed even harder. I responded in kind, offering up months of my life and then going back for more.
The stream of burning memories was more akin to the flow of a waterfall now. Months of my existence disappeared in fractions of a second and I knew that neither of us could maintain it for long.
The terrible energies that we'd released could have destroyed everything for miles. They should have…only they were mostly directed against each other. Even so, the results of the energy bleeding out to the side was still digging into the solid rock beneath us.
I'd begun shaking several seconds before, but that had been a purely physical thing. The trembling now moved inside of me—tried to vibrate my soul to pieces—but I refused to give up. Right as I hit my personal breaking point I felt something change. Something from the outside tip the balance in my favor.
Our fields grew to the point where I couldn't look at Sandra, couldn't even squint past the brilliance created where they intersected, but then they somehow synced up and I was able to see her again. I watched as her expression changed, watched as something behind her eyes started to fade away. If I'd been solely powered by rage I probably would have incinerated her as her field started to weaken, but there was more than just rage in the mix, and I found myself stepping the strength of my effect down as hers faded.
She fought until the very last instant, pouring everything left into her effects. She pushed until she was nothing but a hollow shell that looked up at me in confusion as both of our fields winked out.
I punched her in the face, but I did so with only a fraction of the force available to me.
Once I was positive she was unconscious, I stood up and looked around at the pit I was standing in. It was more than forty feet in any direction, a perfect half-sphere of bare earth and rock without even a hint of vegetation anywhere around.
I felt punch-drunk and confused, but I knew that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something important. I stumbled up the side of the pit, and I got the feeling that the only reason I was able to climb in the soft dirt was the fact that I was moving too fast for the dirt to give way.
I made it to the top of the hill and took in what looked like a scene straight out of hell. Things were on fire, trees had been uprooted, and rocks had been thrown dozens of yards. There was one island of untouched gr
ound on one side of the amphitheater, but other than that everything looked like a war zone.
I saw three figures fighting down in the midst of all that destruction, and my first instinct was to help the underdog, to assist the old man who'd been ganged up on…only that felt wrong somehow. I watched as a massive rock was hurled through the air. It started near the old man, but accelerated with incredible speed towards the girl. She tried to dodge, but the ground underneath her feet betrayed her. She dropped to one knee and for a second I thought it was all over. In the next instant, a rippling field of translucent rings appeared in front of her and the rock ricocheted away as she dropped to the ground unconscious.
The boy shot forward, desperately trying to get close enough to the old man to stab him, and never saw the branches that stabbed him from the side. As the boy dropped to the ground, I expected the old man to go tend to his wounds, but instead the old man picked up another rock and sent it over so it was floating above the boy.
In that instant something broke free inside of me and I screamed as a bar of liquid golden light shot out of my hand. The bar swept through the rock, vaporizing it instantly, and then took the old man in the stomach.
A shimmering shield flickered into place, intercepting my attack. It bought the old man—bought Mephistoles—a couple of extra seconds in which to dodge, but he seemed to be moving in slow motion and it was a simple thing for me to track his movements and keep the golden beam focused on him until the shimmer disappeared. There was a flash as the bottom half of his body vaporized and then nothing.
I sprinted down towards Jace, moving with all of the speed my amped up body was capable of, and arrived at his side panting and out of breath. There was blood everywhere. The branch had gone completely through him before slamming into the ground, pinning him there like some kind of massive insect.
He looked up at me, blood bubbling from his mouth, and tried to smile, tried to tell me without words that it was all okay, that he forgave me for everything. I was shaking again, but this time it wasn't due to overuse of my abilities, it was because the emotions inside of me were just too strong to be contained inside of my body.