by Dean Murray
"And it doesn't mean anything to you that I'm interested in him?"
"Yeah, it means something. It means that I'm leaving the gloves on. Trust me, Selene, I could be a lot more aggressive than this, but I'm not because we're sisters. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to actively discourage Jace. If he chooses you then he chooses you, but I'm not going to take my hat out of the ring. I'm sorry, but I'm not. I might never get another chance at a guy like Jace. Rich, smart, funny, nice, and gorgeous. He's the full package—if you're going to keep ahold of him, you're going to have to get used to a lot more competition than this."
"Fine, but just don't say that I didn't warn you. The last thing I wanted out of all of this was for you to get hurt."
"Don't worry, Selene, I can take care of myself."
Whatever response I might have come up with for that was preempted by Kat's arrival, towing a suitcase of her own along behind her on oversized wheels.
"Okay, girls, let's get moving."
Chapter 18
We were in for a big surprise when we made it out to the massive RV that we were taking out to Cold Springs Lake. Jace wasn't just getting the vehicles ready and then seeing us off, he was coming along.
"But we just got finished telling my dad that there weren't going to be any boys there." I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but I wasn't sure that I'd succeeded.
Kat rolled her eyes at me. "I told your dad what he needed to hear, just like I told you what you needed to hear in order to sell it. Like it or not, Jace is coming. There are too many crazies out there—I'm not taking the two of you camping by myself."
Crazies was code for other pantheons. It was hard to argue with that, especially now that I knew Kat was the low woman on the power scale. I would feel a lot safer with Jace around, and it probably wouldn't even be possible for Kat to train me if it was just the three of us girls, but I didn't like lying to my dad any more than I liked being tricked.
Jace walked over and picked up my suitcase. "I'm sorry, Selene. If it makes you feel better, I'll be in a tent a couple of campsites away."
Ari sidled up next to him, handing him her suitcase as she rubbed up against him like a giant cat.
"You can sleep in the RV with us for all I care, Jace. The more the merrier—besides, this is all your stuff too. It's only fair that you be able to come along."
I had to bite my tongue, but it helped a little that Jace stepped away from her once he'd accepted her suitcase from her. He moved both suitcases to the same hand in a casual display of strength that made my heart skip a couple of beats, and then wrapped an arm around me.
"Please don't be mad at us, Selene."
I sighed. "It looks like I've been outvoted. Just make sure that we don't get caught, please. If my dad finds out that we spent the night camping with you after lying about it, he'll never let us see each other again."
Ari rolled her eyes. I couldn't tell if it was in response to my worries, or because Jace had his arm around me, but in the end it didn't matter. Neither of us was going to be able to do anything about the things that we didn't like right now.
We all climbed into the RV, and Jace slowly pulled it out of the cavernous garage. Ten minutes later we were on the road and headed towards the lake.
Chapter 19
I suspected that Jace and Kat had agreed beforehand that he would be the one driving. If they hadn't, they should have, because Ari instantly slipped into the passenger seat next to him and proceeded to talk non-stop.
Kat grabbed her suitcase and gestured for me to follow her back to the master bedroom. I could tell that she'd bent time as soon as the door swung shut because I felt a warm rush of power and instantly started to feel out of breath.
"Kat, I don't want—"
"It's not your call, Selene. Orders from Jace. Anytime Ari starts fixating on him, I'm supposed to steal you away and start your training. She seems pretty occupied now, so that means it's time to get started."
"Isn't she going to get suspicious if we spend all of our time locked away together?"
Kat gave me a look that said I was being dumb. "Maybe, but she'll be a whole lot less suspicious of you and me than if it was you and Jace. Besides, the door is locked so she can't barge in, and if she asks we came back here to talk while I was putting my clothes in the closet and I locked the door so I could change without Jace walking in on me."
"While he was driving?"
Kat slipped out of her black slacks and then started looking around inside of her suitcase. "I didn't say that it was perfect—just the best I could come up with on such short notice."
I turned to the side so that I wasn't staring at her while she was standing there in her underwear—not that it seemed to bother her one way or another. She found her pants and pulled them out with exaggerated care.
"How come you're moving like that?"
"Because we're moving at something like ten times normal speed. The other day when I broke the desk I wasn't amping up my strength, I just amped up my bones so I wouldn't break my hand. Up until now we've been using a special time effect that limited the amount of damage that we could do to each other, but it's time for you to start learning how time bending really works. When you're moving at multiple times your normal speed it's really easy to break things. If the thing you hit is soft then you'll break it, if it's hard then you'll break yourself."
"Gotcha, no more moving around until you tell me that you've got the cushioning thing up and running."
I waited while Kat finished getting dressed, and then carefully sat down on the bed. It was none too soon. I was already starting to get light-headed even though all I'd been doing was standing there. The bed groaned, a low, slow sound, but I seemed to have managed not to break it.
Kat sat down next to me, and took a deep breath. "Okay, let's get started. The key to exercising your ability is to generate a strong emotion. Once you have that emotion in place, then you visualize the effect you want and push the emotion outside of yourself."
"What does that even mean?"
"Hold on, Miss Impatient Pants, and I'll explain. Let's start with the basics. Generate a strong emotion."
"Just like that? Aren't emotions just something that you feel when you feel them?"
Kat looked tired, like she'd been up all night. She rubbed her eyes, and nodded. "Yeah, for most people that's the case, but there is something in your brain called the amygdala that is responsible for switching up your emotions. Most people don't realize that they feel an emotion and then after feeling it they rationalize why they feel that way. With practice you can make yourself feel a certain way, you can even make it so that your amygdala naturally tends to switch you to a given state."
"Okay, so how do I get started?"
"You pick out an emotion that you want to become dominant."
"What was my dominant emotion back in my previous incarnation?"
Kat rolled her eyes at me. "Seriously? You actually need to ask given your recurring anger issues?"
"Right, I guess I should have realized that. Is there a reason to pick one emotion over another?"
"Yeah."
"Are you going to tell me what they are?"
Kat sighed. "I guess I can, but most people don't even bother asking, they just pick an emotion and go for it because they are so anxious to get started trying to create effects."
"Yeah, I'd really rather know what it is that I'm getting into."
"Okay, there are three classifications of emotion: positive, negative and neutral. Love would be an example of a positive one, while hate would be a negative emotion and anger would be a neutral one. The biggest difference between them has to do with the fact that some effects are easier to manage when powered by a certain class of emotions.
"Really, your dominant emotional state will tend to color your outlook for everything in your life. For example, healing effects are relatively easy to work if you're fueled by a positive emotion, but much, much harder to work if you're experiencing a
negative emotion."
"I guess that makes sense. It's probably hard to visualize flesh knitting together on someone you're actively hating."
"Yep. Combat effects are the opposite, they are easier to power with negative emotions and very hard to do while you're in the grip of a powerful positive emotion. Most people can't incinerate someone while experiencing a powerful wave of love."
"Most—but there are some who can?"
"Yeah, we commonly call them psychopaths."
Something about that didn't feel quite right, but Kat didn't seem to be in a very approachable mood, so I let it go.
"Neutral emotions are…well, neutral. They don't make it any harder or easier to do a given effect. The most important thing to know is that if you're in the middle of experiencing a powerful emotion that isn't your default setting, it can make it very hard to work any kind of effect."
"How so?"
"We are about to go to quite a lot of effort to create a set of neural triggers. They will make it so that you can wipe your emotional state clean at a moment's notice and stoke the fires of a different emotional state that you can call up with sufficient strength to power any of the effects you could conceivably need."
"Right, but why wouldn't I choose a positive emotion as my default setting? Why wouldn't I want to run around happy most of the time?"
"Because happiness isn't the natural state for most people, Selene. What happens if you pick love as your dominant emotion and you anchor that emotion around your feelings for Jace? Sure, at the start it feels awesome. Any time you want to work an effect, you just think about how much you love Jace, and you get warm fuzzy feelings that remind you just how much you love him.
"Eventually though the two of you are going to get in a fight, and one of the unalterable truths of our existence is that emotions have weight and substance. They don't just disappear, at least the strong ones don't. So there you are, nine different kinds of pissed off at Jace, and then someone from another pantheon jumps you and you reach for those feelings of love, but you can't get past the hurt and disappointment, so you only manage to power relatively weak effects and the next thing you know you're dead and your friends are browsing social media sites for the next sixteen years in the hopes that they'll be able to get to you and train you before another pantheon finds you."
"That's why I chose anger before, isn't it? Pretty much no matter what else is going on you can still find something to be angry about. Is that your default emotion too?"
Kat looked away from me for several seconds before sighing. "It used to be. Back when you and I ran together we both defaulted to anger, but after you died everything started changing for me. I can still work with anger—there's plenty about my life to be mad about—but more often than not lately I find myself defaulting to fear. After eighteen years of running, with every day spent wondering if we were finally going to be pinned down by a bigger pantheon, fear pretty much pops into my head without any effort at all."
The idea of spending decades getting angry at the drop of a hat sounded all kinds of unpleasant, but it was nothing compared to having your every thought colored by terror. I couldn't imagine a worse kind of existence.
"Oh, Kat, I'm so sorry."
"Don't be. It's just the way things are. Now are you going to get on with picking an emotion or are we just going to sit here and yap?"
It was tempting to go with anger. It had served me well for decades, or even centuries, and even now I seemed to be able to conjure up a boiling red haze at the drop of a hat. Despite all of that, something inside of me cringed at the thought of feeding the monster I could feel barely leashed inside of me.
I took a deep breath and then nodded. "Okay, I've got an emotion picked out."
"Are you going to tell me what it is?"
"Not unless it's absolutely necessary."
"Fine. Think of an experience, a recent one if possible, that made you feel that way. If you can't think of a recent experience, then you're probably picking the wrong emotion, but it is possible to use a fantasy to achieve the right frame of mind. The goal is to wrap yourself in the memory until you can feel the emotion as strongly or stronger than you did at the time you experienced the memory. It may be harder right now because you don't have the same kind of clarity you'll have once you're fully awakened, but it should still be possible."
I nodded and then reached for the feeling I wanted. It came with almost no effort at all and was part memory and part fantasy. The feeling was nothing less than pure happiness, the amazing revitalizing happiness that seemed to come hand in hand with being around Jace.
It was the moment when I realized that I wasn't going to have to pay for all new tires, it was finding out that I was special in ways that I hadn't imagined were possible, and most of all, it was the feeling of being safe inside of Jace's arms. I knew that he wouldn't let anything happen to me, not while he was still breathing and had the strength to keep fighting.
It wasn't love or infatuation, despite the fact that those feelings also poured into me whenever I was around Jace, this was something as clear and weightless as sunlight. As tempting as it was to go with love as my default feeling—even despite Kat's warnings—I wasn't going to put my wellbeing that firmly in Jace's hands.
I chose happiness and couldn't help but smile as it filled me up to the point of overflowing.
"Okay, I'm feeling the emotion. Now what?"
"Obviously you've picked a positive emotion, which just fills me with warm tingles of excitement. As if Jace wasn't enough."
"It's not going to work, Kat. I'm still not pissed at you. Can you please stop trying to pull me out of my emotion and get on with the next step?"
"Fine. Open your eyes and look at me. The goal is to stop actively maintaining your chosen emotion by thinking about something else, but not something that is emotionally charged. You want to let your gushy good feelings trickle away rather than actively replacing them with something else."
"So what am I supposed to think about?"
"I don't know. Not Sandra, obviously since she pisses you off to no end."
I shook my head at her. "You obviously know how hard it is to not think of something after someone tells you not to think about it. That's a pretty low blow, Kat."
"Hey, you can't blame a girl for trying. Anger served you pretty well in your last life. I don't see why you're in such a hurry to change things up now."
"Because the depth of my anger terrifies me."
"That's good, you want a powerful emotion. The amount of memories that you can burn at any given time is directly proportional to the strength of the emotion you're feeling, Selene. Anger that powerful is going to translate to a heck of a lot of power whenever you need it."
I shrugged. "Maybe you're right and I'm making a mistake, but I don't think that I'm strong enough anymore to keep control over that level of rage. All the power in the world isn't going to do me any good if I can't stay levelheaded enough to use it without laying waste to everything around me."
"Well, if you ask me, restraint is overrated. All of you touchy-feely positive emotion types are the reason that the world is such a mess. You never have the stones to put a fallen enemy down like you need to, and they never thank you for showing them mercy. That type isn't capable of changing. They view mercy as weakness and it eats at them that they were defeated by somebody so weak. They always end up obsessing about taking you down until they finally succeed."
"Noted, Kat. You'll be happy to hear that you brought me back down to earth. My positive feelings have been vanquished and I now feel nothing but an apathetic wish that I could just cut my own throat and never have to deal with another human being ever again."
"Perfect, that's how I feel most of the time. That means we can move onto the next step, teaching you how to cut other people's throats."
"I'm going to assume that's an attempt at a joke because the alternative is too depressing to think about and I'm supposed to not be replacing my positive emotion w
ith anything concrete."
"Suit yourself, but we're past that part—you really should try harder to keep up."
"Past that part?"
"Yeah, usually you're supposed to talk about the weather or something else equally boring for fifteen minutes before you move on, but I think you really have managed to let go of your default emotion, so I'm going to let you move on."
"Great, what's the next step?"
"Now you need to pick another emotion, one that you don't want to feel, preferably one from the other side of the continuum. So in your case since you picked love as your default emotion, you should probably pick hate as the thing that you're going to feel next."
She was trying to confirm her suspicions regarding my default emotion, but I refused to let her needling get to me. She'd told me what I needed to know. I needed the opposite emotion, I needed unhappiness, I needed something that was a cross between sadness and despair.
"So I need to think of an experience that will drive the opposite emotion and wrap myself up in it?"
"Yeah, but make sure that you don't choose anger. Right now that's just going to confuse things. It's going to take you a long time and a lot of work before you'll be able to default away from anger and replace it with love."
"It's not going to work, Kat. I'm still not going to tell you what my default emotion is."
"Fine, let me know when you've got the opposite feeling firmly in place."
I nodded and then reached for the memory I needed. It wasn't hard to find. I tapped back into the precise instant when I'd realized that Sandra had let the air out of all four of my tires. I played those few seconds between realizing I was screwed and Jace asking me if he could help over and over again in my mind.
I didn't just remember the experience, I put myself there. Behind my closed eyelids I could see it happening, and it was so real to me that I immediately began to feel the same emotions that I'd felt back then.
I felt depressed and weak, hopeless in a way that you only feel when you've been kicked around by someone stronger than you for a very long time. I grabbed ahold of those emotions and pulled them over me like a cold, clammy, prickly blanket that was never going to let me go.
