by Dean Murray
"I'm so sorry, Jace. I didn't mean to send you someplace dark."
"It's okay. In an odd way the dark times help me value my time with you even more than I would otherwise. I've detailed them at length so that they'll always be with me in some form or fashion."
I suddenly realized that I was still sitting on his lap and blushed as I pulled myself to my feet. Ari and Kat were far enough out on the lake that I was pretty sure they couldn't make out any details, but there wasn't any reason to court danger.
"Okay, most brilliant of teachers. What's next?"
Next turned out to be putting our towels down in a new spot several dozen yards away from where we'd been before, and then sunscreen for me so that I wouldn't burn now that the sun was over the mountains.
After that, we took another go at me transmuting sand to platinum. I managed glass one time, something that looked and felt a lot like wood the next time, and then actual platinum on the next try. I felt like a million bucks—even though Jace said that my little mound of platinum dust was 'only' worth about twenty thousand dollars.
Knowing that I never had to be poor again, that I'd always have the ability to make sure we had a roof over our heads and food to eat, was liberating in ways I couldn't even begin to describe. When I poured the silvery-white granules into Jace's hand and he confirmed a few seconds later that I'd created ninety-nine point nine percent pure platinum, I jumped to my feet and let out a whoop of excitement that I was surprised didn't make it all the way out to Kat and Ari.
"Do you ever want to just leave behind everything else? There has to be a temptation to just take all this money and go live the life that most people dream about."
Jace nodded. "All of the time. I'd do it if it was possible, but it isn't. Maybe if our abilities worked differently and there was a way to guarantee that other pantheon couldn't sense us, then it would be possible, but it just isn't. No matter where you go other Awakened eventually come looking for you. And if they didn't, you'd still have to worry about the Unseelie Court fairies coming after you."
"That sucks."
"Yeah, it does."
Bethany zipped over appearing as if from nowhere. "What sucks?"
"The fact that no matter what we do, we'll never be able to get away from the constant battle between the different pantheons."
"Oh, that. Yeah, you told me about that before you died last time. It's the same way for us fairies. The Seelie Court is in a constant state of warfare against dark-incarnation, Awakened pantheons and the Unseelie Court. Basically I'm screwed too."
Jace was looking at me oddly, but I just made some flapping motions with my hands to let him know that Bethany had arrived.
"So what are the two of you up to? Have you managed your first effect yet?"
I nodded in response to her question and held up the handful of platinum dust that Jace had returned to me a few seconds before.
"I successfully managed to transmute sand to platinum, which means that I'll never have to be poor again."
Bethany's eyes got really big. "Does this mean that you're going to buy a bigger television? I've seen the television at your house and it's not nearly big enough. Are you going to get one that's the same size as Jace's? Now that's a television."
"Bethany, Jace's theater room is nearly as big as my whole house. There isn't anywhere to put a projector that big at our place."
Bethany made a dismissive gesture. "So get a bigger house—you're rich now."
Trust a television-obsessed fairy to rain on my parade. The truth was that all of the platinum in the world wasn't going to do me any good if I couldn't come up with a way to get my dad to accept it.
"Things could get a little complicated there, Bethany. My dad is going to want to know what's going on if I start spending thousands of dollars all of a sudden. I'm going to be lucky if I can manage to come up with a way to pay down our existing mortgage—I'm pretty sure he's never going to go for a bigger house, not with money that he's going to suspect came from dealing drugs or something else even worse."
It was depressing to be so close to successfully solving all of our monetary concerns and then still not be able to make a difference. Jace reached over and gave my hand a squeeze.
"Actually, Kat and I have a few ideas where that is concerned. Your dad is probably going to suspect that something is up, but he's not going to be able to prove that you're into anything illegal."
"What do you mean?"
"Would your dad believe that you have enough spare cash to scrape together the cost of a metal detector?"
"I don't know—how much do they cost?"
Jace shrugged. "I don't have the foggiest, but we'll buy a brand-new one and then bang it up some so that you can claim that it's an old, used model that you got a great deal on."
"Then what?"
"Then we'll go transmute a sizeable rock into solid gold and bury it on your property. You'll let your dad see you poking around the yard with your metal detector one day, and then on the next you'll dig up the eight-pound nugget just before he leaves for work."
I turned and threw myself at Jace, wrapping my arms around him in the most heartfelt hug I could remember giving in ages. Jace braced himself against the ground with one arm and wrapped his other one around me.
"Thank you, Jace. This is going to make all the difference in the world for us. I know I said that before, but then I started freaking myself out because I couldn't come up with a way to get my dad to take the money. This is perfect."
"You're welcome, Selene. I'm not going to leave you hanging. If that idea doesn't work, there are other options. You could find a stash of jewelry in your attic, or if your dad has somewhere he stashes cash inside of the house, then you could slowly add to it. If nothing else, a long-lost relative on your mother's side can die and leave you a bunch of money."
Bethany yawned. "Does this mean that I'm going to get a bigger TV?"
"Yes, Bethany, I'll get you a bigger TV. Probably not as big as Jace's TV, and probably not for a while, but eventually you'll get to watch movies in the style to which you've become accustomed."
"Good. Are you guys going to get back to work now, or do I need to tell the two of you to go get a room?"
That made me blush, which caused Jace to give me a raised eyebrow of confusion, but I just shook my head at him. There were some things I most definitely wasn't going to pass on.
"Bethany thinks it's time we get back to work. I suspect that she'd like to be visible to you and Kat at some point in the not-too-distant future…"
"Don't you know it, sister. I was starting to think that maybe you'd forgotten about me."
"Hardly. You're the one who zipped off to play tag with Kat and Ari."
Bethany gave me an unconcerned shrug. "I just thought that the two of you might like some privacy. If that's not the case though I could always—"
"Behave, Bethany, or I'll stop practicing today and go play on the jet skis instead."
"Fine, fine. No more room comments—at least not once Jace can overhear me."
"Deal." I turned back to Jace and sighed. "The winged slave-driver wants us to get started."
Over the next two hours I practiced transmuting sand into platinum until I could force it into flat bars just like the one that Jace had handed me earlier that morning. It was a process. My first couple of attempts were still just loose grains of platinum, but then I progressed to the point where I could fuse the grains all together so I got a rough little platinum pyramid, and then eventually managed an actual bar, albeit much smaller than the one that I'd bequeathed myself.
The final bar was challenging mostly because I was transmuting a lot more sand than I had before. About the time I managed my first actual bar of platinum, Bethany got bored of hovering in the air around us and landed on my shoulder so that she could get a better view of my results.
By the time I finished and told Jace I was ready to move on, he indicated that I had the better part of a million bucks sitting on the t
owel between us. I would have happily kept on making platinum for the rest of the day, but Jace said it was hard to liquidate much more than a hundred thousand dollars' worth of precious metal at any one time, and even then you had to go to at least a medium-sized city to do it.
From there, we moved on to amping up my various internal systems. I learned how to reinforce my skin and bones, how to drastically increase the strength of my muscles, and how to make my lungs and circulatory system more efficient so that they could function on thinner, less fluid air.
It was surprisingly easy for the most part. After all of the stresses and difficulties mastering transmuting I'd expected to struggle with amping, but apparently I'd got the worst of the learning curve out of the way because I picked up most of them on the first try, and the one I didn't get first time out of the gate only took me two more tries to master.
While we were training Kat and Ari came in to refuel the jet skis twice, but each time Ari called out for Jace to come join her—preferably on her watercraft so that she could wrap her arms around his muscly chest—he just smiled and waved her off. By the second time, he looked more distracted than sincere as he sent her back out onto the water.
He then had me try to maintain all of the amped-up attributes he'd taught me at the same time, and I really struggled for the first time since transforming sand into white goopy acid. Individually, none of the effects he was asking me to do were that hard, but maintaining them at the same time was a lot more difficult than I'd realized it would be.
At first I tried to implement them all simultaneously, but that failed so badly that I didn't manage to get even one of them to work. Jace seemed to relax slightly, but I cut him off before he could say anything.
"Hold on, I'm trying again."
The second time I layered the effects on incrementally. It was still hard, still felt like I was splitting my mind into eight pieces, but that time around I was able to implement all three effects for a couple of seconds before I lost my focus and they all lapsed.
"Okay, go ahead and tell me what I'm doing wrong. I had them all, but each time I added another effect it got harder to hold it all together. I could still feel my default emotion, but it was weird—it felt like there was a force building underneath the surface. It didn't drain away the strength of my emotion, but once it got to a certain strength it washed all of the emotion away and left me feeling blah and apathetic."
Jace ran his fingers through his wavy blond hair and then shook his head. "Honestly, Selene, I have no idea what's going on."
I felt like I'd been slapped across the face, but I refused to cry in front of him, not over something so stupid.
"I'm sorry, I'll try harder. Just let me catch my breath and try to get my default emotion back in place…"
Jace grabbed my hand. "No, you don't understand. I'm not disappointed in your progress, I'm astonished at it. None of the things you just did should have been possible—not this fast, not without hours upon hours of practice. You aren't failing, you're succeeding beyond my wildest dreams. It just makes me nervous because I don't understand how it's happening."
"You mean most people don't pick it up this fast?"
"Not people who are being awakened for the first time, no. Occasionally someone who gets what appears to be a complete wipe, will manage to pick stuff back up very quickly, but we've always assumed that is because there is a level of habitual memories that can sometimes survive even the most brutal expenditures of power. With someone who's died and been reborn there's never been any indication that it's possible for any memories to survive."
"But you and Kat kept saying how much like myself I was…"
"Yes, but that all came down to your mannerisms and personality, not actual memories from your past life."
I shrugged. "I guess I should just be happy that for once in my life I'm exceptional and leave it at that?"
"Exceptional doesn't even begin to cover it, Selene. You're like some kind of prodigy. As of right now you're basically the Mozart of effects. Most brand-new Awakened are lucky if they learn one new effect every two or three days. You've learned, what, four or five today and it's barely lunchtime? Even more astonishing, you managed to chain together multiple effects on your second day of training. That usually takes months to accomplish."
I was finally feeling uncomfortable. What Jace had described went beyond just beginners' luck. "Maybe you shouldn't have told me any of that. Now I'm going to be second-guessing myself."
"I know. I tried to keep it inside, but it's just so incredible. I can't wait to tell Kat."
"Maybe we should hold off telling her, Jace. She's already jealous of me—of us. I don't want to give her another reason to hate me…"
I could tell that Jace didn't agree, could see that he was going to argue with me, but right as he opened his mouth a two-foot-tall man with black iridescent wings came hurtling out of the sky and landed right in front of Jace.
"Selene and Ari's dad is on his way."
Jace nodded. "Thanks, Kregor. How much time do we have before he arrives?"
"About ten seconds."
Chapter 25
My heart didn't just skip a beat, it actually felt like it stopped working for a second. Jace looked equally shocked.
"Kregor, you were supposed to give us plenty of warning."
"You told me the most important thing was to make sure that nothing happened to him."
Jace didn't look happy, but apparently didn't want to say something that he would regret later. "Fine, please go back and follow Selene's dad the rest of the way in. If I crank us up to forty times normal speed I think we can get Selene to the trailer so she can change before he arrives."
I felt Jace's power reach out for me, and knew I had only a heartbeat in which to stop him. "No, Jace. You'd have to burn a peak memory to make that happen for two of us at the same time—it's not worth it, not just to save me a little bit of embarrassment. I've got my wrap, that will just have to be enough to stop my dad from keeling over. Besides, there are people over by the trailer now."
"Are you sure, Selene? At forty times normal speed we'll be moving fast enough that they probably won't even be able to see us."
"You're right as far as getting across the parking lot goes, but once we got over to the RV you're not going to be able to open the door fast enough for both of us to get inside without ripping it off of its hinges."
I was right and we both knew it. As we got faster and faster it just made it harder to interact with our environment. I'd only ever experienced a few times normal speed, but I'd had plenty of time to think about what it would be like to be moving at forty or fifty times normal speed.
At that velocity, using a key to unlock the door to the RV without snapping it off in the lock would be a challenge, and even if we successfully managed that, the door's natural inertia would make it feel like we were pulling against a one-ton stone slab. It would move, and to anyone watching from outside of our time effect it would move very quickly, but to us it would feel like it was moving with glacial slowness.
Of course Jace could always make himself strong enough to make the door open even faster than that, but the hinges probably wouldn't survive the experience.
There just wasn't a way to move fast enough that nobody saw us and still avoid destroying the RV. Besides, now that we'd stopped training, I could feel the gaping holes in my mind where I'd burned away baseline memories.
Running my mind along my memories and coming to a jagged-edged gap wasn't a pleasant thing. One second I was headed in to talk to my mom and then there was nearly a minute of nothing before my memories picked back up as I headed out of her room and downstairs.
I could tell that Jace was still considering trying to get me to the RV before my dad pulled into sight, but I shook my head at him again as I pulled my gauzy white cover-up on.
"I'm serious, Jace. Now that I've actually experienced memory loss for myself I'm even less willing to let you waste your power on something stupid
like this."
Jace stopped me as I bent down to pick up my towel.
"What do you mean? Right now is the time when most people go wild with using their abilities. Memory loss outside of anything other than a big, extended use of our powers is so slow it's almost imperceptible."
"I don't know what you mean, Jace. I can feel where I lost memories for each of the effects I've used so far. So far it's only a few seconds here, a few seconds there, but it's easy to see where one memory disappears and turns into nothing before it starts back up."
Jace sighed and then bent down to pick up his towel and the two towels I'd ruined with my first transmutation.
"That's not normal either, Selene. Our memories are vivid, but for Kat and me it's more like the memories we lose result in our experiences contracting. The narrative just kind of gets choppy. We'll remember being one place and then suddenly the memory jumps forward several minutes and we are somewhere else. It's disorienting when you go back and examine a set of memories, but it's not the kind of thing that jumps out at you."
"So I'm even more of a freak than you originally thought."
"No, you're not a freak, but there is definitely something going on that I don't understand—something that has never happened before, which is saying something for our kind."
Jace looked for a second like he was going to hold my hand to reassure me, but then my dad's old yellow pickup truck pulled into the parking lot. I double-checked to make sure that all of the platinum I'd created was either in my pocket or wrapped up in my towel, and then we headed back across the beach.
My dad met us at the edge of the asphalt. He gave me an appraising look and then pulled me into a hug.
"I'm so glad that you were able to make it, Dad!"
"Hi, sweetie. I almost didn't come—it hardly seemed worth it given the fact that I'll have to leave to go back to work again in just a few hours, but the three of us spend so little time together these days that I just couldn't bear not seeing you and Ari today."
