by Dean Murray
"All right, but I've got your word that you aren't going to experiment with this, right?"
"Absolutely."
"Okay, then. All you do is force your heartbeat to speed up at the same time that you slow down everything else. You summon up all of the emotion you can contain, you start off by amping up your circulatory system, and then you push against the two pulses with everything you have."
"That's it?"
"Yeah, but you have to remember not to push too hard to start out with. You don't have the experience required to sustain a deep time-bend. You need to start out using the smallest amount of power possible so that you don't throw yourself into an irrecoverable oxygen debt."
"Okay. Noted."
"I'm serious, Selene. We went to an awful lot of work over the last two decades to track you down—nobody wants you killing yourself off."
I gave her my best 'I'd never do anything wrong' look and pointed out at the water. "How much longer do you think they'll be out there?"
**
It turned out that Ari and Jace were only on the water for a little longer than an hour and a half. Ari looked like she wished they'd been able to stay out longer, but Jace winked at me as they parked the jet skis on the beach.
It took us another half an hour to get the water craft on the trailer and then move it over to the RV so that we could load up the SUV, but then we were off. Jace was quick to volunteer to drive and Kat sat down in the passenger seat before Ari could make it up there to monopolize him.
I suspected that Kat actually had stuff that she wanted to talk to Jace about, but I still appreciated the effort on her part to keep Ari from getting her hopes up even more.
The drive north was wonderfully uneventful. Ari and I watched a video on the massive flat-screen mounted across from the couch, and once Ari was completely sucked into one of the chase scenes Kat and I swapped spots so I could ride next to Jace and ask him about some of the places he'd visited over the years.
I shouldn't have been surprised to find out that he spoke six languages or that he'd spent more than a decade in Asia immediately after I'd died the last time. It actually made a lot of sense because it meant that a lot of the pantheons were still looking for him and Kat over there rather than here in the States.
Jace was a surprisingly good storyteller, and the rest of the trip flew by. All too soon the sun was on its way down and we were pulling to a stop in a rest area that was hardly worthy of the name.
Ari took one look at the aging building and shuddered. "I'm so glad that we brought a bathroom along with us. I wouldn't use the one in there if you paid me to."
Jace appeared with a backpack that was loaded up with water, snacks and towels. "My recommendation would be for everyone to change into real shoes and bring a change of clothes. We're going to want to change into something warm for the hike back."
He handed me the backpack with a wink. "Here, Selene. There should be just enough room in this one for your clothes. Kat is bringing another one, Ari. You can share with her or I can go dig a third one out of the gear in the SUV."
"How come you're carrying Selene's clothes for her?"
"Because poor Selene only got out on the water one time all day, which means that she and I are twinners."
"Kat only went out once." Ari knew she was fighting a losing battle, but she wasn't about to throw in the towel. Kat reappeared at precisely the right time and shrugged.
"It's true, but my one turn was longer than Jace and Selene's combined. Come on, runt. It's a good thing you're small, because I'm not excited about carrying a bunch of extra weight on a two-mile hike."
Ari rolled her eyes and followed Kat inside. "You're only like half an inch taller than me."
I was surprised at the sheer weight of Jace's backpack, but the reason became apparent as soon as I made it over to my suitcase and went to stuff a long-sleeved top, jeans and underwear into the backpack. It didn't just have towels and clothes for Jace in it, it also had two of the nondescript black journals at the bottom packed inside of heavy freezer bags. Jace wasn't going to leave anything to chance—he was making sure that the journals came with us where he and Kat would have the best odds of keeping them safe.
I finished packing the stuff I needed, slipped on some shoes and then headed back outside. Jace accepted the bag with a look that seemed to ask whether or not I'd noticed the journals. I gave him a small nod and a thumbs up, which earned me one of his patented grins.
Kat and Ari reappeared a second later with four flashlights and we headed up the trail. I hadn't historically been much of a hiker—it always felt like too much work for too little gain. This time started out the same way as always, but Ari quickly took the lead and set a much more grueling pace than she needed to.
I was pretty sure I knew what she was hoping would happen. Jace was obviously in peak physical shape, but Ari knew perfectly well that I was not an athlete. If she managed to convince Jace to speed up, then I would fall behind and she would get him all to herself.
Ari moved out into the front of the group as we started up the first hill and forced herself not to slow down despite the incline. Jace unconsciously followed at the same pace, and in moments my breathing sped up. She thought that she was going to beat me again, but she was wrong. The difference this time was that I had another card to play.
I tried to summon my default emotion, tried to surround myself with the same happiness I'd felt when Jace had saved me, but that well was empty. The spark of emotion that I managed was barely enough to qualify as such. I watched as Jace and Ari disappeared around a bend in the trail, already more than twenty feet ahead of me, and then looked down to see Kat look back at me.
She took a breath to call out for Jace to slow down, but I stopped her with a look. I wasn't going to be the weak link, not this time. More than that though, I was getting sick and tired of Ari trying to steal Jace away from me.
The anger slipped over me without any conscious effort on my part. For a split second I worried that I was going to lose control and do something terrible, but then I realized that the emotional exhaustion had ratcheted the rage down to something that I could manage, something that was still powerful enough for me to use, but not so powerful that I would try to slam Ari's head into a boulder.
I grabbed the feeling of taking a deep breath and pulled it into existence in exchange for a memory about jumping into the swimming pool when I was three. I could only assume that Dad had caught me—he was there a few seconds later when the memory picked back up. It hurt to lose a little piece of my soul like that, but in that moment I realized that this was no different than my struggle earlier to leave behind the peak memories that had come so close to trapping me forever.
I could either hoard my past to the possible detriment of my future, or I could use my past to get me what I wanted right now, to manufacture the future that I wanted. Once I decided that, it was all just a question of what was worth giving up.
In the next three breaths I went from gasping and lightheaded to breathing normally. I sped up, determined to make up for lost time, but now I could feel the burn in my legs that the pain in my lungs had been disguising.
I checked my anger and found that it was more than sufficient to power additional effects—if anything it had grown because Ari had backed me into a corner where I felt like I had to burn memories in order to compete with her.
I amped up my muscles with another thought and lost a full minute of the time from our swimming outing. I realized that I'd overdone it that time, but it was too late to go back and undo the mistake. Now that the effect was powered it would consume memories at a slower rate and I'd just end up losing even more by releasing it and then re-amping my muscles.
It felt like Kat was practically crawling now. I waited until we hit a wide spot in the trail and then went bounding past her at a jog.
"This is a mistake, Selene."
"Maybe, but it's my mistake to make."
It took me less than a minute t
o catch up with Ari and Jace, and the expression on Ari's face when she looked back and saw me jogging up the side of the mountain was worth the memories I'd had to feed into the effects.
"You in a hurry, little sister?"
Jace looked back and seemed to realize for the first time just how fast the two of them had been going. He opened his mouth, probably to apologize, but Ari beat him to it.
"Oh, sorry, Selene. I guess I'm just excited to get up to the hot springs before the sun goes down and it gets too cold to be wearing nothing more than a swimming suit."
I gave her a smile just as fake as her apology, and saw Jace start slightly as I got close enough for him to detect that I was maintaining active effects.
"No need to apologize, runt. I'm all for getting there sooner. Are you up for a race?"
I could see the gears turning in her head. I'd taken her off guard, but she knew that I couldn't actually beat her. I'd just doubled down on her ploy. By running and catching up with them I'd alerted Jace to the fact that she was being petty. If she beat me though, left me a gasping, quivering wreck on the side of the trail, then I'd look stupid.
"Sure, Selene. All the way to the hot springs?"
"Yep, but it's no fun if there aren't any stakes. What do you say, Jace? Are you willing to be a trophy?"
Jace looked at me for several seconds, obviously not convinced that this was a good idea. He was probably right, but I was tired of playing things safe, tired of pussyfooting around Ari. If we'd taken a more straightforward approach then we could have avoided the whole mess we were in.
"Normally I would say no, but if it means that much to the two of you then I can be persuaded."
I faked a happy smile despite the anger that was still clawing at me.
"Great, the winner gets to spend the time at the hot springs with you. The loser has to hope that Kat will take pity on them and not just leave them all by themselves."
Ari returned my smile with one that was just as sugary sweet as anything Sandra had ever flashed at me. "Just remember, sis, this was all your idea."
"Not going to be a problem, Ari."
She took off like a shot, but soon settled down to something she could sustain for a while. I paced her for a while and then passed her, moving just enough faster that she'd feel motivated to speed up in an attempt to stay with me.
It wasn't a fair matchup. Ari wasn't a runner. She had friends who were runners and occasionally ran with them, but it wasn't the same thing. I smiled when she started breathing heavy. By the time we'd finished the first mile, she was gasping and I was still well out of oxygen debt.
"Here's the thing, Ari. You're my sister and I love you, but you've been terrible to me for the last few days. You knew that I liked Jace, and you knew that I saw him first. A decent sister would have backed off and hoped for the best. After all, there was always a chance that me dating Jace would have meant that you got to meet other hot, rich guys."
She tripped and almost fell down, but I reached out and easily hauled her back up to her feet before she could hit the ground.
"Instead of doing the nice thing, you decided to try to monopolize Jace and risked blowing things for both of us. Some guys love having girls fight over them, but those aren't the kind of guys either of us want to date."
"How are you doing this?"
The words were barely intelligible past the gasps and coughing.
"It doesn't matter how I'm doing it, Ari. What matters is that you don't know me as well as you think you do. I'm done being nice. Stop trying to steal him or I'll really take the gloves off."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah. I've talked to Kat and Jace both. If you keep this up they'll just stop inviting you places. We'll drop you off after school and then I'll go hang out with them."
She shook her head, her face white from exertion. "It's never going to happen. I'll tell Dad everything."
"That's fine. Jace and Kat will back me up when I tell Dad that it was all your idea, that you knew Jace was going to be spending the night last night and didn't tell him. We'll both get in trouble, but you're the one he'll never trust again."
"When did you turn into such a massive bi-otch?"
"When my little sister tried to steal away the guy I had my heart set on."
I sped up and left her in my dust. I didn't slow down until I reached the springs. Ari, Jace and Kat were almost half an hour behind me.
Chapter 28
The response to my throwing down against Ari was mixed. Ari obviously hated me. She was going with the sympathy play and Jace was playing the good cop, which made me want to scream. If he'd had the sense of a termite he would have been nice but distant and let Kat be the one to pull Ari back together.
Kat seemed to think that I'd made a mistake, but as nearly as I could tell, it was a mistake that she was all for. It was like she was enjoying the trip back down memory lane that my rage-fest had triggered for her.
Jace apparently didn't know what to think. He spent a few minutes getting Ari situated in one of the lower pools and then stripped off his shoes and joined me next to one of the upper pools.
The hot springs really were quite amazing. It was a series of gradually descending pools that started out with the hottest water up at the top and then each successive pool got cooler as water cascaded down into them from a higher pool. The pools were deep pockets nearly big enough to swim in, which had been worn into the surface of the granite over the course of thousands or possibly even tens of thousands of years, and the vegetation around us was set back far enough that it wasn't dangling into the pools, but close enough that it shielded the pools from any external view.
"Don't forget to turn off your effects, Selene. There's no reason to waste memories when you no longer need to be amped up."
I nodded and canceled the effects. It was hard to let them go, hard to know that I was returning to nothing more than my normal capabilities, but Jace was right.
"You should have let Kat comfort Ari and try to smooth things over. All you've done is make things worse again."
Jace frowned at me. "She's your sister, Selene."
"Yeah, but she's also been a complete bi-otch for the last several days. She's had this coming in ways that you don't even understand."
That earned me a sigh. "I know that she's been making things difficult, but she's also a lonely little girl who barely remembers her mom."
"I don't care. You're mine and it's time that she understood that!"
As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized they were the wrong thing for me to say. Despite everything else he might have said, Jace was both rich and hot. For guys like that a girl getting all clingy and possessive wasn't a turn-on. Guys like that loved the thrill of the chase.
I wanted to take it back, wished that there was a way to erase the last few seconds, but even we Awakened couldn't do that. It was too late.
I couldn't bear to look at him. I finished pulling off my shoes, slipped into the water and started working my way back to the far edge of the pool.
Jace barely made any sound at all as he slid in behind me, but I was so hypersensitive to his every action that I knew as soon as he was in the pool with me. Maybe it was just the ripples along the surface of the water, but I would have sworn that I could feel a faint electric current humming through the water, connecting us despite the distance between us.
The feel of his hand on my shoulder, turning me around so that I had no choice but to look at him, was like a stronger jolt, one that raced from my shoulder down to the tips of my toes and tightened up everything in between.
"You aren't channeling happiness anymore?"
"No. I was channeling anger. I tried to channel happiness, but I was just too exhausted. I guess you could say that my store of happiness was all used up, but I seem to have an unending supply of rage."
I wanted to turn away again, to run away to another pool, but Jace's wet, glistening body was between me and any kind of escape.
"How ba
dly have I screwed stuff up?"
"I don't know. We'll have to just wait and see what Kat can do over the next couple of hours. It's probably best if you stay away from both of them for a while. The last thing we want is for Ari to start thinking of Kat as your friend—that will make her feel completely alone."
"No, I meant between us."
"You didn't screw anything up, Selene."
"Don't lie to me, Jace. I know how things work. I may not date much, but I've seen how guys like you react when a girl like me gets all obsessive. It never ends well."
Jace's smile was still lopsided, but this time it wasn't lazy. This time there was a heat behind it that took my breath away.
"You've got everything backwards, Selene. I was never the one being pursued in our relationship. I was always the one who pursued you, the one who had to fight for each and every minute of your attention, the one who never knew for sure if you were going to move on to greener pastures. Hearing you say that—hearing you lay claim to me—was music to my ears."
I was in shock. It was the only explanation. I'd been amped up, but I must have still overdone it in the run up to the hot springs. I opened my mouth to tell Jace that I was hallucinating and he stepped forward and kissed me.
I tried to pull back, but with the rock wall behind me there wasn't anywhere for me to go.
"Wait…Ari…Kat…they'll see us…"
"No, they won't, not from down inside the lower pools."
I tried to point out that they might move, but Jace's lips were on mine again and I was having a hard time thinking. This wasn't anything at all like our last kiss, the gentle—almost chaste—kiss goodnight. This had all of the hunger of our first kiss, and this time we were both wearing a lot less.
My hands had instinctively gone back up to cradle Jace's head again; his were resting low on my waist, thumbs positioned just inside of my hip bones, gently pressing on the nerves there. The hot water was making me light-headed and I found myself falling into him, hanging on for dear life with my arms around his neck as he flicked his tongue into my mouth.
