by Dean Murray
I was none of those things. Maybe eventually I'd end up being today's equivalent, but for now I was enjoying playing house. Maybe that was the key all along. This was my choice, and as long as it continued to be a choice rather than something forced upon me, I'd still continue to take some measure of enjoyment in it.
I ran the blender one more time, liquefying the fruit mixture, and then I poured it all into two tall glasses and grabbed a spoon before heading back downstairs. It was tarter than I expected, but it was still good. I spooned it into Kyle's mouth a little bit at a time, finished mine off and then settled in next to him.
I didn't even try to resist the pull of my journal. Maybe I was being stupid. I was definitely risking what I had with Jace, but I just had to know what it had been like. Most people had to jump into a relationship and just hope that things would work out. I, on the other hand, could get a sneak peek at how everything had turned out the last time around.
It just didn't seem right to pass that chance up. I couldn't have both Jace and Kyle—I wasn't even sure that I wanted both—and in a lot of ways reading my old journal was going to make things harder. Making a decision knowing exactly what I was giving up by picking one of them and rejecting the other, was going to be difficult, but not looking felt wrong. I'd always thought that in my own way I was as brave as anyone else—I'd had to be to survive after my mom died. I wasn't going to take the coward's way out now.
Journal Entry
May 29, 1729
I often come back to my journals and reread them, but never with as much fervency as when I'm faced with a difficult choice. I failed Kyle. I've tried for nearly five years to tell myself otherwise, but the truth is that I did.
He was right about so much, so many things that I didn't want to accept. Maybe that is why I lapsed back into French for so long. There was no good reason. French is no more tolerated here in the colonies than it was back in London. There was no reason to return to my native tongue other than the fact that it was my mind's way of trying to assert my correctness, of trying to stick to my way despite all of the evidence that my way was wrong.
Kyle was right to be worried about Ashwell, and I was right to be worried about Nikoli's transplants. Jace has told me a hundred times that it wasn't my fault, that I couldn't have foreseen the two closest pantheons uniting against us, but he's wrong. I should have foreseen the possibility, and spent more time in court in an effort to head it off.
These aren't the same times we were born into. We aren't worshiped as gods anymore. That gives us more freedom, but it also means that we are at the mercy of the humans. Really that was always the case, we just refused to admit it back then.
I'm unaware of any instance where a pantheon from the old days was assassinated without first having their human empires overthrown. I was so smug about the new way of things, about our superiority over the humans, that I ignored Kyle's worries.
I should have been out there molding society to my whim, creating allies and informants rather than wasting my time in research that I knew we wouldn't unveil for decades to come. I indulged myself in a pointless hobby instead of doing my duty to our little family, and as a result we lost everything.
Jace lost his mansion, the marvel of muscle and design that was the talk of the entire court. Kat lost her cobbler—Patrick—struck down in a needless attempt to defend her from powers he couldn't understand. Kyle lost his memories, all of the knowledge and wisdom gathered over the course of centuries wiped away over the course of one hour of fighting, one hour that killed tens of thousands of innocents and three of our true enemies, one hour that will no doubt go down in the history books as a great fire or a limited outbreak of the plague.
I foolishly thought that, out of all of us, I was the only one not to have lost anything. I thought that we would just travel to the new world and pick back up where we'd left off, that Kyle would come back to me over the weeks and months that followed.
I was such a fool. Something changed. Maybe it was the result of sustaining an emotional peak capable of burning through so many memories in such a short time. Kyle couldn't have sustained such a drawdown of power out of anger. I always assumed that he tapped into one of the stronger positive emotions, but I've come to wonder since then. Maybe he tapped into something darker and it left behind an unwanted mark on his very soul.
Maybe not. Maybe it's as simple as starting what amounted to a new life in a world infinitely more dangerous than the one we once knew. The fall of the great empires was good for the humans. It meant that fewer of them have to die at our command or because of our actions, but it means that conflicts among our kind happen with breathtaking speed.
There isn't any more gradual tilt as one economy weakens and begins to crack under the strain of supporting a war. There's no series of reverses as one side slowly pushes the other side out of massive fortifications.
There's nothing left to barter with. With the discovery of transmutation, gold is worthless other than as a motivator to get the humans to serve us. The only thing the other pantheons want now is our knowledge and our lives.
Whatever the reason, the Kyle sleeping three doors down from me is nothing at all like the Kyle who guided us out of Paris and tried to secure a position in the English court. He's darker, and if anything he believes my sins are virtues.
He wants to leave the rest of the world behind, to spend all of our time researching, to create a weapon capable of enslaving all other pantheons, of forcing every human into servitude and creating an empire that will span the entire globe.
I've tried to show him a different way, tried to explain that there are other things in life more important than the pursuit of knowledge, but he doesn't trust me anymore. He doesn't even trust his own journals.
I thought I was making progress, but tonight he gave me an ultimatum. I have to pick between him and the others. He thinks that my refusal is because I have feelings for his brother.
I do, but not in the way that he thinks. Kat and Jace have been loyal to our pantheon for centuries. Kat was with me even before I found Kyle and Jace. How can I leave my family for a stranger whose rage has become so powerful that he's even willing to resort to violence to silence me?
I can't, even though I know Kyle will walk out of our lives tomorrow morning and I may never see him again. It's only fitting that I write this in his native language rather than mine.
In time I will forget every moment I've spent with the love of my life. In time he will be nothing more than a name and some dry facts. I fully expect at some point we will become enemies. I pray it will not be so, but in my heart I know this version of Kyle is even more dangerous than the one I knew and loved. He has all of the old Kyle's intellect and none of his humanity.
Unless another pantheon succeeds in stopping him first, Kyle will eventually become a threat to the entire human race. When that day comes I will be unable to just stand to one side and watch as he slaughters all who oppose him. Maybe once I could have, but Kat and Jace have shown me a different way. They've shown me the value of even the least of our cousins and I cannot help but fight for them, even at the cost of my life if necessary.
And so I'm leaving this message to whatever future version of myself might read it. Kyle is the way he is because of my mistake—our mistake. Do whatever you can to bring him back from the edge if you get the chance. If you don't, you're going to end up having to kill him to save people you care about.
Chapter 18
I closed the book with more force than I'd intended on using and then regretted doing so. I'd been right to be scared of what this journal had contained, but I didn't want to destroy it. Three hundred year-old books weren't exactly indestructible.
Still, I wasn't going to go back and read more of the entries—assuming any of them were even in English—anytime soon. I didn't need the last version of me messing with my head any more than she already had. I needed to get back to Jace and Kat, and I needed to read one of my more recent journals, somethin
g from the time when Jace and I had been happily in love. Only now I was wondering if we'd really been as happy as I'd initially thought.
Jace had as much as warned me that he'd always been the one who pursued me. What if I'd just settled for him after I'd realized that I was never going to be able to make things work out with the new, darker Kyle?
It was all too much for my seventeen-year-old brain. I should be worrying about who was going to take me to prom and how I was going to be able to afford the dress I wanted, not contemplating choosing between two guys I had hundreds of years of history with.
I took a deep breath, maybe to scream, maybe just because I thought it would calm me down, and then I realized that Kyle's breathing had changed. Even before I turned my head to look I knew he was awake, but I turned to make sure. Perfect, soft gray eyes looked back up at me. I felt my skin go hot from embarrassment and started to move my hand away from his bare skin, but he trapped it against his stomach with his hand.
"How long have I been out?"
"I'm not positive. I think it's been two days. How much do you remember?"
I tried to keep my voice calm, but my heart was trying to pound its way out of my chest. It was hard to know how much of that was from the thrill of touching him, and how much of it was concern over whether his fever had caused some kind of brain damage.
"I'm not sure, it's still coming back to me. We…we were fighting outside of the…third ward?"
I nodded and he continued. "We were doing pretty well until a pooka and some kind of flying monkey snake showed up. You used a peak memory to burn a big piece out of Fenrir and then both of us burned additional peak memories to kill Fenrir, but not before he got his teeth on me."
I wasn't sure how to interpret Kyle's response so far. It had seemed pretty promising until he'd called the smallest Unseelie fae a flying monkey snake. Maybe he really had lost chunks of his memory due to running such a high temperature.
Luckily Kyle hadn't noticed my concern. "I remember healing myself and realizing that I'd been poisoned. What are my symptoms?"
"Your core temperature has been all over the place. One minute you're freezing to death and then in the next you're running a raging fever."
Kyle looked confused for a second and then nodded in understanding. "You had a hard time keeping me from overheating and you were worried that there was permanent brain damage."
"Well, you did call the one fae a pooka and the other a flying monkey snake. That's not exactly in keeping with the way you usually talk…"
Kyle shrugged. "Not all of the Unseelie fae have been categorized the way that you'd think."
"So you're really all here?"
"Yeah, I think so. Did you miss me?"
There was something to his question that I hadn't expected. Two days ago I would have dismissed the question as nothing more than a joke, but now I could see that there was more to it than that. There had always been more to it than that.
I wanted to say yes, wanted to tell him that I'd missed him desperately and not just because he was my only way out. The desire was so strong that I almost gave in, but at the last second Jace's face swam across my field of vision. If I gave in to my feelings for Kyle there wouldn't be any going back.
I owed it to Jace to find out how things had really been between us, to tell him what was going on inside of my head. I knew Kyle would sense it if I lied though, so I did the next best thing. I pulled my hand away from his bare skin and smiled.
"Of course I missed you. This place is one big tomb just waiting for one or both of us to drop over dead. I would have killed to have anyone to talk to."
That threw him off. I could see him questioning his Spidey sense, see him trying to separate fact from fiction, but I met his eyes without flinching.
"It looks like you found your journal…"
"Yeah, you mentioned it at one point in between hallucinations."
"What do you think?"
He was just too damn shrewd. I should have known better than to try to bluff someone who remembered the better part of the last two hundred years. It was time to change the topic.
"I think we need to figure out where we go from here. Fenrir is probably just about ready to take down the next ward. We're running out of time before he'll be battering down our doors and I don't fancy fighting him inside here. How long before you can heal yourself and get back out there?"
There was a flicker of something in the back of his eyes at the way I'd started my response. He'd thought I meant that we needed to figure out where we were going to go. The couple version of we.
I felt like such a fool. It had been there all along if I'd only known what to look for. He'd been in love with me since even before I'd arrived back here. That was all well and good in fairytales, but that would never work in real life. I was never going to be as good as whatever it was he had built up in his mind.
I'd known that I was starting to fall for Kyle, but I hadn't realized how hard until that exact moment. A tremor started deep inside me and I realized how crushed I was that there wasn't even a chance of us being together.
It was stupid. I had Jace—I didn't need anything or anyone else. Jace was perfect in every way and I shouldn't need the chance of things working out with Kyle to get me through the day.
I forced a smile onto my face and prayed that it was good enough to fool the guy who'd spent the last two hundred years poring over journals containing every interaction we'd ever had with each other.
"I think we still have a chance. I understand how to use my peak memories now, and I've got seventeen years of them stored up. This time I won't screw around, if I cut loose with that kind of attack right off the bat I should be able to take down the horse and the flying monkey snake while you keep Fenrir distracted."
There was genuine regret in Kyle's eyes as he shook his head. Had he realized it wasn't going to work out between us?
"It won't work, Selene"
"No, it has to work! My friends and family are depending on me getting out of here and meeting back up with them. My dad will die if we can't find a way to beat Fenrir. If this is about you having to use more peak memories, I'll owe you. Whatever you want. You want my help researching so that you can develop a real artifact? It's yours. You want me chained here for the next forty years as your personal maid and cook? Done. Just please help me."
Kyle reached up and grabbed my hands. He shouldn't have been strong enough to do that. I hadn't felt him amp himself, but it was the only explanation for my complete inability to move my arms.
"It's not that, Selene. I would gladly help you, but the venom is still in my system. I don't know how to heal it—not really. Maybe my brother would be able to figure it out in the time we have left, but the human body isn't my area of expertise. Without knowing exactly how it's messing with my metabolism, anything I do could just make things worse."
What little strength I had left me as I acknowledged defeat. I was no match for Fenrir by myself, especially not now that he had help. I opened my mouth to tell Kyle it was over, and then I realized that I'd spent days looking at the problem the wrong way.
"If you can't fight then we'll just have to get some help. Kat and I gave Fenrir a run for his money before. With Jace to help out we shouldn't have any problem kicking Fenrir's teeth in until he's as small as the snake monkey."
"Absolutely not."
"Excuse me?"
Kyle looked at me with eyes so full of rage I almost couldn't breathe. "I will not be saved by my brother. I swore that I would never help him, that I would never accept help from him. He betrayed me once, I will never again put myself in a position where he can hurt me like that."
"You are not going to let my father die because of what happened between the three of us two hundred years ago."
"You chose him over me, Selene. I sacrificed everything I was to protect the three of you. I needed you, but you just used me up and cast me aside like I was nothing more than a piece of garbage!"
"No
. I refuse to believe that. I read the journal entry. I wanted to make things right between the two of us, you were the one who made me choose between them and you."
"I was your husband. I had every right to make you choose."
Up until that moment I'd been fighting to remain calm, fighting not to lose my temper. That stopped as soon as he played the marriage card. I climbed out of bed and opened myself up to the rage.
"No, my husband died fighting off two enemy pantheons that day. I honored his sacrifice and I tried to make things right between us, but you weren't him, you weren't even a shadow of him."
"You read the French entries."
"No. I didn't have to."
Even as I said it I wasn't sure what I meant by it, but Kyle recoiled as though he'd been slapped. I turned and headed towards the stairwell.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to phone a friend."
"I won't give you the password to the computer."
I turned back to him and gave him a smile that would have frozen a bonfire. "You don't have to, I already know it."
Chapter 19
Kyle tried to get out of bed and follow me, but he was too weak. He collapsed onto the carpet, and I didn't stop walking when he called out to me.
A few seconds later I was sitting down at Kyle's computer. I put four numbers into the password box that popped up. Zero, three, one and four. March fourteenth.
I didn't realize I'd been holding my breath until it worked and the home screen popped up. Kyle had been using my birthday as his password because it was the one thing he never forgot.
I found an internet calling program and dialed Jace's phone number. The thought of talking to Jace made my heart flutter with something that was part guilt and part anticipation. I told myself that there wasn't any reason to get freaked out. The call wouldn't be coming from a number that he recognized, so there was every reason to believe that Jace wouldn't even pick up. It was the only thing keeping me in my chair.
