by Dean Murray
"Hello?"
His voice sounded different, deeper and drawn out, but that was just the result of the two of us operating at different speeds. He was experiencing time only half as fast as I was. He sounded different, but it was still Jace.
My knees went weak and tears started pooling in the corners of my eyes. It was a good thing I was already sitting down. The sound of his voice was like coming home after being away for years. If I'd had any doubt about whether or not I loved him, that would have settled it.
"Jace? It's me—Selene."
"Selene! I'm so relieved that you're still alive. Where are you? We've been trying to find you everywhere…"
"I know. I would have called sooner, but it just wasn't possible. How are you? Are Kat and Ari okay?"
"Yeah, the three of us are fine, but your dad—"
"I know, Mephistoles has him."
Jace didn't ask how I knew, he just kept on, moving to the next thing that he knew I'd want to know. It wasn't that he didn't have questions of his own, he just cared about my happiness more than he did about getting his answers.
"We've been trying to come up with a way to go get him, but Mephistoles isn't just any run-of-the-mill bad guy. He's got a necklace that allows him to sustain higher, more extended emotional peaks. His only limiting factor is how much in the way of memories he has to burn in any given fight. It makes him stronger than any one or even two of us."
"Of course, he has an artifact."
"How did you know that?"
For the first time I realized how sticky this conversation was going to get. "Kyle told me. I don't know how much Kat remembers, but it wasn't me who disembodied Fenrir. Kyle showed up at the last instant and saved us. He cut Fenrir's head off and then carried me back to his…home."
"If he's been keeping you captive I'll come tear his arms off and bury him under a mountainside."
I wasn't sure that I'd ever heard Jace mad before. Not like this, not so angry that he probably couldn't have summoned his default emotion even if his life had depended on it.
"It's not like that, Jace. I mean maybe it was at first, but I've been free to leave if I wanted to for a while now. The problem is that Fenrir followed us back here and he's pissed that Kyle interfered. Mephistoles was here for a while too, which is how I know he has my dad, but he left after they brought down the first two wards.
"By that point Kyle had rekeyed all of the other wards. I could have made a run for it, but I knew that wouldn't guarantee anything so I decided to stay here and fight. I figured Mephistoles wouldn't do anything to my dad as long as he knew that Fenrir had me boxed up, and it was better to weaken Fenrir before I came to help you get my dad back."
"This was never about you, Selene. I'm sorry. You're important to us, but all Mephistoles wants is your journals. We're down to less than twenty-four hours before we're supposed to deliver them to him and whoever he has helping him."
It felt like someone had put their fist into my chest and grabbed hold of my heart. "Even if you give him the journals he isn't going to let my dad go, is he?"
"We have to at least try."
"No, I understand at least a little how important those journals are. I need you and Kat to come here. Together the three of us can take down Fenrir and his two buddies. Then we can go after Mephistoles."
"Fenrir has help?"
The doubt in Jace's voice told me I was fighting a losing battle, but I gamely pressed on.
"Yeah, some kind of flying monkey thing and a horse with claws and fangs. It's okay though, I know how to create a sun lance now and I've figured out how to burn peak memories too. Kyle and I killed Fenrir by ourselves."
"It's not going to work, Selene. I wish it could, but it won't. Even if you're right and the three of us manage to put Fenrir down, we won't have enough juice to take down Mephistoles. Even at our best, the most Kat and I could hope to do is fight him to a standstill. That still leaves you to deal with whoever is helping him all by yourself."
"We have to do something, Jace. If the three of us can't make it happen then we need to find some help. What about the police?"
"They're no good. They'd have all kinds of questions that we couldn't answer. Not only that, once they saw the five of us fighting they'd be just as likely to start shooting at us as at Mephistoles. What…what about Kyle?"
"No, I already thought of that. The last time we fought Fenrir he managed to get his fangs on Kyle. Kyle healed the damage, but he couldn't do anything about the poison from the bite. He's awake now, but he's not going to be up to fighting any time soon."
"I've never heard any reports about Fenrir having venom."
"Yeah, Kyle was surprised too. Is that important?"
"It means that Fenrir has been concealing the true extent of his power for decades."
"He's been disembodied twice in the last two days, and the second time was after he bit Kyle. Maybe he's lost that particular ability."
I knew I sounded desperate, but I couldn't help myself. It was only fair for Jace to know the full extent of what he would be getting into if he came to help me, but I was terrified that he was going to back out.
"I'm not going to just leave you there, Selene, and we aren't going to let Mephistoles kill your dad without a fight. Give me an hour or so to make some calls and then call me back. There might be a way we can use this to our advantage."
Chapter 20
I hung up with an acidic mixture of hope and fear still swirling around in my stomach. An hour for Jace would be two hours for me. Two hours was too long to avoid facing the music. I was going to have to go back downstairs and talk to Kyle.
I took a deep breath and headed to the stairwell. I opened the door expecting Kyle to yell at me from the bed, or maybe even from where I'd left him on the floor, but he wasn't in either place. Concern shot through me as I ran into the bathroom. He was there, unconscious, one arm dangling in the water, and he was burning up with fever.
I amped my strength up to three times normal without even thinking about it, and pulled Kyle into the water with me. Even through the thin layer of my shirt I could feel the heat radiating off of him, and the places where we were touching skin-to-skin were even worse. My arm especially felt like it was going to come away with actual burns.
The temptation to let go and save myself from the pain was intense, but I refused. Instead, I turned on the cold water and alternated which arm was holding him so that I at least spread the pain out.
I lost track of time. I forgot about calling Jace back, forgot about Fenrir and Mephistoles, even forgot about my dad. My whole world narrowed down to the slow, labored rise and fall of Kyle's chest and the distance between the top of the water and the top of the tub.
I held onto Kyle, I drained water out of the tub when it got too high, and I prayed. I prayed that Kyle would be okay, that he would come back from this and still be himself.
For the first time since he'd locked me away inside of his bunker, I didn't need him. Jace and Kat were going to come save me and then they were going to help me rescue my father. I didn't need Kyle to help me fight Fenrir, I didn't need him to help me fight Mephistoles, I didn't need anything from him at all, and that destroyed the last of my illusions.
Maybe at the beginning it had all been about what Kyle could do for me, but somewhere along the way that had all changed. I needed Kyle to survive because I cared about him and despite everything that had happened I still wanted to know if there was a chance for us to be together.
My arms were throbbing and red, and they ached like I'd been lifting weights for hours, but I refused to let go, refused to give up hope. I just closed my eyes and listened to the sound of his breathing.
I didn't remember falling asleep, but the next thing I knew I could feel him shift in my arms. I opened my eyes to find him facing me. I wanted to look away, but I forced myself to meet his gaze.
"I'm sorry I left you down here all by yourself. I shouldn't have done that while the poison was still in your s
ystem."
"No, you were right to go call my brother. I should have let you call him days ago. I want you here, but I want you here out of your own free will."
"Kyle, I can't—"
He stopped me with a finger to my lips. "Just let me finish and then you can say whatever it is you need to say. I told you some of the promises that I'd made myself, but I didn't tell you all of them. It's not all just about furthering the advancement of knowledge or hating my brother. Two hundred years ago, I hit you when you told me that you were going to choose Jace and Kat over me. It was the first and only time that had ever happened.
"I've checked my journals, but I didn't need to read them to know that—the sense of betrayal in your eyes would have told me as much. The very first promise I made myself, even before the other two, was that I would never strike you again, that I would never let the anger take over so fully again.
"I left the three of you behind and tried to make a new life for myself, but I never stopped thinking about you, Selene. When Mephistoles cornered you and Kat in New York I tried to tell myself that I'd done the only thing I could, but no matter how tightly I wove the logic of my argument it never felt right, so I made myself a new promise. I promised that I would never again let you be killed if there was something I could do to stop it.
"That is why you're here. All the rest of the things I told you, all of that business about wanting you to help me with my research, were just lies that I told myself to justify bringing you here. I don't deserve to say that I love you, but I do. Please stay with me."
My heart once again felt like it was going to batter its way right out of my chest, but this time it had nothing to do with his wet, glistening skin, or the way that his boxers rode low on his hips, or the inverted triangle formed by the muscles running from his waist to his shoulders.
This time it had everything to do with hundreds of years of feelings, feelings I didn't remember, feelings that had happened to someone else in a different body, in a different time, but which I'd somehow tapped into just by reading about them in a book.
It had nothing to do with his chiseled, perfect jaw and everything to do with the fact that I wanted him in ways that I'd never wanted anyone else other than Jace. Other than the brother he hated.
"Kyle, I—"
This time he stopped me not with his finger but with his lips. He reached down and pulled me up to him with one hand while the other gripped the side of the tub. He lifted me out of the water and pressed me against him as his lips molded themselves to mine.
He was surprisingly gentle, but there was an urgency to his movements. My shirt had come up far enough that his hand was pressed against the bare skin of my back and I was incredibly glad that this time I'd put on a pair of his old running shorts.
His hand on my skin felt like fire, but it was a good kind of fire, a burning that I never wanted to stop. I reached up and wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him down with me into the water. We were both shaking, either from the cold or from simple exhaustion, but neither of us seemed willing to let that interrupt our kiss.
Kyle's body pressed against mine was the only thing keeping me warm, and he seemed to feel the same way about me. The tremble had reached my lips and I broke away from him gasping for air, but he just took the opportunity to switch targets and I felt his teeth close gently on my ear.
It sent me over the moon, under other circumstances it was the kind of thing that I never would have wanted to stop, but it was too much, too soon. I wasn't capable of resisting that kind of ecstasy for very long, and I'd just remembered that I wasn't entirely my own woman.
In that moment I desperately wanted Kyle, but I knew that I would eventually come down and regret how much this was going to hurt Jace.
"Stop, we have to stop."
Kyle pulled back, but his teeth were only fractions of a millimeter away from my skin and I knew he wanted to keep going, that he wanted to silence my protests with his mouth, but he was more of a gentleman than I'd realized. He pulled back, putting inches between us.
"You're sure?"
"It's not fair. It's not fair to you or him either one."
"Don't worry about my feelings or his feelings, Selene. What is it that you want?"
I let out a choppy sigh and refused to cry. I wasn't the victim here. However hard my decision was, it was nothing compared to what Kyle and Jace were going through.
"I don't know what I want anymore. Before you saved me from Fenrir I would have said that Jace was all I could ever want."
Kyle's knuckles went white on the tub next to my head, but I plowed on, desperate to finish.
"Now I've had a chance to read that journal and get a glimpse of what our life was like before we came to America. You scare me sometimes, and I don't agree with most of what you believe, but that glimpse is incredibly appealing. I feel your potential, Kyle. You have the ability to do great things and I want to be part of that. I can't make a decision without seeing what it was like when I was with Jace though. I need time to study, time to get to know you both better and think about what it is I really want."
Kyle looked away from me for several seconds and then nodded. "I understand. You have to do what you have to do, but you need to understand that things between the three of us are never going to be like they would be for normal people. There is too much history there. I'm never going to agree to pick you up on Friday knowing you're going out with him on Saturday."
Kyle was shivering so hard it was starting to affect his speech. His body was depleted in ways most people would never experience. His reserves were gone, he was exhausted and he was dangerously cold, but he refused to allow his weaknesses to define him. His will was more powerful than all that, and right now his will was entirely bent on convincing me that he was the one that I wanted.
"Come on, we need to get you dry and warmed back up or you'll go into shock again."
He looked for a second like he was going to argue, to say something else, but in the end he just nodded and started climbing out of the tub. He only made it halfway out before his arms gave out on him. I managed to grab one of his arms and stop him from hitting his head, but he still hit hard enough that he was going to have bruises.
"You idiot. If you're still that weak what were you doing kissing me?"
"I had to show you that I was more than just that guy, more than just research and world domination."
"I thought you thought those things were important."
Kyle didn't respond for several seconds while I toweled his back and chest dry.
"I did—I still do. I guess somewhere along the way I decided that you are even more important."
It was music to my ears. That was exactly what I wanted to hear, but I sternly told myself that it would have to wait, that I wasn't in a position to be making any decisions yet.
I amped my strength back up as I slung one of his arms over my shoulder and half carried, half dragged him to the bed. I once again threw a towel down to protect the comforter and then I dried his legs. He tried to help, but his movements were so weak it was nothing to just bat his hands away. I slipped one of the heating pads in the microwave and then slid Kyle into place and covered him with the comforter.
"I'll be back in a second to put the other one in."
"Thank you, Selene."
"It's just part of the routine by now—no need to thank me."
"No. I do need to thank you, and for more than just the heating pad. I would have died several times over if you hadn't been here to take care of me."
"It's only fair considering that you were hurt saving my life."
"Which I only had to do because you had just finished saving mine…"
That drew a smile out of me. "Okay, maybe we should just call it even."
Kyle nodded tiredly and settled back against the pillows as the microwave dinged. I pulled the heating pad out and slipped it under the covers before putting the second one in the microwave.
"We can call it even,
but I still get to say thank you for showing me a different way, for bringing me back to something more like the man I was before."
"That I'll accept."
I gave him another smile and then headed downstairs to get my clothes. By the time I got back with my load of laundry, Kyle was already asleep. I slipped into the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind me.
I managed to get all the way dressed before the magnitude of my betrayal really hit. What was I thinking? Jace was never going to forgive me.
Chapter 21
When I came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later I'd washed away all the evidence of my tears, but I still wasn't sure how I was going to look Kyle in the eyes if he was awake once again. Luckily I didn't have to. He was asleep, shivering, but asleep.
He'd managed to get the second hot pack out of the microwave before he fell asleep, but apparently that hadn't been enough to keep him warm. I cycled both hot packs through the microwave, turning it off each time before it could chime to signal that it was done, and then tucked Kyle in with a source of heat on either side of him.
The trip up to the computer room was one of the hardest things I could remember doing. It felt like my legs each weighed a thousand pounds, but I knew that was just the weight of my guilt.
I unlocked the computer and checked the call log. It had been almost three hours in my time since I'd called Jace the first time, which meant that he'd had an hour and a half to make whatever arrangements he'd wanted to make. Not that he was still going to be willing to come help me once he knew I'd kissed Kyle.
I took a deep breath and dialed Jace's number again.
"Hello?"
"Kat, is that you? Where's Jace?"
