by Dean Murray
I felt a movement on my shoulder and realized that Bethany was still standing at my shoulder. A part of me wondered how she'd survived the maelstrom of energy that had been surrounding me, but mostly I was still focused on Jace.
"Save him, Selene."
"I can't—I don't know how to heal him. Maybe Kat can do it?"
It was stupid to sit there staring into Jace's eyes rather than running over to see if I could rouse Kat, but I was frozen there, unable to move. I'd been stressed beyond what I could endure and now my mind was shutting down.
Bethany took to the air and zipped off towards Kat.
"No, it's no good, she's out cold. It's got to be you."
I shook my head as Bethany landed on my shoulder again. "I can't. Healing is one of the most complex effects there is. If you mess it up even a little bit you're as likely to kill your subject as anything else."
"He doesn't have much time, Selene. There is nothing to lose now."
I nodded and gave Jace my bravest smile. "No matter what happens, I want you to know that I've loved you ever since you saved me after school on the day Sandra slashed my tires."
Jace's smile rose fractionally, but I could see that Bethany was right—he didn't have more than a few more seconds. I put one hand on each side of his chest and summoned every spark of love and happiness I had as I willed his body to repair itself.
For the longest second of my life nothing happened and then suddenly I felt a host of effects click into place inside my mind. The effects reached out to Jace and his body regenerated before my eyes. The ends of the branch dropped away as the main piece inside of him was absorbed and converted into the raw materials needed to rebuild all of the damaged organs and muscles.
Jace's smile smoothed into an expression that was less pain-filled and he managed a single 'thank you' before he lost consciousness. I wanted to scream. I'd saved Jace, but I didn't know how I'd done it, and I could feel my emotions guttering into uselessness. They were still there, still real, but they'd taken on the washed-out tinge that told me they weren't capable of powering anything.
I'd been depending on Jace to save my dad, but that wasn't going to happen now. The air around me went back to normal as my effects all faded away to nothing. I knew it would take me at least ten minutes to make it up to where Sandra had left my dad, but I turned and started walking anyway. I couldn't just leave him there, not when he might still be alive. I at least owed it to him to be there for the end.
I'd made less than ten steps before I saw a flicker that brought me around to find Kyle standing in the spot where Mephistoles had died.
"Hello, Selene."
"Kyle! My dad—he's at the top of that hill. Please, you have to heal him."
"I already did. I took care of him while you were still fighting Sandra, you were just too busy to notice me."
"I don't understand, I thought you weren't going to help us."
"I wasn't."
Kyle reached down and came up a second later with a necklace of heavy metal links, and I suddenly realized why he was here. Excalibur was at his hip, one of the most powerful artifacts in existence, but that was nothing compared to the power represented by the other artifact in his hand.
"You didn't come here to help, you came here for the necklace."
His face tightened in anger. "I came here to help you."
"Fine, prove it by giving me the necklace."
He'd been mad before, but that was nothing compared to the rage dancing behind his eyes now. His fist tightened on the necklace until his knuckles were white.
"I saved your father, and I saved you. When you were fighting with Sandra and you reached the end of your strength it was me who tipped the balance in your favor. Me. I saved you and then you in turn saved Kat and my brother. I violated one of my rules for you by letting that happen, and this is the thanks you give me?"
"No, you may have saved me, but you never meant to save Jace. You would have let him bleed to death. You were hoping that I wouldn't be able to save him."
Something changed in Kyle's expression, something I couldn't read, something important that I would go back in my memories again and again to try and identify, but which I never managed to understand.
"I'm not giving you this necklace. This is what I've needed all along to make my plans succeed. I was only researching because I never expected to actually be in a position to acquire a second artifact. The next time you see me things will be different, Selene."
Epilogue
I sat there in the wreckage of a hundred acres of beautiful forest for more than an hour before Kat and Jace regained consciousness, at which point we carried my dad, Sandra, and the research journals back to the house. I say we, but really it was Jace. Kat and I were tapped out, but Jace still had enough emotional juice to make several trips back to the house.
I was half afraid I wasn't going to make it back to the house under my own power, but I managed it—it just took me a while.
Ari was overjoyed when Kat let her out of the basement and she found out that Dad was okay and none of the rest of us had been killed saving him. The journals were all saved, although Jace later revealed that most of them had already been scanned and saved to a thumb drive.
It made sense to back up something that priceless, and digital files were a heck of a lot easier to move around than a box full of books, but I would have liked to know that before we went into a fight against Mephistoles that we should have lost. It wouldn't have made any difference—Mephistoles still would have tried to kill us, but it still would have been nice to know beforehand.
My dad awoke to find Kat waiting at his bedside. He looked like he was still trying to process everything that had happened and everything he'd learned, but he wasn't freaking out and it was nice not to have to lie to him anymore.
I'd half expected Kat to jump into bed with him as soon as he was awake, but she was a lot more patient than I'd been prepared to give her credit for. She was moving with glacial slowness, but I could already tell that one day my dad was going to wake up and realize that he couldn't imagine a life without Kat. Convincing a guy like my dad to date someone who looked like she was seventeen—regardless of her actual age—was going to be a herculean challenge, but I had a feeling that Kat was equal to the task. She'd had a lot of years to practice her technique.
Kat and Jace seemed shocked that I'd left Sandra alive. To be honest, I was too. After more than a decade of her making my life miserable and then nearly killing my dad, I would have probably been justified in killing her, but I just couldn't bring myself to do that, not when the person who had stabbed my dad was truly gone.
I still couldn't look at Sandra without gritting my teeth, but I was dedicated to the idea of trying to reform her and make her a useful member of our pantheon. Four was still smaller than a lot of pantheons out there, but it was bigger than some, and it was infinitely better than two or three. Sandra would be starting from zero, but that would change over time, and simply having her around would go a long ways towards scaring off some of the groups that otherwise would have considered us easy pickings.
With Mephistoles dead, there was every reason to believe that we could remain off of everyone's radar for quite a while still, which was good; we all needed some time to recover.
Bethany was bigger than she was before our massive throwdown with Sandra and Mephistoles, but still not as big as Kregor. She'd absorbed a ton of the expended power since I was mostly using happiness as my driving emotion during the fight, but it was going to be a while still before she could risk being disembodied without truly dying.
Speaking of being disembodied, Kregor was obliterated early in the battle, but coalesced sometime the next day and made his way back to the house. Jace pretended not to be worried, but it was obvious to me that he was getting antsy by the time his sidekick rejoined us.
Only two things were really bothering me, and one of them wasn't even a bad thing. During the course of my fight with Sandra I'd draine
d her dry of memories. Normally I shouldn't have been able to do that without coming away equally drained. The fact that even my memories from before the time I'd been awakened had crystalized changed the math, but I still hadn't lost as much as I should have. I should have lost half of my memories, but instead I'd only lost about the first five and a half years.
That was still a lot to use at once—not enough to create another fairy, even if Bethany hadn't been there—but a lot still. A lot of it was probably just time spent wishing I could crawl or trying to learn to walk, but I still missed it. In one fell swoop I'd lost almost half of the memories from my time with my mom.
That scared me even more than I'd thought it would. I've had unlimited access to my old journals and plenty of free time for several days now, but I hadn't started reading them yet. It was more important to get everything else I remembered down in writing first.
I was also worried about what Kyle would do next. None of us were surprised when we got a message from the Lady two days after the battle. Apparently Kyle cleaned out Mephistoles' lair in record time and then dropped off the map completely.
Saying that the Seelie Court was unhappy to find out that Kyle now had both Mephistoles' necklace and Excalibur was pretty much the understatement of the year. I expected it was just going to be a matter of time before the Lady had the wards around Kyle's bunker pulled down, but I already knew she wasn't going to find anything important there.
Kyle was out there somewhere planning his next move, and no matter how many hours I spent going back over my last words with him, there wasn't anything I could do to change the past. It's very possible that things would have been different if I'd reacted differently, but it's too late to go back and change any of that now.
All we could do was wait and see what happened next.
Becoming immortal and mastering god-like powers hasn't been easy for Selene. Enemies shadow her every move, and using her powers continues to rip away memories of her childhood and the mother she lost too soon.
Things between her and Jace are strained, but Selene still thinks they can work things out until she realizes that her actions—her very existence—has triggered a chain of events that threatens more than just her relationship with Jace.
This time the entire world is at stake and with every passing moment Selene is less sure who she can trust to help her fight evils both ancient and modern.
Endless
by Dean Murray
Copyright 2014 by Dean Murray
Chapter 1
Not even the world's most gorgeous lightning storm could distract me from the fact that the guy I was sitting next to no longer trusted me.
Don't get me wrong, the storm was the kind of thing that most people never got a chance to see. Saying it was spectacular wouldn't have begun to do it credit, but the damage I'd done to my relationship with Jace wasn't the kind of thing I could push to the back of my mind—not even for a little while. Which was too bad, since that was the whole reason we'd come out here.
Jace had been the one to suggest the outing. He'd seen the clouds far off in the distance starting to light up and convinced me to leave the house so we could spend some time away from the pressures inherent in cramming six very stubborn people into one house—even a house as big as the one Jace and Kat had purchased when they'd moved to Cold Springs.
Leaving the house and wandering more than a mile away wasn't usually a good idea right before a storm this size blew in, but it wasn't a big deal for us. Even running through the forest, jumping over trees and all, it took us less than three minutes to cover the distance between the house and the top of the hill behind it. That kind of mind-shattering speed becomes commonplace when you're a demigod capable of amping your systems up to superhuman levels.
When we'd first arrived I'd been convinced that the whole trip had been a mistake. Standing on the top of the hill meant we had an unobstructed view of the destruction left from when Jace, Kat and I had faced off against Mephistoles and Sandra, and what we'd left behind wasn't pretty.
There was a reason that the Greeks had considered us gods and claimed that we'd been descended from powerful giants. The ground looked like it had been torn up by impossibly strong beings. Patches of the terrain had been scorched by fire, others had been blasted by lightning, and there was only one section that had any surviving plant life. We'd nearly lost—we would have lost if not for Kyles' help.
Yay for Kyle. He'd been the hero of the hour—or at least he would have been if not for the fact that he also happened to be Jace's brother and sworn enemy. Neither of the two liked each other, but they both wanted to date me. Actually, where Kyle was concerned, it was almost more like he wanted to possess me.
Kat, my best friend from before I'd been killed during my last incarnation, thought I was out of my mind for even thinking about dating Kyle, but I just couldn't seem to help myself. He'd come so far from where he'd been, but it was more even than that. I'd read an account written in my own handwriting from the last time we'd been together and it sounded like we'd been perfectly happy. That wasn't the kind of thing that was easy to dismiss.
Jace was frustrated by the fact that I hadn't started reading the journals he'd been saving for me. He had a point. It had to feel like I was stringing him along. I'd told him that I couldn't make a decision until after I'd had a chance to read through my later journals—the ones from when I'd been with him—and then I'd promptly spent the next two weeks not reading them.
I wasn't trying to lead him on. Reading more of my journals was terrifying. I did want to read them. I just wanted to make sure that I got everything I still remembered about my most recent incarnation down before I started into another project.
Yeah, the fine print in the metaphorical contract we all signed was a real killer. We could kill people with a look or make ourselves stronger than any three power lifters, but all of that power came at a price.
Every time we used our ability we lost some of our memories. Maybe only a few seconds, maybe months—it all depended on what we were doing. That would have been bad enough, but there was another gotcha. Our memories were the raw fuel that our abilities needed to function, but in order to make any given effect work we also had to be in the grip of a strong emotion.
If one of us Awakened wanted to be more powerful then we had to cultivate even stronger emotional extremes. It turned out that when a strong emotion was entered into willingly it had a little less power to influence your words and actions. That was good, but it wasn't the same thing as having no ability to influence you.
All of which went a long way towards explaining some of the craziness that is a recurring theme in basically every mythology known to man. Greek, Norse, Aztec…they were all stories about beings who were too powerful for their own good, people who reacted on an emotional basis far too often, people who sometimes couldn't even remember who their real enemies were.
I wouldn't have chosen the life of an Awakened for myself, but it wasn't like I ever had a choice. Luckily there were a few offsetting advantages to being an Awakened. Kat was one of them. What girl would willingly turn down a chance to have a friend who'd known them for more than three hundred years?
Of course I didn't remember any of that friendship and Kat remembered less than a hundred years, but things like that happened when you got killed and were reborn into another incarnation. Even so, Kat knew me better than almost anyone else.
I'd been a different person back then, with different experiences altogether, but after being reborn I still had the same basic personality. I still liked the same kinds of things and I still hated Sandra. All of which meant that Kat sometimes knew me better than I knew myself, which was occasionally unsettling, but usually just what the doctor ordered.
Up until recently, the other huge benefit was Jace, but me kissing his brother while I'd been trapped in Kyle's hidden bunker had soured things there. Jace still wanted to make things work, but there wasn't any denying the fact that things were different
now.
All of which brought me back to the fact that I was sitting at the top of a hill watching the world's biggest thunderstorm head our way. I'd seen my share of thunderstorms, but this was the first time I'd seen the lightning striking behind such a large bank of clouds.
It was nearly dark, but there was still just enough light for me to see that the cloud front stretched for dozens of miles in either direction, and every second or two vast sections of the approaching storm lit up with a gorgeous blue light. I was used to thinking of a lightning storm being nothing but cerulean forks briefly connecting the ground and sky, but this was something else altogether. This was like fireworks.
As the storm got closer to us, the frequency of the lightning strikes picked up to the point where there were often multiple strikes in any given second. It would have been a nightmare to endure outside, exposed to the elements, but seen from a distance it was the kind of thing I wished I could never forget.
"So, how was your day?"
Jace's question was nothing more than a weak attempt at breaking the ice. Given that we shared every class at school he already knew everything there was to know about my day, but I still loved him for making the attempt. We both wanted things to work, we just needed to find a way around our respective issues.
"Not bad. I got most of my homework done last night before dropping off for a full three hours of sleep, so I was able to get more written in my journal than I was expecting to."
That was another advantage to being an Awakened. I only needed two or three hours of sleep a night. It meant I had a lot more free time to do whatever I wanted. I had a suspicion that it would start to feel more like a curse than a blessing as the centuries rolled by, but Jace and Kat maintained that it wasn't bad as long as I could come up with an enjoyable hobby.
