The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  Byron shrugged. "It's a possibility. I wondered as much myself, but not using my abilities for the last few decades has pretty much precluded any useful research in that area."

  Jace hadn't put away his knife. He wasn't being overtly threatening, but it was obvious that he still didn't trust our visitor.

  "You still haven't explained why you're here or how you found us."

  "I'm here because my entire pantheon is dead—everyone but me."

  You could have heard a pin drop in that instant. Back in the day it hadn't been unheard of for one pantheon to completely destroy another, but that had been before it had been so easy to cover vast distances in just hours or days. Now it was uncommon for an entire pantheon to be destroyed unless they were caught by surprise and totally outclassed.

  "How many of you were there?"

  Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth something told me that I didn't want to hear the answer. He'd just told us all that Shangri-La really existed, and then turned around and announced its destruction in the same breath.

  "Twenty-five."

  Kat pushed past Jace and grabbed Byron's arm. "How did your group get to be so big? That's the biggest pantheon in recorded history. Some of the ancient groups managed to get nearly that big, but that was all a function of large human populations to draw on and some kind of natural barrier or societal advantage that kept the barbarians outside the gates."

  "We've been recruiting for a long time. Not everyone, just people who'd been in their current incarnation for long enough that we felt confident they would fit into our group. People who default to positive emotions mostly."

  Kat pulled back like she'd been slapped. My dad and Ari looked confused, but I understood what had just happened. Kat had just realized the cost of her choice in default emotions. Byron continued on before I could comfort her.

  "Your pantheon has been on our radar for quite a while, Jace especially. We figured he would make a perfect addition to our group, but some of our members weren't so excited about the rest of you. You're both powered by anger and several of us weren't so sure that Kyle would let…Selene drop out of sight."

  Jace looked like a man who was trying very hard to remain objective, a man who wanted to believe, but who knew that there was a chance that we were just being told what we wanted to hear because it was the best way to get close to us.

  "You're awfully well-informed about our group."

  "We had to be. One bad recruit had the potential to ruin things for all of us."

  "How did you manage it? How did it work?"

  "Manage what? Gathering intelligence?"

  Byron looked legitimately unsure of what Jace wanted to hear, but part of me—a suspicious, jaded part that felt too old and cynical to have come from anywhere other than my last incarnation—wondered if he was just buying himself time to come up with a believable lie.

  Jace stepped closer, trying to intimidate Byron and throw him off his game.

  "I want to know everything. How you gathered information, how you went about recruiting people, and most of all how you found us. Don't jerk us around or I'll bury your body myself."

  "I'd say I'm surprised to hear that from you, Jace, but your history shows that you're extremely protective of the members of your pantheon."

  "We're still waiting."

  Byron slid further back on the table so that he wasn't quite so close to Jace. "We can't use our abilities without risking discovery, so by and large we've had to develop other methods of information-gathering. We've got some of the world's best hackers in our ranks. It turns out that the attributes that make a good researcher tend to translate well into cyber-security and most of our people have had the benefit of being around since before the dawn of the computer age."

  He was right, a hundred years was a long time to spend learning all the ins and outs of hacking a computer system, and when you threw in the fact that his pantheon wasn't forgetting any of the stuff they were learning, it turned into a recipe for hacker domination.

  "At this point we have backdoors into every major intelligence agency in the world and we use that to make sure that we're as informed about the movements of the other pantheons as possible. We've been running facial recognition programs on every form of social media since before even the NSA started doing it."

  Jace shrugged. "We've been doing that too. It only works if you've got a decent picture of the person you're looking for."

  "Not exactly. We've got pictures of some of the different Awakened out there courtesy of the intelligence agencies, but recently we've been scanning for instances where large numbers of people with very similar appearances show up in different locations. Most of those people will be mimics, but it's letting us generate a pictorial database of other Awakened. Sooner or later the humans we've identified will age enough to remove themselves from the running and we'll be able to track all of the Awakened."

  He was painting a picture of a world that I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of. It was the logical extension of what Jace and Kat had already done to find me, but it was still chilling. The idea of being tracked wherever I went, of having someone always looking over my shoulder, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, was going to give me nightmares.

  Jace stepped even closer. "How did you know that we were here?"

  "This was considered a hot spot because we'd registered the possibility of two new incarnations. We've been watching land purchases for a while and this house showed up as the perfect base for any Awakened who decided to stay in the area. The shell company you used to purchase it was quite good. None of us had been able to track ownership back to any known Awakened, but I had a hunch that it was you and Kat. If somebody else had shown up for Selene or the other one they would have just grabbed them and kept moving. You and Kat are the only ones who would care about trying to minimize disruptions to Selene's normal life."

  He had a point there. Everyone else would have either just killed me so that I wouldn't be a threat for another twenty years, or kidnapped me and brainwashed me into working for them similarly to what Mephistoles had done with Sandra. Of course she'd been more than willing to sign onto anything that resulted in her being able to take a swing at me.

  "As for how we recruit, we spend decades watching potential allies. Sooner or later they at least partially fall off the radar on their own and we approach them with an offer to provide them with sanctuary for a trial period. Coming up with a way to keep them out of sight for long enough for their signature to shrink down took some doing, but eventually we decided to just hide them out in plain sight."

  Kat closed her eyes and shook her head. "You guys are the ones responsible for Camelot, aren't you? I knew that there was more going on in New Mexico than anyone suspected"

  Byron smiled like Kat was an exceptionally bright student who'd just managed to surprise him. Jace looked poleaxed; the rest of us just looked confused. I finally broke the silence.

  "Wasn't Camelot in England?"

  Kat waved me off like she was too frustrated to speak, but Jace pulled himself together enough to respond.

  "Yeah, the first one was in England. Arthur was actually one of us, by the way, as were most of his knights and a few of their ladies. It was an odd time. Some of us were still claiming to be gods, but Arthur wanted to create a different society, one where the Awakened weren't worshiped, but rather respected for their knowledge and wisdom. Several nearby pantheons ended up getting together and wiping out Camelot, but shortly after the New World was discovered legends started circulating among the fae and the Awakened that a new Camelot would be constructed somewhere in the western half of the continent.

  "A little while ago one of the most powerful wards anyone had ever seen flared into existence down in New Mexico. Everyone has spent the last hundred years or so wondering who was behind it, but nobody has managed to catch anyone coming in or out. People started claiming that whoever created the ward had gone crazy from all the isolation and killed themselves."r />
  I realized I was rubbing the side of my head and forced my hands back down to my side. "If it's really as big as what you're describing then it's got to be easy to find. Why hasn't anyone taken it down?"

  Byron smiled. "Nobody has taken it down because nobody is willing to invest the time and effort it would require. None of the fae are strong enough to do it yet, and none of the pantheons have been willing to collectively invest the centuries' worth of memory that would be required to bring it down."

  I looked over at Jace and shook my head. "So why didn't Kyle just do something like that rather than hiding his wards behind weaker wards?"

  "Because Camelot is the single biggest target for both courts. It represents more collected power than they could hope to find anywhere else. The courts are both in an arms race. Whoever manages to become strong enough to feed off of that ward first will grow at an incredible rate. They will end up with a clear advantage and finally have a chance at wiping the other side out of existence."

  I turned back to Byron. "So why not run there instead of coming to us? Your group has obviously been cycling people through Camelot, leaving them there for a year or two until their signatures shrink to the point where it's safe for them to join the rest of you. If your pantheon was destroyed, wouldn't it make a lot more sense for you to go hide in the one place nobody else could touch you?"

  "Yeah, that would make a lot of sense, other than the fact that sooner or later Kyle is going to break down the ward surrounding Camelot and then I'll be back to dealing with the same problem—just without any possibility of getting help from anyone else."

  I gave him another confused look, but this time I wasn't the only one. Jace and Kat looked just as unsure of where Byron was headed.

  "I don't understand. What does Kyle have to do with anything?"

  "Kyle is the one who destroyed my pantheon. He and his lackeys took down more than twenty of the oldest, strongest Awakened alive and sooner or later he'll be coming here for a repeat performance."

  Chapter 5

  I felt like I'd been spun around so many times that I no longer knew which way was up. Once Byron finished answering all of our questions, we left him in one of the spare bedrooms and retired to the basement where the wards would prevent anyone from listening in using unconventional methods.

  Sandra didn't want to talk, but Jace didn't give her a choice. Jace was the one person Sandra seemed to listen to. Normally I would have dismissed that as no big deal, but given the fact that her feelings toward me had survived the transition from one incarnation to another, it wasn't entirely beyond the realm of belief to think that her feelings toward Jace might have done the same.

  I knew that Jace wasn't interested in her—Kat had told me several times that he'd never expressed the slightest interest in going back to her over the several hundred years that he'd known me—but I couldn't stop myself from worrying that he would change his mind. There weren't very many guys who'd be willing to wait even just a year or two for a girl. Jace had just finished waiting for me for eighteen years and before that he'd sat around for more than a century pining for me while I'd been married to his brother.

  Jace was the next best thing to an honest-to-goodness saint, but even he had his limits and, despite our kiss a few hours earlier, I couldn't help but worry that he was starting to approach the end of his.

  Once Sandra joined us, the discussion about what to do in response to Byron's news ran fast and furious. Kat wanted Byron to take us to Camelot and let us hide in their equivalent to Kyle's bunker.

  Ari thought we should recruit an army and take the fight to Kyle—not that she had any idea of what that would take—and my dad seemed to just be concerned with getting his daughters out of the line of fire. Saying that he was disappointed to find out that I'd already worked way too many effects for my signature to go unnoticed would have been a profound understatement.

  Sandra basically said that she would do whatever Jace thought was best—which wasn't a surprise—and that just left Jace and me. I tried to get him to go first, but he refused, so I ended up telling everyone that despite being scared to death of what was coming, I didn't think it was right to just put our heads in the ground and pretend like nothing was happening.

  Jace considered everyone's comments in silence for several seconds before stating that he thought it was too early to be making any significant decisions. He felt like we needed to do our homework and substantiate as much of what Byron had told us as possible before we started planning out our future.

  It was the logical answer—the right answer—but it still left me feeling like the meeting had been a whole lot of wasted time. Our group wasn't organized like a military unit, so Jace couldn't just order everyone around, but I still felt like it would have been better if he'd kept the discussion more tightly focused.

  Then again, part of my resentment probably had to do with the fact that my dad had called in sick to work so that he could be there for the meeting. In theory my dad didn't need to work anymore, but I didn't actually have the cash in hand that I'd need to make the mortgage payment and given the bomb we'd just had dropped on us, it was possible that I might not have that kind of cash for a while.

  All of that meant I didn't feel like there was much I could do to stop my dad from feeling stressed at missing a day of work. I'd thought that my being an Awakened would finally mean my dad wouldn't have to keep working at the tile factory, scrimping for every penny, constantly worried he was going to piss off Sandra's dad and get fired. Silly me; I should have known that being an Awakened would just mean things would get worse.

  The money situation wasn't any better and now he had to worry about psychopaths like Mephistoles kidnapping him, Ari or me. Actually, kidnapping was probably the best-case scenario.

  As Jace laid out his proposed course of action—which sounded like a lot of waiting around while Kregor visited other Seelie Court fae—I could see the stress building inside of my dad. When the meeting finally broke up Dad left without saying a word. Dad was nothing if not polite. Acting like that was a sure sign he was approaching his personal breaking point.

  I hurried after him and caught up to him in the bedroom that Kat had offered him two weeks ago when she'd told him that it wasn't safe for me to be living at home anymore. The room was much smaller than the paired master suites upstairs where Jace and Kat slept, but it was still bigger than any of our rooms back home and the furnishings were just as lavish as everything else in the house.

  I hadn't been inside Dad's room here since I'd helped him carry in his suitcases. As I followed him inside I was struck by the fact that he hadn't unpacked. His closets were empty; it looked like he was still living out of his suitcases.

  "I'm sorry you had to take the day off of work, Dad. I'll talk to Jace about that. There wasn't any reason that you had to be there for that meeting—not when we weren't going to decide anything anyway."

  Dad opened his mouth, but I talked over the top of him. "I've been wanting to talk to you about money, Dad. I know you don't want to accept anything from Kat and Jace, but the very first thing I learned how to do was transmute sand into platinum.

  "I've already got millions of dollars' worth of platinum transmuted. Things are a little tricky right now because I'm not sure when Kat will be taking me into Denver to sell my metals, but there really isn't any reason for you to keep working. I can pay off the house and make sure that you and Ari are taken care of regardless of what might happen to me. I hate knowing that you're still always worrying about money. I just really, really want you to be happy."

  Dad kind of deflated right before my eyes. He'd been looking older and more careworn for a while now, but this was nothing like that. He seemed to be aging before my eyes and it scared me in ways that I wasn't prepared to face. I'd already lost my mom, and it was recently enough that it felt like it had just happened yesterday.

  Now that I knew I was an Awakened, there wasn't any getting around the fact that I was going to watch e
veryone I knew—everyone but Kat and Jace—age and die while I still looked seventeen, but I wasn't ready for my dad to get old—not yet, not while there was still so many years where I was going to need his advice and want to be able to make memories that involved him.

  "Dad, are you okay? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you feel like you weren't needed or something. You're so much more important to Ari and me than just someone who provides for us."

  "I know, sweetie. I appreciate your offer. I would tell you that I didn't want you to use memories taking care of me—not when that's supposed to be my job—but I know you're going to do it anyway. Besides, you've already got the platinum. It's not like my refusing to take the money would bring those memories back."

  "So you'll let me help out?"

  "I don't think I really have any other alternative."

  I'd known that this conversation had the potential of being difficult, but I hadn't expected it to leave me feeling like I'd just kicked a puppy.

  "What's going on, Dad? This is a good thing. You can stop stressing about money for once. We'll get all of the bills paid and never have to worry about money ever again."

  He reached over and took my hand in his. "I know, Selene. I'm grateful that you're willing to help out your old man, but the truth is that missing work today is towards the very bottom of my worries. The three of us have basically been living here for the last two weeks, which means that our food bill is non-existent and our utilities bill will be a fraction of what it is normally. I could miss three more days this month and still probably make the mortgage payment without too much of a problem."

  "That's a good thing, Dad. You deserve to have some breathing room."

  He gave me an absent-minded smile. "Do you know that I tried to pay Jace for our room and board? Jace told me that it was too soon to discuss anything like that—that we didn't even know if I still had my job at the tile factory. I knew he was just putting me off, but I didn't know what to do about it. I should have just left things there, but instead I talked to Kat."