The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  Bethany blew a raspberry at me. "Kregor didn't teach me that, I already knew all about it. As for someone else stealing something I've moved to the unseen realm, that's impossible. Only the fairy who moved stuff can bring it back."

  "Hmm, I should have you shift a few thousand dollars and a change of clothes away for me once we get back home. You're like the ultimate emergency preparedness kit."

  "I'm not your personal carryon bag, Selene. I'll help you out this one time, but it's not like towing stuff around behind me in the unseen world is pleasant. Someone like the Lady could basically hide an SUV, but I'm only good for a few more pounds."

  Kat nodded. "Thanks, Bethany. If nothing else, maybe you can make some trips back and forth from here to the house."

  Bethany looked like she was going to protest, but I gave her my best puppy-dog eyes. "Please, Bethany? I'll be your best friend…"

  "You're already my best friend."

  "I'll use some of the proceeds to buy a bigger TV for your room."

  "Okay, throw in a hundred DVD's of my choice and you've got a deal, but only if we can't come up with another option for moving the cash around. If things are really as bad as they sound, I'm not going to want to be running around on my own much anymore. If I get disembodied that's the end for me and you'll never get your cash back."

  I blew her a kiss. "Thanks, Bethany. None of us want that—and for the record you're much more important than the money."

  Kat nodded and headed back to the counter. "I've got some high-value items. Is the owner around?"

  "No, but I can help you out with whatever you need."

  Kat gave him a cold smile. "Sorry, I don't have any time to waste today. Call your boss. The business I'm looking to do will be well above your weekly limit."

  The guy behind the counter looked back and forth between Kat and the silver case in her hand several times before running a hand over his shaved scalp. "Not happening. If you want me to call in my boss then you're going to have to prove that you're on the level."

  Even I could tell that he wanted Kat to open up the cases and let him see what it was that we were carrying, but Kat shook her head. "I'm not opening up this case for you. Your boss wouldn't like that."

  I thought Rog was going to kick us out right then and there, but Kat fished out a stack of hundred-dollar bills and slapped them down on the glass.

  "Trust me, we're on the level."

  "Okay, I'll call the boss, but you better be legit. If I call him in for no reason, he's going to be pissed."

  Given the heavy tattoos Rog was sporting, I had a sneaking suspicion that the fact we were girls wouldn't be enough to save us from a beating, but Kat didn't seem concerned. Then again, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn't need to be worried either. No normal human had a chance against us.

  Kat gestured me closer and whispered into my ear. "Keep an eye on him. He should make one call. No more than that. And tell me if he starts texting on his phone."

  "Okay, what are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to start making some calls. Given the number of places we're going to have to hit up today I'm going to see if I can find out which shops are going to have the owners around."

  I nodded and walked back over to the counter as Rog finished up his call and hung up the landline.

  "Okay, he'll be here in fifteen minutes."

  I nodded without taking my eyes off of his cell phone.

  "So what's your name?"

  I almost told him, but at the last second I realized that the less information I gave out the less he'd have to go on if he decided to try to track me down later.

  "Sammy. You can call me Sammy."

  "I can call you Sammy, but that's not your real name?" Even as he said it he reached for his cell. Without thinking, I amped my strength up to twice what it normally was and grabbed his arm.

  "Let's just leave the phone right there, Rog. My friend and I are feeling a little jumpy right now."

  I'd grabbed him harder than I meant to. He was probably going to have a hand-shaped bruise wrapped around his arm, but there wasn't much I could do about that now. Instead, I just looked him in the eye and refused to back down.

  "Fine, fine. You want me to maintain radio silence, then I'll keep radio silence."

  A short time later the owner, a heavyset guy with dark hair who looked like he was in his fifties, walked in and showed Kat and me back to his office. I was not at all surprised to see that he had a set of scales in his office, but I was pretty sure that Kat was going to check his weights against the scale inside of her briefcase.

  The pawn shop owner—who had introduced himself as Jeb—leaned back in his chair without touching the metal. "That's quite an impressive collection you've managed to pull together. Where did you steal it from?"

  Kat didn't even bat an eye at the accusation. "We didn't steal it."

  "You can't actually expect me to believe that a couple of teenage girls got their hands on that much gold and silver through legal means."

  "Believe whatever you want, Jeb. The gold is here waiting for you to make an offer on it and nobody is going to come around sniffing for it. Make me an offer or we'll go find another buyer."

  The next half an hour blew my mind. Kat was one of the best negotiators I'd ever seen, but she wasn't just after the best price per ounce, she was after the biggest single deal she could get Jeb to agree to.

  Jeb kept trying to bring the discussion back to the fact that he didn't even know for sure whether the metal was real, but Kat ruthlessly kept the discussion focused on the amount and price that he was willing to accept.

  Once that was done, the two of them made sure that their scales were reading the same weight for a given bar of metal, and then Jeb proceeded to weigh out the metal, shaking his head the whole time at Kat's single-mindedness.

  "Okay, so we've got a price and a total weight, but I'm still not convinced that any of this metal is the real deal. Frankly, I would have already kicked you to the curb except for the fact that you flashed all of those Benjamins to Rog…"

  Kat gave him a humorless smile. "That's okay, I'm assuming that it's going to take you some time to pull all that money together. We'll leave the gold here for you to test and then we'll be back here to collect. We'll take as much cash as you can get your hands on and a cashier's check for the rest."

  Up until that moment I would have said that nothing could have surprised Jeb. He was a hard man who worked with desperate people. He had an air about him that said he'd seen it all years ago, but he actually did a double-take at Kat's words.

  "You can't be serious."

  "Why not, Jeb? You're an honest businessman, aren't you?"

  He nodded, but the gesture had the disoriented feel of a punch-drunk prize fighter. "Of course I am, but only a fool would leave more than three hundred thousand dollars' worth of metal here unsupervised."

  Kat's expression turned cold. "I'm not a fool, Jeb, and I'm not some child. You're not going to double-cross us because if you do I'll personally make sure that you suffer ten times the value of this metal in losses. Broken legs will be the least of your worries. I'll burn this shop down and then move on to your vehicles and home."

  He jumped to his feet—obviously intending on using his size to intimidate her—but I'd felt her amp up her system even before she started talking, and she shoved him into his seat like he was nothing more than a child.

  "As long as you deal honestly with me you have nothing to worry about, Jeb, but I don't make idle threats. I'd like to do repeat business with you at some point, but that's only possible if you understand who's holding the whip in this relationship."

  There was another flash of energy as Kat burned away a few more seconds' worth of memory, and a tide of fear suddenly crashed over me. It was so powerful that it took me a second to realize that the source of the fear was Kat.

  Jeb's fists went white, but he didn't get out of his chair. My opinion of him actually went up by seve
ral notches. I had the advantage of understanding what was going on, and I still wanted to run screaming out of the room.

  I could see the fear fighting with the desire to cash in on the metal purchase Kat was offering.

  "It will take me a couple of days to test all of this metal."

  Kat shook her head. "No. You can have three hours. That gives you two hours to test it and an hour to get to the bank."

  "How am I supposed to test this much metal in that amount of time?"

  "I don't actually care how you test it. Melt it down and then test it all at once, or test it individually if you have enough acid to do that. I don't care how much you get tested, but when we get back, anything you don't want to buy is walking back out the doors with us."

  Kat gestured for me to follow and a few minutes later we were back at the car and driving towards a home improvement store. Bethany was still on my shoulder, but she kept jumping up in the air and then buzzing back down.

  "Wow, Kat. The first trip back home with a stack of cash is on me! I've never seen anything like that."

  Kat turned away from the road just enough to give Bethany a wry grin. "You obviously spent most of the last eighteen years with Jace rather than with me. I always prefer to set up longer-term arrangements with potential buyers, but given the fact that we don't know how much longer we're going to be able to liquidate metal, it seemed best to dust off my time in Prague.

  "Selene, we're going to have to move quickly if we're going to make it through my list of possible buyers before shops start closing down. Do you mind waiting inside the car and transmuting stuff while I make the arrangements?"

  "Not at all. I've never done gold or silver before though. Is it going to cause a problem if I just do nothing but platinum?"

  "Maybe, but I don't have time to make sure that you're getting the gold and silver right, so just stick to what you know."

  The next three hours went by in a blur. Kat ran into the store and came back out with six bags of decorative white rock. I had my doubts about our ability to actually move the better part of one hundred and twenty pounds of platinum, but transmuting it was easy enough and the price in memories was small enough that Kat apparently figured it was best to over-prepare.

  We didn't leave the car behind after that. Instead, I remained with the car at each stop while Kat walked in with both briefcases loaded with precious metal.

  Bethany was all aquiver at the idea of seeing Kat intimidate men more than twice her size, so she went inside with Kat and I was left sitting alone in some fairly seedy neighborhoods. It was unnerving to be sitting there changing rocks into tiny bars of platinum, but I just locked the doors and reminded myself that no regular human was going to be able to give me any problems. Even so, that didn't stop me from being thankful that Kat's car had tinted windows.

  The first few stops were more pawnshops, but eventually Kat moved on to small and medium-sized jewelry stores. We fell into an easy rhythm. While Kat was inside, I would transmute a briefcase or so worth of rocks and then I'd call two or three establishments from her list and ask to be connected with someone who had the authority to make a large purchase of platinum at below-market prices.

  The last two shops we managed to get in and out in less than ten minutes, which frankly blew my mind considering how much time we'd spent at the first place.

  "How are you managing that, Kat?"

  "I offered a bigger discount on the metal. That's the piece that makes all of this possible. Intimidation and the 'fear me' aura can help tip the balance your direction if you've pushed them too far on the price or the size of the purchase, but mostly it comes down to the fact that they all know they can flip the metal for a ten-percent profit tomorrow."

  Kat checked the GPS on her phone and then merged back into the interstate for the short hop that would take us back to the first shop.

  "You have to remember that a lot of these guys are borrowing the money to buy this metal. They'll be tapping a line of credit and just about cleaning themselves out to get the cash they need to purchase as big a chunk of what we left behind as possible. That makes people uneasy. Most of them won't have the time to test all of the metal, so they'll test as much as they can and then buy a little more in the hopes that it will turn out to be legit as well."

  "Wow, that feels risky."

  "Yeah. The smart ones will limit their exposure on the stuff that they haven't tested so that even if it turns out to be worthless they'll still come out flush, but most of them will try to grab all of it. Never underestimate people's capacity to think that they've just found their big break."

  "You sound like a con woman."

  "It's the same principle, I just don't use it to defraud them."

  "But you do put them in a risky spot though. If the prices drop even more they could lose money on this."

  "Yeah, but it would have to drop a lot. Here we are. You okay with waiting in the car again while I run in and grab the cash and whatever metal is still left over? Keep your eyes open. If things go south, this is where it's most likely to happen."

  I nodded and then watched her walk inside, but I was suddenly not so sure how I felt about this exercise. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for business. I'd headed out this morning thinking that we were looking for a fairly black and white transaction. I never would have guessed that there was that much in the way of gray out there.

  Five minutes later Kat was back outside with Bethany floating next to her. She slid the silver briefcase over to me as she put the car into gear.

  "He had a hundred thousand in cash on him and managed to get a cashier's check for another hundred and fifty. I got him to throw in a bag—it's in the case—go ahead and throw the metal in the bag, it's worth trying to keep the cash and the metal separate.

  "I thought I would get more out of him than that. Hopefully the jewelers are able to come up with more than that or we're going home a lot lighter than I was thinking we would."

  The next several stops proved to be more lucrative, but I wasn't sure if that was because they were taking a bigger risk than Jeb had been willing to take, or if it was a function of having access to people they trusted to help test the metal.

  As we pulled up to the second-to-last stop, the amount of cash had grown to the point where it wouldn't have all fit in the second briefcase and we had almost twice that amount in cashier's checks. It was a lot less than Kat had been hoping to get—and it was far less than the metal we'd moved was really worth—but it was still a mind-boggling sum, the kind of money that I'd never expected to see all in one place.

  "Can I come inside with you on this last one, Kat? I'd really like to see at least one pickup today."

  "Yeah, that's fine. This is a decent neighborhood. There's still a chance that somebody is waiting to break into our car in the hopes that we've got some metal sitting here unprotected, but the car will still probably be drivable, so I suppose it doesn't matter all that much if we lose the metal. Just make sure that you grab the briefcase that has all the money."

  I nodded and then looked down at the pile of money sitting at my feet. Apparently Kat hadn't realized just how much money hadn't fit inside the briefcase.

  "Bethany, would you be willing to make this pile disappear? Just until we make it back to the car?"

  "Okay, but you're going to have to carry me around everywhere—this much weight will make me fly slower than a pregnant turkey."

  It took everything I had to not roll my eyes at her. I didn't want her to pout and refuse to help me out with the several hundred thousand dollars in cash sitting on the floorboard of Kat's Mercedes.

  "I thought turkeys laid eggs like other birds."

  Bethany shrugged. "Yeah, probably, but there are plenty of expressions that don't correspond perfectly to the real world."

  Kat apparently didn't share my concerns about Bethany refusing to send the cash off into the unseen world.

  "Whatever, that's not an expression. You made that up all of five seconds ago."
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  "So what if I did? All great expressions have to start somewhere. Flying like a pregnant turkey is one of the best expressions ever."

  "Just keep telling yourself that."

  Bethany dropped down onto the pile of cash in a huff and the first stack of bills disappeared a split second later.

  "You just don't get it because you can't fly. Just watch. I'm going to use that expression on Kregor and he'll love it."

  Kat rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I'm sure that flying is the best thing ever—that's probably why the Lady walks around with a pair of wings sprouting out of her back and Fenrir flitters around from one spot to the next like some kind of massively overgrown canine butterfly. The truth is that all of you fae ditch the wings as soon as you accrue enough power to shape your forms. Give it another hundred and fifty years and you'll only dust yours off when you need to fly somewhere too far to walk."

  "Kregor hasn't done that."

  "Yeah, because Kregor is odd even for a fairy."

  Bethany had continued to shift stacks of bills away while she and Kat were arguing. As she shifted away the last one, I shook my head at the two of them and pointed to the jewelry store.

  "If the two of you are done, can we please go finish this? I'd really like to get back to the house and see Jace and my dad before today turns into tomorrow."

  I half expected the jewelry store to still be open, but apparently the owner hadn't trusted his employees around the amount of wealth Kat had left with him. Kat knocked on the door and a few seconds later a short, balding man in his fifties opened the door.

  "Can you give me more time? I've been working as fast as I could, but when news of the attack aired on the television it threw me off."

  I'd been looking around the store, wondering if I could justify spending a little bit of the money we were about to get on a diamond necklace, but his words tore my attention away from all of the sparkly things.

  "What attack?"

  "I'm not surprised that you haven't heard. There have been a series of tanker car explosions in the middle of major cities. Washington, Boston, Chicago, and L.A. have all been hit. The authorities have been suppressing news of the incidents, but nobody believes that it was an accident—not given that all four explosions happened in the same way at exactly the same time. It's got to have been some kind of terrorist strike."