The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  The world was wobbling around me, but Kat had become more focused rather than less.

  "How are they suppressing information?"

  "Cellular networks have been down for the last half an hour. Internet providers have been instructed to go offline, and every cable and television network has been silent as well, so I can only assume that federal officers are there censoring everything that's being aired.

  "I keep a CB radio in my workshop—it's been a hobby of mine for years. Somebody dropped the ball in not jamming the public airwaves. I had a good feeling about you, and all of the metal had tested as good, so I went and grabbed my cashier's check more than an hour ago. I would have left already, but anytime there is a terrorist strike like this people start hoarding precious metals."

  Kat ran a hand through her hair. "You're figuring that the price is going to skyrocket over the next couple of days."

  "Yes. Maybe I shouldn't have told you, but it just doesn't seem right not to."

  Bethany hadn't left my shoulder, but now she moved in closer and whispered. "Here's the honest man you were hoping to find."

  I could tell that Kat was about to try to renegotiate the price, but I shook my head at her. We already had more money than we could conceivably spend and given what had just happened, money was going to be less of an issue in the short run simply because everyone would be hoarding food and other basic necessities.

  "It's fine, we'll stand by the original price and sell as much gold to you as you'd like to buy from us."

  That earned me a frown, but when the jeweler turned to look at Kat she grudgingly nodded. "What she said."

  "Would you be willing to accept unset diamonds as partial payment?"

  I wasn't sure what Kat was going to say to that. Presumably it was just as easy for us to transmute stones into diamonds as it was for us to transmute them into gold, but given how difficult it had been for me to form my platinum into simple bars I suspected that it was a lot harder to get a diamond to have the right cut as part of the transmutation process.

  "Yeah, if they are cut we'd be willing to accept part of the payment that way."

  "Very good. Do you have any extra metal that you didn't leave with me?"

  I nodded. "I'll go get it while the two of you work out the metal-to-diamond exchange rate."

  Bethany was quiet until after I was safely outside. "What does this mean, Selene?"

  I shrugged as I pulled out my cellphone and confirmed that it was indeed not getting any bars. "I don't know. I'm pretty sure that Kyle and his friends were the terrorists though, which means that's one more reason to believe Byron. I guess we should probably stop off at a grocery store on our way back home and stock up on as much food as we can fit in the car. I'd say that we should deposit the cashier's checks too while the banks still have some cash on hand, but they're all closed and I'm betting that this will all be common knowledge by the time they open up tomorrow."

  Bethany was usually a spunky force of nature, but for once she was subdued. "How many people do you think died?"

  "I don't know, but those are pretty big cities and a big enough blast could kill hundreds or even thousands."

  "I get why he would go after the Helena pantheon, but why kill a bunch of humans?"

  I wished more than anything that I could just tell her I didn't know, but this time I had a pretty good idea.

  "Kyle wants to take control of everything. He thinks that the Awakened should rule over the humans and that he should rule the Awakened. I suspect that he's hoping to destabilize the government to the point that people will welcome any form of stability. As long as he can keep it a secret that he's the one creating all of the destruction, people will welcome whatever structure he puts in place to replace the current government."

  I had to amp up my strength to lift the remaining platinum, but it took only a few seconds to get it out of the car. The bag wasn't anywhere near strong enough to carry that much weight, but as long as I picked the metal up from below it seemed to be up to the task of keeping everything together in one place.

  It meant that my arms were full though, so I had to wait for Kat to come get the door for me. As she pushed it open I saw something odd in her expression.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I'm not sure. I thought I saw something across the street."

  "Something?"

  "Yeah. Before you ask, I don't know what it was or I wouldn't have referred to it as just being something."

  "Hey, we're on the same side, remember? No need to get snippy with me."

  Kat had the grace to look embarrassed. "You're right. This guy wants us to hang around while he finishes testing roughly a million dollars' worth of gold and platinum. Now that I know Kyle has escalated stuff I'm feeling awfully exposed out here. I'd feel a lot better if we were back home and could make a run for our wards if something went wrong."

  "You figure it's him too, then?"

  "Yeah. The pieces all fit together too well. Jace probably has some kind of confirmation from the Seelie Court by now, but, with all of the phones down, we won't know for sure until we make it back home."

  "Well, let's get the metal back to our new friend and see if there's anything we can do to move things along. We may have a million dollars' worth of metal, but there's no way he's got that much in cash and diamonds to trade with."

  "Yeah, but at the price we're selling at he's only got to come up with half a million to clean us out. He's down that hall—go ahead, I'll lock the door."

  I'd only covered half the distance to the hallway Kat had been pointing at when she swore. "Drop the metal, Selene, we need to get out of here right now!"

  I'd turned back expecting to find out that she was having a hard time getting the door to lock again. Seeing that she had the door open and was already headed towards the car at a dead run with a briefcase in one hand threw me for such a loop that I just stood there frozen. Right up to the point where I saw something shadowy and four-legged throw itself at Kat.

  If it had been me I would have been killed, but Kat had amped herself before the door even finished swinging closed, and something—maybe a whisper of sound—warned her that she wasn't alone out there.

  I was so busy amping myself that I missed the first couple of exchanges, but by the time I was moving at four times normal speed Kat had a pair of knives out and one of them had blood on it.

  I sprinted towards the door and hit it hard enough to rip the heavy metal frame free of the anchor points that tied it into the rest of the building. My shoulder was going to be black and blue the next day, but my bone augmentation had kept my bones from shattering, and that was all that mattered.

  "Bethany, find me something I can use as a weapon!"

  Even as the words left my mouth I realized that I should have stayed silent and tried to sneak up on the Unseelie fae that Kat was desperately fighting. It whirled around and charged toward me with a speed that was still breathtaking even when I was moving at four times normal speed myself.

  I threw myself to the right, timing it so that it was too close to adjust its path, but not close enough to catch me in its jaws as it passed. I almost cut it too close; something tugged on my shirt for the briefest of instants before the material tore free.

  My attacker was shaped vaguely like a dog. For a split second I was worried that we were up against Fenrir again, but this fae was much too small to be him. Besides, the shape of the head was all wrong, more angular, almost snakelike.

  Kat danced back in and cut our opponent across the shoulder before it could spin around and slash her with the odd, talon-like claws at the end of its feet. It was a good strike, but trying to disembody a fae that size just by bleeding it out seemed like it would take forever.

  "What about that weapon, Bethany?"

  I could feel her swaying on my shoulder, tiny hands wrapped around my hair, wings going like crazy to help her maintain her balance.

  "I'm trying but I don't see anything!"

  Kat ducked un
der a slash and shot forward, sinking her knife into the snake-dog's stomach and carving a grisly furrow more than a foot and a half deep, but its counterattack caught her across the back and she reeled away with several bloody slashes showing over her kidney.

  We were out of time. I conjured the heat I needed for an offensive effect and scored on the snake-dog with a sun lance that was as thick as one of those fat highlighters Ari was so fond of.

  I'd been fighting so many bigger Unseelie fae lately that I'd forgotten just how destructive a properly-executed sun lance really was. I managed to catch our enemy in the side, just forward of its back legs. I'd been expecting the attack to do little more than stagger it—maybe blasting a fist-sized chunk of flesh away. I was completely unprepared for the sun lance to blast cleanly through it and tear a massive, smoking hole in the sidewalk twenty feet away.

  I cursed myself for not waiting until I had a better angle, something that would have let my beam hit it lengthwise, but the attack did what it needed to do. It bought Kat time to recover, to catch her balance and jump back into the fight.

  Kat managed to land another strike, this one across the snake-dog's nose, but it didn't even slow down. It charged forward with enough speed to knock her back into our car as it brushed past, and I suddenly realized that I was much too close for a fight where I didn't have any kind of weapon in my hands.

  The snake-dog was moving just as fast as before, but there was a jerkiness to its movements that was making it harder to time everything. As the distance between us vanished, I realized it was because of the injury I'd done with my sun lance, but by then it was too late.

  I dodged to my right, spinning as I went, and slammed the outside edge of my hand into the creature's face in an effort to keep it from biting me. It shouldn't have worked. Even as I was doing it I knew that I was probably going to lose my hand, but I was hoping that it would at least be enough to keep it from getting hold of something more important.

  Somehow I managed to score on the snake-dog. The blow was hard enough to leave my bones aching, but even that wasn't enough to put the Unseelie fae down for good. The punch did however impart more spin to me, and I dug in with all of the force I could safely muster out of shoes that had already been subject to titanic forces they'd never been designed to withstand.

  I pushed off with both feet and drove my right hand into the fairy's ribs with every ounce of strength I could manage. The dog was less than a third the size of Fenrir, but its bones were still preternaturally strong.

  If I'd been a mere human the best possible outcome would have been my shattering all of the bones in my hand. As it was, that was still uncomfortably close to the actual outcome. The ache from my knife-hand blow to the snake-dog's face was nothing compared to the pain from punching it.

  Every part of me was amped up, reinforced to the point where I was no longer even close to human, and that was just barely enough. I hit the snake-dog and through the flash of pain as bones and soft tissue were both stressed right up to the edge of what they could take, I felt its rib break.

  It probably would have still managed to kill me—a broken rib wasn't lethal even to a normal human—but the force of my blow was sufficient to knock the Unseelie fae away from me. Kat got both of her knives into it this time before being forced to throw herself backwards.

  This enemy wasn't as big and strong as Fenrir, but it was marginally faster and Kat almost wasn't quick enough. As she tried to dodge the jaws coming towards her face one of her knives caught on a bone and refused to come free. That robbed her of just enough speed for the snake-dog to slice her across the cheek.

  The part of me that was usually in control of my actions was screaming that I needed to get back in there and save her. That was the part of me that had never been anything other than a normal girl, the part that had never needed to worry about anything more dangerous than whether the popular girls in school were going to pick on me after school.

  I told that part of me to shut up and followed instincts I shouldn't have had. I spun towards a stop sign less than twenty feet away, shoes groaning in distress as I milked them for every bit of speed my super-charged frame was capable of.

  Even as I crossed the distance, I summoned the heat I needed for another sun lance, but this time it was barely more than the heat of a summer afternoon. I was less than five feet away from the sign when the bar of molten gold shot out, no bigger than a needle, and sliced through the base of the sign.

  I grabbed the sign as it fell, and then spun around and charged back into the fight. Kat was down to one knife and was backing away for all she was worth. The gashes across her stomach and arms were testament to the fact that she'd only barely managed to keep from being pinned down and killed.

  She was retreating, but once she saw me running forward with what amounted to a giant aluminum club, she started circling back in my direction. Everything still felt like it was simultaneously moving in slow motion and much too fast. I felt first my right shoe and then my left come apart from the stresses I'd put on them, and then I was running across the pavement in bare feet, cursing the entire way.

  My skin was amped up to the point where I could have probably walked across thumbtacks without having them draw blood, but skin with that level of tensile strength didn't have anywhere near the traction of rubber soles. I wasn't going to be able to stop in time—not if I wanted to save Kat.

  In the end I didn't even try, even though I knew that was exactly what our opponent wanted. The snake-dog spun around so that it was heading towards me as I crossed the last few feet separating us, but rather than bringing my club around in an overhand blow like I'd originally been planning, I flipped it around and brought the end with the stop sign still attached to it up with everything I had.

  The aluminum pole that the stop sign was mounted to was incredibly strong—it had been designed to shrug off anything other than a direct impact from one-ton vehicles moving at a speed of several miles per hour. Even so, I wasn't sure that it was going to be up to withstanding the forces I was applying to it.

  I hit the snake-dog directly in the chest, and I led with the edge of the stop sign in the hopes that it would cut into the evil fairy's chest. I was almost right. The stop sign hit and sank nearly an inch into the snake-dog's chest. It sheared through muscle, but it wasn't up to cutting into the unnaturally hard bones underneath. The sign deformed, rolling up like a scroll, and then tore free of the bolts that had been used to anchor it to the aluminum pole.

  If I'd done as I'd originally been intending and hit the snake-dog from above that would have been the end of me. Instead, the force of my club hitting my enemy bled off most of the momentum I'd carried into the blow with me.

  The aluminum rod transmitted an incredible shock to my hands, and the vibrations felt like they went on and on, but it was a necessary evil. The upward force I slammed the snake-dog with created an equal and opposite downward force. For the briefest of instants it was as though I weighed more than three times as much as normal and that was the final piece I needed to reverse course.

  It was a good thing too. My blow staggered the snake-dog. I heard its breastbone crack, and its front legs came up more than two feet off of the ground, but it lunged forward, pushing off with its back legs, and my desperate evasive maneuvers were just enough to keep me away from its jaws. I took a long set of gashes across my left leg—apparently my skin still wasn't up to withstanding that—as Kat reversed directions again and slammed her remaining knife into the side of the fairy's neck.

  Something told me that her attack had gone home perfectly, that it should have killed our enemy. Apparently the wolf-dog's anatomy wasn't the same as a regular dog's anatomy though. The artery or vein she was looking for was somewhere else, and I could tell that she'd put too much into the attack. She'd been so sure that this attack would be lethal that she'd left herself off-balance and vulnerable.

  There was a single frozen moment where the Unseelie fairy had the chance to pick its next t
arget. Neither of us was in a position to dodge, whomever it went after next was a dead woman. A second later, a tremendous roar slammed into my ear at the same time that a cloud of buckshot tore into the snake dog.

  It was the tiny old jeweler. Moving in what seemed like slow motion, he pumped his shotgun and started bringing the barrel back down towards the snake-dog.

  The first shot had done more damage than I would have expected. The flesh over one shoulder was almost completely blasted away, but I knew a second shot wasn't going to be enough to save our rescuer. The snake-dog probably would have been better served to kill Kat or me, but it changed course again and charged the old man.

  I could tell that I was only going to get one more hit in. My last blow to the snake-dog's chest had reversed the motion of my improvised club. It felt like an eternity had passed, but in reality it had been barely more than an eye-blink since then. I used the momentum my club already had, spinning the aluminum post over my head with everything I had, and slammed it into the snake-dog, hitting it just in front of its shoulders.

  It was a blow that would have felled an ox. It managed to drive the snake-dog into the ground, but I could tell it wasn't going to stop the snake-dog—not permanently. I'd failed. My club was rebounding upwards with too much force for even my augmented muscles to bring it back down in time, and I knew that the old man was a fraction of a second away from death.

  Only I was wrong. There wasn't anything I could do, but Kat darted in before the snake-dog could regain its feet and her knife once again took the Unseelie fairy in the throat. This time she didn't miss the artery she'd been aiming for.

  Chapter 7

  I wanted nothing quite so much as to just drop to the ground and hyperventilate, but Kat didn't give me a chance. She collected her knives and then grabbed me by the arm.