by Dean Murray
Jace opted for a standard sun lance, and his attack hit a split second before Byron's. The destructive beam took both of the Awakened inside the car by complete surprise and between one second and the next, the car flew apart in an explosion of metal and glass that exceeded even what had happened when the minivan had been hit earlier in our flight.
I started to turn away, instinctively trying to shield my eyes from the hail of shrapnel headed our way, but before the debris could travel more than a few feet it all slammed into the ground as though driven there by a massive, invisible hammer.
Jace's attack had been nothing less than spectacular. He'd launched a sun lance that was bigger around than my waist. I couldn't have managed anything like that without resorting to a peak memory, but Jace apparently was practiced enough to power that monstrosity on nothing more than his baseline memories.
The tail end of Jace's attack had slammed into the mountainside on the other side of the road and vaporized something like a hundred cubic meters of solid rock, but that was nothing compared to what Byron had done. Byron had increased the gravity inside an area more than fifty feet in diameter by such an incredible amount that the road sank more than three inches into the ground in a perfect circle.
Kat looked at me with worry in her eyes and I could have predicted what she was going to say with perfect certainty.
"I guess the two guys who were following us aren't the only ones who know how to play with gravity."
Chapter 9
We stripped the car down of anything useful, moved the weapons and the money into Jace's SUV and then headed back to the house. Dad, Ari and Sandra were waiting downstairs in the secure vault, protected by the wards that Jace had put up when he and Kat first moved in.
It was clear to all of us that we needed to come up with a course of action that would keep us alive if Kyle came after us for real, but Kat and I were just too tired to manage it until after we'd slept. Under other circumstances I probably would have just thought it was coincidence that everyone else chose to stay down in the vault with us until after we woke up, but I knew that wasn't the case right now. We were all scared.
I was still a little groggy when Kat and Byron got into the fight that I should have seen coming from miles away.
"We need somewhere safe to lie low while we figure out what to do next. Take us to Camelot and attune the wards to us so we can take shelter there."
"No."
Byron didn't sound combative, but it was obvious—to me at least—that he wasn't going to back down. I shook the sleep out of my head and stepped in before Kat could completely flip her lid.
"I'm sure you have a reason, Byron. Why are you so reluctant to make the facilities your pantheon built available to us?"
"He'd better have a good reason. We took him in and healed him rather than just letting him bleed out like most other pantheons would have done." She poked him in the chest with her index finger. "Don't think that I didn't notice that your go-to attack is the same gravity distortion effect that nearly got us killed when we were trying to get on the interstate. How many Awakened do you think know that particular effect?"
"I don't know, Kat. It was common knowledge inside my pantheon. One of the earliest joiners brought it with him. My impression is that it's very common in various parts of Asia."
"Wow, that's a convenient excuse if I've ever heard one. I thought you guys didn't use your abilities."
Byron held up a hand. "It took us a period of time to hit upon abstinence as a sustainable method of signature suppression. There was a period of decades in which we were still using, still experimenting with new effects, and it was during that time that I became proficient with that particular effect."
"Come on, you two. You don't actually believe his story, do you?"
Jace shrugged. "He didn't try to overpower me while the two of you were gone. That counts for something in my book. When you throw in the fact that he helped destroy the two guys who were after you and Selene, I think there's a pretty compelling case that we can trust him."
"Yeah, he was so helpful—he waited to attack until after you did so that he wouldn't have his friends' blood on his hands!"
"That's enough, Kat."
The words popped out of me without any conscious decision. I had no right to talk to her like that, and I knew it. Maybe the old Selene had been able to get away with that kind of behavior, but I was so far away from being that woman that it wasn't even funny.
Kat's face was usually fairly guarded. She tended to hide her serious emotions behind a screen of unimportant feelings, but this time I saw exactly what she was thinking. The shock of having me order her around was quickly replaced with anger, but I managed to get my response out before she could tear into me.
"I'm sorry, Kat, I don't know where that came from. You didn't deserve that, but it's equally true that Byron hasn't done anything to deserve having you go at him like that. The truth is that we need him. Our little pantheon is vastly stronger with him than it is without him."
"We've got Sandra."
Sandra had been remarkably quiet, so quiet that I'd forgotten she was even around. I half expected Sandra to flip out too, but she looked like she was in a different world. I wondered what had made her so pensive. Jace had probably said something to her while Kat and I were asleep, but there wasn't time right then to figure out the root cause of her atypical behavior.
"Yes, we have Sandra, but it's going to be years before she'll be in a position to defend herself. Sandra is starting from zero. She doesn't know any effects and even if she did, she doesn't have any memories with which to fuel them. If we get into a fight with a group of three or four people she'll be nothing but a liability and I'm only half a step ahead of her. Byron, on the other hand, knows effects that none of the rest of us remember and based on what he's telling us, he's got hundreds of years of memories swimming around inside his head, just waiting to serve as fuel for effects if things get tight."
I'd tried to be as conciliatory as I could, but the look in Kat's eyes told me that she wasn't ready to let it all blow over.
"Sure, because relative power is the only thing that matters. Jace and Byron should run the show for now—just until you get your legs under you and return to being the world's best researcher—and then Sandra and I will hold your coats and salute on command just like the good little cannon fodder we are."
Kat grabbed Sandra's hand and stormed out of the room with the younger girl following along behind her. I was left in a state of near shock. I'd never expected Kat to take Sandra's side against me. I stood up to follow the two of them, but Jace grabbed my hand and my dad shook his head at me.
"Give her some time, sweetie. I'll go talk to her and see if I can calm her down. You need to stay here with Jace and Byron. We can't let ourselves get bogged down with internal drama, not if the situation is as serious as it seems."
Ari looked back and forth between Jace and the door a couple of times and then stood up and headed out of the room. It broke my heart to see the way she was refusing to meet my eyes.
"You don't have to go, Ari. This concerns you too."
"I know I don't have to leave, but to be honest, I'd rather be by myself right now."
"It's not safe for you to be out in the garage right now."
She finally looked directly at me and nodded. "I know. I'll find a quiet corner down here."
She slipped away before I could say anything else and I was left wondering how I'd managed to empty the room so quickly. I looked around and realized that we'd started out two people short.
"Where are Kregor and Bethany?"
Jace gave me a crooked smile that seemed to say that he knew what I was thinking, that he understood the way that my loyalties to my friends and family were being pulled against the injustice represented by Kat's treatment of Byron.
"They went out to get something to eat. Kregor has a field of wildflowers nearby so they should be relatively safe. They are fast enough to run away fro
m any of the more powerful fae who might be hunting in the area."
I nodded absently as I turned back to Byron. "You never got a chance to answer me. Why is it that you're so opposed to the idea of taking us to Camelot?"
Byron sighed as he ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know if any of you are going to understand this, but I've spent the last several hundred years hiding in one way or another. Up in Helena, inside of Camelot, skulking around in the wilderness, it's all the same thing and it's the wrong answer.
"The group in Helena was the single biggest gathering of Awakened I've ever read about, and we were all fueled by positive emotions. At the time, I was just like everyone else there. I wanted some peace, wanted to live life without constantly looking over my shoulder wondering when the next attack would materialize, but that was the most selfish choice we could have made. We should have been out in the world, working together to stop people like Mephistoles and Kyle.
"Maybe if we'd been a force for good we could have stopped all of this from coming. Instead, we just made the forces of good weaker when they needed us most. We recruited away some of our side's best and brightest and left the rest of you to fight our battle for us."
I considered my words carefully, but there just wasn't any way for what needed to be said not to come across potentially sounding harsh.
"So you're saying that you guys screwed up and now you want us to fight the war that you should have been fighting all along?"
"I guess that is one way of looking at it. I prefer to think of this as me stopping you from repeating my mistake, but I can't argue with your point."
I'd been expecting him to bristle at my criticism, but he shook it off with surprising ease. He wasn't perfect—the mistakes he and the rest of the Helena pantheon had made were evidence of that—but there was a quiet confidence to Byron that I'd never encountered anywhere else.
It was the kind of simple self-assurance that I'd seen a couple of times out of an older woman that Mom had taken care of for a while before Mom had gotten sick. I would have said that it was just a function of having lived so long, but Kat was evidence that long life didn't necessarily infuse someone with a Zen-like understanding of themselves.
Jace had it, but even he fell short of what I felt coming off of Byron. All I could figure was that it was some inherent quality that certain people possessed, a quality that only age was able to bring to the surface.
I was still looking at Byron with a contemplative stare when Jace broke in. "I respect your position, and I think there's some validity to the idea of striking back now while there are still enough unaligned Awakened to have a chance of taking Kyle down, but that idea is going to go over a lot better if you at least leave open the possibility of us sheltering inside Camelot for short periods of time."
Byron gave Jace a sad smile. "I'll consider it, but in the meantime we should create a much more powerful set of wards here. We're past the point where we can hope to remain hidden. It will take a while for the wards to reach their full strength, but the sooner we start, the sooner they'll be of sufficient strength to hold out at least some of our enemies."
"Okay, that's a fair point. Any other ideas you want to share while we're at it?"
"I think that you should try to set up a meeting with someone from the Seelie Court. The Lady if you can manage it."
Jace shook his head. "She won't talk to me. We called upon her for help to get Selene out of Kyle's bunker just a few weeks ago. It went well and she was able to disembody Fenrir at least once, but she seems to make a policy of only helping out once per incarnation. I think she doesn't want the Awakened or our side to depend on her too much."
Byron shrugged as he looked back and forth between Jace and me. I was pretty sure it was just my imagination, but it almost seemed like his gaze rested on me for a fraction of a second longer than it had Jace.
"You never know for sure until you petition to talk to her, but you might as well try. You have nothing to lose by asking and you may just be surprised at her response."
Byron turned to walk out of the room, but stopped in the doorway. "Make sure that you tell her that the petition is coming from all of us."
Chapter 10
Kregor took our petition to the Lady, and then returned two hours later with an invitation to visit her at the Seelie Court's compound in Salt Lake City. I half expected us to leave within an hour of Kregor's return, but it took us two more days to get everything in order so that we could leave.
Kat and I made a trip into the bank to deposit the cashier's checks we'd collected in Denver, while Jace created a new set of interlocking wards that were designed to protect the structure of the house without extending so far out that normal people would stumble into them and be killed. Byron offered to help with that, but Jace politely told him that there was no need.
It wasn't until I saw a flash of satisfaction in Kat's eyes that I realized it was a trust issue. Apparently you could tune wards to allow specific people through, and the creator of the wards could even tune them to allow other people to modify access, but there was no way to exclude a ward's creator from the list of allowed individuals.
Kat was positively gleeful on the way to the bank as she explained that any wards Byron put up in our house would always be a security risk because it was always a possibility that he would lock us out of that section of the house. I understood the concern and I thought it was only prudent for Jace to take that particular precaution, but I didn't like how vindictive Kat was being. She was better than that.
Once the money was all split up between half a dozen different banks and the wards were in place, Byron spent a good chunk of the next day teaching Kat and me how to temporarily suppress our signatures. He and Jace had been right, maintaining a suppression effect wasn't a pleasant experience. It only took me a couple of tries to get the hang of creating the effect, but maintaining it was another matter altogether.
It had taken half a dozen attempts before I was able to hold the effect up past the initial flash of pain that assaulted me as soon as I forced the effect into existence. The sensation wasn't like anything else I'd ever experienced. It wasn't exactly a headache, but that was as close a description as I could come up with. A headache would have been bad enough, but there was also an odd vibration going on inside of my head that set my teeth on edge. It felt like my mind was trying to pull itself in two different directions, and it didn't get any less painful with practice.
After learning how to suppress my signature altogether, I moved on to lessons from Jace on how to shrink down my signature through more conventional means. That wasn't as bad, but even it wasn't the kind of thing I would want to do for hour after hour.
There was no effect, no invisible stream of memories shooting out of the center of my forehead, but it still required sustained concentration to tighten down the metaphysical radar inside of my head that was automatically programmed to try to find others of my kind. By the time I'd been at it for a couple of hours, I felt like someone had given me a squishy ball and told me to hold onto it. At first it was no big deal, but the longer I held onto it the more I wanted to just let go so that my hand could go back to a relaxed state.
Jace briefly had me play around with flaring out my signature in an attempt to increase my sensory range, but I could tell maintaining that for hours was going to be just as wearing. The cherry on top of everything was the fact that once we got done I was told to unwind for a while so I would be ready to shrink my signature down for hours while we drove to Salt Lake.
By the time I wandered upstairs and changed into some workout clothes, I just wanted to scream. I did a couple of miles on a treadmill in the hopes that physical exertion would take my mind off of my mental pain, but that just left me aching and sore both inside and out.
We left the next morning as soon as Dad and Ari woke up, since they were the two who needed the most sleep. We could have left before then and let the two of them sleep in the back of the RV, but none of us were in to
o much of a hurry to get on the road. Realistically we should have probably done all of the signature manipulation stuff as soon as Kregor got back, which would have let us set out a full twenty-four hours earlier, but we all felt a lot better knowing that Jace's new wards had been able to crystalize for an extra day.
They still wouldn't be enough to hold off any kind of determined assault, but between them and the older, more established ward we figured most attackers wouldn't be able to make it into the vault in less than a day and a half. That still wasn't ideal, but unless Kyle tasked a significant force to go after our assets, it meant that our journals would be safe while we drove back from Utah.
The trip to Salt Lake was just as unpleasant as expected. Jace, Kat and Byron took turns flaring out their signature in an attempt to make sure that they would be able to sense any nearby enemies. Meanwhile, the rest of us kept our signatures reduced down to the point that we weren't little metaphysical suns yelling for attention.
The hope was that whoever was flaring their signature would be able to spot the bad guys well before anyone got close enough to detect the rest of us, but that was far from a sure thing, so the rest of us keeping our signatures coiled tightly around us helped buy more time for the scout to detect any nearby signatures.
We made it nearly two hours without any incidents, and Kat got surlier and surlier with every passing minute. Jace had warned me the day before that Kat wasn't a very happy traveler, but I still hadn't expected it to be so bad.
I got why she was unhappy, but it was still all I could do to keep from pointing out that at least she got to switch off between flaring and contracting her signature. I didn't get even that much of a break and by the time we stopped for gas the first time, I wanted to slam my head into the window next to me.
At least I didn't have to drive. I wasn't sure I could have controlled my signature and still kept Jace's SUV on the road. All of the pain and frustration felt like it was worth it though when Jace first reported contact with another Awakened.
