The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  Under normal circumstances the best we could have done was all shrink down our signatures as much as possible and change directions in the hope of avoiding whoever was serving as the scout for the other side. Jace said that sometimes that kind of thing worked and the team that was trying to be inconspicuous managed to stay just far enough away from their enemies to skirt around them.

  Sometimes it didn't work and the pursuers were able to stay in range of their targets. When that happened, things usually got ugly fast. If the balance of forces were close to the same then the pantheon that controlled the area typically tried to bring the interlopers to bay.

  I asked him how that usually went down and his answer wasn't very reassuring. Apparently, back in the day, it had been common to try to lose a pursuing group by skirting into the edge of a third pantheon's territory in the hopes that the bigger group would decide against antagonizing their neighbors.

  These days, now that cell phones made the coordination of widely dispersed groups possible in real time, that wasn't as valid a tactic because it was far too easy for the pursuers to just call the neighboring pantheon and set up an ambush. Apparently the chance to kill others of our kind was usually enough to bring even bitter enemies to a temporary cease fire.

  I'd known that the Awakened culture was by-and-large poisonous, but I hadn't realized just how vicious the war really was. Jace and Kat had been so pleasant, and even Kyle had seemed very civilized. I hadn't realized just how desperate everyone was to bring down anyone who might someday be a threat. The most effective way to guarantee your survival was to make sure that you were the oldest, most knowledgeable, most memory-rich demigod around.

  No wonder Byron had chosen to come to Jace and Kat. Kat was acting like a borderline psychopath where our new member was concerned, but I was starting to realize that she was a picture of restraint in comparison to most of our kind.

  The briefing that I'd gotten in the hour or two before my family woke up hadn't exactly put me at ease about our trip, but Jace and even Kat had stressed several times that we now had an advantage that no other pantheon they'd ever heard about possessed.

  I'd put on a plastic smile and tried to act reassured, but I wasn't—not until Jace called out that he'd just sensed someone up ahead of us and I reached for the image of a perfectly reflective sphere and pushed memories into the effect. Even as I forced the signature suppressor into existence, I was still terrified that something would go wrong. The list of potential problems had burned itself into my memory hours before.

  None of the others could sense signatures while they were maintaining their own effects. That meant that they wouldn't know if my control started to slip, or if my effect had been improperly constructed in the first place.

  Even if I did everything perfectly, there was still a chance that it wouldn't be enough. In order to be safe we had to make it out of range of whoever Jace had just sensed. If they were feeling particularly aggressive that wouldn't be as much of a problem because it would mean that they were already headed in our direction, thinking that we'd merely turned around and were fleeing, back in the direction we'd come from.

  If they were by themselves—either an interloper like us, or just away from the rest of their pantheon—then they would probably shrink their signature down as far as they could, which would make it harder to find them at the same time it drastically reduced their sensing range. If that was the case, we'd be home free.

  The more likely scenario though was that they were part of a pantheon and they would hold their position while their friends moved in to support them. That was bad because it meant that we had to cover twice as much distance before we would be out of their range.

  Kat already had her eyes closed in an effort to retreat far enough inside herself to block out the discomfort of maintaining her signature suppression effect, but Jace looked back at me and managed a smile.

  "It's going to be okay, Selene. Your dad has the radar detector going and we're doing twenty over the limit. It's not going to be a trip to Disneyland, but it will be endurable. We'll make it through to the other side of whatever territory this pantheon claims and be outside of their range by the time our signatures pop back into existence."

  I looked back at Kat's SUV, the one with Ari, Sandra and Byron in it, and then gave Jace my best smile. He wasn't fooled any more than my dad was. Dad held himself back to just casting worried glances at me through the rear-view mirror, but Jace went ahead and verbalized the things we were all thinking.

  "You're worried that Byron won't be able to maintain the suppression field around both him and Sandra."

  "Yeah. I know he said that her signature was small enough to not add in a ton of extra strain, but I'm already starting to feel the effects of concealing just myself. If he can't keep it together then there's a good chance that none of us will make it out of here alive."

  Jace reached back and held my hand. "It's going to be okay, Selene. Byron has been doing this longer than any of the rest of us. He has a better idea of his capabilities than we do. Besides, this isn't a normal relocation op.

  "Usually Kat and I were hanging out in the wind, hoping that we could make it across hundreds of miles of territory without being seen, because we knew there weren't any reinforcements waiting for us at our destination. This time there are twice as many of us, and we're headed towards the Seelie Court's Utah location. We've been invited there, so if things take a turn for the worst we can still make a run for it—all we have to do is get into Salt Lake City and make one call and we'll have an escort waiting to scare off any pursuers."

  "Yeah, I guess that's true. After seeing the Lady take down Fenrir I certainly wouldn't want to tangle with her—I'm probably just nervous about the fact that the phones are all working again. This would be a lot less scary if we didn't have to worry about the bad guys being able to call in reinforcements of their own."

  Jace gave my hand another squeeze and then closed his eyes so he could concentrate on keeping his suppression effect up. I half expected for him to let go of my hand, but he didn't. In a perfect world, he would have climbed out of his seat so that he could come back and sit with me. In the real world, one that included Kat sitting next to me and my dad driving, Jace holding my hand from several feet away was probably as good as I was going to get.

  I gave my dad a brave smile and then closed my eyes. Jace and Kat had been right, it was easier to focus on the effect without extra visual stimuli, but the good was simultaneously offset with bad. Without any other distractions there was nothing to dull the edge of the mounting discomfort the effect was causing me.

  The headache started out as unpleasant and only got worse with each passing minute. The vibration seemed to penetrate deeper and deeper as we drove. Within a few minutes I started wondering if my head was going to shake completely loose.

  Most Awakened with a flared signature could sense other Awakened with flared signatures out to a distance of seventy miles. If the person being hunted had their signature in a relaxed state that distance dropped down to around fifty miles. The radius of detection dropped all the way down to around thirty miles for an Awakened who was actively trying to compress their signature down as small as possible.

  Jace's signature had been flared out when he'd detected the potential threat up ahead of us, which meant that we'd probably been no more than fifty miles away from whoever was up there. In order to be completely safe from someone who remained in the same spot we were going to need to cover the fifty miles between us and them and then an additional thirty miles.

  Dad was driving fast, but that was still the better part of a full hour's worth of driving. The best I'd ever managed before this was twenty minutes and I'd wanted to cut my own throat by the end of that.

  Byron had been confident that I'd have an easier time of it when our lives were on the line, but I was starting to realize that he hadn't been telling the full truth. Maintaining my effect wasn't any easier, I was just a whole heck of a lot more motivate
d.

  I forced my pain and discomfort off into one section of my mind, and sealed them up behind thick walls and a door that would have made the average bank vault jealous.

  It worked for a while. The rest of the world faded out of existence and I only occasionally surfaced up far enough to hear my dad as he counted down the miles. The first twenty felt like torture. I thought I'd hit my limit on several occasions, but each time as the pain crested I told myself that I had to hold on for just a little bit longer, that this was about more than just me and what I was going through.

  Around mile forty I realized that I'd been fooling myself for the first thirty miles. I'd thought I was being tortured, but that had been nothing compared to the new levels of agony I'd discovered in just the last few seconds.

  I wanted to give up. I already had tears silently streaming out of the corners of my eyes, and I could hear my dad asking me if I was going to be okay, but I was doing everything I could to block out the sound of his voice. If I acknowledged my dad I was only one short step away from him telling me to stop trying, from telling me that it was okay to give into the desire to drop my effect and expose all of us to life-threatening danger.

  It was getting harder and harder not to pay attention to his voice and then suddenly I realized that he wasn't asking me anything, he was telling us something.

  "Jace, Ari is on the radio. She says that Byron is having a hard time keeping Sandra's signature suppressed. She's unconsciously fighting him. He's not sure how much longer he can keep his effect up. What do you want us to do?"

  Dad had to repeat his question two more times and I had to squeeze Jace's hand several times before we got any kind of response. Even then, Jace sounded like he was at the bottom of a deep hole, barely able to hear us.

  "How long has it been?"

  "We just hit mile fifty-five. If the bad guys headed towards our last known position then we've got a good chance that you all can drop your effects and nobody will be the wiser…"

  "Yeah, but if they just stayed where they were then we're basically sitting on their lap."

  Dad was silent for a second. "It didn't sound to me like Byron has much of a choice."

  "Okay, tell him to drop the suppression field. If he doesn't sense anyone then the rest of us will do the same. If there's someone else out there then we're setting ourselves up for a long chase, but there isn't anything to be done about it now."

  Jace squeezed my hand. "Hold on, Selene. Just for another few minutes."

  I tried to nod, but wasn't sure I managed to do anything more than just rock back and forth in my seat. Coming back to reality enough to listen to the conversation between Jace and my dad had made the pain worse. I'd found a place underneath the pain, a place full of white static, but the walls to that place were getting thinner and thinner. Dealing with the pain was taking something out of me, something important.

  It felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds later that Jace shook my shoulder.

  "Drop the effect, Selene. There are two enemy signatures ten miles back from us. You need to clear your head so that you'll be ready to drop out of sight again before they catch up to us."

  I shook my head. "I'm okay. Have Kat collect herself first—I can wait."

  I wasn't actually sure of that, but I knew that Kat was more brittle right now than I was. With all of the other pressures on her, she might not bounce back if she got pushed too far trying to suppress her signature.

  "That's what she said too. She wanted me to have you take a break first, but she was responsive and you weren't so I made her go first. She and Byron both got five minutes to pull themselves back together and now they and Sandra are all in hiding again. It's your turn."

  It took several seconds for his words to register, and even then part of me was convinced that I was hallucinating exactly what I wanted to hear, that I was about to betray every single person who mattered to me. Maybe I would have stayed there stubbornly refusing to let my suppression field lapse until my ears and eyes started bleeding, if not for the fact that Jace was holding my hand.

  I was capable of a lot of things. I fully believed that my mind could make me hear whatever it thought I needed to hear for the pain to go away, but nothing was capable of counterfeiting the way it felt when Jace was touching me. It had been my box of static that had kept me sane inside of my own little preview of hell, but it had been the feeling of Jace's hand on mine, the sense of peace that trickled from the contact, that had given me the strength to find that temporary sanctuary.

  Jace's thumb caressed my hand again and I knew that was real. He wouldn't have been able to manage even that simple display of affection if he was buried in the same agony I was currently experiencing.

  I let the suppression field fade and opened my eyes. The desire to flare my signature out was almost overpowering, but I resisted until Jace nodded at me.

  "It's okay, flare it out. That will help you clear your mind more quickly."

  It was like crawling out of a tiny box after being crammed inside for hours. It felt good, but it hurt all at the same time as mental muscles refused to stretch and relax. It only took me a second to orient myself and find the two Awakened Jace had warned me about.

  "Wait, I can feel the two closer enemies, but there are also two more not very far behind them."

  "Yeah, we all felt them too. That's bad news because it means there's a chance we'll end up fighting equal numbers."

  "Yeah, except that fight won't be equal because I still don't know what I'm doing."

  My dad gave me another concerned look, but Jace just flashed one of his trademark smiles. It was such a relief to see it that it took me a second to realize why it felt wrong. The smile wasn't different, but the situation wasn't one that called for happiness or levity.

  "I wouldn't go quite that far, but I'll agree that an engagement isn't ideal right now. The good news is that everyone is either behind us or far enough away that we have a good chance of getting ahead of them before they make it to the interstate."

  I double-checked everyone's position and the muscles in my neck and shoulders relaxed slightly as I realized he was right.

  "Great, so we can just run then and we'll be fine?"

  "Yeah, we could. The other option would be to try to lure the closest two Awakened into an ambush and take them out before they realized they were up against twice their own number."

  I instinctively shied away from the idea, but the more I thought about it the more I could see the appeal to it. If we were really headed into a war, there was something to be said for taking out two of Kyle's people while they were cut off and unable to stand up to our superior numbers.

  "Do we know for sure that whoever is out there is working with Kyle?"

  Jace shook his head. "No. Kat and I haven't been back in the States for long enough to know the lay of the land after so long away. Back in the day this was the territory of a fairly combative pantheon."

  "Combative good, or combative bad?"

  Dad's question echoed my own. Jace shrugged. "We aren't that much different than normal people, Peter. The group that was here back before we left wasn't always good or bad either one. Mostly they were just driven by neutral emotions and very interested in preserving their territory. There's no telling if this is them or not, though."

  "Then we need to run, Jace. Every fight I've been in so far has been terrifying. I'll do it again if that's what it takes to get us all away safely, but we can't afford to kill people we might end up needing in the fight against Kyle and the Unseelie fae."

  Jace considered my words for a second before nodding. "That was my inclination too, but I didn't want to make a final decision without talking to you. If we decide to run it means that we're going to spend a lot more time suppressing our signatures. That isn't going to be any fun."

  "I know, but that's still my vote. What did Kat and Byron say?"

  Dad's chuckle was pretty humorless. "Kat wanted to ambush the two closest ones a
nd then head after the remaining two if we thought we had any chance of catching up to them. Byron said that the group we were probably dealing with could go either way in the fight with Kyle, so he voted for avoiding them. It was a very…enthusiastic discussion."

  I could only imagine. I should have thought to ask Byron very first thing about the pantheon that held the territory we were in, but then again it all still came down to a question of trust. I was mostly willing to trust Byron, so hearing his recommendation made me feel even better about my vote to make a run for it. Kat didn't trust him, so she wanted to do exactly the opposite thing he'd recommended.

  Jace interrupted my thoughts. "I'll bet it was a lot more than just enthusiastic. I'm sorry you had to be caught in the middle of that. What did Ari and Sandra say? What's your vote, Peter?"

  My dad shrugged. "Ari and Sandra seemed to mostly want to get somewhere safe. I can't blame them. Being in the kind of fight like the one you described between the three of you and Mephistoles sounds just as terrifying as Selene indicated. More so even for those of us who can't do anything to affect the outcome."

  "Okay, noted. What about you?"

  My dad looked at the rearview mirror again and met my eyes. "I want whatever is going to make my daughters safest in the long term. If that's running, then I'm all for it. If that means we need to set up an ambush and I need to try to take a tire iron to the back of somebody's head, then we should do that."

  Jace sighed, and for the first time I realized just how much he was dreading being forced to throw a suppression field back up. It was easy to get lost in the fact that I didn't want to go back into that pain-filled state. I'd lost sight of the fact that Jace wasn't any more excited about it than I was.

  "All right. We'll make a run for it, but we'll do it carefully. Peter, please stay close to the speed limit. Five or ten over is fine—the goal is not to stand out, so flow of traffic is best. Keep an eye out for anyone racing past us—that's likely to be our pursuers. If that happens it's okay, we just want to know so we can time our breaks. As long as we don't take a break when they are within a few hundred yards of us then we've got a good chance of making it out of here without any kind of confrontation."