by Dean Murray
Dad nodded. "I'll relay the plan to Ari so she's aware and can brief the others. It might be helpful though to mix up who takes a break together."
I could see that Dad was trying very hard not to say that he didn't want to be stuck in the middle of another yelling match between Kat and Byron, which was smart. Kat was probably in too deep to overhear anything we were saying, but there was no guarantee of that.
Jace gave Dad a sympathetic smile, but he likewise didn't mention the reason for the suggestion. "Okay, that's up to you then. Byron is likely to need a break first again unless Sandra figures out how to avoid fighting him, so when he needs a break just be sure to wake up Selene or me."
Jace turned toward me and reached for my hand again. "Are you ready to do this?"
I looked back at Bethany, who was still sleeping peacefully on the back seat, and then nodded. "Yeah, let's get on with it. The sooner we suppress our signatures the more likely it is that the bad guys won't be able to catch us."
"Assuming they're bad guys. Peter, wait until we both have our suppression fields up and then go ahead and slow down. That should cause the other guys to overshoot us because they'll expect us to continue on at the same speed."
I heard my dad's response, but it didn't register; I'd already envisioned the invisible sphere of a suppression field and forced it into existence. The break had definitely helped, but there wasn't anything magic about that. It was just like dropping down into a walk during the middle of a run. The slower pace was nice, it let you catch your breath and made you feel like you could pick the pace back up and run again when the time came, but the breaks were never long enough to let you maintain the pace you'd started out at.
The lactic acid might have mostly cleared out, but only mostly, and the fuel inside of the muscles was still depleted.
The first few minutes of having my signature suppressed weren't too bad, but I could feel the mental exhaustion building back up to where it had been before and the process seemed to be happening more quickly than before.
Sandra must have gotten her unconscious resistance to the suppression field under control—that or I was just doing a poorer job keeping track of time than I had the first time around—because the pain eventually exceeded what I'd been enduring just before Jace had told me I could take a break the first time around. I knew I was in trouble when I started losing my grip on the static-filled room inside my head where I'd taken refuge.
I started picking up bits and pieces of conversation between Dad and Ari. She was unhappy with our new, slower pace. She thought it was a mistake, that we should have continued on as fast as we could go, but Dad wasn't willing to overrule Jace.
Hearing their conversation was just the first sign that I was really struggling. At some point along the way, I felt Bethany land on my shoulder and ask my dad what was going on. By then the mental agony was starting to bleed through into physical agony in the rest of my body.
Bethany weighed next to nothing, but even the feeling of my clothes rubbing against my skin was distressing and her few ounces of weight felt like an icepick pressed against my shoulder.
I wanted to scream, but I was worried if I opened my mouth and gave into the urge that it would be the last straw.
A low keening filled the car, and it took me several seconds—time that felt like an eternity—to realize that the sound was coming from me.
"Sweetie, go ahead and take a break. It's what Jace would be telling you to do."
I shook my head violently and Bethany grabbed onto my hair like her life depended on it. She'd never had a problem being heard, and this time her mouth was only inches away from my ear.
"You have to take a break, Selene. If you push too far it can cause permanent damage. I know—I was there when Byron taught Jace how to suppress his signature."
I tried to remember if Byron had ever said anything about that to me, but I couldn't seem to think past the pain. The only thing I could hold inside my mind was the fact that Bethany and my dad had both given me permission to let go. They had given me permission and I hurt so badly that I wanted nothing more than that.
I dropped the suppression field with a gasp of relief as something inside my head clicked into place like a dislocated shoulder being reset. My signature flared out without any conscious thought on my part and I could suddenly feel Awakened all around us.
Maybe Jace or Byron were capable of differentiating between different signatures—it had never come up in conversation—but I wasn't. I didn't know which of the signatures I could feel surrounding us were the two that had been close to us a few minutes before, and which ones were the two that had been moving in to support the original pair. All I knew was that the two that had grown to four during our last break had become six now.
My eyes popped open and I grabbed Kat and shook her with one hand while reaching for my dad's walkie-talkie with the other.
"Bethany! Get Jace up. Ari, you have to get Byron awake. They're too close—we're right on top of them."
Dad looked back at me with fear in his eyes, but I knew it wasn't fear of what was going to happen to him, it was fear of what was going to happen to Ari and me. I reached out again, flaring my signature even though there wasn't any need—not when the bad guys were this close—and tried to orient myself against the bundles of energy I could feel around us.
"Floor it, Dad. There's only one of them ahead of us, everyone else is behind us."
The engine on the big SUV howled as Dad pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and then I felt Jace and Kat both drop their suppression fields at the same time that Byron and Sandra popped into existence behind us.
We were closing on the closest Awakened at an incredible pace and I could only imagine what was going through their mind as they realized that they'd gone from being the hunter to the hunted. They'd thought that they were in control, that their pantheon had a three-to-one margin of superiority, and now they were cut off from their group by not two, but five of us.
They probably should have tried to outrun us, or failing that they should have pulled off to the side and tried to keep the other cars on the road between us and them until we'd flown past, hopefully too fast to permit anything more than a passing exchange of attacks. They chose neither course of action.
We were gaining too quickly—maybe at thirty or forty miles per hour. We were close enough that I finally had a sense of which car they were in. I pointed at a red Acura off to our right as Bethany landed on my shoulder.
"That one, Dad. Watch out, they might try to run us off the road."
Even as I yelled out the warning I realized that it was much more likely that the driver of the other car would choose a different way to try to kill us. My window was already unrolling, which was good since I was pretty sure things were about to get dicey. I reached inside of myself, hoping to find a pool of happiness and rage that I could draw on, but worried that Bethany's warning hadn't come in time, that I'd somehow permanently damaged my ability to work effects.
I found my emotional reserve, and it was as powerful as ever—not surprising given just how many reasons there were to be mad. The wind blowing into the car and the sound of the wheels on the pavement were all the pulse I needed, and I amped my time sense up to five times normal before the window made it even a quarter of the way down.
There was a yelp from Bethany as the full force of the wind hit her and nearly threw her completely free of my shoulder. I reached up and grabbed her legs, securing her so she wouldn't be blown free of the car, and then I saw that the driver's side window on the other car was already down and a hand was slowly stretching out toward us.
There was the faintest sense of pressure, a change almost more imagined than felt, and then something inside of me reacted to it while my conscious mind was still trying to decide what it was I'd felt. Black pulses of energy like concentric rings of death shot towards our vehicle, but they were met by a rippling barrier just like the one I'd created the last time we'd been in a
car chase.
I felt the barrier tremble from the force of the attack it had just intercepted, and only then realized it had been me who'd created the barrier. It was a shock—I had no more idea this time how I'd done it than I'd had the last time—but there wasn't time to question what I'd done. I made a throwing motion and my barrier shot forward and slammed into the Acura with enough force to crumple the frame.
A split second later two sun lances tore into the wreckage and created a shockwave of destruction that would have ruined the paint job on both of our vehicles if not for the shimmer of energy off to my left as Kat created a new barrier to shield all of us from the rain of destruction that Jace and Byron had just unleashed.
I looked forward to confirm that Jace was okay, and saw that he was already focused on the next task. He grabbed the walkie-talkie out of my hand and pressed the transmit button.
"Destroy the road behind us! It's the only way to stop them from following us."
I grabbed his arm and pulled the radio back towards me. "Try not to kill anyone, the rest of the drivers on the road with us haven't done anything."
"Acknowledged. Let me see what I can do."
As Dad rolled my window back up from his console, I turned and gently set Bethany down on my headrest. Byron stuck his hand out of the window and used a narrow beam of liquid golden light to start digging furrows in the road, first one lane and then the other. Once he had enough of a trench dug to slow down most of the cars following along behind us, he destroyed one entire lane of traffic for a distance of more than a hundred feet. I expected that to be the end of things, but a few seconds later he destroyed a big chunk of the other lane. The road was still travelable, but nobody was going to be driving very fast, not when they were going to have to switch between single lanes like that.
I sat back down in my seat and found Jace looking back at me. "Good work, Selene. If you hadn't put up that barrier there wouldn't have been anything left of us but twisted wreckage."
"It would be a lot more impressive if I hadn't been the one who dropped my suppression field early and lit up a metaphysical flashing neon sign pointing right to us. I don't understand why I was having such a hard time keeping it together."
Bethany flew over and hovered less than an inch in front of Jace's face. "It's a good thing I woke up when I did! Why on earth didn't you and Byron tell Selene that maintaining that effect could result in a loss of her ability to work effects? She was shaking and cold by the time I convinced her that she had to drop the effect. It's like you wanted her dead."
Jace looked like he'd been slapped. "I wanted nothing of the kind. Byron said that a person's signature becomes more dense with age, but is reset if they are killed and assume a new incarnation. He said that Sandra and Selene were the two who should have the least problem with a suppression field. He and I talked to Kat, but there didn't seem to be any point of bringing it up to Selene, since it would just be one more thing for her to worry about."
Kat grabbed the walkie-talkie and turned it off. "There you go. We finally have proof that he's lying. We need to come up with a plan for how we're going to get rid of him. My vote is for us to wait until just before we arrive at the Seelie Court. Tell him that we need to stop for fuel, and then once he's out of the car the three of us attack him all at once."
I started shaking my head even before she finished talking. "We don't have any proof that he was lying. Maybe there was something else going on. Heck, maybe I was doing the effect wrong. I'm not going to help assassinate him over nothing more than this."
Jace jumped in. "She's right, Kat. What you're talking about would be wrong, but if you're not able to see that anymore, then consider the fact that Byron knows things that we don't know. We can learn new effects from him, which makes him valuable. Throw in the fact that so far his intelligence about Kyle staging a massive takeover has been correct, and the last thing we should be considering is killing him."
Kat looked back and forth between Jace and me for several seconds, but in the end her gaze rested on my dad. She was scared, but she wasn't just scared for herself anymore. She was scared for him too.
"Fine. We'll do it your way, but when he turns on us I just hope we all survive so I can say I told you so."
Chapter 11
Our arrival in Salt Lake turned out to be anticlimactic. Byron's destruction of sections of the road had slowed down traffic behind us to the point that we easily outdistanced the bad guys, and we went back to traveling with one person flared out so they could serve as a lookout. We didn't sense anyone else until we were within a few miles of the city.
Jace kept telling me that the Seelie Court wouldn't allow Kyle's people to operate inside of their city with impunity, that the Court's outposts were always neutral locations where even feuding pantheons weren't allowed overt hostilities, but my stomach still tied itself into knots with every mile that passed, bringing us closer to whoever it was that we could all feel up ahead of us.
As we got closer we were able to sense three more Awakened off in the distance. Jace and Kat both agreed that one of the three was at the location of the entrance to the court. That probably meant that the Lady had stationed an Awakened at each of the four cardinal directions and then kept a fifth close at hand.
It wouldn't help in the slightest against members of the Unseelie Court, but it meant that she would have plenty of warning when it came to the other half of Kyle's forces. Any Awakened approaching the city would be sensed and her lieutenants would be able to dispatch a force to intercept. It made sense, but I still let out a scream as seven men and women in glittering armor dropped out of the sky, instantly surrounding both vehicles.
Dad locked up the brakes to avoid crashing into the tall, redheaded woman directly in front of us, and Ari managed to get the second SUV stopped without rear-ending us, but both collisions were avoided by the slimmest of margins. Bethany squealed as the fae warriors landed, but I wasn't sure if she'd been startled, or if she was just extremely excited to see others of her kind.
As surprised as she was, I was even more shocked. "Have things really gotten that bad, that they'll risk stopping us in plain view like this? I know the government is mostly concentrating on Kyle's terrorist attacks, but surely they'll notice something like this…"
Jace gave me an absentminded smile. "They're invisible to everyone else. You, Kat, Bethany and I can see them because fae can't hide from us Awakened. Luckily they thought to make themselves visible to your dad or we'd be needing to replace yet another vehicle."
"So what do we do now? They are looking a little edgy."
"We all get out of the car, slowly and without making any threatening gestures, but go ahead and amp yourself up slightly. I recognize a couple of them, so it's almost certain that we're dealing with Seelie fae, but it never hurts to be prepared."
Kat grimaced. "Plus they may have revoked our invitation while we were traveling."
I frowned at Bethany. That probably wasn't fair—it wasn't like she was the one who had revoked our safe passage—but she was the closest proxy and the thought of having made that terrifying trip for no reason stoked my anger to new heights.
Jace frowned at Kat. "The Lady is one of the most honorable beings on the planet. She's never done anything like that before."
"Yeah, well, in case you haven't noticed, this isn't exactly the normal state of affairs. The Seelie Court has to be freaking out right now. They've always been fewer in number than the Unseelie Court. The only thing that's allowed them to stand them off for so long is the fact that the Unseelie fae spend most of their time looking for ways to stab each other in the back."
Jace reached for his door. "This conversation isn't productive. Everybody out."
I amped myself up to three times normal speed and wished that Jace had given me permission to grab one of the weapons from the hidden compartment under the back seat. The fae warriors were even more intimidating once we were standing outside and able to see just how tall they all were.
The last time I'd measured myself I'd been just under five ten, which was tall for a girl. I rarely had to look up to anyone unless they were in heels. These girls were all in flats and every single one of them was at least six foot tall and built like their lives depended on being in peak physical condition. The guys were even worse. They were at least six-two and their muscles had muscles. The Lady had gone into combat with Fenrir completely unarmed, but each of these warriors was decked out with at least one massive sword or ax.
They intimidated the hell out of me, but Jace walked up to the redhead and took our group in with a gesture as Kregor flew up behind him.
"I'm Jace. My companions and I are all expected. Kregor was told that the Lady was willing to see us."
The redhead nodded. "I'm Intravil. We were told to expect you. Park your vehicles and we will all walk to the nearest entrance."
Jace motioned Kat and me off to one side as he headed back to the SUV. A few minutes later both SUVs were parked and Jace was asking about weapons. We were told that weapons were permitted. Kat, Jace and Byron all armed themselves with a variety of daggers—all small enough to conceal underneath their clothes—but I was pretty sure that was more for show than anything else.
I'd come to realize that Kat never went anywhere without some kind of weapon secreted on her person. Given the fact that we'd been heading through enemy territory, I was pretty sure that Jace and Byron were both packing too. I'd even considered carrying a knife, but ultimately had decided against it because I knew nothing about using short blades.
Amping yourself up to three or four times normal speed would do a lot to make up for those kinds of deficiencies, but I still had no business getting that close to someone who was trying to kill me. I needed a long sword—that or I needed to stay far enough back I could use a sun lance. The only problem was there was no way for me to walk around Salt Lake City with a massive sword strapped to my back.
