The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  Towards the end of the third hour, Bethany zipped back into the living room and disappeared through the portal for several seconds before returning with a blond fairy who was almost as wide as he was tall.

  That was when I first noticed that I felt some kind of…kinship with some of the fae around me. It was hard to describe. I'd felt like I could trust Bethany almost from the first time we'd met, but now I felt much the same way with Intravil despite the fact that she was still one of the scariest…beings I'd ever come across.

  Maybe that could be explained by the fact that I'd just spent the last several hours in her company—sort of—and that she'd been the one who'd taken us to see the Lady. I had a hard time believing that though because I wasn't usually very trusting—being picked on for years by someone everybody else thought was some kind of perfect angel did that to you.

  As weird as that was, it was nothing compared to the crazy, almost irresistible urge I was feeling to trust the guy who was standing next to Intravil like he half expected to have to jump in front of a bullet for her.

  I was still shaking my head, still struggling to understand what was going on when Bethany buzzed back through the portal and stopped off next to Intravil for a second before darting over to me.

  "Come on, Selene. It's time for all of us to go through the portal."

  "Wait, why? What was the point of coming here in the first place if we were just going to go back into the portal anyway?"

  "You all got…a kind of overdose from being there while the blood oath was going on. You would have still recovered, but it would have taken three or four times as long if you'd stayed inside. By coming back to the normal world you were able to bleed all of that foreign energy off in time to be ready for what comes next."

  I rolled my eyes at her. "Yeah, funny thing about that—nobody has bothered to tell me what comes next. You've been running around who knows where and everyone else seems to have a job to do, but the rest of us have been stuck here cooling our heels with no idea what's going on."

  Bethany backed away from me as though buying herself room because she was afraid I was going to lose it. "Whoa. Settle down there, cowgirl. It's been an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing for the last little while. I'm sorry I didn't say anything before now, but it's not safe to talk out here where Kyle could be spying on us. We need to get back inside the Seelie Court where we're safe and then I'll tell you everything."

  I frowned, but stood up and then helped Jace to his feet as well while Dad helped Kat and Ari helped Byron. I was turning back to help Sandra, but the new guy, the fairy who was roughly the size of a house, beat me over there.

  We went through the portal one after another, and less than a minute later we were all on the other side and I was realizing that Bethany had been right. I could still feel the buzzing in the air that had started at the same time as the blood oath ceremony. It wasn't as bad now, but it was still going to give me a headache if I stayed here for very long.

  "Okay, short stuff, what's going on?"

  Bethany shook her head and motioned me off to one side as though she didn't fully trust the rest of the fae who were standing there with us. Jace and the others followed us over, which meant that the guy helping Sandra walk came along too, but Bethany didn't seem worried about him listening in.

  "So here's the deal. You're the only Awakened who've ever witnessed a blood oath. Please don't tell anyone about what you saw—in fact, it would be awesome if you could leave it out of your journals."

  We all looked at each other and, once I'd received nods from everyone, I turned back to Bethany.

  "Agreed, now spill it."

  "A blood oath is a way of binding a group of fae to a common purpose. It sounds like you could feel the memories that were being released, but what you didn't know is that the ceremony takes those memories and uses them to create a kind of living booby trap. If I were to go back on what I promised, if I failed to do my best to fight this war, then the power I donated to the ceremony will return to me and expend itself destroying many times that amount of my accumulated memories."

  I blinked a couple of times, too shocked at first to get any words out. "So what, you've all made a suicide pact?"

  "Not exactly, but sort of. It's like the Lady said. The rest of them donated more power than I did, but they had a lot more to start out with. They'll lose a lot, but they'll survive the loss unless they end up being disembodied a lot before that happens."

  Jace was still shaking his head. "Why would the Lady ask her people to do that? More importantly, why would anyone agree to that?"

  Bethany nodded in Byron's direction. "She did it because she needs to know for sure who she can trust. We're about to head off to Camelot and bring down the most powerful wards in the history of the world so we can feed that power into any fae who happen to be in the area. You have to remember that even the Lady can't be positive that all of the Seelie fae are really good guys.

  "The portal wardens she's as sure of as she can be of anyone—if she wasn't then she never would have given them control over an access point into the court. It's been a long time since a new portal warden was added, so the odds are good that they are all loyal—that they are really Seelie—but for everyone else all bets are off.

  "She's recalled most of the Seelie fae all over the world. What you all just saw in Salt Lake is happening in almost every Seelie outpost, but it's all a big diversion. While the biggest chunk of our people are headed directly towards Kyle and the Unseelie fae, her most trusted core—the portal wardens and the warriors who just took part in the blood oath—will be headed to Camelot where we'll all absorb every ounce of power in those wards.

  "Sandra, Ari and Peter can all stay here where they are safe. The rest of us need to get moving or we'll be left behind."

  Byron grimaced. "She won't leave us behind. I'm the only one who can bring down the wards."

  Bethany nodded. "That's true, but I'm in constant communication with her—and with every other fae who added their blood to the oath stone. Saying that the Lady is getting antsy is an understatement. You'd have to invent an entirely new word to describe the urgency she's feeling."

  A second later Intravil stepped through the portal and headed in our direction. "You're wasting time! You were all supposed to be halfway to the new portal by now." She pointed at the big guy who was helping Sandra. "You take her and the humans to where the food is being assembled. The rest of you come this way, we're running out of time to get to the portal."

  I looked at Kat, Jace and Byron and shook my head. "They can't. It's all they can do to stand on their own—they aren't going to be able to walk to wherever the portal is."

  She turned her unsettling eyes on me and nodded. "Yes, but help is nearly here."

  Before I could ask her what she meant, a trio of impacts brought me around to see three of the warriors I recognized from the clearing earlier stepping away from their landing spots.

  "Don't drop the scepter, Selene. You're going to need it."

  Before I could ask Intravil what she meant, she wrapped an arm around my waist and threw herself forward with enough force that I thought for a second that everything below my hips had been left behind. It was the kind of impossible stunt you sometimes saw on cartoons or movies. We went from motionless to hurtling through the air in a blink of an eye, and I was convinced that we were going to crash into one of the pillars, but we shot between them and then her wings unfurled with a snap.

  Bethany's wings were clear like dragonfly wings despite being shaped differently. There was an iridescent sparkle to them that was amazing, but she had nothing on Intravil's wings.

  They were shaped broader and shorter than Bethany's—more like a butterfly than a dragonfly—but the really amazing thing was that they seemed to be nothing more than translucent planes of force. They were incredibly beautiful, and the way that they flexed in the wind was both amazing and a little scary.

  Even more alarming though was the speed with which we
were flying through the forest. As we'd headed through the first time, on the way to the Lady's home, I'd thought that the trees were very spread out, but now that we were screaming along at what I was pretty sure was more than a hundred miles per hour they felt like they were far too close together.

  You don't need to worry, Selene. We aren't going to hit anything—I've done this thousands of times.

  It took me a second to realize that she was speaking directly into my mind. It sounded exactly like she was whispering into my ear—except for the fact that even if she'd been yelling I still wouldn't have been able to hear her over the roar of the wind past my ears.

  How are you doing that?

  What, no protestations that this is impossible?

  There was such a dry, understated feel to her humor that I couldn't help but smile.

  In the last few weeks I've seen people run at more than forty miles per hour, been shot at by glowing bars of light, been attacked by a massive wolf straight out of Norse mythology, and met six-and-a-half-foot-tall people with wings who are much too good-looking to be anything other than fae. It feels a bit late to start screaming that none of this can be real.

  Point taken. This is a side effect of the blood oath. All who are part of a blood oath are able to communicate directly, mind to mind. I suspect that is why the Lady chose to let you witness the ceremony. It will make it much easier for you to stay abreast of events in crisis situations.

  That makes sense—only she couldn't have known that was going to happen, since no human or Awakened has ever witnessed one of those ceremonies before, right?

  Intravil was quiet for so long that I almost started worrying that whatever had made it so I could hear her thoughts had gone away. There are no recorded instances of Awakened being able to participate in a blood oath ceremony. That has led most of my fellows to assume it has never happened before, but the Lady is much older than any of the rest of us. It is my suspicion that she's seen this happen before and just never mentioned it to any of us.

  Wait, I don't get it. I mean, I knew that she was the most powerful member of the Seelie Court, but I thought that was just because she was in the right places at the right times to gain power more quickly than the rest of you. Nobody said that she was older than the rest of you.

  Nobody has told you, because very few know. You Awakened have long been the major power in the world, and we fae have had to carefully husband our few advantages. The fact that our memories extend back further than yours—further even than the written records you've maintained—is an advantage that we've used often.

  I felt like someone had just peeled back another layer of the onion that had become my world. Back before Jace and Kat had found me it had seemed like the world was a solid place, a place where most things were exactly as they seemed. Now, it seemed like every truth I was told ended up just revealing more uncertainty.

  I kept hoping that I would get used to the idea of never being quite sure what was real, but that wasn't the case. Instead, I was starting to cling ever more tightly to the few certainties I still had.

  If that's the case, why tell me this now? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to keep it a secret still? Although, I guess it might not end up mattering. Once the Lady is done with me I'm not going to remember having this conversation. All she has to do is make sure that she gets hold of any journals I write and your secrets will be safe still.

  Intravil shook her head as she banked hard to one side to avoid another tree, this one more than twenty feet in diameter.

  No, that would be foolish. The Lady wouldn't rely on such a fragile thread to maintain our secrets. It would be a small matter for you to tell your pantheon, and then containment of the information would become much more problematic.

  Then why tell me?

  I told you because she commanded it. She said I should…trust you. She thinks that if you promise not to say anything, or even write this down, that you'll keep your promise.

  That pulled me up short for a couple of seconds. I pondered what she'd just said as Intravil spotted a break in the canopy above us and darted upwards with a quick downward thrust from her wings.

  I guess she's right. If I promise not to say anything, I won't. I haven't actually promised anything though, so you're getting a little ahead of yourself.

  Yes, but you'll promise now if you want to hear anything else.

  That drew a frown out of me, but it wasn't like I had much of a choice. If I said no, I wouldn't have anything to share with Kat and Jace. If I said yes, then I'd have stuff to share but not be able to share it, which sucked, but at least then I'd know more about what was going on.

  Okay, I promise. I'll keep your secrets.

  Good. The truth is that the Lady is quite a bit older than any of the rest of us.

  How is that possible?

  Intravil shrugged as she made towards another hole in the canopy that was still miles away from us.

  None of us know and so far she isn't saying. All I can tell you is that she was there when I was created, and she hasn't changed visibly since my first memory, so she had to be, at the very least, several hundred years old. She's never told me anything important about the time from before she and I met.

  How is that possible, Intravil? For her to be the oldest, that would either mean that she was the very first fae to be created or that all of the rest of the fae from before her time were destroyed.

  Yes, that's exactly what it means.

  You don't think that she was created significantly before the rest of your kind, do you?

  There was a long pause as Intravil dove into the clearing that she'd identified a few seconds earlier.

  No, I don't.

  I thought it took a lot to kill fae permanently. That isn't the kind of thing that could just happen by accident, is it?

  No, it couldn't. If I'm right, somebody—some Awakened—was actively hunting us down to make sure that we would never become a threat.

  Chapter 15

  The Lady was waiting for us in the clearing, along with more than twenty Seelie warriors. As the rest of Intravil's people landed over the next few seconds I received several more shocks.

  Jace, Kat and Byron were all unable to hear me. In fact, it appeared that being present for the blood oath ceremony hadn't had any kind of effect on them at all. It was one more indication that there was something different about me.

  Intravil had promised to bring me up to speed on everything while we were traveling, but the trip hadn't actually taken very long. I wasn't sure if she'd been expecting that we'd make the trip on foot, or if her view of what I needed to know was dramatically different than my own. She was so different than me, it was hard to know for sure what was going on in her head, but I was pretty sure that she hadn't purposefully lied to me.

  Luckily, the Lady took a few seconds to pull me off to one side and let me know that Ari, Sandra and my dad were all safe, and that she'd arranged to have regular shipments of food brought through one of the few portals she was leaving active. Apparently the prohibition on eating and drinking inside of the Seelie Court was because any food or drink that remained there for very long eventually took on other properties and began emitting a kind of energy that wasn't good for humans to eat.

  "So it would kill them?"

  "No, Selene. It wouldn't kill them, but it would change them. They would no longer be human or Awakened either one. They would be something in between your kind and my kind. There are some benefits—longer life for humans is the main one—but they would never be able to leave the court again. They would became prisoners here more effectively than if we bound them in chains."

  There wasn't much I could say to that. I was ashamed to admit—even to myself—that my first thought was that if Dad and Ari both ate something that had been contaminated by fae energy it would mean they might still be alive when I got done with my two hundred years of service.

  Talk about selfish. I resolved to make sure that they were both back in the real w
orld before telling them about my agreement. It was possible that my dad would choose to eat something here just in the hopes of living long enough to make sure that the Lady eventually released me as she'd promised, but that wouldn't be fair to him. I didn't want him to make that choice out of concern for me and then end up resenting me because of it.

  I couldn't imagine spending centuries here. Bethany was a pretty good sort of person, and even the Lady seemed remarkably human for a being who was several thousand years old, but the rest of the fae—the ones who spent most of their time here—were a lot more like Intravil than they were like Bethany. It would be like being forced to move to another planet, one where the aliens didn't particularly have much use for you.

  "Thank you for making sure that they'll be taken care of. What happens next?"

  "The portal wardens have all been added into the blood oath by now and all but a few of them are headed this direction. I've detached a few of my most trusted lieutenants to lead an assault on one of the Unseelie Court's main portals in Poland, but it is primarily meant to distract our enemies so that they don't realize that our true focus is on the wards around Camelot."

  "So we'll go in with your most trusted people, your most deadly warriors, and you'll all walk away with the power you'll need to be able to win the war."

  "Yes, that's the plan."

  "What about the rest of the Awakened? There were five of them in Salt Lake. How many are you bringing along on this mission, and how are you going to go about gathering up the rest of the ones who haven't picked sides yet?"

  The Lady smiled and the expression looked almost maternal. "Intravil is unique among my portal wardens. I would have expected for her to have the hardest time relating to your kind, but somehow she's managed to gather the largest contingent of Awakened to protect her portal out of all of my people. We have a few more Awakened who we can count on to work with us and not leak to Kyle's people. They will be joining the assault."