by Dean Murray
"Fine. You can both leave—I can't stop you, not without breaking my promise to myself. If you keep moving the direction you were headed, there is a vehicle just a hundred yards or so down the corridor. You can use that to get back to Colorado. I'll head back outside and lead the fight against whatever dregs from the Seelie Court are still alive. It may not make much of a difference, but you'll have half an hour's headstart."
For the briefest of instants, I considered demanding that he hand over both the Brísingamen necklace and Excalibur, but I instinctively knew that he would never agree to that. Going back to what he'd been before—friendless, weak—was a fate worse than death to Kyle. He would fight me if I made that the condition for all of us walking away from this cavern alive, and while there was a good chance that I could kill him, there was no guarantee that Jace and Bethany would survive that confrontation.
Besides, I suddenly very much wanted to live.
Jace and I edged across the room while Kyle backed into the tunnel behind him. A few seconds later, he'd vanished into the darkness. Jace, Bethany and I were safely alone in the tunnels.
Chapter 17
Kyle hadn't been lying about the vehicle. I wasn't exactly sure if that was a surprise or not. He could have easily backed down and left us to wander the tunnels in confusion until he could come back with help. All he'd needed to do was stall, but instead he'd given us a chance to escape.
As difficult as it was to believe, I was pretty sure that he'd let us go at least partly because he really hadn't wanted to hurt me. That wasn't the only reason—I'd seen the fear in his eyes, seen the fact that he wasn't ready to die and lose all of the years of research and preparation he'd put in to get this far—but it was a significant part of why he'd done what he'd done.
That was hard to wrap my mind around, and not just because everything he was doing was going to eventually hurt me. I was struggling to keep two opposite ideas in my head at the same time. Kyle was the villain of this piece. He was unquestionably evil—the terrorist attacks he'd ordered were plenty good enough proof of that—but he was also gallant and he had a stubborn kind of integrity that I couldn't help but admire.
The only thing I was sure of at this point was that no matter what else happened I wasn't going to ever pick Kyle over Jace.
The 'vehicle' turned out to be a brand-new jeep with the kind of massive tires and lift kit that made off-road vehicles able to navigate terrain that should have been impassable for anything motorized. In short, it was the perfect vehicle for making the drive back to civilization.
Jace climbed into the driver's seat as Bethany and I climbed into the passenger seat, and then the jeep roared to life and we were tearing down the wide tunnel where it had been housed. The little ball of light that Jace had conjured when we'd first entered the tunnels had provided all the light I could have realistically asked for, but there was just something more reassuring about the halogen headlights of a motorized vehicle.
Maybe that would change once I knew how to create that particular effect myself, but for now the headlights felt more reliable, more permanent. That was something I needed after all of the fighting and death from the last few hours.
Less than a minute into our drive, we saw a touchpad on the wall. Jace slowed down enough that I could press it, and a loud groan signaled that the exterior door had started to raise itself.
I would have waited for it to finish opening, but once again Jace's superior experience saved the day. He floored the jeep, tearing down the tunnel towards the bar of sunlight, and timed our exit perfectly. I reflexively ducked down in my seat, worried the bottom of the door would tear the top of the jeep right off of the body, but we squeaked out with inches to spare, and were moving at more than forty miles per hour as we exited the mountain. It was a good thing because a familiar-looking pooka was waiting for us.
I thought for a second that Jace was going to ram it, which would have been a disaster given just how dense a fairy that size could make themselves, but Jace cut the wheel over hard at the last second. I half expected the jeep to roll—we did go briefly up onto two wheels—but Jace managed to keep the vehicle under control, and as we passed the Unseelie fae I realized that I had my scepter in my hands.
I'd reflexively amped up my strength and time sense when I saw the pooka, and it was the easiest thing in the world to clamp down on my seat with my left hand while my right swung the Scepter of Storms with enough force to shatter the pooka's neck.
We left Camelot behind in a cloud of dust, and I let myself believe for a little while that we'd made a clean escape. I should have known better than that. The trail that led back to the freeway was in good shape considering the fact that Byron and the others hadn't used it very often, but it was still not the kind of surface that would allow a vehicle to travel at highway speeds.
Jace did a remarkable job of nursing as much speed out of the jeep as could be expected under the circumstances, but it still took what seemed like forever to get to a paved road where he could really open the vehicle up.
About that point I found myself wishing that Byron had stowed away something faster. It wasn't a fair wish—a sports car wouldn't have made it a hundred yards on the trail we'd just finished driving, but now that we were on a real road our top speed was still uncomfortably less than what Bethany could manage if she were to take to the air.
Granted, most of the Unseelie fae chose to abandon the winged shapes they were born with—trading them out for forms that were stronger and able to take a lot more damage—but there would still be some Unseelie fae with wings serving as scouts. Jace tried to reassure me, but I wasn't positive that he was quite as confident as he was trying to let on.
I asked Bethany how fast someone like that was able to move, but she didn't know, and nobody was responding to her efforts to establish mind-to-mind communication with them. That was another bad sign. Bethany had absorbed a tremendous amount of information in just the few hours since the blood oath had taken place, but there was still way too much that she didn't know.
Our best guess was that they were either all disembodied or so busy fighting that they were keeping her out so as to make sure that she didn't distract them at a critical time.
Of course that didn't explain her inability to get hold of the fae the Lady had sent with the diversionary force, but Bethany thought that might have something to do with the sheer distance between us and them. Either way, it meant that we were on our own—at least for a little while.
We'd been on the road for nearly twenty minutes before I saw the first flicker of motion up high in the sky that told me we weren't out of the woods. The first speck became two and then three as more of the Unseelie scouts found us.
They maintained their distance for quite a while. A few minutes after we'd been spotted, one of the three scouts peeled back off—probably to go summon reinforcements. Jace kept telling me that we would be fine—that something as big as Fenrir could never manage a sustained pace in excess of ninety miles per hour—but by that time I could see the holes in his argument.
We couldn't sustain that kind of speed either, not in the long term. We could go without food and water, we could even swap out who was driving and avoid having to stop for rest, but we were eventually going to have to stop for gas.
As long as we had a big enough lead, a five-minute stop to refuel didn't have to be the end of the world, but there was no guarantee that we would be far enough away from all of them at that point to make it back onto the road before they caught up. The really big guns would be further back, but now that I'd lost the focus that had allowed me to connect to the vast ocean of happiness earlier, we weren't in any state to fight off even a weak group of fae.
Jace tried to get me to take a nap, but every time I closed my eyes I saw visions of us being attacked by swarms of smaller flying fae. They wouldn't even have to kill us, they could simply pin us down until something bigger caught up with us.
That would have been bad enough, but if I
were in their shoes that wouldn't be the only option I would have been pursuing. The Unseelie Court might be drastically different than what I'd seen after stepping through the portal in Intravil's club, but it was also located in the in-between space. That meant that they had a network of portals too, a network that even Jace and Bethany knew only a little about, a network that could easily move dozens of fae hundreds of miles instantly.
The guys who were flying—or running—along behind us were a threat because they meant that we couldn't go to ground and disappear while we rested and replenished our emotional reserves, but the real threats were all of the fae who had taken off at a run towards the closest portal back to their court.
It wasn't going to take a rocket scientist to figure out where we were headed. Kyle knew exactly where Jace's house was, which meant that the odds were really good that there was going to be an unfriendly welcoming committee waiting for us when we arrived in Cold Springs.
The best thing we could have been doing was coming up with a plan that had a chance of saving the three of us, but nobody seemed to be willing to broach the subject. Apparently we were all hoping that something would change on the mind-to-mind communication front with Bethany and the rest of the blood-oathed fae.
It turned out that it was only possible to sustain feelings of pure terror for so long. I was still scared, but somewhere along the way scared became the new normal, and I felt myself finally start to drift off.
Given the level of exertion I'd put myself through over the last few hours, I expected to fall asleep instantly once the adrenaline stopped flowing into my system, but instead my mind remained mostly alert as my body slowly started to shut down.
It was peaceful—calming even—but as good as that felt, I knew that was the wrong thing to be feeling. I was right on the edge of falling asleep when I decided that I had to start talking to Jace and Bethany about our options if we arrived in Cold Springs and found a group of Unseelie warriors waiting for us. I tried to claw my way back to full consciousness, but it was like there was a slender but impossibly strong cord holding me there.
The harder I flailed, the less progress I made. It made no sense, but in the end—after an indeterminate amount of time—I finally became so mentally exhausted that I couldn't keep fighting. I gave up and let myself sink.
I expected to fall asleep, but instead I entered another state of consciousness, one where I could feel another…presence…inside of my head. It was the scariest thing I'd ever experienced. Even having someone else's voice inside of my head had been a light, surface kind of intrusion. This was something alien swimming inside the lowest levels of my mind, something big, something powerful.
I expected whatever it was to lash out at me. I could tell it was powerful enough to shatter my mind and leave me nothing more than an empty shell, but it didn't do anything. It just sat there, nearly motionless, as though waiting for something.
I cautiously reached out to whatever it was, and found that it welcomed contact with me. It…hungered…for something that only someone like me could give it. It took me several seconds to realize that it wanted direction, wanted me to command it.
Asking it what I was supposed to do—how I was supposed to order it around—felt stupid, but I was fresh out of other ideas. I reached out and silently questioned it and then gasped in surprise as it showed me a sea of blue sparks that was like nothing else I'd ever seen.
Some of the sparks were brighter than others, and there were sections of the vista that were more densely packed than others, but everywhere I looked, sparks surrounded me. They weren't motionless either. I was moving through them—fast enough for me to be able to register the movement after only a couple of seconds' worth of observation—but it was more than that. The sparks seemed to be moving on their own as well, swaying in relation to each other. It was almost like trying to watch a single molecule of water as it traveled through the ocean.
Each spark rose and fell in relation to the others, swirling around in slow motion. I almost felt like I should be getting motion-sick. The human mind wasn't meant to register that much movement at once—at least not in that level of detail—but something about the presence sharing my mind seemed to be buffering me from all of that.
I got the sense that there was more there, just beneath the level I could see, almost like each of the sparks was orbiting around a different center, but I didn't try to drill down to that—I was almost positive that even the visitor inside of my mind wasn't going to be able to shield me from the consequences if I tried to do that.
I reached out to cup one of the sparks with my hand, unsure if it would hurt to touch it, but I didn't actually have a hand in this place. There wasn't anything visible extending out from me to the spark that had caught my eye, but I could still feel some kind of sensation as whatever I was sending out in to the world slid past other sparks. It was like I'd grown another arm, one that my puny Awakened brain hadn't ever been meant to control, but which still somehow served at my command.
As I touched the spark I felt a tingling and the presence inside my mind woke up. I hadn't realized that it was sleeping—that it had been operating at only a fraction of its capability—but that was exactly what I was feeling now. Something took control of my mental arms, and the flash of panic that raced through me was undeniable, but the presence sensed my concern and calmed me—suppressing the emotions that it didn't want me to feel.
That should have scared me even more, but apparently that wasn't one of the permitted feelings. I was forced to watch as my arms swept through the shimmering universe around me, gathering the sparks into a denser cloud up above me.
The light from the sparks grew more intense as they got closer together. It was more than just a function of the density of the sparks, it was as though they were drawing energy from me—only I didn't feel tired. I was nothing more than a conduit running between the presence and the sparks.
It was beautiful in ways that I hadn't expected. I wanted nothing more than to stay there watching the sparks forever, but something was demanding my attention.
At first I thought that it was the presence, but it had moved beyond asking me for anything. It just took what it wanted—like it was doing now as it swept even more sparks upwards, packing them in around the dense, swirling mass we'd already created.
It felt like I was at the bottom of an impossibly deep hole, but I could hear something ever so faintly.
"Selene! Did you hear me? You've got to wake up. I can't drive and fend them off at the same time."
That probably wouldn't have been enough to pull me back from my new surroundings all by itself, but now that I'd registered the words, I was also able to recognize other sensations. Someone was shaking me—hard enough that I was probably going to have bruises.
I felt a flash of annoyance, and realized for the first time that the presence inside my head was letting me regain some of the control it had taken away from me. The voice had been joined by another—a higher-pitched voice—and now someone was pulling on my hair.
I know the voices, but it was surprisingly difficult to put names to them. Jace…Bethany. Remembering my companions brought me back far enough to open my eyes. I expected that to snap me completely out of the odd, spark-filled world I'd been experiencing, but that was only partly true.
I was back in the real world, but the sparks were still there, layered over the top of everything else. There was a moment of vertigo as my perspective shifted. Before I'd opened my eyes, I'd somehow been both infinitely closer and impossibly far away from the sparks. Now they were closer to me, but smaller—so small that they were nothing more than a soft blue glow that seemed to permeate everything.
"What's going on?"
I looked over at Jace, noticing how amazing his eyes looked with an electric blue overlay, and then followed his arm as he pointed at a group of six moving objects that had gotten close enough to be more than just distant dots.
"Unseelie scouts. They apparently decided to
try to take us now rather than waiting for reinforcements. Do you have any emotional reserves left? Can you knock them out of the air?"
I opened my mouth to tell Jace that I didn't have anything left, and realized that my invisible arms were still there, still moving around—almost completely independent from my will. More importantly, I could still feel the presence inside my mind.
It wanted me to do something. There was a lot that it was allowed to do without me—without my approval—but there was something that it needed me for, some kind of imperative that it couldn't fulfill without me.
It was focused on the approaching fae. It wanted me to reach out and touch them. Without understanding why, I reached my hand towards the closest fae. My invisible arm had to lengthen to have any chance of touching any of our enemies. It did, but the growth in my forearm was nothing compared to the growth between my shoulder and elbow.
Even with the presence inside of my mind suppressing most of my natural responses to things, it was enough to make my skin crawl. I'd never been meant to control an appendage that was so mercurial, and my mind—even with an assist from the presence—was having a hard time making the limb function well enough to actually touch the closest fae.
It was like trying to pick up an egg with a spoon that was more than ten feet long, but then all of a sudden something snapped into place inside of my mind and it became easier—still hard, but easier. I touched the fae, but nothing happened until my elbow brushed against the impossibly bright swirling mix of sparks high over our head.
A split second later a burst of lightning shot down out of the clear sky and vaporized the fae I'd been touching.
I was in shock. If it had been solely up to me I would have sat there with my jaw halfway to my knees, but the presence was still at least partially in control. I wanted the fae gone, wanted us to be safe again, and apparently that was enough for it to fulfill the requirements of whatever safety mechanism ruled it. My elbow didn't move away from the mass of energy, but my hand swept through the remaining fae like I was batting at flies. They were closer now—either they hadn't yet realized that I'd just killed their companion or they figured their best defense was to get close enough that I wouldn't be able to hit them without risking hitting our Jeep as well.
