The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  I knew the flight to the portal wasn't going to take long. That was a good thing considering just how uncomfortable I was around her now. It had been bad enough just when I'd been convinced she didn't think the way I did. Now that I knew she was perfectly fine with the idea of sacrificing my family, my skin practically crawled when she touched me.

  Unfortunately, a short flight meant that I didn't have much time to say what needed to be said. I tapped her arm to get her attention and then waited for her to initiate contact.

  More demands?

  No. Look, I don't particularly like you, and you don't really like me, but that just means that you had that much less of a reason to throw yourself in front of me. If it wasn't for you, I'd be dead right now.

  Yes. Yes, you would.

  Apparently she wasn't inclined to make this any easier for me. I was tempted to just blow off the rest of what I'd been planning on saying, but I knew that wouldn't be right. If I didn't take this opportunity I might not get another one.

  I just wanted to say thank you. I know that what you did came at a cost for you. I don't think that means you like me or anything. I know you were just doing it because you figured that I was a key part of the Lady's plan, but I'm still grateful. So…thanks.

  It took her such a long time to respond that I actually thought that she'd cut off our mind-to-mind link without bothering to tell me that we were done talking. It would have been incredibly rude, but I'd already established that she didn't function by the same set of rules as I did.

  Just as my mind turned to other things—to the battle I was just about to be thrown into the middle of—Intravil finally responded.

  I didn't expect that out of you. That couldn't have been easy to say—not after I was so willing to force your hand where your dad and sister were concerned.

  I shrugged, confident that she could feel the gesture even through all of the layers of armor.

  You didn't exactly make it any easier, but right is right and wrong is wrong. The right thing to do when someone pays that kind of price for you is to recognize it. I'd offer to try to make things right, to let you…tag along while I work effects, but I'm sworn to the Lady for the next two hundred years. By the time she's done with me I'm not going to remember any of this so I won't be in a position to make good on that kind of promise.

  I heard undertones of what felt like humor in her response. It's just as well—I'm long past the point of being able to spend decades following someone around in the hopes of scavenging bits of power like that.

  After a long pause she continued. You know, you're different than I expected. I was purposefully trying to make it harder for you to thank me.

  Why would you do that?

  Because the best way to test someone's character is to make it hard for them to do the right thing. Anyone will do the right thing when it's in their best interest to do so, and most will do it when it's easy. Only a few people ever do the right thing when it's difficult and against their best interest.

  Does that mean I passed?

  I'd responded flippantly, frustrated that Intravil was talking about right and wrong after helping to condemn my family to near certain death, but she seemed to take the question as being legitimate.

  Yes, I think that you did.

  We passed the rest of the flight in silence—mental and otherwise—and before I knew it we were at the freestanding mirror that led back to Camelot.

  There was already a line of people, fae and Awakened, waiting in single file to go through, but apparently being the wielder of the Scepter of Storms meant that I got cutting privileges. The second time through the portal was still disorienting, but I was more prepared for it this time, and I came through close to the edge of the pond.

  I stood up and immediately turned back toward the center of the pond, anxious to make sure that my dad and Ari were going to be okay, but a gentle hand on my shoulder pushed me towards dry land.

  "The more people we have in the water, the more likely it is that someone will get hurt as they come through. I have people tasked with making sure that everyone makes it out of the water unharmed—you need to watch the horizon and prepare in case we have visitors."

  It was hard not to respond to the Lady with something snarky after everything that had happened, but I forced a smile to my face and trudged over to the shore.

  Half an hour later everyone was through and I could feel several Awakened ranging around the fringes of my normal range. I considered flaring my signature out to establish exactly how many people were out there, but we'd been given strict instructions before going through the portal.

  Jace was supposed to keep his signature suppressed. Ideally I would have been doing the same, but there was no way that I could do that and be ready to repel threats with the scepter at the same time. Since I couldn't suppress my signature completely I—and all of the rest of the Awakened—were supposed to keep our signatures shrunk down as small as we could keep them.

  The Lady supposedly had Seelie warriors ranging out several miles from the location of the portal so that the bad guys wouldn't be able to sense us, but based on what I could feel even with my signature shrunk down, it wasn't working. If I could sense them, then they could sense me.

  It would have been nice to let my signature expand back out to its normal volume, but I didn't give into the temptation. I was under orders, and it was always possible that the signatures I was sensing weren't just moving around because they were trying to get closer—they might be running away from a flight of Seelie warriors right now. Under these circumstances, keeping them too busy to report back on what they'd learned was just as good as taking them out permanently.

  The fae all lined up behind the non-fae, which included my dad and Ari, both of who were wielding long spears. Sandra was standing nearby turning a narrow sword over in her hands like she was hoping that she'd remember how to use it between now and when the fighting started.

  A couple of seconds later we were all in the air and the warm wind from our passage was rapidly drying our clothes. This time I was being flown around by no less than the Lady herself. I figured she was worried about losing her secret weapon to some kind of fluke attack.

  It became apparent as we landed that everyone else had received a much more in-depth briefing than our pantheon had. Almost as soon as their feet touched the ground, the rest of the Awakened began blasting large sections of the mountainside away. It took me a second to realize why the Lady had ordered that particular action. She didn't want this battle to take place inside of the tunnels that Byron and the others had cut into the mountain so many decades earlier.

  That was exactly the kind of fight that most suited the Unseelie fae. We needed to be close enough to absorb the energy bleed from the wards, but we also needed a nice, open space where everyone would be able to maneuver once the fighting got started.

  While the other Awakened went to work opening up a giant bowl in the solid rock before us, the Lady sent Jace in one of the tunnels off to the side with instructions on how to find one of the entrances to the second ward.

  I was suddenly glad that I hadn't been one of the people who'd been tasked with mapping out the tunnels while monsters like Fenrir roamed through them. Knowing how to get to one of the cross tunnels that led to the second ward was all well and good, but that didn't necessarily mean that Kat and Byron were waiting by that particular egress.

  This plan could go sideways pretty soon if we couldn't get through to our friends before the bad guys started showing up. It was one more thing to worry about, and I'd been fretting over it for nearly five minutes before I realized what I was doing. I was obsessing about the stuff that I couldn't control as a way of avoiding thinking about the stuff I could control—stuff that I didn't want to be my responsibility.

  I shouldn't be there freaking out about Kat and Byron—not when there was every chance that I was going to need to use the Scepter of Storms at some point in the next few minutes. I was shaking from fear as I
did it, but I closed my eyes and reached out to the sea of tiny blue sparks all around me.

  The sparks were denser than I'd expected them to be, but apparently my artifact had been on edge too. It had been quietly gathering up the energy we would need for when the storm started.

  I thought back to when I'd killed the flying fae that had been trailing us, and tried to compare this swirling, heaving storm of electricity to the field I'd generated that time. It was more—definitely more—but it was hard to tell how much more. I was considering just leaving well enough alone for now when the Lady stepped up behind me.

  "You're going to have to do better than that. You haven't gathered up nearly enough energy yet."

  "How can you tell? Can you see it too?"

  "The field of sparks? No, but I don't need to be able to see them. When you get fully integrated with the scepter everyone will be able to see the effects."

  She turned and walked away before I could ask her what she meant, but I opened my eyes in time to see that she leveled a significant look at my dad and Ari before she left. If using the artifact had been merely a matter of tapping into my anger, I would have been good and ready after that, but it wasn't.

  Bethany had been flitting around the area, taking in the activities of the Awakened who were still boring into the mountain, but now she returned and landed on my shoulder.

  "Don't let her get inside of your head, Selene. You just do what you need to do—the rest of us will take care of everything else."

  "I thought she was supposed to be one of the good guys."

  Bethany shrugged. "She is, but she's also a general and a queen. She has to make some tough decisions. Don't worry though, nobody has ever seen her do anything really terrible—usually when she's giving someone a really bad time it all ends up being for their own good."

  "Somehow that's less reassuring now that I know that she's the oldest fae. It just means that the last really nasty thing she did was so bad that nobody survived to remember it."

  Conscious of the fact that I had a finite amount of time to deepen the link to the point where it needed to be, I reached out to the pulse of the world and channeled a sliver of anger to amp my time sense up.

  I took a deep breath and started trying to lower the barrier between the portion of my mind where the scepter had taken up residence, and the rest of me. It was even harder than I'd expected it to be.

  My artifact sensed what I was trying to do, and threw its weight up against my barrier, but all that did was trigger an involuntary reflex to strengthen the barrier.

  What are you doing? That's just making things worse.

  The only response I got from the presence was even stronger efforts to bring down my shield. I should have known better than to try talking to it. It either didn't understand, or it was just playing dumb and working harder to get at the core of my identity. Neither option was particularly appealing.

  I sent a surge of disapproval roaring through the barrier, and for the first time the presence seemed to take notice of something other than its desire to kill or its need to fully integrate with me. It backed off—not completely, but enough that it was more like having someone leaning against the doorway to my mind rather than having someone throwing themselves against it.

  I tried again to bring the wall between us down, but all I managed was to thin it down to where I got a better sense of what was waiting for me on the other side. That just scared me even more. What I'd been thinking of as a presence was really more like half a presence.

  It wasn't balanced enough to be considered fully self-aware. It was more like a virus. It was all of the questionable virtues taken to the point of being vices, and it desperately needed a host in order to realize its full potential.

  Bile rose in my throat at the thought of becoming the host for something so rapacious. I sat there frozen in amped-up time, seconds passing as minutes, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't bring down that wall. If asked, I would have said that it was outside of my control, but the truth was that I couldn't bring myself to want the barrier to come down. Until I actually wanted that to happen, no force in the world was going to be able to manage that particular task.

  Someone stepped up behind me again, and I initially thought it was the Lady. I started to bristle, and then realized that whoever was behind me was much too tall to be her.

  It was Jace. "We've found them, Selene. The Lady must have had someone make contact with them while we were gone. They were waiting for us. Byron is starting the process of bringing down the second ward. We would wait and give you more of a chance to figure this out, but the advance scouts say that there's a group of Unseelie fae and Awakened on the way.

  "We expected that, but not one this big. Kyle didn't take the bait. He must have realized that everything else was just smoke and mirrors. He knows that this is where the war is going to be settled."

  I tried to respond, but something about my efforts to integrate with the scepter must have been more successful than I'd realized. I was strangely disconnected from my body. I could hear Jace, but it was like listening to someone underwater. I tried to disconnect and swim back up far enough to respond, but it was no good. The scepter wasn't willing to give up any of the ground it had gained.

  Jace waited for a few seconds, seconds that felt like forever to me, and then leaned forward and kissed my temple.

  "I'll do everything I can to keep Ari safe and Kat will do the same for your dad. No matter what happens, I don't want you to beat yourself up about any of this. Us winning or losing shouldn't be your sole burden to carry."

  Jace slipped away while I was still trying to respond, and then I realized that he'd left because of the yelling. It was everywhere, the chaotic screams of people who'd thought they were ready for what was coming, but who'd never realized just how badly they were outnumbered.

  My eyes snapped open, and I thought for a second that I'd regained a measure of control, but that wasn't the case. The scepter had just finally realized what was going on and it didn't want to fight blind.

  The first of the energy arcs from the ward started discharging into the fae gathered around me as I finally located the opposing force. Kyle had learned from the last battle. He'd somehow convinced everyone to stay together and the Awakened were in the front of the host.

  The scepter was demanding that I allow it to begin hurling lightning bolts. It didn't care where or at whom—its desire was for destruction in all its forms. For a second I couldn't remember why it was important that I confined the destruction just to the approaching figures, but then it came back to me. The closer figures weren't just targets, those were my friends and family.

  I reached out with invisible hands and connected the sky above us with one of the figures in the center of the approaching line. The bolt of lightning that ripped out of the sky was a cascade of tiny blue sparks that merged into a single brilliant river. It left a jagged afterimage on my physical eyes, but that didn't matter; I could still distinguish friend from foe.

  I expected the bolt of lightning to vaporize the Awakened that I'd targeted. It was at least as powerful as the ones that I'd used to disembody the Unseelie fae, but as robust as even a weak fae was, that was nothing compared to someone who was able to wield the stuff of miracles.

  My attack drove its target to their knees, but whoever it was managed to erect a barrier effect at the last second that was up to the task of deflecting the worst of the energies away into the ground. I needed more energy.

  The fae and Awakened both were moving at impossible speeds, but I put that out of my mind and reached for the energy in the sky once again. This time I didn't settle for a brief, glancing connection. I sank my elbow deep into the firmament and then closed my fist around the same Awakened I'd hit once already.

  This time the bolt of energy lit up the landscape with a flash that was easily as bright as the sun. I blinked away the spots in front of my eyes, but that wasn't necessary—my link with the scepter had shown me a man-sh
aped group of sparks shattered into a million fragments, all of which disappeared before they finished clearing the blast site.

  I'd succeeded. The bad guys were down one demigod, but the energies that the scepter had spent the last hour assembling were largely depleted after just two strikes. I desperately tried to scoop additional sparks into the fading maelstrom in the sky, but for every spark that went bobbing towards the pool of energy I was trying to replenish, it seemed as though three more swirled away from my hands.

  My efforts weren't going to be enough. They weren't working fast enough, not given how fast that group was moving towards us. I needed more, and for the first time, I really wanted the wall down.

  This was about more than just me. I could already see the first of the long-range attacks starting to flicker out from Awakened on both sides. Something had to change—right now—or every single person I cared about was going to die.

  The barrier was still there, separating me from the scepter's presence inside of my mind, but this time I was the one that crashed into it. It came down like it had been crafted out of nothing more than tissue paper, as though it had never been there in the first place.

  The scepter's presence clicked into place inside of my mind and suddenly I wasn't just me anymore. I'd been hoping that combining with the artifact would be something like putting on armor. I hadn't been that far off. I could feel the presence layered over what I'd come to think of as me, but there was more to it than that.

  Tendrils of that armor—of that alien presence—had burrowed deep into my psyche. It was like putting on a set of plate armor and then being trapped inside of it as it grew roots, roots that extended all of the way from the front plate to the back plate.

  The roots had forced themselves into my flesh and I had no idea whether it would be possible to cut them free at a later date, but that wasn't as important as the fact that my mental arms had expanded more than ten-fold.