by Dean Murray
Chapter 16
Sandra spun around and ran out of the locker room before I could muster a response. Her threatening me wasn't anything new, but she'd always seemed somehow petty before. This time it felt different.
I was shaking by the time I made it out to the gym where Jace was waiting for me. He took one look at me and dropped into a slight crouch as he scanned our surroundings for a threat capable of throwing me into tears.
He reached up and cradled the side of my face as soon as he reached me, covering the smarting skin with his cool, tingly hand.
"Selene, what happened?"
"It was Sandra. She surprised me in the locker room and started saying all of these nasty things. I basically called her a whore, so she slapped me."
Jace visibly relaxed. Obviously he didn't consider Sandra a real threat. "Do I need to go dispose of the body?"
"What? No, of course I didn't kill her. I slammed her head into the lockers, but that just made her madder. She threatened me, Jace. It wasn't like her. Usually she enjoys trotting out all of the nasty stuff that she might do to me. This time she just left it open-ended and then ran out through the other set of doors."
Jace pulled me into a hug. "Well, on the scale of worst encounters between the two of you over the last few hundred years that's pretty far towards the bottom of the list. Usually there are explosions and fire. I'd say a slap and someone being slammed into a locker is almost progress."
I pushed him away, breaking his grip on me. "This isn't funny, Jace. I think she's going to do something to Ari or my dad. I'm really worried."
Jace sobered instantly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make light of your concerns. We'll take precautions this weekend. You and Ari will be with Kat, and I'll make sure that nothing happens to your dad."
"Okay, thanks. She just seemed so different this time."
"Who seemed different?"
I turned around and had to look twice to realize that it was Kat who was walking up to us. She'd said that she was going home to change and touch up her makeup, but this was something else altogether.
Kat was wearing black slacks and a white button-up blouse. It was like something you'd expect a bank teller to wear, and her makeup was suitably understated, making her cheekbones look more prominent and adding at least two or three years to her appearance.
Her hair was pulled back into a messy bun that still looked sexy without looking juvenile. The net effect of all the changes was to make her look like a completely different person, someone older, more responsible and very respectable. It was going to be interesting to see how my dad reacted to her.
Jace got a response out while I was still trying to pick my jaw up off of the floor. "Sandra. She caught Selene alone in the locker room and made threats. Selene is worried that something might happen to Ari or her dad."
Kat frowned at Jace. "Seriously? Can't you even watch over Selene for one hour without letting prissy skanks threaten her?"
"It happened in the locker room, Kat."
She waved away his explanation. "So make yourself invisible. Selene's safety is more important than the privacy of a few teenage girls."
"Jace is not following me into locker rooms, Kat. I'll be fine. Sandra isn't going to try anything in the middle of the day in a public place."
And I wasn't about to go exposing him to all of those young, nubile bodies. I was going to have a hard enough time keeping him interested in me as it was.
Jace sighed. "No, she's right, Selene. I won't follow you into the girls' locker room, but it's getting too dangerous for you to be running around by yourself. From here on out, if Kat isn't around, then you don't go places where I can't follow. I should have had you just wait out here until Kat arrived or you could have just gone home in your gym clothes."
I looked back and forth between the two of them. "I don't get it, what changed?"
"You mean other than Sandra threatening you?"
Jace shot Kat an unhappy look. "Can it, Kat. You're not helping." He turned back to me and ran his hand through his hair. "Your gift is in the middle of manifesting. It's to the point where Kat and I can both sense you from several dozen feet away."
"Wait, you mean the Awakened can sense each other even if they can't see each other?"
"Yeah. The stronger the two Awakened are, the further away they can sense each other. There are things you can do to suppress your signature, but it's always there to some extent. The fact that you are starting to generate a signature means that your gift is manifesting. Kat can start training you tonight assuming we can find a way to distract Ari."
That shaky feeling was back, and this time it wasn't because of my physical proximity to Jace. It was actually going to happen. I was finally going to become one of the Awakened for real. Realistically there hadn't been any going back since the day I'd been born, but this still felt like a big, irrevocable step.
Kat raised her hand in an attention getting wave that I had a sneaking suspicion normally would have ended with flipping Jace or I off.
"This still doesn't deal with a certain loose end that needs taken care of. If Sandra is making threats then we should just get rid of her. It will be easy enough to make it look like an accident."
My blood ran cold. I'd known that Kat had some dark places in her soul, but hearing her talk about casually murdering someone was still a shock to my system.
"No, you're not killing her."
Kat raised an eyebrow. "You'd rather Jace does it? Or maybe you'd like to get your own hands dirty this time?"
"No, nobody is going to kill her. She's just making threats. If she attacks Ari or my dad then all bets are off, but I'm not going to just go around killing people for what they might do."
"So instead you're going to expect Jace and me to guard all three of you at once? For being concerned about us burning up memories in your behalf, you're oddly eager to overcommit us."
Jace raised his hand. "That's enough, Kat. We aren't killing Sandra and that's final. Even if you make it look like an accident, the whole school knows that you were the one to turn her in for that note. If she dies right now you're going to be a suspect, and the last thing we want is for the cops to start trying to poke holes in these identities."
"So we take her out and then pack up and leave town before the body is found. It won't be the first time we've done something like that."
Jace didn't get mad very often, but I could see the twitch starting back up just above his upper lip. "That's not the plan and you know it. This is a good place to use as a base. It's far away from all of the major population centers, and it's not on any of the major highways or airline routes. If we keep a low profile there isn't any reason that we can't stay here for years. Moving around right now just makes us more likely to run afoul of another pantheon. That's why we sank so much of our money into the house here."
Kat gave him a cold smile. "You're hoping that Sandra's the real deal, that she's not just another mimicry. You're hoping to be able to recruit her. Are you really so uncertain of Selene's affections that you're already trying to arrange an emotional fallback?"
She looked over at me. "Did he tell you that the two of them used to date back in the day? They were quite the item before you…became available."
"Don't! Don't say another word, Kat. I'm warning you."
I could feel their abilities pushing out against each other and their energy had gone cold and prickly. They were only seconds away from fighting and it was up to me to stop them.
"Jace hasn't told me, but I already knew. Sandra basically said as much just now, but frankly it's a non-issue for me. If Jace says that we need her then I'm not going to second-guess him."
"Of course you're going to side with Jace. I should have known."
"We aren't going to abandon you, Kat, and we aren't going to replace you with Sandra of all people—even assuming this one is the real deal and not just another mimicry—but you have to meet us halfway. Stop being angry all of the time and trust us for
once."
Kat looked at me for several seconds and then stormed out of the gym. Jace started after her, but I grabbed his arm.
"I'll go talk to her. The two of you are just going to strike sparks off of each other. Besides, I need you to go check on Ari for me. Sandra is a lot more likely to go after someone her own size than she is to go after my dad."
Jace pulled me into a hug. "Okay, but if Kat doesn't respond well to seeing you again just back off and drive to the junior high. We'll regroup and come up with another way to get some teaching time in. If nothing else you can just start sneaking out at night. It's not like you're going to need a lot of sleep in the near future."
I found Kat standing next to a silver Lexus in the parking lot. I stopped several feet away and cleared my throat. "Kat, I know you don't want to have anything to do with me, but if we're going to make it to my house in time to talk to my dad before he has to go to work, then we need to leave now."
"I'm fine. Get into the car and let's get moving."
The drive out to my house went by quickly, which was good because the silence was even more awkward than I'd been afraid it would be. Kat didn't speed, but she didn't waste any time either.
My dad was waiting down in the kitchen for us. "So, Kat—it is Kat, right?"
"Yes, Katherine actually. Kat is an unfortunate childhood nickname that my brother Jace has refused to let die off."
"Very well, Katherine. Selene and Ari say that you've offered to take them camping and then out on some jet skis. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that it's a very generous offer, but I'm just not comfortable with the idea of the three of you young girls being out there by yourselves…"
"I understand your concerns, Mr. Jenkins. Frankly I think in your place I'd probably feel the same way, but I hope that you'll humor me and listen for just a few minutes while I tell you a little bit about my brother and me.
"My father never had a college degree. He dropped out of school when he was seventeen so that he could work full-time to support his family after my grandfather was injured in an industrial accident. He never let that stop him from continuing to learn though. He used to make incredible machines in the shed behind our house.
"As luck would have it, a few years ago he managed to secure a job with one of the few dotcom startups that had a real product to sell. They needed someone who had common sense and the ability to make things with his hands. The job paid even less than the one he'd had before, but he believed in what they were doing and even took out a second mortgage on our tiny house in order to secure extra stock options."
Dad shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "That was risky."
"Indeed it was Mr. Jenkins. I think it scared my mother half to death. The four founders were college kids who didn't have much money, so my dad had provided the bulk of the initial capital and with it got final say on all additional funding. When the venture capital groups started calling, my dad just kept vetoing deals until he finally found one he liked. It came just in the nick of time because the demand for the company's product had been skyrocketing. That was the leverage that allowed my father to secure the deal that he wanted.
"As it turned out, just six months later the company went public, but in the meantime my father had been taking care of the business side of things while the four kids who were the creative force behind things continued to innovate. Everyone involved made an obscene amount of money, but most especially my father. Unlike most people would have expected, his partners never forgot that it had been him who provided the initial seed money and steered them through the negotiations with the venture capitalists."
"That sounds like a fairytale, Katherine."
"I'm not surprised, I've lived it, and that's a very good description of what it has felt like. I can provide you with the name of the company and the phone number of the current CEO if you would like to verify things, but that isn't why I'm telling you all of this.
"I was very young when all of this was going on. We have lived very well for a number of years, but I still remember what it was like to be excluded from the popular crowd because I didn't wear the right clothes and didn't live in the right part of town.
"After we had money everything changed. The same girls who wouldn't even give me the time of day suddenly wanted to be my friends, but I never forgot the fact that it was only my father's money that they liked. When my parents died things became very difficult. It seemed as though everyone around Jace and me wanted to be our guardians simply because it would give them—at least temporarily—access to our family's money."
"I'm sorry for your loss."
"Thank you."
"So you went to a court and asked to be emancipated."
"Indeed, and then we moved to a completely different part of the country and tried to blend in. That lasted for just over a year and then people found out who we were and we had to move again. That has happened several times so far, but we have decided that this will be the last place we live before going off to college. On our first day here it was only your daughters who befriended us, and now I would like to return the favor by taking them on the kind of trip that I always wanted to go on before we had the money to do so."
Dad sighed. "That is a very touching story, Katherine, but it doesn't change the fact that you're still not yet eighteen and you're taking my daughters off into the woods where any number of things might happen."
Kat reached into her pocket and pulled out a driver's license, which she set on the table and slid towards my father.
"Jace and I are both old for our grade in school. My mother was a firm believer that it was best for us to be advanced compared to the other kids rather than being developmentally behind and struggling. I've been eighteen for months now."
"I've seen my fair share of fake ID's, Katherine. You'll have to do a lot better than that."
Kat smiled and pulled out a passport and a birth certificate. "I'm not lying, Mr. Jenkins. Camping was a tradition for my family back when we had very little. If it was just Jace and I, maybe we would be going up to the lake and camping in tents, but given your understandable concern for your daughters' safety, I'll be bringing our forty-two-foot motor coach, which will be locked up all night, and Jace will be staying home and only joining us the next day to enjoy the jet skis."
Dad looked at his watch and then sighed. "I have your word that there won't be any boys or booze or drugs?"
"Absolutely."
"And you really know what you're doing driving a vehicle that big? You know how to stay safe on the water?"
"Yes, of course."
Dad turned to me and gave me the look. "Do I have your word, too, Selene? No boys, nothing that you know I wouldn't approve of?"
"Yes, Daddy. It's just like she said. A girls' night camping followed by some time on the water."
Kat cleared her throat. "I know that you have to work tonight or I'd invite you along, but if you'd like to join us tomorrow on the lake you'd be most welcome."
"Thanks, I just might do that. You can go. Just please be careful. My daughters are all I have left."
"I will personally make sure that nothing happens to them. You have my word."
