Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (100 page)

Something hit the ground nearby and I turned
to look. Peter and Gordon were there, staring at the hole Felix
made. It had collapsed when the last wave hit. Gordon punched the
ground near it hard. His shirt was ripped to shreds, his chest and
back shining with sweat in the moonlight. He punched again with his
left on the same spot, and again with a right, driving his power
down into the dirt and stone below us. He was beating the battery
further into the ground. I showed this to Felix, too. This was his
boy, his legacy.

“Release it, Gordon,” Peter said. “Release
the damn spell! NOW!”

Gordon slammed his fist one more time into
the ground with a savage snarl that would have sent a gorilla back
into the jungle, then collapsed. The ground shook and I felt the
energy rushing toward us through the ground as it shook unlike any
of the previous tremors. As it crested and met with other waves,
bouncing and increasing its amplitude, it finally met with
something new. The funnel Cahill had created in front of my battery
had sprung to life and started its work. As with most everything in
the universe, the energy suddenly found an easier path to follow
than going through rock and stone, so it took it. The energy flowed
through the funnel and into the battery. Very little to destroy in
there.

“See, Felix, you done good,” I said to
him.

“Da!” Gordon called hoarsely, rolling himself
up off the ground. He was caked in dirt and twigs, muddy now. “Oh,
lord, Da!” He scuttled across the ground to the other side of his
father, grabbing his hand in both of his. “What happened to
him?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I said softly. “He
was burying the battery while I watched the surrounding area. When
I turned to look at him, he was trying to push it down through a
massive amount of pain. It looked like his chest had been crushed.
When I got him on the ground, he was having a heart attack and he
wasn’t breathing. I don’t know how to fix this, Gordon. Right now,
I’m keeping him alive, but I don’t know how long I can keep doing
this. I’m sorry, I’m just not good enough.”

“Can we get him to a healer?” he asked?

“Where?”

“We can’t get back to the house. It’s still
too thick there,” said Peter. “And I don’t know the world well
enough to open portals into other places.”

“A hospital, then,” Gordon said. “Any place
is better than here!” I had to agree with that.

“I don’t know any hospitals, Gordon,” I said
softly.

“Is he in pain?” Peter asked, coming up
behind me.

I didn’t want to answer that. “Yes and
no.”

“What does that mean?” Gordon asked.

“Seth, are you—” Peter started, but I
interrupted him.

“Hush, Peter. Felix is very aware of his
surroundings. I’m sure he’s frustrated enough.”

“Is that why you can’t do anything else,
Seth?” Peter asked me, kneeling down beside me and putting his hand
on my shoulder.

“Among other things, yes,” I said, keeping my
voice even and light. “And no, Felix, I won’t do that. I will
accept failure, but I will not accept giving up.” He needed to know
that, captive of his body as he was. Emotionally he was in turmoil.
Hit with immense pain until I took it from him, his body was still
in the throes of a heart attack. I hadn’t found what was causing
the problem to start with and I’d been controlling his heart for
moments only. Correctly was still in question. So was blood gas
level. Was he getting enough oxygen to his brain?

Felix brushed his consciousness against mine
weakly. Well, I’m sure he pushed as hard as he could at that
moment. Opening up my mind is a bad analogy for what actually
happens. It’s more of an intertwining acceptance of being alive and
having purpose and determination. Yeah, let’s just say I opened my
mind as widely as I could to him, much like I had with Peter. What
I got from him was a barrage of images of his family on his estate
doing various everyday things. His sons pulling pranks on each
other, thinking they hadn’t been caught. Dancing with his wife at a
family wedding. Each of his sons’ births. He wanted to go home to
die.

“Why, Felix, that is a very good idea,” I
said, still keeping my voice even. And I leaned forward to look
down into his eyes to make certain I had his attention. “But Felix,
if I do this for you, you have to make me a promise. You have to
promise me you won’t give up on me. Win or lose, just don’t give
up.”

Sitting back down on the back of my feet, I
made sure I held Felix together as well as I could. His nervous
system was firing like mad throughout his chest, arms, and legs,
and I was holding it back from him by taking it myself. If I knew
more or even had more time and control, maybe I could block it
instead, but I was afraid I would cause more harm if I tried that.
Now my problem was I was going to have to divert my limited
attention to creating a portal to the Cahill’s home.

“Peter, Gordon, move in close, please,” I
said. “This is going to be tight.”

They were confused by the request, having no
idea what I was plotting with Felix, but they huddled in close. I
pictured the room in the Cahill’s home I wanted the portal to open
into and exactly how large the openings would have to be, trying to
expend as little effort as possible in the transfer. It was still
going to hurt. As soon as I let go of that control for something
else, it would be like trying to grab the loose end of a firehose
in the dark. Without any prompting from me, the Day Sword rose from
the ground quickly and floated into the space about Felix and the
foundation Stone lifted all of us a foot off the ground.

I ripped a hole in space and screamed. That
was the last thing I remembered.

For the second day in a row, I woke up not
remembering going to bed. This time I didn’t even know the room I
was in. Sitting up in the bed, I realized I was naked. Again. The
universe was conspiring against me and clothes. Why it hated my
modesty, I will probably never know. I let the sleepiness slip out
of my head for a moment then got up, yanking the blanket off the
bed and draping it around me like a toga and headed for the
door.

There was an energy curtain at the door, so I
slowed before I pushed through it, easing my senses into it first.
Still aching all over, I didn’t need any more jolts of anything. It
was just a privacy curtain, keeping noise and extraneous energy out
of the room. And it told me where I was—the Cahill’s infirmary. My
memory returned with a rush and I hurried out the door.

“Hello?” I called, trying to attract
attention. I hadn’t been in this part of the infirmary before. It
really didn’t look like part of it except for the screening
everywhere. And while that screening was up, seeing people in the
vicinity in adjacent rooms was difficult. I could tear through
them, but what damage would that cause? And my mother was in here
and, hopefully, Felix. Considering the isolation they put me in, I
wasn’t gonna put money into that bet. As bad as that felt, I had
work to do and if I gave that rat bastard any time, we’d lose and
he had more than a high enough chance of winning as it was. Huh. I
was learning to curse a little better now. That was something.

Wrapping a portal around myself, I jumped to
my room. I needed clothes first, then food. My silks were laid out
on the bed with a note on top. From Peter, telling me to wait for
him or he’d… Ow! I wadded the note quickly, tossing it away—just
away—grabbing my crotch defensively. I ran for the bathroom,
desperately avoiding the direction of the note. I dropped my
makeshift-toga on the counter, exchanging it for my toothbrush. My
reflection looked rough. Some serious bruising on my chest
explained the aches. The man in the mirror needed a shave. He
looked… a little haunted, too.

Keep pushing that to the back; got too much
to do. Still had that strange calm feeling I had with Felix last
night, that evenness. I had the same feeling before my fight with
Grandfather, too, but I didn’t recognize it. A serene
determination, an odd feeling. Scrubbing off the gunk of last night
took longer than I expected, so I serenely determined to let the
hot water sluice down my back as long as I could.

The house wards buzzed as I toweled off. Not
a warning, just an alert of some kind. Interesting, they’d devised
a sort of bulletin board system through the activation wards. It
was Marty who buzzed the wards. His signature resonated there
delicately. I was dressing when John buzzed. That could get
annoying pretty quick so I pushed up into the wards to look around,
maybe I could buffer myself somehow.

John was still in the wards, his body sitting
still in a small dark room between the dining room and the Butler’s
Pantry. He was calmly checking various energy constructs that
projected across the house and built the Castle. Then Martin came
up, acknowledged John’s presence, and he lit up the wards. It kind
of shocked me, not that I didn’t think he could do it, more of how
confidently he did it. His control was more similar to his mother’s
than his father’s, and this obviously wasn’t his first time being
in control as he dove in directly and started searching for
something. I lay back on the bed, watching him.

He started his search spirally from his
location in the house, locating each person in the house in every
room. He was being quite methodical about it. When he got to the
end, he started over and went more slowly in a different pattern
through the house. There were places in the house that I didn’t
know existed that he slipped into, lifting barriers like rugs and
sweeping underneath them. John even sat up and took notice of him
doing that.

A bright streak of light shot over my head
and I abruptly sat up, convinced I’d just seen a Will-o’-the-Wisp.
I turned in time, barely, to duck and cover as Shrank shot out of
my bathroom and back for the door, careening to the ceiling in a
scattering torrent of sparks and squeals.

“Don’t do that!” Shrank yelled at me and
slapped me. Ever been slapped by a pixie? Believe it or not, it
hurts.

“Shrank! What’ya do that for?” I complained,
rubbing my right cheek. He slapped an area bigger than he was and
the Stone hadn’t blinked about it. I had the feeling it was
laughing at me. Again. Ethan said they didn’t have personalities,
but I wasn’t convinced.

“The four of you. You keep disappearing and
I’m stuck here to worry,” he squealed in that dangerously high
range. If he got much more excited my ears would bleed. “Then I
leave your hospital bed for two minutes. Two minutes! And you
disappear from there! They’re searching the whole castle for you
and John’s about to call Peter in London. And… Argh!” He yelled in
frustration. I fell back on the bed chuckling at him and he landed
lightly on my chest.

“Is that what Marty’s doing? Hunting for me?”
I asked, looking back up into the wards. Martin was about finished
with his second sweep around the grounds. Shrank grunted in assent,
digging a swirl of silk around himself to sit in. I pushed more
into the wards and, acting dumb, projected at Marty, “Hi, Marty,
what are you looking for? Can I help?”

He coalesced beside me. “I’m looking for you,
dumbass. Where are you?” He was trying to hide his worry and fear,
but he was barely into puberty and he was, um,
“hormonally challenged” at this point in his life. It was
still an admirable attempt.

“In my room,” I answered. “I really needed a
shower and I couldn’t find anyone when I woke up. Where is
everybody?”

“Gordon and Mother are at Da’s bedside,” he
said solemnly. “Gordon’s crashed, totally exhausted. Ma dozes in
and out. It was a long night for them. And you. No one expected you
to wake up today at all.”

“So your dad, he’s…” I let the question
hang.

“For the moment,” Martin said. On this he
managed to compartmentalize his emotions. “It’s still very touch
and go, according to the doctors.”

“I’m sorry, Martin,” I said softly. There
wasn’t anything else to say.

“They had to pry you off of him, you know,”
he said, clamping down hard on his emotions and trying to hide his
sudden shame. The memory flashed through the connection briefly,
along with the shame, hatred, and fear that Martin had felt last
night for me. He thought I was killing his father as he came
running into the room, halting by the door in shock. It was the
briefest of pictures. Gordon and Peter on either side of me hauling
as hard as they could. I was shouting in pain with my hands locked
onto Felix’s chest and he was shouting in pain. Three different
doctors were attached to Felix in ways I couldn’t see in the flash.
Energy was shooting through all of us in various colors and
intensities and none of it was calm. “It was really scary,” he
muttered.

“I bet,” I replied.

“Peter went to London to check on Dillon,” he
went on. “And Mike hasn’t gotten back from Germany yet. He should
be back with Bishop later this afternoon.”

“Bishop? What’s Bishop want now?” I asked,
more out of aggravation than thinking Marty would know.

“Don’t know. I’m not in that loop,” he said.
“You hungry?” That’s one of the good things about teenage boys,
priorities in the right places.

“Yes!” realizing just how hungry I was.

“I’ll meet you in the dining room in a few
minutes, then,” he said as he slipped out of the connection.
Several parts of the ward pulsed lightly as John and Marty got up
and started moving. I pulled out of the wards.

“Okay, Shrank, it’s time to move,” I said,
waking the pixie out of his doze. “I need to eat something. Big day
ahead of me.”

“Yes, Master Seth, I imagine you do,” he
squeaked stretching. “And you’re not leaving me behind this
time.”

“You can join me for breakfast, Shrank. I
don’t have a problem with that,” I said, chuckling softly.