Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (101 page)

“Lunch and you’re not going after the elf
without me,” Shrank said, digging tightly into the swirl he made in
the silk shirt as I stood. “I may not be able to see you, but I
know that look. You had the same look when you argued with Lord
Kieran about fighting St. Croix.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Shrank.”

“Yeah, but there ya go.” He clipped the shirt
somehow and created a sling so he wouldn’t fall as I stood up. He
wasn’t going to be accidentally dislodged from the middle of my
chest. I walked downstairs.

John met me in the dining room with a firm
hug and a commanding “Sit” as he ferried plates of food from the
kitchen. He looked haggard and disheveled but kept moving until a
man and woman came into the kitchen through a back hallway and took
over. There was already enough food on the table for ten when he
sat opposite me. Marty came in a moment later. He sat next to me
and set an ornate box about the size of a cigar box next to me.

“Your wallet and cell phone,” he said,
tiredly. “Peter said to call if you got up before he got back.” He
yawned and grabbed a roll. “He also said to eat and fill, whatever
that means.” Martin was snippy today. Looking at him as he nibbled
at the roll and I filled my plate, his tiredness was only part of
the problem. There were other frustrations. I couldn’t throw
kerosene on those fires. He had a lot to be frustrated about and I
didn’t have any platitudes to offer him.

“I would suggest that Peter is back,” said
John gruffly. “At least we can hear him.” I made a face of
incomprehension, my mouth full with potatoes braised in butter and
onions. “The rest of you are quite silent with your portals,
extremely slick. Peter’s are very nearly as quiet, like trying to
hear a whisper on the wind, but if you’re listening…” That tin foil
tearing sound, I remembered and nodded.

Marty gave in, grabbed a plate, and ate with
me, slowly. Peter showed up ten minutes later wearing his silks
like me with a groggy Gordon in tow. He slugged Martin in the arm
lightly as he passed him.

“You were supposed to wake me,” he grumbled,
sitting and taking a plate.

“You needed sleep and he wasn’t going
anywhere,” Marty responded.

Gordon grunted at him. “Ma wants you upstairs
with her, now,” he said.

“Not until I find out what happened last
night,” he snapped, his body going rigid. He was ready to
argue.

“Marty, you’re too young for this,” Gordon
said plaintively. “I don’t want you involved. If you get hurt…”

“Gordon, look around you!” Martin nearly
shouted. “I have no choice but to get involved!” Gordon stared at
his little brother, slack-jawed. Peter and I exchanged looks and
sat back. Whatever was happening, this was not for us to interfere
in. “Da is a breath away from dying. Ma is an absolute wreck. If
you have to leave for any reason, Gordon, any reason, that leaves
me here to raise the Castle. Me! John can’t do it and you know
it.”

Gordon shot a look to John, who merely stared
at the food on the plate in front of him, then back to his nearly
hysterical brother. I haven’t seen the “Castle” in full defensive
modes, but I could understand the implications of what Martin was
saying. There was much more to the wards than locating people on
the property. The tears streaming down Marty’s face seemed to melt
Gordon even more.

“I’m a little hazy on a few details myself,”
I added quietly.

“Surprise, surprise,” grunted Peter, dishing
out some potatoes.

Gordon gave in, reaching across the table to
take his brother’s hand. “All right, Marty, you’re right. I just…
don’t want to have to… I’m afraid of the same things you are,
Martin. You can understand that.” Martin nodded slowly, sniffling.
This wasn’t an argument with his brother that he really wanted to
win. Gordon sighed, sitting up, and started picking at his
plate.

“You know we went to Grammand’s for the
Council meeting, right?” Gordon recounted. Martin nodded. I didn’t
know if Grammand was the city, house or what and I wanted
information about prior incidents, but we’d get back to that. “Da
and I drove a good ways and flew with Bishop part way. The night
for the most part was a fairly normal council meeting, all politics
and glad-handing. When he showed up told us there were elves in the
room.” Gordon pointed to me as the ‘he.’

“You didn’t see them?” Marty asked.

“They used a very good veil and layered a
large number of spells into the wards that numbed the senses,” I
told him. “I didn’t see them right off either.”

“As soon as he said that, all Hell broke
loose,” Gordon said. “Seth attacked the fake Ehran and Ethan, and
Peter and Mike waded into the crowd after the others. It was a
nightmare in that room. They played with our emotions at the same
time they were trying to kill us all. And the elves had help,
damned traitors.” The heat that filled his aura and his eyes was
scary, very scary. He sighed heavily and went on. “As with most
fights of this kind, many things happened very fast, most of them
involving Seth, Peter, and Mike. They had the elves on the run,
though, Martin. The three of them had already killed nearly a
hundred high-powered elves and eighty of our best barely had a clue
as to what was happening around us.

“They had one last trick up their sleeve,” he
went on. “And it took Seth to notice that one, too. The remaining
elves drew every bit of magic they could and drove it between the
water tables and the rock layers to set up a resonance that would
have created a massive earthquake in Europe. We had scant minutes
to divert this resonance somehow. Seth makes these things.” He
pulled a battery out of his shirt pocket and held the orange stone
up for Marty to see. I waved him off and handed Marty one from my
increasing store of them.

“Whoa! What’s the spell? This is powerful,”
said Martin, turning the rock over in his hand several times.

“Draw from it,” Gordon said, making a “go
ahead” motion when Martin looked up at him. He pulled from it with
his fingertips with a child’s grace, moving the energy in and out
of the surface of the stone. Like Ferrin and Gordon before him, the
battery intrigued him immensely.

“What is this?” he asked, still toying with
it.

“Near as Ethan can tell,” Peter said, sopping
up butter and basil leaves with a piece of bread. “Seth has created
something with about eight internal dimensions that magical energy
likes to flow through quite nicely. How and why it works, we
haven’t figured out yet.”

“Da and I created funnels around two of them,
empty ones,” Gordon continued. “Peter and I went one way and Da and
Seth went another. We were going to drive these into the ground and
launch the funnels to collect the energy before it could hit and
create the earthquake. My guess as to what happened is that Da got
caught in the crest of one of the waves when he was driving the
battery down. He knew then how bad it was going to be and kept
trying to drive the stone down, but he was too badly hurt by then.
That’s when Seth saw him.”

“I made him stop,” I said. “All I saw was
that he was hurting himself. I didn’t think about anything else
except that, but I didn’t know how to fix the broken parts. And
when Peter called, I was lost.”

“Peter and I got our stone in place and
launched and Peter took us back to Grammand,” said Gordon. “The
elves laid a ward on the house by then and Peter was stuck there.
We couldn’t make another portal to get out again. We don’t know if
they figured out what we were doing or if they were just trying to
keep as many of us there as possible or what, but we were stuck.
Then the wave hit. Probably the same wave that crushed Da’s chest.
The enormity of it was staggering, but the elves managed to reflect
it one more time. It cost them their lives, but they did it. Da was
our only chance.”

“How did you get out there?” I asked.
“Finding me I can understand. I felt the portal open, but you said
you couldn’t open a portal from the house…”

“Bishop threw us,” Peter said, grinning. “Not
a preferred method of travel, trust me.” I mimed throwing a ball in
confusion at the idea. Peter nodded slowly, still grinning. “Pretty
much. We had to get about four hundred feet out away from the house
and that was the fastest way anyone could think of. It wasn’t fun,
but worked. I got us to you. Gordon got the battery buried and the
funnel activated seconds before the wave hit. You told us how Felix
was. Gordon was saying his good-byes to his father then. We could
both see it.”

Gordon nodded sadly, a tear running down his
cheek. I didn’t dare turn to Martin right then. I would have turned
into a baby, I know I would have.

“Then we were here and you were screaming in
pain and you wouldn’t let him go,” said Gordon. “We yelled and
screamed for doctors. John was screaming at me through the wards
and through it all, Seth didn’t let go of him. When we finally got
enough doctors who knew what to do around him to take over for
Seth, we had to drag him off and hide him behind every screen we
had. You know the rest.”

“When did Kieran and Ethan disappear?” I
asked.

“That had to happen after Mike and I left for
London,” answered Peter. “That was an hour and a half after we got
back from your house.”

“We left for Dunstan’s to meet with Bishop
about two hours after that,” said Gordon. “He and Ethan were holed
up in his room then. Wouldn’t talk to anyone. As mad as he was, we
didn’t push too hard. He showed up at Dunstan’s a few hours later,
ready for the conference. We didn’t think to ask questions about
it.”

That didn’t surprise me. It was the same
magic that lulled me into complacency. And I wasn’t sure that
knowing when Kieran and Ethan were taken would really matter. I
finally looked at Martin and saw the lost little boy rebuilding his
world, wiping his eyes and sniffling.

“Go on up and see your father, Martin,” I
said softly. “He didn’t give up. There’s no reason you should
either.” He ran out of the room with his feet on fire. “Where’s
Ian?”

“Down at the stables at the moment,” said
John. “He’s been checking on Marty every half hour or so, but
trying to stay back, out of the way, just being there for him. How
a kid his age would even think to do that…” He shook his head,
uncomprehending.

“He went through it himself three years ago,”
Ferrin said from the doorway. Bishop stood beside him looking angry
and tired. “The stables, you say?”

“Yes, I’ll walk with you,” John said and got
up from the table. Bishop took his seat, setting his plate aside
and putting a small valise in its stead.

“Elven silk?” he asked, signing a complicated
glyph on the top of the valise, popping the locks. “Don’t you think
that’s in bad taste?”

“Actually, I consider it a delicious irony
and a huge slap in the face considering,” I said, moving my plate
aside. “Haven’t we done enough for you recently?”

“And don’t think that’s not humbling, young
man,” he said quickly, arching an eyebrow imperiously. “But the two
of you seem to find the trouble quickly so rather than skip around
you, I thought I’d go directly to you.” He reached into his
briefcase to pull out a thick bound file, tossing it across the
table. It landed picture perfect across my placemat. It was a cute
little gambit, a subtle play of power, and I wondered how often it
worked for him.

“Perhaps when I get back, I’ll be more
willing to consider looking,” I said, resting my chin on my hands,
elbows on the table around his file. Implicitly accepting his
information from his point of view. I learned a more subtle trick
driving down the road one day last month. The moment he turned his
attentions elsewhere, I’d return the file to his care.

“And where are you planning to go next?” he
asked. “This seems to be the only place that has withstood your
presence.”

“You’re being rude, Bishop,” warned Gordon,
his voice gravelly and rumbling with power. Bishop paled against
his dark blue satin shirt, pausing before speaking again.

“Yes, Cahill, you are right. My apologies,
Seth, I am under a lot of stress right now, but I should not have
allowed that to get the better of me,” he said with sincerity and
looking directly at me. I think he actually meant it. Hmm. Maybe
pigs could fly. I nodded my acceptance of his apology.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to get here
for another few hours,” I said to him.

“That was Mr. Ferrin looking at commercial
flight schedules,” he responded. “I cannot fly commercially and
prefer not to do it at all.”

“What have you learned from last night’s
fiasco, Mr. Bishop?” Peter asked. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with
his word choice but to some degree, he was right. The elves had
waltzed right over him, bottom-up and top-down.

“Precious little in the few hours we’ve had,”
he said tiredly, rubbing his face vigorously. “The elves’ bodies
are defying classification. The traitors are showing to be plants.
And what looked like a rushed and randomly completed convocation
was a carefully orchestrated assassination attempt on a massive
scale. The few suspects we have are denoted in the f…” He waved his
hand vaguely in my direction then noticed nothing between my
elbows. I smiled demurely as he reached into his briefcase without
looking and pulled out the file again. He handed to Gordon this
time and asked, “Would you give this to them with they return from
their chores, Gordon?”

“Certainly, Thomas,” answered Gordon.
Interesting. Gordon just moved himself up on the social-political
ladder. His aura streaked through with unease when he did it. He
didn’t like it, that I could see, but he seemed to be rebuilding
his self-image, just like Martin was doing. Coping. I realized that
it wasn’t Gordon that moved himself up that ladder. Bishop had
moved him up the ladder, to replace his father. It may have been
necessary, but I didn’t have to like it.