Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (16 page)

Jackpot. The door was open as I crept along
the wall. My first sight was a hospital bed. On top of it was
Ethan. I looked quickly up and down the hall, then back at Ethan.
He looked dead, so pale, with dried blood on his face. He had tubes
running out of his right arm and a machine making jagged lines
behind his head. I’ve never been to a doctor or even near a
hospital so I had no idea what all that meant. It looked scary
though.

“Eth’anok’avel,” I said in a commanding tone.
“I’m here.”

Ethan raised his head drunkenly and looked
around. When his eyes locked onto me, he disappeared instantly. I
sighed in relief, then stepped forward and peeked into the room,
looking for more veiled assailants. The tubes that were in Ethan’s
arm lay on the bed leaking clear fluid generously and the machine
was now complaining noisily about its single bright line. I was
more interested in the second bed against the opposite wall. Kieran
was laying in it with a setup identical to Ethan’s. Kieran couldn’t
just disappear, though.

I went to the table between the beds and
jerked open the drawer. It was full of medical supplies, most of
which I didn’t recognize. But I didn’t need anything special. I
grabbed gauze pads, tape, and bandages. Then I glanced back at the
door and froze. The man standing in the door wasn’t very big, but
the gun he was holding sure looked huge. A stock against his hip,
left hand on a grip with trigger and his right on another grip to
steady it. The man was quietly watching me, the gun level with my
every move. He caught my eyes and kept them locked to his. I didn’t
have a shield available to me. That was outside. And that was a
gun.

“Put the sword down slowly,” the man said in
a low voice, his dark eyes never leaving mine. I slowly lowered the
point to the ground, feeling abject fear at facing this man. He
looked cold, amoral. Not only on the surface, but deeper. The man
was more than a little nuts. It made surrendering a lot less
palatable. That realization came when the point of the Night Sword
was about a tenth of an inch from the floor. I let my eyes fall to
the Night Sword, pushing the energy it had stolen from the house
ward outward in the same form. His eyes dropped, too. In that
instant, I called the Day Sword in my right hand while the Night
Sword expended itself. It only took a second before the man was a
seared, flaking skeletal mass on the hall wall, fried by the power
of the wards, taken from his own people. I retched, but better him
than me. And I didn’t start this.

I sent the Night Sword to its hiding place
and turned back to Kieran. Needing the use of my hands, I sent the
Day Sword away, but kept the weight of it in my hand. I didn’t know
if that would make any difference to its power, but I felt safer.
“Come on, Ethan, I could really use some help here,” I muttered,
pulling tape hurriedly off Kieran’s arm.

“I don’t know,” Ethan said from behind me
calmly. I turned quickly to see him standing near the door looking
at the charred remains. He wore a black tee shirt, black jeans, and
black trainers. He looked very sleek. “You seem to be doing pretty
well without me.”

“Now is not the time for light banter,” I
said, pressing a gauze pad down lightly on Kieran’s arm where the
tubes went in. I could see the foreign-ness of it beneath his skin.
I pulled the tubes slowly from his arm, watching for tearing. I was
amazed I could see it that clearly. Pulling the tubes free and
dropping them, I pressed down on the wound and ripped open an
alcohol pad packet with my teeth. Ripped open a bandage next, then
wiped and bandaged his arm in rapid succession. Then I grabbed the
EKG or EEG, or whatever they are, wires and started ripping them
off of him. The machine started objecting but nobody seemed to
care.

As soon as Kieran was disconnected, Ethan
walked up, tossing blankets and sheets to the floor against the
wall and shoving the rail down. Like Ethan had, Kieran looked dead
to me. Skin so pale, with bruises everywhere and dried blood in
several places, but he was breathing, shallowly but breathing.
Ethan considered Kieran’s position for a second, then rolled him
onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He showed no exertion as he
nodded toward the door. I brought the Day Sword out again and
peeked out into the hall. Seeing nothing, I advanced slowly with
Ethan following. At the kitchen doorway, I tilted the Sword through
so I could see the reflections on its golden surface. Whatever was
there before was gone now. We skirted past the kitchen quickly.

The living room wasn’t quite as empty. Both
Swords acted of their own volition, I swear. The Night Sword burst
into existence in my left hand twisting me from the hall directly
into the room, slicing down into four separate tendrils of neon
green and obsidian that slid forward like giant squid tentacles.
The remnants thrashed wildly on the floor, gushing black blood that
burned carpet and furniture alike. The other ends snapped violently
back into their cloudy origin, flinging the black fluid around the
room, primarily on the woman nearest the cloud. She screamed high
and loud when the black blood hit her across the face and down her
chest. She lost control of her magic then and the cloud began to
roil onto her. The screaming stopped and the cloud swiftly
dissipated into the room, but she was gone.

The Day Sword jerked me back to the right to
parry the thrust of a very big knife while I watched the woman
disappear in the blackness. That got my attention. He was a big
man, at least as big as Kieran, all over. Shaved head and really
tiny, black eyes. Made him look mean. So did the ten-inch knife he
was wielding. He apparently respected the two three-footers I was
carrying, because he backed off after the first thrust and started
circling. Well, not circling, there wasn’t enough room for that,
but he was trying to take my measure, his eyes tightly on mine. I
held the Day Sword up in front of me across my body as I crouched
with the Night Sword somewhat loosely at my side, not knowing good
form from macaroni and cheese. I heard Ethan pass by the door
behind me.

“Very handy with those things, boy,” the man
said with a raspy voice.

“Rank amateur. Ask anybody,” I said,
grinning. He grinned back. I swear his teeth were pointed, like a
dog’s.

Then he moved with inhuman speed, jumping
toward me and twisting in mid-air, shoving the knife low at me in a
feint while throwing three smaller knives high. The Day Sword
twisted me to the right, pushing the hilt up to deflect the three
flying daggers into the wall then slamming the sharp point of the
Sword down into the man’s knife arm. The ten-inch steel knife
rolled out of his outstretched fingers as he stared wide-eyed at
the gleaming gold and silver Sword embedded in the floor through
his arm. I jerked the Sword up and backed out of the room quickly.
It looked like the blade had gone through both bones in his
forearms. It was still connected to the rest of him, but just
barely. Gross. I could be sick later. Had to be later.

I took off after Ethan. As I bolted out the
front door, Ethan had just made it to the car. Peter shoved the
passenger door open from the driver’s seat. I stepped out into the
sunlight and started looking for the men who’d been bowled over
when I crashed the house ward. I didn’t see anyone, but there were
five, maybe six, fuzzy areas close by. Raising the Night Sword
ahead of me, I walked out to the car as the man inside started
screaming in pain. Eerie timing, as screeching tires announced a
car arriving at the end of the street.

My attention, though, was still on the nearby
veils and the Night Sword. The bone in the Sword hummed. It was
hungry after its earlier work, even taking what it did from the
tentacles, and it wanted to eat. There were five pockets of passive
energy nearby, stored energy from the feel of it. I let it go. Five
ebony beams three inches thick shot from tip of the Sword
apparently at random and struck at unevenly spaced targets in
neighboring yards and in the street. It lasted for two seconds,
total. At the end five men fell back on their backsides,
off-balance, as their veils crashed, amulets breaking explosively
in two cases.

“Peter, stay down,” I heard Ethan say calmly.
I spared a glance over to see that Ethan had gotten Kieran in the
passenger side, safely buckled in. Now I just had to get Ethan and
me in the car and get away from here.

A black sedan squealed to a halt on the
street in front of me just as I passed Peter’s door. A man got out
of the passenger side wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a beige
raincoat. In August in Georgia. He had to be hot. He was a kind of
squat man with a Marine brush cut and round gold-rimmed glasses.
You had to think he thought he was important.

“That’s far enough, boys,” he said, in a
rumbling baritone. It was a familiar voice.

“I don’t think so,” I said calmly, holding
both Swords parallel to the ground. “You abducted these men. I’m
taking them back. Get out of my way.” When did I get so pushy?

“No, I arrested those men,” he said, reaching
into his coat.

“Don’t!” I shouted, raising the Day Sword
high in the sun so that it blazed in the light. He froze in place.
“That was not a jail I just walked out of. And neither of those men
was given any rights. You arrested no one. You assaulted and
kidnapped. Now get out of my way.”

“Is that the Day Sword?” he asked.

“It’s the Sword that’s gonna kill you if you
don’t get out of my way,” I said.

He sighed, glaring at me. “Seth McClure, I am
Deputy Director Clifford Harris of the United States Marshals and I
am hereby placing you under arrest.” He pulled his hand out of his
jacket and held out a badge wallet with an identification card. I
was unimpressed.

“For what?” I asked, full of contempt. I saw
Ethan taking position opposite me out of the corner of my eye.

“Breaking and entering,” he said, shrugging,
“Assault on Federal Officers, Jailbreaking. I could go on.” He slid
the wallet casually back into his jacket. I heard something fall to
the ground lightly behind me, but I didn’t turn. I knew it was
another dart, like the night before, and I knew the shield around
the car was now around me, too. I could sense it after all.

“If I had any belief that it would ever make
it to court, it wouldn’t hold up and you know it. What is it you
really want?” I couldn’t get into the car with the Swords in hand
and we needed to leave.

“You,” he said. Another soft thud on the
ground behind me. “Something is going on between the Fae and the
Councils and you are the crux of it. We want to know what and
why.”

I snorted at that. “Join the club. You picked
the wrong way to ask my help. You endangered two lives that were
important to me. As it is if I ever run into you again, I will hurt
you, but if my brother dies, I will come looking for you and you
will hurt for a relatively short time before you die. A week, maybe
less.”

I have never really wanted to hurt a person
before. I didn’t want to hurt the man with the gun in the house
earlier. Or the woman that was burned in the black tentacle cloud.
Or the man with the steel knife. But Harris had taken Kieran and
Ethan and put those three people in my way to hurt me and stop me
from helping my brother. My brothers. I finally learned how to hate
somebody and I hated him for that, too. I sent both Swords to their
scabbards with an unnecessary flourish and turned to Ethan, saying,
“Climb in, we’re leaving.”

“Seth, I can’t allow that,” said Harris,
reaching for power from the nearest ley line. It was a big thick
one, too.

I jerked back around angrily, snatching hard
on the ley line and funneling its power through me. Everywhere he
reached, I was there first pulling away energy from every channel
he created and shunting it back to the line just out of his reach,
like a giant game of Keep-Away. Rainbows of light cascaded up and
down my body as I stalked up to Harris, seething, arms at my side
and hands in fists. He stumbled back against the car, shocked to be
made powerless against me.

“Go away,” I said, hoarsely.

I turned and stomped back to the car. Ethan
was beside the passenger door, his jaw almost on the ground. If I
weren’t so mad, I would have laughed. I opened the car door and
climbed in behind Peter, not stopping the cycling of energy away
from Harris. I lit the inside of the car like a couple of hundred
watt bulbs.

“Go, Peter, go,” Ethan urged quietly. Then to
me, “Seth, keep cycling the line. See if you can store some of its
energy within your mind, like the energies of the Pact and weapons.
Just try a little at a time. It may help when we try to heal
Kieran.”

I heard Ethan but I needed to process that in
a moment. My concentration then was on Harris and not taking all
this energy and shoving it into several very uncomfortable places
for him. Pulling this energy gave me a very clear indication where
every other wielder of magic was trying to either push or pull onto
the plane. I was beginning to understand some of this.

I felt Peter pull the car through a
neighboring driveway and onto the street. He accelerated, so I
tugged harder on the line to keep them out over the greater
distance. When we turned the corner and out of sight, I released
the bulk of the cycling I was doing by flooding the entire area
with a pulse of radiation, just like Ethan had done at the hotel
the other night. It was changed to add the sense of Peter as well.
The sense of the four of us in the house, the yard, or the street
was irradiated and destroyed. I wasn’t sure what it did to physical
evidence. I released the line.

Suddenly, I was exhausted, sinking back in
the seat. We got away.

I’d finally done something good.

We got away with it, I told myself again. I
glanced out the window. Oh crap, we’re still in the neighborhood. I
sat back up, reaching for the line just as we ran the car right
through it. Electrifying would be a good adjective. I grunted out
loud, a bit dazed when it happened.