Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (25 page)

Kieran turned to Ethan, eyebrow cocked but
not saying a word. Ethan glanced up quickly, then back down at the
ground, blushing in embarrassment, running thick fingers through
his fine blond hair.

“I’m sorry, Seth. It seemed harmless at the
time, but you’re right. I can’t protect someone I’m not even close
to,” he said, humbly.

“I thought I was helping,” said Peter, giving
me a weak smile and a shrug. “I’m sorry.”

“That is a reasonable plan, little brother,”
said Kieran, nodding to me as he started us moving down the aisle
again. I fell in step with them beside Peter. We passed the fallen
shelves and headed for the double swinging doors at the end of the
aisle. Peter put his arm over my shoulders and pointed to the broad
yellow lines painted on the floor around the aisles. Whistling a
few bars from “We’re Off the See the Wizard” got him a mild chuckle
from me and relieved a little of my tension.

“Where is Shrank?” I asked, suddenly
remembering him there somewhere.

“Right here, Master Seth,” he squeaked,
barely audibly. He was on Peter’s shoulder, wrapped in his aura,
hidden. I guess if he had to hide in an aura, it had to be
Peter’s.

“We’ll explain this in another place, Seth,”
whispered Kieran, pushing open the swinging doors.

What lay beyond was a big empty room. It
still had loads of ambient energy flowing through it but nothing
else. Facing us was a rolling door big enough to drive a semi
through and to the right of that another set of double doors with a
crash bar. We headed for that. Ethan slowed as we got within a few
feet of them, looking back and forth between the doors and the
rolling door.

“Wait,” he said, before Peter pushed the door
open. “That leads outside.”

“Yeah,” said Peter, slowly. “That’s where the
portal is, right?”

“Yes and no,” Ethan answered. “All space has
direction inherent in it. A portal is built to branch two different
spaces together in directions that are not natural to it. The
result is that you can have a portal that can only be reached in a
particular direction if that is what you want. That’s what we’ve
got here. It’s on the other side of that door, but it’s flat. We’re
gonna have to raise the door.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, not understanding.
“What do you mean, space has direction ‘inherent’? There is no
inherent direction in the space we’re in right now.”

“Yes, there is,” Ethan said, shaking his
head. “You’re just used to it. Left, right, up, down, front, and
back. Six directions of mobility, though you could consider three
of them as negative aspects of the others.”

“Okay,” said Peter, apparently understanding
the argument easily. I, on the other hand, was going to have to
think about that for a while. I mean, I’ve dealt with this
conceptually in physics and mathematics for several years, but in
reality? Reaching up beside the exit door to the right, he hit a
bright yellow button marked “Up” and joined us in the center of the
room as the door started rolling up into the ceiling. Light poured
into the room as the door rolled and the ambient energy level shot
up incredibly high, flooding the room. When the door finished
rising, the back dock looked like… well, a back dock, but with huge
striations of power, as thick as telephone poles, emanating around
the edges shooting off into the sky in all directions in dark blue
and black but wrapped in a bright pink. It felt violent, reeked of
violence even.

“I believe this is when we need an
invitation,” Kieran said calmly, staring out the door.

“Yes,” came a voice behind us. We all jerked
around to face the newcomer none of us had felt come up.

Newcomers, there were three of them. In the
doorway to the warehouse stood the elf from the pictures of my
grandfather and my parents. He seemed taller here and less
colorful. His hair was completely white and hung loosely on his
head, feathering back slightly around his face, ears protruding
through it and far more pointed and swept back. His skin looked
like pure ivory, unblemished by time. His eyes had two colors in
them, a pale blue like the earliest morning sky rimmed ever so
slightly with the orange of the rising sun. The pin-stripes in his
white day suit matched the blue of his eyes as perfectly as his
tiepin and cuff-links matched the orange rim. He held matching pale
blue gloves in his hands atop the black cane, casually askew as he
watched the four of us. His top hat was missing, though.

On either side of him, a step back, stood two
identical elves, identically attired in white suit with tails, a
gold vest and white shirt and tie. They looked like snobby butlers
to me. Same white hair falling to their shoulders. Same pointed
ears poking out slightly. Their eyes were darker blue, rimmed in
the same orange, and their skin was still as pale. But they didn’t
have quite the same sense of presence.

“MacNamara,” Kieran said, bowing his head
politely to the lead elf. “It is an honor to meet again.”

“Ehran McClure,” said the elf on the right,
not the one I thought was MacNamara at all, but that one did return
Kieran’s head bow. “It is an honor.”

“You have changed over the years,” said the
elf on the left.

“Such is the way of mortals,” said Kieran,
still to the center elf. I was getting confused.

“To what do we owe this pleasure?” asked the
right elf.

“We are searching for my father and his
mother,” said Kieran. “Our research has led us to your games. We
wish to talk to several people there.”

“You?” asked the left, inflecting
disbelief.

“Wish to join the games?” asked the right
while the center elf seemed horrified.

“No,” said Kieran quickly. “We merely want to
talk to certain people.”

“Then why should I?” asked the left,
petulantly.

“An exchange?” asked Kieran, coyly.
“Information?”

“What could you,” started the right elf.

“…have that I want?” finished the left
elf.

Kieran merely smiled and shrugged slightly,
teetering up and down on the balls of his feet. I was getting the
hang of the outer elves talking for the middle one. It was like bad
stereo. The elf stared at Kieran for a moment, assessing his
demeanor.

“Very well, McClure,” said the right.

“An exchange, then,” said the left. I could
feel the inherent threat in the word exchange, though. The right
elf held up an over-sized square envelope, but made no effort to
approach us.

“The Black Hand has lost its bite,” Kieran
said softly.

All three elves stood stock-still, staring at
Kieran. MacNamara’s face was surprised and his eyes searched
Kieran’s for signs of deception. After a moment, he started
laughing, heartily and deep in his belly. He did, not the right and
left elves. They were too busy being shocked and staring at
MacNamara. He threw his head back laughing. It echoed through the
empty room and it took him a few minutes to stop.

“I thought that might amuse you,” Kieran said
mildly, crossing his arms in front of him.

“Who else knows of this?” MacNamara himself
asked in a high tenor, his voice cracking from under use.

“Oh, one would assume its masters,” Kieran
answered, mildly. “There may be a few humans who have seen one or
two of the teeth in use once or twice.”

“Do you know who? How?” he asked, moving
forward and taking a more amicable position to Kieran’s right,
gesturing politely to lead through the open doorway. We fell in
behind them and his compatriots turned to each other
simultaneously, then fell into step behind us. Ethan and I both
glanced back several times at them, but they merely marched along
with us, watching MacNamara.

Walking through the portal wasn’t like I’d
imagined it would be. I figured it would be like walking through a
sheet of water, feeling the plane hit you as you traveled through
it until you were done. I watched Kieran and MacNamara walk
through. They were there then not there. When I stepped into the
plane, I felt the difference immediately. It felt like a heavy wet
blanket covered my entire body all over, suffocating me, lifting me
up, twisting me, then it was gone and I was through and in a
different environment completely. I looked back and the elves
appeared behind me like they didn’t have a care in the world. The
portal wasn’t there anymore.

We’d come out onto grass, a pasture it looked
like, a dozen yards or so from what looked like the entrance of a
circus a hundred years ago. Huge poles dug into the ground held
colorful banners across the promenade, guy wires streaming down on
two sides of each pole with pennants running down their length.
Canvas tents and pavilions stretched down to the left and right.
There were plenty of trees around. The sky was bright and sunny,
but the wrong color from the sky we’d just came from and completely
cloudless.

“Someone has taken ownership of each, yes,”
said Kieran, smiling up at the elf. MacNamara stood a good six
inches taller than Kieran when he stood up straight.

“A bargain for another time, then?” MacNamara
said, raising his brows and turning to survey our troop. His elves
took up station behind him again.

“I imagine it will become obvious before I
can use such with you,” said Kieran, showing dejection I don’t
think he felt. MacNamara chuckled as we bunched up behind
Kieran.

“Perhaps,” he answered, nodding slightly.
“Since your exchange was so amusing to me, let me offer this gift:
know the rules. It is a dangerous place in there. Now I must take
my leave.” MacNamara turned and evaporated into thin air. At least
that’s what it looked like. The other two elves went with him,
leaving the four of us at the gate to his carnival.

As a group, we turned to look through the
posts. It was a big letdown, really. All the stress and worry of
getting here, going through the warehouse, facing down a massively
powerful elf to stand in front of a county fair. From here, it
looked like an empty county fair.

“Well, let’s go find Grandpa,” I said and
took the first step in.

“Wait, Seth,” said Kieran, uneasily. “I have
to do something unpleasant first. Shrank?”

“Yes, sir. I’m ready,” said the pixie,
sullenly, flying out from Peter’s shoulder to face Kieran, hovering
at chest height.

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking over at
Peter. He didn’t know either, apparently. There must’ve been
conversations neither of us had been privy to. Kieran gathered
power from around us, an easy task since the environment was rich
with it.

“I did the pixie a disservice, it seems,”
said Ethan softly. “Even though it was what he wanted and every Fae
dreams of. When I removed his geas, I removed them all, which
included the Original Geas, passed from mother to child. It
governs, among other things, fealty to the Queens. Without that, he
would be seen as a Wylde Fae by his peers, to be either slain or
tamed. Kieran is going to replace that geas with another. Neither
of them wants this, but both know the consequences of doing without
it.”

“Catch-22,” said Peter, nodding grimly. I’d
read the book a few years back. Didn’t really care for it.

Ethan just watched as Kieran moved the energy
he collected in a circle between Shrank and himself. It coalesced
into a band of gold, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Shrank stared
at it, horrified. Kieran mumbled low, moving his hands about in the
air in a complicated pattern, shifting the ring of power. A fine
script flowed around the outside edge of the ring as if engraving
itself on the band. Palms out, Kieran pushed the ring to the pixie
until it spun slowly around him. Kieran mumbled more urgently,
faster, and the ring spun faster and faster. Shrank stopped beating
his wings and merely hung in space as the golden ring spun on a
different axis and took on a bubble shape. He hung limply, his arms
and wings drooping and his tongue lolling out. Kieran clapped his
hands together, the golden bubble burst, and Shrank fell to the
ground like a stone, bouncing. Ethan caught him before he hit
twice, coddling him to his chest and taking the pixie carefully to
Kieran.

“That hit him harder than I expected,” said
Kieran softly, looking at Shrank.

“It is an old magic,” said Ethan, just as
softly. “He will recover quickly, and he will be happy to not hide
from his own.”

A feminine voice called our attention back to
the entrance. A lone elf stood between the banner posts calling out
quietly in a language I didn’t know. She could plainly see us, so I
assumed she wasn’t talking to us. Kieran strode forward a few steps
and spoke to her in the same language, full of vowels and rolling
consonants. She was briefly surprised that Kieran spoke but hid it
quickly. Whatever Kieran was saying, she didn’t believe readily.
She was easier to read than MacNamara or his goons. They went back
and forth for a few minutes, with Kieran apparently asking
questions and the woman supplying answers. She pointed to the
banners and the pennants running down the guy wires at one point,
then back behind her generally. They bowed their heads toward each
other and took a step back, then she turned and walked back into
the empty concourse.

We split the distance between us, meeting
Kieran halfway to the entrance. Shrank was stirring drunkenly in
Ethan’s cupped hands.

“Either Peter’s information was off by a
day,” said Kieran, “or MacNamara held us up for a day. I wouldn’t
put it past him, either.”

“Could that be why it felt like being wrapped
in a wet blanket?” I asked, thinking about how I felt when I walked
through the rift.

“Yes, but I didn’t feel that,” Kieran said,
looking to Ethan, who shook his head. “He hid it pretty well from
us. I wonder if he just didn’t hide it from you or if you saw
through him?”

I just shrugged. “All I did was feel a wet
blanket.”