Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (40 page)

I pulled the Night sword out of the now crisp
and burnt shell that was St. Croix, smoldering in the grass. I’d
just rationalized killing a man and now I was going looking for
more. How messed up is that?

Okay. I’d gotten six myself. Peter got at
least one, probably two. Ethan and Kieran’s pyres were still hot
enough to melt just about anything, but I couldn’t count anything
that may have been inside at the time. There was nothing on this
side of the fires so I took the far side. Scorched and scored grass
with occasional, not easily recognizable body parts littered that
side. It was eerily quiet, even with the fires.

“Seth! Where are you?” I heard Kieran call
out. Ethan echoed the yell farther over.

“Here!” I yelled, stepping past the fires.
“Where’s Peter?” I hadn’t heard from him yet and I was getting
anxious.

“He’s hurt,” Kieran said. It was a bone
chilling to hear those two words. It was worse when my senses
cleared the fire and I could see Kieran kneeling over Peter,
adjusting his body. His pelvic bone was crushed and his left side
was almost pulp. Thankfully, he wasn’t conscious, but he was barely
alive.

“No!” I yelled as I ran to them. This was my
fault. Guilt and grief flooded me as I watched Kieran flood Peter
with a fine line of blue healing energy that diffused throughout
his body. I made myself look at the damage in Peter’s body as
Kieran worked. It was worse than with Kieran. Something had crushed
his left side and ruptured organs along with bone. He must have had
a shield up but gotten caught between a rock and a hard place.
Peter wasn’t going to make it. Kieran couldn’t move fast
enough.

“Seth, Kieran, you might want to hear this,”
said Ethan, walking up to us from the far side of the fires. He was
holding the goat-thing’s head, the one that I’d decapitated, by its
horns. Its eyes glowed once again but nowhere near as strongly as
before. “Say it again,” Ethan said to the head, shaking it
violently.

“We will heal the boy if you allow us to go
home,” the goat-thing said. It was amazingly articulate with razor
sharp teeth and no throat.

“And you’ll never come back to my world
again?” I asked.

“No,” it agreed.

“Can we get them home?” I asked Ethan. He
nodded. “Do it, then,” I said, “But if you are deceiving me, I will
come after you. All of you, you understand me?” The goat stared at
me with pure hatred for an instant before the fire in its eyes died
out completely. The Loa swarm above us dove at Peter, all of them.
I raised the Night sword nervously but held it in check. Kieran
pulled away as one Loa from the swarm reached out and touched
Peter’s abdomen. The change was instantaneous, unlike the change it
made to the human forms to the twisted animal forms earlier. His
body was re-formed, just like Ethan did with his, solid and just
like it was before he stepped onto the field. The swarm pulled away
and I felt Ethan begin to push on the block he’d created.

“Wait,” Kieran said to Ethan. “You said you
would heal him. You’re not done.”

That made me look again. Kieran was
right—Peter still had holes in his aura, in his soul. Big, jagged
holes that looked like bite marks. The blood drained out of my head
when I realized this. I felt it leaving, like it was puddling in my
feet. This was what my grandfather was trying to do to me.

One eel-like creature swam out of the swarm
down to Peter, sniffing at his prone body. It spent a few seconds
on the bite marks then looked up at the swarm. Whatever it
communicated I didn’t catch, but it roiled like an angry snake pit
until three of the Loa were forced to the outside. Something
invisible seized their heads and dragged them down, the rest of
their bodies snapping wildly trying to get free. As they neared
Peter, their inarticulate bodies went rigid and they were twisted
from head to tail. The essence of Peter’s soul dripped out of their
thinning bodies and down onto Peter. It filled the holes thinly,
but not completely. The three Loa were tossed into the fires, their
bodies spent and lifeless. The Loa began to swim through space back
to the swarm as the goat-thing’s head still in Ethan’s hand said,
with difficulty, “Best… we… can… do…”

Damn it, they’d already lied to me once. I
jumped up and grabbed the retreating Loa by the tail and jerked it
back down. It snapped around, trying to bite me, but found only
shield, and the Stone wrapped its own power around the eel and
trapped it like a fly in amber. I had its measure now and the Stone
knew how to hold it. I looked down the thing’s throat and saw more
of Peter than any of the other three held combined, and don’t cha’
know that just pissed me off?

It didn’t get a chance to scream as I ripped
its jaws apart and kept ripping until I got the piece of Peter’s
soul. I lifted it out as gently as I could. It felt like I was
holding his heart in my hand instead of a gentle energy matrix. I
choked at the thought and had trouble seeing suddenly. Everything
was very blurry. Kieran came up and took the bit of Peter’s soul
out of my hands. That’s when the sob wracked through me and I
realized why I couldn’t see.

I couldn’t do this right now. This was my
fault and Peter needed me. He needed me to be all I could be. I
wiped my eyes and tried to seal my emotions away. Looking at Peter
intently, I tried to judge how much was still missing. There were
still two pretty big holes but his body was breathing on its own
again. I hoped that was a good sign. Autonomous brain functions
were kicking back in. What were the holes going to affect?

Oh, damn. I saw it now. I looked at the goat
head and said, “You make me come up there and I’m killing all of
you.” I meant it, too. Peter was going to be a vegetable. He’d
live. Sorta. They lost and they were trying for revenge. And they’d
almost gotten away with it. As it stood, Peter had no higher brain
functions and no access to his magic. On the surface, everything
looked right. I owed Kieran big for not being as obtuse as I was. I
repeated the words to myself that Kieran taught me in the garage
several days ago as I stared deeply into Peter. See in truth was
their meaning, but I needed more than truth now. I needed to
differentiate fine energy, but from a distance. And Ethan had
taught me magic that worked on a cellular level. A soul wasn’t
cellular.

I sighed as I started to rise into the sky,
lifted up by the Stone. Ethan jumped up beside me. I welcomed his
presence. We were maybe four feet off the ground before two dead
Loa were lying at our feet, split open from head to tail. Well,
their heads were actually missing. Ethan picked up Peter’s essence
out of one eel and I picked up the other one while the Stone
lowered us. Kieran took the soul bits and placed them delicately
into the holes. He breathed lightly onto them and the bits lit up
in sympathy with the rest of his soul. We plugged the holes, but
there was nothing written in the stars that said it would cohere
and work together. This wasn’t clay.

“Do they have anything else we can use to
help him?” I asked Kieran, as I knelt down beside Peter.

“I can’t sense anything of enough
significance,” Kieran said, looking worried. “And I think I’ve done
all I can, at this point. He’ll either heal or he won’t.”

Looking up at the nervous swarm, I said,
“Pass the word to all your kind, if I see the slightest waver of
you, I will track you down and kill you. Now get the hell out of my
sight.”

Ethan pulled his plug on the hole and the
swarm flooded out of our universe, leaving the stink of hatred and
fear as their trail. I called it a plug. It was more like he
confused its ability to exist here. I watched him do it and
basically, it looked like he moved out of their way, like he moved
the “in-between” that he lived in from in front of the portal. It
was a weird sensation.

I took Peter’s right hand as I sat down on
the grass, cross-legged. He was still holding onto my battery. I
smiled as I pushed energy into him, cool blue for healing and a
warm rosy caring and concern. Kieran pulled back, sighing in
relief. He’d been at this a while now. A huge expenditure of
energy, to be sure. He had to be exhausted.

“Thank you, Kieran,” I said, earnestly. “For
everything, really, thank you.”

“S’what family’s for, Seth,” he replied.
“Walls are coming down.”

The roar of the crowd hit when the walls were
about three-quarters high and it was deafening. There was no
conversation between us until the walls were finally down
completely and the referees closed in on us. They carried a magic
bubble of silence with them, or something. Two came up with a
stretcher and slowly lifted Peter up while I continued to coax the
rips and tears in his soul to mend. That’s all I could do, coax
through bleary eyes.

We’d won the battle, but the cost was still
too high.

Peter’s body was intact and working normally.
His aura fluctuated around the tears, not wanting to accept the
patching or the glue the Loa supplied. The pathways between his
mind and his soul had been ripped away and I didn’t know how to
repair that. Grief hit me hard as I looked down at him and I
squeezed his hand harder in mine. The battery bit into my hand
sharply. My mind flew down into it and I saw an echo of Peter
pulling from it to form a deadly spell with his mind: a caustic
liquid suspended in ethereal gel that would eat away at anything
biological.

Suddenly I realized I was in Peter’s mind. It
was an odd feeling, because I was also perfectly aware of myself,
outside of Peter walking slowly beside the stretcher. I watched as
Peter cast the spell directly at me, confident that I would duck
just in time so that it would hit the lizard coming up on my right.
And I did. Then I moved further right and kept going, out of sight.
Two fiery figures burst past the fires and around Kieran. Peter did
a terrific job of destroying one with another caustic orb of green
fire and sent the second careening into Ethan’s fire. It was truly
magnificent timing. I felt his decision to get more active in the
battle. I felt like pulling out and kicking his butt around the
stadium a few times. Instead, I followed the decision up into his
emotional center.

I hadn’t felt that anything I’d done was
particularly courageous. I was behind a nigh impervious shield
with seriously powerful weapons at my disposal. What Peter did here
was courageous. He advanced between the fires. He was in the ready
stance, walking slowly and watching. He had two spells ready and
waiting, a push spell and the caustic gel spell he’d used twice
now. He had gotten maybe four steps forward when the second
goat-thing trotted through the gap in the fires, its stringy hair
smoking lightly from the heat. The Loa trapped within the fires
were roiling at the edges, keeping Ethan and Kieran occupied
containing them.

The goat charged him hard. Peter slipped into
a defensive push, trying to leverage the goat past him on the left.
The same as Kieran had done. He used the push spell he had ready to
add to it. The goat just shoved its horns through the magic and
broke it apart. It just wasn’t enough. Peter did everything right.
His maneuver was correct in form, but it wasn’t strong enough. The
goat-things were deceptively strong and those horns were resistant
to magic. At the last second, he loosed the caustic gel in an arc
to come at the goat on the side. It didn’t have enough time to
avoid that and the spell crashed into its backside and started
eating away at it. Score another one for Peter. But its inertia
still slammed it into him, crushing into his left side.

A small group of Loa leapt free of the goat
as its head erupted in green fire. They swarmed at Peter, jumping
and biting into him like eels on his chest and head before fleeing
skyward. I guess that was about the time I killed the St. Croix
Loa.

And it was all because of me. He had to
protect my backside. He didn’t want me to be alone. He screamed my
name when that thing hit him. The loss was overwhelming. I had to
move; I was having a hard enough time keeping my emotions capped
but adding Peter’s on top of that was breaking me.

I stepped back into his intellect and
considered what to do. It was the echo that had pulled me in. There
had to be a clue in that somewhere, something that would help. He
hadn’t really lost anything. His memory was intact; his brain
functions were working. What he’d lost was control of them, his
sense of self along with it. It wasn’t a medical problem at this
point—it was more psychological and probably spiritual. I was going
to need his help to rebuild this. How was I going to do that?

Standing there for three heartbeats—I could
feel Peter’s after all—I heard a soft crying. That was… curious.
Searching through the whole of his aura and his body, I couldn’t
find anyone or anything to account for the sound. It was definitely
there, though, in the present. I pushed down into the battery again
and followed the echo of Peter’s pull on the power, followed it to
a dead-end. This had to be one of the places the Loa bit away. A
benefit to the bifurcation popped into my mind: I could see where I
was, where I wanted to be, and what lay in between the two. I could
make a path without worrying about destroying anything. Still, I
trod as lightly as I could.

I stepped out into empty space. Another odd
sensation, but the crying was clearer now. I just couldn’t see
where it was coming from. There wasn’t an up and down here, no left
or right that I could sense, no evident boundaries. I let myself
drift for a moment, listening. When I heard the crying again, I
willed myself in that direction and stopped when I couldn’t hear it
anymore. It took me five tries at this before I found him, huddling
in the dark, arms around his knees, hiding his face. Crying.

I sat down beside him and gently put my arm
on his shoulders. “Peter,” I whispered.