Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (53 page)

“So what’ll we do now?” Peter asked. He sort
of yawned, cocking his jaw to one side, then the other. I had no
idea what he was trying to do with his face there.

“Wait to be congratulated,” Kieran said
cheerfully. “But I have no idea what the elf’s humor will be. I
kind of feel like we cheated.”

“What did you do to them, anyway?” I asked
him, getting a mug of water from the table near the door.

“Basically electrocuted them. Just a few
seconds, long enough to keep them out for a while,” Kieran said.
Deciding he was hungry, he headed to the table, too. Ethan and
Peter found an uncomfortable bench and sat, content for the
moment.

A knock at the door forewarned MacNamara’s
arrival by a half-second as he stormed into the room like a silk
hurricane. MacNamara, alone, stopped in front of Kieran as he
calmly bit into the sandwich he’d just finished putting
together.

Granted, I didn’t have much experience with
elves, but when MacNamara spoke, he spoke in the lowest tone I’ve
heard an elf speak. It sounded ominous to me until I processed the
actual words.

“In all the years I have spent hosting the
games here, that by far is the shortest, least violent, and
funniest of finals I have ever seen.”

“Thank you. It was Seth’s idea,” Kieran said
equably. He was still quite happy about not having to kill
everyone.

The elf laughed and it hurt. The pitch drove
in through our skulls and down our backbones and really, really
hurt. The Stone quickly threw up sound baffles for me, relieving
the pain, and I replicated the shield pattern around the others as
quickly as I realized what happened, hopefully in time to save an
eardrum or two.

“How,” gasped MacNamara between fits of
giggles, “How did you do it?”

“It was a simple energy manipulation,” Kieran
said humbly. “Seth merely noted that most combatants waited until
the contest was well under way before protecting themselves. He
thought we might take advantage of that and strike first. It
appears that was an intelligent consideration.”

MacNamara thought about it for a moment. “The
spell you used required knowing where they were.”

“Yes,” responded Kieran, taking another bite
of his sandwich. When Shrank did this to him in the garage, he
threatened the pixie’s life.

“How did you know where they were through the
barrier?” MacNamara asked suspiciously.

“Didn’t you?” I asked, trying to draw the elf
away from Kieran.

“Yes,” he answered curtly, turning to me.
“But I watched them from the moment they entered the field to the
second they carted the last man off on a stretcher.”

“We lost interest once they fell down,” I
said, shrugging.

“How?” he asked more insistently.

“I apologize, Lord MacNamara,” I said as
formally as possibly, standing straight and bowing slightly to him.
“I don’t know how to answer that question more completely without
sounding tremendously sarcastic. We merely looked and they were
there.” He didn’t want to believe me, but he couldn’t see a way
around it without outright calling me on it. It was too simple an
explanation for him. Behind him, Kieran was having a hard time
holding back his own snickers at the exchange. We’d be in serious
trouble if he could read our auras.

A knock at the door relieved the pressure
when an agent of MacNamara came in with Ferrin in tow. MacNamara
brightened a touch at the sight of the black-clad bleached-blonde.
Ferrin tried to exude the same sneering self-confidence he had on
the day we met, but he didn’t quite make it across the bridge from
“Oh my God, these guys can squash me like bug!” mode yet. It was a
reasonable cover, nothing obvious and on the surface, but he was
definitely nervous to be around all of us by himself.

“Ah, Mr. Ferrin, good of you to join us,”
cooed the elf. “I thought perhaps we could all go out together for
the final presentations. This way, gentlemen…”

It was a good thing none of us objected to
leaving because he wouldn’t have heard us—he was halfway down the
hall before we stood up and we had to jog to catch up with his
nearly eight foot lankiness. Not that any of us objected. All
of us wanted this done and over with, including Ferrin.

And this was indicative of the next several
hours. After the, to me, surprisingly short award ceremony in which
we received an elegantly scripted announcement of our
accomplishment and a short stack of bearer bonds drawn on a Swiss
bank. Ferrin received a similar compensation package with his
presentation. It was all very quick and the elf whisked us away
through the cheering crowds.

MacNamara kept us running from one gathering
to another, showing the five of us off like prize-winning poodles.
Kieran kept Ferrin in front of us the whole time, mistrusting him
still. He needn’t have bothered. Ferrin’s attitude and energy level
deflated with each change of party, growing sullen by the fourth.
Couldn’t blame him. I was pretty bored, too. Occasionally, Peter
would greet someone by name and I saw two people I’d seen with my
parents but didn’t know their names.

Roughly three hours later, we stopped outside
our apartment without warning. On the balcony, Shrank waited for us
atop a small bundle of clean laundry. The brownies had laundered
our clothes for us. All of our belongings, mostly our cell phones,
sat in small piles next to them where Shrank had collected
them.

“Unless you’d prefer to stay the night…?”
suggested MacNamara, trilling a little high on the last word. The
second, orange iris in his eyes flared slightly when he said that,
putting me on edge and making me sort of itch all over. Ferrin was
relieved at the thought that this was over and he’d be leaving,
too. He perked up considerably, got downright cheerful even.

“While we appreciate the offer, your Grace,
the young ones have been away from their homes long enough
already,” Kieran responded, smiling broadly. I wasn’t quite sure
what that meant, but it sounded condescending, like babies needing
their blankies.

“Should we change?” I asked, eyeing my stack
of belongings and noticing the more casual silks on the bottom of
each stack.

“If you desire,” MacNamara purred. “But you
may keep the clothing provided to you. I’m certain your Master
would prefer it be destroyed lest it fall into the wrong
hands.”

“Just so, your Grace,” Kieran said, bowing
his head slightly and smiling.

We passed through the gate and grabbed our
stuff while he talked to the elf. Shrank hopped onto my shoulder,
going as invisible as possible as well as leaning as far back as he
could, almost hanging off my neck. He was still nervous of
MacNamara’s attention.

The mad trek through the Arena began again
seconds after we filed in behind Kieran. The contrast now was
amazing: everyone was gone but us, everyone. There wasn’t a soul
left in the entire Arena that I could see. The elf led us through a
door into darkness and quickly through to another door out onto the
wide promenade outside.

The grounds were completely empty, too. Not
one tent or pavilion still stood and no evidence of them existing
prior but minor bare spots on the ground in some places. Not one
piece of litter of any kind marred the grass or roads. MacNamara’s
cleaning and maintenance crews were phenomenal. A canvas rucksack
sat on the left of the road on the fourth ring. Ferrin snatched it
up without slowing down and slung it over his shoulder. MacNamara
had us through his front gate in moments.

Ferrin stepped forward at the elf’s gesture
toward the fuzzy portal opening just past the gate. He turned to
the elf and said, “It has been an honor, Lord MacNamara.” Then he
turned and walked into the portal, vanishing from sight.

“He will be an interesting one to watch,”
MacNamara said as he turned to us. “As I would say of you, but you
make that very difficult to do.”

“As do you, Lord,” Kieran said smiling.

The elf trilled a giggle at him. “But I’m
hardly worth watching in my little fiefdom of Faery.”

“As if you never step outside its bounds,”
Kieran chastised the elf lightly.

“Fare thee well, Ehran McClure,” MacNamara
said, gesturing to the shimmering doorway, giggling. “Until we meet
again.”

“Farewell, Lord Elf,” Kieran said, politely
half-bowing himself. He was talking to himself, though. MacNamara
had vanished. He let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Let’s go home,
boys.”

MacNamara’s door opened at the front of the
fake hardware store. My car sat in the parking lot, untouched
except by a light coating of dust and pollen. My key remote
wouldn’t open the doors and none of the phones would power up, but
once I unlocked the car with the key and Peter changed the
batteries in the phones with the backups from his briefcase,
everything started up without a hitch. The phones couldn’t get a
signal at the time, but the car’s clock read a few minutes after
noon. We changed out of the green silks into our cleaned street
clothes and started for home.

The trip home was uneventful, just long. We
couldn’t skip through space like we did before; Peter and Kieran
needed the phone time. Between attorneys, accountants, and bankers,
we needed as much of a head start as we could get. Our biggest
stumbling block was going to be papers for Kieran and Ethan, but
Peter assured us that we’d have everything we needed for that by
Monday. Having never done anything illegal before, I just nodded
and kept driving. For the sake of the papers, they decided to make
Kieran his own son and Ethan his brother, making the whole ordeal
seem incestuous. Thankfully, there wasn’t a need to create
backstory for paperwork, but it did make me wonder if the whole
stereotype of Southerners marrying close relatives wasn’t really
the work of magic users covering their tracks poorly.

They were able to get an amazing amount of
work done over the phone. Mr. Borland had already started a number
of legal matters that basically needed our permission and
statements to proceed on. Ethan set up several different accounts
through money transfers on one of the laptops using the accounts
and passwords Colbert’s records supplied for us. At this point, we
weren’t particularly worried with covering our tracks so much as
getting the job done. We really needed to get out of the country as
quickly as possible. We ate lunch on the road, mainly because it
gave us the opportunity to skip through some distance and get
closer to home.

Once we pulled through the ward at the edge
of the property, the now-familiar tingle of awareness flowed over
me and I relaxed. It felt like home.

We only had a week here though. Ireland
sounded a siren’s call and so did the attorneys in New York. The
weekend was a little lazy since we couldn’t get any business done,
but that didn’t stop Kieran from pressing us into drills. He taught
Peter to see in truth and both of us several different chameleon
spells that would hide us even further from prying eyes in the
mundane world. By Monday morning, he and Ethan had taught us two
more levels of their martial art form. I wouldn’t say we were
proficient at those levels, but they built on each other and like
the first levels, you knew when you got it right. It felt right
when you did.

Somehow, Peter had managed to get passports
for both Ehran and Ethan delivered to the house on Monday. By
Wednesday morning, we were flying out of Huntsville for New York to
meet with the attorneys. We’d been going back and forth with them
over the phone since last Wednesday so this was a formality of
signing contracts and a half million other documents. It also
helped immensely that Peter’s father met us there.

The plane trip was the first time the four of
us had flown commercially and we were all nervous. I’d never seen a
problem before—my parents flew fairly often, at least I thought
they did—but now that I knew our “sparks” could interfere with the
plane, I worried more. The trip to New York was our chance to
experiment on minimizing the risks.

According to Mr. Borland, mages eschewed
flight in general as being too risky. More than a few planes have
dropped from the sky, causing more damage and loss of life on the
non magical side. We could generally protect ourselves from
the fall, it seemed. Those that flew often had smaller, specially
designed planes with redundant systems and experienced pilots. The
cabins were heavily lined with crystals to collect any errant
energy discharges. Still, there were times even that wasn’t enough,
and we didn’t have the time to learn other ways to get to another
continent. We had to rely on mass transit.

Ethan came up with an idea to try on the New
York leg of the trip: a Faraday cage. It was a simple idea that
would keep the two of us tied up the whole time, but the advantage
of keeping everyone alive far outweighed keeping us in
conversations. He’d scout ahead of us and map out our flight plan
and I would adjust the field around the plane as we went. With
enough practice, we might even be able to do this in the future
with more ease, too. The short hop to New York was a little too
short to let me feel completely comfortable about the experience,
though, but it worked fine that time.

It was a shocked reunion at the attorney’s
office. Pulling us into a conference room, Mr. Borland stared at
his son for some time in disbelief. Peter hadn’t changed
physically, but he wasn’t visible to his father anymore. That had
to be disturbing to Mr. Borland. Peter had been preparing him for
it over the phone, but the reality of it was still difficult,
almost like his son had turned into a zombie. To top it off, he was
seeing his son change from “I don’t know what to do with my life”
to business mogul and power player. Peter was quite suddenly part
of a team that won a major magical contest. Something Mr. Borland
knew personally was tremendously dangerous. Not to mention he’d
almost died. Now he was about to sign papers that would incorporate
him into a multimillion-dollar company. Mr. Borland was a miasma of
conflicting emotions, but happiness for his son won out.