Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (54 page)

Both Borlands beamed in pride as Peter
introduced Kieran as Ehran to his father, then Ethan. Mr. Borland
was on pins and needles by the time I came round. Nervous,
obviously, he gave in to his wants and crushed me in a bear hug,
whispering in my ear, “You boys had me so scared.”

“Us, too,” I said, softly, hugging him back.
“I wouldn’t have made it without Peter.”

He pulled back, smiling disarmingly at me.
“The way you look out for him, I have no worries now.”

A knock at the door interrupted further
conversation and started the barrage of attorneys. They were
actually from two different firms, one agreeing to meet at the
other’s office due to our schedules. I’m sure there was a hefty fee
on the bill for it, too. It was during the second wave of contract
signing that Shrank made his presence known to the room.

Ethan’s cell phone rang as he flipped through
incorporation contracts, not really reading them, since we’d read
through them before. But there were two things particularly odd
about Ethan’s cell phone ringing—first, everyone that would be
calling Ethan was sitting at the table with him, and second, Ethan
didn’t have a cell phone on him. He looked up confused, but the
attorneys paid no attention to it. He excused himself from the
table and fumbled around with his pants pocket in the corner,
faking a phone call. Shrank chirped in his ear. From the table, we
couldn’t hear what he was saying.

Ethan came back to the table and started
pulling the contract apart separating pages in front of him into
piles. “Wow, when you are right, you are right,” he muttered.

“No, these will not do,” Ethan said, more
loudly. “At no time will control of the finances and accounts be
unavailable to any of the executive members. We agreed on that some
time ago. There are several exclusions in the language here. There
are several other loopholes that need to be closed as well.”

“Does that strike all of these?” I asked,
looking down transfer agreements I was about to sign and thinking
about the ones I’d already done. Could I undo all that?

“Maybe not,” muttered the attorney, Steadman
was his name, pulling a slim laptop out of his briefcase. “What are
you objecting to?” His secretary stepped out of the room and came
back a moment later with two other women. One stayed by the door
while the other two went to stand ready for the attorney.
Apparently, he brought the file up with a few quick taps because he
stood and went to stand beside Ethan. The secretary quickly took
his place, ready to type. I watched the ballet while I continued to
sign transfers that matched our plans. Everything I had was
correct.

Ethan pointed out the first of the language
he wanted changed and even gave a suggestion for changing it.
Steadman used almost exactly the same verbiage, changing only two
phrases. He was extremely apologetic when he changed it but pointed
out the same language used in several places, saying it was the
preferred style. He didn’t see that Ethan really didn’t care—he was
channeling a pixie anyway, and even then, Shrank didn’t care.

He worked hard to redeem himself by showing
how well he knew the contract. He and his secretary rewrote it
while he and Ethan talked. They jumped back and forth through the
document citing page and line numbers to each other fairly quietly.
They tweaked a few other places as well as removing completely one
unsalvageable section. They started it printing somewhere and the
secretary by the door left. Ten minutes later, she was back with
freshly printed contracts for Ethan to read. An hour long bump in
the road.

I finally spotted Shrank poking around
Ethan’s shoulder, reading. I could see him, but I had to be
looking. He’d been moving around the room till then and I hadn’t
thought about it until he played cell phone. Peter was right about
Shrank making a pretty good spy. I just don’t think I could send
him out alone into someplace he could get hurt. It just didn’t make
sense to me.

I handed the stack of papers to the man
standing behind me and Kieran handed me the stack he’d just
finished signing. And the round continued. My cell phone rang and
pointed out an incorrect account number in a transfer from Kieran
to me. I voided the check, circling the account number, and passed
it back to Kieran who passed it back to the man behind him who
started his own ballet of corrections.

All in all, it was an amazing amount of
paperwork with few mistakes that were handled with grace and
professionalism. And how Shrank kept up with it all, I had no idea.
I don’t think I have ever been that bored in my entire life. And my
hand was cramping. The order that things were done in totally
confused me, too. For instance, we had to show identification over
halfway through the paperwork. The guy who did it looked over
everyone’s passports and driver’s licenses very carefully, and knew
enough to demand the emancipation documents from me for the
contract signing and access to my parent’s money. He took
noticeably longer on both Kieran’s and Ethan’s. But he didn’t find
fault in Peter’s forgeries. Well, I wasn’t really sure they were
forgeries. They were just brand new. Who could say anything about
that? He wanted to but signed off on the necessary document and
left.

The attorney parade dwindled to nothing and
Peter and his dad huddled on one side of the table going over notes
and lists. The rest of us got up and stretched. Shrank came out of
hiding when it was just the five of us. “Good job on spotting those
mistakes, Shrank,” Kieran said, yawning. The pixie literally buzzed
and glowed at the compliment.

“Dinner?” asked Mr. Borland of Peter, leaning
back in his chair.

“Sure,” agreed Peter, “I think we can finish
up over dinner. Anyone want to join us?”

“Yeah, I’ll tag along for safety’s sake,”
said Ethan. “And it’ll give the brothers a little alone time.”

A secretary stuck her head in the door
looking puzzled, and said, “Did you need me, Mr. Borland?”

“Yes, Edith,” he responded, “Could you order
three cars for us, please?”

I turned to gather my belongings and realized
I came in with a slim briefcase and was leaving with five large
cardboard boxes of copies of documents and no place to keep them.
“We signed all of this?” I asked, a little flabbergasted by the
volume.

“Oh, no,” said Mr. Borland. “A good deal of
that is supporting documentation in addition to what you signed
today. I’ll be taking it with me to Alabama when I start setting up
your offices for you. You’ll have to decide what to do with it when
you get back, though. I’m just helping out while you search for
Robert.”

“I didn’t realize you were doing that much,”
I said, turning to Mr. Borland. “How can we ever thank you?”

“By doing your best to keep my son alive,” he
said with a smile. “Now let’s go get dinner, shall we?”

We filed out of the room that had been our
prison for the last nine hours and down through the high rise
building. Mr. Borland stopped in the lobby of the office and spoke
quietly with Edith for a few moments, thanking her for staying so
long into the evening for us. Then he insisted that she walk down
with us so that she wasn’t leaving alone. There were three cars
waiting for us on the street once we got down there. Mr. Borland
put Edith in the first and sent her on her way, then Peter, Ethan,
and he got in the second, Kieran and I, the third. It was a quiet
ride back to the hotel. Shrank had either been left at the
attorney’s or gone with Ethan and Peter. He’d faded into the
woodwork around Edith.

Once we were safely ensconced in the suite
and our dinner ordered from room service, I let the day’s activity
settle and weariness hit. Kieran’s pensive mood seemed to break a
little.

“Ethan’s right. We haven’t spent any time
together, have we?” he asked.

“There really hasn’t been that much time,” I
said, looking up from the television.

“Yeah, but I know more about you through
Ethan than I do through you,” he complained.

“Are you sure about that?” I asked him. “Or
do you just know more facts about me through Ethan. There’s a
difference there, you know.”

The elevator opening down the hall caught my
attention briefly. I hadn’t realized my attention was so stretched.
A room service attendant pushed a cart out of the elevator and
toward our room. I started to get hungry.

“I guess you’re right,” Kieran said as the
attendant knocked on the door. I ushered her in and let her set the
cart up, signing the check with barely a scribble. We sat down to
eat our dinner.

“Why is it that you and Ethan seem so much
more powerful than anyone else,” I asked. “I mean, you got the
Queens of Faery to back down in front of MacNamara, Cahill, and
Florian. They were all shocked at that.”

I felt Kieran push against the room, exerting
a small amount of power, blocking sound from traveling outward and
sealing the room. It was an interesting effect.

“The Queens think that I still hold the
Pact,” said Kieran, glancing up at me. “Therefore, they think that
I still hold the knowledge of how to destroy them.”

Oh. Well. I had no idea what that meant.
Definitely got the implication though.

“The Pact holds the history of the Elves from
their beginning to the Great War,” said Kieran. “It has a great
many secrets within it, but chief among them is the key to the
defeat of the elves. It is an interesting dichotomy that the Queens
both do and do not want the Pact destroyed.”

“If it’s the key to their demise,” I asked,
“why do they even know about it?”

“They were at its inception,” he said
smoothly. “And they are bound by the Original Geas to not speak of
it to others. Both Queendoms would fall instantly if they did. Not
even the wild Fae would live through the energy of the binding
break.”

“That’s harsh,” I said, awed by the
severity.

“Trust me when I say they deserve worse,”
Kieran said. “You will understand better when you look into the
Pact. But understand that they are truly an alien race. Their
beliefs and morals do not follow the same structures that ours do,
regardless of how similar they appear to us.”

I nodded as if I understood, filing the
statement away for when I did actually pierce the veil on that
roiling mass of information sitting in my cavern. I was more in awe
of it now than before. Millennia of history were stored in a ball
in my head. Freaky.

“Still, you and Ethan seem to control your
magic so much more easily than even the elves,” I said.

“Oh, you mean much like you are doing,” he
said, chuckling. I looked up at him, confused. “You haven’t noticed
how you are doing so much instinctively? Just by moving energy
around? By what ‘feels’ right?”

I nodded. We’d covered this before and I
wasn’t going to keep up the argument that I hadn’t really done
anything.

“Magicians, sorcerers, witches,” he said,
“whatever word or style of magic used, are products of the universe
at large. Through whatever mechanism, these people can control
certain aspects of the magic planes. They use metaphors that their
minds and souls can manage to control these energies in whatever
way they can. In general, their connections to magic are tenuous
and slight. Elves are more closely connected and are more able to
deal with it. You are closer, still. Ethan and I stand on the
planes, me through training and Ethan through what he is.”

“And this is what you’re teaching to us?” I
asked.

“Well, I will definitely teach you,” he
answered, “We don’t know yet how much Peter will be able to learn.”
My head snapped up at that and I nearly choked on cauliflower. “I’m
not putting Peter down. If anything, I am chastising Ethan. He
should not have progressed so quickly with you. It was quite
dangerous, what he taught you. It saved my life, but it was still
dangerous to you.” He looked me in the eye when he said this,
clearly making sure I understood what he was saying.

“What did he teach me, then?” I asked. “I
really don’t remember him doing much of anything or me doing
anything really.”

“Words,” he answered. “That’s one way of
looking at it, as words. Or as etchings onto the fabric of reality.
Or as twisting of energy into reality. He taught you to see below
the froth that dimensions make as they grind together to form
worlds. Of course, he couldn’t have taught it at all if you
couldn’t do it in the first place. He saw the potential in you and
took a desperate move, which obviously I’m quite grateful for.”

“So, what? You give me a dictionary and I
become super wizard in a few weeks?” I asked.

He laughed, “Not quite so simply. It took me
a long time to come close to mastering the art. After all, words
are just sounds and sounds are just vibrations of molecules in a
medium. Speaking in Des’Ra’El’s tongue is much more.” The three
syllables of the name resonated through me—mind, body and soul.

“Who is that?” I asked, awed by the
feeling.

“He was my teacher,” Kieran said, softly. He
had a faraway look in his eyes now, somewhat lost in reverie. “But
that was a long time ago.” He sighed and brought himself back,
smiling. “I’ll tell you more about him later in Ireland, when we
can have a more isolated chamber. There are some things that need
to be said quietly in the universe and his story is without a doubt
one of those.”

“He sounds like quite a man,” I said, trying
to keep his melancholy to a minimum.

“Oh, he was not a man,” Kieran snorted.
“Definitely not a man, but later is better.”

He changed the subject then, asking me about
places my parents took me to around the world, places we’d seen in
common, others we didn’t. The conversation degenerated into
aimlessness but it lasted for hours. Peter and Ethan came in with
Shrank and joined us for another hour. We all headed for bed around
two with a wake-up call set for seven. All in all, it was a good
day for all of us.