Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (56 page)

“This has certainly been an interesting
flight, Ehran,” said Florian to Kieran, extending his right hand.
“I can honestly say I haven’t been to a single conference or
workshop in over fifty years that has been this enlightening, in
theory…” He turned his head to look past Kieran’s shoulder to me,
smiling wryly. “…And in practice.”

“Thank you, Diego. It has been delightful
talking with you,” said Kieran, shaking his hand. “Have a safe trip
to Sweden. Pull your passports out, boys, customs awaits.”

Shrank flew to Kieran’s shoulder and pulled
his disappearing act. Calhoun watched from the corner and as we
filed past him, I recharged his energy deprived amulets. One didn’t
take the energy well; it had some sort of check valve on it that
limited the amount of flow it could leech in.

“Mr. Calhoun,” I said, stopping in front of
him, pointing to his left hip. “This one will not accept the energy
that I took from it earlier. Is it malfunctioning?”

“What?” he cried out, grabbing for his belt,
trying to rip off his jacket and shirt at the same time. “It’s
still there?”

“Yes,” I said, “Is that a problem?”

“Yeah, it can kill me,” he growled.

“Ehran!” I yelled, touching his hip below the
healed burn of a brand. I lightly pushed searching energy up
through his entire leg, mapping the space hopefully without
disturbing it. I started discarding the parts of the map that
didn’t matter, paring it down to the spell and how it hooked onto
him. Then I blew the image up a few times, pushed the slightest bit
of power into it to light it up, and pushed it out onto the astral
plane in between me and Calhoun. Kieran rested his hand on my left
shoulder as he looked at Calhoun and then at my astral handiwork.
Florian slid over onto my right side. To anyone with magical sight,
a red and yellow stick-like spider fixed onto Calhoun’s hip
exploded into space between us and hung in the air. On his body, it
was roughly an inch and a half long.

“This is what I’m seeing, Mr. Calhoun. Is
this what you’re afraid of?” I asked him.

“God, yes,” he cried out. “Get it off, get it
off, get it off!”

“Madre dios,” muttered Florian.

“What is it?” asked Kieran. I know he wasn’t
asking me.

“The mark of a tomb robber,” said Florian,
scowling.

“Just ripping it off doesn’t look like good
idea, Mr. Calhoun,” I said calmly. “It looks like it might take a
good chunk of your pelvis with it if we tried that.” I pushed a
faint violet light through my model to represent pulling it off and
where the resultant energy would go. It would rupture a major flow
juncture. The resulting explosion would in turn rupture a major
artery. He’d bleed to death fairly quickly without a surgeon close
at hand. His mantra of “Get it off” changed to “Oh, God, Oh,
God.”

“Ehran asked what this is, Mr. Calhoun,” I
said. “Maybe you should tell him now. It might be helpful.”

“It’s a… curse,” he rasped out softly, still
showing his hip with the unseeable mark. He was considering lying
to us, wondering if he would get away with it. “Got it back in ’86
in Paraguay exploring a structure we believed at the time to be a
temple to a sun god to a civilization we hadn’t seen before.”

“There is no known remedy for such curses,”
said Florian. His disdain for how Calhoun had gotten the curse had
seeped quickly away into pity and remorse. “Mostly because the
victim does not survive long and the curse fades with them.”

“What’s the delivery system?” I asked. Kieran
looked at me oddly.

“It varies with these curses,” said
Florian.

“Mr. Calhoun, how did you know you had this?”
I asked.

“Searing pain in my side late at night,” he
growled.

“So the curse hid on something,” said Kieran,
“he brushed up against it and it latched onto him and grew, like an
insect or a spider—your delivery system.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “It does seem to mimic a
spider a bit through here and it is very sensitive to his aura,
like a spider to its web.” I pointed out into empty space where my
model hung in the astral plane, showing what looked like a shell.
“What triggers it, though?”

“It was dormant before you fucked with it!”
growled Calhoun, angrily.

“No, Mr. Calhoun, it wasn’t,” I answered
calmly, but a little shocked. “I wouldn’t have had to take away its
energy if it was dormant. Have a little common sense, please. And
some courtesy. Or we’ll leave you with this problem and continue on
through Customs. We don’t have to be here, ya know.”

“I could remove it,” said Kieran, “but I’m
not certain I could do it fast enough to not cause irreparable
damage to him.” He pushed and tugged on my astral model so I could
see what he intended. The odds looked about even that it would
latch into that juncture and blow out his pelvis before Kieran got
even halfway through, even with his lightest touch.

I stared down into the foam of space at the
spell, watching the energy of Calhoun’s life pulse through and
around the spell. Marveling at the mimicry of life that the writer
had put into it, I let my mind wander through the spell until I got
to the warping and twisting parts. The parts that turned the
predator seeking to continue its life into a killing machine intent
only on murder. The Night Sword hummed a deep bass note in my mind,
echoing my dislike for the thing. It hummed a different note, in
resonance with the first, then another.

“Stand back a bit, please,” I whispered,
trance-like, as Night slid down my left arm, appearing in my hand.
Calhoun shrieked when he saw the blade manifest and Huerta inhaled
sharply from somewhere behind me. I touched the tip of the sword
with my right hand, for the first time feeling its unearthly
coldness. It wanted to drink me in, to pull me forever into the
darkness of the ebon Night made solid, but it knew who its master
was. Still, it was sobering.

I knelt on one knee and touched the tip of
the blade to Calhoun’s hip, just below the inch and a half long
“spider” and listened to its song. I slid the blade slowly into his
skin, watching as the edge split the foam apart, guiding it with my
fingertips, separating Calhoun’s aura slowly from the red and
yellow “spider,” disentangling it from its web subtly. The Night
Sword sent harmonics through reality, masking itself from the
thing. When the tip of the Sword was two inches in, I stopped. It
was completely disengaged from his body. Kieran reached down and
snagged it off. It pulsed mildly along one jagged edge. Just a
minor touch of energy, really, but enough to cause a cascading
overflow of energy that would have ruptured arteries at the least,
and quite possibly blown apart his left hip.

I pulled the Night out of Calhoun as slowly
as I pushed it in, then Kieran tossed the curse onto the sword. It
happily sucked the “spider” up quickly, glad to have gotten
something for its work. I put the Sword away as I checked Calhoun’s
hip. Night left no marks of its passage, though. Quite a feat for a
knife that size, I thought.

Apparently, I should have been looking more
“globally” than his hip. He passed out. Fainted dead away and
slumped into the corner, hitting his head against the wall and
everything. Panicked me for a moment, but his body looked healthy
and nothing was exploding or rupturing beneath the skin.

His partner pushed in from the back. “What’s
going on?” he exclaimed, moving in on Calhoun and shoving us to the
side.

Peter said, completely deadpan, “He was
showing his ass and apparently even he realized how embarrassing
that was.”

Laughter broke out through the cabin.
Everyone but the partner, that is. He just glared at Peter as he
bent over Calhoun, then went about trying to rouse him. It didn’t
take but a second or two for Calhoun to start coming back into the
world. Florian and Huerta were already ushering us out the door
again, still laughing at Peter’s joke. We gathered at the bottom of
the stairs around a short man with a clipboard. He stamped our
passports and wrote something on his clipboard, then pointed us to
the first of the two vans, yawning. As we pulled away, we saw
Florian and Huerta getting into the second van and Calhoun
stumbling slightly away from the Customs man toward it with his
partner close behind.

The driver was much more awake and talkative
than the Customs agent. The dash clock read 1:10, but it still felt
like eleven in the morning to me. He rambled nonstop once we pulled
away from the airport, telling us local landmarks we passed in the
night with practiced ease, advising us to return in daylight. We
wove through public roads for about half an hour before turning
onto Cahill’s property through an innocuous gate. A laser reflected
something off the van and opened the gate without the driver
stopping at the keypad standing ready in the dark. The roadway
itself changed after that and became a lot more winding as we moved
up the low mountain. He pulled onto a paved road that turned out to
be the driveway to the manor.

Castle. It was definitely a castle. It was
lit beautifully, capturing the majesty of the intricate stonework
against the lush mountain surrounding it. Two ley lines ran close,
but were fairly minor, lighting the sides with an unearthly glow.
Most striking was the line, bright amber in color, that rose up
through the mountain, up through the bowels of the castle and
flowed out through the front. It was quite beautiful. The driver
went slowly up the drive so we could take in the view.

“Seth,” Ethan said from the seat in front of
me. He nodded to the cluster of people waiting near the front door.
I focused on them: Cahill stood with a woman I’d only seen once,
presumably his wife. Another stocky man I didn’t know but had a
strong family resemblance to Cahill and to Martin standing off a
step or two to the right. Then I saw who Ethan was calling my
attention to. The woman sitting on the bench at the bottom of the
steps, watching intently as the van drove up.

Mama.

The Stone completely surrounded my mother the
instant the van stopped, protecting her from me as I ran in,
colliding with her and crushing her in a hug. I pushed on my aura,
like Kieran had for her in the hospital, letting her see me as I
rushed in.

“I thought I’d lost you,” I whispered in her
ear.

I felt the others pass silently behind us and
up the steps. Cahill greeted Kieran, Ethan, and Peter and
introduced his wife, Enid, and son, Gordon. I released Mother from
the hug finally and looked down at her smiling face. It’d been so
long since I saw that smile.

“You’ve grown,” she said. “And you’re such a
nice looking boy.” She fussed with my hair a little and
straightened my jacket. She hadn’t done that since I was little. It
was kind of cute. She took my arm, facing the steps to the house,
and we started up slowly. The Stone released its hold on my mother
gradually, but never quite gave up its protection completely.

“So how are you feeling?” I asked, letting
her set the pace.

“Oh, I feel fine,” she said. “That’s not the
problem. The problem is that there are times when I can’t string
two thoughts together.”

“It will get better,” I said, trying to
console her. “You’ve come a long way in a week.”

She looked up at me as we passed into the
great hallway of the house. “What about you?” she asked. “What
about all the stories I’ve been hearing about you and the last few
months? How true are they?”

“That depends on what you’ve been hearing,” I
said, laughing. “Like I would ever fall for that.”

She smiled. “They won’t tell me anything.
Felix would only say that my father would not bother us again and
that you were with Ehran looking for Robert. He explained about
your auras being… invisible, but it’s quite a different thing to
experience. And when you… did whatever you did and I saw you that
brief moment shining so brightly… Oh, Seth, I thought I lost you to
that thing.” She started crying into my shoulder.

I shushed gently and rocked side to side. “He
can’t hurt us anymore,” I murmured, kissing her forehead. “I took
care of it myself, Mama. He will never hurt you again.” We stood
like this for a short while before Mother pulled herself together.
I didn’t mind; I understood.

“Oh look what I’ve done,” she said, pulling
back a little and sniffling. She tried to wipe up tearstains off my
shirt with a handkerchief she pulled from somewhere. Then she wiped
away her tears, saying, “I must look a mess.”

“You look beautiful,” I said. She smiled up
at me, dismissing it as a polite lie. She had no idea how true it
really was.

“Was that Peter Borland I saw?” she asked,
looking into the room everyone had gone into. I’d call it a parlor
but this was a castle so I had no idea what it’s really called.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “I called him to
ask a question and he ended up flying down to help me without even
being asked. And he and his father have been amazing, really. I
couldn’t have gotten through any of this without him. Without any
of them.”

“Introduce me to our saviors, then, dear,”
she said, meekly, “Then I’m afraid I’m off to bed. I tire so easily
these days.”

“It’s quite late,” I said, “I’m sure we’re
all close behind.” We entered the room, once again at my mother’s
pace. Everyone looked up as we came in. I could feel her power
weakly questing through the room to Kieran, trying to make some
sense of what her sight wasn’t telling her. Kieran stood as we
approached him.

“K… Ehran, may I introduce my mother, Olivia
McClure, nee St. Croix, of Savannah, Georgia,” I said, turning a
half step away and facing them both, my mother’s hand lightly in
mine. “Mother, this is Ehran McClure, son of Robert and my
half-brother, of Alabama, I suppose. And the master of my
apprenticeship.”

Kieran smiled that beatific smile again and
said, “It is a pleasure to meet you at last.”