Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (65 page)

“Where’d the smiley face go?” I asked looking
around the room.

“That… was… me,” gasped Lucian as Peter and
Kieran helped him up off the floor and into a desk chair.

“Just relax, Lucian, relax,” said Kieran. “Is
anyone else here? We need to move the Home soon so we need
everybody out.”

“Move the Home?” he asked weakly. “Yes, I
suppose so. It has been compromised.” He sat back weakly, pulling
in energy from the lines. He reached into the ward, trying to wrest
control from me, but it was a very weak attempt. “Who has the
ward?”

“I do,” I answered. “You can have it back
when you’re better.”

“I must be more hurt than I know,” he said
softly. “I can’t see any of you.”

“That’s not you,” Kieran said. “No one can
see us. Seth has the ward because he’s the only Pactholder among
us.”

“What?” asked Lucian, alarmed. “How did you
get in, then? And what happened to your Pact, Ehran? You held the
Primary.”

“That’s a long and complicated story,”
answered Kieran. “The short answer is that Seth has my Pact now and
Seth let us in. Now answer the question, is there anyone else here?
Maybe in the libraries?”

“No,” he said, shutting his eyes tightly and
swallowing hard. “They’re all dead. Everyone that was here is dead.
Everyone I ever knew. Those insects killed everybody and damn near
killed me, too.”

Peter said, “Let’s worry about a
cross-examination later, okay, guys? Whatever beat Ethan to a pulp
knows where we are. We should leave soon.”

Lucian shook his head. “No,” he said. “Daniel
Sheen opened the passageway from here. He was the first to die. I
saw to that, but I wasn’t fast enough to stop it.”

“Let’s worry about recriminations later,” I
said. “Peter’s right. We need to move. I’m thinking it’s probably
not a good idea to shift Lucian through the lines, right?”

“No, we’ll need to carry him,” answered
Kieran.

“Seth, on the bookcase to your right, on the
third shelf from the top,” directed Lucian, “There’s a switch. Pull
the shelf out an inch then back in two inches. Then the bookcase
will fall back to reveal a staircase. It leads to the doctors’
offices below. There should be an ori chair there.”

A wheelchair rolled into the room as he said
this. I had it take a longer route but it had started much earlier.
Had I known that the stairwell connected to this room, I would have
waited and saved the energy. Oh, well, live and learn.

“So are there any tricks from here to the
front door or the front gate?” I asked while Kieran and Peter
settled him into his ori-chair, though I’d have just called it a
wheelchair.

“Not really,” muttered Lucian. “These things
are meant as a temporary measure. We can usually heal just about
anything in time. Or Adrianne comes up with a prosthetic. She came
up with this, anyway.”

“Let’s move out then,” I said and nudged the
chair into motion. Lucian gave a
less than half hearted effort to control the chair
before giving up. I couldn’t blame him for being despondent and it
was no effort for me to exert the will to push the chair into line
with us. I didn’t even have to think about the stairs when the
wheels changed shape into flexible treads and trundled down the
steps without slowing or jarring Lucian. None of us broke from our
private little hells until we stood before the gate.

“You know, I’m over a hundred years old and
I’ve never been outside the Home,” muttered Lucian. “This is not
how I pictured leaving.”

“You’ll come back, Lucian,” said Kieran,
patting his shoulder. “We’ll need you to rebuild the Guild.”

“Where are we going to put it?” I asked,
still staring at the huge warded iron gate. It was an awesome
sight.

“For the time being, I thought we’d just loop
the opening around the only Pact we know it likes,” said Kieran
mildly. He cut eyes over at me quickly then back to the gate.

It took me a moment to figure out what he
meant.

“What?” I said, nearly laughing. “Haven’t you
stuck enough in my head already?”

“It’s only for a few days,” said Kieran.
“Just until we can find a haven. Maybe in Alabama. Bankhead looked
nice.”

“What difference does it make, how long?”

“Seth, it really doesn’t matter,” Kieran
said, turning fully to face me and crossing his arms across his
chest. He made a massive presence. “You are the only person here
the ward will accept and we stand as much chance of moving the land
without the ward’s approval as you moving me through the lines
without my approval. You can begin trying at any time.”

“How am I supposed to put this much space in
my head?” The concept fairly astounded me. “That’s not
possible.”

“No, not the whole space, just the connection
to it,” Kieran said. “It’s self-contained. It’s currently anchored
near the Faery Crossroads. We need to link it somewhere else so
that no one can find it. It’s not a matter of volume at all.”

“What do I need to do?” I whined. Yes, I
actually whined. I was still a teenager—I was allowed. Okay, it was
expected. And I wasn’t really liking the sound of this.

Kieran grinned a little, then changed to a
scowl. “Peter, if you wouldn’t mind taking control of the chair,
please? Now Seth, watch the ward as the ‘gate’ carefully. This is
an amazingly complex ward that handles a number of tasks
simultaneously. You want to isolate one particular part, shrink it,
draw it into your cavern, and lock it in place. Sounds simple
enough?”

“The translation matrix,” I muttered
absently, staring into the tightly woven strands of magic-enforced
reality.

“Yes,” Kieran said, softly, from beside me
now. Pushing open the gate, everyone followed me through. I found
the anteroom, of sorts, maybe a mudroom would be a better analogy.
The portal lay just beyond. That’s what Kieran wanted, the portal.
“Got it,” I said.

Kieran stepped through first with fire in his
eyes and power ready in his aura. He would be watching, trying to
protect me. Lucian was next. He stared at me the entire trip out.
It was disconcerting.

“Don’t worry about Lucian just yet. He’s got
a lot of grieving to do,” said Peter, then he hugged me tightly.
“Just make this quick, okay?”

“Virtually instantaneous,” I said with a
smile as I pulled away. It had to be that fast or it wouldn’t work.
I didn’t tell him that part, but I’m sure he knew already. I had to
pull the hole closed behind me as I passed through it just like
Kieran described it to me. This didn’t worry me, though. If Harris
could do this then so could I.

Pulling my awareness out of the ward and
concentrating solely on the portal, then I stepped through. Time
stopped when I stopped the transfer. I had to control which parts
of me went in what order. Awareness of the ward and the hook into
my cavern had to be last. I was pretty sure that this was going to
feel… unpleasant. I re-started the transfer. As the portal
transferred my body through to the Faery no-man’s-land, I touched
the outer edges and started pushing them in around me. The transfer
got faster and faster and I squeezed the portal around me faster
until it was the size of a dime and my consciousness shot through
like water down a drain, reconnecting with the rest of me. And I
held the portal with imaginary hands on the energy plane. I could
see it sitting there as a whirling disk of controlled power. I was
still connected to the ward and it didn’t seem to want to let go of
me. I pulled it into my cavern and set it next to the Pact atop the
Stone’s foundation. Even in my mind, I couldn’t think of a safer
place.

In my mind, it sat beside the Night Sword as
an iron gate.

“You’re Robert’s son, right?” asked Lucian.
“The Null?”

“Yes,” I answered him as he stared at the
space where the gate to the Pacthome once stood.

“But hardly a null. Far from it, actually,”
Peter added.

Lucian muttered, “Obviously not.”

Kieran searched our surroundings carefully,
his eyes still tinged in red and his aura still alight with power.
“Seth, do you have it?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, seems like,” I answered, dropping down
into my cavern. “Actually it feels like I can even sense the ward
from here.”

“Good. I didn’t think that would work,”
Kieran said, then lifted us up and Faery disappeared from
underneath us.

Kieran dropped us right beside the drive of
the castle, showing me that it was possible to have more control of
the dimensional shifts. That might have been just on the exit. I’d
look into that another time. I checked on my internal charges,
Ethan and the Pacthome. No change on Ethan. The Pacthome felt like
the icon it was, an iron gate, separating two very disparate
things—and right now, they were two very disparate things. As we
walked to the house, the adrenaline rush from the bug-fight finally
wore off and I stumbled, seriously weak.

“Whoa, easy there, champ,” Peter said softly,
slipping an arm under my shoulders to steady me. “You threw a lot
of power around.”

Shaking my head didn’t help remove the
confusion of that statement and only made me more light-headed. I
hadn’t done anything that would make me feel this physically weak,
but here I was, leaning onto Peter and letting him guide me toward
the house like a drunk. Confusing.

John came out the front doors as we
approached. Seeing us with Lucian and without Ethan caused him
great concern, I could see that even from a distance. It was nice
to see someone else show concern for us, too. He turned back to the
door and called to someone. By the time, we got to the steps, two
men and one of the physicians came bounding down the steps with
John to meet us.

“This is Lucian,” Kieran said to the group.
“He has been held within a realm in Faery for a long time and is
quite unfamiliar with your ways. He was the last remaining member
of the group we found and his experiences for the last year have
been extraordinarily traumatic. Please respect his wishes while we
try to find any remaining family so that he may work through his
grief.”

“Thank you, Ehran,” mumbled Lucian.

“We’ll do what we can, Lucian,” said Kieran.
“But when you are able, Robert’s wife is also in this infirmary
suffering from a condition that you might be able to help.”

“Olivia?” he asked, looking up at Kieran who
nodded in answer. “I’ve wanted to meet her for ages. Would have
preferred better circumstances.” Then he sighed and fell silent
again, morose and sullen. I nudged the chair forward up the steps
as the two men reached for purchase. They fell back when the wheels
changed shape again and trundled up the steps as easily as they
went down them.

At the top of the steps, Kieran said,
“Lucian, we need to go in a different direction. Can you control
the chair?” Lucian nodded. “If you need anything, just ask. If you
need one of us, tell someone and we’ll come. You know how to
contact Seth anyway, right?”

Lucian’s face brightened for a moment. “I
haven’t done that in fifty years,” he said quietly. Then I heard a
bell ring in my head—not a little bell like you see on a deli
counter, but a big bell like you see in a tower and I was the
clapper. Once was more than enough to make me grab my head and reel
back, disoriented. I know I yelled something but it couldn’t have
been intelligible. Or polite.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Lucian said sheepishly
once I’d gotten some semblance of coordination back. “It’s been a
long time.” He touched the bright yellow line coming through the
front doors and started the chair forward, following the doctor and
two orderlies.

We followed them into the main hallway and
watched them ascend the stairs.

“Have you gentlemen eaten since breakfast?”
asked John. When we all shook our heads, he said, “Then please,
relax in the observatory while I arrange some dinner for you.
There’s a bathroom in the back if you want to wash up.”

“John, you are a godsend,” said Kieran
grasping John’s shoulder and patting his back as he brushed passed
into the observatory. Peter and I said our thanks, too, as we
followed Kieran. John probably already had steaks cooking for us
the second he saw us on the drive. I bet it wouldn’t be over
fifteen minutes before something was coming through the door.
Kieran found the bathroom first. Peter steered me to the nearest
couch and plopped down across from me, kicking back and waiting. We
were both depressed and confused.

“When do I get to start asking what the
hell’s going on here?” Peter asked.

“Yeah, I’m afraid I’m gonna hav’ta ask for an
all-in for information before the day’s out, too,” I said, glancing
around the room. I asked the Stone to put up a shield around us to
block out our conversation, guaranteeing our privacy. “The Queens’
visit was all secret languages and innuendo. Scary as hell. I don’t
know what any of that meant.” I stared up at the ceiling for a
moment, exhausted and not knowing why.

“Then we went to the Pacthome,” I said with a
sigh. I didn’t want to continue. “You know what happened there.
Ethan left normal reality. This isn’t like shifting to another
realm, like Faery or the Pacthome. I can’t begin to explain what
his universe is like. It’s just so terribly… alien, flat and
contorted. And someone yanked him back in. Nearly killed him. Now
here’s the kicker: my name was said before Ethan came through the
tunnel.” I looked at Peter then, for emphasis or consolation, I
wasn’t sure. “Why? I couldn’t tell if it was Ethan who said it or
somebody else. And why would he come through the tunnel when it’s
easier for him to manifest through the anchor? Right now, he can’t
do much of anything. I mean, he really could die!” I bounced my
head back on the couch a few times, nervously. “What do you see
when you look at him?”

“At Ethan?” asked Peter, thinking. “I hadn’t
thought about it, but your auras are extremely similar. His is
shorter and he looks like he has this … I don’t know what to call
it.”