Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (66 page)

“A shadow,” I suggested.

“Yeah, good a word as any, I suppose,” he
said, nodding then waving towards the door. “Food’s here.”

Kieran came out of the bathroom wearing a
white robe and drying his hair with a large white towel. At the
other end of the room, Gordon Cahill and John came pushing carts of
food and beverages. Peter dashed for the bathroom, so I just stood
there drooling like an idiot. The lights of the house were just
beginning to show through the windows, giving the room a warm
yellow glow. John pushed his cart around to the side of the alcove
we occupied, shoving a chair out of the way with his hip.

“Being unsure of your plans for the evening,”
John started as he moved the chair more completely out of the way,
“I went for food more solid and filling than delicacies. Will Ethan
be joining you soon?” Both Kieran and I blanched at the question,
even though we expected it soon.

“Ethan is indisposed for an undetermined
period of time,” Kieran answered mechanically. I didn’t want anyone
to know he was hurt either and I wasn’t really sure why. John had
the good sense not to press the issue.

“John, could you send someone up to our rooms
for clothes?” I asked. “Shrank can show them what to get and come
down then.”

“Certainly, sir,” he said and left the room,
leaving Gordon to jockey his cart into place at the other end of
the couches. He was having a more difficult time, obviously not
used to such tasks. I helped myself to some sort of stew and some
rolls and plopped back down on the couch heavily.

“Hmm, this is good,” I murmured. I was
hungrier than I thought.

Gordon grinned tightly as he handed me a
bottled water from his cart. “I’ll be sure to tell Ronnie,” he
said. “She argued with John quite strongly that it wasn’t good
enough for you.”

“If you’d seen the microwaved crap I’ve been
living on for the last year…” I responded sopping up the gravy of
the stew with a roll with gusto before shoving it in my mouth.
Gordon paced around the cart nervously till I waved at the other
end of my couch.

“Sit down, Gordon,” I said, barely
remembering my irritation with him considering the rest of the day.
“I’ve had too hard a day to bite. Just don’t do it again.”

He sat on the couch with a barely vocalized
“Yes, sir,” leaning forward elbows on knees, still anxious. “Da
took Harris to the airport and should be back anytime now,” he
said. “Harris was very upset when Ethan and Peter were yanked out
before they would make a commitment. Puffed up like a peacock, he
was.”

“We wouldn’t have committed to anything
anyway,” said Peter, filling a bowl with the same stew I was
eating. He, too, was dressed in a robe and had a towel around his
neck. Kieran had opted for a hunk of roasted beef and braised
potatoes. I decided that the food was more important than a shower
just then.

We heard an angry buzz of wings and a scarlet
flash entered the room as John opened the door with a stack of
clothes in his arms. It stopped in front of Kieran’s face and
turned into Shrank. The pixie studied Kieran intently, then turned
to Peter as he passed in front of Kieran to sit, making Peter stop
for his head-to-toe inspection. He flew to me next, staring hard
with his tiny eyes. It was disconcerting in ways. When he lit on
me, he rode on the rise of my neck instead of the flat of my
shoulder, which was unusual. He was making sure he touched my bare
skin, anchoring in my shirt. I smiled when I felt the velvet touch
of his wing as it folded around to the nape of my neck. He still
hadn’t said anything.

Enchanted by the display, Gordon shook
himself from watching Shrank. “Do you still want to go with me to
get Marty tomorrow?” he asked. “You said you had a rough day…”

“Want to? No,” I answered. “Need to? Yes.
With Ethan… away, we need a buffer more than ever.”

Kieran nodded begrudgingly as he ate. “You’ve
learned far more today than I would’ve taught you in a month,” he
said. “Ethan is right. You are surprising in what you can just do,
but don’t ‘just do’ anything tomorrow. I’ll stay here with Lucian
and see what I can find out about our traitors and prod him into
helping Olivia, if he can.”

“I’ll call Dad shortly,” Peter said, “and
have him start looking into that name for us. He might even have
candidates for an assistant already lined up.”

“Good,” Kieran said. “Shrank, you stay close
to one of us at all times, okay? There is something wrong in Faery
and I don’t want you alone until we find out what.”

“Yes, Lord,” he replied, speaking for the
first time. He stayed glued to my neck.

I eyed Kieran’s roast beef across the table
against my now-empty bowl of stew, not wanting to move and disturb
Shrank. Gordon took pity on me, took the bowl, and fixed a generous
plate for me. He even tossed a few strawberries and blueberries on
the plate for Shrank as he passed the beverage cart.

“Da just came onto the grounds,” he said
absently as he handed me the plate, eyes distant. “Will you need to
leave again tonight?” Kieran answered no and we felt a wave of
power rush over the house and onto the rest of the property. It had
a faint taste of Gordon’s power but it had a stronger sense of all
the Cahills, including Enid. It occurred to me then that Gordon had
charged the wards of the castle. Unlike mine at home which were
always on, the castle needed different modes to operate
effectively. I supposed this was “night mode.”

I offered a strawberry to Shrank, who stabbed
it with the sword he carried but never showed, then cut into the
roast beef vigorously. John had stacked our clothes on top of the
desk near the bathroom and carried off Kieran and Peter’s dirty
uniforms already, presumably to be washed.

“Let me leave you to your dinner,” said
Gordon standing. “I’ll come back with Da in about fifteen minutes
or so. Make some calls so everything happens as smoothly as
possible tomorrow.”

Once Gordon left the room, I reasserted the
privacy shield and asked, “You are planning on explaining what
happened today, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Kieran, putting his empty plate
down. “I was planning on doing that at the Pacthome but things
didn’t quite go as I expected there.”

“A number of things haven’t gone as we’ve
expected,” Peter said.

“True,” said Kieran. “And I just don’t see
how anything relates to another. Too many people have already been
hurt or died. We need to find an answer and stop this.”

“Before the war starts, you mean,” I said,
startling Peter with the pronouncement.

“You mean Harris is right?” he exclaimed.

“If he thinks that the Fae are poised to
attack, then yes,” I said, locking eyes with Kieran. “If he thinks
that either Winter or Summer are poised to attack us, then no.”

Kieran nodded his agreement with my
assessment. I did get something out of the conversation with the
Queens then. Peter’s eyes darted back and forth between us. I could
feel Shrank moving against my neck now, peeling away
uncomfortably.

“How can that be?” Peter asked.

“That’s part of what I wasn’t understanding
that Kieran will have to explain later,” I said. “Shrank? I need a
shower before the Cahills come back. Are you waterproof?”

“Yes,” he giggled as he peeled himself
completely off my neck. “But you humans scrub too hard.” He jumped
into the air, flying in slow circles around us, finally landing on
the table in the center so he could see all three of us.

I got up, carrying Kieran’s and my plates to
the cart, and headed for the bathroom, moving very slowly. Eating
helped to assuage the weariness, but I could still feel Peter’s
concern following me through the room. It was comforting. The
Stone’s privacy fell away as I passed through it. I separated the
clothes piled on the desk, grabbing mine, and went into the
bathroom. As I shut the door, I heard Kieran say to Peter softly,
“If anything, Peter, he’ll be proud. Don’t worry.”

Great. Somebody else with a secret. I needed
this shower.

~ ~ ~

“You can tell that woman that if she can
serve this stew to my houseguests then she can damn well serve it
to me, too!” I heard Cahill’s gruff voice as I left the bathroom in
a fog of steam. I’d probably stayed in too long but the hot water
felt way too good. Cahill was scraping the last of the stew from
the tureen while John waited patiently to pull the cart away. He
dropped the tureen and snatched up the bowl. As John removed the
cart, Cahill dragged the chair back into place and dropped into
it.

Unlike the previous members of my party, I
came out dressed but still damp in places. On my neck was an angry
red welt that, before my shower, had been barely a mark. It matched
perfectly in shape and position to where Shrank had laid across my
bare neck. I thought it’d be kind of insulting if I just brushed it
off. It had been a sweet gesture from him.

“I love this stew and the woman refuses to
make it except when I’m not around,” muttered Cahill, digging into
the bowl. Gordon was chuckling about his father by the bookcase
while Shrank was above him contemplating dropping a book onto him.
Peter and Kieran were drinking coffee, smiling at the grumbling
man.

“Shrank, no,” I warned, moving past Cahill to
sit on the couch again. Gordon followed my look to see the pixie
above him and stepped away from the bookcase, grinning up at
Shrank.

“What did Harris want anyway?” I asked.

“Same ol’tripe,” said Cahill, shoveling in
his stew. “The Fae are rallying for a war. This time e’s added
traitors to councils an’ humanity to it. Wants support to root ‘em
out. Has some pretty convincin’ circumstantial evidence.”

“It’d be nice if he were wrong,” said Kieran,
letting his head fall back. Cahill stopped in mid-spoon lift.

“Are you sayin’ he’s not?” Cahill asked,
wide-eyed and letting his spoon fall back into the bowl.

“Yes, I am,” Kieran said, still looking at
the ceiling.

“Not every conspiracy theory is just a
theory,” added Peter.

“Gordon, call the airport. Get him back
here,” Cahill said, putting his bowl on the table, his appetite
forgotten. Gordon left the room hurriedly. “What happened in Faery
today, Ehran? What did the Queens tell you and why do you believe
them?”

“The Fae are always fighting with each other.
That’s a given,” said Kieran, sitting upright again. “Now they seem
to have another mutual enemy. And we find ourselves with a new
enemy, one who has no problem killing us off piecemeal. Now there
are similarities in what the two enemies are doing to the Fae and
to us. Wouldn’t it be wise to consider the idea that it’s the same
enemy? This is a war of attrition on two fronts, human and Fae.

“When we went our separate ways,” Kieran
continued, “Seth and I followed a trail looking for our father.
That led us to Lucian and the fifth curse. Then things really got
interesting because we also found how the curses are set. Seth,
would you mind showing Felix the five bugs, please?”

I pushed images of the five insects out onto
the astral for Cahill to see. Thinking better of it, I also put a
clearer structural image of each right below it along with the
curses that each insect stamped onto its victim. It was a lot of
information to take in with just fifteen pictures. Cahill studied
the diagrams intently without moving, paying the most attention to
the newest, fifth group.

“You’ll notice,” Kieran offered, “the fifth
one can fly while the third mimics flight with long jumps and
glides.”

Gordon came back into the room quietly,
slipping around all of us and stopping at his father’s right
side.

“Lucian had three different curses set on him
when we found him,” Kieran told the Cahills. Cahill gasped in shock
and whipped his head around to stare at Kieran. “He’s the first
we’ve found who had more than one. I can only surmise that is
because at the time he had powerful protective wards on him because
we didn’t find him until Seth removed all of the insects from the
bubble realm we were in and the stasis spell Lucian was in
deactivated.”

“Can we assume,” asked Gordon, “That by
‘removed’ you mean Seth cut the bugs up with the fancy black and
silver sword he has tucked away?”

“You could,” said Kieran, grinning. “You’d be
wrong, but you could. We hope what Seth did was a bit more
flamboyant and destructive than that. Lucian’s realm was a human
colony adjacent to Faery that had visitors from time to time. The
gate would have caught the insects trying to enter, even with
someone smuggling them in. Someone went in and opened a small
portal and let them in. Seth found the hole and Ethan and he set
about closing it. Seth, why don’t you tell this part?”

“Huh?” I muttered, confused. I was perfectly
happy listening to Kieran. “Well, Ethan went through the conduit to
close the other side while I was closing this side. He showed me
what to do. As soon as he went in, though, all of the bugs started
converging on me, firing active curses onto my shields. There were
over two hundred of them beating on me and there was no way I was
gonna get the hole closed before they got through. Then something
on the other side of the tunnel grabbed control away from me. At
that point, I’d lost control of the portal and my shield was
eroding—I was pretty much toast.

“I figured that if the guy at the other end
of the tunnel liked explosions so much he could have ‘em and we’d
seen so many tornadoes with the Queens, why not use that?
Basically, I put four tiny tornadoes in a box and started sucking
up all the bugs around me and shooting ‘em through the tunnel. I
added energy to their power cells as they passed through the
entrance. Only a few exploded in the tunnel. Once the bugs were
gone, I started closing the hole up when Ethan came back through.
Something was following him, but I was able to close it before
whatever it was got there. Ethan was down and there’s no way I
could have handled someone he couldn’t by myself. Then I called for
Peter and Ehran for help. That’s when we found Lucian and came back
here.” I hoped I left out the right information. I really didn’t
want to say that Ethan had been hurt, but it just came rolling
out.