Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (71 page)

“Do that,” said Peter. “There’s not much to
speed us up that we’re going to be able to do once the roads get
all twisty anyway. All right, Seth, let’s get this party going.
Show me how y’all do it.”

“Y’all? So you’re a Southern Canadian now,
eh?” I grinned, pushing my senses out down the road through
traffic. I could feel Peter follow me out, touching the flow of
energies of the land around us, both natural and artificially
generated. I found a likely spot ahead of us about a thousand feet
almost in a direct line. I just skipped us to it. The van shuddered
slightly, as I wasn’t as smooth as Ethan and Kieran at making the
portal adjustments yet. Seek another spot and jump again. This skip
was long and smoother. This was tiring, I realized, portal magic
wasn’t as easy as it looked and this had to be really quickly done
or wreck the van in the shifting.

“Got it,” Peter murmured. I sagged back onto
the bench for a second while Peter took the next skip. He was
smoother than me on my first. Billy didn’t bat an eyelash. “Damn,
that’s hard,” he whispered, falling back next to me.

“Tell me about it,” I said, leaning forward
again. I started pulling on nearby ley lines as we passed to
recharge the battery I was draining while I was seeking my next
jump point. Once I committed the skip, I’d fall back onto the bench
to rest and Peter would take my place pulling energy in, too. We
did this eighteen times before Billy warned us in a grumble, “We’re
getting close.” We fell back onto the bench, exhausted. It did get
easier to control as we went.

“Who’s Kieran?” asked Gordon, still turned
toward us with the maps on his knees.

Damn, this was my fault. “Kieran is my
brother, Ehran,” I said. Gordon didn’t believe me. Didn’t really
blame him for that. He’d been attacked because of me, his home was
being attacked, and his little brother’s life was in danger now,
all because of me. No, I didn’t blame him at all. “It’s like a
title, like ‘master’ or ‘sir’ from where he was trained, but
anglicized. But the rest of the world knows Robert’s son as Ehran
so we make that translation. Well, most of the time.”

“Twenty minutes,” Billy muttered, exiting the
highway.

Gordon peered out the windshield, worried and
building to another hormonal release. I missed his crash while we
were skipping the van up the highway. If he thought the roadside
fight was rough though, I wonder how hard he thought a school with
hostages was gonna be?

“Here, take this,” I said, pulling a fully
charged battery out of my cavern and into my hand. Offering the
bright orange crystal to Gordon, I said, “When you pull on a line,
you leave a huge signature. There are times when you don’t want
that, so pull from here.”

“It’s a freakin’ ley line in a rock, man.
It’s awesome,” said Peter, grinning. “Now show us your map.”

“A lodestone?” he asked startled. “You have a
lodestone? Where did you get this?” At the moment, the issue of
Kieran’s name was forgotten. He tugged a line of energy from the
rock and looped it around him, back into the stone. The man didn’t
know how to do anything small, though—his test line was thick and
heavy.

“I made it,” I said. “Now I know how it feels
to me when it gets low on power, but I have no idea how it will
feel to you, so be aware of that. Right now, it’s as charged as I’m
willing to get it. Now, the map.”

“Billy,” Peter interrupted, pointing to a
fast-food joint coming up on the road, “pull in there. We may not
feel hungry, but we really need to carb load before we go in there
and we need a few minutes to plan anyway.”

Billy pulled in and ran inside without asking
about choices, not that it really mattered. I’d discovered I was
pretty hungry right then, and I would’ve eaten just about anything.
There was a wash of energy around us and I felt Gordon’s influence.
He’d camouflaged the van, somehow, behind a veil, and had used my
battery’s power instead of pulling energy from the closest line,
practicing with it. That was good.

We started studying Gordon’s map while we
waited for Billy. He’d drawn a fine sketch of the school campus on
paper with a pen. Very finely done with quite a bit of detail in
some places, very vague in others. This was a very defensible
property, though. It was surrounded by tall hills ranging into
mountains, very rocky. Twenty-three major buildings with three
roads connecting them, but only one of those was drivable.
Dormitories were fit for a hundred but usually only forty to fifty
students were in residence at any given time. Teachers and staff
usually counted as about the same number.

By the time Billy came back, we’d decided we
didn’t know anything. It was pushing on noon and the parking lot
was getting busier. We all stared at Gordon’s map while shoveling
greasy fried food and overly sweet carbonated colas down our
throats. This just looked impossible. We didn’t know enough. We
didn’t know if the raid was to kidnap someone, presumably Martin,
or to kill someone, again presumably Martin. It was difficult to
believe that this didn’t revolve around me, but we did have to
entertain that possibility as well. Did someone have something
against the Cahills that had nothing to do with me?

Billy came to our rescue on some of it.
“There are thirty-eight students this term, eighteen teachers and
another thirteen on permanent staff. Rest of the teachers are on
sabbatical, either traveling or teaching at other schools. With
this being the last break ‘fore winter, most of ‘em ‘prolly
hightailed it outta here yesterday. The school’s never left without
at least six staff and three teachers, y’know, for security.”

Gordon looked at him in awed appreciation.
“How do you know all that?”

He shrugged and said, “It’s my job to know my
boys are safe.”

“Do you know anything about their wards?”
Peter asked, swallowing the last of his fried fish.

“Only that it’s strong,” he said. “And
there’s more than one.”

“Okay, worst case scenario,” I said, trying
to draw all the strings of this together, “they were trying to kill
everyone there, drop a bomb on the place, and walk away. Whoever is
doing this doesn’t care about other people, that’s obvious. I don’t
think that happened.” I got muttered agreement and head nods.

“Next option is they’re after someone,” I
went on. “The attack on us and the castle point to Martin as the
victim here. I really don’t think the attack on us was to kill us,
at least initially. Seems to me, there are easier ways to kill from
a distance when we aren’t expecting it and they were herding us
somewhere. It felt more like a snatch to me.”

“What about the castle? What do we know
there?” asked Gordon.

“Nothing really,” said Peter, grimacing.
“Just that we need to get there as soon as Martin is safe. Kieran
said that was our top priority. Your father and Kieran can handle
the castle. Neither one is a lightweight.”

“If they were taking hostages,” I asked,
“where would they put them?”

“Practice fields?” offered Gordon.

“No,” said Billy.

“Too easy to get out,” agreed Peter. “They’d
want them someplace small and tight. Pack’em in like sardines where
they’d be afraid to try anything for fear of hurting everybody
else. Or the sinks. Where are the sinks?”

“The sinks?” I asked while Gordon pointed to
a building dead center of the campus. “What’s a sink?”

“The room you found Ethan and me in was a
sink,” answered Peter. “Siphons loose magic down into the ground so
it doesn’t hurt anybody, especially outside of the sink. Usually
you can tune them to how high or low you want them to siphon the
power off. The school’s sinks have to be capable of some strong
siphons considering who they’ve trained in the past.” He waved idly
at Gordon when he said that, grinning. He was picking at Gordon’s
heavy handed use of the lines and complimenting him at the
same time. I was thankful that Gordon only caught the latter
there.

“That seems reasonable,” I agreed, sighing
and leaning back. “Gordon, have you ever done anything like
this?”

“No,” he said, swallowing hard. He was
shaking slightly. “And I’ve never killed a man before today either.
But my family’s at stake. Before today I would have said I could do
it, now I know I can. And I’ll do as much as I have to do.”

That reminded me of the words Felix had said
to my mother just a few days before: “You can stop seeing him as
your little boy, Olivia. See Seth for the man he’s become.” It
saddened me that Gordon had to go through this, but I was proud to
see him make his stand so valiantly. His father would be proud,
too.

“We need to do this,” I said, gathering the
trash up. “Can anybody think of anything we might want before we go
kill some people? Cookies, cake?”

It was going to be a hard day.

Ultimately we turned around and went back a
short distance into town. A change of clothes was necessary for all
of us, so we hit a sporting goods store while Billy gassed up the
van. Again, this is where Gordon shined. We stepped in the door and
he instantly grabbed the attention of two salesmen. Within fifteen
minutes, he had all three of us in camouflage outerwear with shorts
and T-shirts that we hoped would pass as a student’s clothes. He
also grabbed four massive first aid kits. We held no hope for
weapons since guns were illegal in this country, but we each picked
up a pocketknife, mostly for utility purposes.

At the counter while the salesman was
scanning all the cut-off tags from the clothes we wore, Peter was
busy leaning over the counter reading something. “Wait, add four of
those in, too,” he said, pointing. Gordon looked at the headset
walkie-talkies he was pointing to, confused, but didn’t deny him.
We shoved our clothes and the walkie-talkies with batteries in a
bag and left. Everything else we were wearing. Billy was waiting on
the curb when we came out.

“What are the radios for?” Gordon asked, once
Billy pulled into traffic. “We’ll burn ’em out in minutes.”

“Seth and I won’t,” Peter said. “And as long
as Billy doesn’t throw any major magic around, he won’t. The third
and fourth are for him anyway and he’s staying with the van. He’s
our way out.” He’d started stripping away the plastic on each,
loading them with batteries.

“I take it you have a plan?” I said
hopeful.

“Not really,” Peter said. “But if we have to
run, we’ll need somewhere to run and with that much ground to cover
we’ll probably have to split up. Of the three of us, you’re the
best suited to go it alone. Gordon and I may need each other. Hell,
we may need you.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share a
sword or two while we’re about here, would you now?” Gordon asked,
opening the first aid kits and removing the packaging, prepping
them for use.

“I’m willing,” I said, stressing the ‘I.’
“Unfortunately, they don’t play well with others. It takes some
effort for me to get them to not eat others when they’re being
held. I’d be afraid I’d lose my concentration then you’d be chopped
meat in about a second and a half.”

“Is there any way that we can hide Gordon
from sight? Anything the Stone can do?” Peter asked, testing the
third radio’s earpiece, “Try this on. You should still be able to
hear even with it in.”

“I don’t think so. It hasn’t really been an
issue,” I said, as he handed me a radio and earpiece to check.

Jumping down in to my cavern to check my own
battery levels, I saw the solid line of energy was still feeding
into the anchor. I hadn’t realized that was still happening. I
centered on the three remaining batteries in my cavern. One was
newly created and was filling, a little over halfway by now. I
hadn’t realized I was doing that still, either. The second was
full. The third, the one filtered to feed to Ethan, was less than a
third gone. Here I’d thought I was pumping a ton of energy at him,
too. Kieran said it was enough. I hoped he was right.

The road was getting more winding and Billy
was slowing down more. We were getting closer.

“We need to make a decision before we get out
of the van,” Peter said, sighing heavily. “Do we want information
from the attackers? Do we take prisoners or just go in guns
ablaze?”

“No,” answered Billy, gruff and emphatic. “No
prisoners. Let Felix take care of that. There’s too few of you and
one too many of them.” I thought that well said. Gordon agreed with
him. Peter and I just nodded, accepting the grim pronouncement.

We picked a point on the road map a mile away
from the last turn and had Billy park the van in a safe turning
point. We put his radio on one channel, Peter’s and mine on
another, and set the two modules on either end of the van exterior
so Billy could hear them. Billy leaned against a nearby tree so he
could see the road from both directions, his handgun reappearing
without a comment from anyone.

Stepping to the road, we turned back to Billy
and the van and I worked the Stone’s magic on them. It was a simple
and subtle magic. Just looking at the results, it appeared as
though the landscape behind the van just shifted forward a little
and touched the road before it should have, leaving the van
forgotten. Unlike Gordon’s prismatic spell though, there wasn’t any
residue left behind. Nothing to say a spell had been worked here.
As long as Billy wasn’t too active, the spell would last a while on
its own.

“Four hours, Billy,” Gordon said, forcefully.
“If you haven’t heard something from us in four hours, head home.
No longer than that.” Not waiting for a reply, he turned on his
heel and we started up the road.

I called the weapons to ready but that was
unnecessary of me—they were bristling already. The Crossbow and
Quiver were nestled between my shoulder blades and each sword was
sitting on my forearms, ready to jump into my hands. It was
comforting to feel their weight. The Stone was shielding all three
of us and obscuring our physical forms at the same time using one
of the chameleon spells Kieran taught us. We weren’t completely
invisible, just really hard to see. I started working a spell to
dim Gordon’s aura. It wasn’t so much a spell as a continuing
process of tucking and hiding colors among other colors. I was
hopeful I could relegate this to the back of my mind, like I had
feeding Ethan.