Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (77 page)

“Your surrender,” said Peter.

The elf tried to slip out of the room then.
The ward caught the shifting energy in a cascade of silver and
crimson around him in a jagged circle, collapsing his glamour and
shooting angry rips of power from the edges directly onto his body.
His high-pitched screams of pain entered ranges only dogs and I
could hear as he writhed around the searing vortex. The lieutenants
near him tripped over themselves in their rush to back away. One
fired his pistol at the elf but hit the cascading energy, causing a
mild eruption out into the room.

The body of the elf fell abruptly to the
floor as the power he called was used up by the vortex. There were
still several black patches still smoking on the crispy body. The
corpse now looked like an elf, unbelievably thin, seven plus feet
tall, long blonde hair. His clothing was the same as before the
glamour but in silk, not poly-cotton blends. One of the lieutenants
rolled the body over with his foot. The elf’s face was a blackened
mess, unrecognizable through the scorch marks.

“Major, sound the retreat,” said the colonel,
tightly, staring at the elf’s body on the floor. “We’re
leaving.”

“I’m afraid that option isn’t on the table,
Colonel,” said Peter.

The Colonel snapped his head around to Peter,
glaring at him. “Why? You want us gone and we don’t want to be
here.”

“There has to be a reckoning, Colonel,” Peter
said calmly. “Your people raped and murdered. Children,
Colonel.”

“You can’t hold us responsible for rape!”
countered the major. “We can’t control everything.”

“Wrong answer, major,” I said, loudly. I sent
a strong surge of energy through the ward to him. It wasn’t enough
to kill him, but he’d sure as hell remember it. Then I sent him to
Gordon’s cell. It would look to the others like I flash-fried him
on the spot. That must have worked because the remaining four all
pulled handguns and pointed them at us. Peter took the opportunity
to try my gun-to-portal trick on them. True to form, they gasped at
their unseen enemies and froze in place.

“Colonel, I need to understand why someone
would send a conventional force into an unconventional area,” I
said. “And I need to understand now. So, what exactly is your
mission here?”

The Colonel swallowed hard, staring down the
barrel of his gun. I saw the decision he was making, preparing
himself for suicide. He squeezed the trigger, his whole body
flinching with the roar of the gun. I was the only person in the
room expecting it as everyone jerked around to look for a falling
body, muzzles still in faces but forgotten for a few seconds.

The Colonel couldn’t focus completely on the
frozen billow of escaped gases or on the bullet that was forced
forward by the exploding cloud, but he knew what it was. I took the
gun out of his hand with Peter’s trick but left the cloud and
bullet in front of him, held in place with the power of the Stone’s
shields.

“No, Colonel,” I said as condescendingly as
possible. “You don’t get off that easily. You have a lot to answer
and I will get answers one way or another.”

“But you’re just a boy,” he said weakly.

“Yes, Colonel,” I said. “Three boys just beat
the crap out of you. And before you start to believe that you can
still win by suicide, let me show you a few more things.” I reached
out through the ward, feeling for the tightly wrapped packages his
three- and four-man teams were leaving in all the buildings around
the campus and dropped them through portals that ended on the
conference table in front of us. By the time I’d collected all of
them, I had sixty-seven bombs piled there.

Peter raised his eyebrows in shock.
“Destroying the school? Why?” he asked.

The Colonel remained silent. At this point, I
was past caring for his disposition. I tapped my earpiece to switch
channels.

“Billy? You still with us?”

A pause, the length of which made me nervous,
before Billy answered, “Yes, Seth, I’m here.”

“Come on in, Billy,” I said confidently.
“We’ve taken the campus back, but we’ve got wounded here. At least
six that need immediate hospital care. I’m about to round up the
rest of the strike force now. We had no choice but to take
prisoners. There were just too many of them to kill outright.”

“You’ll never get all of us,” said the
Colonel confidently.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Peter,
oozing smarm and pointing out the window. I was dropping his troops
from a height of thirty feet right outside the window. Peter set
the cell up for me when the first man, actually a woman, had gained
enough sense to start moving out of the way.

I opened the front gate long enough for Billy
to drive through then shut it again. Once I was satisfied I had
everyone, I sent the two lieutenants there as well, leaving the
captain and the Colonel in the room with us, their hands bound
behind them with zip ties. I re-wove the holes in the wards while
Peter disarmed the men in his cell. Gordon had done an admirable
job in his cell already.

It was time to start cleaning up the mess. We
paraded the colonel and the captain past Peter’s cell and around
the auditorium building. His men were in a shocked and quiet.
Gordon’s cell was more rowdy as they’d had more time to adjust to
their incarceration, but they too quieted at the sight of their
leader being lead like a pack mule. Billy came over the top of the
hill carrying two of the first aid kits and Peter’s briefcase under
his arm.

It was time to call Kieran. We weren’t going
to be making it back to the castle for a few hours, not without
someone to take over here. Damn, this was getting complicated.

Two hours later, the campus was just
beginning to get active again. Gordon and Peter had worked together
to gather the two cells together, marching Peter’s four ranks wide
to Gordon’s while keeping the force field walls up. It was a tight
move, but both Ferrin and I were watching and ready to help if
anything went wrong. Peter’s group was decidedly more cantankerous
prior to seeing the cell of dead bodies next to Gordon’s. They
calmed considerably when Peter sidled them up close to it. Peter
told them that those men hadn’t followed orders, then left the
statement to hang in their imaginations to come up with the cause
of death.

Gordon sent Billy back to the front gate
after we contacted Kieran and Cahill. The conflict at the castle
was done except for the shouting when we’d called the last time,
but neither Cahill nor Kieran discussed much of it with us,
delaying that until we returned. Cahill was able to get medical aid
to us within a half-hour of the call. Kieran opened a portal from
the castle to the front gate for them by homing on me. The wards
around the school prevented a direct portal in and apparently, that
kind of magic is more difficult than I knew before doing so much of
it today. Admittedly, it was harder at the beginning of this,
especially in the van, but I got better at it as the day
progressed. Peter just smiled when I asked him about it.

While we waited for the doctors to arrive,
Peter and I talked to the boys that were hurt, got their names,
parents’ names, then we started making phone calls all across
Europe trying to get in touch with them. Billy radioed when the
medical team got there and again a few minutes later about a
frantic couple screaming about a hurt child. After that, neither
Peter nor I could reach him by radio; his end was fried. It had
lasted longer than we figured it would. But we trusted Billy to
only let in the right people and if he had a problem, I was
literally a shout away.

The parents were a nightmare. Not that I
blamed them for their outbursts—well, later, I didn’t—but they were
aiming it at the wrong people. Gordon took the brunt of it but I
lost my temper with them. I hung them both upside down over the
largest cell of soldiers and told them if they yelled at us again I
would drop them in. Once they’d calmed down, I apologized for
losing my temper, saying that killing over thirty people for what
they’d done had made me “a bit testy.” I’m pretty sure they didn’t
know want to think about that, but they quit yelling.

The med techs started to move the boys out on
stretchers to the gate, but they would have to go one or two at a
time. Peter and I exchanged glances and decided on a better way
instantly. Emotionally wrecked or not, “nobility” or not, the
parents were pressed into service. Both of them levitated and
carried two each to the gate. The med techs carried the fifth boy
on the stretcher. Jeff was well enough to walk, but he still needed
medical attention and I made sure that the med techs knew what I
had done with his lungs. I wanted him thoroughly examined by
someone who knew what I had done just in case. Ferrin, though,
refused to go with them, wanting to find out the reason for the
attack. I didn’t force the issue. He’d done enough and been through
enough that I felt he had the right to know.

At two hours after our call to Cahill, a
large black limousine arrived at the gate and I felt a push on the
ward for the gate to open. Billy stood behind the gate in the pose
I’d gotten used to seeing him in: feet shoulder-width apart, arms
crossed on his chest with the quite illegal handgun nestled in his
arms, and his face a stoic mask. Billy didn’t open the gate so I
didn’t either. The driver got out and said something to Billy
impatiently. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I could read the
emotions. Billy wasn’t going to open the gate until he knew who was
in the car. Whoever was in the car obviously thought they were too
good to stand and be recognized. Arrogant twit made another grab
for the wards while Billy and the driver went back and forth.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Peter and drew
power in, throwing it in front of the gate as lightning. Then I
skipped over to the spot with the Day Sword drawn and shining
bright in the afternoon sun. “Comply with the man’s wishes or I
start carving your car up by centimeters,” I said. “With you in
it.” I heard Billy snort and chuckle behind me.

The man in the back of the car made another
grab for the wards. He was really ticking me off. I took two steps
over and drove the Day sword into the hood of the car. I’m not sure
of what I hit but the engine made awful noises before it stopped
running and billowed gray and black smoke. Billy couldn’t hold back
his laughter, the second time I’d seen him actually make an
emotional reaction.

The driver was hiding behind the car door,
staring at me with his mouth agape. I moved to the side of the limo
and made a production of lining my next strike on the vehicle to
quarter the hood, stopping only to wave the driver to the roadside.
As I raised the Day Sword, both rear doors of the limo flew open
and two men got out. I glided into a defensive position with the
Sword in front of me and my weight lightly on my left foot, ready
to move. A tall thin man in an expensive light brown suit without
the jacket jumped out. Dark brown hair framed a light tan and dark
eyes did little but accentuate his long face.

“What the hell are you doing, boy?” he yelled
at me.

“Guarding a school that has already been
brutally attacked once today,” I said calmly. “You have refused to
identify yourselves and tried to take the wards no less than three
times. The next time will be your last. Call me a ‘boy’ again,
especially in that tone, and you’ll speak in a much higher register
for the rest of your life.”

“Do you know who I am?” he asked
dramatically, his face flushing in anger at the threats.

“Billy, did I not just say he refused to
identify himself?” I asked calmly.

“Yes, Mr. McClure, you did just say that,”
answered Billy still on the other side of the closed gate. I really
like Billy. He seemed to know just the right things to say.

“Is he an idiot?” I asked Billy, receiving
the huge spike in anger and embarrassment in the man’s aura that I
expected.

“Now I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, Mr.
McClure,” Billy said, changing his tone slightly, to be diplomatic.
I understood his position, but this man had already played three
different power plays on me—true, by the dictionary, power plays.
All he had to do was introduce himself and ask nice and I would
have been home already.

“McClure,” the man grumbled. “Seth
McClure?”

“Yes, and you?”

“Louis Marchand, president of the European
Council,” he said proudly. “As such I serve on the Board of
Trustees for this institution and therefore I am the rightful
caretaker of the wards.”

I couldn’t help it. I swear I tried to
suppress it but it just came out—a snicker at first, then it turned
into a laugh, then, well somehow I ended up leaning against the
gate for support I was laughing so hard. I know I was insulting the
man, but I couldn’t help it. I’ve already seen so much impotent
arrogance today that I was ready to start yelling “Just whip it out
and we can measure ‘em.”

“And your friend?”

“Paul Murrik, an associate of the Council,”
said Marchand.

“Billy, do you know either of these people by
name?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” he said mildly. “They do appear
to be the gentlemen in question.”

“Tell me, Mr. Marchand,” I said, sending the
Day Sword home and passing my thanks for the help as it went. “Were
you aware of the happenings at the school today?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he growled. “Felix
Cahill called me at home barely an hour ago.”

“Mr. Murrik, would you step over to this side
of the car, please?” I asked the other man. There was a bus coming
down the road that would need the driveway soon. He moved around
the car, suspicious. This man was much thinner than Marchand with
darker hair and eyes. A rather hawkish face with sunken cheeks, he
was not a pretty man.