Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (9 page)

“Reaching for his bottle. His Mom and Dad
were busy,” he said, dispassionately, cocking his head slightly. He
didn’t know where this was going any more than I did.

“Okay, wait here,” said Kieran, sighing and
looking around the room. He set the album on the floor with the
picture of me and the table showing, then got up. He went to the
window and pulled the table there over to Ethan’s side then left
the room. He came back a moment later with another table and
stacked it on top of the first. He left again and came back with a
glass from the kitchen and put it atop the two tables. He eyed the
height—Ethan would have to come up off his butt to reach it.

“Get the glass like he got the bottle,”
ordered Kieran. Ethan reached both hands out and the glass raised
up slightly and flew into his hands. I just stared at my double
with my mouth open. Kieran took the glass back and slid the tables
back out of the way, leaving the glass on the top table.

“Thank you,” Kieran said, sitting back down
in front of us and flipping a few pages to the puppets. “Can you
recreate this one?”

Suddenly the room was filled with dancing
puppets with no strings. I laughed a little as they danced around
us rather aimlessly. Kieran ran his hand through one to show that
they weren’t really there, then lost interest in them. Ethan
dismissed them a few seconds after that and I felt kind of sad when
they disappeared.

“He apparently did that one fairly often at
bedtime,” said Ethan, grinning slightly, turning to me. “Much to
his parent’s irritation.” I just looked back with a ‘Who Me?’ look
on my face. I had no recollection of this as I was just a baby at
the time. Kieran was grinning as he went back to reading the second
page of notes.

“Would you mind telling me,” I said, “just
what the big deal is?”

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that,”
said Kieran quietly, still reading. Ethan and I looked at each
other, then gave identical shrugs and looked back to Kieran,
waiting.

When he finished the second page, he looked
up and said, “Magical ability usually doesn’t start showing itself
until the advent of puberty. It’s almost a hormonal effect on the
brain. Generally, you start out seeing auras and ley lines, that
sort of thing. Do you remember when you first started seeing
auras?”

“Always,” I said, with Ethan nodding
agreement.

“Huh. That’s very unusual,” he said. “At just
before your fifth birthday, Father and your mother took you to the
Guild to be tested. This is usually done at fourteen- or
fifteen-years old so I’m thinking Father made some arrangements to
do this very privately. The fact that Father and your mother were
in the room at the time adds to the supposition since it’s normally
done alone. That’s the picture with all the oily stuff in the
background.”

He flipped the album back to a picture and
tapped it. I vaguely remembered the experience from the picture. A
lot of it involved making the goo on the wall do stuff like make
geometric designs and move in strange ways. I remembered it as
being fun and it made Mom and Dad really happy that day.

“You tested off the charts,” he said, looking
intently at me.

“What does that mean?” I asked, feeling like
an idiot.

“It means, little brother, that you were too
powerful at five to be judged by a test,” he said. “But twelve
years later, you haven’t been trained on anything. For some reason,
Father has left you as tabla rasa. That power, that potential still
exists, as does the question of why. And unfortunately, you have to
make a decision without enough information.”

He paused. I waited. I knew he was trying to
lead me into something, but I was too tired to think and too much
had happened today already. He was gonna have to say it outright.
He sighed and went on.

“You’re not the blank slate anymore,” he
said. “For starters, you now hold a huge and powerful Pact. The
magic you can learn delving into that alone is enormous. You hold
five weapons heavily laden with magic. You can now see in truth and
control consciously small amounts of light and sound. You called
them firecrackers?” I nodded at the question in his voice. “Now,
correct me if I’m wrong, but you have no intentions of sitting in
this house while I go look for your parents, right?” he asked.

“Hell, no!” I said, emphatically. I’d already
stayed still too long.

“Then that means I have to teach you how to
protect yourself,” he said, seriously. “How to see who we’ll be
dealing with. Who else is out there in the world, the Worlds,
really. Because somebody is after you for something and I can only
protect you so far.”

“I thought you had to re-learn things
yourself,” I said, yawning.

The smile was contorted while he figured out
how best to say what he wanted. “What I have to re-learn is like
playing a piano concerto while I’m teaching you ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star,’ and even that is a poor analogy.”

“All right,” I said. Looking at the shelf of
financials, I decided I was too tired to go through them tonight. I
pulled those off the shelf and piled them on the floor. Gesturing
at the remains of the bottom shelf, I asked Kieran, “Do you want to
look through any of these?”

He glanced up, saying, “No, I’m familiar with
those, actually.”

I pushed down slightly on the shelf and the
bottom two shelves disappeared into I don’t know where with the top
three snapping back into place, yellow tint shimmering slightly. I
took that to mean the spell was still in place and took half the
pile of financials to the desk. Ethan followed behind with the
rest.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I’m going to bed.”

“Good night,” Kieran said, reading the third
page of notes, not looking up as I left the room.

My dreams were filled with dancing puppets
and cartoons that night. Much better than a nightmare of dying
elves, I suppose.

I woke at a more normal 6:50 a.m. to an empty
house. The sun was shining through the window, promising a nice day
out. Shaking the sleep out of my head, I took a quick shower and
dressed in shorts and a T shirt, opting not to shave again. I
could sense Kieran and Ethan down the hill in the clearing moving
around quite frenetically. I couldn’t tell what they were doing,
though. Shrank was flying toward the house along the trail. I
grabbed some socks and trainers and headed for the kitchen.

“Good morning, Master Seth,” squeaked Shrank
merrily as he flew through the dining room door, left ajar, I
assumed for that purpose.

“Morning,” I grunted, sitting down at the
table to put my shoes and socks on, my hair dripping a little as it
curled into ringlets. I needed a haircut; I hated it when my hair
got curly. It made me look younger than I was. “What are they doing
down there?”

“They called it a ‘morning workout,’” he
said, cheerfully, landing on the table before me. “I’d call it a
battle royale. Kieran asks that you join them when you’re
ready.”

“Okay,” I said and went to the kitchen. I
filled a bottle from the cupboard with filtered water and headed
through the dining room and out of the house. Shrank followed me
down, darting in and out of the trees as we went, buzzing around
happily. I could hear them making a lot of noise as we neared the
clearing. I could feel a lot of movement through the ward and a
huge flow of power of some kind, but nothing really threatening. It
was a strange sensation that crossed sensory bounds, like a taste
that had a smell at the same time, totally incongruous with each
other. I reveled in it until we broke through the trees into the
clearing.

It was all-out war there. There had to be
forty men on the field, all over it. Big men like Kieran, all
bearing weapons and at least partial armor, some with full armor.
There were two clusters of them and I caught a glimpse of Kieran
waving a sword with a blue fire in the middle of the closest
cluster to me. This close, I could feel Ethan on the other side
moving at inhuman speed. Shrank said this was a workout, so I
shouldn’t be worried. Then the man closest to me saw me, turned,
and snarled. That got a few more men’s attention.

One seventeen-year-old ready to cut down, no
waiting. Four men peeled off the group and started advancing on me.
I dropped my bottle and made ready to run like hell, but one of my
magic Swords had different ideas. Without a thought on my part, the
gold and silver Sword was in my right hand flashing up to parry the
first man’s downward slash. I felt the rock shift in my mind,
drawing together the Sword and my body and emitting a field around
me, shielding me.

My feet moved, twisting me to the left,
clipping one man’s sword arm and slashing another’s throat as he
tried to slip underneath the other’s advance. The Sword moved me
again, turning me swiftly in a circle to impale a man fully through
the gut and pull itself swiftly free. As he fell, I saw another man
out of Sword’s reach readying to throw a double-bladed ax at me. I
raised my left hand and fired the Crossbow, hitting him right
between the eyes. He blew apart in an explosion of millions of tiny
spots of light.

Then I felt the rock settle back down into
the marble slab I was used to for all of a night. The clearing was
quiet and I could hear nothing but my own chest heaving for breath.
I stared down at the gold hilt of the Sword in shock, then looked
around. There weren’t any bodies on the ground. I know I’d killed
at least three men and hurt one. I had a Sword in one hand, a
Crossbow in the other, and I’d used them with deadly proficiency. I
could feel the adrenaline rushing through my body so hot I wanted
to scream from the rush. And I wanted to puke. I turned in place
until I could see Kieran and Ethan walking slowly to me, both
bare-chested, breathing heavily, and smiling broadly.

“What do we need to show him about these
weapons?” Ethan asked when they stopped at five feet away from me.
That’s when I noticed that he didn’t look like me anymore. He was
shorter than me now, just a little, maybe an inch, and blond. Blue
eyed. And built. If I didn’t have enough of an inferiority complex
with Kieran around now Ethan was in training for Mr. Universe, too.
They both had sweat running down muscles I didn’t know the human
body had.

“Did you use the Stone as well?” Kieran asked
me.

“It was more like they used me,” I said
nodding as my breathing slowed. I made a conscious effort to send
the weapons back. “What’s going on here?”

“Just working out,” said Kieran, rather
sheepishly.

“It may have gotten a little out of hand,”
added Ethan, shuffling his feet and staring down.

“O-kay,” I started, shaking my head. “I don’t
know whether to laugh at the both of you for looking like
seven-year-olds owning up to dad for losing their bikes, to yell at
you for siccing armed men on me, or to thank you that I don’t have
to check with you before dressing each day so I don’t look like the
stupid twin.”

“We did look that way, didn’t we?” Kieran
said, standing up a little straighter and grinning. “You did very
well, by the way. The flow between the weapons was flawless.”

“That wasn’t me,” I protested. “That was
either the weapons themselves or whatever Ethan did to put them
there. They moved me how and where they wanted me. I was along for
the ride.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, little brother,”
Kieran said. To Ethan, “The Day Sword, right?”

“Yes, The Day Sword,” Ethan said. “The Twin
of Might. Said to be forged from the first gold and silver mined by
the Fae. It has a hair’s breadth of iron in its core, wrapped in
silver and bespelled in the old elven tongues, to guarantee death
to all Fae it strikes. Sharp enough to pierce all but the strongest
armors. It is rumored to know the killing strike for any opponent.
And again, you saw how easily Kieran defeated it.”

He grinned and now he looked positively
cherubic.

“This sounds like stuff out of a cheesy
tourist magazine,” I said. “How do you know this?”

“Some of it was written into the Fae bindings
before I removed them,” he said. “Then there was the pixie. He
found the hummingbird feeder and got positively snockered!” He
started snickering. “It only lasted for about twenty, twenty-five
minutes but he was hilarious! This was while you and Kieran were
looking at the albums. And the bow that never misses? Missed
Kieran, what three score times? Isn’t that how they count them?” He
was laughing outright now. At least he was building a
personality.

Why wasn’t I mad about this?

“Well, I need another shower,” I said,
pulling my tee shirt away from my body to help dry it. The heat was
already pushing eighty-five degrees and it wasn’t even eight in the
morning yet. “What are your plans for the day?”

“A shower, breakfast,” Kieran said, starting
for the trail, “then I thought we’d look through the financial
records you found last night and see what kind of trail we can
find.” I thought he had a sword earlier but I didn’t see any
evidence of it now as I filed in line behind them. They both wore
loose fitting black silk pants, tied at the waist, and they were
both bare footed. The path had been cleared of its sharp
stones over night, so they were walking without wincing now. I
wondered who drew the lot for that job.

In the house, I headed for my room and Kieran
headed for what was technically the Master bedroom, even though the
two rooms were virtually the same outside of the furnishings. Both
rooms had full baths while the main house only had a half bathroom
to it. Ethan hung back in the den while we cleaned up. I was a
little faster in getting out than Kieran and called Ethan in and
told him to pick some clothes for himself until we could get his
own. I was probably a bit small for him, but the change in his
looks had given me the chance to put a few thoughts together.
Combined with some of the comments Kieran had made last night, I
had decided that it was time we came to an understanding. I felt
like I was about to alienate the only friends I had.