Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (90 page)

Dillon slipped out the “No” door and moved
quickly to the end of the bar, pausing to get his bearings. I could
feel the vibrations of the music through the shield as I stood
watching him. One of the bartenders stepped up quickly and put a
glass of dark liquid in front of his tapping hand resting on the
bar. I wished for one of the earpiece and mic combos we had back at
Dunstan’s. That would have made this easier. Or if I could just
whisper in his ear from here. Hmm. That was an interesting
idea.

Dillon picked up the drink he was given and
shot the contents back quickly, without even acknowledging it was
there, but the bartender watched him curiously. I watched the
bartender as he did. He stopped one of the barbacks, and pointed
Dillon out to him. Then they both watched Dillon for a moment. They
exchanged glances then the barback went to the other bartenders and
said something to them. I couldn’t tell what was happening there so
I ignored the small inactivity and went back to my idea.

I pushed the shield up Dillon’s neck and head
to encompass his ears but left openings at the canals. Then I
opened a very small portal, anchoring one end of it onto the shield
wall and the other end about eight inches in front of me. Then I
tried them out.

“Dillon, can you hear me?” I said in a normal
voice. He jumped and looked behind him. Okay, good start. “Dillon,
this is Seth. If you can hear me, nod your head once, please.” He
nodded but very slowly. “Does that mean you can barely hear me?” He
nodded once again slowly. I started repeating the word “Testing”
while moving my end of the portals slowly until his head jerked.
“Better then?” He nodded once. “Good. I’ll try to figure out a way
for you to talk to me while you find Ferrin. He’s near the dance
floor watching. One of the tails is sitting two tables back. Be
careful. Please.”

There was an odd flow of people from one of
the cameras that caught my attention briefly. A number of people
exited the back room for some reason, lining up along the walls of
the rear of the bar. From what I could tell, they were all normal
bar patrons and were apparently having a good time. None had the
telltale fuzzy faces of hiding mages. Damn it, why did Peter have
to act the fool? He would have a better idea of what was going on
here.

Dillon was approaching Ferrin and had to have
my attention. He was dancing off-tempo in what seemed a very
un-Dillon way to me—clunky and drunken. He glanced up and acted
like he’d just seen Ferrin for the first time, calling out his
name. Ferrin had to be confused by Dillon, but I just didn’t see
through the fuzz. By his hand motions, Ferrin was brushing him off,
rather brusquely, but Dillon persisted, grabbing Ferrin’s hand and
shaking it rapidly up and down and moving closer. Close enough to
be fuzzy himself for a moment. He leaned in and said something that
cause Ferrin to still completely then laughed loudly and leaned in
again. After that, I could see Ferrin’s face clearly, shaking his
head no.

Score one for us—our plan worked—but against
us. He hadn’t known about his tails, very bad. “Next question, are
they magical?” I asked. Ferrin smirked at Dillon and hunkered down
closer to the table. The resolution on the picture wasn’t good
enough to tell where he was looking, but at least I could tell it
was him. Ferrin shrugged. Crap, I didn’t know what that meant.

“Is that the answer, Dillon? Is the shrug
mean he can’t tell?” I asked. Dillon nodded once. “Damn. Okay, I’m
gonna risk coming down, then. Stay with him.”

As I turned to leave the office, I felt a
slight tickle at the edges of my perception. Just the ghost of an
image nearby. The Stone snapped to attention and the Day sword fell
into my hand instantly. I pushed my senses out into the apartment,
feeling for anything that wasn’t there before, any dents in the
energy field. I found two. One was climbing slowly in a cut section
of the window in the bathroom. The other was on the far side of the
elevator and heading this way. I couldn’t tell how that one got in.
Decisions, decisions. To kill or not to kill, that is the
question.

Deciding I really didn’t have the time to
deal with these two, I sent the Day sword into hiding and walked
calmly into the hallway. Hitting the elevator call button, I waited
for the first man to attack. His choice of weapons was shuriken
throwing stars coated in something presumably poisonous. They
didn’t hit. They joined him at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I
did give him the opportunity of seeing daylight for the last time.
From several thousand feet up. It was roughly midway along our
flight plan between New York and Dublin, to the best of my memory,
anyway.

I stepped into the elevator and pressed down.
Relief that I was going to miss the second man fled as he slipped
in quickly between the closing doors and took his first swipe at
me. He wore gloves that had razor-sharp knives sewn into them and
wore a small charm around his neck that glowed an ominous and eerie
green. I didn’t have a name for his gloves but if I hadn’t been
shielded my face would have been a bloody mess. He lurched forward
for another strike but I sent him after his friend in the Atlantic
before he had time to make it. I was pretty sure they weren’t close
enough to talk but I didn’t feel bad.

“Dillon, things just got a lot more
complicated,” I said into my portals as I adjusted my cap and
jacket in the mirror finish of the elevator. The razor-handed guy
had nicked the cap. “I’m about to come out of the elevator now. You
might need to come with us, at least for a day or two. I don’t know
yet.”

The elevator doors opened to a tall man in a
black suit with a large handgun and silencer. He shot me three
times in the head and twice in the chest. And, hell yeah I
flinched! It didn’t hurt but I still flinched with each rapid phft
sound. He was somewhere over the Atlantic before the slugs hit the
ground. I searched through the halls before I got out of the
elevator, just in case.

I was gonna have to send Harris a box of
candy.

Now I understood what Dillon was doing at the
end of the bar, getting ready, steeling his nerves. I did not want
to be doing this alone and here I was, facing a huge room of people
that had a very small number that wanted to kill me and I didn’t
know why. Frankly, I was starting to feel a bit territorial, too.
Maybe that was part of that excess odor I’ve smelled all night.
Tons of excess testosterone. This was my gay bar, damn it, and they
were trying to take it away from me.

I stepped out of the elevator and felt the
thrum of all the weapons in my head. The weight of both swords
shifted down to just below my elbows. The Quiver and the Crossbow
moved between my shoulder blades. They helped build my confidence,
but I had to figure another way out of this. There were too many
innocent people in the way. Then I felt the string of the Crossbow
hum against the Quiver, setting the Bolts to vibrating and I was
suddenly and strikingly aware of each and every one of them. And
each and every man in the room, as if they were a target. It was
like being under the wards at Dunstan’s or the one at home after
Kieran got there. I was hyperaware. Awesome.

There were two new dynamics in the room we
hadn’t known about before I came onto the floor. The first I had
expected. That there were more than four problems to take care of
out there, I had not seen. The four men we noticed were indeed
magically active, fairly powerful actually, by the looks of them,
but they were veiled much like Ferrin had Marty and Ian covered.
Not particularly skillfully veiled since they almost looked like
quadruplets, but they hid their power well enough. But they had
cover in the crowd, eight pairs of them spread out over the bar and
armed.

The second dynamic was that Dillon had
coverage and I wasn’t sure that he was aware of it. And it was a
very good coverage. I guess the bartender found his behavior
erratic enough to put a couple of very well built tails on him.
They were intent on Ferrin’s every move and I had no doubt that if
it devolved into physical violence that they could hold their own
against Ferrin in a fair fight. It wouldn’t be a fair fight,
though, not against Ferrin. But far more interesting than these two
were the other ten. These ten were paired off and set like chess
pieces around the bar near each pair of backup men. Someone else
had pegged them before I had.

That had to be the man in the back of the
bar, the one wearing the biker’s leather pants and jacket with no
shirt. His muscular chest showed signs of tattoos at the edges of
where the jacket opened and ink showed along the left side of his
neck. He wasn’t exactly a big man but he had presence. His dark
eyes pierced through me, trying to take my measure, and I met his
gaze without flinching. I don’t know how he knew something was
up—he wasn’t magically active—but he did and he was protective of
his territory. I rather liked him. He acknowledged me with a nod
and went back to scanning his playground.

Time to get this party started.

I stalked through the bar with a purpose,
elbows out and arms wide. I felt like I should have my own personal
Hugo Montenegro soundtrack playing. It was pretty much a letdown
that I wasn’t noticed until I was five feet away from Dillon. The
mages I could understand not seeing me, but the military guys? They
were almost startled when I sat down beside Dillon.

“Hi, Mike! Fancy meeting you here,” I shouted
over the music. I set a buffer around us in the air so I could
hear. This close to the dance floor, the volume was near
deafening.

“Seth, good to see you, too,” he said, not
shouting as the noise had quieted to a far more manageable level.
“Where’s Peter? I was supposed to be meeting him here. I’d like to
thank him for not telling me he was sending me to a…” He glanced
over at Dillon quickly and changed his choice of words. “Cruise
bar.” He nodded politely to Dillon, who smiled and returned the
nod.

I grinned at him. “He needed to return home
suddenly. Something he ate, I think, but don’t worry, I’ll see you
get home safely.”

I glanced over Ferrin’s shoulder at the mage
behind him talking in a huddle with his two military backups. The
three mages behind me were in a similar huddle with two of their
backups, but the other two pair of backups were still in
“hiding.”

“It’s not the first time that Peter’s eaten
his left foot up to his kneecap,” Dillon said with a smirk.

“It’s nice to know someone else can make
mistakes,” Ferrin muttered, not unkindly.

“Are they here for you?” I asked, turning in
my chair to stare at the group of five. It took them a moment to
notice but then they were definitely unsettled by my attention on
them. I turned back when Ferrin answered.

“I can’t imagine why,” he said in his low and
airy voice. “Except that these are exactly the type of people I
avoid. The kind of people you asked me to inquire after. I would
love to know how they found me, though.”

“There’s a mark on the bottom of your shoe,”
I said. “It was very faint now, but still there. Even at its
strongest, I doubt it showed much. They’re getting antsy. Shall we
get this started?”

“I don’t understand,” Dillon said, grabbing
my forearm and stopping me from getting up. “Why don’t the two of
you just disappear, go home or wherever. Leave. It’s got to be
safer than dealing with whoever these nut jobs are.”

“Safer?” I asked. I was pretty sure I was
doing my dog impersonation there, turning my head to one side in
confusion. “For whom? Us? Probably, but what about tomorrow? Why
should we let these jerks define where we can and can’t go? And
what about you? You were seen talking to us both. What are they
going to do to you after we leave? They broke into your apartment
and tried to kill me. Are you so sure that they won’t do that to
you? Or even that they weren’t after you in the first place? Do you
want to risk that? Because I don’t.”

I felt the minor pulse of mage fire from
Ferrin as he blasted the mark off his shoe. He was up and stamping
his foot on the floor, aggravated both at himself and at wherever
he’d picked it up. From the epithets he was muttering, he’d figured
out where it happened.

“You ready to dance?” I asked him, grinning
at his theatrics.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Where ya
wanna do this? Not here, obviously.”

“Let’s head for the roof,” I said. “I know
where it is and there’s probably already some of them up there.”
The silent communication going on here was so cool. I was just
looking at people and I knew they were going to do what I wanted.
This wasn’t an invasion. This was my fight.

First thing was to get Dillon taken care of.
I caught the attention of the closest barback security guy
combo with a waving hand gesture and pointed to Dillon. Then moved
on to find Mr. Leather in the back and pointed straight up. He
nodded affirmatively, which I took to mean he and his people were
willing to go, so I latched on to everybody all at once and shifted
them all up to the roof. Then I located the ones we hadn’t seen yet
and sent them to the roof, four of them, and moved them over with
the others.

I needed a minute after all that, slumping
over against an HVAC unit. Moving that many people around is
tiring. I can see why people didn’t do it and I was glad I didn’t
have to go far.

There were numerous shouts of surprise and
alarm, mostly from the other guys. Leatherman’s men seemed to roll
with the change in scenery quite easily and were cordoning off the
sides of the roof nicely with threatening postures. The mages were
still very disoriented and the constant shouts from the others to
“Do something!” weren’t helping.

One of them finally managed enough
concentration to tap a line and shout a word. A spout of green
flames shot from his outstretched hands toward Ferrin, I suspect
because they felt he was the bigger threat. Ferrin was already
twisting out of the way when I caught the fire a yard out and sent
it curling, first skyward then back on its sender. I had to angle
mine, though, to throw him off the roof instead of incinerating him
on the roof, risking whatever lay beneath. He died a split second
after his fire hit him, before he left the roof. I didn’t feel the
slightest touch of guilt.