Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (99 page)

“Of course we are,” Bishop scoffed. “The two
of you have to be using immense streams all by yourselves!”

“No,” Peter said dismissively. “He’s right.
This house sits on a nexus of three ley lines. You, Gordon, and
Felix could pull from them all day long and not make a dint in
them. And Seth and I draw from a… different source. This has to be
the elves.”

“How far away is the coast?” I asked,
watching the elves through the ward as they shifted their
positions. They were moving more slowly now, moving in wider swaths
through the woods, even though it made them easier targets. And I
could feel them tensing, but I didn’t know what that meant or why I
could feel it.

“About forty miles east of us. Why?” asked
Bishop.

“They’re attempting a resonance,” I said,
turning to Gordon, who understood what I meant immediately. He’d
done nearly the same thing earlier, sort of.

“Through the water tables?” he asked
incredulous.

“Underneath them, all the way to the coast
and back.”

“But they’ll be killed, too!”

“They’re already dead in their minds,” I
argued.

“How do we stop that?” he asked, shocked at
the concept. Could. Not. Blame. Him.

“One of you tell me what is going on. Now!”
demanded Bishop.

“All energy is cyclic,” said Gordon. “We
think the elves are driving ley line energy below the surface,
probably in pulses and at specific intervals, cyclic
intervals.”

“And it’s bouncing around on the rocks at
different strata and coming back,” Cahill took up the story,
sitting down hard on the dais. “The more they bounce around into
the different layers, the more destructive resonance waves they
create.”

“And you think they can create enough
destructive force to destroy us here?” Bishop asked. “Bullshit.”
The house shook. “Believing a little more,” Bishop said quickly.
“What can this do?”

“Depending on how big the resonance gets,
they could drop that mountain range into the ocean,” Gordon said,
stone-faced.

Bishop shouted orders through the wards,
trying to find some way to stop the elves. He sent small teams to
harry the lines of elves as they moved to change the attenuation
patterns.

“What can we do about this?” Peter asked. “We
have to drain the energy away somehow. Stop it from bouncing back.
How?”

“What does this need to look like to work?”
Gordon asked. “I need a frame of reference.”

“Well, they have to be controlling the
direction of flow,” I said. “They seem to be forming something like
theater seating between their draws. I assume that’s when they
pulse the energy, but it’s grounded and I can’t see it.”

“So they increase the amplitude of the wave
with each pass. Does it look like the focal point of the ellipse is
moving closer to them or farther away?” Gordon asked.

“I can’t say. It’s erratic,” I answered. I
could see why he was asking though. If it was closer to them, then
they were tightening their “beam” and trying to give it more
direction and control.

“Bishop,” I called for his attention. “Are
there mountains directly between us and the coast?”

He whipped a pad and pen out of his jacket
pocket. Jumping down off the dais in front of me and sitting, he
drew a squiggly line on the paper, two more almost parallel to the
squiggle and an ‘x.’ “Coast, mountains, then us,” he said. A very
slender corridor to the ocean, but it was enough if the elves were
guiding it.

“We need to sink the energy and fast,” I
turned to Peter and Gordon. “What absorbs ley line energy?”

“Your rock,” said Gordon. Both Cahill’s and
Bishop’s head snapped to Gordon, shocked. “It’s the only thing I’ve
ever heard of that will.” Gordon held up his battery to me,
offering it to me.

“Take mine,” said Peter. “It’s almost empty
anyway.”

“Why didn’t you tell me,” I snapped at Peter.
“Trade!” I held out my hand and Peter took it. I pushed a fresh
battery into his cavern and took the nearly depleted on out. Then
just because I was irritated that he took the chance, I shoved a
second one over. Checking my supply, I was surprised to see six,
three of them brand new and never charged. Made me wonder where I
was when I made them. I kept Peter’s partially charged one and
pushed two of the totally uncharged stones into my hand.

“Do you think two will be enough?” I asked
Gordon.

“One will if we can funnel it right,” he
answered. The house shook again, harder this time.

“We don’t have time for fine tuning here,
Gordon. Let’s err in our favor,” I said.

“Okay, okay. We’ll need to bury them. Maybe a
hundred, a hundred fifty yards deep. Funnel the energy into
them.”

“How far away from the house do we need to
be?” I asked.

“I’d guess at a half-mile, maybe a mile,” he
said.

“How do I make the funnel?” I asked,
twitching to stones in my hand.

“I can do that,” said Cahill, snatching one
of the stones from my hand. “Take me with you.”

“I’ll do the other one,” Gordon said,
snatching the other one.

“I can’t just take either one of you,” I
protested. “I have to know where I’m going and how am I going to
get it underground once I get there?”

“I’ll take care of that, too,” Cahill said,
waving me off. “You just figure out how to get us there.” He and
Gordon stood together for a moment talking quietly, then both
started concentrating. I felt the light pull from both of them, the
lightest touch I’d felt from either of them before.

I turned to Peter, the last person to pay any
attention to me. “How do I get them out there?” I asked in
frustration.

“You can create portals to places you can see
but have never been to, right? Like what we did in the field a few
minutes ago,” Peter said, thinking.

“Yeah, it’s how Kieran and Ethan skip the car
during our trips. Why?”

“Earlier, in the wards, I moved us above the
elves and you shot down on them, remember?” he prompted me. I
nodded but wasn’t getting what he was saying.

“If you create a portal out into open space,
say, twenty-five hundred feet out and look down, then create
another one to the ground…” He was leading me like a horse and I
finally drank from the stream.

“I might kill us, but it might work,” I said.
“I’m willing to try. We’re short on options.” The house shook
again. The tremors were coming more often with greater strength. I
turned to the Cahills and heard a crackling ripple, similar to tin
foil tearing. Peter appeared suddenly next to Gordon, smiling at
me.

“I’ll take Gordon,” he said. “He’s more
resilient, just in case I drop him.”

“How…?” I started to ask.

“I learned it from you,” Peter said. “Maybe
with practice, I can get as smooth as you, but I doubt it.”

I moved up quickly to Cahill and quickly
considered how to do this. I couldn’t hold him, he was too round.
Turning around, I bent to one knee. “Okay, Felix, piggy back, arms
around my neck, put the rock in your pocket.” Peter had more
fun.

“Howdy, handsome,” he said to Gordon then
grasped him in a bear hug, wrapped them both in a portal, and they
were gone.

I grabbed Felix’s arms tightly and thrusted
up, wrapping us both in portals, and then we were falling. Damn, it
was dark. I could barely see the ground. I moved us closer before
we could gain speed. Then a little farther north. Cahill started
choking me. I moved us closer. Then we were crashing into the
ground and rolling. The armor absorbed most of my impact. I stood
and helped Cahill to his feet.

“You all right, Felix?” I asked. He wasn’t
seriously hurt, but he’d be bruised in the morning. “Felix?”

“Aye, aye,” he muttered, his brogue reverting
under stress. “Ah’m fine. Just a wee bit shocked, is all.” He stood
up a little shakily and tried to orient himself. “Where’s the
house?”

“Back that way,” I said pointing back over
our shoulders, then forward of us. “The coast is that way.”

He pulled the orange stone from his pocket
and placed it on the ground. He planted his feet solidly to the
earth, reared back both arms and slammed both hands together
directly over the stone. The clap he created with his hands alone
sounded like a strike of lightening in the summer sky as a storm
began. It was a comfortably dangerous sound. A few moments later, I
heard an answering crack about a half a mile away. Peter and Gordon
had made it. The ground shook again as the energy wave passed
underneath us on its way once again to the coast, gathering speed
and power again.

I scanned the hillside. We weren’t that far
from the house—considering the speed of an elf, it is easily
possible to run into one or twenty. I might be invisible to them,
but Felix wasn’t. Felix was… Felix was hurting himself.

“Stop!” I yelled at him. “What are you
doing?” It was purely reflex on my part. With two giant strides, I
grabbed him by his coat and waist and hoisted him away from the
hole he was digging. At the same time, I yanked every bit of the
power out of his body that was tearing through him like tissue
paper. It was a considerable amount of energy, but I also had
plenty of storage space. As carefully as possible, I laid him on
the grassiest spot available.

Unhooking the Day’s scabbard from my belt, I
knelt beside him and scanned around us again. Calling everything
else in, I had the Stone cover us in a veneer of grass, dirt, and
stone, almost mirroring the current background excluding us.
Pulling the Day out six inches gave me enough light to see Cahill.
His face was wracked in a scream he wouldn’t let out. It was a
horrifying sight.

Shoving both palms down onto his massive
chest, I urged power down through tortured channels to soothe
blocked passages. Damn, I didn’t know what I was doing here. He was
hurting in so many different places that I didn’t know where to
start. Any place was better than indecision. I released the tension
in his arms, pushing down on the nerve structures. Blood flow was
sluggish. Moving into his shoulders and chest, I panicked again.
More and bigger problems. He wasn’t breathing right and his heart
was seizing, beating irregularly and incompletely. The muscles were
stretched and crushed in places. The impulses from his brain were
timed wrong, too—totally chaotic. He was having a heart attack.

“Damn it, Felix! I don’t know how to fix
this,” I whispered hoarsely. I pushed the tears and rips in his
aura together and slapped patches down to hold them together.
Euphemistically speaking, anyway, but it wouldn’t matter if I
couldn’t keep his heart working right. They’d hold till later. I
pushed blue facsimiles of my hands into his chest and cuddled his
heart gently, surrounding the trembling organ. Then I melted them
around it and into it. Using mine as an example, I tried to see
what was wrong. Much of it was age but there was damage there as
well. I cut off the electrical signals to the muscles, forcing my
imaginary hands into the form his heart needed to be and started
squeezing. I had to keep a regular tempo with that—squeezing—while
I rebuilt the muscle.

Muscle, I would need to steal some of his
muscle cells. Shooting down to his abdomen, I stole cells from
everywhere. I’d done this before so it was quick. I was almost
finished when the ground shook so hard we were almost torn
apart.

Little Brother.

“Little busy right now, Pete,” I said through
the connection he just opened.

You have about two minutes before that wave
hits. It’s growing exponentially. One wasn’t enough.

“Damn it. I need help, Peter. Felix is
hurt.”

I’m stuck at the house, Seth. Let me see what
I can do.

Timing, I needed to adjust his timing. That
was in the brain, right? That … looked right. Maybe his hormones
were screwing it up. My mind was tossing Latin phrases at me at
blinding speed and I didn’t need any of it. I needed functions, not
names, with paths and purposes. Send blood to his lungs and out
into his body. Oh, damn, he wasn’t breathing either. Suddenly I had
a third arm, shining bright blue, forcing his chest to rise and
fall slowly.

We’re on our way. I hope this works. The
Stone pulled the façade away and the Day slid another six inches
out of its sheath.

The emotional part of me knew I wasn’t going
to make it, that I’d seen him too late. If I was going to lose him
here, then at least he was going to know the little bit about the
legacy he left behind. Taking his pain into me, the first memory I
pushed into his mind was of Enid as she delighted in dancing
through the wards of their home. It was a delightfully elegant
image of ethereal beauty. She contrasted his almost geological
frame in an interesting fashion.

I went to Martin next. Starting with
MacNamara’s, I stepped through every experience I had with Marty,
highlighting the ones I was proudest of—Dunstan’s and helping the
Ferrins. He was a good kid. How they’d managed to raise him without
him being a stuck-up snob, I’d never know.

“There! They’re over there!” I couldn’t tell
who yelled that, but the Day wasn’t threatened so I ignored it.

Gordon was a lot easier. I had more to show
on Gordon.

“Da!”

“Gordon, find the battery! We’ve got less
than a minute!”

The first meeting we had when he was
confident with himself but scared to death of us, the Great and
Powerful Wizards of Oz. So eager to please that he rolled in a
full-length mirror so I could see my armor. Willing to help his
friends, like his brother, that he put them in job interviews just
to get their names on a future possibility list.

“There! About a hundred feet down.”

“Need another sixty at least.”

Smart, too. Protective of his people and the
public. The prism wave from the side of the road in Dublin showed
that. Just before he killed for the first time. Then I showed him
Gordon running down a dark path behind me, gathering his power as
he ran. I let him feel the strength of his son’s energy and resolve
as he followed me into a totally unknown situation, knowing he
might not survive it. And I showed him the results of his son’s
resolve.