Authors: Scott V. Duff
Dad laughed at the thought of the High Princesses flying o’er the ramparts. Mother didn’t understand why that didn’t kill them or why the other elves didn’t attack. I waited for Dad and Kieran to stop laughing to explain to Mom, then continued talking about Peter. As I talked about my decision to rewrite everything I could in sequence instead of the handier rewrite Peter’s psyche presented to me, I also talked about how scared it made me. Peter got up from his chair and ruffled my hair as he passed behind me.
“I think he did well enough,” he said cheerfully. He stepped further down the aisle and met with Ellorn, asking for a cup of coffee and handing off a half-empty bottle of beer. Jimmy stood up and walked around the circle of chairs, asking quietly if anyone needed anything, then followed Ellorn out. Peter passed him on the way in, carrying two brandy snifters. He handed me one and curled a leg under him as he sat on the arm of my chair. “Ellorn is making more coffee,” he said in a whisper.
Ethan picked the story up with getting us off the field and into the locker room. He talked about seeing the expansion of Peter’s magic as being a door opening into another room. Like it was there already, he just had to open the door. Peter woke to us standing in the room, still groggy and lying on a table. I’d been watching the Queens and MacNamara and sparring verbally with Kieran, which Ethan mentioned in due course. Dad had another laugh at Kieran’s threat to the Queens. He sobered a little, then asked Kieran if he had been bluffing. Kieran burst out into fits, but nodded in answer and suddenly Dad was laughing again. Mom was wondering if she married into insanity, I could see it on her face.
Ethan kept on through the second battle, even describing Harris’ defeat by Ferrin in humiliating detail. Peter picked up on the trip to Dublin and subsequently to Dunstan’s. He kept it short, but still insinuated the number of men I killed there and why, sobering everyone again for a short while. Until I killed Marchand’s car, then Dad was laughing again. We got another outburst when I dropped the school on Bishop and disappeared on him. Kieran stole the lead here to tell the Cahill side through my three-day disappearance and return, disturbing everyone again with my lack of memory of the event. I faked mine and had to believe Ethan’s was real. He spoke briefly of our argument, my rewiring his ward, and his decision to confront MacNamara, admitting it was a foolish move. Then he talked about getting Ethan and himself sucked into the folded universe and trying to fight their way out unsuccessfully.
Peter spoke up again and talked about following me to London to the mall where I was shopping. I had to take over when he got to the point of being sent back to Ireland, though, and discussing the fight on the roof didn’t take long. We were riffing back and forth about Grammand in short order. I probably spent more time on Felix than the actual battles or the earthquake. Pete grinned at the mention of his threatening note crushing my determination to leave the Cahill’s immediately after waking up. I talked about the change in timbre of everybody’s attitude in the castle. The heavy toll the war struck the Cahills twice already, even in victory, had made everyone eager for a more decisive role when Gordon stepped up and forced his way into the raiding party while Mike just eased his way in.
When we started on the battle for the Arena, Dad started getting tense and listened carefully to us, searching for some unknown detail. Peter told how they watched over me when I couldn’t, distracting the elven king with repeated attacks on his elves and his person. And how I watched over the three of them, creating huge swathes of destruction in the elven lines when I helped Mike and Gordon. Words started failing us when it came to the abomination of the geas the Rat Bastard committed in his rage.
With that moment past, Ellorn came in with fresh coffee, Jimmy behind him with more tea for Mom and several glasses of water and other refills on a tray. They moved in quickly and quietly, making the trades without interrupting me as I sent Gordon and Peter back to the Cahills in preparation for dying at the Rat Bastard’s hand. Dad got a chuckle, as tense as the situation was, when he found I’d renamed the Rat Bastard somehow and it wasn’t just a euphemism.
“You pretty much know the story from that point,” I said, “Except for a few not so minor issues. Whoever is fighting against us is using forms of magic that we aren’t generally familiar with. So far, we’ve encountered the Loa, blood magic, and now Druidic magic that most of the world had thought long past or far below its real power base, not to mention an elven liege that no one knew existed. The blood mages we found because of Jimmy Morgan.” I had to steel myself for this part of the conversation, where I steal Jimmy’s soul.
“My turn!” Jimmy said excitedly. He took us back a few weeks to the day they left me in the forest, filling in a few gaps I’d left about the Black Hand’s presence there, as well as his father’s and his complicity. Then he told of their downfall because of the failure to deliver me, and how he camped outside my house to ask for my help. He talked about how eerie it was watching the three of us turn all together and face the watcher’s apartment at Richard’s, then shred the building into a giant fireball while invisible. When he talked about the Walker’s house, his enthusiasm died a little. He effected an odd lonely quality as he talked about his family farm by being dispassionate about it.
I took over on entering his parent’s bedroom, the feeling of nothingness, the heavy dust everywhere, the darkness. Until Jimmy turned the lights on in the house and the desiccated bodies of his family were suddenly visible on the bed and nailed to the wall. “Our first real experience with a blood spell was the attack on Jimmy,” I told them, “and none of us felt it until it triggered on him. It happened incredibly fast and fed on the terror on the scene, but the spell was eating him from the inside out, literally. The spell took his identity first, then his family next, and was working on his body by the time I halted it by breaking the relationship it depended on. I called a previous marker to the spell and took him. My compulsion sat at the base of his body and soul were the blood spell hadn’t gotten to yet, so I pour myself in until that detestable magic was gone. When I pulled back, the First of Gilán was born and he was whole again as he fell to the ground from the memory of the torture they put him through.”
“He thinks he’s done me a disservice in saving my life,” Jimmy said, smiling. “While I miss my family, my mom and sister especially, look at what I’ve gained!” He spread his arms over his head as his aspect overtook him, but if he realized the valley and the moon loomed behind him so eloquently, I wasn’t aware of it. It was masterful serendipity and quite beautiful at the same time.
Dad understood now why I trusted Jimmy so completely. He heard the proclamation of
sidhe
but had not understood it. He thought Jimmy was something like Ethan and sort of hanging around me, not bound to me. And now he was making the connections with the Guard, finally realizing the faery part of the story affected the human side, too.
“That’s… never happened—” Dad started to say.
“He’s never happened, either,” Kieran muttered, gesturing at me. “And he’s not done yet. We went looking for the magician that did this to the Morgans and we found him in the first place we looked, along with a few hundred other surprises.” He talked about finding Yaeger’s farm and shutting down the military and the blood mages. Dad saw me cast a much more difficult magic a million times over so the idea of a complicated compulsion on four hundred didn’t bother him in the slightest, but our offensive against the va-du-seet was hard to describe. Mom and Dad couldn’t differentiate the energy plane from the astral plane. Neither Kieran nor Peter knew of it before I showed them. My parents’ depth of perception wasn’t acute enough to see the difference. We’d have to figure something else out, then.
Peter started the discussion of politics with the Pentagon and dealing with military. “Jumping past whatever ploy Colonel Echols wanted to play,” Peter said, “seriously cramped the entire situation. It didn’t help them that they underestimated Seth’s abilities on two different fronts. And Pentagon still has no idea how he caught them. As if three government agencies withholding aid because of legal entanglements wasn’t exactly absurd. It was suspicious enough that when he decided to shoulder the financial burden and called in civilian aid and they evaporated that Seth dug the tidbits of information that showed the game being played. We couldn’t tell who was playing for what, so Seth made a hard decision and brought people to Gilán for the first time.
“You know how that turned out,” Peter said. “The part you don’t know is that Seth has been one step ahead of the Pentagon all along by himself and he wasn’t playing. And now he has evidence of multiple breaches of Hospitality against him. Now instead of him owing them one, they now owe him fifty.”
“Not that it’s some great amount,” I said, taking another turn in the story. “The saddest thing about their situation is the children.” I related that story with as much detail as I could and colored Mericine Grimes as the bitch she truly was. I don’t think I had quite enough silver in the polish on Barry Grimes’ knight suit, but the idea came across well enough and I moved on.
Talking about the trip to find a house was a lot easier. The idea that Peter is gay didn’t seem to bother either of them, a fairly enlightened aspect of my parents that I liked since they’d managed to pass it on to me somehow. I didn’t mention my talk with Dillon before Trelaine’s because I felt it was a private matter between Peter and Dillon. I did however mention Peter dressing Jimmy, ignoring my First’s glares of disapproval. We needed to lighten the mood and that helped immensely.
Peter took control of the conversation again with our meeting with Ryan Davis and the Hilliard Brothers. Dad was positively amazed that I could call upon the Accords and pull the Authority into the universe, even more with my assertions that all of us could do it. Peter didn’t explain the exact nature of the druids’ spellwork, describing it in relation to MacNamara’s abomination in broad terms. Dad agreed with Kieran that I had been lenient on the Hilliards but he also agreed that their destruction would have been another great loss to the world. That brought us again to the blood mages.
Jimmy once again entered the tale by expressing his feelings on the use of the children with very… colorful and descriptive phrases. Kieran talked about Sondre’s destruction with few words and glossed over what we found in Lucian’s body completely. Jimmy returned to the floor and explained the Pentagon trip, taking pleasure in his description of Harris twisting in the winds again.
“That’s pretty much where we are now,” Kieran said soberly. “Still too little information about a large number of actions against us.”
“We’re chipping away layers of this and finding even more layers underneath,” I said slowly. “It’s getting to be quite a puzzle.”
“It’s also getting quite late,” Peter said, standing and stretching languidly. “I think I’m gonna call it a night.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Jimmy said, standing as well. “I’ll walk with you, Peter.”
Watching my mother stifle a yawn, Kieran stood, waving Ethan up, too. “We should go, too. Long day tomorrow.”
“Thank you all for helping,” I said. “See y’all in the morning.” My parents exchanged quick good-nights with my brothers as they left the alcove.
“You’ve given us a lot to think about, Seth,” Dad said, standing and reaching for Mother’s hand. “That was quite a story there.”
Taking Dad’s hand, Mother stood up slowly. “And quite a group of men you’ve surrounded yourself with,” she said, giving me a small but distant smile.
“I’m sure there are lots of details we missed,” I said, moving in beside them and slipping an arm around her waist. “But this gives you a springboard to ask about them. And, thank you, I like them, too.”
Dad glanced at Mother’s tired face and asked quietly, “Would you mind…”
I smiled. “Not at all,” I said, hugging them each quickly. They murmured, “I love you” as we embraced. Then I shifted them to their apartment. I turned to the table to gather the remaining glasses and found nothing. Ellorn managed to breeze through when I wasn’t looking and cleared away everything without even a whisper in passing. Smiling, I shifted to my bed and disrobed slowly, thinking about all we’d said and how we’d said it. I definitely have an awesome family now, and a hellacious cheering section. Sleep came as soon as I hit the pillow.
Lord Daybreak, it’s time to get up,
Jimmy called through our link. I kept brushing my hair and ignored him for a moment.
Wakey, wakey.
He tightened the physical link to me and tensed.
Well, if he was going to invite me in then I was going to take advantage of it and see what he was trying to do. He was in the Garrison’s kitchens, jumping into a large sink of ice water. The chill ran up my legs in a sympathetic reaction. I suppressed the feeling in certain tender parts of me, letting the contrast of my hot shower relax me more, then grabbed my jacket and shifted to the kitchen.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” I said cheerfully to Brinks who stood a few feet away watching Jimmy flounder in the sink. “Do you know why First is naked in the sink?”
“Good morning, Lord, something about waking you early, sir,” he stuttered quickly, quite confused it seemed.
“I think I’ll buy a traveler’s alarm clock instead,” I said, looking back as Jimmy slipped and fell back into the water. “
That
seems terribly inconvenient. Besides, the water at the bottom of the lake is colder. Would you like to see, First?” I raised my hand dramatically in his direction.
“No!” he cried out, splashing ice and water out of the sink as he stood then shifted to stand shivering in front of me. “We’re going to get you one of these days, ya know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said innocently. “Shouldn’t you be dressed?”
Little Brother, are you ready?
Kieran asked through a Named link.
I am, Kir’du’Ahn, but First is going to need a moment to dress
, I answered.
Meet in the Throne Room?
‘Kay
, he answered, severing the link. We shifted over, all four of us at the same time, taking what was more or less standard positions there. The four of us looked up at the representation of the house outside London, or rather, what was once that. It had radically changed in many ways. The first floor, the ground floor, was taller now and wider on the whole. They raised the roof, too.
“I’m afraid to look any further,” I said casually. “At least they kept the patio.”
“I was rather hoping they’d keep that statuary, though,” Peter mumbled, grinning. “Thought it added ‘Old World’ charm to the place.”
“’Old World’ as in Roman and Bacchanalian, you mean,” I said snickering.
“Maybe you shouldn’t say things little ears can hear,” Kieran said, pointing at the house. “That is, if you truly don’t want to affect the design.”
“Oh, good point, then our remarks have already been interpreted,” I said. “I apologize. I was rude and will reserve judgment until you are ready.” There were four brownie carpenters and three masons inside around the back who
might
have heard us. They didn’t, but they might have.
First, are you coming, or what?
Where are you? I’m getting echoes of you from several places in the Palace,
Jimmy answered. I sent a sense of the Throne Room and gently tapped the Palace’s gentle buzz of faery activity. Entering the faery mindset was a little like walking into the back end of an intelligent shark’s nightmare. Disconcerting at best. I went looking for the echoes that Jimmy was seeing. That meant changing to the way he saw things. That was almost as disconcerting, seeing someone else’s interpretation of it. Purposefully, I avoided looking at Jimmy’s and now here I was staring at it. And staring at it. Couldn’t make head or tails of it, so I bailed on the idea and waited another half of a second for the real thing. He shifted in right on time.
Jimmy, show me one of these echoes, please,
I asked. Watching as he looked, he pointed out the nearest he saw, which happened to be a condensation of energy sitting on the wall of the Throne Room. It was my follower, my shadow. And Jimmy saw a bunch of these. I canvassed the Palace, looking the same way he did and saw many of them, just as he did, but they were all of lower energy levels than my shadow. Since Jimmy couldn’t really see me anyway, what he actually looks for is an absence of me surrounded by a slight buildup of power around me, sort of a negative or photographic image. On Earth, he could feel the geas more distinctly than against the background of Gilán. I needed to look into this condensation of energy more directly, and soon.
“Breakfast first?” Ethan asked with Peter and Jimmy agreeing immediately.
“Where would you like to go?” Kieran asked. “We have an embarrassment of riches in choices, starting with cities. Do we want to make a statement by showing up at the conference or just have breakfast somewhere?”
“Might as well start the politics hard and fast,” I said. Sorting through the keys to people I thought would be in London, I picked the obvious one and grinned. Ryan Davis put the diamond in a small snuff tin stuffed with cotton padding in his vest pocket. With his sunrise ceremony fresh on his mind, he’d bound the box closed and warded it against detection. Then he wove the pocket he put it in together and warded the vest from faery influence. It might have worked, too, if the key’s influence didn’t exceed the vest by a few yards and my power didn’t exceed his by a few orders of magnitude. “Good morning, Mr. Davis,” I said through the key. He sat at a desk reading the morning paper with a cup of tea.
“Good morning, Mr. McClure,” he said pleasantly, looking up from his paper expecting me to be coming into the room. “I take it contact with the gem is unnecessary.”
“Yes,” I answered, chuckling. “Proximity is enough. My brothers and I were looking for a place to eat breakfast before the conference this morning. I was wondering if you could suggest someplace for us as we’re not that familiar with London.”
“Oh, certainly, sir!” Davis said cheerfully. “Lord Bishop would like it if you would join him at the welcome banquet if you’re amenable to it. I don’t think he was actually expecting you to be available yet. Something about a time difference,” he said.
“Yeah, the Palace is three hours behind y’all,” I told him. “We can check out the banquet, but I’m not a fan of buffets. Reheated scrambled eggs and ham aren’t quite our favorites.”
“If it’s not to your liking, the restaurant here is excellent,” Davis said chuckling. “And there are a number of other local places nearby as well.”
“Move in tighter, guys,” I told my brothers, moving my hand in a small circle. “Davis’ room is a little small.” As everyone moved in closer, I shifted us over to Davis’ room. I had to put Jimmy in the doorway just to have enough room. “Why’d Bishop put you in a hotel, anyway? I expected his compound in Wales or his house outside London.”
“Security reasons for the conference, he said,” Davis replied, standing. “He’s staying in the hotel, too, along with several of the attendees to the conference.”
“Well, let’s go check out the food before we announce ourselves,” I said. “No need to get Thomas’ hopes up if we’re gonna ditch. Who wants the lead?”
Peter, Ethan, and Kieran exchanged mischievous looks then Peter cried, “First one out the door!” Over seven hundred pounds of muscle and bone ran for the door of Ryan Davis’ suite. Unfortunately, Jimmy wasn’t paying attention to them and was examining the protective magic on the entry, blocking their exit. While Kieran wrestled with Ethan to get him out of the way—grabbing him by the shoulders and tossing him six feet back into the room—Peter, laughing, opened the door, shoved Jimmy out, and slammed it shut again.
“First is out the door!” Peter shouted, still laughing. Kieran and Ethan stopped roughhousing and gawked at Peter until they started laughing, too. Jimmy shifted into the center of the room, staring at Peter in confusion as he slumped against the door gasping for breath.
I walked up behind Jimmy, put my arm over his shoulders and said, “You’ve just been drafted, dude. You’re in the lead for the time being.”
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“You know what that means,” I said. “You saw it yesterday when Kieran was in charge. You take the lead today. Basically, you’re in charge.”
“I don’t understand,” Davis said. “I thought you were in charge.”
“No, I have final say on anything related to Gilán,” I said. “Because Gilán is mine, and Kieran has final say on anything relating to the four of us and basically everything else because he is our master, but that’s a complex issue. Otherwise we take turns being in charge. We’re basically fairly equal and we take care of each other, so this works well enough for us.”
“We should get started before the eggs hatch, First,” Peter said, his laughter slowed. Jimmy was still very hesitant.
“Think of it as practice for your own missions when he has the need and finally trusts you enough for it,” Kieran said. That apparently galvanized him as he strode purposefully for the door and out to the hallway.
“Now you’ve done it,” I muttered to Kieran, grinning, as we started following him. “He’ll want to invade Mexico next week, or something, just to show he can.”
“Nah,” Kieran said cheerfully. “Probably just the Seelie. Then he’ll want to go hunting the
bean sidhe
to see if they really exist.”
“Don’t give him any ideas,” I replied as we entered the elevator bays and walked straight into a waiting car. Jimmy had lodged the door open from Davis’ room so we wouldn’t wait for another. After the six of us crowded into the tiny car, I glanced at the placard that’s required in every elevator. I wondered idly how in the hell fifteen people could possibly fit in here, but felt disturbed that we were precariously close to the thousand-kilogram weight limit. Both Kieran and Ethan massed more than they looked. We didn’t fall to our doom though. Unless that waited at the buffet.
Jimmy left the car first and headed for the lobby. Without consulting any signs or hotel personnel, he hit the lobby and turned right and right again, down a shorter hallway where several people milled about. It was an obvious choice with the avoidance spells meshed over the hallway entrance. Of course, if he hadn’t been looking for them, the disinterest spells would have affected him, more than likely.
I recalled a few of the men in the hall as Bishop’s security forces from Dunstan’s. Whether they recognized us is another question. Peter took his left side and I took his right. My First took us past the door to the most obvious choice of rooms, striding past two of the much less obvious security. He stared hard at the wall, but the warding around the room blocked him thoroughly.
“Seth, can you see past the wards?” Jimmy asked quietly.
“Yep,” I said. “I vote for the restaurant.”
“I second,” Ethan called from behind me.
“Well, this ‘leading’ crap is easy then, ain’t it?” Jimmy asking, grinning at me as he turned around. “Back to the restaurant.”
“Is there a problem, gentlemen?” said a man in a dark blue suit, white shirt with a black silk tie. About six feet one, he was a very average-looking man, not imposing in any way. He was someone you wanted as your insurance agent or family doctor or even a minister. On the astral plane, he was lit up like Madison Square Garden on Christmas Eve. He controlled three sets of wards for rooms on this level and cords of energy wound around him from each one. They were thick and pulsing with power. More, smaller tendrils, millimeters-thin, shot from his back to the hallway entrance controlling the avoidance spells.
“No, no problem,” Kieran said casually, walking around the man. Davis followed him, nodding politely to the man as he passed. Ethan passed him on the other side. The rest of us converged around him while he tried to guess what happened in such a short time.
“Will you not be joining the conference this morning then, Lord Daybreak?” he asked, turning sharply. We stopped and faced him.
He’s gambling
, Jimmy sent to me.
He doesn’t know who you are
.
“The McClures have grown used to having food for breakfast that was cooked this week,” I said smiling. Kieran was amazingly fast delivering the smack on the back of my head. “Sorry, we saw the buffet and decided to eat in the restaurant. And Daybreak would prefer not to have his name shouted down corridors in public places, please.” I rubbed the back of my head lightly and glared at Kieran sideways. “Damn, you’re fast,” I muttered, causing a few snickers and a little more confusion in the ward handler. He transferred his attention to Kieran.
“I can arrange to have anything you’d like brought from the restaurant to the banquet room, sir,” he said genially.
You’re letting this get away from you,
I said gently to Jimmy across our link.
“Would you mind telling us who you are before we begin accepting promises from you?” Jimmy asked politely, interposing himself in the conversation and the man’s line of sight to Kieran.
“Yes, certainly. I’m Jonas Randolph of the security division for the European council,” he said, making no move to shake hands. Considering how active he was, probably a very good decision.
“And you somehow know who we are?” Jimmy asked.
“By reputation, yes. Mr. Bishop has described you, but I’m still not certain who is who among the five,” he admitted. “Although I’ll have to ask him why he didn’t mention the four hair colors. That would have differentiated beautifully.”