Sons (Book 2) (133 page)

I watched for a second or two as the changes began to pass from person to person without their awareness of it.  They were actually very small changes in relation to the whole of the compulsion itself.  Then I released the Authority, returning my perceptions to normal for me.  Shifting my attention briefly to my father’s diamond, they were walking a fold between a convergence of two ley lines.  Daybreak shot out ahead of them along the fairy pass and found three different locations the path could end in. 

“Time to go, Pete,” I said and jumped us through portals to the end of the Weird Way that Dad should come through. 
Turn left up ahead, Dad,
I sent through the key.  Peter and I were standing at the edge of a forest on a hill, overlooking a large house.

“I don’t know.  Seth said turn so I did,” Dad said in a hoarse whisper, coming through the trees.

“They’re up ahead, Dad,” Kieran said quietly.  He stepped up beside me, Dad and Ethan moved in beside Peter.  The trees shrouded us in darkness.  “How’d you get here before us?”

“Didn’t really,” I muttered.  “Accessed Dad’s key just before that last turn and saw where y’all were coming out.”

“Is this Norway?” Peter asked in a whisper.  “Doesn’t quite look right.”

“No,” Ethan answered.  “Eastern Germany.  He led us on a merry chase, but he’s down there.”

“Well, y’all have walked a long way.  Rest up for a bit and we’ll go say hello,” I said.  In the meantime, I’ll look and see what we’re up against.

Germany made sense.  We were in the mountains.  The house was surrounded by a dark forest of old trees.  Access was controlled by a single road to the house and chain-linked fence until the terrain became impassable.  From there, a series of smaller wardings crisscrossed the mountains, encircling several hundred acres of land to warn against intruders larger than raccoons.  Not as effective or comprehensive as Kieran’s, they were merely an alarm and not a defense.

The house was a wood and stone mansion, a fortress, easily defensible but of no strategic importance.  The Nazis might have used it during WWII, but likely only as a depot or a safehouse.  The main roads were too far away to be useful, as were the railways.  The house could hold about twenty comfortably, a lot more rack-‘em-n-stack-‘em.  I couldn’t imagine Marchand doing the latter.  The house looked too clean and elegant for that.  There were slow moving guards that walked the fence line with, yeah, you guessed it, German Shepherds.  Not a Doberman in sight.  A few guards patrolled around the house and at the gate.

Peter came out of the darkness that the trees provided with the descending sun and crouched down beside me.  “You need to take a few days off after this,” he said quietly.  “Then slow your ass down, Seth.  You’re doing too much.”

“You ain’t just whistling ‘Dixie’,” I whispered, snickering.  “Funny thing is, the more I delegate, the more the problems increase.  So, tell me how and I’ll be happy to oblige.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Kieran muttered and crouched down behind us.  “We’re ready to go.”  We followed him back into the trees single file.  Ethan waited with Dad a dozen or so yards in.  The walk did them some good, it seemed.  They were more at ease with each other.

“We need to plan,” Dad said to Kieran as we formed a circle, moving in close.  We joined hands and I took Dad into my cavern under familiar filters surrounding him.  Peter, Ethan, and Kieran dropped in through other connections.  I displayed the house and outlying forest in as much detail as I could without disturbing the alarms or setting off the wards.

“Since we’re supposedly here just to talk to him, why don’t we just show up on his front door and ring the bell?” Peter asked.  “Then see what happens.”

“How do we get there?” Dad asked, looking at my display.  “Can’t go through the guards at the gate without setting off an alarm.  There are numerous magical and physical defenses here.  We’d have to get past those, too.”

“We’re also expecting to find blood rites being performed here as well as a large cadre of mercenaries with axes to grind,” Ethan said.  “You couldn’t see beyond the ward?”

“Not without setting it off,” I said.  “’Course, with the way they have the wards anchored, I could release them all at once and they’d never notice.  Then we could just stroll in nice and quiet.”

“What?  How?” Dad asked, looking closely at the structure of the nearest to him.  “This looks solid enough.”

“They are, but what they’re attached to is more fluid than they think,” I answered.  “You just have to think like a druid to see it.  There is more than one magic in the world, Dad.”

“I never got the hang of their craft,” he muttered.  “It moved too slowly for my tastes.”

“Wanna bet?” I said, grinning.

“Seth, ring the bell,” Kieran said.  “Let’s see if Lucian is here.”

“How do I do that?” I asked, looking at the Pact through the darkness.  The answer had to be in the lock, which had gained functionality when Gilán was made and the Pacthome was subsumed into it.  “Never mind, I see it.”  I guess I took in more information about the librarian’s abilities than I thought.  It was a simple matter of pulling on this tiny membrane and letting go.  It sent an echo through the ether that pinged other membranes just like it, answering me back like sonar.  I felt Dad immediately.  Then another, farther away and muffled.  And then there was a vague hint of another that felt like it was halfway around the world.

“I got three!” I said excitedly.  “Dad’s, one close but muffled, and another one very far away!”  My father was reeling within his filter cage, had broken contact, and was staggering in reality, holding his head with both hands.  Both Ethan and I jumped after him to steady him before he hurt himself.  “Sorry, Dad.  Are you okay?”

He grunted and breathed heavily for a few moments while we fussed over him.  “Damn, son, you’re loud,” he complained, shaking his head.  “Three?  That’s good, then.  Another Pact exists.  We can search for it later.”

“Muffled,” Kieran repeated.  “I wonder what that means.”

“Let’s kick this mule and find out,” Ethan said.  “We’re not getting anywhere just talking about it.”

“I agree,” Kieran said.  “I think.”  Peter and Dad snickered.

Starting the simple chant to the mountains around the house, I forced the rock and stone to remember its earlier state of being.  It was a long, long time ago that it was nearly liquid and flowing, but this was the Earth and it remembered the heat at its core.  For the briefest part of a second, the mountain’s surface rejoiced in its past and changed its form, liquefying then solidifying again.  A warm breeze flooded through the trees as the wards released from their footing on the rocks, blowing away in the wind.  I waggled my eyebrows at Dad, grinning at the same time, and pushed my senses onto Marchand’s property again.

Back in my cavern, I painted the model showing the ugly smears of blood rites in the clearing about five hundred yards northwest of the house along with the three separate training grounds and barracks to the north about twelve hundred yards out.  I pegged roughly six hundred men in four groups near the barracks and another three hundred in two groups to the southeast with several small streams between them.  The house was occupied with forty-two people spread around.  About half of them wore a glamour of some kind that masked their auras enough that I couldn’t find Marchand, Murrik, or Lucian, but there was plenty of magical power both in the house and among nine hundred men milling about.  This wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, that was for sure.

“And the porch is clear,” I said as the last man guarding the house round the corner.  “Who wants to lead?  The man hates me.  I killed his shiny limo.”  Dad looked at me confused, eyebrows knitted together.  Slowly, he started laughing at the absurdity.  Don’t know why.  I did shove the Day through the engine then threw it into a ditch.

“I got it,” Kieran said, grinning at Dad in reality.  We’d maintained the links in my cavern, except for Dad.  “Ringing the bells” caused a physical reaction in him that broke the link.  “Keep your eyes open and be safe.  Pete, take us in.”

In a purely show-off move, Peter reached out and pressed the doorbell, which played several bars of “The Witch is Dead” on bells, loudly.  He’d slipped
the
most delicate portals around the five of us and moved us
so quietly
that even Ethan was a little surprised by the move, as rooted in space and dimension as he was.  Better yet, there was no doorbell on the house.

“Very nice!” murmured Ethan, chuckling as Peter turned around to the yard looking smug and satisfied.

Grinning, I turned to the yard and sent my awareness outward.  It was time to get serious about this.  The Quiver pushed in between my shoulder blades and both Swords dropped into my forearms.  The Crossbow thrummed and people became articulated in my perceptions, or more simply, enemy identified and ready to fire.  The Stone projected a thick shield around the five of us, a rounded-edged cube that went through the stone walk.  Polarizing the shield then projecting a level of disinterest and ambiguity a few feet and outward from the porch, I figured the fence-stalkers would be fooled long enough.  Now I felt better, safer.  This made it easier to
not
look like a scared little boy.  ‘Cuz that’s what I felt like.

Ten men came running down the hall, six carried rifles and sidearms while the four carried magical implements of some kind.  They’d burst out the doors before the next house-crawler would come out Pete’s side.  We heard them stop at the door, mumbling a plan and counting off, interestingly in French.

On the count of three, both doors swung inward and showed us all ten men and all six rifles pointed at us, shifting to take aim.  The man in the middle wearing a dark blue jacket with gray slacks and a truly ugly sweater started barking in German at Kieran and Ethan.  They just smiled cordially and waited until he stopped.

“Good afternoon,” Kieran said.  “I’m Ehran McClure and I’d like to speak with Louis Marchand, please.”  He smiled sedately while the man processed the information.  Since he didn’t object to English, we knew he understood.  That and his thoughts were million-watt green neon:
McClure, no auras on four of them, all four of them!  Shit! Shit! Shit!  What do I do?  What do I do?

The man held a short staccato conversation with another wizard in a suit standing behind the riflemen on his right and no doubt informed the others as well.  He chose French for this one.  “It’s what he thought.”

“Can we take these guys?  Are they who I think they are?” the other man growled quietly, shifting nervously behind his mercenary protectors.

“No and yes.  I need to ask what to do,” the man said anxiously.  “Calm the dogs and lead them in.”  He looked at Kieran and said in clear English, “The man’s name again?”  His accent was French with heavy hints of German, maybe immigrant parents or something.  Maybe he’s just a freak, I’d vote for that.

“Louis Marchand,” Kieran said, still smiling vacantly.

The man paused imperiously, but his aura flared brightly with fear and anxiety.  He fought desperately to control it.  In a deep, gravely baritone, he said, “I will inquire if such a person is in residence.  You may wait in the foyer.”  He turned immediately and retreated down the hallway toward relative safety.  The second man barked orders to the mercs in German while the other two magicians darted around them to join him.  The mercenaries slowly lowered their guns, short-barrel Uzis with modified clips taped together.  Tense and anxious, they slowly backed down the corridor glaring at us sternly and fiercely. 

The wizards blockaded the foyer against prying eyes, which might have worked if we weren’t already everywhere in the house.  “Boys?” Kieran called quietly, turning slightly to Peter and me.  A diversion, he saw the single, quick nod I made telling him I had the first man while Ethan and he twisted subtle magics.  Ethan twisted space a little to let the wizards believe their blockade was successful while Kieran pulled a trick similar to Peter’s magnetic portal trick.  While the soldiers moved, he slowly removed the bullets from their rifles and sidearms and dropped them onto the grass beside the porch.

We were all smiles when the second man waved us forward slowly into the foyer fully believing he had the upper hand behind his shield of lead and muscle men.  We followed them in like good, little victims until we were in a crossfire and a guard shut the doors.  They waited nervously, we waited calmly, and I followed the first guy up the hall and around the corner.  He nearly ran down the next hall to a door four down.  Stumbling with the knob and his footing, he finally got the door open and ran inside.

“It’s them!” he said hoarsely and panicked to the room’s single occupant who sat in front of a dressing mirror calmly applying eyeliner to his already horribly made-up face.  “The McClures!  All four of the them plus another, they want to talk to Marchand.  What do we do?”

“Why didn’t you kill them, you idiot?” the man at the mirror asked, adjusting the line he just made with a pinky nail.

“They would have slaughtered us!” the door greeter objected in horror.

Murrik sighed.  Behind all the greasepaint and Revlon products was Phillip Murrik, Marchand’s greasy lapdog.  He started to say something, but I decided not to play their game and dropped them both through portals back to the foyer.  Murrik fell on his ass since the chair was no longer supporting it.  The five of us busted a gut while the talker and one of the riflemen fumbled to help Murrik off the floor.  His floundering gave us the chance to see the costume he wore underneath the black and red cape he wore over his shoulders.  The short man wore an arrangement of unbleached cotton gauze tied tightly in patterns around his entire body.  It was tied in a way that cuts made across the top and bottom of his chest would release the whole gauzy structure, forming a cocoon for him to exit.

“Kill them!” Murrik snarled in German as he stood up straight, trying to keep his bandages from knotting.  Five clicks of empty Uzis were followed by harsh Latin and Arabic words as eight of our greeters immediately followed his orders.  The surprised mercenaries fumbled for their sidearms and the wizards reached deeper into their fetishes and pulled foci out, trying to regroup and try again.  Apparently they didn’t see the huge Faraday cage around them.

In perfectly textbook German, Peter looked at the gunmen on his side and said, “It’s getting crowded in here.  Why don’t you guys wait outside?”  Then he played a version of his own trick, not to be outdone by Kieran.  He wrapped portals around the six riflemen and moved them a thousand feet further down the ravine where we’d first seen the house.  Just the men, everything else they had on stayed—boots, socks, belts, guns, one guy’s Prince Albert even.  I fell onto his shoulder for support as I laughed and laughed.  Murrik and his pals were trying to sneak down the foyer but were having a hard time getting past the Stone’s wall that I’d put up behind them.  The five of them pressed up against it staring at us in fear as Kieran, Ethan, and Dad spread out in front of them, waiting for Peter and me to stop laughing.