Sons (Book 2) (139 page)

“I guess I know something about the woods, too, then,” I said, grinning, joining the argument but looking at the pictures.  “And maybe swamps, too.  Then there’s the whole planetary ecosphere.  Come to think of it, First, they do have a couple a’hicks in charge, don’t they?”

“Yep, and proud ones,” Jimmy said and leaned over the table.  “What are you considering?  I thought you wanted to stay out of this?”

“I do, but I’m feeling a bit stressed and look at how big they are,” I whined, waving my hand at the map.  “They’re spread out to hide, but that makes them vulnerable in many ways.  On the fringes, those businesses not involved will be easy to identify.  Of course, I’d prefer to cut the head off the beast, then deal with the squirming body after, and let’s understand I’m being figurative this time.  Hmm?”

“Keep your options open, Lord,” Byrnes said seriously.  “How many men are you taking with you?”

“Well, initially, I’ll go alone just because there’s no other way,” I answered, still studying the map.  “First can home in on me within a second or two, but I won’t be in the middle of a viper pit to start.  As to how many men I’m
taking
, none.  Now, how many volunteers the First may bring with him is a different question and unfortunately I don’t think I can answer from hours old pictures.  We’ll need more current espionage before we go in and really, we’ll need a goal.  It’s not like I want to go in and slaughter a bunch of people.  I just want to not so gently dissuade them from their current path if it’s the one we believe it to be.”

“Can we disarm them?” Jimmy asked.  “Not completely, I know, but maybe empty their armory and incapacitate the big guns?”  Byrnes and Velasquez almost dismissed it out of hand.

“Probably,” I answered, thinking about how well the ten men worked together earlier.  “Especially if we can give them a big enough distraction.  That does mean a bigger crowd to control at once, though.  Oh, this
could
be fun!”

Jimmy and I hunkered down and planned an attack that Byrnes and Velasquez laughed at.

“That’ll never work!” Byrnes said.  “Sentries have to report on interval.  Alarms will be raised.  You don’t have enough men and you should go in armed.”

“Well, we’re not that far from weapons, really,” I said, seeking out my third commander through the geas.  “Tom, if you’re not busy, could you join us in the Situation room, please?”

“Yes, Lord?” Tom answered after a moment, shifting in from the back gardens.  He was wearing loose, baggy, white shorts and a white wife-beater under a blue Hawaiian print.  I explained my plan to him and pointed out several of his peers’ objections.

“What do you think?” I asked, already knowing the answer percolating on his mind.

“Can I go?” he asked, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement.

Grinning, I said, “I’m not the one taking volunteers, but I wouldn’t say no.  Well, Ted, looks like you’ve been out-voted.  Let’s talk about what will make you feel better about the situation while Tom and First decide who will volunteer.”  My mind really wasn’t in it though.  I was already trying to figure out what to do as a distraction and I didn’t have a clue.

My house was in transformer hell.  Battery packs of all sorts and sizes were plugged into outlet multipliers then spread methodically over the floors in the den and living room.  I knew they were charging batteries here.  I just didn’t realize how extensive the project was when I shifted into the pitch-blackness and started cartwheeling into a fall.

I stopped myself about a foot off the floor using the Stone while emitting the most girlish scream ever to come from my lips.  Snorting as I pushed myself upright, my laugh caught in my throat when something in the dining room glowed.  I should have already touched the ward…

“Zero?  What are you doing here?” I asked peering around the wall.  He was staring up at the dining room lights, concentrating.

“Trying to turn on the lights,” he muttered absently, then started, realizing to whom he was talking.  “Lord Daybreak!  I’m sorry, Lord!  I was concentrating so hard on the lights that I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Oh, well, the lights are easy,” I said, reaching down and flipping the switch on the wall beside me.  “There’s another set behind you beside the door.  They toggle opposite each other.  Now why are you here?”

“Ellorn sent me, Lord, as part of my training,” Zero answered cheerfully.  His eyes were the same double-iris as every Faery I saw, gleaming with the power of their geas, but his inner iris was so blue it was hard to see the difference.  His hair was the color of Ellorn’s and matched his eyes.  He parted it in the middle and showed a slight widow’s peak, brushed back over his ears.  Zero looked so innocent, still.  Even dressed in dull black from the neck down.  Strapped to a brace on his thigh he had a pair of sticks similar to Jimmy’s.  It was oddly comforting.

“Training?  What are you training for?  I’m pretty certain ninjas died out a long time ago,” I asked, looking dubiously at his outfit.

“Training as Ellorn’s assistant, Lord Daybreak,” Zero said, coming around the table to me.  “As your assistant, in some cases.”

“And what are you here to learn today?” I asked, still amused.  “Certainly not to learn the ward.”

“Oh, no, sir!  I haven’t touched it!  I brushed it like you showed us and that’s all.  Human magic scares me.  And all I’m supposed to do is follow and do anything you ask.  First thought it was funny and Ellorn said it would be more difficult than I expect, probably dangerous.”

“There’s no reason to be afraid of human magic,” I said, laughing lightly.  “I gave you the ability to control it.  Here, let me show you…”  I reached through the geas, singling out Zero from the over a million minds chattering away their daily thoughts or dreaming their daily dreams, and I pushed ever so slightly on his conscious mind and joined the ward with him.  Kieran crafted a family ward for his previous home, so the wardstones would hold thousands of names before a problem began.  I logged Zero into the controlling functions, but warned him not to change anything without my brothers’ or my approval until we taught him a lot more.

He was enthralled instantly.  “What is that?”

“I’m not certain.  I don’t see the same way you do.  You have to tell me what you’re looking at.”  Physically, he was looking at the wall into the kitchen, so that was no help.  “Here, quick course in seeing webs of energy against physical reality.  This is called ‘buzzing the ward.’  I’m just applying a small amount of the right kind of energy signature to get it to react…”  I buzzed every section of the ward from outside to inside, identifying it by name and function.  Zero built his own internal map of the house and its surrounding land from the ward alone.  It took us only about two minutes before he turned and gasped.

“It’s you!  Lord Daybreak, I can see you in the ward!  You’re so bright!” he cried aloud, turning to me from the kitchen wall, wobbling a little, dizzy with the unusual attachment of the ward to his senses.  He was grinning from ear to ear.

“Yes, you can see a part of my aura in the ward here,” I admitted.  “My brothers’, too.  Let’s keep that among those allowed in the ward, please.  It’s a family thing.”

“Yes, Lord,” he said, bowing his head in obeisance.  “Human magic is a wondrous thing.  It has an elegance that counters the flow of faery magic, not that I am expert in either.  Will you teach it to us, too?”

“Too?  I have to learn first.  You’re guess is as good as mine, in most cases. That’s why I have tools.  Now, are you sure you want to come?”

“Yes, Lord!” Zero said immediately, detaching himself from the ward as if he’d practiced the transition.  “Within ten minutes, I already learned so much from you.  I am eager for more.”  He rubbed his hands together briskly and bobbed up and down of the balls of his feet.

“You
do
know that I’m going to start a fight with a bunch of people, right?” I asked, brows together and eyes bright.  He didn’t know what he was getting into.  As a brownie, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about letting him tag along—he’d be an invisible menace—but as a
huri
he was barely two days old and looked like an skinny sixteen-year-old.  Looks were definitely deceiving in his case, but still.

“Really?” he said, awed and grinning up at me.  “Can I help?  Or at least watch?”

“Not the reaction I was hoping for,” I grumbled.  His grin widened a little sheepishly.

“I can’t be a protector if I don’t learn to fight, Lord,” he said quietly.

“That’s true, but Ellorn and First, along with the Guard, will see to a more correct training in that regard than I can provide.  I’m still learning myself, after all.”

“Then we can learn together, Lord,” Zero said mischievously.

“Feeling a little aggressive?” I asked imperiously, barely touching Daybreak’s power.  Zero shuddered back in response.

“Not against you, Lord Daybreak, never!” Zero cried, raising his hands up defensively.  “But, yes, I do seem to be rather anxious lately.”

Raging hormones have given me over six hundred men with the strength of pro football linebackers in the bodies of teenagers and accountants, all rapidly changing to match their fundamental age.  The over six hundred women with equally raging hormones in similarly changing bodies were also going through difficult emotional changes.  Trust me, I felt every bit of it.  There was no balance between the sexes, by the way.  And it no doubt added to the frustration I felt over my father.

“Show me your shield and you can come with me,” I relented, thinking, hoping, he wouldn’t be able to do it.  He did, grinning the whole time, a solid shield of blue polyhedron plates surrounded him in a cocoon eight to nine inches out from his body.  “Is your view obfuscated at all within the shield?  Can you make it clear?”

“No, Lord, I can see perfectly through my shield,” Zero said, dropping his arms to his side and his shield with them.  “And we hadn’t thought to change the form of our shields.  I’ll work on that next, sir.”

“We?”

“Yes, sir, Ellorn selected all of us for training,” Zero said, beaming a pearly white smile across his pale complexion. “Zed, Nil, Naught, Zilch, and Nada.”

“I haven’t met the girls, yet,” I muttered, drawing the images of Naught and Nada from my memory.  They were both quite lovely young women.  “All right, let’s get this show on the road, then, but if it starts to get too nasty, don’t be surprised if you turn up at the Palace suddenly.  I won’t risk you when I’ve got half the Garrison waiting at my beck and call.”  I threw my arm over his shoulder, wheeling him around as I spoke, feeling him tremble and tense.  “We’ve got a long way to travel before the night’s over.”

Zero never once lost either his enthusiasm for our unknown mission or his fear of me as I herded him toward the garage and my car.  I let go and led the way at the door, grabbing my keys off the hook and subconsciously resetting the ward.  Zero followed me, closing the garage door.  Popping the locks with my keychain fob, I stopped with my hand on the door handle and looked at the
huri
beside me.

“You get in on the other side, Zero,” I said, calmly, quirking one side of my mouth into a grin.  I wondered what other “everyday” sort of thing I was going to have to explain to him.

“Yes, Lord Daybreak.  Sorry, sir,” he said, scrambling around to the other side.

“And stop apologizing for everything, Zero,” I said, opening the door and climbing in.  “You’re here to learn and that’s what you’re doing.”  Slamming the door and shoving the key in the ignition, I dropped my phone in the charger and turned to the black torso pacing the right side of the car.  Confused by his actions, I waited.  His face appeared in the window a few seconds later.

“How do I open the door?” Zero asked, his voice muffled through the glass.

Chuckling, I pointed at the handle through the door.  “Lift up on that thing on the side and pull gently.”

“Ooohhh,” I heard as the door opened.  The lock enthralled him for a moment, then he crawled in the seat and shut the door behind him, then turned to watch me intently.  I hit the garage door opener and started the car.

“What is this thing, Lord?” Zero asked.

“In specific or in general?” I asked, adjusting the mirror before I backed the car out.  I needed a frame of reference to answer his question.

“In general, I suppose.”

“This is a car, or an automobile.  It’s a method of transportation, a messy, noisy one, unfortunately.  It’s a lot faster than a horse for straight distance.  It runs on a number of principles, mostly the internal combustion engine—that thing up there.  An overly simplified explanation is that the engine burns a volatile fuel called gasoline, which apparently we need,” seeing the gas gauge for the first time.  I rarely let it get below a quarter of a tank, but others had been driving my car lately so now I had less than an eighth. “The explosion drives camshafts, which in turn drives the transmission which powers the driveshaft which turns the wheels.  Put your seatbelt on.”  I started backing slowly out of the garage, watching him try to figure out what a seatbelt was.  He was nearly frantic after a moment and I almost hit a tree trying not to laugh.  I pushed the memory of me putting mine on into his mind and his head twisted right immediately.  I heard the click of the latch as I backed onto the road.

“What do all those lights mean, Lord Daybreak?” Zero asked, leaning over as I changed positions and gears.

“Zero, stay in your seat, please.  You’re blocking the mirror.  We’ll teach you to drive another time.  It’s too complicated right now.  The most important things right now are the gas gauge and the speedometer.”  I pointed to those two on the dashboard.  “Speed is always important for both safety and legal reasons.  The gas gauge is important because if you run out of gasoline, then the car won’t go and that’s not good.  And someone left me very, very low on fuel.  Someone will be very unhappy tomorrow morning when they start scrubbing the outside of the Palace with a toothbrush.”

Zero looked startled.  “That hardly seems a punishment, Lord.”

Now I was startled.  The faery mindset was… peculiar.  Laughing at the absurdity, I said, “Hold on, Zero.  I need to move us around the planet a little.”  We’d already picked out the first and last points of the journey.  We just didn’t know how many steps along the way I’d need.  The first step was at Kojo’s Dojo, just outside Tucson.  It was definitely a cover for a hand-to-hand combat training facility.  They handled an obscene number of men, far too many for a normal “Dojo.”  Opening a small portal into the Tucson Airport where my men had hooked their spatial awareness last week, I pushed my awareness through and oriented myself to the front doors.  From there I had a lock on the road.  Traffic was light so the skip was easy.

“Wow,” Zero whispered, sitting straighter in his seat as he looked at everything out the window.  He twisted around to see behind us as I navigated out of the airport.  Pushing my awareness out, I picked another site and skipped us ahead several miles along the same highway.  “Wow,” he whispered again, quieter than the first and almost dazed.

“Is something wrong, Zero?” I asked, seeking the next jump point when the tone from the car reminded me how low on gas we were.  There were eighteen gas stations within a ten-mile stretch of road.  I picked one that looked bright but empty and skipped us a mile away.

“You are so deft with such a complicated crafting!  You are amazing, Lord Daybreak,” Zero praised me, his eyes aglow and his hair spiking with his energy in his excitement.

“Thank you, Zero.  Kieran and Ethan showed me how to do that on more crowded roads than these.  They were politely pushing cars out of the way and hiding it from me at the same time.  That was before I really knew what magic was.”

“Did you catch them at it, Lord?” he asked, still beaming with pride, turned sideways in the seat.  Glancing over at him, I chuckled .  He reminded me so much of himself from a few days and a few feet ago.  I couldn’t help myself, I swear.  I reached over and tousled his hair, cupping the back of his head affectionately.

“Yes, but I don’t know how many times they did it before I figured it out.  Now face front before something happens.  If the airbags deploy with you in that position, you’ll likely be killed.”  He turned in the seat and I returned both hands to the wheel.  “We’re about to stop for gas so we need to talk about what you’re calling me.  On this side, you should avoid ‘Lord Daybreak’ and say Seth, for now.”

“Sir?  I—I, couldn’t, sir,” he stammered.  “That’s your family’s name, sir.”