Authors: Scott V. Duff
“No,” I said. “You linked using my name asking where I was, I told you and you were here. I felt you coming but I didn’t pull you over. You did it somehow.”
“’Across the link’ means power,” Ethan said. “What did you say?”
“’Gilán,
Little Brother
’,” Peter repeated himself, thinking back.
“I felt that,” I said, sensing the words as a pressure, almost a pinprick inside me.
“That’s not the same word Seth’s been saying either,” Ethan said. Opening another link to me, he said,
Little Brother, what is the name again?
“I didn’t catch any of it,” Mike complained as I sent both Ethan and Kieran the name of my realm in its complete form with all of its voices.
“Understandable, unfortunately,” I said to Mike, grimacing. “It can take a lot of practice to hear all the voices.”
Ethan disappeared, sinking through the envelope of energy around my realm and re-entering the hotel room we came from. I felt the pressure of the shift equally as he shifted back a second later, easily differentiating the direction of the shift as well. He did it a few more times, then Kieran joined in, shifting back and forth with ease. The moves took little energy from them to make, a tenth as much as a portal, maybe less. Then they started moving to other parts of the world as Mike, Peter, and I watched.
“Stop,” I said suddenly, when they were both on my side of the membrane, stopping the shift that Kieran had started to some place in Cairo he vaguely remembered from his childhood. “That’s enough, boys, we do have
some
work to do today,” I said, chuckling at them. If I could contain myself then so could they.
“Okay, Seth, you’re right,” Kieran said, the gleam in his eyes not dulling at all. “This is seriously cool. We cannot tell anyone about this. No one. Seriously, this is yet another first in the universe.”
“Well, I’m going for breakfast before it gets cold,” Peter said and promptly disappeared.
“Congratulations, little brother,” Ethan said, cheerfully. “Now you have a name, a door and a lock for the door. Great start for the day!” Then he disappeared, too.
“A lock?” I asked Kieran.
“You stopped us from making a transition,” he said. “So you have control over the veil or field or whatever it is that occludes your realm from the rest of the universe and protects it. At some point, we’ll have to test it and see if you can stop specific people or—”
“Yes,” I said, interrupting him. “You’re very specific when you pass through the field. It’s very definite about who and what it lets through.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re certain of this?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I responded, sitting on the ledge of the pond again. Mike was fidgeting behind us, unsure of what to do. That reminded me he was there and reminded me that Shrank wasn’t. I’d left him back at the hotel.
My brothers now had a way into my realm, but that still left others outside of it, like Mike and Ian. It was our salvation yesterday. Admittedly, I was in control of that shift and it would have been very messy for everybody if I hadn’t bled off the inertial differences, but it still saved our lives. Mike and Ian couldn’t say my Name, neither could they say Gilán with enough voices to pierce the field around it. They would need a key.
Keys, plural, I thought, standing and facing the pool of glowing diamonds. Each diamond in the pile sang with Gilán’s power and Name with a different voice. Each was separately identifiable, no two alike, just as snowflakes. I reached down into the pile and pulled a small handful out. I washed most of the smaller ones back into the pool, then dropped all but the smallest into a drawstring bag that was suddenly in my hand.
“Shall we have breakfast?” I asked, shifting the three of us back over. I wondered idly where I’d left my half-eaten scone, but the smell of bacon and eggs quickly over-rode that concern. “Shrank, where are you?”
“Here, Lord,” Shrank called, shooting out of Kieran’s bedroom near the ceiling and flying lazily toward us. The pixie looked downright perky this morning. “I do apologize for not greeting you all this morning, but I slept most deeply last night.”
“He was up with the sun, Shrank,” Peter mumbled over a muffin, pointing at me.
“The sun has just risen,” Shrank said, pointing vaguely to the east.
“Not in Gilán,” Ethan said, piling a plate with scrambled eggs.
Shrank shot through the air to me, stopping two feet out directly in front, head high. “You named your realm? Congratulations, Lord Daybreak!”
“Thank you, Shrank, but it named itself,” I said.
“Same thing,” Shrank said, cheerfully. “The Fae must be ecstatic. They did not expect this until much closer to the Great Claiming.”
“Just remember that’s been moved. I need you to pass word on that today,” I reminded him. “Here, can you take this?” I held the diamond chip out on the tip of my finger to him. He changed his flight so that he approached me straight on, horizontally to the chip, and took it off my finger in one hand. It looked much larger in his tiny hands.
“A diamond, Lord?” he asked. “It is imbued with your power, it seems, though very faintly. It wanes with distance.”
Concentrating on the tiny sliver that Shrank held, I stamped, for lack of a better word, Shrank’s essence onto one of the diamond’s many facets. Looking at it now, I was pretty sure it would be exactly what I needed.
“Okay, Shrank, I think that’ll work as a key,” I said. “While you’re holding the diamond, think about a place on Gilán you might want to be right now, that you might want to go. When you’ve got the picture in your mind, say the name of my realm to the gem. Doesn’t have to be aloud.”
He was gone in a second. And back the next, grinning. “Yes, Lord Daybreak, this pierces the veil well.”
“And you can halt those transfers as well?” Kieran asked as he fixed his own breakfast, watching Shrank and me carefully.
“Yep, even better than that, I can tie an individual diamond key to a specific person, maybe even a place, so somebody can’t steal somebody else’s keys,” I said, starting on my own plate now.
“The ‘place’ is likely to be more important than you realize,” Peter said finishing his muffin and moving to eggs and sausage. “A good deal of the difficulty in portal magic is realizing the endpoint into real space across a non-space environment. I’d bet dollars to donuts the only places that Shrank could go by himself are the last two he’d been at.”
I looked to see the pixie nodding in agreement. “Okay. That’s not quite as effective as I thought it would be.”
“No, don’t knock it, Seth,” Kieran said. “It’s still a very good safety net and if you can lock a place into a gem that would be even better. Besides, exactly how many places do any of us really need to go in the world?”
Peter’s cell phone shrieked from the other room with one of the annoyingly sweet stock chimes manufacturers thought of as obsequious. Seconds later the house phone started bleeping in a similar chime, also announcing an incoming call.
“We have some eager beavers this morning,” Peter remarked, glancing at the clock as he rose to get his phone.
“Good morning, Ian,” Mike said answering the phone extension nearest him. Ethan snorted back a laugh through a biscuit next to Mike’s chair. The digital clock next to him read seven fifty-nine. “Did you enjoy your night with Marty?”
Ethan moved closer to us to give Mike some privacy when Peter came back, cell phone in hand talking to his father. They were setting up a timetable already.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes, Yonnie. Don’t worry. Just be close to the door. We have to leave very soon,” Mike said before hanging up. He started shoveling his food in.
“Six o’clock for dinner sounds great, Dad,” Peter said. “You want to eat in Huntsville or New York? We have to come back tonight anyway. We’re interviewing for assistants, hopefully hiring someone if they’re worth their salt.”
“Hmm, odd phrase,” muttered Ethan.
“Not really,” Mike answered. “Salt was once used as a currency, highly valued as a spice and hard to get.”
I was surprised I didn’t know that. “You’re kidding. The oceans are full of it.”
“Not the same kind of salt, Seth,” Mike said, shaking his head ruefully.
“Oh, yeah, I knew that. I get your point,” I said, properly chastised for that simple miscalculation. But it did cement in my mind the idea that even though these bright blue diamonds were abundant to me, they would likely be considered very rare here. A pleasing thought since I considered them precious regardless.
“Shrank, are you ready to go?” I asked putting my plate on the coffee table and standing, stretching.
“At your discretion, Lord,” Shrank squealed, flying loops around each of us eagerly.
“Back in a few, guys,” I said, then shifted Mike and Shrank with me to the doorway to the Castle Cahill. “Okay, Shrank, I’ll work on marking some places in the diamonds so you can move back and forth where you need to more easily. Anything else you think you need?”
“No, Lord Daybreak, I can think of nothing now,” he piped happily. “I will spread word of the change in times.”
“While you’re doing that, see if there are any smiths among them,” I said, the thought just occurring to me. “I might need to set some of these into jewelry.”
“Certainly, Lord Daybreak,” Shrank squealed. “It would be an unusual talent for brownies, but perhaps one of the sprite clans or among the changed. Gilán is frightfully interesting that way.” He shot off through the grass without another word amid a puff of golden dust. Mike moved up beside me, watching the little Fae fly off.
“He’s awfully cheerful, even for a pixie,” he muttered as we walked to the door.
I grinned at him, throwing my arm over his shoulders. “Not everybody can be a sullen Brit, y’know,” I said, laughing, then I shoved him through the door. I got through in time to see Ian landing on Mike’s shoulders, then both of them crumpling to the floor in a heap. John stood in the doorway amused, watching the minor pandemonium occur.
“Hi, John,” I said, waving to him. “Somebody ate his oats this morning.”
“Get off me, y’little badger!” Mike cried, laughing. “I hav’ta work in these,” he whined as he stood, brushing the newly pressed wrinkles out.
“Well, ya’ shoudn’ta lied to me, then,” Ian said, falling backward onto the bed, his face a righteous mask of gleeful torture. I think their relationship had taken a turn recently. Looking at their auras, it appeared to be a good thing.
“How did I lie?” Mike said, gawking at Ian in shock.
“You said nothing would happen last night. You both did, so you both lied!” He huffed at us and glared, leaning up on his elbows to get a good angle.
“What happened last night?” I asked Mike.
“I’m afraid Mr. Bishop recounted the events of last night’s dinner party to the Cahills at breakfast this morning,” John said, smiling. “He can be a rather boisterous storyteller.”
“It was a rather boisterous story, truth,” Mike said, going to the bed to sit beside Ian. “The boys were being a mite touchy last night. It was a lot like Thursday night, just a lot of flash surrounding a lot of boring.”
“No, Michael, he’s right,” I said and started a slow walk forward. “I mean, you are, too. It was a lot of boring, but he did miss things just because he wasn’t there. But.” I stopped in front of Ian, meeting his glare with another. I was certain mine would win. “We can’t predict everything that’s going to happen, but until we have more certain ways of guaranteeing your safety, especially when you’re with us, that comes first. Now, we’re going to make mistakes, Ian, but I’m not going to second-guess these decisions. I have to believe that I am making the best decision about every situation I’m in. There is too much riding on each and every one of them. It’s not just me anymore. I’m not trying to deprive you of anything, Ian.” I had both the Ferrin brothers enraptured for a moment. It wasn’t from magic, though, curiously.
“I’m sorry, Seth,” Ian said, his voice cracking a little at the end. “I was just frustrated, is all.”
“Okay, Ian, as long as you know I’m trying,” I said. “And Mike’s right, we were a bit touchy early on last night.”
“A bit? He ‘bout took Phillips’ head off,” Mike whispered to Ian, knowing I’d hear, his accent thick and heavy. “Then he nearly blinded everybody.”
“How did he do that?” Ian asked Mike as they got off the bed.
“Don’t know,” Mike said. “But I suspect he showed his aura.”
“No,” I responded shaking my head. “You know how I can send people places? Well, it works just as well with light as with people. It was just a trick.”
“Now let’s go show you how truly boring last night was,” Mike said moving Ian toward the door.
I turned to John, smiling. “Thank you for coming to see Ian off, John. Is there anything I can do for you today?”
“No, Seth, I’m sure you’re busy enough right now,” John said. “Safe journeys.”
“Thank you, John.” Then I jumped us back to New York.
“Will you drive?” I asked Peter, holding out the keys as I raised the garage door.
“You want me to drive your baby?” he asked, taking the keys, cutting his eyes at me. “Ian must have really gotten to you.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, moving to the far side of the car. “More than he knows, anyway. It’s not that what I told him was wrong, but I sat on the sidelines for seventeen years and didn’t even know there was a game going on. I completely understand what he’s complaining about.” I shoved my phone in the charger out of habit once I’d buckled in, jiggling the pouch of diamonds nervously in the other hand.
“And what do you expect to do with those?” Peter asked as he backed the car slowly out of the garage.
“Well,” I started, slipping a few of the diamonds out of the bag into my hand. “With the sliver I gave Shrank, I imprinted an image of his aura or essence, I guess, onto it. He’s able to shift himself between the last two places that he was, here and on Gilán. So what I’m thinking is that I can do the same and imprint some sites into it as well. That way, the keyholders can pick where they want to go, providing it’s in the key.”
“And you can still block the passage of keyholders, right?” he asked, backing out into the road.
“Yeah, it looks that way,” I said.
Something didn’t feel right as we pulled past the ward at the end of the driveway. Something didn’t belong there.
“Wait, Peter,” I said quietly, looking out through the tinted windows. “Pull back in.” As we crossed back over the drive, that feeling fell away. He stopped the car and cut the engine. We hopped out.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly, watching me and sending his own questing magic out around the area, mostly outside the wards. The Stone wasn’t protesting and neither was the Night, so this wasn’t malignant magic.
“I’m not sure,” I said, nearly whispering, standing at the very edge of the ward’s protection. It was just a slight tickle on my senses and the ward was blocking it easily. Just to be certain I wasn’t being paranoid, I took one purposeful step outside the ward and pushed my senses outward.
“There’s someone watching my house,” I said loudly and started out through the woods. Peter was quick to follow, but I was obviously not paying attention to where and how I was going. I outpaced him quickly and was far more quiet, as in totally silent, moving through the underbrush of the woods. I stopped about fifty feet away from the tree my target slept in, and waited for Peter to catch up, using the short time to reconnoiter the setup.
It was an amateurish blind, effective but only because of the distance from the house. My peeper was more of a hunter of animals than people, sleeping in a tree stand found in any discount or sporting goods store, and tied in with bungy cords. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him, bundled in camo gear and twisted into a ball. High-powered binoculars were fixed to another tree limb, pointing at my house.
Once Peter caught up, I lifted us up with the Stone. He grabbed onto to me with both hands to steady himself. I turned, grinning, and whispered, “Sorry,” and asked the Stone to make the platform visible. It chose a four-foot square stonework pattern. As we got closer to the tree, the smell of urine and the sight of litter on the ground were evident. My peeper liked his junk food and didn’t clean up well afterwards. At least he took other matters elsewhere. When we rose high enough, Peter leaned out, catching one of the tree limbs, and looked through the binoculars. He looked at me, angry, and nodded. I moved the platform over a little, leaned, and looked, too.
The binoculars had a perfect view of my bedroom window. An occasional breeze obstructed the line of sight easily by moving branches and leaves around and no other part of the house was visible. Six inches in any direction would break that line. It had probably taken days to find this spot. This was definitely intended to spy on me.
Turning my attention back to the sleeping man, he was a normal human male, about my age, and he snored. The only weapons on him were a pocketknife and a four-inch hunting knife, sheathed on his left side. This was the only appreciable metal on him. His gear was stowed in a duffel bag at the base of the tree, mostly dirty clothes, clean socks, and junk food. This didn’t appear to be a dangerous person, exactly. I looked at Peter just as he turned back from staring over the edge of the platform, examining the duffel bag, I suspect.
“Wake him up. This is just weird,” Peter said, holding onto the tree casually. It struck me as funny that he could do that, make standing in the middle of a tree look casual. So I was laughing a bit when I pulled the Day—scabbard included, I didn’t want to kill the guy, yet—and whacked him once with it.
“Yo, wake up!” I yelled, then dropped the Day, point down, holding the hilt loosely and watching the spastic throes of my peeping tom. The golden glow from the Sword gave the event excellent lighting. A familiar face finally popped out of the lightweight jacket, dazed blue eyes, unshaven, unwashed, and unmistakable.
“Jimmy Morgan, why are you spying on me?” I ask, loudly and forcefully. And more than a little angrily.
“Seth, what the f—” Jimmy stuttered and stopped moving, staring at me in shock. “Seth. You’re back.”
“Answer my question before I pull this Sword free and show you the business sides of it,” I said, turning a little nasty. “And it’s very sharp.”
He looked down at the Sword then. His mistake, seeing both by the glowing golden scabbard and a floating platform of stone, he jerked on the stand, startled, and popped a few of his bungy cords loose. Jimmy lost his balance, falling off the stand. He caught a limb nearby and kicked out for the platform, stopping his fall.
“What the fuck are you standing on?” he cried hysterically.
“You get distracted easily, Jimmy,” I said, reaching over and grabbing the back of his jacket. Hauling on him hard and, popping the rest of the bungy cords loose, I pulled him over completely to the Stone platform and started sinking to the ground slowly. Peter moved through the change smoothly, which helped me at least stay out of a murderous rage and stop in the “beat to a pulp” range instead. I tossed him on his back a few feet from the ground and let him flail a minute to get his composure. “Why are you watching my house, Jimmy Morgan? Wasn’t leaving me in a forest in the middle of the night enough for you?”
“’Cuz I need your help, Seth,” Jimmy said, scurrying backward a few steps, then sitting up in the underbrush. He’d gone through a lot in the last two and a half months. His aura showed the emotional scars and his body wasn’t too far behind it. The boy wasn’t too far from malnutrition. Still, he left me in a forest in the middle of the night. I’m having a really hard time letting go of that.
“And? Talk fast. I have work to do and people are waiting for me,” I snapped. Being Daybreak does have advantages. I had his full attention.
“You’re the last hope I have of finding my father,” Jimmy said, his deep blue eyes welling in tears.
“Why should I care about you and your father? You left me in a forest in the middle of the night. Did you forget that?” I ask the questions thumping the Sword on the ground for emphasis with each sentence.
“No, Seth, I didn’t forget,” Jimmy said, his voice barely a whisper, his eyes wide with fear. He truly felt like he had nowhere else to turn. It was obvious in his aura and in his mind. He was totally emotionally drained. “I know I don’t have any right to ask you for help, Seth, especially after that, but your name is the only thing in common with all this weirdness. Billy and his dad disappearing, my dad disappearing, losing the farm, too much happened so fast and it all seems to hinge on you. I’m hopin’ you can tell me what’s going on. Please, Seth, I got nowhere else to go.”
“Damn it, Jimmy, I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, my anger melting away into pity way too fast. Seeing into people’s heads was a definite disadvantage.
“We can’t help everybody, Seth,” Peter said calmly and quietly. I turned to look at him. He wasn’t telling me not to help, but he was giving me a nonjudgmental out. I didn’t owe Jimmy Morgan anything and we all knew it. He wasn’t telling me not to help him, either.
“Yeah, I know, Pete,” I answered, turning back to Jimmy. “Again, Jimmy, why should I help you? Why does everything hinge on me? What do I have to do with your father going AWOL?”
“Billy said it was a setup,” Jimmy said, gulping again and shutting his eyes on the last word. “His daddy told him that no matter what he did that night that he should get away from the campsite by midnight and that he should try hard to get me to go with him. He didn’t care none ‘bout Pitch. But when I saw you doing that thing, I freaked and we all ran. That’s why it was so easy to get him going—he was looking for a reason anyway. He told me the next day when his dad and him came over. Same time my dad called you the first time.
“Mr. Walker was mad as a hornet when he got there the next day,” Jimmy continued. “Went straight to Dad’s office ‘n’ started yelling at ‘im. A five-foot stick yelling at a six-foot-five grizzly bear. Took guts, I guess. Dad almost broke him in half that day. Last I saw of ‘em. Two weeks later, they was gone and their house was up for sale as a foreclosure. Dad said they were ‘called up,’ whatever that means, but he wouldn’t talk about it. Made me stay at the farm all the time, took my phone away and grounded me for a month because of the crap we did to you.
“Dad started having problems at work, too. People hassling him about sumpin’, wouldn’t say what though. Kept coming home pissed off every day. About two and a half weeks ago, he disappeared completely. Just didn’t come home from work. Mamma was scared out of her mind, ‘specially with the way he’s been acting lately. She sent me out looking for him and I went every place I could think of. Nobody’d seen him. When I got back to the house, the man from the mortgage company was there with the Sheriff’s deputy with a notice of foreclosure. He said we had a week to pack up and leave.
“I didn’t think that was legal,” Jimmy said, shaking his head tiredly. “I wanted to argue, to fight it, see a lawyer, something! But Mamma just took it from them and told me to shut up. She went back in the house and grabbed every bank book she could find, then we went to the bank. Started closing out accounts, but most of ‘em had already been cleaned out by Dad. She should have had close to a hundred grand according to the ledgers. We managed to get about seven grand.
“By that time, I was just shocked by all of it. Mamma had us packing everything up, but so much of what we had was part of the farm, there was just so much we couldn’t take with us. The day we were supposed to leave, Mamma and me got into a fight. Again. We’d been fighting a lot lately, no big surprise, really. I ran off. Called her later and told her I would stay in town for a while longer and look for Dad. Go up to Virginia in a few weeks. That’s where she was going with Cecilia, to my aunt’s in Virginia. I miss ‘em.”
He finally stopped for a moment, giving me a chance to think. I knew there was a human connection to the Black Hand’s attack on me, but none of us had given it any thought since the Rat Bastard’s demise, attributing it to him. But I was well outside of Alabama when all of this went down. I couldn’t have any relation to this. This was all their own crapfest.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “All right, Jimmy, I will try—understand me here,
try
—to look into this, but it takes a back seat to my obligations and it comes with restrictions that
you
will have to agree to up front.”
“Okay,” he said, eagerly, eyes brightening a little in hope. “What do you want from me? I’ll do anything.”
“I’m not the same person you knew two months ago, Jimmy,” I said. “When you knew me, I was a lost little kid looking for friends and eager to do just about anything I could to get people to like me. Now I’ve found my parents, found brothers I didn’t know I had, and found an entire world I didn’t know existed. Now I have a million people depending on me to live. Not just be nice to them, Jimmy, to live, to eat, to breathe, to sleep, so before I agree, you have to agree to keep everything that you experience while you are with us a secret. You tell no one anything that might even come close to endangering any one of my family or people or friends. And before you agree, understand that this is
not just a promise
. I have the power to make it happen.”
“Yeah, Seth, I understand,” he said softly. “I can agree to that.”
“No, I don’t think you do understand,” Peter said chuckling.
“But you will,” I said and pushed Daybreak to the forefront, making Jimmy see the Faery Liege whether he wanted to or not, then I placed the geas on him.
A minute later, Jimmy was getting poked in the side, by Peter this time. He rolled over on the ceramic tile of my bathroom floor, groggy and dazed.
“What happened?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows.
“Seth wasn’t gentle when he made you keep your promise,” Peter answered. “Just be glad he didn’t take your head off instead. Now you’ve got fifteen minutes to get cleaned up before we leave again. Find something to wear in Seth’s room. We’re late for a business meeting already.”
Peter came out of the bathroom and sat on the bed beside me. Glancing up at him briefly, I went back to staring at the ceiling, trying to decide how badly I’d screwed up by saying yes to Jimmy.