Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (109 page)

“Hug already, damn it! It’s been forty
years,” I said scornfully. Using the Stone was becoming second
nature now and it shoved the two of them together chest to chest,
almost crushing the wind out of them. “We’ll be in the dining
room.”

A second later, after moving the three of us
to the dining room, I had Peter and Ethan in a bear hug neither was
expecting and no doubt assaulting their auras with a tumult of my
emotions. It took them a moment, but they hugged me back, gently
rocking in place with me. We knew and felt other people in the room
and we ignored them completely. When we finally pulled away from
each other, we had tears streaming down our faces and a definite
feeling of communion between us. My brothers, the first real
friends I’ve ever really had, and their Little Brother.

“You leave on another fool’s errand without
telling me and I’ll leave you adrift next time,” I told Ethan as we
pulled away.

“Tell that to the Big Kahuna,” he muttered
softly. “I don’t have a lot of choice but to follow when Quixote
goes tilting at windmills, you know.”

“Robert?” I heard Felix gasp from behind me.
I turned to the door and saw Dad and Kieran standing there. Looking
at the table, the side we stood on was empty, but the opposite side
held several men, all waiting quite impatiently for us. Felix and
Gordon sat together in the middle of the table. John stood behind
Felix’s wheelchair, making sure he didn’t overexert himself, no
doubt. There were also two doctors sitting close by watching him
carefully. I was surprised that he was even out of bed. Bishop sat
to their right then, surprisingly, Marchand with his lapdog,
Murrik. Clifford Harris sat to Cahill’s left with two other men I
didn’t know. I did find it interesting that the only women in the
room were those serving. I’d have to look into that later.

“Felix, may I come in?” Dad asked
politely.

Cahill nodded mutely, still surprised. He
turned to me. “So while all of this was going on, you managed to
find your father at the same time?”

“More like he found me,” I said, noticing the
food spread out on the table for the first time. My stomach
grumbled angrily at me. “May I?” Again, Cahill nodded mutely.

I picked up a bowl and sought out the stew
that he loved so much from the far end of the table. Reclaiming the
seat I’d chosen, Dad sat next to me with Kieran on his right. Peter
sat on the other side of me with Ethan on his left. As I started
eating, I looked up to see everyone staring at me. It was enough to
turn me into a statue.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, what happened?” Gordon and Felix said
loudly together. I laughed a little.

“I’m alive, aren’t I,” I answered
rhetorically. “I won.”

There was a collective shout of joy and
relief outside and the dining room itself got very loud for a few
minutes as they vied for congratulations to us and me in
particular. I tried to keep eating and actually got a few bites
down as they slowly lost some of their energy. Questions abounded
and everyone vied for my attention.

“It’s been a long day and I’m not sure it’s
over yet,” I said as I cut up something like roasted turkey. “How
much of the story has been told so far?”

“Up to the point that you sent us back here,”
Gordon prompted. “But not why. Something happened to the elves, to
all of them at once. Then you sent us back. What happened after
that?”

I sighed heavily, trying to come up with a
polite way to say this. “He committed… an abomination.” Looking
across the table at Gordon, I could see that least he understood
the undercurrent, if not the fact, of what I was saying. “If the
Faery Queens wish that information to be public knowledge then I
will say and not until.”

“So why did you send us back?” Gordon
asked.

“Because I didn’t want him to do the same
thing to you and I was already doing two things at once. At the
time, I wasn’t exactly sure how he did it, so I couldn’t protect
you two from the same fate.”

Gordon sat and thought about it for a few
moments, reconciling what he witnessed against what I said. Others
on his side of the table weren’t quite as thoughtful in their
consideration.

“What happened then? What did you do?”
Marchand asked.

“Once the Rat Bastard was standing again,” I
continued, glancing over at Marchand with slight annoyance but
keeping my attention on the Cahill’s and Bishop, “he did what elves
have been doing to a very long time: the arrogant prick gloated. He
knew the magic I was working, knew what it would do, and he knew I
couldn’t handle it.”

“But you proved him wrong, huh?” Marchand
asked, sniffing at the end, almost as arrogantly as the Rat
Bastard.

“No, he was right. I couldn’t handle it,” I
said dismissively. “When the spell finished, it was like being
connected to the power output side of a nuclear reactor. I couldn’t
move. I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t do anything but die. He
knew it. I knew it. But being an elf, and an old elf at that, he
had arrogance down to an art-form. And as he crawled to me, he let
a tiny bit of information out that he knew couldn’t possibly help
me because there was no way that I could possibly have what he was
talking about. Except I did.

“It wasn’t going to be fast enough to save my
life though,” I said, being alive now made it easier to say
casually. “I’d run out of time and he was breaking the Day and the
Night out of my hands through the armor. He was about to slice
through my neck with my own Sword, but at least I made him pay a
huge price for the privilege. He was king of nothing now. I’d
stolen his kingdom from him and he wasn’t getting it back.” I left
a few details out of the story, but everybody didn’t need to know
everything. Those that deserved to know more would be told with a
little time.

“But you’re here and he’s not,” Gordon said,
trying to lead me on.

“Yes, well,” I said, grinning. “Once I tied
his power down, he was still an elf, an old and powerful elf, and
I’m still a kid and I was pretty much wiped out. He literally broke
my hands taking the Night and Day from me. I wasn’t resisting; I
was just locked into place by the armor. As he swung the Day Sword
back to take my head off, I made one last ditch effort. I yelled
for my daddy and look who showed up.” I grinned and waved my hand
at Dad. “He grabbed the Rat Bastard’s sword hand, said ‘Nobody
fucks with my boy,’ and punched him right in the kisser! The damn
elf dropped the Sword, flying back ten, twelve feet through the
air!”

Picking up Dad’s arm and pushing his forearm
back to show his arm muscles, I leaned forward a little to look at
Kieran’s shocked face with a grin on mine. “Daddy’s got guns!” Most
of the table broke into raucous laughter, either at the statement
itself or at Dad’s red-faced embarrassment.

“Shrank pointed out that the Queens were in
the neighborhood and that we needed to leave,” I said after a few
moments, once the kidding had subsided. “The Rat Bastard jumped up
out of the rubble of the arena and I filled him full of holes. I
called up a portal to what I thought was here. Shrank asked me to
save the remaining Faery that were left behind. Once they were
through, I closed the portal and found out we weren’t here. I
passed out shortly after that.”

“How long were you out?” Bishop asked
eagerly. He had a lot of questions waiting. This was by no means
the most pressing on his mind.

I shrugged and started to answer, but Dad
beat me to it. “It felt like about three hours,” he said. “But time
is a fluid concept when you don’t have anything to judge against.
And considering the huge panic going on around us… And while I am
not without ability, I was without power at that time.”

“When Dad was finally able to wake me up,” I
took up the story again, “it was to tell me the Fae we’d rescued
we’re about to die again. They would not be able to survive the
night where we were without what MacNamara had taken from them. It
was too harsh an environment. They would freeze to death by night’s
end.”

“How many?” Kieran asked quietly,
understanding exactly what I meant.

“Over a million,” I said looking over at him.
Kieran gasped at the number. “I need you to look at them, too. I’m
not certain I did it right. It looks different than yours and
Shrank doesn’t think it will last more than a month or two without
further guidance. Frankly, I was just worried about getting them
through the night.” He nodded numbly at me.

“So what was the Queens’ reaction to the
death of their peer?” Marchand asked with a sneer. “You said they
were ‘in the neighborhood.’ Surely they have some reaction to you
killing one you claim to be their equal.”

“We’re about to find out,” Gordon said,
staring vacantly at the wall over my shoulder. “Seth, there is an
envoy of elves at the western gate… asking very politely to
speak…well, to speak with you.”

“Um, okay,” I said blankly. “I guess I should
talk to them, huh?” Dad chuckled softly. “Show them to the front
door, I suppose. I wouldn’t let them in the house though.”

I kept eating as I rose up into the wards to
look at the western gate. Marty had control of the castle wards
now, so I slid in beside Gordon as an observer.

“Leave the gun,” murmured Felix. I nodded in
agreement, feeling several others beside me in the wards now.
Within seconds, we had a virtual peanut gallery with us. There were
two men on the gate, one held the gate open while the other led the
elf up the road. The lead man tossed his rifle to the gatekeeper
and started toward the castle at a trot. The elf urged the horse
forward, walking slowly to match the man’s speed, unbearably slow
for the fine steed but neither the elf nor the animal showed
discomfort.

The elf was astride a magnificent stallion,
had to be twenty-two hands high—impossibly tall for a horse, yet
perfectly proportioned, of rich chestnut brown and thickly corded
with muscles. A magnificent white starburst pattern marked its
forehead, ending in fine lines. The elf atop the horse looked like
a black and white harlequin in triangles, not too far from my
armor’s pattern. It was both striking and gauche at the same time.
The cut of the outfit was elegant on his long form, but the
flashing colors were too extreme for me. The only weapon he carried
was a simple eight-inch dagger on his belt. The elf himself could
only be described as beautiful. Of course, you saw what his magic
wanted you to see. I saw both, but I think my brothers were the
only ones who knew that.

Still, the single most interesting item about
this elf is that he was a flag bearer. From his stirrup, a pole was
set and run through his hand and past his head probably six feet.
At the top was a pennant of white, a truce, and below that was a
green silk square bearing the Elven mark of McClure in the same
dark blue that colored the geas of the Faery earlier edged in fiery
orange of the rising sun. I knew no one here knew the significance
of those colors, but they’d find out soon enough.

I felt more than saw that three riders were
issued from the stables to the gate. That would speed their arrival
considerably. The gatekeeper started to close the gate as the first
elf cleared its path when two more elves appeared from the gloom,
startling the man. On the left was a tall male Unseelie elf riding
a stallion of the darkest black I’ve ever seen on an animal. The
horse was at least three hands taller than the first elf’s and
looked to weigh in at two hundred more pounds of solid muscle. Its
hooves sparked with each beat, as if detesting the ground it walked
on. Only the reflecting moonlight from its coat showed the
definition of the huge beast, giving rise to the black silk leg of
its elven rider.

Clad from the waist down in black, the elf
almost completely blended in with his animal. Above the waist, he
almost blended in with the night sky. His shirt was a starscape of
twinkling lights, punctuated by his hands and head sticking out at
the appropriate places. His long black hair wafted gently in the
breeze and concealed his face from sight through the ward. It hung
loose, well past his shoulders, so if Shrank was correct about the
haircut thing, this elf ranked very high in the Winter Court
hierarchy.

Next to him on his right sat his opposite, or
maybe opposition was a better word. The Seelie elf rode a white
stallion of equal measure and it nearly glowed in the moonlight
next to the midnight black steed. The elf on top was dressed in the
style of his people, but in a darker aspect. His legs hugged the
horse with the dark forest browns of tree trunks. His chest was the
deep greens of the rain forest while his arms showed highlights of
the blooms of forbidden flowers and fruits found only in the
deepest jungles, promising exotic beauty, untold sweetness, and
incredible danger. His hair, white to the point of translucence,
fell forward to obscure his face in the moonlight, too.

Together the two of them were an imposing
sight just for their clothing alone.

“Those are Royal Emissaries!” sputtered
Marchand, standing from the table in shock. He’d been remarkably
quiet tonight, neither offering congratulations nor asking too many
questions. I wanted to ask if he had a car here I could kill for
him, but I resisted. Barely. I really didn’t like him.

“Yes,” murmured Bishop. “Yes, they are.
What’s going on here, Seth?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but we’re
gonna find out really soon. Martin, you may want to pull the Castle
up. Might be a good idea to have a little fire in our eyes when
they get here.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Gordon said calmly. The
first time we watched him pull the Castle up, he took three seconds
to do it, slowly working through each level methodically powering
it up until the fortifications took form and energy flowed
correctly. Marty was amazingly fast this time. Like between the
beats of running horses fast. And there wasn’t the slightest wave
out of place either. Even the moat was in place, an angry red river
of power daring anything to try going over it.