Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (13 page)

“Thank you, Mr. Higgins, we’ll be right out,”
said Colbert. Colbert sighed heavily again. “I’m going to ground,
Ehran. I’m far too old and weak to fight in something that could
take your father, you know that.” “I understand, Artur,” Kieran
said, soothingly, “You’ve done well by my family and for that I
thank you. I’m sure Father does, too.”

“Let’s find out what we’re up against right
now, shall we?” asked Colbert, leaving the room. We filed dutifully
behind him.

Back in the parlor we found six men in blue
suits now visible at every entryway, one being Higgins in the
center of the room. He was staring at a laptop on the table in
front of him turned away from us so we couldn’t see the screen when
we walked in. He rose immediately, nodding to Colbert.

“We have lost contact with three of four
stations on the perimeter,” Higgins said, his voice calm yet
demanding attention. “The house is still secure, but we did find
scorch marks on the porch outside Samantha’s open office window.
Motion detectors are picking up something approximately one hundred
yards out from the house but cameras show nothing, either
ultraviolet or visible spectrum. I cannot check the wards
themselves and the only people who can are unaccounted for.
Currently, that is twenty people, sir.”

Twenty people were missing? Where were they
hiding in the first place?

Colbert nodded curtly then said, “We will
give our guests time to get to their vehicle, then we will evacuate
the premises. Gentlemen, to me, please.”

He looked at Kieran and nodded to the glass
front door. Ethan took the lead since he had free hands and Kieran
and I stepped up and waited behind him, looking back at Colbert. He
reached both hands into his pockets and began pulling crystals of
various colors and sizes out. I watched nervously, going back and
forth between him and the yard beyond the door, seeing nothing
outside.

When I felt the ward on the house tingle, I
looked back at Colbert. He had a blue translucent crystal rod about
three inches long and half an inch thick in his hand. I could feel
him reaching for the next ward gingerly, weakly. That ward was
farther out from the house, about a hundred yards. I pushed
slightly through the crystal. Colbert gasped, but right then I
didn’t know if it was what I’d done or what we saw. There had to be
eighty men out there. Wait, “men” was wrong. Eighty men and elves
were out there, spread in a circle around the house, with another
group around my car. The ward was torn in two places, so I assumed
that’s where they got in.

Colbert looked at me and said, “I can give
you three pulses. That’s thirty seconds to get to your car. Then I
will counterattack. You have one minute to get off the property
before everything blows up. One minute only. Can you do that?”

I thought quickly, looking through the ward
at my car and the distance between it and the door. I dug the keys
out of my pocket and tossed them to Ethan.

“You will have to unlock the doors and pop
the trunk. There are twelve men surrounding the car and you’re more
apt to be able to do something about them than I am if something
goes wrong,” I said. He nodded then faced the glass door again. I
glanced quickly around the room. Nine grim and determined faces and
one smiling, amber-encased face. Colbert dropped three small rubies
on the floor in front of him as his men formed a six-person circle
around him.

“Ready?” he asked calmly. Without waiting for
an answer, he stomped on one of the crystals and a spire of ruby
red light shot up through his foot and through the ceiling. The
light shot outward in a pale ruby wall and as it passed Ethan, he
opened the door and followed it out quickly, Kieran and I right
behind him. Outside, the wave passed in front of us at the height
of the house like the tsunami, freezing everything in its path. In
the wave, both man and elf showed briefly in frozen tableau. We
were almost to the car when I heard the trunk pop open and the
doors unlock.

Then the second wave flashed from the house
and started rolling down the hill. Ethan crashed into something I
couldn’t see like a linebacker, clearing a path for us. I rounded
the car, lifting the trunk and dropping my box on the left, and
kept going to the driver’s side. Ethan was there first, kicking and
swinging wildly. The trunk slammed shut just as I opened my door. I
climbed in the driver’s seat with Ethan shoving himself in behind
me and slamming the ignition key into my hand. Neither of us was
worried about my comfort as he crushed me against the steering
wheel. As long as he cleared the door as I slammed it shut.

The third pulse flashed. Ten seconds was not
a lot of time. I jammed the key in the ignition and started the
car. Elves hit the car windows hard. Apparently, the ones Ethan had
attacked were able to fight off the affects of the ruby wave. I hit
reverse and peeled out, tires screaming. I slammed on the brakes
and shoved the gearshift to drive and faced a line of three elves
across the road with swords drawn. Twelve appeared as they decided
to drop their hiding spell, four elves and eight men with guns.

Then Colbert started his counterattack. I
heard a high-pitched whine and all four elves dropped their swords,
covering their ears with looks of intense pain. Automatic weapons
fire from the direction of the house startled the men enough to
make them duck and crouch, facing the house instead of us. I took
the cue and floored the accelerator, again peeling rubber from the
tires, screeching loudly. The ones in front of me jumped as quickly
out of the way as they could. I drove the winding road taking turns
too fast, clipping bushes and cutting across grass without concern.
I just wanted out. I swore I heard bullets hitting the sides and
back of the car and for God’s sake I just wanted out of there. The
gate to the property never looked so good.

It felt like an earthquake hit just as we
passed through. I slammed on the brakes and looked around, but we
were stable. Looking back in the rear window, I swear it looked
like a mushroom cloud. Not an earthquake then, an explosion. All
the way up to the gate, the whole property was on fire. Colbert
hadn’t gotten his minute, it seemed. I was in shock, looking back
at it. I looked at Kieran who was looking back, too.

“I’m sure he got away,” he said, soothingly.
“He’s a wily old pirate. He has his ways.” I’m not sure he believed
it anymore than I did. I started driving again, shell-shocked.

Chapter 7

We holed up at the Dugard Suite Hotel for the
night. Yeah, slumming it at two hundred a night. I’d driven the
loop around Atlanta for close to two hours on pure adrenaline,
which at 4:30 ya gotta have anyway, between the road construction
and the kamikaze commuters. By the time I started to come down from
that, I wasn’t in any shape to drive home. Besides, it wouldn’t
hurt to not be someplace expected tonight. Backward logic, but it
still worked.

Kieran asked for my wallet as we approached
the front desk. He pulled out my driver’s license, ran his thumb
over the front a few times, and handed it back to me. Kieran was
very business-like, asking for either a suite or adjoining rooms,
paying in cash up front, and having me fill out the information
card so I could have the receipt. That’s when I figured out why he
was doing what he was doing. I’d laid my license on the counter
between me and the form when I noticed my identity had been stolen.
I was suddenly Sean McCune and I lived ninety miles further south
now. Even the number had changed. He was lucky I didn’t break out
laughing. It would have been a hysterical laugh after all that’d
happened today.

“Sean McCune?” I asked when the elevator door
closed on the three of us and our boxes of information.

He just shrugged, grinning a little, and
said, “I’d just thought of it and I had to work fast. You’re the
only one of us that has identification and I didn’t even know what
it looked like to fake it.”

“Yeah, we’ll have to rectify that soon,” I
said as the doors opened. I led my band of box carriers to our
two-room suite. Ordered pizzas and drinks first thing. Then we all
dove into my stuff. It didn’t take long. Everything was well
organized: one file for school records that included standardized
tests, records of tutors in specialized areas of study,
immunization records. My parents never talked to me about grades
and neither had my teachers. According to this, I was a straight-A
student. By the time the pizzas arrived, I’d blown it off to being
teacher’s pet. I was home schooled after all.

Another file was all bank account
information. There wasn’t much we could get out of this without a
computer. Couldn’t access any information at all except online.
Others were marked “In Person,” which I thought sounded ominous.
Then a book of envelopes with safety deposit box keys from
different banks in different cities around the world. Nothing to
say what was in those boxes either, just bank names and box
numbers. The last file was real estate holdings. More deeds and
things like that.

Now I’m a mogul. I’m gonna have to start
paying taxes. I need to hire somebody. Great. I can see the ad now:
Needed: CPA to manage finances for 17yo naïve virgin real estate
mogul and wizarding student. Must look wolfish. Name your own
salary and still embezzle away. I’d get a computer first and at
least try to know what power I was giving away.

We packed it all back up just in time for the
pizza arrival and set the box beside the door. I tipped the driver
an extra twenty for walking up. He didn’t have to—he could have
just called from the lobby.

Kieran pulled the lid off the other box while
we ate. Lying on top was a scorecard of sorts, a list of names.
Eyeing the files stuffed into the box, I understood why Colbert did
that. It was going to take days, maybe weeks, to go through
everything and there was no telling if it would even be worthwhile.
Kieran put the list on the table between us.

“We knew those two were involved somehow,” he
said, tapping the first two on the list, Summer and Winter.
Seasons?

“That’s mom’s father, my grandfather,” I
said, pointing to the fifth name on the list.

“This man was a troublemaker in the European
Council eighty years ago,” said Kieran of another name, “or maybe
this is his son.”

“And that name seems familiar, but I can’t
place it,” I said, tapping the name of a U.S. Marshal. A Marshal?
The Government is against me?

“So we might need an interpreter for the
information we just got,” Kieran said, forlornly looking at the box
on the floor. “And we have no idea who to trust.”

All of us sat in silence chewing, drinking
our warm drinks, and staring at the list of names until we’d
polished off two of the three pizzas.

“What about Peter?” asked Ethan after a few
minutes.

“Borland?” I asked. It was from Peter and his
father that I learned to make my firecrackers. He had been a
history and anthropology tutor a few years back and he’d brought
Peter with him for the time he stayed with us. I’d walked up on
them in the woods one day near my house in Savannah while he was
showing Peter how to do something. I didn’t see exactly what they
were doing as they saw me fairly quickly but I saw enough that I
could make a little noise. With practice, I learned to make even
more noise.

“Yeah,” Ethan said, “He always had a computer
with him and he probably at least knows who those people are. And
he’s young enough to have stayed out of the politics of it,
wouldn’t he? Or is that naïve?”

“Naïve,” Kieran confirmed.

“And why would he help us?” I asked.

“Because he’s a good guy,” said Ethan,
looking at me with eyebrows raised. He was, after all, giving me my
own opinion. Mr. Borland and Peter were both really nice people,
affable and polite. Peter was always helpful to the few household
staff that held the large house together. And he always had his
laptop with him even though he never had it open when I was around.
He brushed it off as having nothing but dry history texts on it
whenever I would ask, which wasn’t often.

“Could it hurt?” I asked Kieran.

“It could, or it could give us a friend,” he
answered, shrugging. He was leaving it up to me. Great.

I decided to go for it and powered up my cell
while I dug through my box of records for the Borland’s number.
Then I stared at the number trying to come up with what to say. I
still didn’t know when I punched in the number. It rang five times
before anyone picked up.

“Hello?” answered a male voice, a little out
of breath. Trance music was playing loudly in the background.

“Hello,” I started, “May I speak with Peter
Borland, please.”

“You got him. ‘Sup?” he answered,
breathlessly.

“Hi, Peter, this is Seth McClure. I wonder if
I can have a few minutes of your time?” I asked.

I heard a door slam on his end, then the
music abruptly shut off. “Seth, did you know that a lot of people
are looking for you and your parents?” Peter asked.

“I’m finding that out, yes,” I said. “I’m
looking for my parents myself.”

“Are you on your cell phone?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, throwing a concerned look at
Kieran.

“Listen carefully, Seth,” he said,
forcefully. “Some of the people looking for you can track you by
your cell phone. When I was at your house, we talked about going to
several places. Do you remember them?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking back to those
conversations. There were actually a few places he could mean.

“Meet me at the smaller one in the big city
at dawn,” he said. “Right now, you need to throw your phone in a
bucket of water and leave. Wherever you are now, run.”

He hung up.

I stared down at the phone in my hand for a
moment, then looked up at Kieran and Ethan.