Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (17 page)

“Seth, you all right?” asked Peter
quietly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just hit that power line
wide open. Wasn’t expecting it.” I brought the line into my cavern
away from my center. It looked to me like a long thick line of
pinkish putty that stretched to infinity into the darkness of the
cavern. A perfectly reasonably three dimensional
representation of unrealistic space. I grabbed the imaginary line
with imaginary hands and tugged on it like taffy. It stretched and
flowed through my fingers and I started looping it then coiling it
through the air between my hands. It was fun playing with the
patterns.

“Where am I going?” Peter asked, turning down
the main road toward Atlanta, hitting the gas hard.

“I hadn’t thought that far,” I said, quietly,
turning to Ethan. “I didn’t expect this to work.” Ethan was hugging
the passenger seat with his eyes closed. I kept coiling the line in
my mind, creating various geometric figures with the energy, taking
liberties with junctions. Partitioning that off for a moment, I
considered our next step. Kieran needed attention. Whatever Ethan
was doing wasn’t working. We needed a hole to crawl in and home was
too far.

“We need to find a motel, some place away
from here but not too far. We have to see to Kieran. Pick one at
random. We’ve got the cash.” I fell back in the seat, tired. I
played with the pink string with my mind absently like it was in my
hands, even after I felt the ends snap off in the distance. I
reached out for another line as we drove by, this one a brilliant
blue but thinner. Twining the new line in with the pink, I created
patterns within the lines of the shapes then released it. The
brilliant blue energy continued its trek with the bright pink on
its endless circuit that I was holding in my mind.

“Peter, what did we just do?”

He sighed heavily behind his hand. “Well,
everything you said to Harris was correct, I think. He doesn’t have
a legal leg to stand on, but I’m not an attorney. I don’t know what
happened in the house yet, but you came out splattered in gore
waving two big-assed Swords—man, you were scary as hell! Then you
made the Swords just disappear. I thought we were goners. You
actually have both the Night and Day of the Black Hand. I thought
somebody sold you a bill of goods when you told me that, but if
they’re not, damn!”

I had no idea what he meant so I let him
rattle for a few minutes. I felt the next line coming up on the
right, underground. I reached out and grabbed for the thick line
but it disappeared wherever I tried touching the pale lilac. It
evaporated instantly. Yet it still flowed evenly through the dirt
and rock. I cupped both imaginary hands underneath the line and
gently lifted. It moved into my mind as a huge tunnel of lilac. The
energy was far less dense than the other lines but no less
powerful. Instead of trying to pull power out of this line, I
brought the structures into it and pulled energy, peppering the
five shapes I held with motes of the line before releasing it. The
glowing shapes were fascinating to see, even if not the most color
coordinated.

“How about this one?” Peter asked, slowing
the car to turn.

Looking out the window at the hotel he was
turning for, I mumbled, “Yeah, looks good,” then checked the dash
clock. We’d been driving for over an hour. It felt like minutes.
Ethan stabilized Kieran’s condition but wasn’t able to make any
headway in making him better. He still hugged the passenger seat
with one arm around Kieran’s chest. But his eyes were open now. He
was watching me, not saying anything.

A sudden thrumming took my attention back to
the five power structures in my head as the car jostled over the
curb. They were starting to flex in the wrong way, holding too much
force in the paths I’d created. The noise got louder in my head and
started to hurt. The blue helix banding in one started oscillating
slowly. This didn’t look good. I cast around on the energy plane
for a line to ditch the energy onto, but only one, a very weak one,
showed in the distance. Another structure picked up the
oscillations like a tuning fork. That hurt more, too. I started
shuffling the pieces around like it was a game of Three-Card Monty
with two extra cards, just trying to slow the next resonance,
fearing they’d explode and not knowing what that would mean to my
head.

That’s how I noticed it, noticed how the
second bands, the brilliant blue ones, were projecting on the pink
and how the motes of lilac where shifting slightly to accommodate
them when they moved. Projecting was the right word—I’d seen this a
few years ago when Dad was showing me stuff about topography and
drafting. It was projecting from one plane onto another. I made an
intuitive leap then. That’s the cool thing about standing in your
imagination: that you can do stuff here that you can’t do in real
life. I squashed one dimension of the five shapes and drew out the
projections onto the one I squashed. They weren’t pretty, but it
worked and suddenly they fit together, locking perfectly into place
with each other. Then I let go of the squashed dimension I was
holding and it snapped into place in my mind, no longer oscillating
or humming and no longer pink or blue or lilac. And it hurt to look
at, but I could feel it just fine and it didn’t feel like it was
gonna explode now.

Peter was getting back in the car when I
looked out the window. It occurred to me that I had felt the car
moving over the curb, but nothing between that and now. I’d have to
be more careful in the future when I’m playing in my cavern. I’d
never gotten this easily distracted before, but obviously, it was
possible now. Peter pulled the car around to the backside of the
hotel.

Still early in the day, there were two
families packing up their cars to leave, fathers joking with each
other about a shared sports rivalry, children playing on the
sidewalk, harried moms directing fathers and corralling the
children. We had to go through the middle of them somehow. Peter
got out of the car and helped me drag myself out. I was so tired.
It’s been a long, long two days.

We moved to the passenger side to help with
Kieran. Ethan slid out first, right hand still planted on Kieran’s
chest. I felt Peter reaching for power and not finding a ley line
near. He pushed himself harder, barely sensing the line I felt
earlier and trying to draw that power to him. He wasn’t strong
enough, though, and I didn’t know what he was trying to do. I had
plenty of stored energy so I tugged slightly on my newly formed
structure that hurt to look at and a fine line of blue appeared. I
fed that to Peter’s reaching power. I heard him gasp loudly and
turned to look around.

“Too much?” I asked, quietly, seeing the
image of an elderly man snap over Kieran as Ethan moved him out of
the car. Peter had both placed an image over him and was levitating
him upright, so that it looked like we were helping an elderly man
instead of an unconscious one. Kieran was bobbing slightly in the
air as Peter fought for control of the levitation and Ethan held
him in place. Several of the children watched curiously, keeping
their distance. We started toward our rooms as quickly as we
could.

“It felt like a very strong ley line just
popped into existence,” said Peter in a whisper. “Right on top of
me. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“It did,” said Ethan quietly. “Seth fed you
that line.”

“What?” both of us asked at the same time,
for different reasons. I touched the energy I’d thrown to Peter,
what felt like a tiny portion of what I’d stored away. The
difference between what was going out and flowing back was almost
negligible. Peter was gawking at me. I’ve had a lot of that today.
Taking the room key from Peter, I moved ahead of them and unlocked
the door.

Entering the room, I turned on the lights and
ran for the bathroom and grabbed all the towels. Peter dropped the
pretenses as they got Kieran through the door and had shifted him
horizontally toward the first bed, dropping the disguise
completely. I darted over and spread a few towels out underneath
him before Peter got Kieran down. We had to clean him up which
meant we’d have to clean what he was lying on too. Dumping the
remaining towels and wash cloths on the second double bed, I
grabbed the ice bucket on the dresser and went to the tub, filling
the bucket half full with water as hot as I could stand. When I
came out of the bathroom, Peter was missing and I noticed a door
beside the dresser for the first time. It was open revealing
another door with no handle. Within a second, Peter opened the
door, carrying the towels from that room. I released the breath I
didn’t know I was holding.

Ethan was kneeling beside the bed staring at
Kieran’s unconscious body. I told myself I was not going to cry
while I bathed him. Kicking my shoes off, I climbed up on the bed
of the far side of Ethan and knelt down to start swabbing. I
glanced over at Ethan several times but he seemed not to
notice.

“Ethan,” I said finally, wringing out a hand
towel and laying it across Kieran’s chest. “Talk to me. What’s
going on?”

“I do not know what to do,” he said. “I
cannot fix this. I can keep him exactly as he is, but I cannot help
him.”

“Why?” I asked. Peter moved in with another
bucket of water and started washing on the other side. He was
nervous, worried, concerned, and intensely curious. It was written
all over him. I didn’t have the energy to put into deciding which
emotion went with what problem at the moment.

“Peter,” Ethan said, sitting back on his
heels, hands on his thighs. He looked fresh as a daisy except in
his eyes. His eyes looked really old right then and I really
couldn’t tell you why. “I need your help. I need you to help me
convince Seth of how many miracles he’s performed today and how he
should try for one more.”

He was looking directly at me while he said
it. Both Peter and I stopped bathing Kieran for a moment, staring
at Ethan. I didn’t see anything I’d done as being particularly
miraculous. Peter had levitated Kieran, for God’s sake.

“Well,” Peter said, glancing over at me and
rinsing out a cloth. “First there’s riding on the hood of a car
into a government safe house by crashing a majorly powerful ward.
Then escaping with your comatose brother and his friend by creating
a Faraday cage around one of the most powerful combat wizards in
the country. I’d call that miraculous.”

Ethan turned to Pete calmly and said, “You
missed the part where Seth projects his consciousness through a
point attached to his soul into the realm I exist in my natural
state. It is a state… in between states. He should not have been
able to do that. He should not have been able to find the anchor at
all. It is a point.” He turned back to me with that cherubic smile
again. “In the escape, all I did was carry Kieran to the car. You
protected Peter while you took on a whole house of an unknown
number of people and got us out. Then you had a shouting match with
the head honcho and won by basically flipping him off and stealing
his thunder. He was gonna put you in your place, by God! Well, he
got his gun, but you stole his bullets.” He grinned at me. “A
Faraday Cage, man, you put Harris and at least five others in a
magical Faraday cage in the middle of a pitched battle! That was
fuckin’ awesome.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said, mildly
irritated, “and I doubt I could do it again. They were being
stupid.”

“And the last miracle you performed,” Ethan
said, his big blue eyes centering on me again, “the power he gave
you, Peter, the line? Do you know where he got it?”

Peter and I gently rolled Kieran back and
forth to clean his back and neck. Not an easy task—Kieran is big.
We were down to his lower half and I was not looking forward to
below the waist at all.

“No, but that was a buttload of power,” said
Peter, standing and gesturing for my bucket. I handed him the ice
bucket of dirty water and cloths to rinse as well.

“Ethan, I don’t know what you’re getting at,”
I interrupted him, leaning back on one arm while I waited for
Peter. “But all I did was what I had to do to get y’all back as
soon as I could, and from the looks of it, I wasn’t fast enough.
The only reason you are here talking to me is because you can pop a
new body into reality. Kieran can’t.”

“Seth,” Ethan said softly, “You created a
multi-dimensional battery in your head in less than an hour without
help from anyone. And I don’t think you even know what a ley line
actually is. That is what that thing in your head is. And it is
fully charged. I watched you do it. This is not something that I
could do. Not because I lack the knowledge or the ability, but
because I would not have thought of doing it.”

“A multi-dimensional battery?” Peter asked as
he came back with cleaned steaming buckets and towels.

“Ethan had asked me to catch and release ley
line energy while we were running from the house,” I said, taking
the bucket and towels. “I kinda lost track and started building
patterns with it. Before I knew it, I had a ton of it built up and
nowhere for it to go. There isn’t a line near enough to here for me
to dump it on but the patterns I made locked together nicely into a
smaller package and stopped threatening to explode. That’s the part
I liked, the not exploding my head.” As I pulled Kieran’s leg
toward me, I was thankful that they’d made at least some effort to
keep him clean. I guess they didn’t want to deal with the
smell.

“But that was an active line…” Peter said,
looking at me confused.

“Yes, it was,” said Ethan, smiling
slightly.

“What does that matter?” I asked.

“If it was stored energy,” Peter explained,
“it should have been more passive. It would have felt like you. You
‘filtered’ it.”

Ethan added, “Like in your office the other
day, when you could tell which of the two of us was moving the
chair.”