Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (20 page)

The reports said he was supposed to meet my
mother again in January about a hospital in New Orleans, her
hometown, and support for several orphanages in South America. Her
plane landed in New Orleans, but she never made it to see him. Dad
saw him apparently, a few days after that. It was a violent meeting
from all accounts. Harris’ name showed up once. The police reports
regarding the incident said that Dad had argued with my grandfather
in a New Orleans hotel convention center two days after my mother
should have met with him. Harris was a witness to the events that
included my father being dragged off the premises by bodyguards
while shouting curses at my grandfather. Shortly after that, a
series of accidents occurred to my grandfather that Colbert’s
people attributed to my Dad based on these reports.

I sat back in the chair and thought about
everything I’d read about my grandfather. Before I moved on, I
wanted to get a picture of him as the reports read against what I
recalled. It didn’t take long; I didn’t have much to base a
comparison. My father wasn’t the man in these files, I knew that.
But I also knew he was more than what I knew of him. A lot more,
with a lot more children for example. Then I hit on another issue
that nagged at me: the police reports from the eyewitnesses were
surprisingly similar. Even Harris’, which didn’t mention his status
with the Marshals at all.

Time to look at Harris a lot more closely. I
started with looking up what a Marshal is. That required linking to
the Internet and jumping to a site on the Web. As I read, I was
angered that Harris had been able to attach himself to such a group
of law-enforcers, but I suppose everybody is in danger of cancerous
cysts like him. Still didn’t like him or respect the power his
office gave him. Closing off the connection, I looked at his
resume. It was impressive for its length, but everything else was
lost on me. I didn’t recognize any of his accomplishments, though I
suspected they supported Peter’s assessment of his combat skills.
He was deputized as a Marshal in the late fifties according to
these records, so I was curious to know how he was maintaining the
illusion that he would be in his early seventies and served
continuously. There were several pictures of him in his office over
the years. He rarely changed expressions in the pictures, only his
clothes and the furniture, usually he stood in front of a trophy
case.

This man has given me every reason to hate
him. Not that I didn’t, I just couldn’t allow myself to feel it. If
I let myself feel the hate then I’d get angry when he wanted me to
and then he’d own me at his discretion. He could get whatever
reaction he wanted or needed from me. I couldn’t let that happen. I
needed control of myself. This man made himself an enemy to my
family and me. Why?

Most of Harris’ records we had were receipts
from expense accounts. No explanations were included and no salary
records, no address of any kind. Still, it put him in certain
places at certain times. Like Gulfport in August. And New York in
January. I dug into the New York receipts and tracked through all
the dates. Hotel receipts where he consistently had breakfast in
his room in the morning and dinner downstairs in the evening from
the nineteenth through the thirtieth. The date on the police report
was the twenty-second.

“Do we have photocopies of the police reports
from New Orleans for January?” I asked aloud.

Peter looked up in a daze, saying, “I don’t
remember any police reports.” He reached down to the floor near his
feet, sliding the chair back, and tugged the box forward on the
floor between us. Movement obviously cured his daze as he lifted
the lid off the box and peered inside.

“Okay, what are we looking for?” he asked,
looking up at me over the box.

“First, copies of all police reports from an
incident in New Orleans on January twenty second involving my
father and grandfather, specifically, the report by C. Harris. Then
secondly, the receipts for the same time period of Marshal Clifford
Harris, which according to the computer records, puts him in New
York.”

“Here’re Harris’ receipts,” he said, pulling
out a thick manila envelope and handing it to me. “There are
several sets of hotel bills. The dates are usually circled at the
bottom. I’ll have to search for the police reports.” He started
pulling the envelopes out of the box and laying them on the floor
beside him. I opened my envelope and slid the contents out
carefully on the table.

“In the files on the computer,” I said, “the
police reports were linked in my grandfather’s records, if that
helps.”

“We need more chairs,” muttered Kieran from
the bed as he tried to wedge himself against the wall and balance
the laptop at the same time. “These police reports do read
remarkably similarly for eyewitnesses.”

“I thought so, too,” I said, locating the
hotel records among the ream of photocopies. “I also wondered if
there was any kind of newspaper write-up about it, considering how
big some of the names involved were.”

“I’ll look,” chimed Ethan.

I found the records I was looking for and
verified that Harris had indeed stayed within the patterns he’d
set. Breakfast in his room and dinner in the hotel restaurant, for
the entire time. I couldn’t tell if he ate alone at night or not,
but dinners were always expensive. I looked to Peter as I collected
the papers to return to the envelope. He’d found some police
reports and had spread them out in front of him over the envelopes
he’d laid out.

“What’d ya find?” I asked him.

“Well, these are similar,” he said looking
up, “but not remarkably so. And no C. Harris.” He handed the first
two up to me and continued reading the third. Kieran moved to the
closer bed with his laptop, abandoning his wedged pillows to look
at the reports. I handed him the first when I finished reading
it.

“This isn’t the same report,” I said,
starting on the second.

“And I don’t even see a mention in the
newspapers,” said Ethan, moving closer to the group, his laptop
showing a picture of my grandfather with some people I didn’t know
by name that looked vaguely familiar holding a giant check. “But
St. Croix shows up four days later in Baton Rouge with a large
donation from private investors ‘to help rebuild the
infrastructure’ around New Orleans. Whatever that means.”

“Wait,” I said, looking back at the picture.
The check had an emblem on it, in the corner. “What’s that?” I
asked moving closer to the screen partly across Kieran to point at
it. I’d seen that emblem before.

Kieran said, “That’s MacNamara’s sign. Why is
MacNamara’s sign on a human check?” I turned to gawk at Kieran. I
wasn’t sure exactly what bothered me more, that he knew the emblem,
that he implied it wasn’t human, or that I hadn’t made my own
connection yet.

“Who’s MacNamara?” I asked, falling back in
my chair. I was excited to be making some sort of headway.

“Seth!” Ethan barked sharply at me. “Let go
of the line!”

“What?” I asked, startled.

“Let. Go. Of. The. Line.” he said again. He
punctuated each word for emphasis.

Oh, I was twiddling my imaginary fingers in a
ley line. For hours now, subconsciously connecting to different
lines nearby. I’d amassed a huge amount of energy. So huge I was
beginning to dent the energy plane, even hidden behind whatever was
hiding me. I could feel Ethan and Kieran’s probing touches seeking
out the location of the energy as I switched off the connections to
four different ley lines. Four different lines. I couldn’t believe
I’d done that, especially considering the fourth line looked so far
away it could have been in Tennessee for all I could tell. On the
energy plane, I was a nimbus of color, outshining the nearby ley
lines, but they had pulled back from me, still tracing their
original routes but reduced greatly in flow.

I started pushing the energy I had been
playing with onto the plane, separating the four colors and pushing
them toward their original lines. As each line began approaching
its original flow rate, it started getting harder to push the
energy onto the plane. That seemed to break the laws of
conservation of energy until I realized it wasn’t a closed system.
I had to find a place to put this. The remaining string was still
huge, a twisted braid of four bright, nearly pastel colors. I
brought my battery over and shoved the end of braided string into
one end. Nothing happened. Shifted to the other end and it started
sucking the string down as fast as I could feed it in. It didn’t
take long before I had to push a bit. I stopped at an imaginary
line I’d drawn in my mind about how much was too much. This place
is somehow linked to my mind and soul and therefore body so I erred
on the side of caution. More than half remained.

I was still panicky. How big of an explosion
would this make? The pressure was still huge in my head and I had
no idea why I couldn’t feel it before. Would I just kill myself?
The room? The block? I looked into Kieran’s eyes, pleading for
help.

“I need help,” I said, sounding panicky and
with good reason. “I’ve gotta lot of energy here I can’t get rid
of.” I was starting to feel panicky, too. Having seen ley lines all
my life I could accept their existence, but manipulating their
energies like this was still new and mind boggling.

“Okay, Seth, try to stay calm. How much
energy are you talking about?” asked Kieran evenly.

“How do I measure it?” I asked.

“Believe it or not, by the yard,” said
Kieran. “As antiquated as that seems.”

“Does color matter?” I asked. “And thickness
of the rope? Will I need to untwist the braid? ‘Cuz that could take
some time.” I was new at this. I did not want to make a mistake.
Anxiety made the long ropy substance almost writhe in my mind. This
living energy was part of a beginning and an end, and I had better
damn well give it a place to be soon or it was gonna get mad!
That’s what it felt like, anyway.

“Seth, trust me enough to let me in,” said
Kieran, with a touch of panic of his own. He hadn’t expected that
kind of question from me at all. “Let me see your space for a
moment.” He moved from the bed to kneel between my knees, his hands
on my thighs. With a sidewise smile on his face, Ethan turned to
say something to Peter, but was met with a glare I only saw a part
of that stopped all but the smile. I put my hands on Kieran’s.

“How? What do I do?” I asked. I swallowed
nervously. “I’m a little green at this, remember?”

“The Stone is blocking me, I believe,” he
said, fixing his eyes tightly on mine. “Just tell the Stone to let
me in. You will feel me touch you, just draw that touch in. Just
like the ley line energy.” I wondered what else the Stone would do
for me that it didn’t do for the troll. It wasn’t much help for him
against Kieran then. But it was doing something now. I patted the
cool obsidian brick suddenly at my side.

Good job, I thought. But I need Kieran now,
so please let him in. I didn’t have to do anything for Kieran to
show up in a physical form near me. It took him three separate
attempts, really, with the first two coming into my surreality at
very odd perspectives, like an Eischer painting. He coalesced
beside me, smiling warmly at me then turning to the Stone’s brick
form and nodding respectfully. He was dressed in a simple, white
garment that looked like a gi: a wrap-around tunic with
three-quarter sleeves with white, loose pants tied at the waist and
ended slightly above the ankles. He took in the rest of the weapons
and the Pact with a glance then the center went flying away in the
distance as I took us to where I was working with the energy. I was
a little calmer with Kieran here so it wasn’t writhing as much. At
least until I saw the look on his face.

“That’s a lot of energy, Seth,” I heard him
say aloud. “You pulled all of this into this dimension in a few
hours?”

“More. I’ve gotten rid of some of it,” I
answered back. “Maybe thirty, thirty-five percent of it.”

“And none of us felt that pull?” he said,
surprised. “You have an amazingly light touch. Can you show me your
battery?”

It appeared between us, at our feet, looking
like an early twentieth century milk container in dull orange,
standing about two and a half feet tall and a foot diameter. It
still hurt to look at, like it didn’t belong here, even in my
imagination. Kieran picked it up, turning it, but it eerily always
seemed to stay in the same orientation, the same position, no
matter how he moved.

“Can you make another?” he asked.

I shrugged in both worlds. I hadn’t thought
of that. Taking the rope in my hands, I recalled the image of the
first of the five designs. I needed to change the pattern of the
stream I currently had to make this one into another battery. The
string ballooned and separated in front of me, allowing me to work
the individual streams together to form what I needed. It was a
much faster process this time as I twisted and braided the lines,
peppering with color where needed and beating back the dimensions
of individual plates so they would snap together. Total, it took
about ten seconds before I was feeding the newly created battery
new energy. Stopping at roughly the same point as with the first, I
looked at the remaining stream. A solid stream, I still can’t get
over that, about five hundred yards long in three colors. So I
started on a third battery and when I ran out of the colors I
needed I pulled from the other batteries. I pushed whatever energy
remained into the third and last battery and stood to look at my
work, my nerves finally relieved of the constant pressure.

“Can they be moved?” Kieran asked me.

“I suppose,” I said. “I can move them around
here easily enough.” Kieran reached down and pushed on one of the
milk bottles, sliding it to the side.