Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (41 page)

He jumped, startled. “Seth?” he whispered,
peering over his arms with bloodshot eyes. “Oh, God, not again!” he
cried out and shoved his head back down in his arms, sobbing
harder. The darkness lit up when pictures the size of billboards
appeared in the darkness all around us, millions of them all moving
in a circle around us. They were all of me—at least, all framed
around me. There was me in the Stone armor running past Ethan, me
ducking his spell, me on the hood of the car as we drove through
the neighborhood to get Ethan and Kieran. They went even further
back in time to when he and his father stayed at my house in
Savannah. Some centering on Ethan started showing up, then on
Kieran. Then of his family. His family took a while, too. There
were a few people I didn’t know. Over all, I’d say Peter had a very
pleasant life by the looks of these pictures.

“Shh, Peter, it’ll be all right. You’re in a
safe place now,” I whispered to him, squeezing his shoulders into
me. He suddenly wrapped his arms around me and shoved his head
against my chest, crying again. All I could do was hug him back and
try to comfort him until he calmed down some.

That’s when the Stone snapped a solid shield
wall around Peter and me. I looked up from Peter in the real world
to see what the Stone had seen as threatening. Obviously, my sense
of time was confused. We hadn’t even gotten off the field yet and
it felt like I’d been working on Peter for at least thirty minutes
now. Kieran and Ethan were facing away from me and were holding
some serious power ready.

“Ehran, do you need me?” I asked, quietly.
“I’m at a critical juncture here.”

“No, we can handle this,” Kieran answered
without turning around. I couldn’t see who or what was at issue,
but I asked the Swords to be ready regardless and loaded the
Crossbow. I turned back to Peter and sank back into the
darkness.

“Peter, buddy, we need to get you out of
here,” I said quietly. “We need to get you back home with us.”

Peter laughed once. “You can drag people out
of Hell, now?”

“Hell?” I asked, looking at the pictures
floating around us. “Peter, this isn’t Hell. This is your cavern,
your safe place. You just got stuck here when the Loa hurt you.
Peter, you did so well. You are such a brave man but you got hurt
so bad.”

“What do you mean, this is my cavern?” Peter
asked. “Why can’t I do anything if this is my cavern? You talked
like this would be a center of imagination, where I could do just
about anything.” He sniffled. I almost laughed at him. It was
endearing that he imagined himself being stuffed up after crying
for so long in an imaginary place.

“Peter, you’ve been severely traumatized, for
one thing,” I said, standing up and reaching for him to stand, too.
“For another, you’ve been cut off from your magic, probably at very
close to the same time as your intellect was hit. You’ve been cut
off from yourself. But even without that kind of resource to draw
on, look around you at what you’ve done here.” I wave my arm at the
pictures still shining at us.

“My torment, you mean,” he said, huddling in
on himself like he was cold. “Showing me everything I’ve lost.”

“Really? I thought it gave you reasons to
live,” I said, surprised. “You’re normally so upbeat.”

“I’ve tried. Over one hundred and
sixty three thousand things,” he said, sadly. “Anyway, you’re
just a figment of my imagination. Seth doesn’t need to come for me.
I’m nobody to him.”

“Peter, how can you say that?” I asked,
shocked at the statement. “You’re just as important to me as Kieran
and Ethan! I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.” This was getting
frustrating. I was definitely not going into psychiatry for a
living. This was too damn hard.

“I don’t know what to do here,” I said,
scratching my imaginary head as I stared at Peter. He was still
naked and hugging himself. I reached back along the path I’d
created by my earlier passage and pulled the battery in to us. I
pulled out about an inch of power from the battery and started
stretching the power strand out more thinly.

“What’s that?” Peter asked, coming in a
little closer. I felt that was a good sign, him showing interest in
something.

“This is the battery that was in your hand,”
I answered. “Mine are being used at the moment and I need some
power to show you what I need to help you.”

“That’s ley line energy?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, forcing the image of Peter’s
body onto the energy field with a translucency. Then I overlaid
that image with an image of his aura.

“I’ve never seen it quite like this before,”
he said. “It’s like you’re touching it.”

“You can. Here,” I said, tossing him a pinch
off what I was still holding. “Make some clothes or something.”
Peter played with the little ball of magic. I wanted to watch but
other matters pressed for attention. I checked the image against
the real image, a good match.

The Swords were starting to vibrate and hum
in a low voice. Not a good sign.

“Peter, this is where I need your help,” I
said. “We’re kind of on a deadline here. Kieran and Ethan are about
to get into an argument with someone and we’re caught in the
middle. Look here. Your body is working now. That, we got fixed.
The problem is that your soul was also attacked: here, here, and
here, specifically.” I pointed out the areas on the simulacrum I’d
made.

“Why does it hurt to look at?” he asked,
staring at the battery.

“I think it’s because it exists in more than
three dimensions at a time,” I said, trying to stay calm. “Peter,
please stay focused over here. I can’t bear to lose you again and
if I don’t hurry, I will. Please, Peter.”

“You sound so much like the real Seth,” Peter
said softly, chuckling a little.

“Dammit, Peter, would you see me for who I
really am?” I shouted at him. There was a lot of emotion in that
shout: grief, impatience, guilt, frustration, love, yearning, and
so much more. I lost control and all the feelings I’d been capping
and constraining came shooting out like a geyser. There was also
power in it. A whole lot of power came bursting to the surface.
Peter got to see my aura again, then, and how much it had changed.
I didn’t know I had changed, other than going invisible to people.
I could tell from his pictures, just before my outburst blasted
them to needle thin shards.

Once I’d contained myself again, the only
light in Peter’s cavern was the glow from the battery and a single
picture floating slowly toward me from the distance. I didn’t see
Peter immediately till he stood up behind the battery, hand on his
head like he’d hit it on something. I had to wipe away tears.
Imaginary or not, they made my vision blurry.

“Seth?” he mumbled. “Is that you?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that, yes,” I
said, helping him up.

“I can feel my body again,” he said,
confused.

I pushed my senses out into the darkness. I
was wrong before. It had a boundary, with “had” being the operative
word. My outburst of power had pushed on the boundaries and started
fractures that created pathways back to the rest of him.

“I’m not dead?” he asked.

“No, Peter, you’re not dead,” I answered,
distracted. I wasn’t sure this was good or bad. I had increased the
size of this space by my actions. Looking from the outside, I’d
almost filled the gaps completely instead of building new paths and
I didn’t know what that meant. And there were still two other areas
to deal with yet. We needed to get off the field so I could talk to
Kieran and Ethan about this. Maybe they knew what was happening.
Maybe they could help.

“You are so beautiful,” Peter said, staring
at me.

“What?” I said, startled at the
statement.

“Your aura. It’s so bright and strong. So
many colors swirling together. Not even your father’s is that
bright,” he said, staring at me, eyes glazed over somewhat.

“Peter, I need to leave for a short while, to
see what’s happening outside,” I said cautiously. “Will you be okay
if I leave you? I’ll be back. I promise.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. He cleared the
glazed look out of his eyes and looked around at the emptiness. “I
think I’m good now.”

I sighed in relief as I pulled back into my
body and took a step back away from Peter. Then I looked around to
take in what was happening on the field around me. It was not an
easy sight, being surrounded by a high-ranking caste of warrior
elves. Two, actually, with one on each side. Winter faced Kieran
and Summer faced Ethan. It looked like both groups had just backed
up a few steps, though I didn’t know why. The Princesses of each
group stood firm though, unimpressed by whatever had shocked their
fighters.

“The Day Sword belongs to the Seelie,
McClure. Give it back. Now,” said the Summer Princess to Kieran’s
back. Though she faced Ethan, the argument was with Kieran. Her
presence was fiery, literally—the grass was on fire around her.

“And the Night to Winter,” screeched the
Unseelie Princess, standing on an icy plate. “I tire of this. Take
them.”

My cue if I’d ever heard one. I knew that the
Stone was going to be an extremely powerful tool and I was
seriously having a love affair with it and its force fields. The
‘m’ was still reverberating in her mouth when I grabbed both the
Princesses with the Stone’s power and jerked them to me while
knocking every member of their teams’ feet out from under them and
shoving their shoulders forward into the ground and not letting up.
I held both of them tightly in front of me motionless with both
Swords out barely an inch from their chins, Night to Winter, Day to
Summer. Barely a quarter of a second had passed.

“What the Hell is wrong with you bitches?” I
yelled. I saw Kieran and Ethan whirl around. “We just came out of a
fight! Five to one, for God’s sake. And you, two of the most
powerful beings in the Shadowlands, chose now to pick a fight? When
it’s two against fifty? When they’re both exhausted from trying to
help a fallen friend? How cowardly can you get? Just… get out of my
sight!”

Then I just threw them over the walls. I
figured they were strong enough that they’d handle the fall
somehow. Didn’t really care that much, either. I let the other
elves up, too. I put the Swords away. I got the feeling they were
enjoying the day immensely.

“Leave, or I’ll toss y’all out, too,” I said
without looking at them. It may have looked like I wasn’t paying
attention, but that would have been a mistake. I was aware of where
they were and what they were doing. So were Kieran and Ethan and
each of them still had a dozen or so heavy spells loaded and ready.
Vicious looking magic that I definitely did not want to face. It
was no wonder that they took out the lion’s share of the Loa. Damn,
Peter and I were so lucky.

The crowd noise in the Arena tripled with
stamping and yelling. I really couldn’t tell if it was approval or
disapproval. It was just loud. I sat down beside the stretcher and
held on to Peter’s arm and hand again. Ethan started dismantling
his builds, smiling and shaking his head as he looked around
warily. Kieran was doing the same thing, but he looked like he was
actually laughing every once in a while. I pushed out onto the
astral again and into Peter’s cavern. I had to pull back once to
reorient myself—Peter was busy while I was pitching a hissy
fit.

Peter’s floor was a grid of black reflective
tile lined in yellow every two feet. He had created a lane through
the tile using pictures of his life, though calling them pictures
was an injustice. They were links into his memories, heuristics
really. That’s how my mind comprehended what his mind was doing
here. It was interesting to me that I just grasped this without
being taught, how much of this was purely instinctive. I was about
to pour some speed on and rush through Peter’s life when I noticed
an odd little twitch in the structure of the path. It wasn’t much,
really, just a slight turn that made me feel like a he’d skipped
ahead a few days.

So I kept walking, instead of running through
at the speed of thought. It made me feel very uncomfortable, like I
was spying on him. I didn’t notice anything else that felt or
looked wrong as I walked through his life and I was getting more
uncomfortable with spying. When I got to his eighth birthday and I
was once again going to rush through, it happened again: a little
twist in the path. Except it was such a little twist this time.
This time it was like watching a movie with a number of frames
removed. Removed. That’s what he’s doing, he’s removing memories he
doesn’t want.

“Peter, what are you doing?” I called out to
the darkness.

“Seth! You came back!” said Peter, beaming at
me, appearing in front of me on the grid as I looked at his eighth
birthday party.

“I told you I would,” I said, smiling back at
him. “But what are you doing here?”

“Well, it looked like the easiest way to
rebuild the links through to the two areas that the Loa attacked
would be to realign the experiences that caused the links in the
first place.”

“That makes a certain amount of sense,” I
agreed, carefully.

“I’m lining up the experiences,” he said with
nonchalance.

“Why have you edited them?” I asked.

“What?” he asked, feigning surprise. It even
showed in his aura outside. It was a very good job of faking it. I
might have been fooled if I hadn’t been so recently intimately
aware of Peter. I must handle this very, very carefully. Peter was
very fragile right now.

“Peter, why are you editing your memories?” I
asked again, softly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he
snapped at me.

This was not good. I started us walking again
through his life with pictures.

“Okay. Okay,” I said, as soothingly as I
could muster. “What do you think we need to do now?”