Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (67 page)

“If Ethan is hurt,” asked Cahill, “Why didn’t
you bring him back with you?”

“Because you can’t help him,” I snapped and
regretted it instantly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cahill. Ethan is receiving
all the care he can get from us at the moment.”

“And Lucian?” asked Gordon. “Who is he,
exactly?”

“The leader of a small colony of humans,”
answered Kieran. “Several families lived there for a long time.
Reclusive and private with few visitors, they had a fair amount of
trade, considering. Nothing particularly amazing about them.”

“Except that they were heavily targeted,”
said Cahill. “Why?”

Kieran shrugged. “If Lucian knows, he hasn’t
said.”

I almost laughed at the way he dodged the
question. He wasn’t lying but he wasn’t truthful either.

Gordon stiffened, eyes glazed, then said, “A
car is at the east gate. It’s Harris. He’ll be back here in ten
minutes.”

“Bring the defenses up a notch, will’ya,
lad?” Cahill said.

“Yes, Da,” Gordon said, robotically. I felt
another rush of power pulse through the nearest ley line. Through
the windows, the lights of the castle dimmed noticeably. Farther
out, I could feel something like sentry posts being established in
the outlying areas of the grounds, points of heightened awareness
in key positions that watched for trespassers. Closer to the house
the awareness-coverage was absolute, but it was a large property.
John entered the observatory as Gordon relaxed.

“We’ll be running wary for the next few
weeks, John,” said Cahill without preamble. “And we’ll be having
more guests for the night, so please see to accommodations.” John
nodded and left again.

“What do you want to tell Harris?” asked
Cahill.

Kieran answered, “As little as we can get
away with. Nothing about Ethan.”

“Harris isn’t going to be difficult anyway,”
said Peter, shaking his head. “It’s everyone else that’s going to
be hard to convince. I was there and I barely believe it.”

That was an interesting point. I dropped part
of my attention down into my cavern and pulled the first curse from
memory, an active version, not the clipped, branded version, and
started toying with it.

“He has a point, Da,” agreed Gordon, waving
his hand at the still floating images of the curses as if they were
in real space. “Really, these look like so much gibberish to me.
I’m not denying they’re real and do what you say, but others
will.”

“Oops,” I said. The curse started drawing
power. Well, Gordon wanted to see it work, so I pushed it out onto
the energy plane and planted it on a chair on the far side of the
room. Making sure Shrank was nowhere near it, I pushed more power
into the curse and said, “Fire in the hole.”

The chair exploded. It was pretty loud, too,
and I recognized Kieran’s touch as a shield contained the damage
around the conflagration. It only lasted a few moments and the fire
was out. When Kieran pulled his influence away, only ash remained.
I looked for Gordon’s reaction.

“So much for gibberish, eh, Gordon?” laughed
Cahill, turning in the chair to look at his son. “Pick your jaw off
the floor before Harris walks in.”

“Sorry about the chair, Mr. Cahill,” I said.
“I was trying to see if I could pin it down for show. I guess being
in the middle of a ley line isn’t the best place to try that sort
of thing.”

“No,” said Kieran, chuckling. “But you got
one convert.” He walked to the desk and picked up the stack of his
clothes, going into the bathroom. Peter followed a few moments
later and waited by the desk while Kieran changed. Gordon studied
the astral structures while Cahill used a little magic to reheat
his stew.

“Do you understand these things?” Gordon
asked me.

“Only parts,” I admitted. “The power siphons,
the motivators, for instance. I can see where the trigger is but
not what causes it to finally activate. Flooding the power cells
will do it, but there are other things that’ll do it, too.
Proximity to others, that sort of thing.”

“Would you show me?” he asked. I pulsed the
sections of the image I understood as I ticked them off, explaining
what I knew, but stayed seated. I was still really tired. Meanwhile
Peter had taken the bathroom and Kieran had resumed his place on
the couch. Shrank landed on his shoulder, barely visible and took
off again with a brief nod from Kieran.

Harris burst through the observatory door in
an angry huff followed by two of his men. John was fast on his
heels. On his first step into the room, Harris shouted, “You
grounded my plane?”

Cahill said calmly, “Clifford, the McClures
have lent some credence to your claim and found both another curse
and the beasties that are causing all of them. I thought you might
want to know about that as soon as possible.”

“You grounded his plane?” asked Peter in a
stage whisper, passing behind Gordon to sit beside Kieran. “Way to
go, Gordon!”

Gordon shrugged, “They were taxiing into the
queue and Da said he wanted him here.”

“We are training our youth to take our
places,” said Kieran to Harris, grinning. “Think of it as Gordon
flexing his muscles.” That pretty much covered Gordon from any
reprisals from Harris, even verbal ones. Harris stopped at the
table between the couches, his colleagues, Calhoun and Bob, took up
position on either side a step back with their hands clasped in
front of them.

“May we?” he asked, gesturing at the astral
images. I turned the images to face them and I explained each one
in turn as we told our story. The gist of it was the truth, just
liberally excised of facts. I totally left out any mention of
Ethan’s current condition and, of course, any mention of the Pact.
I was also pretty sure that Kieran and Cahill were relying on “the
dumb teenager” to make their jobs easier. Harris was past that
tactic, but he had the courtesy to wait until I finished to point
that out.

“There are so many holes in that story you
could grate Parmesan,” he said gruffly, tossing his suit jacket on
the back of the couch next to me. He sat down sideways next to me
so I obliged him with a direct confrontation, turning sideways,
too.

“You guys got this?” I asked waving at the
images. “We’ve been looking at them a while now…” They all nodded
so I wiped the space clear. It was a huge relief for me, too.
Keeping the forms lit and active actually took control and effort
that I didn’t realize. I heard Shrank lightly land on the back of
the couch behind me.

“The borderlands are huge,” Harris said. “In
one day, you happen to find an unknown colony that has been overrun
by the bugs that deliver highly dangerous magical curses. You then
purge this realm of these bugs and save the only remaining person
alive from there. You’ve removed about four hundred insects from
the pool of potential delivery systems out of an unknown quantity.
Well done. Now, where’s Ethan?”

“Ethan is unavailable for a time,” I answered
keeping my face as expressionless as I could.

“Is he upstairs?” Harris pressed.

I sighed and looked at Peter plaintively.
“I’m done,” I said with aggravation. He smiled at my pitiful look
and switched places with me.

“I’m the last one who’ll talk to you, Mr.
Harris,” Peter said a faint smile as he took my place. “Please
don’t make me regret it.”

“Is Ethan upstairs?” he tried again.

Peter’s response was an expressionless,
“Ethan is unavailable for a time.”

“How were these ‘bugs removed’?” he asked.
Finally, he got a sense of a clue.

“K…” Peter paused a second. “Ehran and I
hunted down some in the gardens, but Seth blew most of them
up.”

“How did he do that?”

“He created several tornadoes and as they
passed through the smaller end, he initialized the curses then
overloaded their power cells. The few that remained after that he
killed with lightning, sorta. ”

“Sorta?”

“It was really ley energy, not atmospheric
lightning, but it was so generalized the bugs couldn’t home in on
him to stamp the curse to him. It was rather nicely done.”

I’m pretty sure I blushed at the compliment.
Harris looked over at me and started to ask me a question when
Peter tapped his leg, saying, “He’s not talking to you,
remember?”

I turned to Bob and said, “You guys may want
to grab some chairs. Looks like this may take a while.”

Calhoun and Bob were both amused and annoyed
at the situation and were trying hard not to show either emotion.
Letting them move as Harris continued questioning Peter allowed
them to better hide the annoyance. And it was going to be a long
evening if Harris couldn’t find better questions. Besides, we had
some of our own to ask.

John came in with a silver tray in one hand
and a broom and a long-handled dustpan in the other, obviously
intended for the chair I’d destroyed. I jumped up when I saw that,
taking the broom from him. “I destroyed it,” I said. “The least I
can do is sweep up the mess.” Poor John was mortified as I shooed
him away. A pair of wingtips stepped into view as I swept up the
last of the ash.

“What did you do?” asked Calhoun, smirking.
He’d brought the chair from the desk over since most of the other
chairs were large and cumbersome.

“I blew up his chair a little while ago,” I
said lightly. “Gordon wanted to see one of the curses in action, so
I obliged.” Calhoun’s snicker was cut short when a large book fell
off the top shelf of the case behind, thunking him on the back of
the head then landing on the floor.

“Gordon,” squeaked Shrank from the top of
Cahill’s chair, “You may want to get that shelf looked at. That’s
the second time today a book has fallen off.” From appearances,
Shrank was cleaning his fingernails with his sword and had been for
awhile. I turned quickly back to sweeping up ashes, trying to
stifle my snickering, while Calhoun continued across the room,
grumbling and rubbing the back of his head.

John lifted the lid off his tray and
presented Cahill with a fresh steaming bowl of stew, much to
Cahill’s delight. “I’ll have more supper for our guests shortly and
coffee, tea and brandy momentarily,” John said.

“Thank you, John,” said Cahill, beaming at
him as if he’d received manna from heaven. “And please thank Ronnie
for me as well.”

“Not a chance, sir. I sneaked it out when she
wasn’t looking,” said John, turning and coming to me for the broom
and dustpan.

“Let me shorten this verbal dance you seem to
want so badly, Harris,” said Kieran tersely. “Yes, there is a
previous relationship between Lucian and me through my father.
That’s why we went there in the first place. No, you don’t get to
know that relationship nor do you get to know why Lucian’s group
was there, or even who else may have been a member of said group. I
believe that your government professes to believe in the right to
privacy. These people were no more subversive than Felix or me. My
one and only goal is to find my father. Seth and I are hunting down
every lead we can to achieve that goal. Along the way, we are
finding some very interesting and alarming information. We’ve made
some friends and discovered some enemies. Felix is soundly on one
side and you’re on another. You’re trying to change that. In honor
of that, we’re throwing you a bone. You have to accept that there
are things you just don’t get to know. Just as I’m sure, you have
things I don’t get to know. Am I right?”

“Quite reasonable, yes,” said Harris. He
wasn’t quite squirming but it was a close call. He took advantage
of the change of focus, though. Harris asked Kieran, “Your father
was rumored to heading to the Courts. Did you make it there?”

“No, we didn’t go to either Court,” said
Kieran.

“So what makes you believe now that the Fae
are preparing to war against us?” Harris asked.

“I don’t,” said Kieran. “The Fae are already
at war with someone else. Someone who is doing the same thing to
them that is being done to us: eroding our power base. From my
father’s records, what little we have, and including Lucian’s
group, over the past ten years close to five hundred master-class
mages have been killed or died under mysterious circumstances, half
that number in the last year. That’s just what I know about. And
you’re mucking about making it easier on them.”

Harris didn’t seem convinced.

Cahill decided to have a go at him. “I think
you’re thinking about this the wrong way, Cliff. Ehran isn’t saying
that the elves are our friends, only that we share a common enemy.
So far, that enemy has remained hidden and hidden well. We need to
find that enemy, man, elf, or other, and show his face.”

“I can accept that,” said Harris after a
moment. “So what do you want to do now?”

~ ~ ~

That discussion went on for several hours as
Cahill and Harris decided who should be included in their “war
council” and why. Kieran wouldn’t let us leave, saying that this
was the political life and we had to get used to it, as boring as
it was. We’d have to know these people sooner or later.

He did let me visit my mother during one
extended break. She’d woken briefly shortly after I left that
morning, even though the staff hadn’t expected her to. That’s twice
just talking to her had helped. But she’d already gone to bed for
the evening when I got there. I was both relieved and disappointed.
I also spoke to Lucian’s doctor while I was there. She was a
chipper woman who happily said Lucian’s physical problems were
fairly quickly solved, but the mental issues surrounding the trauma
he’d suffered would take quite a bit longer. Pretty much what we
expected to hear.

When I went back to Mother’s room, I found
Lucian sitting in the ori-chair beside her bed. He’d screened off
the room so that no one could see what he was doing, which really
should have alarmed me but it didn’t. Once I stepped through the
screen, I could tell instantly what he was doing: gently
manipulating the Pact cache back to one piece. He was doing what I
couldn’t.