Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (70 page)

I felt Gordon draw heavily on the line that
ran through the park behind us. He gathered the energy to him until
he had cycles going around him. Once he built it high enough, he
cast it down the road creating a hundred thousand prisms in the
air, maybe more, filtering the light between the road and the
background behind the wrecked car. He was effectively screening us
out of view. It was an interesting solution.

“Y’all see where everybody is, right?” I
asked as we walked past the van and nearer the men. “Gordon, when I
relax my shield, will you be protected? If not, I need to know
now.”

“I can hold my own,” said Gordon, seriously.
“I will say I don’t want to do this.”

“Neither do we, my friend,” said Peter,
shaking his head. “Neither to do we.”

As we passed the step van, all four tires
blew unexpectedly, making Gordon jump. Peter grinned at him,
glancing sideways. He’d spiked their tires but hadn’t pulled on the
line as Gordon had. I kept forgetting that people couldn’t see the
power we held, just as they couldn’t see our auras, and certainly
couldn’t see the lodestone batteries. I held four now while Peter
held one. At some point soon, I was going to have to start asking
how many was too many, but that’s for another day.

We stopped just past the van and surveyed the
damage. Two van men each helping one of the convertible mages back
toward their transportation, unaware apparently that they weren’t
going anywhere on four flat tires. Maybe the wizards knew some
handy triple-A type spells. The wizards looked a bit worse for
wear, battered by the tumbling of the car before they could get
shields up, no doubt. Did my heart good. When they were around
twenty feet away and still hadn’t seen us, I decided it was time to
let them know we were there.

“So what exactly was the plan, here?” I
asked, loudly, arms crossed on my chest. Five heads snapped up at
my voice. One of the wizard’s heads just lolled forward loosely. It
was only partially a lie—he was dazed, but recovering faster than
he let on and gathering power slowly, through the ground.

“No’ you,” grumbled one of the van men. “I
wouldn’t’ve signed on if’n I’d known it was agin you.” I could
barely understand him through his accent but I saw the streaks of
fear run through him when he realized we were still here. Maybe it
was that I was still here. I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not
as he was partially hidden behind the recovering wizard. That, and
I could barely understand what he was saying.

“That’s not an answer,” I said dourly.
Without looking, I slowly tipped the side of the van over the
incline by using the Stone as a jack on both ends, tipping it over
onto its side into the ditch. Not an ounce of energy was exerted by
me that they saw. Gordon didn’t jump this time. “Care to try again?
Or do I get aggravated?”

The van men began extricating themselves from
the wizards hurriedly, babbling things like “We’re just the muscle”
and “We don’t know nuttin’” and “Please don’t hurt me.” The more
injured wizard fell to his knees while the other one was able to
stay standing. I might have been more apt to believe them if they
hadn’t taken so long to notice us or, maybe, if they’d backed away
faster and more convincingly. As it was, I expected something to
happen, but I didn’t know from where—the injured wizard was too
obvious…

Even as I thought it, I felt him pull hard on
the line across the road and channel the energy down into the
grass. He was chanting something I couldn’t hear from this distance
as the grass blackened and smoldered around his hands, knees and
feet, growing together into a circle. The energy shot downward hard
in a ring of solid white when he looked up at us, shouting a word
that made no sense, but its intent was clear. Destroy. His aura was
a shambles once the spell was released. He was gonna hurt like hell
if he survived. I almost, almost, felt sorry for him.

Gordon started off angrily towards them just
as the van men changed their tunes and charged us at a run. Peter
just held him back by the shoulder while I calmly raised my arms
and brought out the Crossbow. I brought down of one of them on his
second step and two more on their third, one to the head and one to
the heart, each. It was sickening, but these people were trying to
kill me first. The other three had shields the normal bolts
couldn’t penetrate. And the remaining van man was closing.

Falling back into fighting stance, Peter let
go of Gordon, who raged forward to meet him. I’m sure it was really
stupid of me, but I watched him for a moment as he crashed into the
man’s shield and tore it to shreds. It was as if he had hard
crimson claws and just beat through it.

Gordon was a brawler. Doing pretty good at it
too. Peter helped him out with a kick to the back of the knee as he
moved by to deal with the first spellcaster. That left the quiet
one for me. He was closer to me anyway.

Stodgy dresser, greasy hair—this guy needed a
high school health class in a bad way. Even a quick flip through a
Sears catalog could improve his wardrobe. But, he hasn’t quite been
still so much as subtle and quiet. You wouldn’t think that would be
possible just by looking at him. He was subtly controlling the
creation of the other wizard’s spell: a dragon. Or maybe a drake,
it wasn’t that big. I don’t really know quite what the difference
is. It looked like the spell was meant to take more than two of
them. The broken wizard that Peter was seconds away from wasting
took the brunt of the sudden loss of the third, one of the sedan
men, no doubt. Controller guy needed to be fresh for this to work
and he definitely wasn’t.

He squatted down next to a huge blue puddle
of liquid magic, the injured one’s ring of burnt grass. He had
double loops of red and pink energy pushed down into the puddle. It
was only a coupla feet wide. As he stood up the strands came up
looped around a bright red, ten-inch lizard, whose skin smoked. The
puddle pulled in on itself once the lizard was clear, disappearing
quickly. The lizard fell lightly to the ground and a solid line of
fire an inch wide shot across the grass at me. The Stone almost
giggled at it when the fire brushed against it. I felt vaguely
invincible as I turned to face my opponent in full Stone armor, Day
and Night at my side and the Crossbow and Quiver on my back. That
feeling may get me killed someday, but not today.

He thought it was a glamour. That was
obvious. His first action with the drake was a full frontal: it
just ran up and jumped on me, clawing at my armor and basically
making me very hot. Those claws were sharp, long, and superheated.
Very possibly made of the strongest stuff in the universe, just
like the Night sword is made from the sliver of a dragon’s bone.
Except this one wasn’t real, it was a magical construction of one.
I plucked the thing off my chest with both hands, twisting it back
so it had little control of its movement and looked down into the
spell. The red cords back to the wizard were still there, just
stretched and thinned to invisibility. The rest of it looked odd to
me, blocky, kind of like it was made from a kit and held together
with wires.

I looked over at the guy controlling it. He
was jerking his arms and legs still, trying to wrestle the ten-inch
lizard out of my grasp, ineffectually. Well, if he wanted the drake
so badly… So I threw it at him, fast and hard.

His control spell had a distancing affect to
it, built like a well, a gravity well, not a water well. This meant
that it would keep the drake a certain distance away from him so he
wouldn’t get burned till he could dismiss it. It would get harder
and harder for the drake to get closer and closer to him. That is,
until it gets to a certain distance, the lip of the well, then it
falls in and it’s nearly impossible to get out of the well. That’s
what I did. I threw the drake into the well. The uninjured wizard
panicked. The drake kept doing what he told it to do, which was
flail about. He wasn’t uninjured anymore with the drake’s long,
sharp claws ripping and tearing through the flesh and bone of his
torso. Then its heat rose uncontrollably and fast. Then the wizard
wasn’t anything anymore.

I stood staring aghast at an over a yard wide
circle of blackened dirt where the little red lizard sat calmly
raising its feet one at a time, content to sit there for the
moment. The soot from its conflagration was still falling to the
ground farther out in the slight breeze. I called out the Night and
stalked forward slowly on the firedrake, just in case it reverted
to its nature with the demise of its controller. I had no idea what
that nature would be, so imagine my caution. It didn’t move as I
approached it though. Still not taking any chances, I lashed out
with the Night and broke its interconnections, the wires between
the blocks. The other wizard started screaming out in pain.
Ignoring him, I let the Night suck the magic from the rest of the
lizard body. It left behind a smear of red skin that looked like a
dog’s rubber chew toy left outside for years.

The screaming stopped as suddenly as it
began, but Gordon and his man were still fighting it out. Peter’s
foe was nowhere to be seen, so I assumed he met a similar end to
mine. Peter wasn’t the type to leave loose ends and I’d seen what
that green and black ball of his did. I turned in time to see
Gordon kicking the slumped man ten feet into the air. He landed
over thirty feet away, not moving. Gordon roared, “Who’s next!”

It almost made me wish we had someone else
for him. We all jerked around when we heard the engine start, but
it was just Billy, turning the van around to get us. I sent the
weapons home and Peter and I eased closer to Gordon. We needed to
calm him down before we moved or we’d lose the van’s control before
the end of the road. We needed to get to a phone, too, and could
only hope the briefcases protected our backups well enough.

“Gordon, it’s over. They’re all gone now,” I
said calmly, watching him carefully. I didn’t want him latching
onto me as “next.” Peter was coming up in front of him just as
slowly and saying similar things. Wild-eyed as he searched the
vicinity for more victims, Gordon was sweating profusely and
bleeding from a cut above his right brow. His chest was a bellows,
heaving with each breath, and his power coursed through him like
the waves of heat through a furnace. Billy pulled the van up beside
us on the road and got out, leaving his door open.

“Y’done good, lad,” Billy said calmly to
Gordon over the short hood of the van, “but it’s time to go. They
be needing us at home soon.”

Gordon’s head snapped to Billy when he spoke
and his breath caught on the inhalation. He started slowing his
breathing down that way, staring at Billy for what seemed like an
eternity. Billy held his gaze with his deep brown eyes. Peter made
a dash for the van, dipping below their line of sight on the way. I
don’t know if he thought Billy held some sway with Gordon or not,
but I would have ducked, too. By the time I was beside Gordon,
still murmuring calming words, his breathing was more normal and
his stance far less aggressive. When I touched his shoulder, he
turned and grinned at me.

“Well, that was exciting,” he said as he
surveyed the scene behind me. “Let’s not do that again.”

I grimaced. “Can’t make any promises, man.
Sorry. Somebody attacked the castle. Something is happening. We
have to find out what.”

“It’s ringing,” called Peter from the van.
He’d gotten his backup phone initialized incredibly fast. Gordon
and I ran for the van. Billy was already in the driver’s seat.

“Kieran? We were attacked.” Pause. “Seven.”
Pause. One-sided conversations sucked. “Gone.” Pause. All we heard
was Peter’s responses, not Kieran’s, so nothing made sense. “Not
yet.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Who? Lucian? Damn.” Pause. “We’ll get
him home safe.” And he snapped the phone shut, then fused it
together with a flash of heat, tossing it out my still open door.
“Billy, we still have to get Martin and we have to do it fast. Seth
and I will pull a few tricks on the highway that will get us there
a lot faster, but will disorient you like before. Do you think you
can handle that?”

“Aye, I can do that,” Billy answered,
throwing the van into gear. Gordon tugged on the line again and I
felt a wave of dissimilarity rush from the road to the treeline. It
crashed through his earlier prism spell and I had no sense of any
of us around the crash sites or the remaining three bodies on the
ground. We slammed our doors shut as Billy had the forethought to
back down the road and turn around again to avoid the traffic jam
the crashed convertible created.

Once we were moving, both Gordon and I turned
to Peter with “Well?”

“This was a concerted effort,” Peter said,
watching Gordon carefully. “There were three different attacks
mounted at roughly the same time. Ours was the least effective of
the three. The castle is number two and they’re still fighting it.
They had an inside man that got them in past the ward: Lucian.
Kieran said it answered as many questions as it asked, but it
wasn’t Lucian’s fault. He’ll explain more later. The third target
was the school.”

We all slammed to the left as Billy took a
right turn too hard, flooring the accelerator to gain control and
speed.

“All we know about the attack at Martin’s
school is that it’s happened,” continued Peter. “All communications
are out and wards are up all over the place. Gordon, maps. We need
maps to the school and of the school.”

Gordon reached down into the console between
the front seats and pulled out a wire bound book of maps,
flipping through it quickly. He turned in his seat and put the maps
across his knees.

Pointing, he said, “We’re here. We’ll follow
this road, turning off here to here…” It was a complicated route,
fast on the highways but twisting and turning a lot on the end. “I
don’t have a map of the school. I can sketch a general layout for
you.”