Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (72 page)

We came to the last turn for the school and
stopped. Peter pushed his senses out to the left of the road, so I
went right. I had a clear image of a hundred feet in then butted
against the school’s ward. Roughly eighty feet down there was
something that looked like an attempted break in the ward but it
felt old.

“Nothing on this side,” Peter said,
quietly.

“Here either,” I said and started us up the
road slowly. If we could hide so could someone else, but no one
showed as we approached to main gate. It was a large and impressive
gate and it was wide open and inviting. There was a small booth to
the left of the road with glass on all four sides, containing only
an old telephone.

“The gate should be closed,” Gordon said,
quietly.

“So they’ve left or are inviting someone in
for a trap,” Peter offered.

“Or both,” was Gordon’s thought.

I was busy examining the ward in place across
the road. It was lodged thoroughly into the ground, so no hope of
going under. The only experience I had with wards I was either
keyed into them or I was destroying them. Destroying this would
alert whoever was inside to our presence, if there was anyone
there. It did look similar to one of the wards on Cahill’s
property.

“I don’t suppose you have a key, do you,
Gordon?” I asked him.

He looked confused. “A key? To the ward? Why
would I have a key?”

“Because this gate is remarkably similar to
the one we drove through on the way from the airport,” I said.
“It’s a lot bigger and it’s tied into a whole lot more power
structures, but the gate itself seems the same.”

Peter and he stepped closer to me and looked
in the same direction I was. Peter saw it almost immediately, but
Gordon took a moment longer.

“It is virtually the same,” he agreed. “Why,
though? That interferes with the sanctity of the castle.” He was
getting testy over this.

“Don’t take it so personally, Gordon,” said
Peter, calmly. “A lot of compact and powerful spells are reused and
modified for years, centuries even. No one has noticed the
similarities in the past. You haven’t and you’ve been through this
ward hundreds of time. Your father has, too, and I’d bet he doesn’t
know. Try the key.”

Gordon nodded, calmed slightly by Peter, and
stepped closer. He pushed out with his power because the key was
magical, what else would it be? If I hadn’t been manipulating his
aura as I had I probably wouldn’t have seen it. The key was wrong,
similar but wrong.

“Stop!” I called harshly. Peter was a
half-second behind me in yelling. He saw it, too. That was good.
“Wait, the key isn’t right. Hold on.”

Looking at Gordon’s key and back to the lock,
I pushed gently on the structure Gordon was presenting, bending it
back and forth until it missed all of the hot spots I saw in the
locking mechanism, the ones that would fry Gordon on contact. Once
I was satisfied Gordon wasn’t going to be a black smear on the
road, I turned to Peter for approval. He just shrugged.

“Okay, try it,” I said, stepping back.

The gate just shimmered out of existence. All
three of us exhaled heavily and walked through. My perceptions were
still pushed out as far as I could get them and with the ward open
my awareness rushed in.

“Get down!” I whispered harshly. We hunkered
down behind the little booth. We may have been hard to see, but it
wasn’t impossible and there were people close by. “Regular people,
military by their looks. I only see two right now. The first is
fifty feet up on the right, watching the road. The second is about
seventy, eighty feet up on the left.”

“How much farther can you see past them?”
Peter asked.

I shook my head. “Not much. Too much
interference.”

“Can you get a clear shot?” he asked.

“Not from here,” I said. “But…” Looking up to
make sure I had the clearance, I had the Stone shoot me straight
up, fifty feet in the air. At the apex of the short flight, I took
aim and fired the Crossbow twice, hitting the first, a woman, in
the temple, and the second, a man, directly between the eyes. The
Stone caught my fall, slowing my descent by gently squeezing me
until I touched down lightly. The Crossbow and the two Bolts were
already back between my shoulder blades, hidden.

“Where can we get more of him?” Gordon asked
Peter seriously.

“I’m working on it,” he answered with a
grin.

We scurried up the road as quietly as our
rubber-soled shoes would carry us, stopping even with the first
sentry’s position. Peter stayed close to the road to watch while
Gordon and I went back the ten feet to the body. I rolled her over
and looked carefully. There was absolutely nothing on her magical,
not even a rabbit’s foot. She had been slumped over a rifle of some
kind, mean looking thing, with a scope. Her uniform carried no
markings; it was as plain as ours, but hers had a more military
bearing, especially the boots. The holstered sidearm helped, too.
Gordon found nothing of interest in her pockets then he ripped open
her shirt and yanked free some dog tags, shoving them in his
pocket. He looked up at me, questioning.

“Let’s go,” I said. We scurried back to the
road as quietly as possible.

We trotted quickly down the road another
hundred or so feet, ignoring the second body, before I could see
further onto the property. A personal ward was blocking me before,
on a groundskeeper’s house, according to Gordon’s map. It was a
privacy ward, not a protective one. The groundskeeper wouldn’t need
it anymore. Neither would his wife. They didn’t have any privacy to
protect, being so dead and all. Gordon took the sight of them hard,
both anger and anguish slamming through his mind. I had to fight to
keep his aura from lighting up like a Christmas tree. Lucky for me,
Peter was there to hold him back physically because if he had made
it into the ward, I would have lost that battle. The emotional
imprint on the ward from the couple was horrifying from this side.
The imprint I got was grotesque and not in the carnival freak show
way. This was in a how-you-imaged-Mengele-grotesque way. We skirted
the outside of the ward.

The grounds were about to open up, so Gordon
nudged us into the woods, moving us uphill until we could overlook
most of the campus when we came out of the treeline. From there, we
could only see five men, two atop the taller buildings and three
more milling around between two of them.

“Why haven’t we seen any power pushers?”
Peter whispered. “Everybody we’ve seen is mundane.”

“Yeah, but there’s a lot of them,” whispered
Gordon. “Bet they’re throw-aways.”

“How do we find out exactly how many?” I
asked.

“What’s that?” Peter asked, calling our
attention back down the hill.

As Peter asked, the door to the closest
dormitory to us was thrown open and a body thrown out onto the
lawn. All three of us gasped at the sight of the boy. He was a
bloody mess. His arms were tied behind him and he had been beaten
severely. A troop of ten men followed the boy out, laughing as his
body was wracked in a fit of coughing. I couldn’t take the cruelty
anymore.

I stood up in full armor. “Quiet time is
over, boys.” I didn’t feel the slightest remorse as the Crossbow
hummed for three seconds. That’s how long it took, three seconds.
Mostly because I wasn’t in any hurry. Two on the roof, three moving
around the buildings and ten in front of the dormitory. It took
them slightly longer to all fall over, and still I felt no
remorse.

“I’ll see if I can draw them off while y’all
look for Martin and any hostages. If you need me, call. Okay?” I
asked.

“Be careful, little brother,” warned Peter.
“You aren’t unbreakable.”

“And you be careful, too,
Seth’Dur’an o’an,” I said. Then I took off at a run for the
dormitory, leaving Peter to decide how to proceed. I trusted him.
Me, I’d just started a killing spree, but I had a boy to help
first. He could have died in the time it took me to get to him. He
was coughing up blood again when I finally did get there. His arms
were bleeding around the plastic zip cord they’d tied him with. I
cut them off with my new pocketknife, thankful for small favors,
then stretched him out hurriedly, looking at his wounds.

I looked around quickly to make sure I wasn’t
going to be jumped in the next ten seconds, then concentrated on
him. This wasn’t Martin. Head trauma was mostly cuts and bruises
and a probable concussion. I should be able to relieve some of that
pressure. Farther down though, he had several broken ribs, one had
punctured a lung, and he was bleeding profusely internally. Several
internal organs were bruised to the point of almost rupturing. This
was going to be close.

I stopped his heart. Quickly I pushed the
bleeding artery closed, fusing it together by pure force of will.
His body seized with blue energy as I poured more and more power
into him as I worked through his circulatory system, repairing what
I could. Then I restarted his heart. It felt like only five seconds
to me. Hoping that was right, I worked on his lung next, pushing
the shards of bone back towards their original places. The tissue
was so fibrous in the tear. Too much of the tissue was beyond
repair for me right then. I felt really ghoulish doing this, but I
reached back and touched the nearest dead man on the chest. Shoving
energy down into his lungs, I searched for still living tissue,
searched for the type of cells I needed, shifting the cells along
the energy conduits until I had enough to seal the tear.

With some relief on my part, the next step
was emptying his lungs of blood and reinflating them. Probably not
the best way to do this, but he was going to need cover soon
anyway. I picked him up and started for the dorm. Blood started
running out of his mouth again and he started coughing hard. I held
him as close as I could, saying, “We’re going for cover, man. Just
hold on, we’re running for cover.” I pulled the door open and
looked cautiously down the hall. “How many more men are in this
building?”

“Who wants to know?” his voice hoarse, barely
above a whisper.

“I’m part of the rescue team sent to get you
guys out of this, whatever this is. Now to keep you as safe as
possible, I need to know how many of our enemy’s men are in this
building.”

“Another ten, I think, still searching the
floor above mine. Don’t think they found ‘em yet though.”

“Found ‘em? There are more of you hiding in
the building?”

He had another coughing fit, poor kid. I
tried to ease him through it as I clutched him close, moving into
the building. The first room was a meeting room—sort of a game
room, it looked like. It had a bunch of couches and chairs, tables
and such. All of it overturned and ransacked. I went to the back of
the room, shoving a couch around to block the view from the front.
Setting him down carefully, I propped him up slightly at his
shoulders and head, then looked at his chest again.

“What’s your name?” I asked once I got him
situated. The smaller breaks would have to heal on their own. The
break that punctured his lung might shift when he moved and
re-puncture it. I didn’t think he’d survive that. Of course I was
operating on instinct and no real knowledge.

“Jeff,” he mumbled. “Who’r you?”

“I’m Seth,” I said, making the headgear
disappear so he could see my face. “Jeff, this is gonna hurt but I
need to knit some ribs together so it doesn’t puncture your lung
again, okay? Try to be still.”

“You’re Martin’s friend?” he slurred, barely
audibly.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. The first break
was close, so it was the easiest to fuse. His chest tightened
against the pain of the moving bones, but I couldn’t put enough of
myself into him to block the nerve impulses. I hoped I never got
enough practice at it. I moved the rest of the shards in line as
rapidly as I could and fused them together. His breathing was very
shallow by then. I’d done what I could for him right then.

“Jeff, you said there were more students in
this building?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ian… brother… Martin…
Jacob… I think that’s all.”

“So four of you?” I asked. “And about ten of
them? All wearing camo, right?”

He nodded once at each question, grimacing
with every motion. “All right, Jeff, this is what I need to do,” I
said, clearing the armor away from my hands to make sure we had
skin contact. Then I put my left on his shoulder and took his right
hand, still dripping in his own blood and I pushed energy into him
in a miasma of colors that filtered through my emotions and into
his. He had to feel like he could make it through this situation.
He had to have the will power to fight for his life. He was worth
fighting for. He had someone fighting for him. “I need for you to
stay alive, Jeff, while I find the others in the building. Then
take care of the bad guys. You can stay alive for me, right, Jeff?
Till I come back?”

“Yeah,” he answered, looking a bit rosy with
the infusion.

“Good,” I smiled at him. “I’ll be back as
soon as I can.”

I trotted back to the hall and down,
listening for movement in the building. There was no sense of
anyone else on the bottom floor, but if I could hide, surely
someone else could. At the stairwell, I looked up. The outside wall
was glass all the way up through the four floors, but it was built
oddly so I could only see up to a mezzanine between the second and
third. I wasn’t here to review the architecture.

I tiptoed up the stairs as fast as I could,
staying to the sides of the stairwell. It occurred to me that the
building lacked a number of features I was used to in my life. The
lack of electrical wiring was what caught my attention first. If
the attackers were normal humans, they probably thought more or
less like I would about things like heating and cooling systems,
general ventilation. There could be hundreds of cubby holes stashed
in this building where they wouldn’t think to look. I decided to go
for the top floor and work down and make adjustments to that plan
as necessary.