Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God Read online

  “Where am I going?” Peter asked, turning down the main road toward Atlanta, hitting the gas hard.

  “I hadn’t thought that far,” I said, quietly, turning to Ethan. “I didn’t expect this to work.” Ethan was hugging the passenger seat with his eyes closed. I kept coiling the line in my mind, creating various geometric figures with the energy, taking liberties with junctions. Partitioning that off for a moment, I considered our next step. Kieran needed attention. Whatever Ethan was doing wasn’t working. We needed a hole to crawl in and home was too far.

  “We need to find a motel, some place away from here but not too far. We have to see to Kieran. Pick one at random. We’ve got the cash.” I fell back in the seat, tired. I played with the pink string with my mind absently like it was in my hands, even after I felt the ends snap off in the distance. I reached out for another line as we drove by, this one a brilliant blue but thinner. Twining the new line in with the pink, I created patterns within the lines of the shapes then released it. The brilliant blue energy continued its trek with the bright pink on its endless circuit that I was holding in my mind.

  “Peter, what did we just do?”

  He sighed heavily behind his hand. “Well, everything you said to Harris was correct, I think. He doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but I’m not an attorney. I don’t know what happened in the house yet, but you came out splattered in gore waving two big-assed Swords—man, you were scary as hell! Then you made the Swords just disappear. I thought we were goners. You actually have both the Night and Day of the Black Hand. I thought somebody sold you a bill of goods when you told me that, but if they’re not, damn!”

  I had no idea what he meant so I let him rattle for a few minutes. I felt the next line coming up on the right, underground. I reached out and grabbed for the thick line but it disappeared wherever I tried touching the pale lilac. It evaporated instantly. Yet it still flowed evenly through the dirt and rock. I cupped both imaginary hands underneath the line and gently lifted. It moved into my mind as a huge tunnel of lilac. The energy was far less dense than the other lines but no less powerful. Instead of trying to pull power out of this line, I brought the structures into it and pulled energy, peppering the five shapes I held with motes of the line before releasing it. The glowing shapes were fascinating to see, even if not the most color coordinated.

  “How about this one?” Peter asked, slowing the car to turn.

  Looking out the window at the hotel he was turning for, I mumbled, “Yeah, looks good,” then checked the dash clock. We’d been driving for over an hour. It felt like minutes. Ethan stabilized Kieran’s condition but wasn’t able to make any headway in making him better. He still hugged the passenger seat with one arm around Kieran’s chest. But his eyes were open now. He was watching me, not saying anything.

  A sudden thrumming took my attention back to the five power structures in my head as the car jostled over the curb. They were starting to flex in the wrong way, holding too much force in the paths I’d created. The noise got louder in my head and started to hurt. The blue helix banding in one started oscillating slowly. This didn’t look good. I cast around on the energy plane for a line to ditch the energy onto, but only one, a very weak one, showed in the distance. Another structure picked up the oscillations like a tuning fork. That hurt more, too. I started shuffling the pieces around like it was a game of Three-Card Monty with two extra cards, just trying to slow the next resonance, fearing they’d explode and not knowing what that would mean to my head.

  That’s how I noticed it, noticed how the second bands, the brilliant blue ones, were projecting on the pink and how the motes of lilac where shifting slightly to accommodate them when they moved. Projecting was the right word—I’d seen this a few years ago when Dad was showing me stuff about topography and drafting. It was projecting from one plane onto another. I made an intuitive leap then. That’s the cool thing about standing in your imagination: that you can do stuff here that you can’t do in real life. I squashed one dimension of the five shapes and drew out the projections onto the one I squashed. They weren’t pretty, but it worked and suddenly they fit together, locking perfectly into place with each other. Then I let go of the squashed dimension I was holding and it snapped into place in my mind, no longer oscillating or humming and no longer pink or blue or lilac. And it hurt to look at, but I could feel it just fine and it didn’t feel like it was gonna explode now.

  Peter was getting back in the car when I looked out the window. It occurred to me that I had felt the car moving over the curb, but nothing between that and now. I’d have to be more careful in the future when I’m playing in my cavern. I’d never gotten this easily distracted before, but obviously, it was possible now. Peter pulled the car around to the backside of the hotel.

  Still early in the day, there were two families packing up their cars to leave, fathers joking with each other about a shared sports rivalry, children playing on the sidewalk, harried moms directing fathers and corralling the children. We had to go through the middle of them somehow. Peter got out of the car and helped me drag myself out. I was so tired. It’s been a long, long two days.

  We moved to the passenger side to help with Kieran. Ethan slid out first, right hand still planted on Kieran’s chest. I felt Peter reaching for power and not finding a ley line near. He pushed himself harder, barely sensing the line I felt earlier and trying to draw that power to him. He wasn’t strong enough, though, and I didn’t know what he was trying to do. I had plenty of stored energy so I tugged slightly on my newly formed structure that hurt to look at and a fine line of blue appeared. I fed that to Peter’s reaching power. I heard him gasp loudly and turned to look around.

  “Too much?” I asked, quietly, seeing the image of an elderly man snap over Kieran as Ethan moved him out of the car. Peter had both placed an image over him and was levitating him upright, so that it looked like we were helping an elderly man instead of an unconscious one. Kieran was bobbing slightly in the air as Peter fought for control of the levitation and Ethan held him in place. Several of the children watched curiously, keeping their distance. We started toward our rooms as quickly as we could.

  “It felt like a very strong ley line just popped into existence,” said Peter in a whisper. “Right on top of me. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “It did,” said Ethan quietly. “Seth fed you that line.”

  “What?” both of us asked at the same time, for different reasons. I touched the energy I’d thrown to Peter, what felt like a tiny portion of what I’d stored away. The difference between what was going out and flowing back was almost negligible. Peter was gawking at me. I’ve had a lot of that today. Taking the room key from Peter, I moved ahead of them and unlocked the door.

  Entering the room, I turned on the lights and ran for the bathroom and grabbed all the towels. Peter dropped the pretenses as they got Kieran through the door and had shifted him horizontally toward the first bed, dropping the disguise completely. I darted over and spread a few towels out underneath him before Peter got Kieran down. We had to clean him up which meant we’d have to clean what he was lying on too. Dumping the remaining towels and wash cloths on the second double bed, I grabbed the ice bucket on the dresser and went to the tub, filling the bucket half full with water as hot as I could stand. When I came out of the bathroom, Peter was missing and I noticed a door beside the dresser for the first time. It was open revealing another door with no handle. Within a second, Peter opened the door, carrying the towels from that room. I released the breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  Ethan was kneeling beside the bed staring at Kieran’s unconscious body. I told myself I was not going to cry while I bathed him. Kicking my shoes off, I climbed up on the bed of the far side of Ethan and knelt down to start swabbing. I glanced over at Ethan several times but he seemed not to notice.

  “Ethan,” I said finally, wringing out a hand towel and laying it across Kieran’s chest. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  �
�I do not know what to do,” he said. “I cannot fix this. I can keep him exactly as he is, but I cannot help him.”

  “Why?” I asked. Peter moved in with another bucket of water and started washing on the other side. He was nervous, worried, concerned, and intensely curious. It was written all over him. I didn’t have the energy to put into deciding which emotion went with what problem at the moment.

  “Peter,” Ethan said, sitting back on his heels, hands on his thighs. He looked fresh as a daisy except in his eyes. His eyes looked really old right then and I really couldn’t tell you why. “I need your help. I need you to help me convince Seth of how many miracles he’s performed today and how he should try for one more.”

  He was looking directly at me while he said it. Both Peter and I stopped bathing Kieran for a moment, staring at Ethan. I didn’t see anything I’d done as being particularly miraculous. Peter had levitated Kieran, for God’s sake.

  “Well,” Peter said, glancing over at me and rinsing out a cloth. “First there’s riding on the hood of a car into a government safe house by crashing a majorly powerful ward. Then escaping with your comatose brother and his friend by creating a Faraday cage around one of the most powerful combat wizards in the country. I’d call that miraculous.”

  Ethan turned to Pete calmly and said, “You missed the part where Seth projects his consciousness through a point attached to his soul into the realm I exist in my natural state. It is a state… in between states. He should not have been able to do that. He should not have been able to find the anchor at all. It is a point.” He turned back to me with that cherubic smile again. “In the escape, all I did was carry Kieran to the car. You protected Peter while you took on a whole house of an unknown number of people and got us out. Then you had a shouting match with the head honcho and won by basically flipping him off and stealing his thunder. He was gonna put you in your place, by God! Well, he got his gun, but you stole his bullets.” He grinned at me. “A Faraday Cage, man, you put Harris and at least five others in a magical Faraday cage in the middle of a pitched battle! That was fuckin’ awesome.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said, mildly irritated, “and I doubt I could do it again. They were being stupid.”

  “And the last miracle you performed,” Ethan said, his big blue eyes centering on me again, “the power he gave you, Peter, the line? Do you know where he got it?”

  Peter and I gently rolled Kieran back and forth to clean his back and neck. Not an easy task—Kieran is big. We were down to his lower half and I was not looking forward to below the waist at all.

  “No, but that was a buttload of power,” said Peter, standing and gesturing for my bucket. I handed him the ice bucket of dirty water and cloths to rinse as well.

  “Ethan, I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I interrupted him, leaning back on one arm while I waited for Peter. “But all I did was what I had to do to get y’all back as soon as I could, and from the looks of it, I wasn’t fast enough. The only reason you are here talking to me is because you can pop a new body into reality. Kieran can’t.”

  “Seth,” Ethan said softly, “You created a multi-dimensional battery in your head in less than an hour without help from anyone. And I don’t think you even know what a ley line actually is. That is what that thing in your head is. And it is fully charged. I watched you do it. This is not something that I could do. Not because I lack the knowledge or the ability, but because I would not have thought of doing it.”

  “A multi-dimensional battery?” Peter asked as he came back with cleaned steaming buckets and towels.

  “Ethan had asked me to catch and release ley line energy while we were running from the house,” I said, taking the bucket and towels. “I kinda lost track and started building patterns with it. Before I knew it, I had a ton of it built up and nowhere for it to go. There isn’t a line near enough to here for me to dump it on but the patterns I made locked together nicely into a smaller package and stopped threatening to explode. That’s the part I liked, the not exploding my head.” As I pulled Kieran’s leg toward me, I was thankful that they’d made at least some effort to keep him clean. I guess they didn’t want to deal with the smell.

  “But that was an active line…” Peter said, looking at me confused.

  “Yes, it was,” said Ethan, smiling slightly.

  “What does that matter?” I asked.

  “If it was stored energy,” Peter explained, “it should have been more passive. It would have felt like you. You ‘filtered’ it.”

  Ethan added, “Like in your office the other day, when you could tell which of the two of us was moving the chair.”

  I thought about that and about the way that some of the spelled amulets and fetishes had felt from the street earlier. They had felt passive, not weak, just waiting for something. Until I cut their strings and let them out. Not that any of that mattered at the moment and I said so.

  “I still don’t know how to fix him either, Ethan. I’m not a doctor.”

  “But I can show you,” he said. Then he said a lot more, but I didn’t hear that much of it. None of it was in English and the very first word rocked my world. Literally. It shook me till I blacked out. At least I thought I did, but the words just threw me into the cavern in my mind, away from the center and the battery so that I had no reference and everything was black.

  Kieran lay prone before me, suddenly huge in my perspective and badly damaged. I couldn’t tell why. He looked the same to me here as he did on the bed out there, pale, breathing shallowly, covered in bruises. He looked like death warmed over. I heard Ethan distantly, echoing, and Kieran’s body shimmered suddenly, appearing to me to be a magazine picture with offset problems: three images overlaid but ever-so-slightly off from one another.

  It took me a moment, but I was able to isolate and look at one overlaid image at a time. The first was his physical body and the most obviously damaged. It was the drug. I could see it working its way through his system even now. His kidneys and liver were trying to filter it out, but it was damaging them with every heartbeat. Why had they kept him under for so long under so harsh a drug? They could have killed him. I was too tired to be angry and I still had too much to do. How did that poem go? And miles to go before I sleep. I needed to destroy the drug and remove it before any more damage was done, to pull out the poison. I pulled in power and touched Kieran’s chest, infusing his body with pale blue energy. I could see better now. I could see the chemicals pumping through his bloodstream and where it was building up and tearing away at tissue. So I started tearing away at the chemical, breaking chemical bonds like leaves from a tree.

  More of Ethan’s words flowed into me. I could feel the power of them flow into me, too, and see how it related to what I needed to do. When I couldn’t find any more of the drug, I started looking at the damaged organs. He had several cuts and scrapes but they were mild. The most damage was to the kidneys, liver, heart, and the brain. Ethan had stopped Kieran’s body from healing itself. Unbelievably, this was a good thing. The build-up of scar tissue would have created too many problems later for Kieran. I could work with that.

  I started with his kidneys. Jumping bodily into the first cell, I peered into the DNA and figured out what it was supposed to look like, then started making it happen. I pushed and prodded rips and tears into place, re-growing from whatever I could find nearby. And there were plenty of ruptured cells to work with, too. And scar tissue from previous injuries. By the time I was done, his kidneys probably looked better than when we met. I moved on to his liver, then his heart. I had to stop his heart for a moment. That scared me. Scared me so bad. One muscle was stretched badly and was about to tear and I only needed a few seconds to realign it. But that fear was nothing compared to his brain.

  And I was so tired. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep this up as I squeezed his heart back into pumping. My arms were so heavy.

  Parts of his brain were just dead. Some small blood vessels in his brain had
burst and killed brain cells. I knew from what I’d already done with the magic and power that Ethan had given me that I could rebuild the cells, at least to some degree, but I couldn’t rebuild the knowledge or relationships those cells provided. The brain was just too complicated with millions of neurons. And it was strongly linked to the second overlaid image, making it even more difficult to understand.

  When I shifted my perspective to see the second overlay, all I saw was a reflection of me. I was shocked. I pulled back a little, even though distance made no sense where we were, and looked again. It looked like he had invested all of his emotional capacity in a sense of failure because of me and the damage in his brain had cut away any handholds he had to climb out of that pit of despair. That made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but that’s what it looked like. What was I supposed to do with that?

  I moved back down to the physical level and started correcting the blood vessels that had ruptured. Then I moved on to the cells. I couldn’t replace knowledge or functionality, but it didn’t look like the affected areas were long-term storage of anything, but I’m not a neurologist. I fixed what I could and shunted what I couldn’t into the bloodstream. Then I moved back up to the second overlay and considered what to do. It was getting harder to think, I was so tired.

  It was hypnotic, staring at my reflection especially as tired as I was. I almost gave in to the same feelings of despair that Kieran had. It felt like I was falling into him, but without that feeling of vertigo since there was nothing around to judge against. I shook my head to get the cobwebs out and wondered mildly if I did the same in the real world. Then I concentrated again on Kieran. He’d transferred a great deal of his self-worth onto me and now he was losing that because he felt he was failing me. No matter how stupid that was to me that seemed to be what he was doing. I didn’t have a clue as to what to do about that. I’d done all I could do.

  I pulled back into myself and the hotel room resolved around me. Kieran lay on the bed with me kneeling beside him still. I didn’t see Peter, but I didn’t have the energy to look around the room. I said something. I don’t remember what it was. They were just words.