Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God Read online

  “Well, I see what tuning means,” I said. I moved the Sword and scabbard to their holding places. “But I didn’t do this. I wouldn’t know how to begin doing this.”

  “Yes,” Kieran agreed. “That is part of the puzzle.” His eyes were unfocused and he stared off into space somewhere over my shoulders.

  “So how are your computers?” I asked Peter. “There’s been some pretty strong magic thrown around here now and definitely some sparks. That’s how this conversation started.” I plopped down in the chair as Peter hurriedly started checking the three laptops on the table. Kieran leaned back and opened the laptop near him. The computer came to life after a few seconds and he closed it again, satisfied it was working.

  “Everything looks fine,” Peter said, tapping keys on what I guess was his primary computer. He’d closed the other two after checking them.

  “So where are we on finding my parents?” I asked. “Has anyone gone through the stuff from Colbert’s office yet?” Fun time with weapons wasn’t giving us anything but more unanswered questions.

  “Yes,” answered Peter, “and we did make one happy discovery if not immediately helpful to the goal.”

  “Artur worked with a lot of humans,” Kieran said, tapping on the laptop again. “Humans who used computers extensively apparently. Everything that we have found in that box has been verified against what we’ve found in what Peter called his data dump. Which means we have the information in a computer form that can be more readily manipulated.” He turned, grinning, then said, “Of course, Peter’s the one doing the manipulating.”

  “He’s learning fast,” Peter said softly, turning his laptop to me and showing its screen to me. He picked up a second one and flipped open its screen, tapping on its keyboard after a few seconds.

  I pulled the proffered computer closer and started reading. It was the same list of names from Colbert’s box that I’d seen previously down one side and dates along the top, forming a grid. It formed a timeline of sorts. The fairy names were conspicuous for their lack of information, but the others had a considerable amount. Peter showed me how to manipulate the mouse pointer with the touchpad to collapse and enlarge blocks of information to see a broader picture. He showed me how some things could be clicked to bring up more information on the highlighted item. Conceptually, it wasn’t difficult and with assurances that I couldn’t hurt anything even if I fried the computer, I started digging tiredly through the data.

  The room got quiet as all four of us delved into research, though I didn’t see when Ethan picked up the fourth laptop. After a few minutes, somebody put some music on low so the room wasn’t completely silent: post-grunge by the sound of it, mostly British. It was oddly calming, and I definitely needed calming. My mind started to wander a few minutes into the research so I reached out and grabbed a nearby ley line, much nearer than in the first hotel, and toyed with it with imaginary fingers while I read in the real world.

  I started with the names I knew, my grandfather first, Uriah St. Croix. His biography in the reports was not complimentary in several aspects, implying he was involved in several political and criminal scandals over the last twenty years. There were links to newspaper articles and government agency databases supposedly supporting some of those claims. I glossed over most, opting to target more recent activities and those related to Mom and Dad. Itineraries from August showed he met with both of them about a hospital in Gulfport. There was a newspaper article with a picture. I couldn’t keep it onscreen for long. It just ached and reemphasized that I could be looking for corpses now.

  The reports said he was supposed to meet my mother again in January about a hospital in New Orleans, her hometown, and support for several orphanages in South America. Her plane landed in New Orleans, but she never made it to see him. Dad saw him apparently, a few days after that. It was a violent meeting from all accounts. Harris’ name showed up once. The police reports regarding the incident said that Dad had argued with my grandfather in a New Orleans hotel convention center two days after my mother should have met with him. Harris was a witness to the events that included my father being dragged off the premises by bodyguards while shouting curses at my grandfather. Shortly after that, a series of accidents occurred to my grandfather that Colbert’s people attributed to my Dad based on these reports.

  I sat back in the chair and thought about everything I’d read about my grandfather. Before I moved on, I wanted to get a picture of him as the reports read against what I recalled. It didn’t take long; I didn’t have much to base a comparison. My father wasn’t the man in these files, I knew that. But I also knew he was more than what I knew of him. A lot more, with a lot more children for example. Then I hit on another issue that nagged at me: the police reports from the eyewitnesses were surprisingly similar. Even Harris’, which didn’t mention his status with the Marshals at all.

  Time to look at Harris a lot more closely. I started with looking up what a Marshal is. That required linking to the Internet and jumping to a site on the Web. As I read, I was angered that Harris had been able to attach himself to such a group of law-enforcers, but I suppose everybody is in danger of cancerous cysts like him. Still didn’t like him or respect the power his office gave him. Closing off the connection, I looked at his resume. It was impressive for its length, but everything else was lost on me. I didn’t recognize any of his accomplishments, though I suspected they supported Peter’s assessment of his combat skills. He was deputized as a Marshal in the late fifties according to these records, so I was curious to know how he was maintaining the illusion that he would be in his early seventies and served continuously. There were several pictures of him in his office over the years. He rarely changed expressions in the pictures, only his clothes and the furniture, usually he stood in front of a trophy case.

  This man has given me every reason to hate him. Not that I didn’t, I just couldn’t allow myself to feel it. If I let myself feel the hate then I’d get angry when he wanted me to and then he’d own me at his discretion. He could get whatever reaction he wanted or needed from me. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed control of myself. This man made himself an enemy to my family and me. Why?

  Most of Harris’ records we had were receipts from expense accounts. No explanations were included and no salary records, no address of any kind. Still, it put him in certain places at certain times. Like Gulfport in August. And New York in January. I dug into the New York receipts and tracked through all the dates. Hotel receipts where he consistently had breakfast in his room in the morning and dinner downstairs in the evening from the nineteenth through the thirtieth. The date on the police report was the twenty-second.

  “Do we have photocopies of the police reports from New Orleans for January?” I asked aloud.

  Peter looked up in a daze, saying, “I don’t remember any police reports.” He reached down to the floor near his feet, sliding the chair back, and tugged the box forward on the floor between us. Movement obviously cured his daze as he lifted the lid off the box and peered inside.

  “Okay, what are we looking for?” he asked, looking up at me over the box.

  “First, copies of all police reports from an incident in New Orleans on January twenty second involving my father and grandfather, specifically, the report by C. Harris. Then secondly, the receipts for the same time period of Marshal Clifford Harris, which according to the computer records, puts him in New York.”

  “Here’re Harris’ receipts,” he said, pulling out a thick manila envelope and handing it to me. “There are several sets of hotel bills. The dates are usually circled at the bottom. I’ll have to search for the police reports.” He started pulling the envelopes out of the box and laying them on the floor beside him. I opened my envelope and slid the contents out carefully on the table.

  “In the files on the computer,” I said, “the police reports were linked in my grandfather’s records, if that helps.”

  “We need more chairs,” muttered Kieran from the bed as h
e tried to wedge himself against the wall and balance the laptop at the same time. “These police reports do read remarkably similarly for eyewitnesses.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said, locating the hotel records among the ream of photocopies. “I also wondered if there was any kind of newspaper write-up about it, considering how big some of the names involved were.”

  “I’ll look,” chimed Ethan.

  I found the records I was looking for and verified that Harris had indeed stayed within the patterns he’d set. Breakfast in his room and dinner in the hotel restaurant, for the entire time. I couldn’t tell if he ate alone at night or not, but dinners were always expensive. I looked to Peter as I collected the papers to return to the envelope. He’d found some police reports and had spread them out in front of him over the envelopes he’d laid out.

  “What’d ya find?” I asked him.

  “Well, these are similar,” he said looking up, “but not remarkably so. And no C. Harris.” He handed the first two up to me and continued reading the third. Kieran moved to the closer bed with his laptop, abandoning his wedged pillows to look at the reports. I handed him the first when I finished reading it.

  “This isn’t the same report,” I said, starting on the second.

  “And I don’t even see a mention in the newspapers,” said Ethan, moving closer to the group, his laptop showing a picture of my grandfather with some people I didn’t know by name that looked vaguely familiar holding a giant check. “But St. Croix shows up four days later in Baton Rouge with a large donation from private investors ‘to help rebuild the infrastructure’ around New Orleans. Whatever that means.”

  “Wait,” I said, looking back at the picture. The check had an emblem on it, in the corner. “What’s that?” I asked moving closer to the screen partly across Kieran to point at it. I’d seen that emblem before.

  Kieran said, “That’s MacNamara’s sign. Why is MacNamara’s sign on a human check?” I turned to gawk at Kieran. I wasn’t sure exactly what bothered me more, that he knew the emblem, that he implied it wasn’t human, or that I hadn’t made my own connection yet.

  “Who’s MacNamara?” I asked, falling back in my chair. I was excited to be making some sort of headway.

  “Seth!” Ethan barked sharply at me. “Let go of the line!”

  “What?” I asked, startled.

  “Let. Go. Of. The. Line.” he said again. He punctuated each word for emphasis.

  Oh, I was twiddling my imaginary fingers in a ley line. For hours now, subconsciously connecting to different lines nearby. I’d amassed a huge amount of energy. So huge I was beginning to dent the energy plane, even hidden behind whatever was hiding me. I could feel Ethan and Kieran’s probing touches seeking out the location of the energy as I switched off the connections to four different ley lines. Four different lines. I couldn’t believe I’d done that, especially considering the fourth line looked so far away it could have been in Tennessee for all I could tell. On the energy plane, I was a nimbus of color, outshining the nearby ley lines, but they had pulled back from me, still tracing their original routes but reduced greatly in flow.

  I started pushing the energy I had been playing with onto the plane, separating the four colors and pushing them toward their original lines. As each line began approaching its original flow rate, it started getting harder to push the energy onto the plane. That seemed to break the laws of conservation of energy until I realized it wasn’t a closed system. I had to find a place to put this. The remaining string was still huge, a twisted braid of four bright, nearly pastel colors. I brought my battery over and shoved the end of braided string into one end. Nothing happened. Shifted to the other end and it started sucking the string down as fast as I could feed it in. It didn’t take long before I had to push a bit. I stopped at an imaginary line I’d drawn in my mind about how much was too much. This place is somehow linked to my mind and soul and therefore body so I erred on the side of caution. More than half remained.

  I was still panicky. How big of an explosion would this make? The pressure was still huge in my head and I had no idea why I couldn’t feel it before. Would I just kill myself? The room? The block? I looked into Kieran’s eyes, pleading for help.

  Chapter 11

  “I need help,” I said, sounding panicky and with good reason. “I’ve gotta lot of energy here I can’t get rid of.” I was starting to feel panicky, too. Having seen ley lines all my life I could accept their existence, but manipulating their energies like this was still new and mind boggling.

  “Okay, Seth, try to stay calm. How much energy are you talking about?” asked Kieran evenly.

  “How do I measure it?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not, by the yard,” said Kieran. “As antiquated as that seems.”

  “Does color matter?” I asked. “And thickness of the rope? Will I need to untwist the braid? ‘Cuz that could take some time.” I was new at this. I did not want to make a mistake. Anxiety made the long ropy substance almost writhe in my mind. This living energy was part of a beginning and an end, and I had better damn well give it a place to be soon or it was gonna get mad! That’s what it felt like, anyway.

  “Seth, trust me enough to let me in,” said Kieran, with a touch of panic of his own. He hadn’t expected that kind of question from me at all. “Let me see your space for a moment.” He moved from the bed to kneel between my knees, his hands on my thighs. With a sidewise smile on his face, Ethan turned to say something to Peter, but was met with a glare I only saw a part of that stopped all but the smile. I put my hands on Kieran’s.

  “How? What do I do?” I asked. I swallowed nervously. “I’m a little green at this, remember?”

  “The Stone is blocking me, I believe,” he said, fixing his eyes tightly on mine. “Just tell the Stone to let me in. You will feel me touch you, just draw that touch in. Just like the ley line energy.” I wondered what else the Stone would do for me that it didn’t do for the troll. It wasn’t much help for him against Kieran then. But it was doing something now. I patted the cool obsidian brick suddenly at my side.

  Good job, I thought. But I need Kieran now, so please let him in. I didn’t have to do anything for Kieran to show up in a physical form near me. It took him three separate attempts, really, with the first two coming into my surreality at very odd perspectives, like an Eischer painting. He coalesced beside me, smiling warmly at me then turning to the Stone’s brick form and nodding respectfully. He was dressed in a simple, white garment that looked like a gi: a wrap-around tunic with three-quarter sleeves with white, loose pants tied at the waist and ended slightly above the ankles. He took in the rest of the weapons and the Pact with a glance then the center went flying away in the distance as I took us to where I was working with the energy. I was a little calmer with Kieran here so it wasn’t writhing as much. At least until I saw the look on his face.

  “That’s a lot of energy, Seth,” I heard him say aloud. “You pulled all of this into this dimension in a few hours?”

  “More. I’ve gotten rid of some of it,” I answered back. “Maybe thirty, thirty-five percent of it.”

  “And none of us felt that pull?” he said, surprised. “You have an amazingly light touch. Can you show me your battery?”

  It appeared between us, at our feet, looking like an early twentieth century milk container in dull orange, standing about two and a half feet tall and a foot diameter. It still hurt to look at, like it didn’t belong here, even in my imagination. Kieran picked it up, turning it, but it eerily always seemed to stay in the same orientation, the same position, no matter how he moved.

  “Can you make another?” he asked.

  I shrugged in both worlds. I hadn’t thought of that. Taking the rope in my hands, I recalled the image of the first of the five designs. I needed to change the pattern of the stream I currently had to make this one into another battery. The string ballooned and separated in front of me, allowing me to work the individual streams together to form what I need
ed. It was a much faster process this time as I twisted and braided the lines, peppering with color where needed and beating back the dimensions of individual plates so they would snap together. Total, it took about ten seconds before I was feeding the newly created battery new energy. Stopping at roughly the same point as with the first, I looked at the remaining stream. A solid stream, I still can’t get over that, about five hundred yards long in three colors. So I started on a third battery and when I ran out of the colors I needed I pulled from the other batteries. I pushed whatever energy remained into the third and last battery and stood to look at my work, my nerves finally relieved of the constant pressure.

  “Can they be moved?” Kieran asked me.

  “I suppose,” I said. “I can move them around here easily enough.” Kieran reached down and pushed on one of the milk bottles, sliding it to the side.

  “Let’s see if it can be moved away from you,” he said, looking up at me, reaching down and grabbing the newest and least charged of the three. “Tell the Stone to be ready, please.”

  Kieran shot away from me at light speed with the battery in both hands. I could feel the Stone answering to my confusion, tightening around me in the darkness as I followed Kieran out of my mind and onto the energy plane. I could see his own shielding clamp into place as he left me and I watched as he tossed the almost empty battery out away from both of us, veering away as gravity took control of its path. Kieran removed his hands from my thighs, breaking the physical connection to my body like a mild electrical shock as he pulled back his energies. Something landed on the bed a few feet from us with a thud. I think Kieran was more surprised than I was, considering the way his head snapped over.