Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  And Daybreak said, Mine.

  Chapter 10

  “Tell me he’s okay, Peter,” I said, nervously pacing over Jimmy in the front yard. He looked all right to me, just in shock. Aftershock, really, I’d come on pretty strong when I hit him.

  “He looks like he’ll be okay,” Peter proclaimed, sitting back on his heels. “What happened? It looked like he was attacked by static electricity.”

  “Interesting analogy,” I said. “When Jimmy came into the room, his shock at seeing his family desecrated triggered the blood magic to attack. That would be the static electricity effect, I believe. The magic then pounded his mind with memories of each person’s torture including the evisceration. My bet is that this was merely a distraction for the main spell, which took longer to activate, but would be nicely hastened by the victim’s misery. The one that burned them to a pulp and took the building with ‘em.”

  “Damn, you’re good, kid,” Richard said quietly.

  “Not good enough,” I said, glancing his way. “This spell, and maybe all blood magic, works on sympathy. The blood had a sympathetic hold on Jimmy through his family bonds. I broke that hold by claiming a stronger, previous bond.”

  “What kind of bond?” Peter asked, confused. “What came before his family?”

  “Not before his family, before the abomination that attacked him,” I explained slowly, barely taking the ramifications in myself. “Peter, I forced the geas and claimed him. The one I put there earlier today.”

  Peter looked up at me, eyebrows furrowed together. “You mean, like…” he let the question hang there, unasked.

  “Just like Marchand suggested?” I finished it for him. It wasn’t the direction he was going, but the trail ended in the same place. And it was a shameful place. My guilt.

  “Seth, this isn’t the same thing as what Marchand said,” Peter argued, standing up between me and Jimmy, crossing his arms and looking angry at me.

  “Isn’t it? Consider this carefully, Pete,” I said softly. I could see Richard watching a short distance away, not understanding anything we were talking about. “First I’m getting ticked off at you for thinking I can tear through some poor sucker’s head. Next thing I know, I’m pickin’ up the fact the some asshole likes to hit his women to prove his manhood. Marchand says I’ll be stealing men’s souls and lookie here…” I point to Jimmy lying on the ground in some sort of fugue state, both conscious and unconscious at the same time.

  “Show me.”

  “What?” That shocked me.

  “Show me what happened, from the time Jimmy Morgan came into that room to when we hauled him out. Show it to me,” he insisted. I could feel him opening his mind and probing into my cavern. We’d shared this intimacy before and these were familiar paths for us.

  I clamped down hard on those connections, though. “No! I won’t put you through that! That’s why I took Jimmy in the first place because of the torture that spell put him through!” Now I was angry with Peter. We faced off in the yard, arms tense and ready to strike out.

  “That’s why it’s different, Seth,” Peter said. He was still mad, but not fighting mad. “If, and it’s still a big ‘if,’ it turns out you claimed Jimmy like one of the Fae, you didn’t do it to build an army or enthrall him, you did it to save his life. It’s that simple. And, damn it, Seth, you’re seventeen years old! You will make mistakes.” He pointed at his father. “He’s a hundred and eighty-eight years old. He makes mistakes. Your father is over six hundred years old. He makes mistakes. Get over it!”

  “Le—av… Seth—” Jimmy mumbled, dazed, barely a whisper. He was beginning to come out of whatever paralysis held him. All my attention turned to him. His jumbled thoughts were a hurricane of disjointed pictures and ideas without reason. His words, though, were very clear, “Leave Seth alone.” He was trying to defend me against Peter, an idea wrong on so many levels but predictable considering the circumstances.

  Without really thinking, I reached into my room on Gilán and retrieved a blanket and a good-sized pillow off of my bed as I moved with Peter to Jimmy’s side. Shushing him gently, we eased him up and shoved the pillow under his head and shoulders and wrapped the blanket around him.

  “Just relax, Jimmy. You’ll be okay, now,” I said softly. He latched onto my arm tightly.

  “Seth?” he croaked, his mouth and throat dry from screaming. Peter lifted his head up and put a bottle of water to his mouth.

  “Sip slowly, Jimmy,” Peter said. “Easy now. Seth’s right beside you.”

  “I’m right here, Jimmy,” I murmured, searching through him again for anything I might be able to heal or help in some way. The blood magic hadn’t gotten very far in the physical aspects. Most of the damage was emotional, spiritual—the interface between the body and the soul. I didn’t know enough about those areas to even begin to help… That’s when I realized how wrong I was.

  “Damn.”

  “What’s wrong?” Peter asked, still helping Jimmy drink.

  I touched Jimmy’s forehead lightly and said, “Jimmy, go back to sleep.” I wasn’t exactly sure what language it was, but it worked. “Richard,” I called past Peter, “I need to speak to my brother for a moment, so I’m going to box us in. I do apologize, but it’s rather personal for me.”

  “Oh, no, no. I understand,” Richard said and went to the car to give me privacy.

  “I don’t know what to do, Peter,” I said, sitting down cross-legged, taking Jimmy’s hand as I moved to keep the skin contact he seemed to need. “This is so wrong to do to someone, but I can edit his memories. I can take out the gutting of his family of this sadistic—, rgrhg, I don’t have a word for this person. How can I not do it? But how can I justify doing this now? And against his will?

  “What do I do?” I pleaded.

  “Wow. When you open a can o’worms, you don’t do it by halves, do ya?” Peter said, grinning sadly. “Think about it this way: those memories were not Jimmy’s experiences. They were manufactured in some way, whether recorded or produced artificially. We don’t actually know certainly. You would be removing the affects of the magic, not actual memories that he went through himself. And if you’re worried about it, tell him. Let him decide if he wants to know about it. You’re not excising brain cells. You’re changing memory heuristics, right?” I nodded to answer the question, still thinking about his argument.

  “And that’s not really going to change a lot for him, either,” I said as I readied my mind to do something I felt so reprehensible for doing. “Damn, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said softly as I invaded Jimmy’s mind. The geysers of horror were easy to see, in inky black and purplish-pink in his psyche, odd colors I thought. From there, it was easier to stand in the way of those memories, to actively block them, than to remove them. For now anyway, I capped the geysers with solid nodes of Gilán blue. Jimmy could decide later if I should enclose the nodes and destroy the contents. Now if I could do that to my copies…

  “Jimmy, you can wake up now,” I said softly, pulling back from his mind. “I’m done.”

  “That helped,” Peter noted as Jimmy’s entire body relaxed at once, released from its torment. Now I had physical affects to work with, and pushed healing energies through him, releasing the power evenly and allowing it to be used to nourish. I sent a short wave of power through to finish off the last of the rigor-producing acids in his muscular system. He fell into a natural sleep rhythm that would wake him very soon.

  Dropping the sound-blocking barrier around us, I called loudly, “Thank you, Richard. I’m done.” He ambled back slowly, looking back and forth between the house and us. “Peter, go ahead and tell your father what I’ve done and why, but let’s keep this in the family, please.”

  “I understand that. We should call somebody about the murders, too,” he added. “Probably out of the city’s jurisdiction.”

  “Call Harris. See what he says,” I suggested. “I’ll buzz Ethan, tell him what’s happened, so he can tell Kiera
n and Mike.”

  “Okay, Seth,” he said, reaching over Jimmy and lifting my chin up until I met his eyes. “You did good in there, Seth. And you did good out here. Don’t keep kicking yourself because you’re not perfect, or I’ll have to start kicking you, too.” I gave him a weak smile as he patted my check twice and stood up.

  Peter pulled his cell phone out just as Jimmy woke, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Momma!” He bolted upright, tensing every muscle he had again. His eyes were bloodshot and his face bright red as his scream waned with his emptying lungs. All three of us had jumped, but none of us were surprised by his outburst.

  I wrapped an arm around his shoulder, took his hand in mine, and began murmuring: “I’ve got you, Jimmy. You’re safe now.” Over and over, like a mantra, I repeated it in his ear as he melted against me, sobbing. He still had the visions of his desecrated family. His father nailed to the wall and his mother and sister laid out on the bed below him. All I blocked from him was how they got that way. Finally, I did take some comfort in that.

  Ethan, we have a problem, I brushed the anchor and sent my thoughts through.

  Seth? What’s wrong? You seem… depressed, Ethan pushed through the anchor and into my cavern. I dropped down and related everything that happened since lunch. He was not happy. Kieran and Mike were finishing the second interview as we spoke. He would explain to Kieran between the second and third, but we both expected that they would come back to the house. He said they’d go ahead and hire the first guy, but probably not the second woman, too flighty. They’d see about the third. Our conversation took about three seconds. Peter was still on “…this is Peter Borland…” and Jimmy was still wracked in sobs and tears.

  I considered overriding Jimmy’s emotions for a moment. Push the pain of loss and grief back and let him deal with it in smaller increments. There’s where I caught myself. That was exactly the slippery slope I needed to avoid, the minor editing of people’s lives. Whether I liked it or not, whether he liked it or not, he’d seen the bodies of his family and he needed to deal with it. I just had to have the decency to be there for him now.

  “Yes, Marshal, we’re quite certain it was blood magic,” Peter said tersely into his phone, coming back to me. “If you’re doubting his veracity, I’m sure that Seth would be more than happy to replay both directly into your brain… You sure? He’d love …” He rolled his eyes at me while he talked to Harris. “We don’t care. We just need to know who we should call… Okay, how long will that take?”

  “Seth?” Jimmy whispered hoarsely.

  Peter handed me a small bundle of napkins from the car, along with a bottled water, and walked off to finish with Harris.

  “Yes, Jimmy?”

  “Why do I keep seeing you in my head?” he asked, still holding himself tightly against me, sniffling, his head tucked under my chin like a child’s.

  “I don’t know, Jimmy,” I said, handing him the napkins. “How are you seeing me?”

  “Bright,” he said, softly, then he pulled away, dropping a hand to my thigh, keeping contact subconsciously. “You’re so bright, even now.”

  I handed him a napkin to wipe away the rivers of snot and tears. “I guess you’re seeing part of my magic at work,” I said. Not wanting to push him, I peeked into his mind to see what he remembered of the last hour. He appeared to have a complete memory of it, not blocking anything as too horrifying except what I had locked up. “How are you feeling?”

  “Awful,” he answered after a few seconds of thought. “I guess I have my answer, though, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, sadly. “I guess ya do.”

  “Sumpin’ was tryin’ ta eat me in there, wadn’it?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “You stopped it.” It wasn’t a question. He just knew I was responsible.

  “Yes, I stopped it.”

  “What’s that sound?” he asked, crooking his head a little to the side.

  “I don’t hear anything unusual,” I said. Hooking into his hearing didn’t help either. Moving up to his consciousness, I heard what he meant fairly quickly. “Oh, that. That, Jimmy, is Gilán calling to you. I… need to explain something. I made a pretty big mistake and I’m not sure how to fix it. And that sound is part of it.”

  Peter walked over again covering his phone, a welcome interruption. “Harris is sending someone from the FBI over. Lead agent’s name is Messner. He says it’ll take over three hours to get them here from Atlanta.”

  “What about the Dugard Suite Hotel? How fast can they get there?” I asked, remembering that parking lot extremely well. That was where Kieran and Ethan had floated away after Harris first attacked us.

  Peter relayed the question to Harris. “Well, have them turn around, then,” Peter snapped. “This is going to save all of us and them three hours, Marshal.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Thank you. We’ll meet them in the parking lot in twenty minutes. There’ll be four of us.” He cut the connection, breathing out with “Idiot,” showing just how edgy he was feeling. “Dad and I are gonna get a quick look in his office. You need to decide how you’re gonna set up a portal for the FBI team. There’s gonna be trucks or vans for evidence gathering, fairly sensitive equipment. No idea how many.” He took off for the house hurriedly, meeting his father halfway to the door.

  “Jimmy, can you walk with me?” I asked as I stood. He followed me up awkwardly.

  “Why do I feel like you can’t make a mistake?” Jimmy asked, confused and standing way too close to me. Sighing, I looked at the dirt road into the house and barn, deciding how many cars and trucks could drive the ruts and fit into the available space.

  “That’s probably part of the magic, too, Jimmy,” I said, walking towards the car. “I definitely make mistakes. Whoever did this used a particularly nasty kind of magic called blood magic. It’s one of the few that normal, non-magically-inclined people can use. We don’t know much about it because of that and because, frankly, it’s disgusting to commit. You saw evidence of just how extreme it can get.”

  Clenching his eyes shut, he nodded in understanding. At least in this case, he did. Definitely had to give him credit for that.

  “Whoever did this was apparently upset that he didn’t get you, too,” I said. “And he went out of his way to set this trap. I don’t know why. None of this makes any sense to me, but at the moment that doesn’t matter. We’ll deal with that later. But, I will find this bastard and I’ll show him a few things about magic that he’ll wish he couldn’t know about.” The road turned back to the left, back toward the paved, main road. The FBI vehicles shouldn’t have any trouble maneuvering through here.

  “We should have kept you out of that room, first off,” I said, scratching the back of my head and staring at the ground. I was having a hard time looking into his eyes. “I knew something was wrong in there from my first step. The whole room seemed to suck in the light from the sphere I called. And there was so much dust everywhere. The spell, the blood, was in the dust. It didn’t react at all to us, so we didn’t suspect anything about it until it was too late. The three of us were examining the bodies, trying to see what happened, why they looked that way, how they died.

  “All my attention was down in the blood,” I said, finally managing to look at his face. He was watching me so intently it hurt, pangs of guilt ran through me. “I was trying to see what triggered the magic into action when you came in. I got to see it, up-close and personal. You were this spell’s trigger.” We stopped at the bend in the road, the afternoon sun casting long shadows on the road through the woods. The physical distress on Jimmy’s face, though, was clearing up much faster than I thought it should normally.

  “The first action was to draw all of the spell to you physically,” I said. “Basically, all the dust in the room attacked you, but in doing that, it took me with it since I was attached to it at that point. Then it started its real work. You remember the guy in the apartment earlier? He burst into flames, super-hot flames?”<
br />
  “Yeah,” he said softly, nodding.

  “To do that, you have to have energy,” I explained. “In the apartment, we could see the energy as a powerful object there. They expected that knife to be used in an emergency. Mr. Borland saw them and confronted them, for instance, which is tantamount to what happened. Here, they expected you and you alone. They thought they had time to build the power, sort of like stoking a fire. So they, he, whatever, set it up so that you would be tortured while the power was raised until you burst into flames. The spell would keep fanning the flames until the house was completely ash. Inexplicably hot. Crematorium hot.”

  “Tortured? I don’t remember…” he started to say he didn’t remember any torture, but something in his memory got in the way. An idea, actually. “How did they die?”

  I gulped, clenching my eyes shut for a moment, remembering. “Unpleasantly,” I whispered.

  I wanted to say, “You saw how they ended up, Jimmy. Isn’t that enough?”

  I actually said, “Misery and horror from you would have fed the fire spell immensely, so they pumped the damnable thing with the memories of your family’s torture and evisceration. I… removed them. I didn’t like doing that, Jimmy. You start messing with people’s minds and you start playing God. I’m not God, Jimmy, but what they did…”

  “So you stopped me from seeing that. And?” he prompted me.

  “No, you saw it once,” I said, sadly, turning back toward the house. “We both did. I’ve just blocked that memory from you. But the spell used that connection to lock into your blood using what’s called sympathy. It’s a little different than it sounds. It uses the similarity of your blood to your family. The family bond can be particularly strong. Yours was. I had to break that bond before the spell could finish or you would be that guy in the apartment all over again.”

  I paused, hoping beyond hope that he’d figure this part out on his own, but that was really outside of his scope. Last week it would have been out of mine. Stopping behind my car, I hopped on the trunk, looking at Jimmy as he moved up in front of me, still too close. Even he knew he was too close, but couldn’t tell why he felt that need.