Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  Jimmy appeared on the landing holding a basket in each hand. Inside each sat six large, golden Esteleum nestled in dry grasses and small flowers. It was obviously not his doing but I could see how he attracted so many girls. If I could only carry myself so easily…

  “I know that Daybreak plans to make a more formal presentation of these to your council, Mr. Cahill,” Jimmy said as he handed one of the basket to him. “The Lord’s Regent, Shrank, introduced these to me a short while ago and said that what you were used to was rather like eating a muddy shoe. This would make a muddy shoe taste like manna!”

  He handed the second basket to me. “For your parents, Seth.”

  “Thank you, Jimmy, that’s very thoughtful,” I said, looking over the basket and flowers. “I didn’t realize there were any Esteleum bushes in the garden. Did the nymphs do this?” The weaving was a delicate work, twining back on itself and creating a curious pattern around the sides. The small flowers scented the basket, sweetening the light cedar-like odor wafting from it.

  Still, I was worried about the seeds being an issue, not knowing why the Fae removed the sheathe from the casing that allowed for its growth. Until I knew why the elves removed that sheathe, I was uncomfortable allowing them out of Gilán. So I slipped underneath the skin and meat of the twelve fruit, searching for the tiny seeds, and shifted them out.

  “Yes, Lord,” Jimmy said. “I apologize if the pattern is unacceptable. The nymphs were unhappy as well, but I didn’t want to leave the Cahills unattended for too long.” This got Felix laughing again and I knew a conversation with Gordon was in our future. Jimmy actually meant what he said, so the laugh was rather insulting and it was entirely my fault. What Felix was laughing at was the completely elven way Jimmy shifted the blame of the imperfection back completely to him. Laughing at the stereotype that I had perpetuated in the first place a moment ago.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy,” I said, shooting my free hand out to his shoulder, trying to show sincerity. “He’s not laughing at you, really. You just happen to say the exact wrong thing at exactly the wrong time right after I set up a really bad joke. If you’d planned this, it’d be a great joke.”

  “Okay, Seth,” he said. Just like that, he accepted what I said. Huh. It would be really easy to lie to Jimmy in the future, if that was in my nature. I don’t attempt to lie often since lies tend to be written all over you, but now that I was hidden from all but three others…? I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.

  “This is Gordon’s apartment,” I said, knowing I was repeating Jimmy. “Y’all can divvy up the suite however y’all see fit. I know Mike has told Ian he can’t have his own until a certain age, but I’ll support what you decide with Martin either way, so long as there is an emergency spot picked and locked into place for everyone.”

  The four of them thought of the foyer of Gordon’s apartment, just past the door, so I stamped the position onto the second face of each of their diamonds, right beside their essence. The Cahills now had a backup plan and I felt better, safer. Safer for Marty who still lacked the training and experience necessary to survive an assault and safer for Enid who had the power but lacked the experience and the confidence to use it properly. I wouldn’t want to face her when she got her maternal dander up, though. All of Gordon’s power didn’t come from Felix—Enid was an instinctual powerhouse. I’d bet a cool million that Felix had been tamed, and enjoyed it, too.

  “When you get the time, please practice shifting back and forth between here and the castle,” I told them. “We want to make it second nature in case of an attack outside of the castle stronghold, like with Ian yesterday. So long as we’re at war, we want to be as safe as possible while people are gunning for us, okay? And yes, Gordon, I mean you, too.” He felt mildly offended and I didn’t care.

  “Marty, you busy today?” I asked. “Ian’s bored, I think, and could use the company.”

  “Can I, Ma?” Marty asked, pleading with his mother. “I’m just in the way at home right now.”

  “Yes, dear, you can stay until dark,” Enid agreed, reluctantly. “But stay out of the lake when no one is around to watch you.”

  “I’ll leave you to look around and get used to the place, then,” I said, watching Felix idly toying with the fruit in the basket. “Take as long as you want. Come and go as you please and yell if you need anything. Okay?”

  I searched quickly into the garden to get a fix on Ian then glanced around to find Marty. As I shifted the two of us to Ian, I heard Felix exclaim, “I’ll be damned. This would make a muddy shoe taste good!”

  “Thank God,” Mike said under his breath as we appeared in the garden. When I turned to find him, he was looking for Marty. Ian must be driving him up the walls and Marty was his fix for that. They were both pretty high-maintenance people.

  Jimmy slipped in beside me a minute later. “Mr. Cahill looks better already,” he said. “That is quite an amazing little bush.”

  “Just be careful giving it away just yet, okay?” I said. “There may be a problem with the seeds that I haven’t figured out. If you remove the seeds like the elves would, it turns the skin a similar shade of purple to the Esteleum we’re used to. Still tastes a lot better, but it’s discolored. So until I find out why, I don’t want the seeds leaving here.”

  Jimmy looked panicked, eyes dropping to the basket in my hand and his thoughts to the Cahill’s basket. “I took care of these already, Jimmy,” I said, looking for Ian and Marty, only to find Ian introducing the sprites and nymphs to a wide-eyed Marty beside the lake. Apparently even for landed gentry, Marty led a sheltered life and wasn’t used to naked nymphs and certainly not touchy-feely naked nymphs. Hormones raged throughout Gilán and my back garden was no different.

  “Marty, Ian, we’re leaving now,” I called. “Keep the diamonds close or I’ll come looking for you!”

  “Where are we going, exactly?” Mike asked. That stymied me. We hadn’t really decided on that, at least on my side. Kieran and Ethan were down the mountain with the sprites and were apparently having good luck separating some sprites from the likely candidates. With Shrank’s help Kieran had two fairly large families gathering their few belongings and Ethan had another doing the same and was talking to a fourth. All four of them were far more comfortable in an urban atmosphere than the forests, so the Palace was the best I could offer them.

  Once I knew what to look for, I found three more families with similar traits. I didn’t want to push the entire city dwelling inclined Faery from the forests, though. Towns and villages are a necessary part of life if they were going to exist as a people. If I allowed them to spread out too thinly, they’d start to die out over time, unable to find viable mates and build new families. I didn’t want a true-life, Adam-and-Eve-style population problem. I was already facing that with the water nymphs. Gilán hadn’t seen fit to change other Fae into that form yet, but I could sense about six that were close. By Wednesday, I may have a total of eight.

  Richard and Peter were both gone, too. I hadn’t felt the now familiar light scratch that meant a key shift across whatever constituted the veil around Gilán, so Peter must have carried his father with him. While I could sense my brothers’ shifts, theirs was a subtler move and I had to be listening for it. David must have gone with them.

  “I guess we find out how last night ended,” I said. “Right after I give this to my pare—” Okay, there are some things a teenager doesn’t want to know about their parents, especially a teenager between the ages of puberty and death. When I checked to see where my parents were, that’s what I got to see. Hormones raged all over the planet and I didn’t want to know about it. Not that I minded the possibility of a younger sibling and I definitely understood the processes involved, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see it happen.

  “I’ll just leave that on the coffee table,” I said quietly and slipped the basket onto it from the garden, opting to not venture up to their apartment right then, and shifted us to Alabama. The house wards were happy to
see me.

  They were under assault when we slipped in.

  Chapter 18

  It was more of a prelude to an assault, really. The wards were being probed repeatedly from six directions, trying to find the limits to its strength and space. I shielded Mike and Jimmy, hiding them behind one of Ethan’s chameleon spells and hopefully keeping them out of the sights of whoever was doing the probing. Then I sent my own probes out, following the first bulky and thick sensation of energy back to its source, near where I found Jimmy but closer to the house.

  “Something is wrong,” Jimmy said, as he looked around the den nervously, unable to locate the source of his unease.

  “Y’think?” Mike snapped at him. He tugged at the battery he held, charging himself with power.

  “This is unreal. Four times in two days, this is startin’ t’piss me off,” I said, feeling the drawl on my tongue. I found four of the six in a few seconds, all between one hundred twenty and one hundred fifty feet directly out from the house. The other two were trying to map the lower yard, in the field. They were searching for the wardstones, the source of the wards.

  With all of my attention pushed outside of my wards, I barely felt that faint scratch of a shift, followed by an equally faint tug of magic use, a familiar tug.

  “Why are you boys hiding?” my father asked quietly.

  “Because several someones are probing my wards,” I said from the window just as quietly. “Maybe you should go back and get Kieran and Ethan for me.”

  “When did I get ‘stupid’ tattooed on my forehead?” Dad asked, peeking through the curtains over my head. Mike laughed. “Nice cloaking, by the way. One of Ehran’s?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, still looking over the opposition. I had all six teams in the immediate vicinity. The two teams at the front of the house were both four-man teams, the two on the sides were five-man teams, while the two out back were both three-man teams. They were all armed in some form, but the unmagical had firearms, automatic and semiautomatic. I didn’t know enough about such to identify them. “With some minor adjustments, I can get to near invisibility depending on the intensity of the aura involved. And of course, the person doing the seeing.”

  “So what have we got out there?” he asked, squeezing my shoulders. It was very comforting to have him there at my back, so it was a minor surprise how anxious I was over him.

  “Six teams,” I said and I pointed. “Five men, four men, and three men, each group has at least one and at most three wizards and at least two armed men with firearms. They are all armed in some way. They haven’t seen us yet. Seem to be happy searching for the wardstones.”

  “Same ones that I installed?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, but I think Kieran has managed a few tweaks and changes since then,” I said. “You’re welcome to join me in looking, but I have control at the moment.”

  “You found the second wardstone,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “That was what drew Kieran to me the night we met in the forest,” I told him. “He brought it out of the lake and back here the next day while I was recuperating from Ethan.”

  “’Recuperating from Ethan’?” Dad repeated, asking what that meant.

  “A story better left for another time,” I said gently. “It has a good ending.”

  Jimmy walked into the room holding two black cases. Dropping both into the chair, he popped the snaps and opened them, taking out two different sizes of binoculars. The pair he handed me were huge in comparison to what I considered the more normal sized ones he handed my father.

  “I thought it was Billy that had ‘Short Man’s Disease’,” I said sarcastically.

  “Well, those were his,” Jimmy said dryly, with just a hint of humor in his eyes. “I think I still have his tweezers, too.” Mike let out a snort and Dad chuckled. I just shook my head for being the straight man for that act.

  “Mike, front,” I said, tossing the binoculars to him. I was looking straight down the barrel of a sniper’s rifle as he attempted to acquire targets in the house. I didn’t really need to get a better view of that. The see in truth spell had them locked down tight for me. This team had three wizards of fairly high power and two able-bodied men armed to the teeth—almost literally, one of them was picking his teeth nervously with a pen knife. Of course, the mages were the more interesting to me as they held more of a threat to us.

  “Hmm, snakes,” Dad murmured, then he turned more to the back, trying to see the two teams at the rear. There were too many trees in the way for that, but I could help there.

  With just a few calculations and estimates of distances and focal lengths, it was pretty amazing what you can do with pinhole-sized portals and reflective surfaces. I had images of the six teams from overhead displayed onto the wall behind us, showing all twenty-four men, no women at all this time around. The three mages on the team nearest us did indeed share some affinity to a snake god and their magic was based and tokenized on it. Two of them even carried several live and venomous snakes with them.

  “I see what you mean,” I muttered staring at them as one attempted to burrow through the underbrush again, only to get slowly burned in the wards’ energy barrier. “Does the way they are set about mean anything? The four, five, three pattern?”

  “Not really,” Dad said, dropping the spyglasses and glancing back at me. He joined me at the wall, blocking the left side portals until I adjusted his position and he figured out how I was doing it. “Another of Ehran’s tricks?”

  “No, extrapolating from photography and telescopes, actually,” I said. “Pinholes above their heads, lensing through the atmosphere, portals are wonderfully adaptable.”

  “Good job, son,” Dad said, nodding and studying the men carefully. “I wonder where they got these men. Snakes usually mean Africa or South America.”

  “One’s carrying a black mamba so Africa makes sense,” I agreed.

  “You’re joking, right?” Mike said, coming back into the room. “Idiot’s carrying a black mamba?” Peering at the images on the wall, he said, “I’d say this was the Russian’s work, the fixer anyway. Are they looking for the wardstones?”

  “Yes,” I answered, watching him piece together the little mystery before us. Obviously his previous experience showing value.

  “It’s his style anyway,” Mike continued. “Armed backup with groups of multinationals. Keeps the groups actively interested in keeping each other alive. Real Cold War, hate monger type man. He’s good and he’s expensive.”

  I sighed heavily. “Time to call in the big guns, I guess,” I said, glancing up at the clock. Even at ten thirty, I didn’t think we’d make the interviews in time.

  Little Brother, Peter is in trouble, can you come? Ethan called me through the anchor as he closed his business as quickly as possible. “I have to go, figure this out for yourselves,” he told the sprites.

  We are under attack, too, I told him. I have Dad and Mike with me. Go help Peter and Richard.

  Time to change tracks. Gordon? I sent through the key I’d set on him this morning. I could feel him near it.

  “Seth, is that you?” I heard Gordon say as if he was standing beside me. It was an uncanny sensation of sound.

  “Yes, Gordon, it’s me,” I said, thinking maybe it would translate to him through the link as he seemed to be talking. “Only have a moment. Both Peter and I are under attack at our individual homes. Kieran and Ethan have gone to help Richard, David, and him there. I have Dad, Mike, and Jimmy here. That leaves Ian and Marty on Gilán. The Palace has a Fae population that will see to their needs for some time, but I’d rather not leave them for too long without adult supervision.”

  “What can I do to help?” he asked, the concern streaked through his aura. There was also a vague sensation of someone hovering about four feet away from Gordon. So there was a limit to how far out from the diamond I could sense or was it out from Gordon? The pattern was very irregular and did seem to be spherically oriented around Gordon and no
t the diamond.

  “We need information,” I said. “That’s the best help you can be, find out if others are being hit. Mike says this looks like the Russian’s work. Find out what you can about him. Who he is, where he is, and why he’s doing this, although money is the most obvious answer.”

  “We just got off the phone with Harris,” Gordon said. “They’re still processing your assault last night, but he made no indication of other problems. We’ll get him back on the wire. You be careful, Seth.”

  “We’ll do our best on that front, Gordon,” I said, breaking the connection. “Looks like we’re on our own. That, or we bail out and help Peter.”

  “Abandon your home?” Dad asked. “I don’t think so. These guys don’t look so tough.”

  “It’s not them I’m worried about,” I said. “It’s who’s waiting in the wings to take over once they crash the wards.”

  “A healthy fear of the unknown is good,” Dad said. “But we can’t let that rule our lives. Ehran and Ethan may need help with Peter. We’re that help, so we need to move.”

  “Good point,” I said. “I’ll expand the sensitivity of the wards to encompass all six teams. Jimmy and I will take this pair while you and Mike take that pair. Whoever finishes first should go after the back pair. If you can identify the one in charge try to keep that one alive, but otherwise don’t bother trying. Where and how do you want to be dropped in?” If Dad was surprised by the way I’d taken charge, he didn’t show it and he didn’t try to usurp it either. He did pick the larger team to attack.

  Moving three batteries out of my cavern, I handed one to Mike and held the other two out to Dad. “Take these and pull from them. That’ll help keep you hidden longer and there’s more energy available in these than ambient right now.”

  “Merlin’s Stones,” Dad whispered as he took the batteries from me. He studied them carefully, pulling energy and pushing it back down several times with growing intensity.