“Then you killed him—bam!” he went on, taking the paper-wrapped burgers Mike handed him. Jimmy dumped handfuls of ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise packets onto the middle of the table. Cardboard boxes of french fries flew by, along with sweating cups as the food was passed out. “The pixie really had his hands full for the first few minutes, but once your power kicked in, you held them all entranced as you built your realm and I have to admit… it was pretty damn awesome to see.”
I’d finished only half a burger while I listened and already it was weighing heavy on my stomach.
“For me, in the period of a day, you went from fresh-faced, barely shaving boy to world-creating godhead. You wrote a Faery geas onto over a million sprites on the fly! You yourself said you didn’t know the language, but you wrote a working geas in it?” He gasped, frustrated.
“You aren’t alone there, mate,” Mike said after sucking from the sweating cup. “Pretty much all of us got similar stories about him doing stuff like that. The First of Gilán is the most recent. But get Peter and Ethan together one night. Get them to start their story. If you’re lucky, they’ll talk Kieran into joining in and get the whole story from the beginning. To hear Seth tell it, the story’s a little dry, but theirs is just as good as yours. Besides, maybe that way, I’ll get to find out why Peter and Seth fought in London.”
“It was something he said,” I answered. “Leave it at that, Ferrin.”
Mike grinned and shrugged it off. “Point is, they watched him grow from who you knew into who he is now and they can’t explain it any better than you can.”
“That’s not it, though, is it, Dad?” I asked, thinking that something didn’t quite feel right. “At least, not all of it.”
His eyes shot to mine as he hesitated. Collapsing a little, he admitted, “Not so much. When I left before you were a naïve little boy. Today you’re a commanding general of men. It’s a huge point of pride—that’s my son! Last week, I was taking what you said to me and judging it critically, telling you where you were right and wrong and how best to proceed on this or that idea. Today, you were telling me and I was doing it your way. And you were right!”
I saw the distress in his eyes and felt the helplessness that he felt, along with the gamut of similar emotions that flooded out of him. He needed to talk and I needed to hear it, I think. I hoped so, anyway, because I didn’t have any other ideas about what to do. He wound down some as I finished the first burger and cleaned up with paper napkins.
Sucking down some sweet, tart clear liquid from the paper cup, I sighed and said, “Do you remember Ophie? She was a cook we had in Savannah for a while? She left about four years ago. She had a saying that she’d quote a lot that I didn’t understand really until recently: ‘needs must when the Devil drives’.” Dad nodded, remembering the fat cook who loved to make fried okra, even though she knew Dad hated it.
I went on, completely losing interest in the second burger. “Well, I definitely understand that now. Simple fact of the matter is when people started telling me what to do and when I said ‘no’ with perfectly valid reasons, I had to stand up for myself. This led to bigger and bigger situations that required me to make decisions, often quickly. When people started relying on me, those decisions became more important. Unfortunately for me, people were relying on me from the beginning.
“That… changes you, changes your perspective,” I said, meeting his eyes again. “When someone’s life depends on the decisions or actions you make right then… whether it’s against one man or a thousand, it’s a lot of pressure to get it right the first time, every time. And when you’re faced with situations so totally out of your control, you have to be willing to take extreme measures and do the things you don’t want to do. That changes you, too. When you’re seventeen and new in the world, you think you’re unbreakable and nothing in the world can hurt you, but the universe conspired early to throw a monkey wrench into the works on that, too.
“That’s what you’re seeing here, those changes wrought,” I said spreading my arms out as if to say ‘Here I am.’ “Believe it or not, it’s not that great a change. I’m still the kid you left in Savannah on a business trip to… Chicago, wasn’t it? ‘Cept if someone tries to shove a gun in my face, he’ll find it back in his before he can squeeze the trigger. I’ve learned to take care of myself in a lot more situations.
“I don’t think of myself as a general of anything, but somebody has to be in charge of every situation. Mike and I have worked together for a while and we know reasonably well how each other works. He trusts me to do what I say I’m going to do and not get in his way. This comes from working together and spending time together. Jimmy trusts me implicitly in the nature of who and what he is. When you came through my diamond and into my home, you were already showing a good deal of trust in my magic. You came from the Cahills where I have worked hard to earn their respect and trust because of what Felix has done for Mother and I still feel like I’ve not done enough for them. But you’ve heard some pretty amazing stories, highly exaggerated I’m certain. You came into my house trusting me. When it came time to fight, of course you trusted me; it was already ingrained.
“I can say that who’s in charge is situational,” I added. “In my house and my realm, it’s obviously me, but more often than not Kieran’s in charge, but Mike, Ethan, and Peter have all taken control of aspects of both battles and business. It all depends on who excels at what.”
I figured he was feeling a little better when he turned to Mike and asked, “You excel at something?”
Chapter 19
“Those were a lot better last week,” Jimmy muttered at my side, grimacing and rubbing his belly as if that would remove the second half of my second hamburger from his stomach. I managed the first half and gave up. He didn’t.
“Your metabolism’s changing,” I said quietly. “That was a lot of grease you just ate.” Ducking below the Spanish moss that hung low from the cypress trees near the lapping waters of the inlet, I peered into the dimness of the wetland at the back lot of my childhood home. We followed the trail of the assault team from the break-in point at the relief valve of a floodgate. It was barely wide enough for a man to slither through, but that was all it took.
The original plan called for us to jump directly into my bedroom in the house—I certainly knew it best—but someone warded the house and I couldn’t tell whose it was. It could have been Mr. Colbert’s, but… When we came onto the property, the wards were screaming bloody murder. The house ward wasn’t one of ours, then, and wasn’t Artur Colbert’s. We made a good decision.
Mike and Dad were both sneaking up closer to the house while Jimmy and I followed the break-in point to the house, working to ascertain the number of men involved. At the moment my current estimate was ten, but Jimmy thought eight.
What struck me as being peculiar about this was the method involved in the break-in. Depending on how it’s built, a ward is just like any other electromagnetic field. Unless you bring it down completely, disrupting it in one place merely shifts it to another, like pushing one magnet into another magnet’s influence. Whoever was in charge of this went to some length to hide the fact that magic was at work here by using copper plates, oddly twisted wiring, and small but useless circuit boards at the junctures where the ward was hobbled. This was weird.
“Dad, Mike, when you get a second,” I whispered through their keys, waiting crouched in the shadow of the mossy cypress. The grand house peeked through the bushes from here and this was the last break in the ward before coming through to the yard. It was severely overgrown, having been untended through the summer, but it still showed the affects of years of meticulous care, almost aglow in luscious greenery.
“Yes, Seth?” Mike whispered. I pushed through the key into their personal spaces and trying to figure out exactly how far I could see. I was pretty much still at “personal space” length.
“We found where they broke into the ward and how they’re bypassing each level,�
�� I whispered. “But they’re leaving behind something strange at each point that I don’t understand. Do either of you know what this is?” I wasn’t really certain how to make sure they could see the contraption laying on the ground eight feet away from us so I just sort of concentrated really hard at looking at it.
“Seth, do you… see differently than we do?” Dad asked quietly after a short pause. He seemed confused and a little upset.
“Um, maybe,” I whispered, “but Tremaine didn’t have a problem seeing through my eyes in London.” Until I looked at Peter, anyway, then he freaked.
“I can tell that there are a few objects in there but that’s all,” Dad said. “Although, let’s try that ‘looking through your eyes’ with me later.”
“Is that a circuit board?” Mike asked. Now that was interesting. I could hear Dad whisper to Mike in the background, “You can see something in all of that?”
“Yes, it is,” I answered. “I can’t see that it does anything and there doesn’t seem to be any power source of any type available to it. You know my expertise at these things, though, is nil.”
“I don’t know what it is either,” Mike whispered. “My advice would be to move it. Slowly at first to see if the ward reacts at all, then hide it. Maybe it had something to do with alignment to something else, or proximity, and moving it will cause them problems. Be careful.”
The spacing on the other ‘mouse droppings,’ for lack of a better phrase, was already pretty random. Still, it sounded reasonable. The small, squat tripod lifted off the ground slowly with a gentle thought as I watched the force wall of the ward. There was the slight molding effect as the mass of the ‘mouse droppings’ moved but there were no other effects, just as I expected. Unclamping the circuit board from the tripod, I wrapped the copper plate and the board together with the wire and re-clamped it, collapsing the tripod legs down until it was a single rod. Standing, I shoved it as high as I could into the Spanish moss and the tree it was strangling. It’d be safe for a while.
Both Jimmy and I scanned the surroundings, there wasn’t anyone guarding their retreat that we could tell. We moved slowly through the next stage of the ward, slipping through the underbrush slowly. With our chameleon spells newly invoked, we were virtually invisible into several spectrums. Jimmy moved to my right, watching anxiously for any movement, his arms outstretched from his body slightly with the white truncheon in his hand. I may have looked a little naked and scrawny next to Jimmy, but I still had a Sword at each forearm and a Crossbow on my back. And he still didn’t have anyone to whack with his stick.
My connection to Dad’s ward was spotty at best even this close to the house. Considering I’d never really had a connection to begin with, I certainly wasn’t going to gain control if Dad couldn’t. He’d do that shortly, I suspect, and I’d definitely know about that. Standing slowly and watching the house came easy in the afternoon heat, the sun rising high in the sky with the humidity rising with it.
Memories rushed in of cut grasses and trimmed hedges, of my parents playing croquet on the front lawn while I chased butterflies near the creek and through the bushes. Then crawling along the creek bed behind me and coming back to the house gray with mud having just caught a black racer snake. Just short memories pushing through, good, happy memories. With just the slightest melancholy, I closed this chapter of my life completely. I couldn’t come home again; it just didn’t feel like home anymore.
Still, I was born in that house and spent seventeen years of my life within those walls. Nobody knew it better than I did, all the nooks and crannies, which steps creaked and which boards, too. Pushing my senses into the house, I could only get into the front clearly, the living room. Someone else held the hall back into the house and I didn’t want to announce our arrival yet. Jumping noiselessly to the porch, I peeked in through the first of several tall windows lining the sides of the house. This old house had been built and rebuilt several times over its two-hundred-and-fifty-year history. It now sported a covered porch that ran the front of the house and along half of both sides. That meant doors on the sides as well as the front, allowing access to the dining room on the other side and a second access to the living room on this side. And lots of windows, old windows with the “old glass” effect of runs that you see so rarely nowadays.
I felt Mike and Dad enter the house from my old bedroom window on the second floor as planned, even from the porch, but I lost their positions when they did, short of a vague feeling of their presence.
“Seth, I can’t re-take the ward,” Dad whispered to me through his key. “They are in the process of mangling the control now.”
“Okay, then I’m going to crash them,” I whispered back. “See if you can get ‘em back up quickly afterward.” It was time to take a more direct approach. It was time to go home again, at least in some way.
Dropping the chameleon spells on Jimmy and me, I waved for him to follow more closely and stood up, straightening my shirt and touching up my hair. I was primping for our burglars. Walking purposefully to the front doors, I pushed both open wide and called, “Mom! Dad! I’m hooo—oo—mmmeee!”
Then I tore into the wards, taking every iota of energy sequestered away for it and driving it deep down into the earth. Dad’s wards were very familiar, based almost entirely on the same form as mine, but modified for the larger property and the waterways on the south and east sides, where the break-in had occurred. Colbert cocked up the invocation, otherwise the break-in would not have succeeded. Really, he couldn’t be blamed as this magnitude of magic was beyond his capabilities.
They knew we were here now, Jimmy and I, and with the ward not scrambling my senses, I knew where they were now, too. Eight of them, six were completely normal while two were very strong wizards. Thankfully none smelled of blood, but one of them was caught at the edges of my Faraday cage around the ward. He fought against my pull on his energy, thinking at first the ward was draining him to charge itself. When it still didn’t answer to his satisfaction, he tried to pull away from me. I noticed, poor man. If he hadn’t been so twitchy and forceful, I would have let him go, letting him think it just another perturbation in the field. As it was, I unmade all of his fetishes and ready-made spells and he’d have to recharge himself before doing anything major.
A shadow appeared in the hall and a glint of metal flashed once and again closer. Jimmy gasped loudly behind me, starting to call my name and moving to intercept the black metal knife turning end over end toward me at gut level. He needn’t have worried, though. I ran at the knife and snatched the blade out of the air by the handle before it left the hall. With another two steps, I grabbed the thrower with my free right hand. Swinging my hips into his, I picked him up and tossed him down the right side of the hall. Jimmy swung hard at the man’s head with his truncheon as he flew by, crushing into his skull and creating enough torque on his body to snap his neck in the twist and turned him flat to the ground.
“Nice swing,” I muttered as he met me in the doorway.
“Nice toss,” he responded with a grin.
A short, loud eruption in the plaster in the wall next to us interrupted us.
“I told Paulie knives didn’t belong in a gunfight,” said an accented voice from the doorway to my dad’s office. The man there wore camouflage military gear, like the first man, with his semi-automatic held in both hands, almost lovingly. He had a vaguely Mediterranean look, but his accent placed him as either Italian-American or Hispanic.
“And I tell everyone I don’t like guns being pointed at me,” I said, opening a portal and shoving the man’s gun in his face. “So, really, I don’t need a gun to make that point. Before you get any bright ideas about pulling the trigger, that is your gun in your face. Your life is truly in your own hands.”
He whimpered, cutting his eyes between us and the gun against his forehead as we passed by him. Nobody in my dad’s office, but the four in the map room were panicked now. The wizards were both there with two of the regular humans
guarding the door, armed with the same weapon as the man hugging the wall in the anteroom to Dad’s office. I wanted the mages. I wanted to know why they were faking the magic use.
“Only one shows up, right outside,” one whispered. “A lightweight. What the fuck is going on out there?”
Grinning, I realized the wizard was acting, checking a laptop computer about our whereabouts, while actually sensing Jimmy outside the room they huddled in. They couldn’t see me at all and Mike and Dad were still hidden under the chameleon spell upstairs, seconds away from removing the other two men from the action.
“The tacos just ate it,” snarled the other wizard, feeling the twin pulses of energy that were Dad’s and Mike’s attacks, killing the two men. “Means at least two more. Playtime’s over. Pull ‘em out, now!”
Twin bursts of hatred came from the humans in the room at the racial slur from the wizard. I couldn’t blame them. He didn’t seem like a very nice man at all. While the powerless wizard attempted to pull whomever out of wherever, the active wizard sent light pulses down the hall like sonar, searching for us.
“Don’t bother,” I called down the hall and strode forward. The Stone thrummed in my cavern and issued a strong field in front of us and the Night shifted from my forearm into my left hand.
“Drop the sword!” yelled the man crouched on the left of the door aiming the gun at us.
Chuckling, I said, “No.” Two more portals took care of my gun issue for both of them. Apparently one firing causes a chain reaction. We were left with two suddenly, and three big, bloody messes. Dad wasn’t going to be happy about so many of his maps getting blood all over them. “Nervous, weren’t they?” I asked, half-hopping over the fallen bodies on the floor.
Sons (Book 2) Page 32