by Scott Duff
I ripped a hole in space and screamed. That was the last thing I remembered.
Chapter 56
For the second day in a row, I woke up not remembering going to bed. This time I didn’t even know the room I was in. Sitting up in the bed, I realized I was naked. Again. The universe was conspiring against me and clothes. Why it hated my modesty, I will probably never know. I let the sleepiness slip out of my head for a moment then got up, yanking the blanket off the bed and draping it around me like a toga and headed for the door.
There was an energy curtain at the door, so I slowed before I pushed through it, easing my senses into it first. Still aching all over, I didn’t need any more jolts of anything. It was just a privacy curtain, keeping noise and extraneous energy out of the room. And it told me where I was—the Cahill’s infirmary. My memory returned with a rush and I hurried out the door.
“Hello?” I called, trying to attract attention. I hadn’t been in this part of the infirmary before. It really didn’t look like part of it except for the screening everywhere. And while that screening was up, seeing people in the vicinity in adjacent rooms was difficult. I could tear through them, but what damage would that cause? And my mother was in here and, hopefully, Felix. Considering the isolation they put me in, I wasn’t gonna put money into that bet. As bad as that felt, I had work to do and if I gave that rat bastard any time, we’d lose and he had more than a high enough chance of winning as it was. Huh. I was learning to curse a little better now. That was something.
Wrapping a portal around myself, I jumped to my room. I needed clothes first, then food. My silks were laid out on the bed with a note on top. From Peter, telling me to wait for him or he’d… Ow! I wadded the note quickly, tossing it away—just away—grabbing my crotch defensively. I ran for the bathroom, desperately avoiding the direction of the note. I dropped my makeshift-toga on the counter, exchanging it for my toothbrush. My reflection looked rough. Some serious bruising on my chest explained the aches. The man in the mirror needed a shave. He looked… a little haunted, too.
Keep pushing that to the back; got too much to do. Still had that strange calm feeling I had with Felix last night, that evenness. I had the same feeling before my fight with Grandfather, too, but I didn’t recognize it. A serene determination, an odd feeling. Scrubbing off the gunk of last night took longer than I expected, so I serenely determined to let the hot water sluice down my back as long as I could.
The house wards buzzed as I toweled off. Not a warning, just an alert of some kind. Interesting, they’d devised a sort of bulletin board system through the activation wards. It was Marty who buzzed the wards. His signature resonated there delicately. I was dressing when John buzzed. That could get annoying pretty quick so I pushed up into the wards to look around, maybe I could buffer myself somehow.
John was still in the wards, his body sitting still in a small dark room between the dining room and the Butler’s Pantry. He was calmly checking various energy constructs that projected across the house and built the Castle. Then Martin came up, acknowledged John’s presence, and he lit up the wards. It kind of shocked me, not that I didn’t think he could do it, more of how confidently he did it. His control was more similar to his mother’s than his father’s, and this obviously wasn’t his first time being in control as he dove in directly and started searching for something. I lay back on the bed, watching him.
He started his search spirally from his location in the house, locating each person in the house in every room. He was being quite methodical about it. When he got to the end, he started over and went more slowly in a different pattern through the house. There were places in the house that I didn’t know existed that he slipped into, lifting barriers like rugs and sweeping underneath them. John even sat up and took notice of him doing that.
A bright streak of light shot over my head and I abruptly sat up, convinced I’d just seen a Will-o’-the-Wisp. I turned in time, barely, to duck and cover as Shrank shot out of my bathroom and back for the door, careening to the ceiling in a scattering torrent of sparks and squeals.
“Don’t do that!” Shrank yelled at me and slapped me. Ever been slapped by a pixie? Believe it or not, it hurts.
“Shrank! What’ya do that for?” I complained, rubbing my right cheek. He slapped an area bigger than he was and the Stone hadn’t blinked about it. I had the feeling it was laughing at me. Again. Ethan said they didn’t have personalities, but I wasn’t convinced.
“The four of you. You keep disappearing and I’m stuck here to worry,” he squealed in that dangerously high range. If he got much more excited my ears would bleed. “Then I leave your hospital bed for two minutes. Two minutes! And you disappear from there! They’re searching the whole castle for you and John’s about to call Peter in London. And… Argh!” He yelled in frustration. I fell back on the bed chuckling at him and he landed lightly on my chest.
“Is that what Marty’s doing? Hunting for me?” I asked, looking back up into the wards. Martin was about finished with his second sweep around the grounds. Shrank grunted in assent, digging a swirl of silk around himself to sit in. I pushed more into the wards and, acting dumb, projected at Marty, “Hi, Marty, what are you looking for? Can I help?”
He coalesced beside me. “I’m looking for you, dumbass. Where are you?” He was trying to hide his worry and fear, but he was barely into puberty and he was, um, “hormonally challenged” at this point in his life. It was still an admirable attempt.
“In my room,” I answered. “I really needed a shower and I couldn’t find anyone when I woke up. Where is everybody?”
“Gordon and Mother are at Da’s bedside,” he said solemnly. “Gordon’s crashed, totally exhausted. Ma dozes in and out. It was a long night for them. And you. No one expected you to wake up today at all.”
“So your dad, he’s…” I let the question hang.
“For the moment,” Martin said. On this he managed to compartmentalize his emotions. “It’s still very touch and go, according to the doctors.”
“I’m sorry, Martin,” I said softly. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“They had to pry you off of him, you know,” he said, clamping down hard on his emotions and trying to hide his sudden shame. The memory flashed through the connection briefly, along with the shame, hatred, and fear that Martin had felt last night for me. He thought I was killing his father as he came running into the room, halting by the door in shock. It was the briefest of pictures. Gordon and Peter on either side of me hauling as hard as they could. I was shouting in pain with my hands locked onto Felix’s chest and he was shouting in pain. Three different doctors were attached to Felix in ways I couldn’t see in the flash. Energy was shooting through all of us in various colors and intensities and none of it was calm. “It was really scary,” he muttered.
“I bet,” I replied.
“Peter went to London to check on Dillon,” he went on. “And Mike hasn’t gotten back from Germany yet. He should be back with Bishop later this afternoon.”
“Bishop? What’s Bishop want now?” I asked, more out of aggravation than thinking Marty would know.
“Don’t know. I’m not in that loop,” he said. “You hungry?” That’s one of the good things about teenage boys, priorities in the right places.
“Yes!” realizing just how hungry I was.
“I’ll meet you in the dining room in a few minutes, then,” he said as he slipped out of the connection. Several parts of the ward pulsed lightly as John and Marty got up and started moving. I pulled out of the wards.
“Okay, Shrank, it’s time to move,” I said, waking the pixie out of his doze. “I need to eat something. Big day ahead of me.”
“Yes, Master Seth, I imagine you do,” he squeaked stretching. “And you’re not leaving me behind this time.”
“You can join me for breakfast, Shrank. I don’t have a problem with that,” I said, chuckling softly.
“Lunch and you’re not going after the elf without me
,” Shrank said, digging tightly into the swirl he made in the silk shirt as I stood. “I may not be able to see you, but I know that look. You had the same look when you argued with Lord Kieran about fighting St. Croix.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Shrank.”
“Yeah, but there ya go.” He clipped the shirt somehow and created a sling so he wouldn’t fall as I stood up. He wasn’t going to be accidentally dislodged from the middle of my chest. I walked downstairs.
John met me in the dining room with a firm hug and a commanding “Sit” as he ferried plates of food from the kitchen. He looked haggard and disheveled but kept moving until a man and woman came into the kitchen through a back hallway and took over. There was already enough food on the table for ten when he sat opposite me. Marty came in a moment later. He sat next to me and set an ornate box about the size of a cigar box next to me.
“Your wallet and cell phone,” he said, tiredly. “Peter said to call if you got up before he got back.” He yawned and grabbed a roll. “He also said to eat and fill, whatever that means.” Martin was snippy today. Looking at him as he nibbled at the roll and I filled my plate, his tiredness was only part of the problem. There were other frustrations. I couldn’t throw kerosene on those fires. He had a lot to be frustrated about and I didn’t have any platitudes to offer him.
“I would suggest that Peter is back,” said John gruffly. “At least we can hear him.” I made a face of incomprehension, my mouth full with potatoes braised in butter and onions. “The rest of you are quite silent with your portals, extremely slick. Peter’s are very nearly as quiet, like trying to hear a whisper on the wind, but if you’re listening…” That tin foil tearing sound, I remembered and nodded.
Marty gave in, grabbed a plate, and ate with me, slowly. Peter showed up ten minutes later wearing his silks like me with a groggy Gordon in tow. He slugged Martin in the arm lightly as he passed him.
“You were supposed to wake me,” he grumbled, sitting and taking a plate.
“You needed sleep and he wasn’t going anywhere,” Marty responded.
Gordon grunted at him. “Ma wants you upstairs with her, now,” he said.
“Not until I find out what happened last night,” he snapped, his body going rigid. He was ready to argue.
“Marty, you’re too young for this,” Gordon said plaintively. “I don’t want you involved. If you get hurt…”
“Gordon, look around you!” Martin nearly shouted. “I have no choice but to get involved!” Gordon stared at his little brother, slack-jawed. Peter and I exchanged looks and sat back. Whatever was happening, this was not for us to interfere in. “Da is a breath away from dying. Ma is an absolute wreck. If you have to leave for any reason, Gordon, any reason, that leaves me here to raise the Castle. Me! John can’t do it and you know it.”
Gordon shot a look to John, who merely stared at the food on the plate in front of him, then back to his nearly hysterical brother. I haven’t seen the “Castle” in full defensive modes, but I could understand the implications of what Martin was saying. There was much more to the wards than locating people on the property. The tears streaming down Marty’s face seemed to melt Gordon even more.
“I’m a little hazy on a few details myself,” I added quietly.
“Surprise, surprise,” grunted Peter, dishing out some potatoes.
Gordon gave in, reaching across the table to take his brother’s hand. “All right, Marty, you’re right. I just… don’t want to have to… I’m afraid of the same things you are, Martin. You can understand that.” Martin nodded slowly, sniffling. This wasn’t an argument with his brother that he really wanted to win. Gordon sighed, sitting up, and started picking at his plate.
“You know we went to Grammand’s for the Council meeting, right?” Gordon recounted. Martin nodded. I didn’t know if Grammand was the city, house or what and I wanted information about prior incidents, but we’d get back to that. “Da and I drove a good ways and flew with Bishop part way. The night for the most part was a fairly normal council meeting, all politics and glad-handing. When he showed up told us there were elves in the room.” Gordon pointed to me as the ‘he.’
“You didn’t see them?” Marty asked.
“They used a very good veil and layered a large number of spells into the wards that numbed the senses,” I told him. “I didn’t see them right off either.”
“As soon as he said that, all Hell broke loose,” Gordon said. “Seth attacked the fake Ehran and Ethan, and Peter and Mike waded into the crowd after the others. It was a nightmare in that room. They played with our emotions at the same time they were trying to kill us all. And the elves had help, damned traitors.” The heat that filled his aura and his eyes was scary, very scary. He sighed heavily and went on. “As with most fights of this kind, many things happened very fast, most of them involving Seth, Peter, and Mike. They had the elves on the run, though, Martin. The three of them had already killed nearly a hundred high-powered elves and eighty of our best barely had a clue as to what was happening around us.
“They had one last trick up their sleeve,” he went on. “And it took Seth to notice that one, too. The remaining elves drew every bit of magic they could and drove it between the water tables and the rock layers to set up a resonance that would have created a massive earthquake in Europe. We had scant minutes to divert this resonance somehow. Seth makes these things.” He pulled a battery out of his shirt pocket and held the orange stone up for Marty to see. I waved him off and handed Marty one from my increasing store of them.
“Whoa! What’s the spell? This is powerful,” said Martin, turning the rock over in his hand several times.
“Draw from it,” Gordon said, making a “go ahead” motion when Martin looked up at him. He pulled from it with his fingertips with a child’s grace, moving the energy in and out of the surface of the stone. Like Ferrin and Gordon before him, the battery intrigued him immensely.
“What is this?” he asked, still toying with it.
“Near as Ethan can tell,” Peter said, sopping up butter and basil leaves with a piece of bread. “Seth has created something with about eight internal dimensions that magical energy likes to flow through quite nicely. How and why it works, we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Da and I created funnels around two of them, empty ones,” Gordon continued. “Peter and I went one way and Da and Seth went another. We were going to drive these into the ground and launch the funnels to collect the energy before it could hit and create the earthquake. My guess as to what happened is that Da got caught in the crest of one of the waves when he was driving the battery down. He knew then how bad it was going to be and kept trying to drive the stone down, but he was too badly hurt by then. That’s when Seth saw him.”
“I made him stop,” I said. “All I saw was that he was hurting himself. I didn’t think about anything else except that, but I didn’t know how to fix the broken parts. And when Peter called, I was lost.”
“Peter and I got our stone in place and launched and Peter took us back to Grammand,” said Gordon. “The elves laid a ward on the house by then and Peter was stuck there. We couldn’t make another portal to get out again. We don’t know if they figured out what we were doing or if they were just trying to keep as many of us there as possible or what, but we were stuck. Then the wave hit. Probably the same wave that crushed Da’s chest. The enormity of it was staggering, but the elves managed to reflect it one more time. It cost them their lives, but they did it. Da was our only chance.”
“How did you get out there?” I asked. “Finding me I can understand. I felt the portal open, but you said you couldn’t open a portal from the house…”
“Bishop threw us,” Peter said, grinning. “Not a preferred method of travel, trust me.” I mimed throwing a ball in confusion at the idea. Peter nodded slowly, still grinning. “Pretty much. We had to get about four hundred feet out away from the house and that was the fastest way anyone could think of. It wasn’t fun, but worked
. I got us to you. Gordon got the battery buried and the funnel activated seconds before the wave hit. You told us how Felix was. Gordon was saying his good-byes to his father then. We could both see it.”
Gordon nodded sadly, a tear running down his cheek. I didn’t dare turn to Martin right then. I would have turned into a baby, I know I would have.
“Then we were here and you were screaming in pain and you wouldn’t let him go,” said Gordon. “We yelled and screamed for doctors. John was screaming at me through the wards and through it all, Seth didn’t let go of him. When we finally got enough doctors who knew what to do around him to take over for Seth, we had to drag him off and hide him behind every screen we had. You know the rest.”
“When did Kieran and Ethan disappear?” I asked.
“That had to happen after Mike and I left for London,” answered Peter. “That was an hour and a half after we got back from your house.”
“We left for Dunstan’s to meet with Bishop about two hours after that,” said Gordon. “He and Ethan were holed up in his room then. Wouldn’t talk to anyone. As mad as he was, we didn’t push too hard. He showed up at Dunstan’s a few hours later, ready for the conference. We didn’t think to ask questions about it.”
That didn’t surprise me. It was the same magic that lulled me into complacency. And I wasn’t sure that knowing when Kieran and Ethan were taken would really matter. I finally looked at Martin and saw the lost little boy rebuilding his world, wiping his eyes and sniffling.