by Scott Duff
“It’s early November, Dad,” I said. “You’ve been missing for over ten months. And I’ve been studying, if you can call it that, for under two months.”
“Ten months?” he repeated. “Two months? St. Croix must be having a shit fit by now.”
I snorted, saying, “He’s not a problem anymore.” Glancing past him, I noticed the gates to the compound again. They lacked the power they showed the first time I saw them, that sense of impending doom they had at first. Curious, I stood up and moved closer to look.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked, following me to the gate.
“With the help of Lord Kieran, and Masters Ethan and Peter,” squealed Shrank, finally returning from safeguarding the other Fae. “Lord Seth dispatched Mr. St. Croix some time ago.”
“It wasn’t the first time I killed anyone,” I muttered. “But it was a… disgusting feeling… to kill your own grandfather.” I looked at him, directly in the eye. “To kill anyone really. My count’s over hundred now, cuz of the war. I try not to count, but when you can remember every face on every man, it’s hard not to.”
With one finger, I pushed on the gate. It swung easily forward, almost inviting us in. I stepped over the threshold and felt no difference between inside and outside the fence, but I could clearly sense the wards. The feeling of omniscience, of knowing where everything was, still existed. In fact, it extended well beyond the fence to include the wooded areas surrounding us. And it was growing! Centering around a small orchard of citrus trees at the southern tip of the house, long ranges of rain forests began sprouting into existence, or at least into awareness to the wards. It was fascinating to watch, and scary. How viable would this world truly be?
“Oh my freaking God!” I said. “I’m in control of a freaking world!”
“What?” Dad asked. He had followed me through the gate, looking it over as he went, confused by it. I’m there with ya, Dad.
I stared at him, utterly frustrated.
“Dad, there is so much that has to be done all at the same time that you’re just gonna have to trust me for a little while,” I said and opened a portal to the Castle.
Chapter 61
I dropped us directly into my mother’s room and said, “Unlock it.”
“Olivia!” he gasped as he ran to her side.
I brushed against my brothers’ auras to let them know I was here. They were outside a ways, on the hilltop they’d designated as their headquarters. And all terribly worried and frustrated, probably about me.
Little Brother?
“Yes, Kir du’Ahn, I’m here,” I called through the link he’d created. “Unharmed, but in the infirmary. Could you and the guys join me? I have a surprise. And ask Gordon and Mister Bishop to meet with us shortly in the dining room? I’m starved!”
While I watched Dad searching and probing Mom, I glanced down at myself and noticed my hands weren’t broken anymore. I remembered the broken bones, some bruises and contusions, from the battle, but now saw no traces of any injuries. Pretty damn lucky, but I still felt like I could sleep for a week.
You will tell us what is going on. He was trying to sound imperious and demanding. It didn’t work.
“Are you kidding? I’m begging for help, brother!” I told him, laughing as I closed the connection. Dad had pulled himself together long enough to open his lock on her memory. I started tugging pale blue energy from one of my batteries and forming the field out in front of me. Slipping in beside him, the field fit perfectly onto her aura and melded easily into the bends and twists of her magically-tormented mind. Now I could do something without being counteracted. Now she could heal. For the first time in close to a year, I felt like I could relax.
I felt Kieran, Ethan, and Peter appear in the common room just down the hall from us, startling the attendant there.
“Dad,” I said, still pushing pieces of Mom’s psyche around. “There are three men coming in that you need to know. I consider them family—brothers—and you will notice a familial trait, sort of. It’s a simple relationship with very complicated people all of whom you already know, sort of.” I stood up and grinned at him for a second then went back to finish smoothing out any rough spots, adding in the sense of comfort and relief at finally being at home again with everyone I love. She’d lost so much weight, but she could get better now.
“The first is Peter Borland,” I said as Peter rushed in, looking first to me, then to Dad as he stood to face the door. It was good that Peter was first since Dad knew him in some way. He knew Peter’s dad well from what I’ve recently learned.
“Mr. McClure?” he said, surprised. “He found you!” Peter jumped at him, swinging his arms around his chest and squeezing the breath out of him.
“Peter,” Dad said, barely, while trying to inhale.
“Don’t worry, Dad, it only gets weirder,” I chuckled, pulling away from Mother. She pulled in a deep breath and rolled away from us slightly, just sleeping. It’d been months since she’d just slept.
Ethan finally made it into the room. “Who did you just say?” he asked, stopping the second he saw Dad standing there. “Dad?” He launched himself at my father, grappling him in a hug that caught Peter’s head under Ethan’s biceps. Tears streamed down his face in honest emotion and I honestly didn’t care who he was happy for.
“This is Ethan,” I said, wondering what kind of psychological damage this was putting on Ethan. “Ethan is going to take some explaining. At the moment, you could consider him… a lot of me. Come on, guys, you’re freakin’ him out. He doesn’t understand. He thinks it’s January.” I felt Kieran in the doorway behind me as I pulled Ethan and Peter away from Dad and made sure he was breathing again. Dad didn’t have a problem understanding Peter at all but he was suspicious as hell of Ethan. I have to admit it, though. He hid it very well.
Ushering Peter and Ethan toward a corner of the room with a sink I said to Dad, “And of course, you know Ehran.”
None of them had expected me to walk in with Dad. I hadn’t. So chaotic auras were the order of the day and getting a decent understanding of what anybody was feeling right then was damn near impossible. That was certainly true with Kieran.
“Ehran? Is that you?” Dad whispered hoarsely, his green eyes searching his son’s face and racing over his body trying desperately to reconcile what he was seeing with his memories. And what he wasn’t seeing.
“Father?” Kieran asked.
It was kind of sweet in a Nineteen Forties kind of way. How neither of them wanted to make the first move. I got over it pretty quick.
“Yes, Dad, this is your son, Ehran. Yes, Ehran, this is your father, Robert. Now hug and get it over with. I’m hungry.” They both turned and scowled at me. I just rolled my eyes and washed up.
“What the hell happened?” Peter asked quietly, still wiping a damp cloth to some of the larger abrasions on his forearms. “You sent us back then were out of contact for close to six hours. You had us scared out of our minds.”
“Did you see what he did? The elf, did you see what he did to his people?” I asked in a whisper. I have no idea what I looked like when I said it, but Ethan looked positively disturbed by the question itself.
“Not exactly,” Peter answered. “I saw something that I found… nauseating? Then I saw them start to fall, like puppets with their strings cut. Then we were on the hill across from the command tent.”
“He ate them,” I said, my voice hoarse and thick with disgust. “I really don’t want to say that again.”
“I don’t understand,” Peter said softly.
“He broke the geas,” Kieran said. “Stole their lives in the backlash. Vicious. That would explain Race Traitor.”
“It’s been forty years,” I said, with mock aggravation. “You two stand there like you don’t know what to say to each other. Mother will probably sleep for four to six hours. I’ll come back after supper and a nap.” I looked to Peter and Ethan. “Would either of you care to join the newest Lord of Faery in
a late supper?”
“You would not believe what he just did,” Dad said to Kieran.
“Actually,” Kieran said, laughing, “Yeah, I probably would.” They’d opened a line of communication instantly through me. Go figure.
Peter was still beat-up pretty bad. “No one would see to your injuries?” I asked him angrily.
“He wouldn’t let anybody near him long enough,” Ethan answered for him. “We’ve been trying every trick we know to get to you. Even Named Summoning didn’t work. You were blocked behind something extremely powerful.”
Dad and Kieran spoke quietly in front of the door, probably still about me, not that I was listening. They were starting to piss me off.
“Hug already, damn it! It’s been forty years,” I said scornfully. Using the Stone was becoming second nature now and it shoved the two of them together chest to chest, almost crushing the wind out of them. “We’ll be in the dining room.”
A second later, after moving the three of us to the dining room, I had Peter and Ethan in a bear hug neither was expecting and no doubt assaulting their auras with a tumult of my emotions. It took them a moment, but they hugged me back, gently rocking in place with me. We knew and felt other people in the room and we ignored them completely. When we finally pulled away from each other, we had tears streaming down our faces and a definite feeling of communion between us. My brothers, the first real friends I’ve ever really had, and their Little Brother.
“You leave on another fool’s errand without telling me and I’ll leave you adrift next time,” I told Ethan as we pulled away.
“Tell that to the Big Kahuna,” he muttered softly. “I don’t have a lot of choice but to follow when Quixote goes tilting at windmills, you know.”
“Robert?” I heard Felix gasp from behind me. I turned to the door and saw Dad and Kieran standing there. Looking at the table, the side we stood on was empty, but the opposite side held several men, all waiting quite impatiently for us. Felix and Gordon sat together in the middle of the table. John stood behind Felix’s wheelchair, making sure he didn’t overexert himself, no doubt. There were also two doctors sitting close by watching him carefully. I was surprised that he was even out of bed. Bishop sat to their right then, surprisingly, Marchand with his lapdog, Murrik. Clifford Harris sat to Cahill’s left with two other men I didn’t know. I did find it interesting that the only women in the room were those serving. I’d have to look into that later.
“Felix, may I come in?” Dad asked politely.
Cahill nodded mutely, still surprised. He turned to me. “So while all of this was going on, you managed to find your father at the same time?”
“More like he found me,” I said, noticing the food spread out on the table for the first time. My stomach grumbled angrily at me. “May I?” Again, Cahill nodded mutely.
I picked up a bowl and sought out the stew that he loved so much from the far end of the table. Reclaiming the seat I’d chosen, Dad sat next to me with Kieran on his right. Peter sat on the other side of me with Ethan on his left. As I started eating, I looked up to see everyone staring at me. It was enough to turn me into a statue.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, what happened?” Gordon and Felix said loudly together. I laughed a little.
“I’m alive, aren’t I,” I answered rhetorically. “I won.”
There was a collective shout of joy and relief outside and the dining room itself got very loud for a few minutes as they vied for congratulations to us and me in particular. I tried to keep eating and actually got a few bites down as they slowly lost some of their energy. Questions abounded and everyone vied for my attention.
“It’s been a long day and I’m not sure it’s over yet,” I said as I cut up something like roasted turkey. “How much of the story has been told so far?”
“Up to the point that you sent us back here,” Gordon prompted. “But not why. Something happened to the elves, to all of them at once. Then you sent us back. What happened after that?”
I sighed heavily, trying to come up with a polite way to say this. “He committed… an abomination.” Looking across the table at Gordon, I could see that least he understood the undercurrent, if not the fact, of what I was saying. “If the Faery Queens wish that information to be public knowledge then I will say and not until.”
“So why did you send us back?” Gordon asked.
“Because I didn’t want him to do the same thing to you and I was already doing two things at once. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure how he did it, so I couldn’t protect you two from the same fate.”
Gordon sat and thought about it for a few moments, reconciling what he witnessed against what I said. Others on his side of the table weren’t quite as thoughtful in their consideration.
“What happened then? What did you do?” Marchand asked.
“Once the Rat Bastard was standing again,” I continued, glancing over at Marchand with slight annoyance but keeping my attention on the Cahill’s and Bishop, “he did what elves have been doing to a very long time: the arrogant prick gloated. He knew the magic I was working, knew what it would do, and he knew I couldn’t handle it.”
“But you proved him wrong, huh?” Marchand asked, sniffing at the end, almost as arrogantly as the Rat Bastard.
“No, he was right. I couldn’t handle it,” I said dismissively. “When the spell finished, it was like being connected to the power output side of a nuclear reactor. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t do anything but die. He knew it. I knew it. But being an elf, and an old elf at that, he had arrogance down to an art-form. And as he crawled to me, he let a tiny bit of information out that he knew couldn’t possibly help me because there was no way that I could possibly have what he was talking about. Except I did.
“It wasn’t going to be fast enough to save my life though,” I said, being alive now made it easier to say casually. “I’d run out of time and he was breaking the Day and the Night out of my hands through the armor. He was about to slice through my neck with my own Sword, but at least I made him pay a huge price for the privilege. He was king of nothing now. I’d stolen his kingdom from him and he wasn’t getting it back.” I left a few details out of the story, but everybody didn’t need to know everything. Those that deserved to know more would be told with a little time.
“But you’re here and he’s not,” Gordon said, trying to lead me on.
“Yes, well,” I said, grinning. “Once I tied his power down, he was still an elf, an old and powerful elf, and I’m still a kid and I was pretty much wiped out. He literally broke my hands taking the Night and Day from me. I wasn’t resisting; I was just locked into place by the armor. As he swung the Day Sword back to take my head off, I made one last ditch effort. I yelled for my daddy and look who showed up.” I grinned and waved my hand at Dad. “He grabbed the Rat Bastard’s sword hand, said ‘Nobody fucks with my boy,’ and punched him right in the kisser! The damn elf dropped the Sword, flying back ten, twelve feet through the air!”
Picking up Dad’s arm and pushing his forearm back to show his arm muscles, I leaned forward a little to look at Kieran’s shocked face with a grin on mine. “Daddy’s got guns!” Most of the table broke into raucous laughter, either at the statement itself or at Dad’s red-faced embarrassment.
“Shrank pointed out that the Queens were in the neighborhood and that we needed to leave,” I said after a few moments, once the kidding had subsided. “The Rat Bastard jumped up out of the rubble of the arena and I filled him full of holes. I called up a portal to what I thought was here. Shrank asked me to save the remaining Faery that were left behind. Once they were through, I closed the portal and found out we weren’t here. I passed out shortly after that.”
“How long were you out?” Bishop asked eagerly. He had a lot of questions waiting. This was by no means the most pressing on his mind.
I shrugged and started to answer, but Dad beat me to it. “It felt like about three hours,” he said.
“But time is a fluid concept when you don’t have anything to judge against. And considering the huge panic going on around us… And while I am not without ability, I was without power at that time.”
“When Dad was finally able to wake me up,” I took up the story again, “it was to tell me the Fae we’d rescued we’re about to die again. They would not be able to survive the night where we were without what MacNamara had taken from them. It was too harsh an environment. They would freeze to death by night’s end.”
“How many?” Kieran asked quietly, understanding exactly what I meant.
“Over a million,” I said looking over at him. Kieran gasped at the number. “I need you to look at them, too. I’m not certain I did it right. It looks different than yours and Shrank doesn’t think it will last more than a month or two without further guidance. Frankly, I was just worried about getting them through the night.” He nodded numbly at me.
“So what was the Queens’ reaction to the death of their peer?” Marchand asked with a sneer. “You said they were ‘in the neighborhood.’ Surely they have some reaction to you killing one you claim to be their equal.”
“We’re about to find out,” Gordon said, staring vacantly at the wall over my shoulder. “Seth, there is an envoy of elves at the western gate… asking very politely to speak…well, to speak with you.”
“Um, okay,” I said blankly. “I guess I should talk to them, huh?” Dad chuckled softly. “Show them to the front door, I suppose. I wouldn’t let them in the house though.”
I kept eating as I rose up into the wards to look at the western gate. Marty had control of the castle wards now, so I slid in beside Gordon as an observer.
“Leave the gun,” murmured Felix. I nodded in agreement, feeling several others beside me in the wards now. Within seconds, we had a virtual peanut gallery with us. There were two men on the gate, one held the gate open while the other led the elf up the road. The lead man tossed his rifle to the gatekeeper and started toward the castle at a trot. The elf urged the horse forward, walking slowly to match the man’s speed, unbearably slow for the fine steed but neither the elf nor the animal showed discomfort.