Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (24 page)

“Any other myths you care to break? Now would
be a good time,” I said, knocking on the countertop loudly.

“Hm. I’d have to know what the myths are
first,” he said.

I shrugged. “Elves can’t lie. Don’t take food
or drink in Faery or you get trapped there. They’re immortal and
unbelievably beautiful. They want us all dead because we stole
their world. They’re dying out because they can’t have children.
They’re interbreeding with humans to create half-breeds called
changelings just to survive. They steal and eat babies.”

“You’ve been reading too many fantasy
novels,” muttered Peter.

“The ‘can’t lie’ one is partly true,” said
Shrank from the counter in front of me, giggling. “It’s part and
parcel to the Original Geas.”

“’Original Geas’?” I asked.

“You’ll find out about that later,” said
Kieran, putting a hand on my shoulder and leaning over the counter,
peering down a row. “And while they’re certainly long-lived, they
are not immortal, except perhaps the queens and kings providing no
one sticks a blade between their ribs. There are elven children,
but they are few. But you’ve met one. Would you want to have sex
with that bitch?” He looked me straight in the eye, mischievous
grin wide. “You’re seventeen. You can get it up if the wind hits
you right, but could you get it up for her?”

Hawthorne could have made an alphabet of
letters on my forehead, I was blushing so hard. Sex wasn’t taboo in
my house. Dad talked to me about it when I was eight, rather
matter of factly. We lived on a lot of land and there
were a lot of animals around so I saw things. I saw a lot of
things. It wasn’t dirty or anything, just sex, procreation,
survival of the species, facts of life. But this was my, um,
equipment we were talking about here.

“Pick your jaw up, I think I hear someone
coming,” whispered Peter from behind me. He banged on the counter
loudly again. “Hello!”

A small elderly man teetered slowly out from
the right side of the shelves, moving toward us. “Can I hep you,
gentlemen?” he said. If there was an accent in there, I didn’t
place it, but his voice was mild and a little squeaky. He was
dressed in a starched pinstriped shirt, sleeves rolled to the
elbows, with wool pants held up with braces. He wore a visor over
metal-rimmed, round glasses hanging low on his nose with a stub of
a pencil behind his ear. Very Laura Engles and very much a façade
with all its haziness. The man behind the façade stood six-foot
four and breathed like the bellows of a furnace when he moved.
Heaving around all that muscle obviously took effort.

“Please, we’d like to speak to MacNamara,”
Peter said, speaking to the shorter, elderly man’s face. I watched
the much taller man’s face instead. Kieran stared back into the
rows of shelves, while Ethan… Ethan was nowhere in sight.

“Mister MacNamara ain’t here,” said the
elderly man. “He’s gone up north for supplies. Won’t be back for
three or four weeks.”

“Now we all know that’s not true,” I said to
the big man’s face.

The big man got angry at that. The façade
fell and the little man disappeared along with most of the
accouterments in the front room. All that remained was the counter
and the center bin that Kieran had pulled nails from. The big man
leaned towards me threateningly.

“You calling me a liar?” he asked, his voice
deep and angry, rumbling with the power of violence.

“Obviously,” I said, calmly. I probably would
have been more scared if I hadn’t seen him already. Not that he
wasn’t plenty scary now, breathing in my face like that. He swung a
huge ham-sized fist at me and I caught it. Then there was a very
large sword tapping on his nose. He backed off as far as I would
let him.

First off, it’s not really fair to say, “I
caught it,” when in fact I did see it coming—barely. The Day Sword
thrummed like harp string, freshly plucked, and the Stone rumbled
to life, slammed upward like lava from a volcano, and encased his
hand completely, holding it in place. But the sword wasn’t
mine.

Kieran tapped the man’s nose lightly again on
its point with the flat of the sword, pushing him back, so I let
the Stone move him back a little further behind the counter while I
studied the sword. Before the Day and Night, I’d never thought of a
blade of any sort to be particularly beautiful. Of course, that’s
changed. In craftsmanship, both the Day and Night are simply
gorgeous and incomparable. In power and utility, again they are
incomparable. The sword that Kieran held was categorically
different. I couldn’t tell what it was made of. I was actually
having a difficult time seeing it at all, like I didn’t understand
what it was. I followed the dark disruption in space back to Kieran
to see him grasping it like the hilt of a large sword just like the
form implied, but I couldn’t see any metal in its composition, or
any exotic bones, like the Night Sword. It was like a dark gray
energy caught in a state of flux. Okay, I’ll be honest—I didn’t
have a clue what it was beyond scary looking.

“Should I let him go?” I asked lightly with
raised eyebrows, trying to show little of the fear that was rolling
through me. I think I actually knocked my knee against the counter
once, shaking.

“If you don’t mind,” Kieran said, oh so
politely. It was so cloyingly sweet, you’d think we’d practiced it.
I stroked the foundation Stone, sending a polite thank you to it,
and released the man’s hand. Glancing at it before he pulled it
away, I was pretty sure he had a few cracked bones in there.

Suddenly there was a resounding crash in
back, far behind the counter to our left. Rapidly followed by
another, and another. Someone was knocking the shelves over,
domino style. The fluorescent lights overhead started flaring
off, most bursting like they were hit. Peter vaulted over the
counter and sprinted down an aisle.

“Peter! No!” I shouted, basically to Kieran
who was still keen on the big guy in front of us. Since he was six
and half foot of muscle tipping the scales at a little over three
hundred pounds, you’d have paid attention to him, too. His
shoulders were so thick he hunched over. Oh, God, I have to go past
him.

“Now you just stay right there and have a
nice chat with Kieran while I go find out what the boys are up to,
okay, big guy?” I said, flashing a smile at the man. Backing down
the counter about six feet, I jumped up and swiveled around,
looking carefully on the other side for anything nasty that might
be waiting. I jumped down and looked back down the counter to see
the man standing there in black silky athletic shorts that were far
too small. Even then, his legs looked emaciated. Dark leathery
brown with black writing on every square inch. Another crash
announced whatever was happening had crossed the wider center
aisle. Kieran could handle whatever this thing was.

I tracked back a few aisles and started
running. Whatever this place was for, they loved bins. They had a
lot of them on shelves stacked to the ceiling. Bigger aisles
crossed in the center both ways among the rows of shelves. When I
hit the main cross aisle, I skidded to a halt, staring down it.
Peter was slowly walking toward me as the shelves tipped over in
front of him. He was watching the ceiling, his hands held out in
front of him at a strange angle and they glowed with a green light,
mottled heavily with black. Definitely not a pleasant spell to be
hit with. Okay, maybe I could feel a little less guilty later.

Something moved over my head. Time to get
serious. Both Swords unsheathed in my mind, the Crossbow strung its
bow, a green Bolt ready to fire, and the Stone set a wall of
granite and meshed steel around me. I felt invincible, but just
like Ethan said, Kieran walked right through these, so someone or
something else might, too. Still, they’d been good to me so far and
I’d seen the Stone produce what looked like steel only once before
now and the car survived a significant blow. Something jumped the
aisle overhead and the lights started swinging. The shelves crashed
heavily into one another, leaving the last section against the wall
standing. Then something big and dark crossed over the aisle, too.
These shelves started swaying in the opposite direction. Then the
first set tipped over, crashing into the second.

“Near as I can tell,” whispered Peter
hoarsely as he neared me, “Ethan is being chased by something. I
can’t see either of them well enough to help, though. And I think I
heard him laughing.” Peter started back down the aisle slowly
trying to get a vantage point. There was a lot of movement
happening up there and if half of it was Ethan, I wasn’t seeing
more than I thought.

This was getting out of hand. We were being
split up. Whether intentionally or not, it didn’t matter. I could
imagine Peter deciding he needed to climb up to help Ethan. I
couldn’t let that happen. Another set of shelves fell and I was
behind the “wave.” Fine, that put me comfortably safe, now I just
needed height. I started walking in place, up the steps the Stone
obligingly locked into place for me, rising up toward the ceiling.
I knew the Stone was going to be a far more useful tool than just a
defense and it was proving it again and again. Peter glanced back
at me, then did a double-take when he realized I was nearly level
with the top of the shelves, slowly rising to peek over the plane
of action.

Yep, Ethan was up there, running up and down
the tops of the shelves, jumping lightly across the aisles. The
silence was artificial, the sound reflected back to the ceiling by
an energy shield at the top of the shelving units. I barely saw it
when I stuck my head through, but it was clearly visible looking
down at it. Ethan was taunting whatever it was chasing him. It was
chewing up the field so Ethan wouldn’t have anywhere to run. That’s
why the shelves were falling—it was knocking them over in anger. I
almost laughed when I saw that. But what was it?

Ethan was bleeding from his left arm. Three
blackened scorched marks about six inches long and a half-inch
thick ran down his biceps, thin rivulets of blood ran down his arm
from each. It looked nasty but he didn’t seem to be favoring the
arm in any way. I focused intently on his pursuer. It looked
similar to a bat with two sets of wings, if a bat was made of black
smoke and blue fire. It obviously had physical mass because it hit
and blew out the fluorescents and knocked over shelves. And it
could hurt Ethan. I concentrated on the energy plane, astral plane
I mean, and watched as the thing moved. The room itself was thick
with ambient energies and the creature was using this to phase in
and out between the physical and astral realms. And it wasn’t
natural.

“Too slow,” muttered Ethan, batting a clawed
wing to the side and grinning. He jumped back a few feet then
flipped over to the next aisle, swinging the lights. Running over
the top shelf toward me, the creature thought to cut him off, half
jumping and half flying across the diagonal path, it misjudged
Ethan’s speed and landed inches behind him as he flipped back over
to the aisle he’d been on. The creature snarled angrily and
launched itself backward across the aisle again.

This was my chance. I raised myself a few
feet and pulled the Crossbow. Ethan ran farther down the shelf,
ducking under a brown steel rafter then launched himself back
across the aisle. The creature braced itself against another rafter
and started shoving the shelf. I fired. I fired fast, up and down,
into each taloned claw, four times, then eight, then twelve. Each
claw was pierced and held in place on the shelf or rafter by a
bright green Bolt from the Crossbow and the creature hadn’t even
realized it yet, until the unit started to wobble and fall only to
be held up by its body. It seemed to stretch out some, but the
creature didn’t give and the Bolts held it in place.

“Ethan, are you all right?” I yelled,
watching the thing stretch. I might have been more apt to relieve
some of the pressure on it if it was real. But this thing was just
wrong.

“Yeah, I’ll live,” he said, dejected, off to
my right somewhere. “It got me once while I was distracted, before
I knew it was there.”

“Kieran’s at the front with a sword on a guy
and Peter’s down below us ready to throw some pretty nasty magic at
something. I don’t like the idea of any of us being alone right
now,” I said, urgently. This was seriously out of my comfort
zone.

“I’ll go to Kieran. You take Peter. Head to
us and we’ll head to you.” He started jogging across the top of the
shelves then jumped, missing a steel beam by a few inches. This was
one of the times it helped that Ethan’s personality was based on
mine. He knew exactly what I needed to hear and started moving. It
was pretty much what I was thinking anyway. Returning the Crossbow
to its ready position on the foundation Stone in my cavern, I
bounded down the invisible staircase the Stone created and shadowed
for me in my mind. With eerie timing, at the same time that I hit
the concrete and the Stone dismissed its creation, there was a soft
thud above me and the teetering shelf finally fell. I felt queasy
when the twelve Bolts returned to the Quiver, but a little relieved
to put that thing out of its misery.

Peter was nowhere in sight. I was gonna have
to put a leash on that boy. I trotted to the center aisle, looking
down each row as I went, turned and pulled up short. Kieran was
strolling nonchalantly down the center with Ethan on one side and
Peter on the other. Kieran was weapon-less now. I waited for them
to come to me.

“How did your chat go with our big half-man
go?” I asked when they got within conversational distance.

“It was… distasteful,” he said, grimacing.
“Blood magic always is. All he was able to tell me was the
direction of the door and we already knew that.”

“Then can we please come to an
understanding?” I asked, angrily, forcing them to stop in front of
me. “Can we please stick together, at least until we get in and can
form some sort of a plan? So we can watch each other’s backs? Or
have the three of you forgotten that you are all I’ve got and the
power y’all take for granted I’ve only known about for less than a
week?” I looked pointedly at Peter and Ethan. They shouldn’t have
run off alone. We could’ve needed them and they had needed us. It
scared me, as if I didn’t have enough to be afraid of. Fear
translated into anger now.