“No, Seth, I didn’t forget,” Jimmy said, his voice barely a whisper, his eyes wide with fear. He truly felt like he had nowhere else to turn. It was obvious in his aura and in his mind. He was totally emotionally drained. “I know I don’t have any right to ask you for help, Seth, especially after that, but your name is the only thing in common with all this weirdness. Billy and his dad disappearing, my dad disappearing, losing the farm, too much happened so fast and it all seems to hinge on you. I’m hopin’ you can tell me what’s going on. Please, Seth, I got nowhere else to go.”
“Damn it, Jimmy, I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, my anger melting away into pity way too fast. Seeing into people’s heads was a definite disadvantage.
“We can’t help everybody, Seth,” Peter said calmly and quietly. I turned to look at him. He wasn’t telling me not to help, but he was giving me a nonjudgmental out. I didn’t owe Jimmy Morgan anything and we all knew it. He wasn’t telling me not to help him, either.
“Yeah, I know, Pete,” I answered, turning back to Jimmy. “Again, Jimmy, why should I help you? Why does everything hinge on me? What do I have to do with your father going AWOL?”
“Billy said it was a setup,” Jimmy said, gulping again and shutting his eyes on the last word. “His daddy told him that no matter what he did that night that he should get away from the campsite by midnight and that he should try hard to get me to go with him. He didn’t care none ‘bout Pitch. But when I saw you doing that thing, I freaked and we all ran. That’s why it was so easy to get him going—he was looking for a reason anyway. He told me the next day when his dad and him came over. Same time my dad called you the first time.
“Mr. Walker was mad as a hornet when he got there the next day,” Jimmy continued. “Went straight to Dad’s office ‘n’ started yelling at ‘im. A five-foot stick yelling at a six-foot-five grizzly bear. Took guts, I guess. Dad almost broke him in half that day. Last I saw of ‘em. Two weeks later, they was gone and their house was up for sale as a foreclosure. Dad said they were ‘called up,’ whatever that means, but he wouldn’t talk about it. Made me stay at the farm all the time, took my phone away and grounded me for a month because of the crap we did to you.
“Dad started having problems at work, too. People hassling him about sumpin’, wouldn’t say what though. Kept coming home pissed off every day. About two and a half weeks ago, he disappeared completely. Just didn’t come home from work. Mamma was scared out of her mind, ‘specially with the way he’s been acting lately. She sent me out looking for him and I went every place I could think of. Nobody’d seen him. When I got back to the house, the man from the mortgage company was there with the Sheriff’s deputy with a notice of foreclosure. He said we had a week to pack up and leave.
“I didn’t think that was legal,” Jimmy said, shaking his head tiredly. “I wanted to argue, to fight it, see a lawyer, something! But Mamma just took it from them and told me to shut up. She went back in the house and grabbed every bank book she could find, then we went to the bank. Started closing out accounts, but most of ‘em had already been cleaned out by Dad. She should have had close to a hundred grand according to the ledgers. We managed to get about seven grand.
“By that time, I was just shocked by all of it. Mamma had us packing everything up, but so much of what we had was part of the farm, there was just so much we couldn’t take with us. The day we were supposed to leave, Mamma and me got into a fight. Again. We’d been fighting a lot lately, no big surprise, really. I ran off. Called her later and told her I would stay in town for a while longer and look for Dad. Go up to Virginia in a few weeks. That’s where she was going with Cecilia, to my aunt’s in Virginia. I miss ‘em.”
He finally stopped for a moment, giving me a chance to think. I knew there was a human connection to the Black Hand’s attack on me, but none of us had given it any thought since the Rat Bastard’s demise, attributing it to him. But I was well outside of Alabama when all of this went down. I couldn’t have any relation to this. This was all their own crapfest.
“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “All right, Jimmy, I will try—understand me here, try—to look into this, but it takes a back seat to my obligations and it comes with restrictions that you will have to agree to up front.”
“Okay,” he said, eagerly, eyes brightening a little in hope. “What do you want from me? I’ll do anything.”
“I’m not the same person you knew two months ago, Jimmy,” I said. “When you knew me, I was a lost little kid looking for friends and eager to do just about anything I could to get people to like me. Now I’ve found my parents, found brothers I didn’t know I had, and found an entire world I didn’t know existed. Now I have a million people depending on me to live. Not just be nice to them, Jimmy, to live, to eat, to breathe, to sleep, so before I agree, you have to agree to keep everything that you experience while you are with us a secret. You tell no one anything that might even come close to endangering any one of my family or people or friends. And before you agree, understand that this is not just a promise. I have the power to make it happen.”
“Yeah, Seth, I understand,” he said softly. “I can agree to that.”
“No, I don’t think you do understand,” Peter said chuckling.
“But you will,” I said and pushed Daybreak to the forefront, making Jimmy see the Faery Liege whether he wanted to or not, then I placed the geas on him.
A minute later, Jimmy was getting poked in the side, by Peter this time. He rolled over on the ceramic tile of my bathroom floor, groggy and dazed.
“What happened?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows.
“Seth wasn’t gentle when he made you keep your promise,” Peter answered. “Just be glad he didn’t take your head off instead. Now you’ve got fifteen minutes to get cleaned up before we leave again. Find something to wear in Seth’s room. We’re late for a business meeting already.”
Peter came out of the bathroom and sat on the bed beside me. Glancing up at him briefly, I went back to staring at the ceiling, trying to decide how badly I’d screwed up by saying yes to Jimmy.
“You sure about this, Seth?” Peter asked, leaning back on the bed with me. “It could add a lot more work for us to an already full plate.”
“In some ways,” I agreed. “But it’s also just another angle on an existing problem. And there are a lot of holes in his story. I just don’t know if he’s wrong, being lied to, or just stupid.”
“Well, his English aside, I didn’t get the feeling that he was stupid,” Peter said. “Naïve, stunted, perhaps, but not stupid.”
“He wasn’t lying. He believes everything he said. And I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have been thrown out of their house as fast as they were unless there was a lot more financial difficulty than he knew about. Which, if you think about, really isn’t that surprising. There’s no particular reason for his parents to give him access to their finances. I didn’t really know that much about mine. But that Mrs. Morgan supposedly didn’t know anything bothers me. And Mr. Morgan didn’t seem to be under that kind of stress when I met him, though I’m not sure I would recognize an exact difference in those emotions then.”
We heard the shower shut off as steam rolled out into the room. Jimmy had been quick. Let’s hope he’d been thorough. He was pretty rank out there in the woods and I’d left his duffel bag o’foul things on the deck outside. He could wash them later.
“And you’re feeling sorry for him,” Peter said, smiling coyly at me. “You can admit it. You were feeling the same thing a few weeks ago.”
“Partly, yeah,” I admitted. “This might give us a lead into whoever is trying kill me, though.” Jimmy walked in, a towel wrapped around his waist, drying his hair with another. He stopped just outside the doorway and looked up. Peter pointed to the dresser then the closet and Jimmy headed in that direction.
“You don’t think you were just another target?” Peter asked. “Or maybe tha
t your whole family was targeted?”
“That doesn’t affect the decision, though,” I said. “Either way, if they’d been effective, I’d be dead by now.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jimmy asked. “Somebody’s trying to kill you?”
“Us, but, yes,” Peter said. “We’re a little harder to kill than most people.”
“We haven’t quite figured out who or why, just yet,” I said, glancing at the clock pointedly. We were outside our fifteen-minute window. He took the hint, opening the closet and searching for clothes that would fit.
“Damn, Seth, how rich are you?” he muttered.
“I think my personal holdings are down to about three and a half million,” I said coolly. “My group holdings are in the range of about sixty million.”
Jimmy gawked at me, one leg through a pair of dark brown slacks. Peter just laughed at me.
“You’re kidding him, right? Three mil? You think you’re worth a lousy three mil?” Peter asked in shocked disbelief. “Lord Daybreak, Liege of Gilán, your wealth is incalculable, ya idjit.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said slowly, smiling. “I forgot about that. But it’s not like I could sell it or anything.”
Jimmy breezed by carrying the towels into the bathroom. He came back out a moment later with his dirty tree gear held gingerly in one hand away from his body. I opened a portal over his duffel bag on the back deck for him to deal with later.
“Just drop it right there,” I said, holding my hand out flat. “You get the pleasure of washing those out tonight. Just literally drop them right there.” He watched them fall into the top of the bag, then watched the hole I created zip itself shut. Jimmy stared at the spot in awe, not moving. Peter and I stood up off the bed.
“Come on, Jimmy, we have to go now,” I said impatiently. “We’re late already.”
“Wha—?” Jimmy stuttered, pointing at the spot where his duffel bag should have sat.
“Magic, Jimmy,” I said. “That’s what you saw that night. I performed a very small, elementary magic. I’ve learned a few things since then. You’ll be seeing a lot of that around us, though we do try and keep it out of public eye.” As I said this, I wrapped the three of us in portals and jumped us to the car at the end of the driveway. “You still have the keys?” I asked Peter. He grinned and popped the locks, getting in the driver’s side again. I opened the door and made Jimmy crawl in the back seat. He was going to need some alone time to come to grips with his new reality.
Peter pulled out on the road again. “Maybe we can make up some time on the highway.”
“How behind are we anyway?” I asked Peter, pulling the bag of diamonds out of my pocket.
“Only about twenty minutes, looking at the map,” he answered. “If we can gain about twenty, twenty-five miles, that should do it.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, once we get out on the highway,” I responded absently, leaning forward into the light from the windshield flashing through the trees as we drove. “Let me know when we get there, please.”
Bending my mind to the task of creating keys, I poured the diamonds into my hand and peered inside them. The first and most important keys were for Ian and Mike. My brothers had passwords that would work already. These two would be emergency keys, but they had to be big enough not to lose and I still didn’t know exactly how close the contact needed to be. I was still pretty sure that setting the stone in some kind of jewelry would be sufficient, providing it wasn’t too loose a necklace or something. I pulled out two, a pair of similar stones, kind of flat with an almost round, sixteen-sided face on each.
Pouring the rest back into the bag and dropping it to my lap, I could feel Jimmy’s wide eyes on me from the back seat as I held the gems up to the light, one by one, examining them carefully. I really needed somebody to explain the right words to me about gems. Cut, clarity, and crap was all I knew, but I was pretty sure they didn’t come out of the ground looking like this.
“You weren’t kidding about him being rich as fuck, were you?” Jimmy asked Peter in a whisper between the seats.
“No, and watch your language,” Peter said mildly.
“Sorry,” Jimmy whispered back, still watching avidly. He’d apparently gotten over the idea of magic faster than I thought he would.
Saving the biggest face of each diamond for their identities, I selected the bottom face for their safe place, the next most important item to store. For Mike, that meant home. Sending my thoughts to the Palace, I found Mike’s apartment there easily. Daybreak was constantly attached and aware of Gilán, so picturing Mike’s living room was not a problem. For Ian, at least right now, that meant Mike’s home, too. I might have to make another or possibly rewrite Ian’s key later. I chose two sites on this side, my den and my room at Cahill castle.
“We’re pulling onto the highway, now,” Peter said as I stamped one of the diamonds with the sense of the den. The second diamond followed quickly. A minute later I dropped the two diamonds in a second, plastic zipper bag I’d found in my desk earlier and tucked it away with the others.
“That should work,” I said, settling in and moving my attention to the road now. “Need to test it and see if Ian can access it. It’d be really sweet to have a permanent escape route for him.” Sending out several different seekings, I picked a number of likely spots to skip the car ahead and let my awareness sync in with Peter’s. Neither of us was expecting how stupidly simple it would be this time. From the timing of the skips to the aversion spells, I was able to move us all the way to the city limits in under two minutes. Peter was quite able to manage the direction changes as I fed them to him since mostly they averaged out to a slow right curve. I was glad he knew where he was going, though, at least initially.
“Um, wow,” I said, gripping the armrests, a little white-knuckled. “That was intense.”
“Everything with you is intense, Seth,” Peter said, grinning, turning into the wider arc of the off-ramp. “It was faster than usual, though. Next you’ll have us walking the Weird Ways.”
“Weird Ways?” I asked.
“We don’t really know what that is,” Peter explained. “Some of the Fae higher ups can do it. Theory is that it’s looped dimensions that meander through our space, linking one spot to another. You just walk through to another place, sort of like a portal except you don’t really expend any energy.”
“Oh, Kieran did that,” I said, remembering him pushing my back and suddenly being across a canyon. “The night we met.”
That surprised Peter. “Well, if someone could, I suppose he would be the one,” he said, thoughtfully, exhaling slowly.
We drove in silence a few minutes until Peter slowed and pulled into a realty office off of Governor’s Drive. The sign out front proudly proclaimed over three hundred years of experience and a billion dollars in sales. I seriously doubted there was a three-hundred-year-old agent inside trying to huckster houses. Jimmy seemed a lot happier as he climbed out of the car than he had been in the woods half an hour ago. From what I could see in his mind, he was taking the idea of magic and building his hopes on it. It scared the crap out of him still, but he cemented the idea that coming to me for help was right because I could do magical things and that would help him find his father. Get his life back for him. I hoped he was right.
A short, plump secretary greeted us on entering the office. I felt the sexually passive-aggressive assault immediately, even though her words were a soft, Southern, “How can I help you today, gentlemen?”
Before we could answer, Mr. Borland barreled out of the nearest hallway. “Pete! Seth! Good to see you again!” he called, grabbing his son in a tight hug and pounding his back almost before Peter could react. I wasn’t far behind with the same treatment.
“Hi, Mr. Borland,” I said with a grin when he finally finished beating the air out of my lungs.
“I think a king can call me ‘Richard,’ don’t you?” he murmured.
I grinned bigger and nodded. “But you get to deal
with my parents if they complain.”
“Deal,” he said with a smile. “Now let’s go see what we can see, shall we?” He led us down the hall past the lusting secretary as she answered the phone, finally. It had rung several times without being answered in the few minutes we’d stood there, ignored. I had a feeling that someone would get lucky at Girl’s Night Out tonight.
Richard walked through the short hall and into a conference room like he owned the place, a consequence of being rich and powerful, I supposed. I’d probably get there at some point myself. This was probably the largest room in the building, roughly fifteen by thirty, with a large oblong table dominating the room. Chairs lined the table and were spread loosely along the wall and a smaller table sat at each end of the room. On the far end, the small table held refreshments, fresh coffee and soft drinks, donuts and some fruit. In the corner sat a fax machine and printer combo, next to that sat another printer of enormous proportions. I supposed that it printed the huge maps the two men now standing at the table were poring over.
“Pete, Seth,” Richard said, turning halfway to us as he spoke. “This is Ben Grier and Ron Whitmore, the Real Estate agents I’ve been working with. Ben and Ron, this is Seth McClure and my son, Peter. Owners of McClure and Associates and the people looking to buy the land we’ve been talking about.” He was smiling broadly as Peter and I stepped forward to shake hands with the agents.
“I’m sorry, Richard,” I said, looking to Jimmy as he stood uncomfortably just behind Peter’s father. “That was rude of me. This is Jimmy Morgan. He’s going to be with us for a while so that I can look into a problem he’s having.”
“Good to meet you,” Richard said politely, shaking Jimmy’s hand.
“It’s good to meet you, too, Mr. Borland,” Jimmy said, the idea that Peter and I shared mothers flashed through his mind. He was desperately trying to figure out the relationships without asking questions, but he wasn’t coming up with answers that made sense to him. That did, at least.
Sons (Book 2) Page 13
