by Scott Duff
I chuckled as I turned off the tap. “I don’t see fifty people willing to guard me milling about the yard. And what do you know of my lineage?”
“I followed Master Kieran and Master Ethan’s discussions after you retired for the night,” Shrank answered. “You are an extremely wealthy young man through both of your parents.”
I shrugged it off, still not caring about money. I was more interested in getting my parents back than getting their money. And this man in my office who said he was my brother was going through my finances right now. I could feel where he was in the house, if not sense his aura, like I could Shrank. And the shapeshifter felt even slicker. It felt like he was telling the truth, but how did I know? My track record in decision-making wasn’t good right now.
Kieran and Ethan entered the dining room from the den just as I did from the kitchen. They were both reading bound ledgers from my office. Getting a head start, I supposed. I set the glasses on the table and sat down and started eating. I offered Shrank my bread plate with sliced banana and strawberry on it. I spread some marmalade on a pancake and offered some of that as well. He buzzed contentedly as he chased a banana ring around the small plate.
“Sounded like you two were having a good time in there this morning,” said Kieran amused as he watched Shrank eat between his own bites.
“Yes, we did,” I said, smiling, “It was a lot of fun. Shrank was very helpful. He did most of the work, really.” That was pretty much it for breakfast conversation. We made short work of the food and there was little left over, even of the overdone bacon. We all finished at roughly the same time.
“We need to talk,” I said, leaning back in my chair and stretching out. I wasn’t looking forward to this discussion. I saw Ethan start to stand out of the corner of my eye. “All three of us,” I said. Kieran leaned back and fixed his attention on me. It made me very nervous but I couldn’t back down from this. If I backed down now, I’d be cowing to him for the rest of my life. And if to him, how many others? No, bad decision or not, I had to own it.
“Last night,” I started, slowly, meeting him directly in the eyes, “you said that if you let me go with you to find my parents, you’d have to teach me magic to protect myself. But you need to realize that, with or without your help, I am going to look for my parents, both of my parents, not just Dad. To that end, I will not be treated as an errand boy or the purse strings of our expedition. I expect and demand to know what’s going on at least as much as either of you. If you can’t accept that then you can take the toys you’ve dropped in my head and go your merry way now. But I won’t be ordered around like a puppet and I won’t be shunted around like a puppy either. I’m young, not incapable.”
Kieran’s eyes gleamed in the morning sun as I gave my speech. There wasn’t a trace of anger or aggravation on his face. He studied me while I spoke and I watched his eyes move.
“I would very much like to meet your mother,” he said softly. “I have no issue at all with treating you as an equal, as my brother.”
“Good,” I said, nodding, “’Cause there are some things that already need explaining.” Sitting up in my chair, I turned to Ethan. He perked up and met my look.
“What is an anchor and what does it mean to me?” I asked him.
“When my people protected Home,” he started.
“Home?” I interrupted him.
“My teacher’s realm,” Kieran said, “I’ll speak more of that in time.”
Ethan went on, “When we protected Home, we were all interconnected. We surrounded it completely. When the realm began to dissolve, it took fewer of us and so the connections were discontinued to the unnecessary. The disconnected, too, began to dissolve back into the matter of the universe. When Kieran left, I followed and I began to dissolve as well. I needed the connection to continue my purpose. I thought that I could connect to this realm and it would be enough, but something had changed and that connection was not strong enough to allow me safe transit. In the few days I was here before Kieran arrived, I attempted several connections to animals, but they all fell short of a true anchor and continued to weaken me. When you arrived, I was able to make that anchor and return to my native form and still feel your world. I was still very confused, barely more aware than the wild dog you saw.”
“And what is your native form?” I asked.
“You would have to see it,” said Kieran. “He lives in the space between worlds so his form is… convoluted.”
“So what does this anchor do to me?” I asked.
“To you, not much,” said Kieran. “It makes you his only entryway into the universe without damage to himself.”
“And he can read my mind,” I said, snapping a bit.
“More like I read all of your mind, once,” said Ethan. “It was a result of mapping your mind and body to find a good place to put the anchor. I will not do that again, Seth.”
I shuddered. It was creepy. Ethan was creepy. I didn’t want him to be, but just knowing he knew me more intimately than I knew myself, just because I could forget stuff. Creepy.
“Why did you pick that particular form to be in?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“Kieran and I worked on it last night while you slept,” he answered, “so I could make the transition back and forth without disturbing you. Most of the considerations were made to be either different from you or to draw away from you, to protect you. If there is anything you don’t like, I can change.” He said that as if it was as easy as changing a shirt or shoes, but then, I guess to him it was.
“I thought you were here to protect him,” I said to Ethan.
“I am,” he answered, nodding, “But until you can unseal the anchor from the Pact magic, I am bound to you instead. You are under no obligation to me, Seth. You should know that. Indeed, I am obliged to you. That doesn’t make me your errand boy any more than you are Kieran’s, mind you, but I do have knowledge and abilities to bring to the table.”
Hearing my own Georgia accent and speech patterns coming at me from another voice and body was still eerie but I felt a little better about it. I could feel the sympathy from Kieran, which confused me. Then I figured out it was through the ward. I was picking up Kieran’s sympathy for both of us through the ward. That he was sympathetic to Ethan, I found curious and turned to face him. Apparently, he understood the unasked question.
“Once he had the opportunity,” Kieran said, almost in a whisper, “while you were still sleeping the first night, he went through your life to learn, to see the world he was coming into. In doing that, he saw what he did to you as the same violation that you do. We both considered withholding the information but in the end, he decided that compounding the misdeed with a lie would be far more damning.”
I looked at Ethan across the table. He looked back. He wasn’t asking for anything, just meeting me. Big blue eyes, soft round face, blond hair. Cherubic. I had to remember they’d designed him. I hoped I wasn’t being suckered.
“All right,” I said, nodding. “We can work on this. It’s a beginning.”
“Ethan,” Kieran said, “Since you’ve already seen this, would you mind finishing up in here while I show Seth what we’ve found so far?”
“Sure,” he said, standing to clear the table.
I followed Kieran back to my office to find orderly piles everywhere. They had dismembered the records and laid them out in some order on the floor. I assumed he was going to explain the order to me and I didn’t wait long.
“Ethan and I went through these last night after you went to bed,” he said. “There were ten years of records, ending with January of this year. Quite frankly, it didn’t tell me very much. No, not what I mean. It didn’t tell me much about what Father’s been doing lately. If you look at how we have it laid out on the floor, you can see each year as a column. Each row is a different aspect or company. The top two rows being household or transfers to you personally.”
I looked at the mass of papers on the floor. Kieran’s explanation m
ade sense in some terms, but there were several places where files were stacked onto others.
“And the clusters?” I asked.
“Those are areas where we couldn’t quite figure out exactly what he had done,” he said. “Most likely, the transfers were between your mother and him, or were perhaps political in nature, but were not insignificant.”
“Don’t you sleep?” I asked him, treading over the papers slowly.
He barked a laugh, “Yes, just not that much right now. I’ve been Rip Van Winkle for a while.”
“Really?” I asked, glancing up as I picked my way through the mess, idly reading papers.
He nodded, saying, “My body was in a stasis as I traveled, basically sleeping for weeks.”
I stopped and stared at him, slack jawed. “Weeks?” I asked, astounded. “How far away were you?”
“Distance really isn’t the issue here,” Kieran said, squinting at me. “It’s more like how deep was I and even then the only answer is ‘pretty deep’.”
Ethan and Shrank came in then. Ethan plopped down on the floor near the door, one of the few clear spots. Shrank flew around the room, peeking and poking at things.
“So all of this is a bust?” I asked, happy for their arrival to divert us from that strange topic.
“Well, there is much here that you might need in time,” said Kieran, “but I don’t think it will help now. I started making a list of recurring names, but only one came up. A Colbert.” He said the name as “cole-bert.”
“Coal-bear,” I corrected him. “Artur Colbert, our family attorney.”
“Artur is your attorney?” he asked, grinning.
“I take it you know him,” I said.
“Yes, I know the old pirate,” said Kieran, still grinning. “His name is all through these files. Does he have Father’s power of attorney?”
“I imagine so, at least in some circumstances,” I said. I looked down at the floor and picked out several company names I recognized. “I know he can sign as Comptroller for this company and as legal counsel for those two.” I pointed out three rows of papers on the floors.
“Can you get in touch with him?” Kieran asked.
“Think so,” I answered. “He’d be the first I’d try anyway. Let me get my phone.” I hopped through the piles and left the room. When I got back, the floor was clear and Ethan and Shrank were re-binding the last two years together. Kieran was standing before the bookcase peering intently at the top shelves.
“Ehran McClure,” he said to the shelves.
The spell reacted to him. A sheet of red fire blossomed out of the three top shelves like it was gas fed. Three words bloomed equally as explosively seconds later in vibrant yellow, one word to a shelf, “Ehran Find Seth.” The flames stayed on the shelves for twenty, maybe thirty seconds then evaporated. On the shelf behind my name sat a book. Glancing at me, Kieran took the book off the shelf.
“So that’s how you spell your name?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered, sitting down in the middle of the floor. “My mother preferred the older spelling, said the other way was a stuttering vowel and that was confusing. Let’s see what Father left for us to find, shall we?”
I sat down beside him in the floor as he opened the book, a picture album. Ethan came and sat in front of us, looking at it upside down. The first item we came to was a handwritten letter from Dad to Ehran:
Ehran,
That you’ve found this means that you’ve come home and for that I am grateful beyond words. I know we can reconcile and I hope you will give me the chance when I return. Until then, please find Olivia and Seth, your brother. Help them. Protect him.
I love you both.
December 3
“Short and sweet,” said Kieran, placing the note back in place and turning the page. The first picture was of Mom and Dad’s wedding, a portrait of the two of them.
“You and Dad were on the outs?” I asked as I looked at the picture.
“Yeah,” he murmured, leaning in to look closely at the picture. “I’d prefer not to talk about it until he’s here to tell his side of the story, though. He’d come out really bad, otherwise, and I’m sure there are things I don’t know. Your mother is a beautiful woman.”
I thought so, too, but I was prejudiced. The next picture was of me as a newborn. The next, me a few months old grabbing at a floating rattle. The next page switched to instant camera pictures like the previous album. Where the first album hinted at something, this album showed magic outright. Well, showed something outright. Page after page of floating balls and toys gave way to half-formed colorful cartoon characters that couldn’t exist. One showed what looked like a hole in the wall with Dad raising his hands near it. His face strained with concentration. You could see a small sprite twice the size of Shrank peeking through uncertainly. Kieran stared at that picture for a long moment before turning the page. It was the last picture.
Kieran closed the album and stared blankly at the cover, deep in thought. I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t like I could do what the pictures showed. That wasn’t my doing. It couldn’t be. Something else had to be going on. It had to be. I just couldn’t do those things. Yet here was a book of pictures from my father, a witness, telling me I did them. My life is getting weirder by the minute.
“Quite a precocious tot,” said Kieran, slapping on my back and knocking me out of my reverie. He got up and started collecting all the books, stacking them in front of the bookcase.
“What does all this mean?” I asked. “I mean, I can’t do that stuff now, so why could I then? Assuming that was me, then.”
“Would you mind?” Kieran asked, waving at the bottom of the bookcase. I said my name and he slid the shelves upward and started loading the books onto the second shelf. “Well, the short answer is that it was you doing it, otherwise Father wouldn’t have been taking pictures of it and insinuating it.” He finished loading the shelf and slid it back into place. Then he stood and waved Ethan over to his side.
“Take this as an example,” he said, pointing out a chair next to the window. “One of us will move that chair across the room. You tell me which one of us did it.”
They look at each other, communicating somehow that I couldn’t see, then the chair whisked across the room next to the stacked tables from last night. I felt the tug of power clearly from Ethan.
“Ethan,” I said, “but how?”
Kieran smiled and said, “Now turn around and try again.”
I turned around so that I couldn’t see either one of them. Again, I felt the slight tug of power and heard the chair slide lightly behind me. This time it was…
“Kieran,” I said, turning back around to look at them.
“It takes a bit of effort to hide the use of magic,” he said, smiling. “At that age, I doubt you could do it. They knew you were the cause.”
“So why can’t I do that now?” I asked, a bit frustrated.
“I bet you can, you’ve just learned not to,” he said.
“What?” I said deadpan. That didn’t make any sense to me.
“Think of it in terms of potty training,” Kieran said after a moment, grinning. “You were taught at an early stage of life to wait for an appropriate time and place to use the potty instead of just going in your drawers. You just weren’t taught when the appropriate time to use magic was.”
I felt like one of those bobble heads while I thought about what he said, my head just waving in the wind, back and forth, up and down. It sort of made sense, I guess.
“So why didn’t they ever teach me?” I asked. “And why don’t I remember them teaching me not to do it?” That was a pretty big hole in the argument.
“That I don’t know,” he said, “But I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with why they’re missing now.”
Kieran held his hand out for my phone. “May I?”
I powered it up and handed it to him, telling him to give it a moment, then sat down at the desk. Watching him us
e the cell phone like he’d had one for years, he called the attorney’s office. Kieran didn’t ask to speak to Mister Colbert or for an appointment, he merely informed the secretary that “Mister McClure” would be stopping by his office around 2:00 p.m. and he would like to speak to Mister Colbert if available. It was shortly before nine, which was cutting it very close—his office was in Atlanta, a four-hour car trip. I wondered if Kieran knew that.
I pulled the address book out of the top desk drawer and the three maps we’d need off the bookcase behind the desk. Dad was a fanatic about maps. He had a whole room of them at the house in Savannah, some dating back centuries. Here, I had road maps for the whole country, parts of Mexico and Canada, and just about every major city you could name. We’d really only need Atlanta, but it never hurt to be prepared. There were three routes from here and I knew all three without a map. I went to change for the trip.
When I got back in the office, Kieran and Ethan had already changed and come back to pore over the maps I’d left. Shrank was at the windows, flitting back and forth aimlessly.
“Shrank,” I said, “We’re gonna be in the car for a long time. You just wanna stay here for the day? Explore the yard?”
“May I?” he asked, shooting from the window to hover a foot in front of me, excitedly sparking red and gold dust in his path.
“Yeah, we’ll leave the kitchen window cracked open for you. But just you and stay within the ward,” I told him.
“Thank you, Master Seth,” he said, disappearing through the doorway, humming as he went.
“We need to get moving if we’re gonna make it by 2:00,” I said, moving to the safe to get some cash. Twisting the dial, I thought about what we’d need and realized I had no clue, so I counted out three grand and stuffed it in my wallet. When I stood, Kieran and Ethan were by the door waiting. Uncanny.
“Are you guys telepathic or something?” I asked.
“Huh?” said Kieran with a funny look.
