by Scott Duff
“Seth?” It was a faint whisper.
“Got him! Stay here,” I said aloud to Peter, jumping out of the car and moving out onto the hood. In my cavern, I said, “Ethan, can you hear me?”
“Barely.”
“Listen, you and Kieran were attacked with darts. I was shielded by the Stone. Can you protect yourself once you regenerate?”
“Yes.”
“Can you go home from where you are now?”
“No, I cannot see the way,” he slurred. “How are you doing this?”
“I don’t know. What will guarantee you seeing the way home?”
“Seeing you.”
Damn. “All right. Be there in two minutes.”
I concentrated on the Stone foundations. I needed them bigger than they were, surrounding the car totally. I needed a tank. I felt the rock shifting in my mind, the weight moved along my body uncomfortably. Energy structures began to form in my vision in front of me in steel blue plates, slamming into place, covering the car completely in translucent force. I caught Peter’s alarm as I watched it happen, but he calmed as I sat on the hood without reacting. Maybe I wasn’t being sufficiently flamboyant in my practice of magic or he just wasn’t expecting it to happen.
“Pull up to the ward, but don’t break it,” I called. Peter accelerated slowly forward the two blocks and turned the car widely, pulling to the center of the road slowly and stopping. It put me in a good position to inspect the ward placed at the beginning of the street. The base of the ward was very simple, a tripwire spread over about fifty different points on the entrance. Basically, it was a big spider web. Pull on any string and the spider knows you’re there. And it had a big something at the center that was probably tamper-proofing. I didn’t have the expertise to remove any of it. It was time for clichés, so in for a penny in for a pound… I pulled the Night Sword into my left hand, cut through the middle of it, and called to Peter, “Let’s roll!”
Peter accelerated down the road a bit faster than I liked, but the shielding around the car held me fast to the hood in a turret-like structure as we went. Which house was evident now—the one with the huge wards and no people running out of it. Something slammed into the back of the car hard. I looked back as Peter jumped in his seat, accelerating faster and jumping the curb, throwing me up in the air and into the shields. It hurt like hell but the shield held against whatever hit us. I jumped off the hood, turning to look at Peter. The shield stayed on the car. Good.
I sliced through the ward at the front of the house with the Night Sword. It acted differently this time. It was a far more actively defensive ward. It blew up like a keg of dynamite in a cartoon. Gotta hand it to elves, though, I thought. They make some handy weapons. The Night Sword let me know it did not appreciate that association. Energy expanded outward from the cut, enough to obliterate a man to cinders, but the Sword deflected it in a wedge beginning at the keen edge and continuing well past my shoulders. When I looked back, the car was rocking on its shocks a little, but every man I could see was thrown fifteen to twenty feet back on the ground. More men than I knew were there to begin with. Some weren’t getting up yet. I don’t think some of the closest were going to get up at all from the angles they were lying in. Peter looked panicked. Didn’t blame him there.
The front door was unlocked, so I let it swing slowly open, peering around the doorjamb cautiously. I stepped slowly into the empty foyer, Sword first. I searched the foyer for the fuzziness that showed a veil like the elves. Seeing nothing in the foyer or the hall, I moved down the hall and moved swiftly past the kitchen entrance. There was someone in the kitchen, hunched down beside the counters behind a veil. I crept down the hall farther and peeked into the living room. The television was on with the sound off. There were two drinks on the table and a paperback slung down haphazardly. At least two in the house, I surmised. Surely genius level thinking. I moved past the door. No fuzziness was evident but there was much in the room I couldn’t see. I moved farther down the hall to what I assumed was the first bedroom door.
Jackpot. The door was open as I crept along the wall. My first sight was a hospital bed. On top of it was Ethan. I looked quickly up and down the hall, then back at Ethan. He looked dead, so pale, with dried blood on his face. He had tubes running out of his right arm and a machine making jagged lines behind his head. I’ve never been to a doctor or even near a hospital so I had no idea what all that meant. It looked scary though.
“Eth’anok’avel,” I said in a commanding tone. “I’m here.”
Ethan raised his head drunkenly and looked around. When his eyes locked onto me, he disappeared instantly. I sighed in relief, then stepped forward and peeked into the room, looking for more veiled assailants. The tubes that were in Ethan’s arm lay on the bed leaking clear fluid generously and the machine was now complaining noisily about its single bright line. I was more interested in the second bed against the opposite wall. Kieran was laying in it with a setup identical to Ethan’s. Kieran couldn’t just disappear, though.
I went to the table between the beds and jerked open the drawer. It was full of medical supplies, most of which I didn’t recognize. But I didn’t need anything special. I grabbed gauze pads, tape, and bandages. Then I glanced back at the door and froze. The man standing in the door wasn’t very big, but the gun he was holding sure looked huge. A stock against his hip, left hand on a grip with trigger and his right on another grip to steady it. The man was quietly watching me, the gun level with my every move. He caught my eyes and kept them locked to his. I didn’t have a shield available to me. That was outside. And that was a gun.
“Put the sword down slowly,” the man said in a low voice, his dark eyes never leaving mine. I slowly lowered the point to the ground, feeling abject fear at facing this man. He looked cold, amoral. Not only on the surface, but deeper. The man was more than a little nuts. It made surrendering a lot less palatable. That realization came when the point of the Night Sword was about a tenth of an inch from the floor. I let my eyes fall to the Night Sword, pushing the energy it had stolen from the house ward outward in the same form. His eyes dropped, too. In that instant, I called the Day Sword in my right hand while the Night Sword expended itself. It only took a second before the man was a seared, flaking skeletal mass on the hall wall, fried by the power of the wards, taken from his own people. I retched, but better him than me. And I didn’t start this.
I sent the Night Sword to its hiding place and turned back to Kieran. Needing the use of my hands, I sent the Day Sword away, but kept the weight of it in my hand. I didn’t know if that would make any difference to its power, but I felt safer. “Come on, Ethan, I could really use some help here,” I muttered, pulling tape hurriedly off Kieran’s arm.
“I don’t know,” Ethan said from behind me calmly. I turned quickly to see him standing near the door looking at the charred remains. He wore a black tee shirt, black jeans, and black trainers. He looked very sleek. “You seem to be doing pretty well without me.”
“Now is not the time for light banter,” I said, pressing a gauze pad down lightly on Kieran’s arm where the tubes went in. I could see the foreign-ness of it beneath his skin. I pulled the tubes slowly from his arm, watching for tearing. I was amazed I could see it that clearly. Pulling the tubes free and dropping them, I pressed down on the wound and ripped open an alcohol pad packet with my teeth. Ripped open a bandage next, then wiped and bandaged his arm in rapid succession. Then I grabbed the EKG or EEG, or whatever they are, wires and started ripping them off of him. The machine started objecting but nobody seemed to care.
As soon as Kieran was disconnected, Ethan walked up, tossing blankets and sheets to the floor against the wall and shoving the rail down. Like Ethan had, Kieran looked dead to me. Skin so pale, with bruises everywhere and dried blood in several places, but he was breathing, shallowly but breathing. Ethan considered Kieran’s position for a second, then rolled him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He showed no exertion as he nodded towar
d the door. I brought the Day Sword out again and peeked out into the hall. Seeing nothing, I advanced slowly with Ethan following. At the kitchen doorway, I tilted the Sword through so I could see the reflections on its golden surface. Whatever was there before was gone now. We skirted past the kitchen quickly.
The living room wasn’t quite as empty. Both Swords acted of their own volition, I swear. The Night Sword burst into existence in my left hand twisting me from the hall directly into the room, slicing down into four separate tendrils of neon green and obsidian that slid forward like giant squid tentacles. The remnants thrashed wildly on the floor, gushing black blood that burned carpet and furniture alike. The other ends snapped violently back into their cloudy origin, flinging the black fluid around the room, primarily on the woman nearest the cloud. She screamed high and loud when the black blood hit her across the face and down her chest. She lost control of her magic then and the cloud began to roil onto her. The screaming stopped and the cloud swiftly dissipated into the room, but she was gone.
The Day Sword jerked me back to the right to parry the thrust of a very big knife while I watched the woman disappear in the blackness. That got my attention. He was a big man, at least as big as Kieran, all over. Shaved head and really tiny, black eyes. Made him look mean. So did the ten-inch knife he was wielding. He apparently respected the two three-footers I was carrying, because he backed off after the first thrust and started circling. Well, not circling, there wasn’t enough room for that, but he was trying to take my measure, his eyes tightly on mine. I held the Day Sword up in front of me across my body as I crouched with the Night Sword somewhat loosely at my side, not knowing good form from macaroni and cheese. I heard Ethan pass by the door behind me.
“Very handy with those things, boy,” the man said with a raspy voice.
“Rank amateur. Ask anybody,” I said, grinning. He grinned back. I swear his teeth were pointed, like a dog’s.
Then he moved with inhuman speed, jumping toward me and twisting in mid-air, shoving the knife low at me in a feint while throwing three smaller knives high. The Day Sword twisted me to the right, pushing the hilt up to deflect the three flying daggers into the wall then slamming the sharp point of the Sword down into the man’s knife arm. The ten-inch steel knife rolled out of his outstretched fingers as he stared wide-eyed at the gleaming gold and silver Sword embedded in the floor through his arm. I jerked the Sword up and backed out of the room quickly. It looked like the blade had gone through both bones in his forearms. It was still connected to the rest of him, but just barely. Gross. I could be sick later. Had to be later.
I took off after Ethan. As I bolted out the front door, Ethan had just made it to the car. Peter shoved the passenger door open from the driver’s seat. I stepped out into the sunlight and started looking for the men who’d been bowled over when I crashed the house ward. I didn’t see anyone, but there were five, maybe six, fuzzy areas close by. Raising the Night Sword ahead of me, I walked out to the car as the man inside started screaming in pain. Eerie timing, as screeching tires announced a car arriving at the end of the street.
My attention, though, was still on the nearby veils and the Night Sword. The bone in the Sword hummed. It was hungry after its earlier work, even taking what it did from the tentacles, and it wanted to eat. There were five pockets of passive energy nearby, stored energy from the feel of it. I let it go. Five ebony beams three inches thick shot from tip of the Sword apparently at random and struck at unevenly spaced targets in neighboring yards and in the street. It lasted for two seconds, total. At the end five men fell back on their backsides, off-balance, as their veils crashed, amulets breaking explosively in two cases.
“Peter, stay down,” I heard Ethan say calmly. I spared a glance over to see that Ethan had gotten Kieran in the passenger side, safely buckled in. Now I just had to get Ethan and me in the car and get away from here.
A black sedan squealed to a halt on the street in front of me just as I passed Peter’s door. A man got out of the passenger side wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a beige raincoat. In August in Georgia. He had to be hot. He was a kind of squat man with a Marine brush cut and round gold-rimmed glasses. You had to think he thought he was important.
“That’s far enough, boys,” he said, in a rumbling baritone. It was a familiar voice.
“I don’t think so,” I said calmly, holding both Swords parallel to the ground. “You abducted these men. I’m taking them back. Get out of my way.” When did I get so pushy?
“No, I arrested those men,” he said, reaching into his coat.
“Don’t!” I shouted, raising the Day Sword high in the sun so that it blazed in the light. He froze in place. “That was not a jail I just walked out of. And neither of those men was given any rights. You arrested no one. You assaulted and kidnapped. Now get out of my way.”
“Is that the Day Sword?” he asked.
“It’s the Sword that’s gonna kill you if you don’t get out of my way,” I said.
He sighed, glaring at me. “Seth McClure, I am Deputy Director Clifford Harris of the United States Marshals and I am hereby placing you under arrest.” He pulled his hand out of his jacket and held out a badge wallet with an identification card. I was unimpressed.
“For what?” I asked, full of contempt. I saw Ethan taking position opposite me out of the corner of my eye.
“Breaking and entering,” he said, shrugging, “Assault on Federal Officers, Jailbreaking. I could go on.” He slid the wallet casually back into his jacket. I heard something fall to the ground lightly behind me, but I didn’t turn. I knew it was another dart, like the night before, and I knew the shield around the car was now around me, too. I could sense it after all.
“If I had any belief that it would ever make it to court, it wouldn’t hold up and you know it. What is it you really want?” I couldn’t get into the car with the Swords in hand and we needed to leave.
“You,” he said. Another soft thud on the ground behind me. “Something is going on between the Fae and the Councils and you are the crux of it. We want to know what and why.”
I snorted at that. “Join the club. You picked the wrong way to ask my help. You endangered two lives that were important to me. As it is if I ever run into you again, I will hurt you, but if my brother dies, I will come looking for you and you will hurt for a relatively short time before you die. A week, maybe less.”
I have never really wanted to hurt a person before. I didn’t want to hurt the man with the gun in the house earlier. Or the woman that was burned in the black tentacle cloud. Or the man with the steel knife. But Harris had taken Kieran and Ethan and put those three people in my way to hurt me and stop me from helping my brother. My brothers. I finally learned how to hate somebody and I hated him for that, too. I sent both Swords to their scabbards with an unnecessary flourish and turned to Ethan, saying, “Climb in, we’re leaving.”
“Seth, I can’t allow that,” said Harris, reaching for power from the nearest ley line. It was a big thick one, too.
I jerked back around angrily, snatching hard on the ley line and funneling its power through me. Everywhere he reached, I was there first pulling away energy from every channel he created and shunting it back to the line just out of his reach, like a giant game of Keep-Away. Rainbows of light cascaded up and down my body as I stalked up to Harris, seething, arms at my side and hands in fists. He stumbled back against the car, shocked to be made powerless against me.
“Go away,” I said, hoarsely.
I turned and stomped back to the car. Ethan was beside the passenger door, his jaw almost on the ground. If I weren’t so mad, I would have laughed. I opened the car door and climbed in behind Peter, not stopping the cycling of energy away from Harris. I lit the inside of the car like a couple of hundred watt bulbs.
“Go, Peter, go,” Ethan urged quietly. Then to me, “Seth, keep cycling the line. See if you can store some of its energy within your mind, like the energies of the Pact and weapons. Just tr
y a little at a time. It may help when we try to heal Kieran.”
I heard Ethan but I needed to process that in a moment. My concentration then was on Harris and not taking all this energy and shoving it into several very uncomfortable places for him. Pulling this energy gave me a very clear indication where every other wielder of magic was trying to either push or pull onto the plane. I was beginning to understand some of this.
I felt Peter pull the car through a neighboring driveway and onto the street. He accelerated, so I tugged harder on the line to keep them out over the greater distance. When we turned the corner and out of sight, I released the bulk of the cycling I was doing by flooding the entire area with a pulse of radiation, just like Ethan had done at the hotel the other night. It was changed to add the sense of Peter as well. The sense of the four of us in the house, the yard, or the street was irradiated and destroyed. I wasn’t sure what it did to physical evidence. I released the line.
Suddenly, I was exhausted, sinking back in the seat. We got away.
I’d finally done something good.
Chapter 9
We got away with it, I told myself again. I glanced out the window. Oh crap, we’re still in the neighborhood. I sat back up, reaching for the line just as we ran the car right through it. Electrifying would be a good adjective. I grunted out loud, a bit dazed when it happened.
“Seth, you all right?” asked Peter quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just hit that power line wide open. Wasn’t expecting it.” I brought the line into my cavern away from my center. It looked to me like a long thick line of pinkish putty that stretched to infinity into the darkness of the cavern. A perfectly reasonably three dimensional representation of unrealistic space. I grabbed the imaginary line with imaginary hands and tugged on it like taffy. It stretched and flowed through my fingers and I started looping it then coiling it through the air between my hands. It was fun playing with the patterns.
