Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God by Scott Duff Page A

sitting down at the
table to put my shoes and socks on, my hair dripping a little as it
curled into ringlets. I needed a haircut; I hated it when my hair
got curly. It made me look younger than I was. “What are they doing
down there?”
    “They called it a ‘morning workout,’” he
said, cheerfully, landing on the table before me. “I’d call it a
battle royale. Kieran asks that you join them when you’re
ready.”
    “Okay,” I said and went to the kitchen. I
filled a bottle from the cupboard with filtered water and headed
through the dining room and out of the house. Shrank followed me
down, darting in and out of the trees as we went, buzzing around
happily. I could hear them making a lot of noise as we neared the
clearing. I could feel a lot of movement through the ward and a
huge flow of power of some kind, but nothing really threatening. It
was a strange sensation that crossed sensory bounds, like a taste
that had a smell at the same time, totally incongruous with each
other. I reveled in it until we broke through the trees into the
clearing.
    It was all-out war there. There had to be
forty men on the field, all over it. Big men like Kieran, all
bearing weapons and at least partial armor, some with full armor.
There were two clusters of them and I caught a glimpse of Kieran
waving a sword with a blue fire in the middle of the closest
cluster to me. This close, I could feel Ethan on the other side
moving at inhuman speed. Shrank said this was a workout, so I
shouldn’t be worried. Then the man closest to me saw me, turned,
and snarled. That got a few more men’s attention.
    One seventeen-year-old ready to cut down, no
waiting. Four men peeled off the group and started advancing on me.
I dropped my bottle and made ready to run like hell, but one of my
magic Swords had different ideas. Without a thought on my part, the
gold and silver Sword was in my right hand flashing up to parry the
first man’s downward slash. I felt the rock shift in my mind,
drawing together the Sword and my body and emitting a field around
me, shielding me.
    My feet moved, twisting me to the left,
clipping one man’s sword arm and slashing another’s throat as he
tried to slip underneath the other’s advance. The Sword moved me
again, turning me swiftly in a circle to impale a man fully through
the gut and pull itself swiftly free. As he fell, I saw another man
out of Sword’s reach readying to throw a double-bladed ax at me. I
raised my left hand and fired the Crossbow, hitting him right
between the eyes. He blew apart in an explosion of millions of tiny
spots of light.
    Then I felt the rock settle back down into
the marble slab I was used to for all of a night. The clearing was
quiet and I could hear nothing but my own chest heaving for breath.
I stared down at the gold hilt of the Sword in shock, then looked
around. There weren’t any bodies on the ground. I know I’d killed
at least three men and hurt one. I had a Sword in one hand, a
Crossbow in the other, and I’d used them with deadly proficiency. I
could feel the adrenaline rushing through my body so hot I wanted
to scream from the rush. And I wanted to puke. I turned in place
until I could see Kieran and Ethan walking slowly to me, both
bare-chested, breathing heavily, and smiling broadly.
    “What do we need to show him about these
weapons?” Ethan asked when they stopped at five feet away from me.
That’s when I noticed that he didn’t look like me anymore. He was
shorter than me now, just a little, maybe an inch, and blond. Blue
eyed. And built. If I didn’t have enough of an inferiority complex
with Kieran around now Ethan was in training for Mr. Universe, too.
They both had sweat running down muscles I didn’t know the human
body had.
    “Did you use the Stone as well?” Kieran asked
me.
    “It was more like they used me,” I said
nodding as my breathing slowed. I made a conscious effort to send
the weapons back. “What’s going on here?”
    “Just working