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

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