Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God Read Online Free Page B

haven’t been trained in the Arts. I
mean the Magical Arts. You were prepared to take the Pact, but
nothing else. There is much that father didn’t teach you and you
are well past the age that you should be taught. And it adds to our
troubles here. It’s very confusing.”
    I sat down in the grass, cross-legged. This
was obviously going to take a while so I was going to get
comfortable. Kieran followed suit, sitting opposite me with his
legs out at an angle.
    “All right,” I said, trying to collect my
thoughts in all this. “You said we’re a long lived people. Who are
we as a people?”
    “Wizards, magicians, people of power,” he
said mildly. “We are a very small portion of the world who can see
and manipulate the powers in the universe that we call magic. For
us, it’s like using a muscle to move a rock or lighting a candle to
see in the dark. It’s a talent, mostly traveling down families.
Occasionally, a normal person will show up with some talent but not
often. And the talent does vary from person to person.”
    “And this is called a Pact?” I asked.
    “Oh, no,” he said. “The Pact is completely
different. The Pact belongs to our family and a few others and is
secret. Actually, it is several secrets. I don’t know how many
exactly, but there can’t be but, maybe three or four. The one you
hold now, for instance, shows the history of the Fae, down to their
defeat and expulsion from this plane by us. You should, by the way,
never try to open the Pact to anyone. It will react very badly to
that. That is its purpose: to keep that secret beyond coercion. You
know it’s there and you can use the information if you need to, but
you can’t pass the information around. It is very old and very
strong magic, written before the Fae even. No one has ever broken
it.”
    “But you just said it,” I asked.
    “Yes, but I am no longer constricted by the
Pact,” he said, smiling. “You are.”
    “So remove it.” This didn’t sound difficult
to understand.
    “It is entwined in your soul,” he said. “I
cannot remove it without killing you. And then it would dissolve
before I could take it.” Okay, that sounded difficult.
    “But you removed yours.”
    “No, my teacher taught me how to disengage it
from my soul to do other things,” he said. “His language was much
older even than that of the Pact. The beast pulled the Pact with it
when it left my body. I can teach you the same way, but it will
take some time.
    “And we must be certain that you are not the
last holder of this Pact. If you are, then I have the duty to find
a suitable replacement. The story must not die.”
    “Why is it your duty?” I asked.
    “I accepted the Pact.” He said it so simply,
he was almost child-like again.
    “So where is this beast now?” I asked,
playing idly with a blade of grass.
    He stiffened. “It was able to do with you
what it could not with me. The body disintegrated creating the
gateway attached to your soul. Right now, it’s sitting in its home
between worlds waiting on you to call it.”
    Okay, this was another astounding moment. My
head snapped up, but my jaw was on the ground. This was the biggest
yet.
    “I’m possessed?” I shouted. Didn’t mean to,
but when a demon makes a doorway through your soul, whatcha gonna
do?
    “Not exactly,” he said softly. “More like
you’re a door now.”
    I stood up and started pacing. Several times
I stopped to say something, but I couldn’t get the words out.
Frustration was just too high. My parents were God knows where. I
was stuck in the hills with this giant redheaded Rumplestilzkin
telling me stories about magic. I couldn’t ignore the magic because
I felt and saw it. And even performed some of my own.
    “Why me?” I finally got out.
    “Oh, that actually does make some sense,” he
said, sitting up straighter and getting his legs underneath him.
That was amazing in itself, considering how thick his legs were.
“The spell that sent me back concluded