Hunter
“So, Meg is dating Frank now?” Mace asked me when I stormed back into the estate house.
“Not if he doesn’t make it through the night,” I grumbled.
“See?” Blade told Weston. “That’s why I didn’t let you drink any of that smoothie.”
“Nasty stuff. Men were falling out on the sidewalk, seeing visions,” I relayed as I shrugged off my suit jacket.
“I don’t know,” Weston mused. “A lot of CEOs pay good money for out-of-body experiences. It helps them be creative and come up with cutting-edge ideas.”
“I don’t need hallucinogenic dirty water to have a good idea,” I said smugly, unfastening my cuff links.
“Svensson brothers!” I bellowed. “Meet out on the back terrace in twenty. Wear black and face masks.” I shooed several of my younger brothers, who were making a Minecraft world at the dining room table, toward the stairs.
“You all need to help too,” I told my adult brothers as I herded the younger ones upstairs to change.
“This is illegal,” Mace complained, “and there are snakes out there.”
“It’s notillegal, only if I get caught, which I won’t.”
“All for what?” Garrett snorted. “How much land have you won? Like a five-inch-wide patch?”
“No,” I said. “I have six and a half feet now. If no one contests, then it’s our land.”
In Harrogate, the law on the books was that if you claimed land adjacent to your property and maintained it, then after three years, you could keep it. So every two weeks, I marched all my brothers out to the western edge of our property and moved the fence out one inch. I had been doing that for the past three years. I had increased our estate property holdings by a percentage of a percent, sure, but in the next ten years, we would be at the driveway on the old farmstead neighboring our property. I mentally calculated the acreage as I changed.
“The brilliance of it,” I crowed to Weston, once we had all assembled on the terrace, “is that no one notices if a fence line moves an inch. Shoot, they don’t even notice if it moves a couple feet every year. And technically, that first five-inch strip now officially belongs to us. The rest is soon to follow.”
“Why can’t we just buy the land?” Nate complained as I adjusted his face mask. My brothers and I were fairly pale with blond hair. We needed to blend in with the night.
“Because,” I said, “this way is better. And I don’t have to deal with Meg not letting me purchase that property. Gentlemen, let’s march!”
This was the first night that the toddlers were out with us for the great fence move. My younger brothers all carried straps, wrenches, and drills to pick up the fence posts then move them.
“Why did we have to bring them?” Parker complained as one of the toddlers sat down on a tree stump and wailed.
Archer picked him up.
“Don’t you want to do a fun illegal family activity?”
Johnny wailed harder. “Hungry!”
“Use a complete sentence,” I reminded him.
“I want some crackers.”
“Dinner happens after the fence is moved,” I barked at my brothers as we made our way through the woods. I hoisted one of the toddlers on my shoulders. He hiccupped and seemed more amenable now that he had a better view.
We had the fence-moving process down to thirty minutes.
“Places!” I ordered, and my brothers ran to the fence posts.
“What do I do?” Justin asked me. He and the other two triplets stood at my feet, gray eyes big under their masks.
“Keep a lookout,” I told them. “Not that anyone is ever going to find out about this.”
The drills were loud, but my little brothers were like a well-trained Formula 500 racing team. The stakes came out of the ground. The older brothers and I lifted out the posts then moved them exactly one inch west. I had Davy and Henry run a laser.
