Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  “I need to change into my uniform. For some reason I’m wearing…what am I wearing? Uh, sorry, that’s kind of a goofy question. How would you guys know?” he asked, looking himself over.

  We all froze. Evidently the spell that camouflaged Tal’s gear still recognized him, so he could actually see his dragon armor, and while we were trying to figure out how to explain that, he noticed his sword.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pulling out White Hilt. It didn’t flame, so it didn’t recognize him, but that was probably just as well. I was pretty sure if the blade had suddenly flared, Tal would have dropped it and set the carpet on fire.

  “It’s too heavy for plastic,” he said, turning the blade and watching how it caught the light. “It looks like metal. But that would be crazy…wouldn’t it?”

  Tal looked at me, torn between distrust and the need for an explanation of the numerous details he couldn’t get to gibe with the memories of whatever past day he thought he was living.

  “Is your room upstairs?” asked Khalid. “I’ll just show myself around.” With that, he ran up the stairs without waiting for Tal to invite him. I wasn’t sure that was a great idea. Downstairs the house probably looked pretty much the way it did four years ago. Tal’s room, though, was a whole other situation.

  Still, we did need to talk a little without Tal listening in, and Tal did follow Khalid up the stairs.

  “Nice catch, Jimmie,” I said, “but how did you know which team Tal was playing? How’d you know what day he thinks this is? Weren’t you dead already?”

  “Luckily, I was earthbound, remember, and mostly I followed Tal and Dan around,” replied Jimmie. “There was obviously only one league championship game when Tal was twelve, and I went to it. Somebody has a sick sense of humor, though.”

  “Why?” asked Carlos.

  “Guys, that’s the day…you know, the day Ceridwen hit Tal with the awakening spell.”

  “So he’s back to just before he changed?” asked Lucas. “That makes sense, actually.”

  “Who cares what exact day he thinks this is?” asked Carlos. “The real question is how do we get him back to normal?”

  Yeah, that was the question of the day for sure.

  “Don’t we need someone with magic?” asked Jimmie.

  I chewed on that for a few seconds. “I guess. We can’t even tell what kind of spell did this to him, much less how to break it. That puts us back to where we were right before Tal got here: we need to get in touch with one of our more magical friends.”

  Tal came racing down the stairs at that point, wearing clothes that were clearly too big for him. He had his dragon armor draped over one arm. Khalid came close behind him, looking flustered.

  “Someone…someone took all my stuff!” he said angrily. “It’s like someone took over my room. There are clothes there, but they don’t fit me.” He looked down at himself and blushed a little. “I guess you can see that. I just didn’t want to keep wearing this…costume.” He dumped the dragon armor and scabbard on the ground like so much garbage. “Oh, there’s a high school soccer uniform, but no middle school one. How am I supposed to get ready for my game?”

  I could tell he was at the point of exploding. The house was his, yet not his. He knew some of us, yet he didn’t. The room was his, but nothing like he remembered.

  I couldn’t see any way around telling him the truth, but I couldn’t imagine he would believe a word of it.

  At that moment the silver swirl of an opening portal appeared at the other side of the room. Tal backed away, his wide eyes reflecting the silver glow, but I actually felt relieved. This must be someone coming to help.

  That feeling of relief lasted for about fifteen seconds, and then Dark Me, Tal’s evil side, now unfortunately with a body of his own, stepped out. Yeah, he looked exactly like sixteen-year-old Tal, but the real Tal never sneered that way.

  All of us who had weapons drew, and Lucas assumed what I took to be his fighting stance. Even Tal, somewhat to my surprise, reached down and grabbed White Hilt. Even without his magic, he must have gotten a bad vibe from Dark Me, though Dark Me looked like his older brother.

  “Is this any way to greet your savior?” asked Dark Me mockingly.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  Dark Me chuckled. “What, you’re the leader now?” He took a quick glance around the room. “Ah, I see the second string is playing today. No wonder everything is such a mess!”

  “What are you doing here?” asked Carlos.

  Dark Me chuckled again. “Wow, and I thought Gordy was the dense one! I’m here to save your sorry asses.”

  “Like we can believe anything you say,” I replied, trying to control my temper. Dark Me had a way of getting under people’s skin, but we had to think clearly if we were going to survive.

  “Yeah, why would you want to rescue us?” asked Carlos. “You never do anything without some selfish reason. For all we know, you’re here to help Vanora take us down.”

  This time Dark Me laughed outright. “It doesn’t seem like she needs much help. You’re all cornered here, with no magic, and the Boy Scout has been turned into…well, a Boy Scout.”

  “Who are you?” asked Tal, still pointing his sword at Dark Me, though I was pretty sure he wouldn’t really know what to do with it if it came to a fight.

  “I guess what’s left of your band of warriors hasn’t told you the truth, so I better. Tal, I’m…closer to you than any brother. This morning you were sixteen, but you’ve been age regressed somehow back to twelve and have no memory of the last four years. That’s why I’m here.”

  “That’s crazy!” protested Tal.

  “You won’t think so after a little something we call the awakening spell,” said Dark Me, raising his right hand. If I could see magic, I knew I would be seeing that hand surrounded in a reddish glow.

  “No!” I said. “From what Tal, Stan, and Carla have all told us, that spell is incredibly painful, and it took Tal weeks after to get himself sorted out. Can’t you just break the spell that made him twelve?”

  “If only it were that easy.” said Dark Me. “I know none of you can tell this, but the spell Tal is under is incredibly powerful. Tal has no magic of his own, but I could stand three blocks away and still sense the spell that’s on him. This is, like, faerie-king level, or Olympian, perhaps even elder Olympian.” He pulled the lyre of Orpheus out of his backpack, and I realized we should probably have tried to take him down before he got his hands on that highly magical instrument.

  “I could use the power of the lyre to try to break the spell, but I have no idea yet what I’m even dealing with, or whether it’s so fully soaked into Tal that removing it would tear him apart. At least we know what the awakening spell will do. I’ve had all the experiences Tal had up to just recently, remember? I can help him through the transition.”

  “What’s the rush?” asked Carlos. “Why not take us to someone who could research the problem? Why try to cure Tal so fast?”

  “Cure me?” asked Tal shakily. I still didn’t have any idea what to say to him.

  Dark Me shook his head. “Too many unknowns. We don’t know what the other side’s endgame is, for example, or even who’s on that team. We don’t know what they want—or how far they’d go to get it.”

  “It must be Vanora,” said Jimmie. “She tried to trap me when I called her earlier.”

  “Look,” said Dark Me, in a tone that sounded like he was explaining something to an idiot. “Vanora is certainly a bitch a lot of the time, but is it logical to assume she’d suddenly turn on all of you, much less allow Tal to be munchkinized? Isn’t she still on that Tal-is-the-messiah kick?”

  “Who’s Vanora?” asked Tal. Nobody answered him. I wouldn’t even have known where to start.

  “We all want Tal back,” said Jimmie, “but that doesn’t mean we have to get him back right now—”

  “Get me back?” asked Tal, looking from one of us to the other, eyes filling with
fear.

  “We all want that,” continued Jimmie, “but isn’t it obvious Vanora or whoever wanted him here, probably to distract us. He had to walk right past like a dozen security men. I think he was sent here precisely so we’d get tied up in trying to help him, which evidently we can’t do right away.”

  Carlos nodded. “That’s true—and you’re smart enough to have seen that, too,” he added grudgingly to Dark Me. “So why—oh, I know. You haven’t figured out how to duplicate Tal’s blood yet.”

  The spell that Robin Goodfellow had used to become a perfect copy of Tal had been based on Tal’s blood. Unfortunately, the copying had been so perfect it had included Tal’s rambunctious dark side, and Robin, who had no experience controlling Dark Me, lost control. Once in command of the body, Dark Me had stolen Tal’s donation from the blood drive to keep the spell going, as well as a blood-magic ring he intended to modify to manufacture more as needed. In Dark Me’s eyes I could see the truth of Carlos’s words.

  “So now you know,” Dark Me conceded. “Yeah, I’m only a few days away from running out of my supply, and Tal’s current blood would only make me like Tal is right now.”

  “Just as I said earlier,” said Carlos with a self-satisfied smile. “Selfish.”

  “Perhaps,” said Dark Me grimly. “However, that’s how you know you can trust me: my self-interest. I need Tal restored just as much as you do.”

  “So you can keep stealing Robin Goodfellow’s body,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t want my help?” asked Dark Me. “Fine. I can leave and take my chances on finding the right magic before the last of the blood is gone, and you can—what exactly? Hang out here until whoever is pulling the strings takes your parents hostage, or your friends? For that matter, your enemies have some of you already, right? I’m assuming everybody who isn’t here is captive one way or another.”

  “Tal, Nurse Florence, Carla, and Alex all went to Olympus earlier today, and, except for Tal, haven’t returned,” I said. “Stan, Shar, and Dan were captured later. That leaves just us free.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting someone?” asked Dark Me, a touch of anger in his voice. When I didn’t respond immediately, he said, “Eva, you twit! Where is she?”

  “We don’t know,” I admitted. “She isn’t really part of the group, so we figured—”

  “I don’t give a damn what you figured. I’m going to get her right now.” A whirl of silver, and he was gone. I had never seen someone use a portal so fast.

  Whatever I thought of Dark Me, and it certainly wasn’t much, he did care about Eva, at least as much as he was capable of caring about anyone besides himself.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Tal sounded whiny, but I could hardly blame him.

  “That guy’s evil,” said Khalid. “Don’t trust him. But he is telling the truth about what happened to you. You were sixteen years old just this morning.”

  “That can’t be!” Tal protested angrily.

  “Tal, it explains what you’ve seen,” I pointed out. “You know me, yet you can see I’m older than I should be. None of the clothes in your room fit you because you’re now four years older. There’s a high school soccer uniform upstairs because you’re on the high school team, not the middle school team.”

  “That’s crazy!” Tal insisted. He was stubborn at sixteen. I don’t know why I would have expected him to be less stubborn at twelve.

  “Do you have a better theory?” asked Carlos gently.

  “Tal, I know you don’t remember us,” said Khalid, “but we’re all friends of yours, and other friends like Stan and Dan are in trouble. Forget about trying to work everything out with logic. What does your heart tell you?”

  A portal opened just at that moment, and through it stepped Dark Me and a very upset Eva, who must have figured out he wasn’t the real Tal. The red slap mark on his cheek was a dead giveaway, too, and he didn’t look happy.

  The only person who did look happy was Tal, at least until he realized that Eva, like me, looked older than she should. Even then, I could see that look in his eyes, and I knew he was in love with her, whether she was older or not.

  “Eva?” he asked, knowing the answer. Even four years older, she had the same strawberry-blond hair, the same angelic face, the same body of a goddess. Hell, I would have gone after her in a heartbeat if she hadn’t already been with someone else. I couldn’t think of any straight, unattached male who wouldn’t.

  Eva stared at Tal, probably uncertain how to deal with him.

  “Yes” was all she could finally manage.

  I could see the transition from skepticism to belief on Tal’s face. If Eva was older, then our story must be true, even if it was crazy.

  “Eva, I know I’m not as old as I should be right now, but…but you can still love me, right?”

  Awkward!

  Of course Tal had no way of knowing that during the four years ripped out of his mind, Eva had broken up with him, moved on to Dan, and then eventually settled on Jimmie.

  It might have been better, at least in terms of saving time, if Eva had let him believe they were still together, but I guessed she just didn’t feel right about doing that, because she said, “Tal, we aren’t together anymore. I’m with Jimmie now.”

  “Who’s Jimmie?” said Tal in a tone suggesting that if Jimmie were nearby, he’d soon be feasting on a knuckle sandwich.

  Eva hesitated. Yeah, she had only now worked out that Tal would remember Jimmie as dead, and she didn’t know how to extricate herself.

  “Tal, I’m actually Jimmie, not Rhys. I’m your friend, Jimmie, Dan’s brother…just not quite as dead as you remember.”

  Tal was back to skepticism in an instant, I thought more because of Eva’s revelation than Jimmie’s. I bet he would have swallowed resurrection. Eva not loving him anymore was going to be a tougher sell.

  “Liar!” Tal yelled, lunging at Jimmie. We were all caught by surprise. Lucas and Khalid in particular were fast enough to have stopped Tal, but they didn’t. Surprisingly, neither did Jimmie. Instead, he let Tal hit him a couple of times before we pulled Tal off him. The punches had been hard. Jimmie’s lip was split, and his left cheek was already showing a bruise.

  “Liar!” Tal screamed again.

  “Remember when you used to read me that book about angels, Tal? You used to read to me almost as much as Dan and my parents did. I loved it when you did that, even though you were only about my age and didn’t really know all the words. It was that you took the time to do it that mattered.”

  Tal lost it completely. “It can’t be! You can’t be Jimmie!” he yelled, loud enough for the security men outside to notice and report back. Small as Tal now was, Carlos and I had a hard time holding him.

  “Jimmie would never steal my girl!” he wailed, thrashing harder and harder.

  How we would ever have calmed him down I didn’t know, but Dark Me actually proved useful, putting him to sleep.

  “I’ll instill some restraint,” said Dark Me, taking Tal from us with surprising gentleness and laying him on the couch.

  “I can’t allow you to mess with his mind,” I said, stepping toward Dark Me.

  “You know I can’t hurt him, and you know why,” said Dark Me, not sneering at me for once. “Any damage I do to his mind I’ll inherit the next time I take blood from him. I’m just going to get him calm. We won’t be able to do anything if he’s hysterical.”

  I had to admit the bastard actually had a point. I looked around, and everybody nodded reluctantly.

  Eva and Jimmie were both crying. I half expected them to hug, but they stayed uncomfortably distant, as if Tal was somehow watching them.

  “I’m sorry,” said Eva. “I didn’t handle that well at all.”

  I was sorry, too—sorry that I had ended up in charge.

  It’s not that I thought I was stupid, the way Dark Me obviously did. The problem was that I’d always been taking orders before. Now I was the one in charge, sort of by def
ault. I wasn’t as smart as Stan. I didn’t know as much about magic as Tal, and I didn’t have his hundreds of years of experience to fall back on. I hadn’t been learning martial arts practically from the cradle, like Shar, and I wasn’t Alexander and Achilles reincarnated like Shar, either.

  I was just me. What if that wasn’t enough? What if I was faced with a choice, like the obvious one up ahead? Dark Me would only help us get out of our current jam if he got to keep Robin’s transformed body; that much I knew for sure. At some point I was going to have to choose between getting little Tal changed back into his current self and rescuing Robin.

  Robin was annoying at best, at least as far as I was concerned, but he was also conscious somewhere inside Dark Me—conscious but trapped, nothing but an observer in his own body. I couldn’t leave him that way. But I couldn’t leave Tal the way he was, either: trapped in a time he didn’t understand, frightened, and, though he didn’t know yet, soon to be forced away from home. We could never explain him in his current condition, and the supernatural community would never allow us to reveal the truth about him.

  I got so lost in thought I jumped a little when Dark Me spoke.

  “This is worse than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, unable to make my voice sound confident or even calm.

  “Just keeping him asleep is taking way more power than it should. Whoever did this to him has somehow locked him into his current condition. He can change emotional states, as we’ve seen, and I think he can retain new memories, but aside from that, his body and mind shake off any changes. I’ve been trying to do something as simple as blur the memories of the last few minutes so he won’t be as upset. That’s child’s play, but every time I apply the magic, his mind takes it momentarily, then bounces back to the way it was, memories still intact. His body is the same way. I tried some little changes, just as a test, but his body rejected all of them.”

  “So the spell didn’t just make him the way he was four years ago?” I asked.

  “It did that, but then the caster took additional measures to freeze him in that state.”