Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  Stunned silence followed as the parents struggled to formulate yet another rational explanation.

  “Khalid, come here,” said Mrs. Sassani, her face unreadable. Was she going to reject him as he had feared? I felt as if my heart had stopped beating. Khalid, stiff as a rod, must have figured it was better to be in a hundred percent than to chicken out now, glided over to her instead of walking, then landed right next to her. His fear was so obvious that for his sake I would have turned back time an hour or so and forgotten the whole thing.

  “Honey, don’t be afraid,” she said, pulling him to her. “I don’t care if you’re a little boy or a djinni or Santa Claus. You’re my son, every bit as much as if I’d borne you myself.”

  “And mine,” said Mr. Sassani, “just as if I had fathered you myself.”

  “I was afraid…so afraid,” whispered Khalid.

  “I can’t believe any of you are buying this,” said Mr. O’Reilly, Eva’s dad, looking at the Stevens and Sassani tables as if both families needed to be supplied with straitjackets.

  Mrs. Schoenbaum, however, was having a light-bulb moment—but not the kind we wanted. “This is true, isn’t it?”

  Stan nodded.

  “Then that means that you—you’ve been in danger, not once, but several times…because of him!” she said, pointing an accusing finger at me. “Taliesin Weaver, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “It isn’t like that!” protested Stan. “Tal didn’t put me in danger on purpose. He’s actually saved my life more than once.”

  “Yes—saved it from dangers he created.”

  “Mrs. Schoenbaum, I didn’t ask to be who I am…what I am,” I said. “I didn’t go out looking for trouble. It came looking for me.”

  “Whatever your motives were, my son was still in danger because of you,” said Mrs. Schoenbaum. “No more, though. He is never seeing you again.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Stan. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  That might well have been the first time in his life that Stan was that abrupt with his mother, and she seemed more shocked by that than by reincarnation or dragons.

  “I am your mother, Stan,” she finally got out, “and I can—”

  “Until I’m eighteen maybe,” Stan conceded. “After that, I’ll see him as much as I want.”

  “I think some of you are missing the point that your sons and daughters have saved lives…have restored order to whole worlds—” began Vanora.

  “And you,” said Mrs. Schoenbaum, turning on her. “A responsible adult, someone we trusted—and you lied so our children could go on these life-threatening adventures. We should have you up on charges!”

  “You’re assuming, dear, that all of this is real,” said Mr. Schoenbaum. “I’m not yet convinced, though I’m also having a problem seeing how such a practical joke could be orchestrated…or why a community leader and an educator would go along with it.”

  “Either way, Stan is not seeing Tal again,” said Mrs. Schoenbaum with a finality that would have done the grim reaper credit.

  “I always knew you were trouble,” Mr. O’Reilly said to me. “Ever since that breakdown—”

  “Which wasn’t actually a breakdown, as it turns out—” started Dad.

  “Believe what you want. We aren’t sitting here and listening to any more of this nonsense.”

  “It isn’t nonsense!” protested Eva. “It’s not Tal’s fault, either. He’s not trouble.”

  Mr. O’Reilly rose slowly. “Eva, that’s enough.”

  “Dad, I wanted you to know the truth,” said Eva. “I thought you could handle it.”

  I did my best to block out the increasingly angry buzz around me and do a head count. The Stevenses and the Sassanis were OK. The Schoenbaums, O’Reillys, and Hayeses were decidedly not. Mr. Santos was staring at his wife, son, and supposed mother-in-law as if the Martians had landed, so he probably wasn’t OK, either. The Stratoses, Alex’s parents, had on their we-really-don’t-want-to-make-a-scene-but-this-is-all-nonsense faces, so maybe not OK. The Reyeses and Rinaldis appeared to be offline, or perhaps in shock, though I noticed Mrs. Rinaldi cross herself multiple times, which didn’t seem like a good sign under the circumstances.

  It looked obvious we were going to have to memory wipe and start over with most of the parents. Given what Vanora had told us, that wasn’t a great plan, but I didn’t see what else we could do. We’d hoped the truth would make them feel better—if not right away, then eventually. We had been wrong; it was as simple as that.

  I didn’t notice a new problem. I was too preoccupied by that point. I did see Lucas and my mom both react to something, but I didn’t realize what it was until it was almost too late.

  As it turned out, the fake Vanora hadn’t fled after all.

  Chapter 36: Uninvited Guests (Tal)

  She wore Vanora’s form for only an instant, then quickly switched to her own. The gray robes made me think she was one of Nicneven’s witches. The enraged scream, followed by a spray of hellfire in my general direction, suggested revenge could be her motive.

  Unfortunately, she was not alone. She must have gotten out the word to the remaining remnants of Nicneven’s once-mighty force. Into the room surged maybe half a dozen witches and twenty or so faeries. My friends and I could handle them. Unlike with any of our earlier battles, though, we had to protect a large group of innocent bystanders, most of whom had frozen at the abrupt appearance of these intruders.

  “Cover your parents!” I yelled mentally, not that any of my friends needed prompting. What they did need was a strategy, and that I couldn’t give them right away. I only barely managed to avoid being made extra crispy myself. If the other witches could also use hellfire and started firing indiscriminately around the room, I had no idea how we would protect everyone. The parents were too spread out over too large an area. Then the faeries opened fire, and arrows whizzed our way with alarming speed.

  Fortunately, most of the attacks were aimed at me initially, and I was able to dodge successfully. The fact that I was wearing dragon armor helped too; it wouldn’t have protected me from the heat of hellfire, but it handled the arrows with which the faeries showered me nicely. Actually, all of my friends were armored and equipped for battle. Vanora had thought showing our equipment at some point might be a good way to convince the parents, and that idea was turning out to be a lifesaver, at least in the short term, though by now the faeries knew to aim for my head and hands, and it took me a little time to kick myself up to faerie speed to dodge more effectively. In that time, I almost lost an ear and took an arrow in my left hand.

  I could have done better if I hadn’t been distracted by what was happening behind me, but I couldn’t help myself. My parents were here, after all, just like everyone else’s.

  Once again, playing host to Magnus, who had needed to relinquish his borrowed faerie body, came in handy. While I handled the defense, he kept an eye on what was happening farther back and then fed the information to me.

  As soon as the threat became apparent, Stan, Dan, and Eva tried to herd the shocked parents into a smaller area that could be more easily defended. My parents, not off-balance the way everyone else’s parents were, helped get the others regrouped. Carla, Gabriela, Vanora, and Nurse Florence worked together to raise protective shielding around the civilians. Quickly constructed defenses like that wouldn’t take many hits of hellfire, but they could be reinforced over time, and even at the beginning, they could stop the arrows.

  Khalid was in the air, alternately shooting and dodging, trying to get the faeries off me. Alex was also in the air, leading with his shield, which we had learned could resist hellfire, up to a point. Shar, Gordy, Jimmie, Carlos, Michael, and Lucas charged in close formation at the faeries and witches. As long as the guys stayed relatively close to Shar and could touch Zom as needed, they could protect themselves from hellfire. Arrows were another matter, but the faeries stayed focused on me until the guys were almost on them.

>   The attack could have been better coordinated. The fake Vanora had her forces attack is if I were the only person in the room. By the time they reoriented themselves, they were already fighting at a disadvantage. Not only that, but once I didn’t have to spend all of my time on defense, I was able to start spraying White Hilt’s fire at them. As I might have expected, the witches were protected against that kind of attack, but the faeries were not, and many of them fell, though I tried to avoid killing them when I could.

  It was looking like one of our easier battles once we recovered from the initial shock—but, as we had already learned, looks can be deceiving.

  Magnus alerted me to the fact that some of the each-uisge, the vicious Scottish shape-shifting water spirits, some in human form and some in horse form, had charged in through another entrance and headed straight for the closest humans—who happened to be our parents.

  I should have scanned the building when the attack began to see if any other beasties were lurking around, and now most of us were pinned down for the moment. Turning our back on the remaining faeries could mean arrows in the back of our necks, to say nothing of what the witches still standing might hit us with. However, Stan, Dan, and Eva, the first two with their swords and Eva with her bow, did a good job of blocking the creatures from advancing on our parents. At the same time, Carla, Nurse Florence, and Vanora countered the each-uisge mob by magic as fast as they could.

  Reassured, I turned my full attention back to the threat in front of me. The witches managed to frustrate our assault for a time by throwing up a wall of hellfire, a tactic I thought they might have learned from me. A few strokes with Zom, however, and Shar made their fiery barrier collapse in emerald ruin. Hellfire was too high-energy a form for them to reconstruct that barrier immediately, and the guys charged them before they could do much else.

  We were outnumbered, but we had superior weaponry, and even the best spell caster isn’t going to be able to act fast enough to do much about determined swordsmen right next to the caster. For a few seconds victory seemed inevitable—but the fake Vanora had one more trick up her sleeve.

  “Tal! Something new is coming at our parents!” shouted Magnus in my head. The guys had the witches and faeries in front of me pretty well occupied, so I was able to look back, and it was a good thing. A group of bodachs were advancing against our parents, and our spell casters, never having fought such creatures before, were having limited luck holding them back.

  Normally bodachs appeared alone, not in packs, but since Nicneven had gotten the even more intractable each-uisge hunters to fight together, we shouldn’t have been surprised she had done the same with the bodachs.

  The creatures appeared less savage at first than their each-uisge allies had, but as with so many other supernatural beings, their appearance was deceptive. Though looking like an old man in gray, each bodach was a foreteller of death in Scottish folklore. A few darker tales, however, whispered of a bodach’s ability to bring death, and that was what we were facing here. The creatures looked so saturated in dark energy that even a touch might be enough to kill a human.

  “Don’t let them make contact!” I yelled as I flew at top speed toward the new threat. The creatures were moving slowly against the magic resistance our four casters were throwing out, but they were still moving.

  Stan, operating in David mode, raised his sword at them and yelled, in ancient Hebrew, “In the name of the Almighty, begone!” The bodachs wouldn’t have understood the language, but the white glow from his sword usually gave evil creatures pause. In this case, though, they kept coming. One swing of that luminous blade brought one of them down in a dark heap, but another nearly touched Stan during the move. Only Dan’s quick thinking saved him. With one swift stroke, Dan lopped off the thing’s hand, and it fell back with an unearthly shriek. Another fell to one of Eva’s silver arrows.

  I had just seen a few of them at first, but more kept entering the room. There had to be an open portal nearby; there was no way so many creatures like this could have been in Awen earlier without at least one of us picking up on their distinctive emanations.

  I was about to start slamming them with fire when, against all odds, a stray faerie arrow caught me in the back of the neck. It grazed me rather than piercing me, but the wound was deep enough to make me bleed, and I could tell this one had some kind of magic on it that immediately started weakening me. I made an unsteady landing right behind Stan and Dan. The parents could see the blood, now pouring from my neck. I managed to stop the flow, but I was suddenly feeling groggy. During the time it took me to halt my bleeding, the bodachs had come dangerously close to Stan and Dan.

  Nurse Florence was at my side in seconds. “Tal, there was something nasty on that arrow. It’s going to take a few minutes for me to draw it out of your system.”

  “We don’t have a few minutes!” I said, my voice coming out more hysterical than I wanted.

  I couldn’t focus well enough to start throwing fire, but I managed to move shakily into line with Dan and Stan, hoping the flaming blade might deter the bodach advance.

  “Tal! You’re in no condition for this!” insisted Nurse Florence. She was right, but at least until the guys up front were free to join us, I was afraid to pull out of the fight.

  The bodachs were now numerous enough that getting around Stan and Dan and either attacking them from all sides or bypassing them and heading for the parents was a real possibility.

  “Help the others shield the parents!” I yelled at Nurse Florence—well, more like gasped, really, but I think I was audible. By now I was moving sluggishly, but at least bodachs were not particularly fast-moving adversaries. If they had been, they would have overwhelmed us.

  As I fought, I was dimly aware of the arrival of Gordy, Khalid, and Lucas. That must mean the other battle at the front of the room was nearly over. If we could hold out a few more minutes, we would able to assemble enough force on this end of the room to make the defeat of the bodachs inevitable.

  Khalid flew over us and out the door through which the bodachs kept entering, no doubt looking for the portal so he could close it by shooting with his blessed arrows. Gordy cut off a bodach attempt to outflank us. Lucas moved forward, but I held him back.

  “Not…sure…patuá would…protect you,” I got out.

  “Then I’ll just have to be a distraction,” said Lucas, shaking off my hand and moving like lightning. He went into his jinga, the dance-like movement pattern used to evade and confuse opponents in capoeira, and his movements did indeed seem to confuse the bodachs, slowing their advance, if nothing else.

  At this point I could barely stand, but I managed to keep swinging my sword. Groggy as I was by now, I could still be of some use.

  Stan almost got grabbed by a bodach, and his mother, who must have been edging closer during the battle without anyone noticing, was suddenly right behind him, trying to drag him back.

  I didn’t know whether to be impressed by her incredible courage, by her willingness to risk herself for Stan, or be irritated by her interference, which was probably making it harder for Stan to defend himself.

  Either way, she wasn’t going to die on my watch!

  Stan was so surprised he froze for a few seconds, and a bodach near his side and reaching for him looked as if it might brush his mother. Whatever was on the arrow seemed to be affecting both Magnus and me, which meant it was interfering with my body as well as my mind, but together we managed to move my body fast enough to throw ourselves between Mrs. Schoenbaum and the bodach’s grasp. Unfortunately, I wasn’t well positioned, and the bodach touched me, mostly on the dragon armor, but also on a tiny part of my neck. Cold shot through me instantly, and in my weakened condition I dropped to the ground like a rock. Blackness was closing in all around me.

  By that point I was only barely conscious of what was happening around me, but from what I was told later, Stan, Mrs. Schoenbaum, and I were all saved by the timely intervention of Lucas, who discovered that he could
use sweeping kicks to knock bodachs off their feet as easily as he could human opponents, particularly when those bodachs were focused on someone else. While Mr. Schoenbaum pulled his wife back, Stan, Dan, and Gordy managed to hold the line until more help arrived, and then, as I had predicted, even the bodachs didn’t stand a chance. By that point Khalid had collapsed the portal, so our adversaries couldn’t get any more reinforcements. With Alex using Harpe to cut them in half with one stroke and Shar doing pretty much as well with Zom, their defeat was total within minutes.

  Before the battle was over, Nurse Florence and Vanora managed to reach me and pull me back far enough for them to safely work on me. They got to me just in time, and even then, they had to persuade the startled parents to join in the power sharing in order to save me. The inner battle between our healers and a combination of that arrow magic and the bodach death touch took so much of a toll that evidently everyone involved in that rescue attempt lost consciousness for a few seconds. At almost exactly the same moment, the last of the bodachs were dispatched, and the guys told me later they, too, felt as if they had lost consciousness for a second from sheer exhaustion, though as it turned out, they had really been out for much longer.

  When I awoke, I felt weaker, but lucky to be alive—again.

  It was then we learned from Vanora that most of us had been out for hours, and it was now nearly three o’clock in the morning. Vanora had recovered a little faster and had already gotten Gwynn’s men to help with cleanup and to take the surviving attackers into custody.

  The ballroom looked, well, like a battle had taken place there, but we had suffered only minor wounds, which Vanora had evidently healed while we were unconscious.

  That settled the question of whether or not what we were saying was true. It did not, however, do much for concerns about danger.

  “You see?” said Mrs. Schoenbaum triumphantly. “Look at the kind of menacing situations our kids have been in!”