by Hiatt, Bill
“Tal, I do appreciate everything you’ve accomplished,” replied my dad, more defensively than usual.
“Then, what? What the hell is it that’s bugging you?” I was practically shouting now.
“Tal,” said my dad, his volume rising, “we raised you better than to behave like this!”
“Dad, I don’t know how else to say this: I’m not gay, I’m just busy.”
It is one thing to know the elephant is in the room. It is another thing when it jumps up on the table and tramples your Rice Krispies. For a second my dad got so red in the face I thought he was going to have a heart attack right on the spot.
“I never once said I thought you were…like that!” he finally replied, quietly but intensely.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to say it, did you? I could see it on your face every day.”
I shoved back my chair and got up as fast as I could. My mom just sat there, stunned, and I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t have any comfort for her left in me right then. I just needed to get away from her, from him.
“Taliesin Weaver! Sit down this instant!” Dad’s voice had steel in it I had never heard before. I was so angry at that moment that I might still have ignored him, but he was out of his chair with remarkable speed, putting a hand on my shoulder firmly and pushing me back down into the chair. I could have resisted, but even at my angriest, I couldn’t actually get violent with my dad. Nonetheless, I looked up at him with unconcealed defiance.
My mom looked as if she were about to cry. I did my best to ignore her.
“Tal, what is wrong with you?” Dad asked urgently. “This isn’t like you at all.”
“I’m just tired, Dad. Tired of always falling short,” I said, the anger cooling slightly. I was tired, and I just wanted the conversation to be over.
“I don’t know why you think I’m disappointed with you. What have I ever done to make you think that?”
“We love you,” added Mom, in a trembling voice, suggesting she was still dangerously close to crying.
Well, my dad had asked, so I told him. I told him every little facial twitch, every under-the-breath remark, every innuendo I could remember from the past four years. I had to give him credit. He listened, though it wasn’t really evident how much he was actually hearing. He had gone from red-faced to expressionless fairly quickly.
When I finally finished spilling my guts all over the dining room table, Dad was at first completely silent. Then, very quietly, he said, “When I was your age, we didn’t even talk about things like that. Everyone tried hard to pretend they didn’t exist. I guess that isn’t right, but that’s the way I was raised.”
“I know that,” I said slowly, “but—”
“Let me finish. I listened to you, now you listen to me! Okay, I admit, I worried about you sometimes. I worried, but I couldn’t talk to you about it. I can see now I should have. You knew what was on my mind anyway.
“I know I shouldn’t feel this way. I know I shouldn’t care whether you’re gay or straight, but I do. That much it sounds like you figured out. But what you don’t know, it’s hard for me to even say, but I know I have to, is, Tal, gay or straight, you are my son. I love you. I will always love you. And I feel terrible that I made you wonder whether that were true.”
I hardly knew how to respond. As long as I could remember, my dad had been pretty closed off emotionally. Oh, he had said he loved me before, but it always sounded like a very staid greeting card without any real depth to it. Opening up that far must have been hard, and it seemed to me that he was shaking a little.
I had not expected this conversation to end up in a family hug and a tidal wave of mutual apologies, but it did. My mom finally did cry, but at that point I think more from relief than anything else. I could tell my dad still wasn’t a hundred percent sure I was straight. But I could also tell he was trying really, really hard not to care. Brought up in the era he had been, he couldn’t possibly be expected to go further than that right then.
I met Stan pretty late, but we were close to school, so we still managed to be on time. We didn’t talk much—both of us were waiting for the thumbs up from Nurse Florence. That might have been just as well, since the confrontation with my dad had left me feeling pretty raw. Yeah, things had worked out better than I expected, but it still wasn’t the easiest conversation to get through, and my original reasons for exploding all over my dad—the tiredness, the anxiety—still remained.
At the beginning of lunch Stan and I strolled casually by the nurse’s office, and Nurse Florence gave us the thumbs up, so we went in.
“We’re okay?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Anyone trying to see through Stan will actually be seeing through another student neither one of you know,” replied Nurse Florence. “That means I can ask Stan what he was able to find out in Carrie Winn’s office.”
Stan started fumbling in his backpack and finally pulled out a flash drive that must have been buried at the very bottom.
“Don’t put it up on my computer,” said Nurse Florence quickly. “The network administrator might notice, and it would be hard to explain. Just tell us.”
“Okay. She really doesn’t have much in the way of security on her network, and the office network did connect with the network at Awen, but I can’t make sense out of the data I got. Her security men are theoretically supplied by a security company she has a contract with, but there is no list of them anywhere on her system. The security company sounds like something out of a TV mystery. It looks like a shell company owned by a series of other companies that don’t have much more substance either, but if one traces the line of ownership far enough, it eventually comes back to Carrie Winn.”
“What?” I said incredulously. “She is contracting with herself to hire security? That makes zero sense.”
“I doubt it is that simple,” replied Nurse Florence. “Think— why would someone need to create a front like that? Tal? Stan?”
“Money laundering?” I tried, but I could see from her face that was not the answer she was looking for.
“I’m no expert, but I think you need an actual company bringing in actual money, not just a shell.”
“Since there is no list of names, she is trying to hide who her security people are,” suggested Stan.
“Quite possibly, but why?”
“I’m not liking what I’m thinking,” I said. “Could there be something…supernatural about her security?”
“I’m afraid so,” replied Nurse Florence grimly. “I can’t imagine why Winn wouldn’t deal with a real company if she were going to hire ordinary security. All of this fake companies owning more fake companies kind of chain is a lot of work to set up—hardly worth it to someone who isn’t trying to hide something. This situation opens up a whole world of new possibilities, most of them nasty. She could be recruiting from Annwn. Picture a large security force, all with the advantages of faerie blood. Maybe they are even all shifters. Maybe Winn is not the only one on her side who can do magic. There isn’t any easy way of telling what we are up against. Stan, what about the rest of her staff?”
“There are some real employee records on both her business and home servers, but as far as I can tell, she went to great lengths to hire people from out of town, with no ties to anyone in town. The domestic staff lives in a separate building right behind Awen, and none of them seem to have any dependents. The business employees all seem to live no closer than Carpinteria in one direction or Santa Ynez in the other…”
“Which makes it difficult to do exactly what I wanted to do—get information from their family members. I was hoping in an organization that large to have at least a few children of employees on campus, if nothing else. Any of us would be too conspicuous showing up at someplace like Carpinteria High School for no reason.”
“I can try to extend my range and maybe start seeing through people from greater distances,” I suggested.
“That’s a good idea, but your first priority right
now should still be finding ways for your magic to affect technology. Faerie or not, the guards will be expecting their guns to work and will be thrown off balance when they don’t. Now, if there are more questions…”
“Just one,” I interrupted. “What progress have we made on Eva’s body guard?”
“None, I’m afraid. I can’t seem to find a girl with the right skills in Eva’s circle, and introducing some guy who tags along all the time would be hard to explain to her.”
“She kind of knows what’s happening,” I said sheepishly, suddenly realizing I had left that particular detail out in earlier conversations with Nurse Florence.
“What? How does she know?”
“I had to tell her in order to get her and Dan back together.”
Nurse Florence looked at me in total amazement. “Do you realize what you have done?”
“She was in Annwn on Founders’ Day. She already knew something was up.”
“Yes, but she had no way of finding out what. Now that she and Dan are back together, she knows what questions to ask, and at your insistence I have adjusted Dan’s tynged so he always has knowledge of our situation. What do you suppose they talk about? Tal, I thought Stan was the only possible way Carrie Winn could spy on us, but she can do almost as well with Eva if she realizes how much access Eva has. You really should have told me about Eva right away.”
“I’m sorry. At the time I didn’t realize Winn was using other people that way.”
“True, but you need to be more cautious in general. Now I have to do something about Eva, and the kind of arrangement I made for Stan is hard enough to maintain without having to keep another one going at the same time.”
“At least it’s only a few days until Halloween,” I pointed out lamely.
“Assuming the danger is over after Halloween. You know it could be an anticlimax—and then we’d just have to keep living in fear, not knowing when Winn was actually going to strike.”
“I don’t think so,” said Stan suddenly. “While I was hacking Winn’s computer, I ran across the guest list for the party, and it got me thinking.” Both Nurse Florence and I looked at him expectantly. We both had a general idea of who was on the guest list, but obviously he had noticed something we missed.
“The adults are the bigwigs you would expect…except that none of them are local.”
“Maybe because of Winn’s impending state senate campaign,” suggested Nurse Florence.
“Possibly, but we’ve all seen that monster house of hers. She could certainly have included the usual local dignitaries, but she didn’t. Almost as if she didn’t want them to see what was going to happen.”
“How is it better for out-of-the-area dignitaries to see?” I asked.
“Maybe because we don’t know them. Winn could bring in impostors. If she has all those fake security people, why not?
“And then there are the students she invited. Tal’s band. Okay, so they are the entertainment. All the other students from Founders’ Day—well, that could just be picking the conspicuous student leaders. But she also just added Shar and Gordy. Not the rest of the football team. Just the two who happen to be with us.”
“If she knows they are with us, wouldn’t it make more sense not to invite them?”
“Unless,” said Nurse Florence, not doing as good a job as usual of concealing her fear, “she intends to wipe all of us out at once.”
This day just kept getting better and better.
“What about you?” I said. “Are you invited?”
“No, but Coach Miller is, and fairly randomly—no other school staff members on the guest list. And it wouldn’t be too hard for her to guess at this point that I would be Coach Miller’s plus one. I’m afraid Stan is right. And her making some kind of move at the party makes sense. Samhain is, after all, a point of greater than normal magical potency.
“We still don’t know what she’s up to, and I’m thinking now we won’t until it’s too late. But that doesn’t change my idea about our best strategy. She is definitely going to surprise us in some way. Our only real chance is to surprise her at least as much.”
“Got it,” I said. “Stan and I will work on that this afternoon.”
And so we did. For lack of a better word, I “downloaded” Stan’s scientific visualizations. It took a few hours for me to really put them to good use, but suddenly everything “clicked” (again, for lack of a better word), and I began to be able to manipulate electronics because suddenly I could see and feel how they worked—literally. Though I felt silly singing to Stan’s computer, inside my head I could feel the programs executing the same way I had been able to feel the blood flowing in living beings ever since my awakening. At first I could only nudge the programs a little, like speeding up or slowing down execution. But gradually I managed to create files and erase them just by singing. A key moment came when I was able to log on without using Stan’s password. His computer began to respond as an animal would; it was loyal to me, regardless of passwords or other security measures.
In the days that followed, I frequently walked down the halls at school humming. Nobody really paid attention, since I had often done that before. Now, though, the hum was me subtly syncing with the electronics around me. I’d walk past a computer lab, and all the machines would simultaneously power up. Public address system? I could use it as my address system if I wanted to. I only did that once, though, in the late afternoon. Too conspicuous otherwise. Security cameras? They always went suspiciously blank whenever I was around. (Evidently no one ever checked those tapes, since some of us had been walking around with sheathed swords hanging from our sides in full view of the security cameras for days, but at least now even the potential risk was gone.) I was confident I could control pretty much any of the technology at Awen, and I hoped that that would throw a pretty serious wrench into Winn’s plans.
Guns, however, were another matter. Electronics had become part of my repertoire with surprising ease, but perhaps because Stan hadn’t thought about the mechanics of firearms that much himself, that all-important manipulation eluded me at first. Stan and I took a bus to Carpinteria several times and loitered near a shooting range. I could see through the eyes of the shooters, but really feeling or seeing the inner workings of the guns did not come. In the end Stan solved the problem by a quick but intensive study of the way guns worked. Once his visualization got better, I downloaded again, and presto! I could feel the inner workings of the gun. I could see the gunpowder explode, and that was the easiest spot to block the whole process. It might have been an interesting twist to get the guns to fire at random—preferably into the people carrying them, but with such limited time, I was more than happy to settle for neutralizing them, so that they did not fire at all. Just a little tinkering with the way the gunpowder reacted, and the gun failed. Simple as that. I triggered enough random failures at the shooting range to be sure. Then, gradually, I moved farther and farther away. By the eve of the party, I could be standing almost a block away and still prevent guns from firing. That should be enough range to wipe out the firepower for Winn’s whole security force. Well, the physical part anyway. There was no telling what occult means of attack they possessed now that we knew they might not be human. We had to hope that our collection of magic swords would be sufficient to tip the battle in our favor. Yeah, I now agreed with Stan and Nurse Florence. I was sure Carrie Winn would make her move on Samhain.
Our cause was reinforced in one other way. A day or two before Halloween I ran into Carlos Reyes, who suddenly wasn’t avoiding me—and I couldn’t avoid noticing the sheathed sword hanging on his right side.
“So, Carlos, I see you have joined the club.” The choice made a lot of sense. Carlos was already on the guest list, Eva knew him, if only slightly, and although he would need a very intense crash course in swordsmanship, his long hours of water polo and swimming had put him in excellent physical shape.
Grim as Carlos had been ever since Founders’ Day, he was a little
like a kid with his first bicycle—or like Gordy—in terms of his enthusiasm. Take a guy to Annwn, give him a custom made Faerie sword, and he’ll do anything you want, apparently.
“What does yours do?” I said, leaning closer. There was no one nearby, but still, I was learning the value of caution.
Carlos leaned even closer. “Even a touch makes someone feel like he’s drowning. An actual wound, and the enemy will die as if by drowning unless the spell is broken.” I wanted to tell him that watching “the enemy” die was not the picnic he seemed to imagine, but if in fact we had to go into battle, he would find that out soon enough for himself.
In just under two weeks I had done what Nurse Florence was pretty sure no spell caster before me had ever done—forge a connection between magic and technology. Would that, together with six magic swords, four of which we hoped Carrie Winn knew nothing, be enough? In just a couple of days, we would know.
CHAPTER 19: SAMHAIN
Halloween at school was one long headache. I dimly remembered enjoying it in some earlier years, but this time all the adolescent lets-see-how-much-I-get-away-with costuming just annoyed me. Probably my attitude was colored by the fact that I didn’t know whether I would be alive twenty-four hours from now, but either way I still longed for the day to end. You would have thought, given what I was heading into, that I would have wanted exactly the opposite, but what would have been the point? Even if I had the power to stop time, why be the moth frozen forever in flight, just half an inch from the flame? No, I had been haunted one way or another since that night when Stan had uncovered my secret. I had been haunted by Carrie Winn before I had any idea who she was. Yeah, maybe I would end up dead, but maybe I would end up free, and there seemed little reason to think I could be free by trying to avoid the inevitable.
