by Hiatt, Bill
“We had to keep you from full consciousness,” said Gwynn in a tone that came as close to being apologetic as he was ever likely to get. “If we had not, you might have tried to escape and hurt yourself or somebody else in the process.”
“Stan!” I said, suddenly remembered what had happened when Alcina first took control and feeling extra guilty about it. “I hit you! Shar, I drew on you! I’m…I’m so sorry.”
“Forget it, man,” said Shar. “You weren’t yourself—literally.”
“Yeah, and anyway it was a pretty sissy punch,” said Stan with a big grin. “I could have punched harder than that before I started working out.”
“Oh, well, I’ll be sure to hit harder the next time!” I said with a wink. “Nurse Florence, from what I remember, it must not have been easy to break the spell.”
“It wasn’t,” she agreed. “Alcina hit you with all the power she had, and you became so convinced you loved her that you fought any attempt we made. Even working at only partial capacity, your resistance made reversal more difficult. And then the standard way of breaking that kind of spell is by reminding the victim of the person he really does love. The problem we had was that your current love was for Carla, who wasn’t here and wasn’t going to be. So we…”
With mounting apprehension, I realized where this conversation was going, but surely Nurse Florence wasn’t going to start exploring my former love for Eva right in front of her and Dan.
“So we brought Eva. You used to care about her, you know, when you were twelve,” said Dan, looking profoundly uncomfortable.
“Yes, and then Gwynn and Nurse Florence put everybody’s willpower together—”
“And everybody’s feeling of friendship for you,” put in Carlos.
“Yes,” continued Eva a little nervously, “and they channeled it all through my kiss. Wow, I’ve never felt anything quite like that. It was like…” she left the thought unfinished.
Dan was still looking uncomfortable. He must have wondered how a crush he thought ended four years ago could have been powerful enough to break the spell, even with a lot of help. Well, that was one thing he was going to have to keep wondering about!
“We hoped that remembering not only what you used to feel for Eva, but what you felt for all of us, might be enough to break the spell,” said Nurse Florence just in time to keep the silence from becoming too awkward. “As it turns out, we were right.”
“I guess I’m just lucky I have friends like all of you,” I said, meaning every word. “Now, could somebody untie me?” They all laughed at that, since in the excitement it had kind of slipped their minds that I was tied up, even though they were standing right in front of me.
“I think before we do that, there is a certain faerie maiden who would like to pay you a visit,” said Gordy with a snicker.
“You should talk, faerie fu—” started Dan, who stopped at a glare from Eva.
“So it looks like everything is pretty much back to normal,” said Stan, who stepped over to help untie me.
“What passes for normal with us, anyway,” I observed, rubbing my wrist as soon as it was free. “How long have I been like this?”
“About two weeks,” said Shar as he reached over to reclaim Zom.
“Two weeks! What…how are we going to explain that to people?” I had visions of our secrets being revealed to the whole town.
“That’s just a little over a day back in Santa Brígida,” said Nurse Florence in her best calming voice. “And you know me better than to think I wouldn’t provide cover for all of you. I got word to Vanora, who concocted some elaborate story about a special opportunity for a few select students to spend 24 hours with a visiting Nobel laureate. The story was so full of holes I could have driven a bus through it, but you know how the adults of Santa Brígida are about Carrie Winn—she speaks, and they accept whatever she says, especially if she suggests that their children are as wonderful as they already know they are. When you come back, you’ll get a little applause and go back to your regular routines, with no one any the wiser.
“By the way, Tal, your security plan for Santa Brígida seems to have worked. As far as we can tell, Morgan didn’t attempt any kind of attack, even though we’ve been gone longer than we thought we would be. Vanora’s griping about having to keep that system going for so long, but once you get settled in at home, we can talk about what to do next.”
“Of course, now Morgan has what she wants,” I said ruefully.
“Maybe not,” cautioned Nurse Florence, “but we can worry about that later.”
Once untied, I discovered that my muscles were very stiff, but a little magic from Nurse Florence brought them much closer to normal. “You may need to do stretching exercises for the next few days, just to be sure,” she said, “but I used magic to keep any muscle atrophy from occurring, and after all, it’s not like you were out of commission for six months.” She frowned a little. “I did the same thing with Carla. If I hadn’t, Alcina wouldn’t have been able to make such an easy getaway; she would hardly have been able to move at all.”
“No one can blame you for that,” I said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”
By now Nurse Florence and I were alone in the room. I had thanked everybody, they had assured themselves that I really was OK, and now they were preparing to leave. It was a good thing we were alone, because at that moment I began to realize that something was wrong.
I had started to think about Carla. I worried about her, naturally. I still felt guilty about the mess she was in, and I still felt determined to rescue her from Alcina.
What I didn’t feel was any romantic love at all. There was a void in my heart where that love used to be, an aching hole that became more and more obvious to me. Nurse Florence could see my growing horror in my eyes.
“Tal, what’s wrong?” she asked, looking very concerned.
“What, what has happened to me?” I asked, much more shrilly than I intended. “I…I don’t feel anything for Carla anymore.”
“Tal, I was going to wait to tell you this until we got back to Santa Brígida, but…well, there is no easy way to say this. Your love for Carla was never real in the first place.”
“WHAT?” I didn’t mean to shout. Well, maybe I did. In about thirty seconds I had gone from being grateful to Nurse Florence for curing me to angry with her for somehow ripping a piece of my soul out in the process.
“Tal,” she said gently, “think back to Samhain. You told me yourself you could feel Carla broadcasting raw power, including mental images of the two of you, uh, having sex.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she was able to cast a spell on me. That’s ridiculous! She wouldn’t even have known how!”
“For shifting that kind of basic emotional response, she could maybe have done it instinctively. You’ve told me yourself how quickly you developed feelings for her.”
“But my mind is strong enough to block that kind of enchantment!” I protested. “You know that. Even with full power, Alcina couldn’t have taken me so easily unless I was completely drained. So how was an untrained caster like Carla able to do it? That just doesn’t make sense.”
Nurse Florence was trying hard to ignore my mounting anger. Her tone remained the same calm, rational tone she always used to deal with people who were not in full emotional control. “You were not exhausted then, but you were distracted…and on some level, I think you wanted it.”
“Are you crazy?” She tried to put her hand on my shoulder, but I brushed it away.
“You loved Eva, but you didn’t see any way you could ever be with her. Carla was attractive, and obviously, as you might say, ‘into you.’ You didn’t really love her, but you thought your life would be a lot easier if you did. How hard would your mind have fought against something you wanted to happen?”
The hell of it was, she was right. I couldn’t admit that yet, though, not even to myself. “If all of this is true, why didn’t you do something about it b
efore?”
“At first I wasn’t sure. After the battle on Samhain, all of us had magic residue all over us. I was suspicious of how fast your relationship with Carla progressed, but I also thought it might be partly guilt. As the days passed, and I could still feel foreign magic on you, I became more certain, but I made the mistake of thinking maybe you were better off that way. You were right; at least in the short term, your relationship with Eva couldn’t go anywhere. With Carla there was a chance, at least there was if we could cure her. If we hadn’t been able to, I would have told you the truth and let you choose what to do about it.”
“But you didn’t give me a choice! You knew this process would make me stop loving Carla, and you did it anyway!”
“You were hardly in a fit state to be asked, Tal. At that point, I doubt you would even have known who Carla was.”
I stared at her, the accusation plain in my eyes.
“Yes, Tal, I knew that if our plan worked, your love for Carla would fall in the same way your love for Alcina would. I lied to the others, Tal, to protect the friendship among you, Dan, and Eva. Even amplified, there’s no way a crush you had four years ago would have broken the spell. The spell broke because you have feelings for Eva now. Your artificial feelings for Carla masked your real ones for Eva, but they were still there. And thank God they were, or you might have been enthralled by Alcina forever.”
And that’s when I realized just how far in hell I really was. I had been so focused on losing my feelings for Carla that I hadn’t even thought about Eva, but Nurse Florence was right. When I did think about Eva, I thought immediately about making love to her, and not just because she was so beautiful that every straight guy who saw her wanted to do her. No, I could have handled a physical attraction. Damn, if not I would have taken that gorgeous faerie woman up on her offer. No, my feelings were not just physical. I wanted to make love with Eva because I loved her; I loved her every bit as intensely as I had loved her for the last four years. I loved her even knowing that the only way to be with her was to betray Dan, an idea that hadn’t been quite so terrible when he was hostile to me, but now that our friendship had been restored, now that we were comrades in arms? No, I could never do that. So where did that leave me? The girl I could have I didn’t love at all. The brand of the girl I could never have was seared into my heart, and until that wound healed, I didn’t see how I could ever love another.
I could go back to Carla if we ever found her and managed to restore her. I could pretend. I would have liked to think that at some point I could learn to love her, but my heart told me that would never happen. I could lie to myself, I could lie to her—hell, we could even get married in a few years. I might even make her happy, though I feared at some point she would realize the truth: to me our love had been a mirage, and I was stuck in a waterless desert, a wasteland, wandering alone even when I was with her, wandering alone forever.
I shouldn’t have taken my agony out on Nurse Florence; after all, she had saved me…again. But I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that she had done what she had to do. I yelled at her a little, and she let me. Then I stormed out of the room without another word. I found the guys in the courtyard…and Eva. I managed to get myself into a long conversation with Gwynn so I wouldn’t run the risk of talking to Eva. I doubted I could trust myself right now.
After a while, Nurse Florence appeared. It looked as if she might have been crying, but otherwise she had her professional facade clamped on very tightly. She thanked Gwynn for his hospitality, a gesture which started another round of thank-yous. While that ritual was going on, I sought out Khalid.
“Hey, buddy, I heard you offer to use your wish to save me at one point. That was a great thing to do.”
“But it didn’t do any good!” protested Khalid.
“You didn’t know that when you offered. My point is that you were willing to take your shot at happiness and give it to me.”
“Tal, I have never been happier than I am right now,” said Khalid, looking up into my eyes. I knew he was lying a little; I could still see the shadow of his father in those eyes. However, he wasn’t completely lying. We had taken him on a pretty amazing adventure, but we had also made him a part of our group. He might not be with his father, but at least he wasn’t alone anymore.
At about that point, I felt Nurse Florence open the portal, and one by one we passed back into the “real” world.
God! What I wouldn’t have given right then to just stay with Gwynn.
At least then I would not have had to look at Eva every day.
CHAPTER 12: SOUL-SEARCHING
Nurse Florence as always handled the logistics flawlessly. We came through the portal from Annwn in Awen, Carrie Winn’s mansion/castle. The downside of that was getting treated to Vanora’s long list of complaints about how the screw-up on our part of the operation was spreading her too thin. The upside was that we could all go home by limo, reinforcing the story about where we had been for the last twenty-four hours.
I would have liked to talk to Stan, but it was getting pretty close to dinner time, and our parents were expecting us home with tales of what we had gotten out of visiting with a Nobel laureate. He could tell I was upset and wanted to talk, and I knew that after two weeks I really needed to make sure the uneasy peace with David was still working out in his head.
“Stan, meet me after dinner!” I thought to him in the moments before we each got packed into a separate limo. He nodded, so I knew he understood.
Once I got home, my proud parents naturally drilled me about my prestigious meeting with a genius, not to mention how I got selected.
“Not that that’s much of a mystery,” said Dad with an uncharacteristically broad smile. “It’s clear that you have made quite an impression on Carrie Winn.”
If you only knew…
“Yeah, I guess she thinks pretty well of me.”
“Oh, and you’re so modest too,” added Mom, beaming.
The problem with visiting faerie realms was that going back home required a considerable adjustment. Colors always seemed a little flatter, for example, when compared with the dazzling brightness of Annwn. Whatever I thought of the architectural choices in Santa Brígida—and, let’s face it, I didn’t think much of them—I had to admit that I lived in a pretty nice house. Yet its Navajo white walls seemed dull when compared to the glowing silver of Gwynn’s castle. Even my mom’s pot roast, which I had always liked, was semi-tasteless when measured against the culinary delights of a faerie feast. I knew I would adjust in a few days, but right now I understood why so many mortals who had accidentally stumbled into a faerie realm spent the rest of their lives trying to get back there.
When Dad got a phone call and had to leave the table for a few minutes, Mom’s manner suddenly changed. She leaned over to me and spoke so quietly that she was almost whispering, “Tal, is something wrong?”
You mean besides the gaping hole where my love for Carla used to be? You mean besides the throbbing wound my love for Eva has caused to burst wide open again?
“No, Mom, nothing at all. I’m a little tired, but otherwise, just fine.”
Mom continued to look worried, however, despite my putting on the most reassuring manner I could.
“Tal, this is going to sound crazy, but I have been having the oddest feelings lately.”
I was ashamed to admit it, but I had actually forgotten about my mom’s newfound psychic powers for a few days. Well, out of the frying pan, into the nuclear reactor.
“What kind of feelings? Just tell me, Mom—I promise I won’t think you’re crazy.”
“Well, while you were gone, I had the oddest dream about you—strange women trying to kiss you, dragons, castles. And Carla was in the dream, too, and the school nurse, and lots of other people. I don’t think I have ever had such a complicated dream.”
Mom might not quite be the oracle at Delphi, but she had apparently had a relatively accurate dream out what I was doing in Annwn, and considering An
nwn was a different plane of existence, she had to be operating on a fairly high power level.
“It sounds like a very imaginative dream to me, but certainly nothing to worry about. Wasn’t it kind of fun?” I asked her.
“You’d think, but I’m not describing it very clearly. There was a feeling of danger. Many times I was frightened for your life. I woke up in a cold sweat, with my heart pounding. That’s never happened to me before, not even once.”
“Everyone has bad dreams, Mom. I’m still not seeing a problem.” By now it was getting hard for me to be as reassuring as I needed to be. I knew I couldn’t tell her what was really going on, but I couldn’t let her think she was going crazy, either. And in a town with two aware reincarnates (Stan and I), and maybe a third if we could get Carla pulled together (or even find her, for that matter), a half djinn, a lady of the lake, and a shape-shifter disguised as the town’s most prominent citizen, my mom was going to get constantly bombarded with psychic impressions that didn’t match what she knew, or at least thought she knew, about the world. How could anyone not go crazy in that kind of situation?
“I’m sure you’re right, dear, but still…what’s happening with you and Carla?”
“She’s in a coma, Mom. It’s the most stable relationship in town.”
“You don’t need to be sarcastic. Of course, I know she’s in a coma. I’ve visited her in the hospital. But…have your feelings changed? I’d understand if they have. It must be hard wanting to be in a relationship with someone who may never regain consciousness.”
“Mom, nothing has changed. I’ll tell you if it does, OK?”
“Is David coming over later?”
“Who’s David, Mom?”
Mom looked at me in obvious shock, then pulled herself together a little. “Oh, Tal, I meant Stan. I know his name is Stan. I’ve no idea why I just called him David.”
I do.
“It’s OK, Mom. I just think you’re worrying too much.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Tal,” she said, though clearly she was nothing of the kind.
