Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  “All right, David, you did the only thing you could have done, but don’t worry—we can break the spell on Stan. Let me just take a look at Dan and see how he’s doing.” David nodded, still serious, as he always seemed to be.

  The guys were watching Dan uneasily. The tricolored light still swirled around him, but it seemed to be getting fainter, as if the wish was exhausting what energy remained to it and would soon vanish completely, its work only partly done. A quick glance in Dan’s mind told me he was still in Alcina’s grip and would need to be restrained once he regained consciousness.

  Khalid was standing nearby, looking at me with big eyes, lips trembling just a little. Shar joined me at that point, and together we walked over to thank the kid for saving all of us. However, before we quite reached him, he started sobbing.

  “Khalid, what’s wrong?” asked Shar, putting his arm around Khalid. Khalid hung on to him as if letting go would mean his death, maybe both of their deaths.

  “I…I…used…my…wish,” he stammered between sobs.

  “We know that,” I said. “You saved at least some of us, maybe all of us tonight. We’re all more proud of you than we can say.”

  Khalid was still hugging Shar hard enough to crack his ribs, but his tear-filled eyes looked in my direction.

  “I…would…do…it again. I had to do it…but…now…now I’ll never be able to…be with my father again.”

  Crap! I should have seen that coming.

  “Khalid, I don’t know what kind of wish you were thinking about making,” said Shar in a gentle tone I had never heard him use before. “I do know one thing, though: if you want to be with your father, we will find a way to make it happen some day.”

  I almost tried to cut Shar off, knowing that Khalid’s father would probably never accept him and, in any case, was no fit parent for him as far as I was concerned. I just couldn’t bring myself to say that in front of a nearly shattered Khalid.

  Khalid was looking at Shar with something akin to wonder. “Promise?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes, Khalid, I promise!” replied Shar without hesitation. I cringed inwardly, but there was nothing I could do. Then I cringed again when I felt something very like a tynged snap into place around Shar. Neither Shar nor Khalid had the power to create a binding spell, yet somehow one had popped into being as a result of Shar’s promise.

  I jumped a little when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Turning around, I found myself once again face-to-face with Vanora.

  “Taliesin, we need to tie up loose ends here as soon as possible. Maintaining the pretense of normality is quite difficult enough as it is.” Vanora was clearly barely standing by this point, but it was still hard for me to deal with her officious tone in a situation like this.

  “What exactly are the loose ends in this situation?” I asked irritably.

  Vanora sighed. “I should think putting right Stan and Dan needs to be taken care of before we head home. We can’t very well just let them go about their normal routines when they are still controlled by Alcina, but we can’t exactly explain their sudden disappearances either.”

  As much as it irked me to admit it, she was right.

  “I can take care of Stan,” said David.

  “David, you could take care of Stan in combat, but you aren’t very good at pretending to be him, especially as…separated from him as you are now,” I pointed out. “I know this is hard for you to understand, but what we are, what you and Stan are, is not something we can reveal to everyone.”

  He looked at me, puzzled once again.

  “Do you remember what it was like after you had been anointed king, but Saul was still in possession of the office?”

  David nodded.

  “You had to keep who you were to yourself for years, right?”

  David nodded again.

  “Well, that’s what Stan has to do, for different reasons. That’s what we all have to do.”

  “I have learned some of that from Stan,” David conceded, “though I still don’t really understand it. I have learned to trust you, though. I will do whatever you ask of me.”

  “Your help is invaluable to Stan and me,” I said respectfully.

  “So what is our plan?” prompted Vanora.

  “As I recall, we need to remind the victims of this spell of their own true loves in order to break Alcina’s hold on them. For Dan that’s Eva O’Reilly. For Stan it’s…”

  Much to my surprise, I suddenly realized that I didn’t know who my best friend was in love with, or even if he was in love at all. Since becoming more popular, Stan had dated a few girls, cheerleaders mostly, but I didn’t think he loved any of them—he just liked actually being able to ask a pretty girl out and have her say yes. We weren’t going to break any spells with feelings like that.

  “If he isn’t in love right now, that could be a big problem,” said Nurse Florence, who had just walked over, presumably after making sure that Morgan and Alcina were not going to regain consciousness until we wanted them to.

  “I know. I could try to probe Stan’s mind, but it’s such a mess right now that I’m not sure I could tell if he actually loves someone or not.”

  “He loves Natalie Kim,” said David and Gordy, almost in unison. Well, David would know from the times his mind and Stan’s were linked, but it stung a little that Stan had shared that kind of information with Gordy but not with me—a clear sign I had been too preoccupied lately. I had once suspected he had feelings for her, but I’d never actually asked, I guess thinking he would tell me when he felt ready. Apparently Gordy had asked and found out.

  “All right, here is what we need to do,” I said, pushing my personal hurt aside for the moment. “Dan’s situation is easy. I’m not limited by the Annwn ban anymore.”

  I didn’t really want to take the time to explain, but Vanora and Nurse Florence both looked sufficiently surprised that I knew they were bound to question me. “Alcina kidnapped me to her island, which apparently is in a different otherworld than Annwn, so I can use Alcina’s world to travel to Eva’s house and back without ever having to pass through Annwn. I’ve been to Eva’s, so that’s not a problem. Like Eva, Natalie has been with us in Annwn and during the battle on Samhain, so she knows our secret. That part won’t be a problem. What will be a problem is that I doubt she knows Stan loves her. He hasn’t ever even asked her out as far as I know.”

  “I was working on that,” said Gordy.

  “Tal,” said Nurse Florence gently, “that’s going to be very awkward, but perhaps we can give her a different reason for her presence being essential to break the spell on Stan.”

  “Yes, and that’s exactly what I would do, but there’s another problem. I’ve never been to Natalie Kim’s, so I can’t open a portal that gets me there.”

  “That is a problem,” said Vanora. “Anyone here ever been to Natalie’s?”

  Judging by the head shakes, that was a unanimous no.

  “David, do you think you can act sick for a day or two?” I asked. “If Stan’s parents think he is sick, and you make a point of acting as if you are asleep or groggy most of the time, you won’t have to do anywhere near as much acting to pretend to be Stan, particularly at school, because Stan’s mom is bound to keep him home if he is sick.”

  “Yes, I’m sure I can behave like a sick person.”

  “We can induce a slight fever,” added Vanora. “Not enough to do any damage, obviously, but enough to make the idea of illness more credible.”

  “Good!” I said. “I’m sure we can get Natalie over to Stan’s house tomorrow afternoon after school, distract Stan’s mom somehow, and get the spell broken.”

  Shar cleared his throat awkwardly at that point, reminding me that I was still holding Zom.

  “I suppose you will be keeping that, now that you have discovered how much you can do with it,” he said. I could hear the reluctance in his voice when he continued. “I would understand if that was what happened.”

  “Sh
ar, this is your sword,” I said with a smile, handing it back, “and it knows it. I would not think of taking it away, though I might occasionally want to borrow it. Just in emergencies, of course!” Shar took Zom back, visibly relieved, and it seemed to glow more brightly now that it was back in the hands of its true wielder.

  Since I wasn’t sure of the geography of Alcina’s world, I flew a little way into the air before opening the portal. I didn’t want to end up in the ocean, potential prey to Alcina’s aquatic army, and the only land I had seen, her island, I had never actually been on, and so I might not be able to hit it precisely.

  While I was getting positioned and building power to open the portal, I couldn’t help feeling almost overcome by the night’s events. I had finally decided to kill another human being. Not having succeeded didn’t make me feel any better about it, even though I could still argue that it might have been necessary. The very fact that we had ultimately captured Morgan without having to kill her made that argument seem hollow.

  Then there was the terrible price my friends were paying because Morgan wanted something from me. Nurse Florence had nearly died tonight. My efforts to get Stan and David integrated back into one personality had suffered a major, perhaps irreversible, setback. Dan was a mess, Shar had nearly died from his wounds, and Khalid had given up the thing he wanted most in the whole world. The fact that what he wanted was never really going to happen didn’t matter. I didn’t even want to think about my increasingly psychic mother and what she might have gone through tonight.

  For the first time since I had managed to get my own past selves reintegrated into my personality four years ago, I realized what I really needed to do.

  I needed to find a way to forget my past lives, to lose the magic, to lose the combat skill, the musical abilities, everything.

  If I were no longer the reincarnated Taliesin, but just plain old Tal Weaver, the person I was meant to be, then my friends could go back to the lives they were meant to have. Maybe those lives would not always be what they wanted, maybe some of them would not be exceptional…but even ordinary had to be better than what they were going through now.

  CHAPTER 13: THE FUTURE CAN DIE, BUT NOT THE PAST

  Given how early in the morning it was, it was lucky I could be very precise with my portal. I had been in Eva’s bedroom before. (Get your mind out of the gutter—we were twelve, and we were just kissing!)

  I stepped through the portal very carefully so I wouldn’t make any noise. I couldn’t afford to have her parents wake up and find me lurking around.

  Judging by Eva’s slow and deep breathing, she was still sound asleep. Before I even looked at her, the situation hit me. Aside from a few short conversations and my effort to get Eva to reconcile with Dan a couple of months ago, this was the first time I had been alone with Eva since…oh my God, since we were twelve!

  She had come to visit me in the hospital a few times when everybody thought I was insane. Yeah, before I had gotten control of the past-life memories. I was always asleep or drugged into unconsciousness, though, and we never actually had a conversation. After I got out, I had expected Eva and me to get back together, but I had felt awkward about making the first move. She had seen me at my worst, and as much as I tried to play Mr. Self-Confident, I was embarrassed by the way she had seen me at my lowest point.

  I had wanted, desperately wanted, for her to approach me, for her to tell me everything was all right, that she loved me, that she would always love me. She never did any of those things. I finally got up my courage to go over to her house, but her parents had the unwelcome mat out for me, and I never even saw her. For all I knew, she wasn’t even home.

  After that I did about as well as a twelve-year-old could to move on, especially since Eva ended up with Dan pretty quickly. Dan became hostile around that time, for reasons I didn’t figure out until much later, and Eva continued to stay away from me at first, though eventually we became friends again. I fantasized about winning her back from Dan some day, but once Dan became first my ally and then my friend again, even that pale hope faded to black.

  No wonder I had been such easy prey for Carla’s unconscious love spell; no wonder my defenses had been so compromised when Alcina trapped me. After four years of unrequited love like a twisting knife in my guts, I wanted to love someone, wanted it badly. After I was freed from Alcina’s spell and discovered that my love for Carla was also nothing more than a spell, I did my best to stay away from Eva…until now.

  Well, I would have had to face her some time. I brushed the past away as if I were brushing cobwebs off my face and focused on recruiting Eva to save Dan. I reached gently into her mind without reading anything and prompted her to awaken quietly. I brought her out so smoothly that she half knew what I wanted before she was even fully conscious.

  “Tal, should we go right away?” she whispered.

  Damn! As usual, I could smell her jasmine perfume. Her strawberry-blond hair almost glowed in the moonlight, and her skin had the look of alabaster.

  No, let’s make love first.

  “Yeah, we’d better. The longer Dan is enchanted, the harder this is going to be.”

  Crazily, though, my thoughts about making love were not sarcastic. If she weren’t in love with Dan, and he with her, I would have rolled into bed with her without thinking twice about it, and Dan could bloody well wait for another hour…or two. How was I going to get through the rest of high school having to face Eva every day? In one respect Morgan was right after all—it would have been easier to just let Alcina take me.

  Given the fact that Samhain had made Eva and me comrades in arms, she got out of bed, quite unselfconscious about being in her satiny-looking nightgown that some guys at school would have given their left arm to see her in. Her reaction would have been quite different if she had been able to read my mind. I guess it was fortunate so few people really possessed that ability.

  She quickly threw on a fairly heavy looking green robe, I re-opened the portal, took her in my arms, and guided her through it. Contrary to what you might think, putting my arms around her was necessary, since we would probably be over water in Alcina’s realm, and I would need to fly straight up as soon as we reached that side of the portal.

  Just as I thought, I did have to fly up to avoid sinking into the ocean. I felt Eva’s soft warmth against me and longed to make that flight last forever—but the others were waiting, and we might have hard work ahead of us. I linked my mind to Goleta Beach again, opened up another portal, and sailed through it.

  I set Eva gently down on the grass near the pier and led her over to where Dan was still being held unconscious. By now the shimmering light of Khalid’s wish had faded completely.

  “Good! You’re here,” said Vanora. “We had more power at our command when we broke the same spell on Taliesin, but I think Alcina was not able to establish as effective a hold on Dan…because of the distance, and the fact that she wasn’t making eye contact.” The last part gave me the odd feeling that she was actually sparing me embarrassment for having been so completely and quickly controlled. She was being…almost human.

  Since I wasn’t really aware of the preparations they had done last time, Vanora and Nurse Florence organized everyone. Basically, Eva would kiss Dan to remind him of his true love. We three casters would blend her love with the friendship of everyone else, amplify it as much as possible, and hit Dan with it. An ordinary love spell wouldn’t require that much magic to beat, but Alcina’s specially crafted version was about the most powerful one around.

  We moved Dan from the dock to the grass so that we could form a ring around him, with Dan and Eva in the center. Vanora and Nurse Florence established the connections among all of our minds, we let our emotions flow, I sang to make our magic more potent, and then we channeled all that raw power into Eva. Without being told, she knew the moment had come for her kiss. She bent over, kissed Dan tenderly on the lips, and her love swept through him like a flash flood, washing away the stagnant
muck of Alcina’s evil and restoring Dan’s mind to normal.

  Dan sat up, looking totally embarrassed and stuttering apologies for what he had done under Alcina’s influence.

  “I’ve been there, Dan,” I said quickly, helping him to his feet. “You couldn’t have stopped what you were doing.”

  “I could have hurt someone, even killed someone,” Dan protested.

  “But you didn’t,” replied Carlos. “We’re all OK, and now you’re OK. Life is too short for guilt trips.”

  “That sounds like excellent advice,” said Nurse Florence.

  We heard rumbling, and, looking across the parking lot, we could see Vanora’s security force arriving on the scene. Well, better late than never.

  “Hey, it’s like four-thirty in the morning,” said Carlos. “Where are we going to say we were this time? A pajama party at Carrie Winn’s place?”

  “After Stan called me, I made sure your parents would sleep until morning,” replied Nurse Florence. “With any luck, they won’t even know you were gone.”

  “Good job!” I said. “Let me just make sure Dan is all right, and we can be on our way.” To my surprise, Dan stiffened, as if in fear of my getting into his mind.

  “Dan, you know I’m not going to go poking around unnecessarily. I just want to make sure there are no lingering traces of Alcina’s control.”

  “Wise precaution under the circumstances,” agreed Vanora.

  Dan seemed to relax a bit. “Of course, Tal, I guess you have to. Let’s make it quick, though.”

  I put my hand on his arm and let myself gently enter his mind. It took me a few minutes to be sure; this was not a job I could afford to rush. Finally, though, I convinced myself that there was no alien force left in his mind. Well, except…

  Except there was some kind of darkness, nowhere near the surface, and seemingly unconnected to Alcina’s magic. Nurse Florence had mentioned something similar before around the time of the boxing match. Dan had seemed unreasonable then, vengeful against Stan as a result of a little fling Eva had faked when she was angry with Dan. A stressful time, to be sure, but Dan hadn’t acted like himself at all. What was it Nurse Florence had said? Something simple, like “There is a darkness in him.” At the time she wasn’t sure if the darkness was a product of hostile magic or not, but she figured that at the very least an enemy could exploit it.