Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  My only hope was to prove Nurse Florence’s theory. Hell, if the memories were false, I would owe Dan the biggest apology in the world.

  Of course, if they were real memories, if he had actually stabbed me in the back, taken Eva away from me forever…

  Then what? Trap Jimmie here forever, in ever-increasing pain?

  “Jimmie, let’s go find Dan,” I said in such a matter-of-fact way that Nurse Florence seemed not to quite believe what she was hearing.

  “Tal, you really need to—” she started to say.

  “I know what I need to do,” I replied quickly. “While I’m doing it, can you make sure someone tracks down Natalie Kim and explains Stan’s situation to her? We’ll need her later to cure Stan. Oh, and call Vanora and let her know I’ll want to visit Alcina later tonight.”

  “What?” Nurse Florence was practically aghast.

  “I’ve figured out how to get Carla back in control of her own body. Neither Stan nor Carla is going to be completely healed right away, but with time, we’ll complete the process. I’m a man on a mission today, and I’m going to damn well get some things crossed off the to-do list!”

  Because then there will be time to find out the truth about Dan.

  I was already late for soccer practice by this time, but I had the feeling Dan wasn’t there anyway. I could have found him easily enough, but I decided to see what other tricks Jimmie might be able to do.

  “Jimmie, can you find Dan?”

  Jimmie gave me a smile that reminded me of his nine-year-old mischievousness, despite the greater maturity of his current face. “I can find either one of you, and I can find my parents too!” His brow wrinkled in concentration for only a moment. “Dan is at home.”

  As we walked down the hall, it did not take me long to realize that Jimmie was visible to everyone. I suppose from a girl’s perspective, he was a pretty hot-looking guy, but if that had not been enough to attract notice, his resemblance to Dan certainly would be.

  “Jimmie, why are you making yourself visible to everyone?” I muttered under my breath.

  “I didn’t realize I was visible to anyone but you and Nurse Florence.” Jimmie looked panicked.

  “Don’t worry! We’ll be out of here soon.”

  As we walked, I sent a quick mental message to Nurse Florence, asking her to excuse my absence—and Dan’s—with Coach Morton. Then I magicked a couple of teachers and a security guard who would have stopped us from leaving the school. Once out in the student parking lot, I got Jimmie into the Prius, and then I drove him to Dan’s on autopilot. The less I thought about things, the better.

  “Jimmie, are your parents home?”

  “No,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  “It’s better that way. I couldn’t explain you to them anyway. I can explain you to Dan.” Jimmie sighed but didn’t argue.

  Dan’s house was pretty much the same kind of Spanish-colonial-on-steroids monstrosity that I lived in, though, in an effort to avoid a tract-housing feel, no two of them had exactly the same floor plan. Still, pulling up out front gave me the eerie feeling that I was pulling up in front of my own house in some alternate universe.

  Not quite as weird, of course, as having a seven-years-dead friend in my passenger seat, but everything was relative.

  We moved quickly up the front path, and I knocked loudly on the front door. No answer.

  “You’re sure he’s here?”

  “Yeah,” said Jimmie, looking puzzled.

  “Dan, get your butt out here!” I thought loudly. He must have heard my knock and probably knew I was the one knocking. If I were him, maybe I wouldn’t have been exactly eager to run to the door either. Well, Dan might be a girlfriend-stealing scumbag, but he was no coward—I had seen proof of that often enough on the battlefield. He opened the door in about a minute, his face a deliberate blank.

  “Yeah?” he said suspiciously. I stepped aside to give him a good view of Jimmie. Because Jimmie looked so much older now than he had when he died, it took Dan a minute. He immediately saw the resemblance, of course, but it only gradually dawned on him that he was looking at his dead kid brother.

  “Jimmie?” Dan said, half-disbelieving. Then he grabbed him in a rib-crushing bear hug. “Tal, you…brought him back to life?”

  Oops! It hadn’t occurred to me that Dan would reach that conclusion, but I should have known, considering everything else he had seen.

  “Dan,” I replied softly. I wasn’t quite up to being gentle with him, but I suddenly did feel awful that he believed Jimmie was back to stay. “Dan, that is Jimmie, but he’s a ghost. Dan let go of Jimmie and stared at him again in disbelief.

  “He’s solid!” He protested. “I can feel him, Tal!”

  “He can assume the appearance and even the feel of a real body at times. Dan, we need to go inside.”

  Understanding how odd having someone who looked so much like him show up would look to the neighbors—and what they might say to his parents about it—Dan ushered us in and had us sit down in the large living room that’s general layout was the same as mine, though Dan’s parents clearly liked leather upholstery more than mine did. I explained the mechanics of Jimmie’s reappearance and then got straight to the point.

  “Jimmie’s a restless spirit now. He knows he should move on, but he can’t as long as we are in conflict. I have to forgive you for what you did four years ago, and we have to become friends again in order for Jimmie to find peace.”

  “Why can’t he just stay with us, now that he’s back? His physical body may not be real, but it looks real enough to pass. We could make up some story that you could magick my parents into believing. He’s some distant cousin, recently orphaned, or something like that. He certainly looks related to us, so that part wouldn’t take much selling.” Dan was talking faster as he went along, his nervous energy barely held in check. “I’m sure my parents would take him in. They miss Jimmie as much as I do, and even though they wouldn’t know he was Jimmie, it would still help them.”

  “Dan…” I started, not quite sure how to approach such a crazy idea. Actually, when I considered what we had all been through, I could see why Dan thought it might work. If the Sassanis could adopt a half djinn, why couldn’t his family adopt a ghost?

  “Dan, I want to stay,” Jimmie cut in. “I want it more than anything, but I know I can’t. I hurt sometimes, remembering the accident, and the pain is getting worse. Don’t ask me how I know it will keep getting worse until I can’t stand it; I just do.”

  Dan sat silently for a minute, his face twisted by conflicting emotions. He understood that Jimmie would have to go, but he didn’t want to understand. Fortunately, Jimmie stepped up and made him understand. Dan might not have accepted the truth if it was just coming from me. When he finally did accept it, he cried a little, though he tried to pretend he wasn’t. I understood he was probably just as emotionally raw as I was, though I didn’t want to sympathize with him. After all, he didn’t create Jimmie’s situation, but he did cause the end of our friendship and the breakup with Eva.

  After Dan had finally collected himself, he looked me straight in the eye. As he did that, I realized he really hadn’t been earlier. “Well, Tal, the ball is in your court. Can you forgive me?”

  “Yes,” I lied for Jimmie’s benefit. “I think I can.”

  “Dan, listen closely!” I knew he couldn’t respond to me, because he couldn’t broadcast his thoughts, but I just needed him to hear me. I had to deceive Jimmie, but it would be cruel to lie to Dan and then have him find out the truth later. Angry as I was with him, I didn’t want to play with his emotions like that. Then I would be no better than he was.

  “Dan, are you paying attention?” He nodded ever so slightly. “All right. The truth is, I don’t know if I can ever forgive you. I do know I can’t right now. But if we stay visibly at odds with each other, Jimmie will be trapped here until his pain becomes uncontrollable. For his sake, I’m willing to pretend if you are.”

 
; He nodded slightly again. He didn’t look happy, but whatever he had done to me and to Eva, I knew he wouldn’t consign Jimmie to hell.

  “You’ll take back your sword and be my warrior again. We’ll hang out. Publicly we’ll be close again. Even the other guys have to be convinced for this to work.”

  I wasn’t done, but Dan got off the couch and bear-hugged me, quite a bit harder than seemed to be necessary. “And after Jimmie leaves?” he whispered to me.

  I had thought a little bit about that contingency. Perhaps Jimmie would disappear right away, perhaps it would take a while, but inevitably it would happen—that was the whole point. And once it happened, I couldn’t blame Dan for wondering what his status would be.

  “I can’t guarantee I’ll ever forgive you, but I won’t ask you to leave to group. If we’re still not really friends, and we probably won’t be, that will just be between us. I’m sorry I didn’t handle the situation that way in the first place.”

  The odd part was that I really was sorry about that. Not so much for Dan—he had a little public humiliation coming after what he put me through—as for everyone else. Eva aside, since I would have had to tell her, by going public in the way I had, I made the guys, who liked both Dan and me, choose between us. I made Khalid feel like his new family was tearing itself apart. I was shocked, but I shouldn’t have let my anger get the best of me that way. All my efforts to not act impulsively had gone down the drain, because I still didn’t have the self-control. Well, I was going to develop some if I had to die trying.

  When Dan finally let go of me, after one last squeeze that felt genuine, he was doing his best to look happy. Hell, maybe he was happy. At least now he could have his position in the school hierarchy back. Knowing he could do something to help Jimmie probably also made him feel better. Hopefully not too much better, though—I wasn’t really ready to let him off the hook all that easily.

  We both looked at Jimmie, who was grinning broadly. “Are you really friends again?” he asked.

  “We still have some things to work out, but yes, we are.” Lucky I was such a good liar!

  “Yeah, we can work out our differences,” agreed Dan. His words sounded a little hollow, but thank God Jimmie didn’t pick up on that.

  “Wow, this is the happiest I have been in a long time!” He hugged Dan again, then me. “I can’t imagine anything better.” I, on the other hand, was still imagining Dan smeared with honey and tied to an anthill, so on the whole it was a good thing that Jimmie couldn’t read minds.

  Well, cross one of those items off the to-do list. I half expected a brilliant white light to burst into the room and Jimmie to wave good-bye as he walked into it, so the nothing that actually happened was kind of an anticlimax. Evidently Jimmie needed to see us being friends for a little while before he was truly ready to let this world go. What Jimmie needed, Jimmie was going to get, and after the experience of feigning friendship with Dan, I could easily become a professional actor.

  “We need to fix Stan this afternoon, and then I need to do something over at Awen. Dan, Jimmie, want to come with? We can pick up Dan’s sword on the way.” Dan looked a little surprised, but he played along, and Jimmie couldn’t have been happier. He sat in the back seat and chattered nonstop while Dan and I sat up front.

  Nurse Florence had Dan’s sword, and I wasn’t eager to go back to school, but I couldn’t think of a better visual image for Jimmie’s benefit than me presenting Dan with his blade again. I threw a little don’t-notice-us magic around, because I didn’t want to blow whatever excuse Nurse Florence had made to Coach Morton, and with that magical help, we managed to reach her office unseen. Since she had wanted me to forgive Dan anyway, she was almost ecstatic to see us together, but she was also a little concerned that Jimmie was still trailing along behind us.

  “I see Jimmie is still here,” she said—certainly a masterpiece of stating the obvious, but also a cue for me to explain to her what was going on.

  “Dan and I kind of faked a quick reconciliation for his benefit, but I think he needs to see us being friends for a while before he can say good-bye.” She nodded, and though I could tell she didn’t like the fact that the reconciliation was merely fake, she did not try to continue the conversation.

  “I’d like to return Dan’s sword to him,” I said. Nurse Florence nodded, went into her storage room for a minute, and returned with his familiar blade, which I made a big point of presenting to Dan as if he were receiving it for the first time. He seemed more comfortable with it hanging once again at his side, and Jimmie looked satisfied. So far, so good—our act was working.

  “Is Natalie Kim ready?” I asked.

  “Shar, Gordy, and Carlos will have her at Stan’s right after practice, and I’ll come along too, just to make sure we have enough magical oomph to break the spell on Stan.”

  “Good! Thanks for setting all that up. I’ll take care of Stan’s mom. I’m going to need to stay after the spell is broken to make sure I can get Stan back in charge of his body. Then I’d appreciate it if you could join me at Awen. I want to do the same for Carla.”

  “You mentioned that earlier,” said Nurse Florence with evident concern. “How exactly do you plan to do it? I’m sure Alcina is not going to cooperate.”

  “She will once she is irresistibly in love with me,” I said, wincing reflexively in anticipation of Nurse Florence’s impending tsunami of disapproval. I did not have long to wait.

  “Tal, that spell is dark magic. I thought you knew how risky that is, how…evil that is!”

  “It would be evil if I used it to make someone fall in love with me for my own purposes.” I shuddered for a moment, thinking of what I had almost done to Eva. “Surely the purpose for which the spell is used makes some difference?”

  Nurse Florence shook her head. “I know your motives are pure, Tal, but that kind of compulsion is inherently evil.”

  “Right now we have Alcina restrained,” I pointed out. “This is just a different form of restraint.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Dan. I really didn’t want to spend time bringing him up to speed, but I couldn’t very well tell him to shut up with Jimmie standing right there.

  “During the battle of Goleta Beach, I learned how to cast that super-powerful love spell Alcina uses. We know from the fact that Alcina cast the spell on Stan but somehow missed David that it can be directed at only one personality within a body, so I should be able to use it on Alcina without having it affect Carla.”

  Dan chuckled. “Carla has the hots for you anyway, as I recall.”

  Yeah, you bastard! It’s too bad my feelings for her were magically induced, or maybe I could actually end up with somebody to love, since you made any kind of relationship with Eva impossible for me.

  “Wouldn’t making Alcina fall in love with you make her less willing to relinquish control to Carla?” asked Nurse Florence.

  “You’d think, but trust me. From my days under that spell, I know. Absence from Alcina was painful, but I would have done anything she ordered. I would have moved to the other side of the universe if I thought it would make her happy. All I need to do is give the order once she is under the spell, and she will have to give up control of the body to Carla forever, no questions asked.”

  “So it might work out for Carla, but what about you?” asked Nurse Florence. “Tal, think of dark magic as if it were heroin. Shooting up for some reason to save someone else…Well, OK, I can’t think of any way that could ever save someone else, but just imagine it could for the sake of argument. You shoot up to save someone else, but the fact that you are saving someone else doesn’t make it anything other than what it is: heroin. It is still addictive; it still damages your body. The reason for shooting up, even if it is noble, cannot change that.

  “The same is true of dark magic. You can begin with the best motives in the world; they won’t matter in the end. The more you use it, the more you will want to use it. Oh, you will find ways to justify that use to
yourself. You may not even realize what you are doing, or, if you do, you still won’t be able to stop yourself.”

  “Has anyone ever attempted what I’m talking about doing?” I asked.

  “No, but—”

  “Then you don’t actually know whether this type of usage will have any bad effects at all.”

  “I told you!” said Nurse Florence in her firmest tone. “Dark magic is inherently evil, inherently corrupting. I will not allow you to sacrifice yourself in this way. Besides, forgetting about your own soul, we need you…and we need you intact, not horribly compromised.”

  “Need me for what, exactly?” I could feel anger creeping into my tone and tried to keep it out. “Ceridwen is already gone. Morgan is imprisoned and will be turned over to the faeries soon. Once Stan is healed, once Carla is healed, what do you need me for?”

  Nurse Florence was about to about to answer, but Jimmie beat her to the punch. “Tal, you’re a hero. I’ve seen you in action. Doesn’t the world always need heroes?” I glanced in Jimmie’s direction and almost felt like bursting into tears.

  God, Jimmie, if I had only been there right before the accident, with the power I have now! Then I could have saved you.

  “Let’s ask Vanora before we make a final decision,” I said slowly. “If I am going to throw away what may be the only way to save Carla, then at least let me be sure that is the right course of action.”

  “Of course we can talk to Vanora. I’ll make arrangements, and we can go over right after we finish with Stan.”

  “I need to make a quick stop at home first. I need to tell my mother the truth.” Hell, might as well get another lecture about why I shouldn’t do what I needed to do.

  “The leaders of Annwn aren’t going to like that,” began Nurse Florence cautiously.

  “I don’t care!” I replied firmly.

  “Please let me finish. I was about to say that you probably need to tell her, given her psychic nature. I can make a good case that she will figure out what is happening eventually, whether you tell her or not. I’ll square things with Gwynn and the others as soon as I get the chance.”