Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (10 page)

Then the thief became visible for a moment, evidently to try to threaten the dog with Zom. At the sight of the glowing blade, the dog did indeed back off, but it kept snarling at the kid, who looked frightened. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. I know, I know—looks can be deceiving, and the kid could be some kind of shifter who was using that form to play for my sympathies. But what if he really was just a kid? Well, clearly he wasn’t just a kid, but what if he was mentally and physically as young as he looked?

“Hey!” I yelled as I closed in. “Drop the sword!” I didn’t really expect him to follow that instruction, but at just that moment the dog lunged at him, at which point he fumbled and dropped the sword, which hit the street with a resounding clang. Preoccupied by another lunge from the dog, the kid didn’t immediately reach to pick up the sword, and by the time he thought of it, I had used White Hilt to surround the sword in flames. The dog retreated from the blaze, but I didn’t need to distract the kid anymore. After all, he couldn’t get to the sword, and now I could use magic to subdue him. Case closed!

Except that it wasn’t. Without even blinking, the kid thrust his hand into the fire and pulled out Zom, which dispelled the flames as soon as it touched them.

I gasped, but there was no smell of burned flesh, no sign of even the slightest blister on his hand.

Fast and fireproof? What other surprises did he have in store for me? I did not intend to find out.

By now I was almost upon him. He turned and tried to run again, but the combination of his ankle injury and his blood loss was finally slowing him down enough to make escape unrealistic. His facial expression betrayed the fact that he knew it as well…but it made him look all the more like the frightened kid that perhaps he was.

He became invisible again, seemingly a desperation play, since he obviously knew by now that I could still track him. Then I heard the whoosh of a sword swing and jumped out of the way just in time. So, the little scumbag was out for blood! I was awfully tempted to give him some—

Parrying blind was hard, but the kid’s lack of skill with the sword compensated. He was swinging wildly with a blade whose weight he was not used to.

“Give it up!” I yelled at him. “You’re more likely to hurt yourself than me!” My ears echoed with another clang as Zom and White Hilt collided again with an emerald flash. Every time I parried with White Hilt, part of its fire was extinguished by Zom’s anti-magic touch, but that touch didn’t break permanent spells, such as those embedded in White Hilt, so I knew the flames would return shortly. Their loss mattered little right now, since the kid was clearly immune to fire anyway.

I could hear running footsteps and knew without looking in that direction that the guys were running down the street toward us.

“You may as well just give me the sword now,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, though I was feeling less and less reasonable by the minutes. “My friends are here now. You can’t fight all of us.”

“I need the sword!” the kid yelled in high-pitched, heavily accented English. He sounded more out of breath than I was. The running did not seem to have been a problem, but the sword fighting was wearing him down fast.

“Why do you need it?” I asked, hoping that if I kept him talking, he would not try to run again.

“Please, please, just let me have it!” he said in a tone so plaintive it was almost heartbreaking. By now the guys had arrived, and, realizing I was fighting an invisible opponent, formed a wide circle around the general area where the kid had to be. I was pretty sure he was done now. If he had any more tricks, he would certainly have used them to get away before my reinforcements arrived.

Abruptly, the kid threw Zom up in the air, a move that caused it to become visible. He was trying to use the sword as a distraction, but we weren’t about to fall for that kind of rookie move. Shar grabbed the sword midair, while the rest of us threw ourselves in the general area we knew he had to be. He managed to jump sideways, but the move did him little good, since he landed on his bad ankle, and the jolt of pain caused him to become visible and then nearly fall. In seconds Dan, Gordy, and Carlos were all on top of him—literally.

“Careful, guys—he’s just a kid,” I said, and they eased up a little. After determining that all the fight had more or less been knocked out of him, they dragged him off the ground. Dan and Gordy held his arms, and both Carlos and Shar stood nearby, waiting to help if they needed to.

“What’s your name?” I asked him. I got no answer. He refused to even look up at me.

“Should we get the answer out of him?” asked Shar, who seemed to want me to say “yes.”

“He’s just a kid,” I repeated.

“Yeah, right,” said Dan. “A kid who can run at thirty miles per hour or so? What did you clock him at, Tal?”

“That sounds about right,” I replied, studying our captive, who continued to stare fixedly at the ground.

“Let’s not forget jumping the fence, turning invisible, and oh, yeah—being able to grab a sword he shouldn’t even have been able to see,” added Dan.

“He’s apparently also fireproof,” I noted absently, still looking carefully at him.

“Shifter of some kind, if you ask me. No little kid could do all that!” exclaimed Shar.

At that point our captive began sobbing loudly, his whole body shaking. If he was a shifter, he had the little-kid routine down pat.

Aside from being too large for him, his clothing was pretty worn out and certainly dirty, and though it was hard to tell his head down, I thought I had seen dirt on his face as well. Unless our “shifter” was also a master of disguise, I would say he was homeless.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized there were any homeless people in Santa Brígida. He could have just arrived from somewhere else, I supposed, but how did someone with the kind of power he obviously had end up homeless in the first place?

I tried probing his mind, but his defenses were strong, and I didn’t want to risk hurting him, so for the time being, I made peace with the idea that we were not going to have all the answers we needed.

“Let’s get him back to school,” I said after a minute. “Nurse Florence needs to see him. Maybe she’ll have some answers.”

As we walked, I called up a fog to hide us. There was something vaguely disturbing about the image of two big, athletic guys like Dan and Gordy dragging a crying little kid along between them, and I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I also figured that there would be a big mess at school, and I wanted to see if we could smuggle the kid in without his being seen. This was no ordinary thief we could just turn over to the police, nor ordinary little kid that we could hand over to social services.

By the time we got back, lunch was over—just as well, given the need for secrecy. We came through the hole in the fence I had made earlier. I took a minute to magically mend the break, hoping no one had noticed it. As we entered the building, I cast one of those don’t-notice-me spells around us so that we could get to Nurse Florence’s office. It was a good thing, too, because she wasn’t in her office.

“Nurse Florence, where are you?”
I asked mentally.

“Cafeteria!”
That figured. She was probably doing damage control there—and she didn’t sound at all happy about it.

Gordy looked at his watch. “We’re all late for practice,” he said grumpily, “and all because of this little jerk!” The kid, who had been quiet for a while, started sobbing again, more quietly than the first time, but Gordy looked even more unhappy as he tried to reconcile his desire to clobber the thief with his desire to protect the little kid. Shar in particular probably wouldn’t admit it, but I think we were all feeling sorry for this little guy.

“I’ll clear things up with our coaches,” I said quietly. “We need to go to the cafeteria for a while.”

We moved liked ghosts toward the cafeteria, unnoticed by the few students we passed on the way. When we got to the cafeteria, though, I reinforced the spell keeping us from being noticed. There were at least fifty students still in the cafeteria; two police officers, who were taking statements; Coach Miller, who seemed to be sending students over to talk to the police one at a time; Principal Simmons, who was watching the proceedings nervously; and Nurse Florence, who was “comforting” some of the students. I had no doubt that what she was really doing was re-arranging memories before they talked to the police. When she sensed our presence, she looked over and walked carefully in our direction, more as if she were stretching her legs than actually going anywhere specific. Once she reached us, I extended our protective spell to include her.

“What a mess!” she said in a vaguely reproving tone, looking at me. “I couldn’t just erase all memories of the ‘incident’ this time. Too many students involved and too little time, considering how fast Principal Simmons got here and how quickly she called the police. I had to settle for editing out the more colorful details, you know, like about high school students running around with swords, and you and someone else running incredibly fast. Coach Miller stuck around to do traffic control so that the police talked to the students only after I had a chance to make my adjustments. Still, I’m afraid their stories won’t all be consistent. Since I can’t read thoughts the way you can, all I can do is command the witnesses to forget certain things and hope that their minds execute that command in a reasonable way.” She looked at me irritably. “What were you thinking?”

“That I had to keep Zom from being stolen,” I said defensively.

Nurse Florence sighed. “Well, I can’t fault you for that. The sword is priceless, and the people who lent it to us would not be happy if it…who is that?” she asked with obvious concern. She had finally noticed our prisoner.

“The little thief who stole Zom,” replied Shar, as if that were the only identity the kid had.

Nurse Florence’s eyes widened a little. Like me, she had some difficulty visualizing the kid as a master criminal.

“You’d better take him to my office—and keep him there, until I get back.”

“Oh, don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere,” replied Shar emphatically.

We hurried back to Nurse Florence’s office, managing to slip in without being seen. Magic really did have its advantages. Unfortunately, magic couldn’t make the time pass any faster. (Actually, it probably could, but I didn’t want to risk complicating our situation any further.) Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity—or at least, like an algebra class—Nurse Florence returned, looking even more exhausted than usual.

“How did it go?” I asked, already knowing.

“Not particularly well, but at least the police didn’t leave with any suspicion that anything supernatural was happening, and I doubt any news teams are on their way over to cover the story. The police did, however, manage to put together a pretty accurate description of our ‘friend’ here. Who is he, by the way?”

“He won’t say,” answered Gordy sullenly. “He won’t say anything. He just cries every so often.”

“I do not!” snapped the kid, his voice cracking, his eyes fixed defiantly on Gordy. It was the first time he had spoken since we had captured him.

“Is it really necessary for both of you to hold him like that?” asked Nurse Florence. “I don’t think there is too much risk of his getting away from us now.”

“You might just be surprised,” Dan replied. “You’ve already heard he’s fast. He can jump really high as well—”

“And make himself invisible,” I added. “He’s also immune to fire, or at least very resistant to it. He might be able to do other things.”

“I think Dan and Gordy can let go of him anyway,” Nurse Florence replied. “There are six of us in here with him in this tiny office. He could be as fast as the wind…he’s still not going anywhere.” Reluctantly, Dan and Gordy released his arms. He stretched a little but made no move to take advantage of the situation.

“I’m going to take a look at your injuries now, if that’s all right,” said Nurse Florence in a professional way, though I could feel her maternal instincts kicking in. Probably she was trying to project a maternal image to the kid.

There was an awkward silence, but eventually the kid nodded yes, and Nurse Florence looked at his cut. She didn’t ask where his injuries were, so I figured that, even though the kid was resistant to mind probes, he wasn’t resistant to her body probes.

“This is deeper than I’d like, but you didn’t nick anything major. I’ll have the cut healed in no time.” The kid cringed away a little bit when she brought out her ointment, but something about her manner evidently reassured him, and he let her apply the greenish paste. (The ointment wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary, but it did make it easier for Nurse Florence to heal the wound.) Then she held her hand a couple of inches away from the wound, closed her eyes to concentrate for a couple of minutes, wiped off the excess ointment, and there was not even the slightest sign of an injury. The kid’s eyes widened with surprise, which told me that, as supernatural as he obviously was, he had never seen healing magic before. Perhaps he was the loner he appeared to be.

Then Nurse Florence turned her attention to his ankle.

“Are you sure you need to fix that?” said Shar, quite pointedly.

The kid looked momentarily frightened, and Nurse Florence glared at Shar. “Yes, we have to fix everything.” Then, turning back to the kid, she continued, “We aren’t going to hurt you. Shar is just upset, rightly so, that you tried to steal his sword. His life may depend on having it some day.” Nurse Florence began working on the ankle, continuing to speak in a casual tone as she did so. “Why did you try to steal the sword?” The kid looked down at the floor again and said nothing.