Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (3 page)

Well, no point fussing about how fast my allies could get here. I needed to focus entirely on countering Morgan’s arcane attack. In the short time it had taken me to reach Nurse Florence, the wind had intensified until its howl was like that of a rabid wolf, the rain was practically knocking me off my feet, and my sword was radiating more steam than fire. Just in time, I willed the flames to become stronger, to burn back the rain, to envelope me in a flaming shield. I had to concentrate so hard I was shaking, but for the moment I was protected—unless of course someone tried to walk out the front door of the hospital, in which case I would have another problem.

The powers that be in Annwn were none too pleased that so many people already knew my secret. Nurse Florence they accepted as practically one of their own, and they could have swallowed my “warriors.” It was the fact that I wouldn’t wipe the memories of the other students who had been with us in the final battle during Samhain that really irked them. The leadership in Annwn was all about keeping humans from learning too much. So, yeah, if anyone saw the display I was currently putting on, I would have to wipe that person’s memory of it—but I would have to keep him or her out of Morgan’s way first. Too many complications.

I knew it was risky trying to “multi-task” with magic, but I did manage to jam the door behind me, and the sudden temperature drop created by Morgan’s storm made it easy for me to frost the nearby windows. The manner in which the entry way of the hospital projected out from the rest of the building would block the view of what I was doing from a lot of those windows, but I wanted to be as careful as I could be.

Even that slight change of focus thinned my fire shield a bit, and as the rain’s fury increased, it brought the shield near to collapse. It took every bit of concentration I had to stabilize the situation. I started singing softly in Welsh to amplify my power as much as possible. Even so, I knew I could not hold out indefinitely. I had to hope that the cavalry would arrive—soon.

It also worried me that, with this storm raging, Morgan could very easily slip in through some other point of entry while I was blocking the front door. I thought about trying to locate her in the fog, but I guessed she would be masking her presence as much as she could, forcing me to give more of my focus to finding her than I dared right now. I had to depend on her desire to kill me, or at least render me helpless, to keep her outside as long as I was still breathing and conscious.

The lightning flash almost made me jump, and the thunder was loud enough to rattle some of the nearby hospital windows. That lightning was powerful, and it was close. My fire shield might protect me from the rain, but it probably wouldn’t stop the lightning, though I was having a hard time thinking through the science involved. The hiss of steam as the rain hit the fire sounded almost deafening now, but even it wasn’t enough to drown out the reverberations of the thunder.

Between the racket and my need to concentrate on maintaining the fire shield, I spared a second to wonder what had happened to Gianni. Even inside the hospital such a sudden and intense storm must have been quite noticeable; probably one of the nurses had spotted him and was now keeping him from coming outside to look for me, but he had to be getting awfully worried by now, and I wasn’t sure whether my command to go inside would
keep
him inside—I was working too fast at the time to consider all the contingencies. Well, I didn’t want to think too much about that; at least he was safe inside right now, and I was pretty sure someone would keep him inside. That was the most I could hope for at the moment.

I was beginning to feel tired. No, not just tired—more like exhausted. Morgan was hitting me with everything she had, though I did wonder why the lightning, which must be striking nearby, wasn’t actually hitting me. I wasn’t really trying to deflect it, because doing that would take too much power away from the fire shield, but perhaps countering the lightning was more important. If I concentrated on the lightning, I knew I could keep it from striking really close—I had seen that kind of magical defense before. However, if the fire shield collapsed, as it very likely would, the rain would beat down on me so mercilessly that, at the very least, my concentration would shatter. In this kind of situation, logic suggested retreating inside the building, especially since Morgan believed her sister was inside and couldn’t exactly level the place. She could, however, follow me in, and I wanted to keep our fight outside if I possibly could.

“Taliesin, let me in!”

I jumped at the sound of the voice coming from right next to me. It was not the voice I wanted to hear, but it was at least someone who would help. I parted the flames on my left just long enough for Vanora to jump through.

Yeah, that’s right—the same person I held responsible for Carla’s condition. Not only that, but she was still disguised as Carrie Winn, the identity Ceridwen had assumed while she was stalking me. Carrie Winn was too prominent a citizen to just disappear, so Vanora had shifted into Winn’s form long enough to keep us all from getting entangled in a police investigation and to tie up other loose ends. Intellectually I understood the need for such a deception. Emotionally, it was hard for me to look at someone who had been willing to condemn me to eternal suffering, no matter how often I told myself that the person really was dead, and what I was seeing was merely an illusion. It was a damn convincing illusion though. I guess it would have to be to serve its purpose. Still…

Vanora knew I didn’t like her, in the shape of Carrie Winn or in her natural form, but she was too business-like to acknowledge my surly glance in her direction.

“Viviane’s gathering the others. She asked me to help you hold out until they got here.”

I had to hand it to her for being cool in a crisis. Without skipping a beat, she started casting a spell to keep the lightning from hitting us. I had seen her do the same thing on Samhain, and it had worked. Between the two of us, we could certainly hold Morgan until the others arrived.

The situation didn’t make me like Vanora any better—but I had to admit, however grudgingly, that she was a worthy adversary for Morgan.

Of course, Morgan would quickly sense that she now had more than one opponent, but I doubted she could up her game enough to destroy both of us. At least, I hoped not. There was perhaps more danger of her trying to outflank us and get into the building, but Morgan was not the type to leave two enemies at large in such close proximity to her. Or was that just more wishful thinking on my part?

“Taliesin, let me in!”

This time I froze rather than jumping. I had expected the others to show up soon, so hearing someone else asking to be let inside the fire shield should not have caused my heart to skip a beat. The problem was that the voice outside was Vanora’s, just as it had been a couple of minutes before.

I already knew Morgan was a shape-shifter, so I shouldn’t really have been surprised. The problem was, who was the fake Vanora—the woman standing next to me, or the woman outside? If I guessed wrong, things could get really nasty really quickly…

The Vanora already inside with me, however, had known who else was coming, something Morgan, who couldn’t read minds, probably wouldn’t know. On the other hand, now that I thought about it, Morgan’s faerie ancestry gave her advantages beyond the speed I had seen earlier. For one thing, her vision was much better than the human norm. The darkness would not have been much of a problem for her, and as the sorceress who had conjured the fog and storm, she should have been able to see through them pretty easily as well, even though I couldn’t. Logically, she should have been able to see Vanora arrive. But in that case, why shift into the image of Vanora? She could have fooled me much more easily by becoming Nurse Florence, whom I would have let in without question. She had to know I would not just passively accept two Vanoras. Why was my life always so complicated?

“That has to be Morgan,” observed the Vanora standing next to me, her eyes narrowed in concentration, most of her attention focused on keeping the lightning from hitting us. “Perhaps you should give her a…warm welcome.”

I tried to gently probe them both, but typically I didn’t have much luck getting into the minds of powerful spell casters, and so I couldn’t read much more than their power. Casters such as they consciously or unconsciously created shields to protect their minds from the wide variety of mental attacks an opponent might hurl at them. The ancient Celts hadn’t visualized reading minds in the way that I had trained myself to do, but the kind of mental shielding Morgan and Vanora had kept me out pretty effectively anyway. By now maintaining such shields had become almost second-nature to them, so maintaining that defense did not require much effort on their parts unless I attacked their shielding—something I didn’t dare do until I knew who was who.

I caused the flames to blaze up on the side from which I had heard the other Vanora’s voice come—but slowly enough to give her a chance to dodge out of the way, which she did.

“Taliesin,” said the second Vanora, in what was, at the very least, a good imitation of her real Vanora’s indignant tone, “what are you doing?”

“Demonstrating I’m not that easily fooled, Morgan,” I replied, putting a lot of emphasis on that name. “The real Vanora is already here.”

“No, she isn’t,” insisted the second Vanora loudly. “You must have Morgan inside with you.”

Well, she must have been right, because at that moment I felt a very sharp, very cold dagger thrust into my right arm.

CHAPTER 2: REINFORCEMENTS

I had good enough reflexes to pull away from Morgan’s dagger before she had the chance to thrust it in very far, but I realized at once it was not the blade I had to fear, but whatever Morgan had coated it with. From my life as the first Taliesin, I well remembered just how much skill Morgan had with every substance from herbal remedies to poisons. I could see something gleaming darkly on the dagger, even beneath my blood. It almost seemed to squirm across the blade, as if Morgan had heightened its poisonous nature with some powerful spell.

In seconds my sword felt as if it had been embedded in about half a ton of lead. I managed to shift it to my left hand, but I could feel the poison flowing chillingly in my veins; it would not be long before my left arm also began to succumb.

Keeping my blade between me and Morgan, I took an unsteady step backward and made a quick opening in the fire shield for the real Vanora to step through—except that there was no one there. Morgan, already shifted back into her normal form, laughed heartily at my obvious confusion.

“You aren’t the only one who can find new uses for magic,” said Morgan, smiling brightly at me as if we were best buds. “I was doing more or less the magic equivalent of throwing my voice. You were hearing me and even sensing me outside, but really I was inside with you the whole time.”

It now seemed I had no alternative to killing Morgan if I wanted to protect Carla and Gianni. The problem was that my mind was becoming just as sluggish as my body. I knew I could theoretically shoot fire from my sword in a concentrated burst and scorch her right where she stood, but using both “fire shield mode” and “laser blast” mode at the same time was a little tricky to do under ideal conditions, let alone now, with my brain quickly losing its focus. Nor could my faltering brain figure out how to drop the fire shield quickly enough to blast Morgan before she could dodge away. I dimly realized that the storm raging around us was shredding the fire shield anyway, but I couldn’t get myself to concentrate on countering that damage either. Icy rain was splattering my face now, but I could barely feel it. The same rain hit the sword and raised another steam cloud, but I just stared at it. I could see the sword was sputtering and would soon go out, yet I did nothing.

Suddenly my willpower was melting faster than ice in the Sahara. I also knew I should try to counter the poison, but I could not seem to summon any energy to do that either. My sword slid from my nerveless fingers and clattered on the hospital steps. The flames gave up their futile struggle against the rain as soon as I was no longer wielding the sword, and the pathetic remnant of my fire shield fizzled out. I knew that my life, too, would soon be fizzling out.

The rain and wind hit me hard enough to push me to my knees. In what seemed an instant in my half-dead state, but might have been a little longer, Morgan was standing right above me, looking down and smiling her death-promising smile. The storm eased, but not the fog, which engulfed us and made it hard for me to see even Morgan—unless the poison was now blurring my vision.

“My little cherub, you have dropped your sword,” she said in mock-sorrow, picking up White Hilt. It would not flame for her, but she was taking no chances that I might somehow manage to grab it long enough to launch one last fire attack.

I knew she could not read minds as I could, but she could read my fear in my eyes well enough.

“Taliesin, do you really think I mean to kill you? Had that been all I wanted, I could just as easily have struck you with the lightning several minutes ago. You know that as well as I do.” I did know that much, even though my thoughts were moving as swiftly as stone. For that matter, Morgan could have plunged her trusty dagger through my heart right then and finished the job. I could not have lifted a finger to stop her.

Then, even stranger than Morgan not killing me, she caught me as I nearly fell forward on my face and laid me out, with what felt like gentleness, face-up on the steps. The steps beneath me were cold and wet, but it was better to lie face-up than face-down.