Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (7 page)

“It was indeed. Morgan isn’t the only one who can psych out an opponent.”

“Morgan could hear us?” asked Gordy suspiciously, looking around the room as if he expected to see Morgan looking down at us from the ceiling.

“Yup. She was hearing us through Gianni, but Nurse Florence has broken that connection. Morgan may be suspicious, but she won’t entirely discount the conversation she just heard. At the very least, she will contact me again, I’m guessing at some point when the rest of you aren’t around, and I’ll find out what I can about her intentions.”

“That’s clever,” said Stan, who still clearly had something else on his mind. “But she’s never going to tell you how to counter the awakening spell without binding you with a
tynged
that requires you to help her.”

I shrugged. “Well, I won’t need her help with the spell after all.” I could have just explained, but, perhaps because of how worn-out I was, I couldn’t resist being a little theatrical. I raised my left hand and made it glow with sickly red energy.

Nurse Florence’s calm professionalism came close to cracking completely at that. “Tal, that kind of magic can corrupt the user. Stop at once!” I did, expecting another tongue-lashing, but when I looked somewhat sheepishly in Nurse Florence’s direction, she was staring at me with wonder.

“It was amazing enough that you adapted your magic to work with technology, and you did it in just a few days before Samhain. But learning a spell that complex, just by seeing it once? That should be impossible. How did you do it?” she asked.

“Two spells, actually,” I said, trying not to sound as if I was bragging—which I totally was. “Naturally I can do the reversal spell too. As for explaining how I learned them, well, I just…entered each spell, the way druids have entered the forces of nature for millenniums, the way you enter the body of someone you want to heal, the way I can enter a piece of technology. If I can adjust my mind enough to become one with a spell, I can
feel
the magic rather than just seeing; I can feel how it would be to cast it.”

“I understand in theory,” Nurse Florence replied slowly, “but to do it so fast? Sorcerers spend months, even years learning their magic.”

I shrugged again. “When Gwion Bach accidentally drank the potion from the cauldron of knowledge, he learned a great deal of complex magic almost instantly. That potion must have changed him on a very deep level. Then, as you’ll recall, the witch Ceridwen managed to swallow him during a shape-shifting contest, and he ended up being reborn as the original Taliesin, another fundamental change. You know I have the skills of all my previous lives. I must also have whatever fundamental change in nature happened to Gwion Bach and to the original Taliesin—who, by the way, did have some training, but more as a way of concealing the true extent of his ‘difference’ and throwing off his enemies than as a way of actually learning his magic, which he knew he could learn much more quickly.”

“How long have you known? Did you get the idea from Taliesin’s memories?” Nurse Florence knew we had other pressing matters to attend to, but she let her thirst for knowledge get the better of her anyway.

“I got a suspicion from Taliesin’s memories, but as far as I can remember, he never actually tried to learn a spell the way I just did. Of course, for most of the time he was at Camelot, Merlin typically took care of any casting that needed to be done, so there wasn’t as much pressure on Taliesin as there has been on me.”

Nurse Florence was clearly still amazed, but she quickly switched back into professional mode and threw me off balance. “It’s a good thing you insulated the room against eavesdropping. Tal, there are already some pretty powerful people in Annwn who are nervous about you. If anyone outside of our group realized that you could learn new spells just by having them cast in your presence, it would make your critics even more nervous.”

“Critics? I solved a big problem for them when I stopped Ceridwen. Why should I have any critics in the first place?”

Suddenly, Nurse Florence was all about getting back on schedule. “That’s an important conversation…for another time. I have kept us from being noticed by the hospital staff only with great difficulty. I’m tired, I can feel the spells thinning, and you and the guys need to get back home soon…to say nothing of Gianni.” She looked critically around the room. “They need cleaning up first, and Stan’s ripped out of his shirt again.”

Stan had been trying to wear more loose-fitting clothing for those occasions when he wielded his sword and increased his muscle mass, but occasionally he forgot, as with tonight’s shirt, which was hanging down his chest in shreds.

In the old days, when we had been trying to conceal the connections among us from Ceridwen, Nurse Florence had to buy the guys replacement clothing, and we had just tossed the bloody stuff, but now that pretty much any spell caster or other supernatural being around knew who my warriors were, Nurse Florence no longer bothered to minimize the magical residue on them. Instead, she used a spell to draw the blood from their clothing. She couldn’t knit synthetic fabrics back together, but I had learned how to do that (with a lot of help from Stan, who could always visualize the underlying science better than I), so I took care of that kind of repair work, and in just a few minutes, everyone was looking more or less normal.

After that it was a simple matter to re-sheathe White Hilt; pick up Gianni, still sound asleep; get out of the hospital; remove all of the don’t-notice-me” kind of magic; and arrange transportation.

“It probably isn’t safe to go through Annwn to get back to Santa
Brígida,” I observed, then realized I was probably just stating the excruciatingly obvious. “The Prius only seats four.”

Nurse Florence already had her cell phone out. “I could get home by water, but that might be…disconcerting for any passengers, so I’ll call a cab for Shar, Gordy, Carlos, and me. You take Stan, Dan, and Gianni.” I must have looked worried, because she added, “First, though, I’ll call Vanora, and she’ll make some security arrangements, both magical and otherwise, for the hospital. Morgan is not getting in again, no matter what.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to make sure my sincere gratitude showed, despite my fatigue. “You always handle the logistics so well.”

I checked my phone and realized I had three missed calls from Mrs. Rinaldi, so I called back to reassure her that Gianni was indeed on the way. Then I hit the lock button on my Prius remote to see which car in the parking lot beeped—from a distance one gunmetal Prius looked pretty much like another, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of them around these days. Having finally found mine, I got my passengers loaded and took off as fast as I safely could. (I didn’t particularly want the supreme irony of having us all survive a potentially fatal encounter with Morgan Le Fay, only to get us all killed on the freeway.)

Fortunately, we made the short trip home without incident. I dropped off Gianni first, got my obligatory hug from Mrs. Rinaldi, which Stan and Dan both kidded me about, excused myself from staying for what was now a very late dinner, dropped off Dan, and then headed for Stan’s place, which was only about three doors from mine.

“Tal, can I ask you something?” Stan asked.

I had a weird moment of déjà vu. Those were exactly the words Stan used before he knew about my unusual “situation,” when he first asked me about some of the discrepancies in my life. I shook the feeling off. That time I had been caught by surprise. This time I knew exactly what Stan was going to ask. He was going to start a conversation about why he wanted his awakening spell reversed—at least, that’s what I hoped he was going to ask about.

“Ask away,” I replied. I didn’t really want to start what could be a complicated conversation after the day I had just been through, but if something was bugging Stan, I definitely wanted to know about it.

“Tal, I…what the heck?” He sounded so alarmed that I braked and then glanced in his direction.

The shirt that I had mended was hanging in tatters again.

We were only about two minutes from his house at this point, and there was always the possibility that someone could already have seen us, so I didn’t want to spend longer mending the shirt again than I had to.

“Sorry, Stan. I must be more tired than I thought. I’ll fix you right up again…unless you want to tell your mom one of your lady friends tried to rip it off of you.”

Stan looked surprisingly worried, and his cheeks reddened. “Tal, she’d ground me until I’m fifty-five. I can’t…”

“Relax, dude,” I said with a chuckle. “I was just kidding! Here, let me fix that for you.” I leaned over, humming a little bit to heighten the spell, and pulled the surprisingly stubborn threads back again.

“You need to start wearing more cotton, Stan. These synthetics are giving me more of a headache than usual.”

We both breathed a sigh of relief when the job was finally done. “I’m sorry that took so long. I guess I really am tired.”

“I guess you’re rusty. What’s it been, a month since you saved the world? You need to work out more, I guess,” replied Stan with a grin.

I chuckled again, but more so Stan wouldn’t worry than because I really thought the situation was funny. I had thought—hell, we had all thought—that defeating Ceridwen meant we wouldn’t have to constantly watch our backs. We knew Morgan had survived on Samhain, but with Ceridwen gone, we assumed that she would have no further reason to hang out in Santa
Brígida. Now we knew she had been here the whole time, spying on me and looking for her long-lost sister. At the very least, now we all had to be extremely careful. Hopefully, Morgan now believed that I was going to cooperate with her, but one careless word from any of us could reveal the truth—with bloody consequences.

I let Stan off, drove to my house, got the car in the garage, and had a very late dinner with my parents. Visiting Carla was still a built-in excuse. Neither one of them ever questioned me, pretty much no matter when I came in. I could tell that Mom in particular still worried about me, but I had gotten to be a very good actor in a very short time, and both of them were convinced I would get over my grief eventually.

I had to admit that this particular night the acting was more of a chore than usual, both because I was worried about Morgan and because I suddenly had at least a glimmer of hope that I might finally be able to bring Carla out of her coma. I would have loved to share that news with them, but I would have been hard-pressed to explain, since they knew nothing about my…unusual nature.

At some point in the last your years, I probably should have told them, but after I finally got out of the hospital after my “unexplained breakdown” (for which read, “the awakening of the memories of all my previous lives,”) I had a hard enough time convincing them that I was normal again, without trying to convince them I was normal despite believing I was a reincarnation of the original Taliesin. “Yeah, Dad, I can do magic, but I’m not crazy…really, I’m not.” Doesn’t sound like the world’s best strategy, does it?

I don’t want you thinking either one of them was stupid. Actually, they were both pretty sharp. What can I say? A little strategically planned sleep here, a little memory erasure there, a bit of illusion somewhere else, and I could keep them from noticing anything unusual. I didn’t like doing that kind of thing, but in the last four years that pattern had become so automatic I didn’t really think about it most of the time; I did it almost reflexively.

In my defense I couldn’t tell them when they were worried about my sanity, and I had since gotten the hint (from the rulers of Annwn, delivered through Nurse Florence) that I must not tell anybody else about myself. In other words, I couldn’t really tell them now, even if I wanted to. For better or worse, I had to settle for a well-crafted lie that at least kept them happy and out of harm’s way—I hoped. I couldn’t restrain a slight shudder, thinking about how much danger they would be in if Morgan figured out I was trying to play her.

“Tal, are you cold?” asked Mom in a concerned tone. “You’re shivering.”

“No, I’m fine, Mom,” I said, making a mental note to be extra careful for a while. Maybe it was just maternal instinct, but she really did have an uncanny way of sensing when something was wrong. She had seemed to sense danger if I went to Carrie Winn’s Halloween party, where I could very well have died, and now…”

I looked at her casually, trying to conceal the fact that I was studying her. She definitely looked better rested than she had in the bad old days of October, and really most of the past four years. She almost looked younger. Her brown hair was still liberally sprinkled with gray, but the absence of the perpetually worried expression helped smooth out some of those wrinkles, and she definitely looked less saggy. However, her blue eyes still betrayed a slight concern as she looked back at me across the table.

I tried to avoid reading people’s minds unless in cases of emergency, and I did not break that rule this time, but there was something different about Mom, something I couldn’t quite figure out. Then the truth hit me, and I jumped slightly despite myself.

I could feel psychic energy coming from her.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t much, a mere whisper compared to the shout that my power could create. Still, it was more than the average person would broadcast, and it could pose problems later because it would make her at least marginally more resistant to my mental manipulations.