by Bill Hiatt
I hated to admit it, but it seemed likely whoever was after us was even darker than Dark Me. Turning to Lucas, I said, “Let’s try it.”
Lucas let Dark Me up with clear reluctance. Dark Me retrieved the lyre and immediately starting playing something so intense even I could feel the air around us vibrating.
Only Tal actually looked happy, I guess because for the first time he had an actual job, helping us guard Dark Me. Given that Dark Me’s magic couldn’t affect him without being constantly renewed, and the fact that Dark Me couldn’t risk hurting him, anyway, Tal actually made a decent choice for the job.
With a jolt I realized I’d been an idiot. I should have insisted Dark Me wake everyone else up first. Well, maybe everyone except Alex. Since we didn’t yet know who was in control of his body, he was too much of a wild card. Keeping everyone else asleep, though, reduced the odds against Dark Me if he decided to try something.
There was no use worrying about that now. I was afraid to interrupt Dark Me’s single-minded focus on whatever magic he was crafting.
“How is it going?” I asked Khalid and Lucas, both of whom had at least some chance of knowing.
“Dark Me has whipped up a lot of power,” said Khalid, “but he hasn’t been able to break the spell. I think maybe someone keeps reinforcing it.”
“If what I’ve heard about the lyre is true, that must be some kind of reinforcement,” said Lucas. “I, too, can feel Dark Me’s power. It’s stronger than anything I’ve ever felt.”
That seemed to be the theme of the day: fighting against an unknown foe who had greater resources than we did, and not making any headway.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take much more suspense, Khalid and Lucas both gasped, and Dark Me announced, “The blockage is removed, but I don’t know for how long. We have to move now!”
He wiped sweat off his forehead. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him. Thankfully, I hadn’t seen him too much, but his expressions were enough like Tal’s for me to read.
Gripping the lyre again, Dark Me strummed a few notes and awakened everyone except Alex.
“Gordy, Carlos, pick up Alex. We have to get out of here right now.”
Both Gordy and Carlos looked ready to jump Dark Me again.
“Guys!” I said loudly. “Dark Me can explain himself once we’re out of here. I think he’s right about the immediate danger.”
“I can feel it,” said Lucas.
“All right,” said Gordy grudgingly. “But when we get where we’re going, Dark Me is going to explain what he’s up to.”
“Stop calling me that!” snapped Dark Me.
“I won’t call you Tal,” said Gordy.
“Then call me DM for the moment,” replied Dark Me. Then he played a few chords on the lyre, and a portal shimmered open in front of us.
Opening portals, complicated as it seemed to someone as nonmagical as I was, apparently didn’t require much juice, at least if the caster knew what he was doing. The fact that Dark Me…uh, DM, needed the lyre to do it reinforced my feeling that he was tired. Lifting that one spell had pretty well drained his batteries. That made him seem a lot less dangerous. Unfortunately, it also made our enemies seem more so.
Much to my annoyance, DM did a ladies-first routine with the portal, and I stepped through, followed by Gordy and Carlos with the unconscious Alex. Jimmie and Tal hurried after, jostling each other a little in the process. Lucas and DM came last.
We found ourselves on the sandy beach of Alcina’s island. Apparently, with Carla in a coma, DM figured no one would find us here.
Wales made more sense to me, though. We could have gotten in touch with the Order of the Ladies of the Lake and received immediate help. Instead, we were in an isolated location. We might be safe from our enemies for a while, but we weren’t exactly going to be recruiting more allies here, and even DM had said we needed help.
Of course, Alcina’s island would be an ideal location—if DM planned on double-crossing us.
Chapter 4: Séance in the Sand (Jimmie)
“Weird” didn’t begin to do justice to how I felt. I wished the feeling came from combat adrenalin and getting jerked around by Dark Me’s spells, but that was only part of the problem. The biggest problem was Tal.
For all my life, and, if you want to get technical, all my recent death, too, Tal and I had been friends. Now the twelve-year-old version of him looked at me like he wanted to cave in my skull with a hammer. I would have expected him to spend more time getting over the fact that I had returned from the dead, but if he still felt surprise over that, he buried that reaction beneath his resentment of me and anger at me.
The fact that he had tried to sacrifice himself for Eva only a few minutes ago just complicated the situation. Yeah, he didn’t suffer any lasting harm, but he couldn’t have known that would happen when he threw himself between her and that weapon.
Sixteen-year-old Tal had assured me he was cool with me and Eva being together. Seeing the intensity of his twelve-year-old version reminded me of how much Tal had once loved Eva. Could he really have gotten over that love? Would he ever?
And if he didn’t, where did that leave him and me?
I tried to force those questions out of my mind once we reached Alcina’s island. At least young Tal, momentarily fascinated by the portal trip and by the island on which he found himself, took a couple of minutes off from giving me the stare of doom.
Gordy and Carlos laid Alex gently on the sand and looked at DM.
“Now what?” asked Gordy, sounding impatient and suspicious.
“Give me a few minutes,” said DM. “I need to figure out who Alex is and see if it’s safe to wake him. Once I’ve done that, we can plan our next move.”
I was surprised when Gordy didn’t object. I think DM was surprised, too, but with a shrug he sat on the sand and closed his eyes. In seconds his face was expressionless.
Gordy was at my side so fast I jumped.
“Your sword,” he whispered. “I know it gives you a little spell resistance. Think it would set up enough static to keep DM from reading us from a distance if he finishes with Alex?”
“No clue,” I whispered back. “Let’s try it.” I drew the sword and walked rapidly away from where DM was sitting. Gordy, Carlos, Lucas, and Khalid followed me. Someone must have spoken to Eva, because, as if on cue, she started talking to Tal. Once that conversation began, Tal focused exclusively on her, completely ignoring our rapid withdrawal. I thought she was as uncomfortable with Tal as I was, but evidently Gordy or someone must have decided our former leader in his present condition would just slow down our conversation, and we had to move fast. It might take DM only a couple of minutes to figure out who Alex was and what to do with him.
“We need to find some way of getting rid of Dark Me,” said Gordy as soon as we were almost out of the others’ sights.
“We can take him—we already know that,” replied Carlos. “The problem is that we can’t rescue our friends without him. I hate the guy just as much as you do, Gordy, but I don’t see an alternative to him right now.”
“How about Tal?” asked Gordy.
“Dude, the twelve-year-old? He doesn’t have the memories or the magic to be much of anything but a worry.”
“No, I mean the real Tal…well, sort of. We all think of Dark Me as Tal’s dark side made flesh, but that’s not really what he is.”
“I get it,” I said. “He is Tal in every detail. It’s just that when Robin Goodfellow made himself into an exact duplicate of Tal, he didn’t know about Dark Me or how to handle him, so Dark Me took over.”
Gordy nodded his head vigorously. “Exactly! Tal’s normal personality is still in there. We just need to bring it out.”
“That’s a great idea,” said Lucas, “but do we have any idea of how to do that?”
“We’ll need magic,” said Gordy. “If we can weaken Dark Me and strengthen the real Tal in there, he can take over the body.”
“But ma
gic is exactly the one thing we don’t have!” protested Carlos.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Gordy. “Hell, I think I even dreamed about it while Dark Me had us asleep. Carlos, you know about Tal’s experiments, right?”
“You mean the ones Tal’s been doing in the castle?” asked Carlos, tilting his head in the general direction of the massive structure Alcina had created so long ago.
“Yeah, especially one in particular—the project he’s doing for Coventina.
Tal had discovered a few months ago that being around him long enough awakened the magic potential in people and things. Except maybe for Lucas, we all knew about Tal’s visit to Coventina, the original Lady of the Lake, and his promise to her to create some kind of spell that caused the magic potential in people to stir much more rapidly. With that spell Coventina planned to rebuild the Order, now sadly low on genuine spell casters.
Carlos figured out what Gordy meant before I did. “I know where you’re going, but we don’t have any way of knowing how to use Tal’s experiment, or even whether it’s in working order.”
“Tal thought it wasn’t ready yet,” said Khalid. “I heard him tell Shar that’s why he was going to keep it here. It was too dangerous to bring to town right now.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Gordy said, chewing on his lower lip. “I can’t ask any of you to expose yourself to it if Tal thought it was still too dangerous.”
“Look, I know I’m the rookie here,” said Lucas, “but I saw what Dark Me did to Carla and Alex. We can’t trust him, but we can’t just take him prisoner, because then we lose the ability to help our friends. Is there some alternative to using Tal’s experiment that I’m not seeing?”
“No, it’s a dumb idea,” said Gordy, looking downcast. “I didn’t think it through. Even if one of us has latent magic, and even if Tal’s experiment awakened that, I think some things about magic need to be learned. Does having power automatically mean you know how to do something as complicated as free Tal from Dark Me? From what Tal’s told us, most people need to be trained, and the only one here who could do that is Dark Me. Something tells me he isn’t going to help us train one of us so we can drive him back into the depths of the duplicate Tal’s mind.”
Lucas glanced nervously over at Dark Me, who still seemed to be in a trance. “There has to be something we can do.”
“There is, now that I think of it,” I said. “You remember how I was able to communicate with Merlin after he died?”
Carlos nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t Tal think it was probably because you’d been dead yourself?”
“He did. But regardless of how it happened, I do have a sort of magic: I can communicate with the dead. Maybe we can get help that way. Perhaps even Merlin is still lurking around the way I used to, unable to move on until he sees what’s going to happen next.”
“Now, I know Tal believes that’s dangerous,” said Gordy. “So does Nurse Florence. Merlin is the one who contacted you, right? You don’t have any practice summoning someone, and from what we’ve been told, it’s dangerous to just poke around. You could get someone hostile, or worse, someone hostile who tricks you into thinking he’s friendly.”
“I know how it felt to connect with Merlin,” I insisted. “At least if it was him, I’d know it.”
“You can’t—” began Gordy.
“Don’t you trust me?” I asked, a little irritated. “I know what I’m suggesting has risks. So does tampering with Tal’s experiment. So does letting Dark Me run amok. Of the three, mine is the least risky.”
I could tell Gordy was having trouble answering me. Finally, he said, “If anything happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”
“If I don’t try, and something happens to Dan, or to anyone else, I’m not going to be able to forgive myself,” I replied, meeting his eyes as if I were trying to stare him down.
“Tal!” we heard Eva yell. All of us turned and saw young Tal racing down the beach in the opposite direction from where we were. Unfortunately, at that moment Dark Me came out of his trance and looked around. We still had no plan—and now we weren’t going to have one.
Dark Me was getting up, his body language suggesting he intended to chase Tal.
I started running almost before I knew what I was doing. “I’ll get him!” I yelled as I ran past a startled Dark Me.
“Jimmie, wait!” Eva called after me, probably to tell me now wasn’t a good time to talk to Tal. I didn’t look in her direction.
At this point, I would rather crawl naked for a mile over live snakes than talk to Tal. Maybe what we needed to do was talk, though.
However, that wasn’t why I was following him. I needed to get away from the others for a few minutes.
I needed to have time to see if I could raise Merlin.
Yeah, I know, I really shouldn’t—blah, blah, blah. What else could I do, though? Leave all of us at the mercy of Dark Me? Let my brother rot in one of Vanora’s cells? Let Tal stay twelve forever?
The last part concerned me the most at the moment. Maybe I was being noble. Maybe I just wanted to say good-bye to the unforgiving twelve-year-old so I could welcome back his more merciful sixteen-year-old version. Either way, I had to try.
“Tal!” I yelled again. He didn’t slow down. He was pretty athletic, but so was I, and his legs were now shorter than mine, so I closed the gap between us quickly.
Just as I was about to catch up with Tal, he spun around and started throwing punches. I could have subdued him in his present condition, but I took another risk and just let him punch away. Maybe if he got some of his hostility out of his system, he’d have room to feel something else. I had seen how much he cried when I died. However mad he was now, I knew his friendship for me was in there somewhere.
It only took me a couple of seconds to realize that whether or not those old feelings really were in there somewhere, they were buried beneath an avalanche of frusttation, maybe even hatred. Tal wasn’t trying to pull those punches, either consciously or subconsciously. He was putting every ounce of kid muscle behind them.
“Get away from me!” he yelled. “Get away!”
I’d already taken a couple of dizzying shots to the head, so I changed strategy and started dodging as best I could. Having had to dodge arrows and sword strokes a lot since I came back to life, staying away from an untrained twelve-year-old’s fists shouldn’t have been much of a challenge. However, I was slower than usual, because Tal had gotten in a few good shots in the beginning. Not only that, but as I began to tire, I realized Tal hadn’t. Since his body was sufficiently resistant to change that his injuries healed almost immediately, it wasn’t surprising that he couldn’t wear out.
I realized now how stupid my plan had been. I thought I was going to use Tal as an excuse for getting away from everybody else; instead, the fight with him was consuming precious seconds.
Even as I had that realization, I heard Dark Me in my head.
“Are you going to get him to come back, or do I need to do it?” he asked. “We don’t have time for this.”
“I need a couple more minutes,” I thought back. “He’s almost hysterical. He’ll just be in the way if I bring him back now.”
“Well, be quick about it!” he thought. “We don’t have that much time before we should move on.” I felt him break the connection, but not before he muttered something about not sending a boy to do a man’s job. I was sure he wanted me to hear that.
I hadn’t been paying enough attention to Tal, who smashed me in the face and threw me off balance enough to make me fall.
“Get up!” he demanded, obviously not done using me as a punching bag.
I had at least one black eye by now, and I was wondering how I was going to explain loose teeth to my dentist. Another good hit and I’d have to beg Dark Me to reattach some.
“Tal, aren’t you glad I’m alive…even a little bit? We used to be best friends.”
“You aren’t that Jimmie,” Tal insisted. “You could
n’t be! My Jimmie would never do this to me.” I could hear the feeling of betrayal in his voice, but I could also tell I’d gotten him thinking, at least to the extent that he wasn’t trying to kick me in the ribs or something.
“Eva broke up with you almost four years ago, and I only just got together with her myself…after talking to you about it.”
“That’s what she said,” he admitted sullenly. “I just know that isn’t true, though. It couldn’t be. Maybe she isn’t Eva.”
“Tal, you’re a smart guy. You just had a laser of some kind dig a hole in your back and then discovered that the wound healed almost instantly. Then you got teleported to an island that’s not even part of our world. How many other impossible things are you going to have to see before you accept what’s happening?”
“It’s a trick!” he insisted, but somewhat less angrily. Maybe his mind was starting to catch up with the reality of his situation.
Given another half hour or so, I might have been able to convince him, but I also needed to have a few minutes to concentrate on Merlin. At any minute Dark Me could be back in my head again—and if he sensed what I was planning, I was going to be in big trouble.
“Tal, hate me if you want. But whatever you do, don’t trust the guy we’re calling DM.”
“Who are you to talk about trust?” he asked.
“Whether you believe this or not, I’m your friend, and I care about you. DM only wants your blood.”
That got his attention. “He’s a vampire?” Under the circumstances, the question wasn’t unreasonable.
“No, but you’ve noticed how much he looks like an older you?” I asked. He nodded. “Well, actually he looks identical to the Tal you will be in four years, but only because of a spell. He needs your blood to sustain that spell. He’s protecting you until he figures out how to get you back to your sixteen-year-old self so he can imprison you somewhere and keep taking blood.”
OK, so I was improvising a little at the end, but it did make sense. At least until Dark Me could duplicate Tal’s blood, he would have no choice but to hold on to Tal somehow.