Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  “I knew it!” Stan practically yelled. He surprised me so much I almost lost my balance.

  “Stan, what the hell?”

  “Tal,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “I just asked you a question—in Hebrew—and you answered it. In Hebrew.”

  Well, that was a problem.

  I guess I should mention that Welsh wasn’t the only language I wasn’t supposed to know in this life but did. There was a poem in “The Tale of Taliesin” that was sometimes attributed to me, though I couldn’t remember writing it. A lot of it was pretentious nonsense suggesting that the bard Taliesin (whom I thought of as Taliesin 1) was with God at the creation and would be in the world until the Day of Judgment. Hogwash, probably, but there were specific verses talking about being with King David when Absalom was slain and witnessing other events in ancient Israel that stirred dim memories in me, as did the references in the same work to Alexander the Great. In any case, my ability with both Hebrew and Greek was second only to my ability with Welsh—though right then, I was wishing that was not the case.

  “I must have picked up enough Hebrew from you…”

  “Tal, the only time you ever heard Hebrew was at my Bar Mitzvah, and you weren’t exactly quoting my Torah portion just now.”

  The fog was still thick, but I could hear voices up ahead. We were definitely getting close to school. If I wasn’t careful, Stan would out me in front of everyone. The tynged aside, I wasn’t sure how I felt about some public revelation of my previous lives, which at best would make Stan look stupid, at worst make me look like some kind of freak.

  “Anyway, when we started to really talk last night, you put me to sleep. I know you did.”

  The danger level just spiraled off into the stratosphere. There was no way, absolutely none, that Stan should’ve remembered our conversation as anything but a dream—and there was really no way he should’ve remembered my putting him to sleep. Over the last four years, I had had to manipulate my parents from time to time. I’m not proud of that, but I did it very sparingly, and only when necessary. (I know that sounds at best self-serving coming out of an adolescent mouth. Feel free to picture me as a wise old man with a white beard—I’ve been one quite often in the past—if that helps my credibility any.) Anyway, I had done the same with others as well. No one in all that time had ever resisted me or realized that I had done something to them. No one. And yet now Stan was talking as if he were somehow immune to me. Well, he hadn’t been last night, so what had changed?

  I really had no time to ponder that question. Shadowy figures in the fog ahead of us had to be other students. We were very, very near the front of the school.

  I did my best work with both voice and instrument, but I couldn’t exactly whip out my guitar at this point, or start singing, for that matter. In a pinch, I had sometimes made my speaking voice alone work, if I put enough “oomph” into it. Welsh would have been best for that, but I couldn’t risk that either, so I settled for English.

  “Stan,” I commanded in a harsh whisper, “you will be unable to speak of this until we are alone.” I could feel the power flowing through my words. This maneuver should be enough to buy me some time, and perhaps a little privacy.

  Stan stopped dead in his tracks.

  “What are you trying to do, Tal, cast a spell on me?” That was Stan’s serious tone, not his joking one. Odd as it was to hear the campus’ biggest science nerd talking about spells, there was no question. He was aware of what I was doing, and he was completely unaffected by it.

  I was still trying to frame a response when the car hit me.

  CHAPTER 3: THE THEFT

  Okay, so I was being a little over-dramatic. The car hit at about half a mile an hour, not enough to kill or maim in this case, but certainly enough to make an ominous sounding thud, knock me over (since I was a little off balance anyway), and send my shoulder bags flying in different directions. I had been so distracted by Stan that I hadn’t realized we were standing right in the middle of the street. The incident ended up being more embarrassing than anything else. The driver turned out to be one of the mothers dropping off her daughter. She seemed torn between fussing over me and getting hysterical; getting hysterical won pretty quickly, with the result that we drew an uncomfortably large crowd, including several girls who I wished had not seen me sprawled out in the middle of the street, and Ms. Simmons, the high school’s principal, who eased back on her usual sternness to fuss over me herself. Needless to say, that too was embarrassing.

  There were, however, two good things that came out of the fiasco: Stan couldn’t keep questioning me, and Ms. Simmons sent me to the nurse’s office to be checked out—which meant I got to check out the nurse!

  I’m not complaining, but really someone should have more common sense than to hire a smoking hot twenty-something nurse with long blond hair and the figure of a Playboy model for a high school. Usually students just try to get sent to the nurse’s office so that they can miss class, but at good old Santa Brígida High School, the guys had an additional reason for faking illness. You practically had to be dying, though, before most teachers would let you out of class. Clearly, they knew what was going on.

  “Tal, your heart rate is a little fast.”

  No kidding! (Yeah, I know, I should have been thinking about what to do with Stan, and the Gwrach y Rhibyn, and the myriad of other problems I had, but again I’ll point out that the combined wisdom from my previous lives couldn’t completely override my sixteen-year-old body.)

  “Adrenaline, I guess, Nurse Florence. You know, from the accident.”

  “Probably.” God, even her voice was sexy. “I don’t see anything else wrong with you.”

  Funny, I don’t see anything wrong with you, either.

  “But,” Nurse Florence added, “I should call your mother, just to let her know what happened.”

  Well, that was certainly one way to derail the porno movie I had started scripting in my head.

  Switching into Welsh, I said, “That won’t be necessary. There is no need to call my mother.”

  As if I had not spoken, Nurse Florence smiled, and said, “Well, I guess there really isn’t a need to call your mother—but come back here if you notice anything wrong. I mean anything.”

  You can count on that. “Yes, Nurse Florence.” It was good to know that my Celtic mojo was still working, even if it didn’t work on Stan for some odd reason.

  I pulled on my backpack and left the office as slowly as I could. As I closed the door behind me, the bell rang. I must have missed first period. As they say, it is amazing how time flies when you’re having fun.

  I’m sure someone out there is silently cussing me out for objectifying women. Guilty as charged, but at least I don’t act on every impulse I have. Indeed, I don’t act on most of them. Say what you will about my parents—and certainly I have said my share about them—they brought me up to respect women and to set moral boundaries, and I really do. At least my brain does—I can’t always vouch for the rest of my body, but my brain manages to stay in charge—and this despite the whisperings from some of my past lives, during which society had a quite different sexual morality. You know I’m not just putting you on. Given my unique abilities, think what I could do without moral restraint. Hell, give me a guitar and a chance for a little lunch time concert, and I could have the whole female population ready to jump into bed with me right on the spot. I could, but I don’t.

  Damn morality! Damn free will!

  And damn…down the hall came Eva O’Reilly, a fellow Celt, straight at me.

  My self-restraint was certainly being tested today.

  Eva was about my height, strawberry blond with deep green eyes and a curvaceous figure. She wasn’t quite Nurse Florence, but I knew my heart rate was a little too fast again. Now that she was closer, I caught a whiff of the jasmine perfume she liked to wear.

  “Tal, are you okay?” she asked softly. “I heard you got hit by a car.”

  “Rumors of my death h
ave been much exaggerated,” I said, trying to be witty—nearly always a mistake. Somehow, Eva never seemed to get my humor, even though I’d known her for years. Apparently, she didn’t get Mark Twain’s humor either.

  “Well, I knew you weren’t dead,” she replied in her stating-the-obvious voice. “But anyway, I’m glad everything is okay.”

  “Yeah, Weaver,” came a loud voice from right behind me, “next time look twice before crossing the street.”

  I didn’t need to turn around to know that Eva’s boyfriend, Dan Stevens, was right behind me.

  Yeah, boyfriend. The way my luck was going, you would have to figure Eva was attached.

  Except for some well-hidden tension, Dan was stereotype incarnate: varsity football quarterback, and looking pretty much like the all-American boy from Central Casting, with blond hair, blue eyes, deep tan, and well-muscled body. He stood about a head taller than I did and infinitely higher in the high school social hierarchy, so naturally he made little attempt to conceal his general contempt for me. Our relationship hadn’t always been like that, though. There was a time when we had been friends—close friends actually, almost as close as Stan and me—but that seemed very long ago now, like in another lifetime, though ironically that particular memory came from this one.

  “Yeah, I’ll try to remember that next time,” I quipped. Dan looked as if he might have wanted to get another dig in, but Eva probably wouldn’t have liked that, so he pressed his lips together and said nothing.

  “Anyway,” I said, turning back to Eva, “thanks for asking.”

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re okay. I’ll see you later.”

  I smiled my best fake smile and nodded as she walked off with one arm around Dan. Women are so superficial.

  Suddenly I realized what should have occurred to me a while ago: I had my backpack, but not my guitar or fencing equipment. Since the nurse’s office was closer than the front of the school, that’s the way I headed.

  “Nurse Florence, I was carrying my guitar and fencing stuff this morning. Do you have any idea what happened to them?”

  She pondered for just a second.

  “I think your friend Stan picked them up.” I thanked her and headed out into the hall. The students still milling around meant passing period wasn’t quite over. Stan and I didn’t have the same period two, and I wasn’t sure exactly where he was, so I pulled out my cell phone and gave him a quick call.

  He took a longer time to answer than I expected, and when he did, he sounded half dead.

  “Stan? Where are you?”

  “Still at home sick,” he responded, almost in a whisper. “I admire your faith, but sorry, no miracle cures this morning.”

  “When did you get sick? You seemed fine this morning.”

  “You didn’t see me this morning. I texted you not to come.”

  “Sorry to bother you, Stan. I’ll call you later, to see how you are.” He mumbled a goodbye, and then I started sorting through my texts. Sure enough, there was one from Stan telling me he was sick, and that I didn’t need to come by his house. I had been so frazzled getting out of the house that I hadn’t noticed it.

  However, a missed text was the least of my worries. The fog hadn’t been so bad this morning that I couldn’t recognize my best friend standing right behind me.

  Ever since my past selves had awakened within me, I had remembered many encounters with supernatural beings, but all of those had been many centuries ago. Except for my own abilities, I had never experienced anything out of the ordinary in this life, and I had pretty well decided that such encounters with the supernatural no longer occurred. Then, less than a day ago, the Gwrach y Rhibyn had shown up, and I now apparently faced another, much more immediate supernatural visitor.

  There was a shape-shifter on campus, and he had stolen my stuff!

  Perhaps more than just a shifter. He—or it—not only looked like Stan, but acted like Stan. Either the thing had observed him quite a bit, and that thought chilled me more than I can say, or the thing had some kind of telepathy, which wasn’t a much more comforting thought. I didn’t remember any telepathic creatures, though. Then another thought struck me.

  I had counted very carefully. I knew I was at the right door this morning, though I now realized that “Stan” had actually popped out before I had a chance to knock.

  The thing had come out of Stan’s house.

  Obviously, Stan was still alive. I was half tempted to call his parents to make sure they were still alive, but I couldn’t think of any particularly plausible reason to have called if they turned out to be alive. Anyway, Stan, even groggy as he apparently was, would certainly have noticed if his ever-hovering mother was not around. And there was still the problem of the shifter, who was running around loose at school, with at least one particularly dangerous piece of equipment.

  The bell starting class rang, but I ignored it. I couldn’t chance the shifter getting away with what it had stolen. I moved down the hall as stealthily as I could; even at that, I had to convince a couple of teachers that I was supposed to be out of class. As I looked around, I tried to figure out how to find the shifter. It hadn’t waited for me in the nurse’s office, which suggested its mission the whole time had been to steal from me. Its mission accomplished, it would probably get as far away as it could with its loot. Logical enough, but what good did any of that do me unless I knew in what direction the thing was moving or at least what its destination was?

  The Celts practiced a number of methods of divination in ancient times, but most of them were impractical right now. My best option was to get outside and look for signs in nature. The high school, also a Spanish colonial revival structure, featured an enormous courtyard in the center that was almost more forest than courtyard, but enclosed nature like that wouldn’t do me as much good as the real outdoors. Anyway, more people could potentially spot me, especially from the second floor windows, if I was out in the courtyard, and I didn’t want to have to magic every adult on campus. There was also a wooded area near the back entrance of the campus. It wasn’t a real forest, but an artifice of the developers. Nonetheless, the trees were real enough, and perhaps they would speak to me if I were patient. Patience was in short supply at the moment, but what choice did I really have?

  I got out of the back entrance of the school, across the parking lot, and almost ran toward the “woods.” In their own way, they looked nearly as out of place as the ubiquitous palm trees, but even I had to admit they looked as if they had grown there naturally, though some types of trees were not native to the area. Doubtless they, like the palms, had been brought in full grown.

  As soon as I hit the edge of the woods, I reached out and touched each tree in turn, trying to hear any message that it might have for me. I was expecting that this process could take hours, but the third tree I touched actually did speak to me, though not quite with the message I had anticipated.

  “HE’S HERE!” it shrieked, and the wind seemed to echo the cry. My body tensed into combat readiness, and I crept slowly around the next turn in the path.

  “Stan” was indeed there. Having tossed my guitar case down roughly on the ground, he was rummaging through the fencing equipment, tossing the foils on the ground one by one, clearly disappointed so far. Without hesitation I lunged for the guitar case. I was quick, but “Stan” was quicker, noticing my presence, charging in my direction and smacking me aside before I could get within ten feet of the instrument. I rolled and was back on my feet almost before I hit the ground. However, “Stan’s” blow had been much harder than Stan, or probably even Dan Stevens, could have administered, and it left me a little wobbly. Indeed, if the thing had pressed its advantage, I might have been dead, but instead it made a grab for the last foil in the bag and then gave a triumphant, un-Stanlike scream as it raised high above its head, not a fencing foil, but a real sword, its blade flashing in the sunlight as the last bits of the foil illusion that had surrounded it melted away.

  Why I felt
the need for a real sword when I had never faced a serious threat until today, I never knew, but it is said, “A sword always finds a wielder,” and this one must have called out to me hard enough to get me to manipulate my parents into vacationing in Europe. The finding of the sword, to say nothing of the difficulty concealing it from my parents and from customs officials, was an ordeal for which even I couldn’t understand the reason—until this moment. Perhaps destiny had led me on the sword quest precisely to save me today. The problem with that theory was that the shifter was the one with the sword and was charging in my direction, hell-bent on impaling me with it.

  The shifter was clearly stronger than the real Stan, so it had the muscle to swing the sword, but not the months of practice to really make those swings count. I dodged without difficulty, though I knew I could not keep that up indefinitely. I started to sing a couple of times, but the physical exertion made me short of breath; the sad fact was that I couldn’t very easily sing and dodge so fast at the same time.

  The shifter was losing his “Stanishness” in an attempt to master the weapon. He was now a head taller than the real Stan, with longer arms and legs that bulged with muscle. The face remained superficially like Stan’s, but the sheer malevolence of its expression destroyed the illusion almost completely.

  I knew my music could affect the shifter now that I knew what I was dealing with, but since I could neither play (the guitar being well out of reach) nor sing, my theoretical ability to win that way was of little practical use. I continued to commune with the trees, but this forest was not sufficiently used to magic to make a very effective contribution to combat. Nor was there much wildlife, and I doubted the couple of squirrels I could sense would be much of an obstacle to this adversary.

  It was then I realized that I might die today.

  The shifter wanted me dead; there was no question of that. I was in decent shape, but there is a big difference between fencing, or even practicing with a long sword, and actual combat. Sure, I had seen plenty of action in my past lives; one of me had even served with Alexander the Great, and another with King David. The problem was, though I had their memories, physical skills depended to some extent on the body, and my current body, I now belatedly realized, just wasn’t up to the job yet. I had been practicing the skills, but not building enough stamina. I could still dodge successfully, but my breathing was getting pretty ragged, my heart was pounding, sweat was getting in my eyes—the damned sword looked like it was getting a little closer each time. Then “Stan” managed to nick me on the left arm, and I felt blood begin to trickle down.