Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  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.

  “You need to answer that question sooner or later, young man,” said Nurse Florence somewhat more formally. “You understand we can’t just let you run around town stealing things, but if we know what you need, we can find you some better way for you to get it.” Still no response.

  “All right, your ankle is better now, but I’m still waiting for an answer. We can’t help you if—”

  “Nobody can help me,” he said with a sort of dismal finality I had never heard from a little kid before. For a second I was afraid he was going to start crying again, but he managed to hold himself together, at least outwardly.

  “If I had the sword,” he almost whispered, “then he would have taken me back. I know he would.”

  “‘He’ must be this boy’s father,” thought Nurse Florence.

  “The kid was abandoned? Why?” I asked. I knew that kids were sometimes abandoned, but I had never met someone whose parents had just dumped him.

  “Try not to act too surprised. I don’
t want to say this in front of the boy. During my physical examination I figured out where his powers come from. He’s half djinn.”

  I had encountered more than my share of weirdness in the past four years, but generally it was Celtic weirdness, not Arabic weirdness, so it took me a minute to catch up with her.

  “Djinn?”

  “In the Quran the djinn are described as being created by Allah from smokeless fire, which explains why the boy is so fire resistant. Islamic law forbids sexual relationships between humans and djinn, but there are a few known cases. I dealt with one half djinn back in Wales, so I can recognize the physical signs. I’m guessing the boy’s father is the human partner in a human-djinn relationship and abandoned the boy when it became obvious he wasn’t ‘normal.’”

  “But how…” I started. Then I realized my shock had caused me to speak aloud, and I switched back to mental dialogue. “How could a parent abandon a child for any reason, let alone something the child has no control over?”

  “People abandon children for many reasons just as arbitrary as that. I’ve had to deal with a couple of situations in which students were thrown out by their fathers when the fathers discovered they were gay.”

  I thought about how, just a few weeks ago, my father had feared I was gay. Even at the darkest point of that misunderstanding, I didn’t think he had ever been close to throwing me out. I had to give him credit for not giving up on me.

  “So what do we need to do, find his djinn mother?”

  “I wish it were that simple. Typically the djinn are no more welcoming of half djinn children than the mortal parents are. Honestly, I’m at a loss on this one. The boy apparently thinks that if he performs some great feat, his father will take him back, but I doubt that’s a realistic hope. If anything, the boy’s showing up with a stolen magic sword will just reinforce the father’s feeling that he wants nothing to do with him.”

  “How long has he been living on the street like this?”

  “No way to tell. His accent tells me he wasn’t born here but rather in some Arab country, and then he came here later. But since I don’t know how old he is now, I can’t even speculate. It could have been days, though I’d guess that’s too conservative an estimate, based on the way he is behaving. Unfortunately, he could also have been abandoned years ago.”

  “Years!” I went from shock to outrage. “What a scumbag his father must be!”

  “My father is not a scumbag!” screamed the kid. I felt stupid, as if we had been spelling words the kid we were talking in front of actually knew how to spell. After all, if he really was half djinn, why couldn’t he pick up thoughts so close to him? None of his earlier actions had suggested he could read minds in the way I could, but I had just mentally shouted right next to him.

  Nurse Florence also looked non-plussed, and the guys moved as if to restrain the kid. “That will not be necessary!” she snapped. Then, turning to the kid, she adopted a gentler tone. “We’re sorry. We don’t really know your father, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge. Tal is angry that you have had to fend for yourself when someone should have been taking care of you.”

  “I did OK on my own!” said the kid defensively. “No one needed to take care of me.”

  “May I ask your name?” said Nurse Florence. “Mine is Viviane. Gentlemen, would you please introduce yourselves to our guest?”

  “You mean, to our prisoner?” asked Shar acidly.

  “Guest,” replied Nurse Florence, calmly but forcefully. One by one, the guys introduced themselves.

  “Now it’s your turn,” said Nurse Florence gently.

  “Khalid,” replied the kid finally, after a long pause. It was clear we were not going to get a last name, and Nurse Florence knew better than to press for one.

  “All right, Khalid. For the time being, I’m going to see if some of my friends in Annwn will look after you—”

  Khalid, though clearly afraid of us, was apparently even more afraid of going to Annwn, though I doubted he had any idea what Annwn even was. “No!” he practically screamed, jumping up and looking as if he would make a dash for the room’s only door.

  Just as Nurse Florence had predicted, however, the room was just too cramped for his speed to make much difference. In seconds Dan and Gordy had his arms again. He struggled desperately, and if his strength had been as great as his speed, he could have given them much more trouble. As it was though, two seventeen-year-old varsity football players had little difficulty subduing one eleven-year-old.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Nurse Florence, genuinely puzzled.

  Khalid said nothing, but his quivering lip spoke volumes.

  “Khalid, we really want to help you, but you need to tell us what’s wrong,” said Nurse Florence, trying her most calming tone.

  Khalid looked even more as if he would bolt at the slightest opportunity. “Just…leave me alone!” Khalid finally begged in a half whisper. “I’ll…go somewhere else. And I won’t try to steal from you again—I promise.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Nurse Florence explained patiently. “Khalid, we can see you can take care of yourself—” Dan snickered a little but quickly got control of himself. “—but we still can’t just leave you all alone. You have noticed the young men with you all carry swords—”

  “You bet he noticed,” cut in Shar angrily.

  “I can do this more easily without interruptions,” said Nurse Florence in her do-what-I-say tone. Switching personas again, she looked into Khalid’s eyes. “Khalid, they carry swords because there are…bad people nearby, very bad people. One of them tried to kill all of us just a few weeks ago and nearly succeeded. You have seen what these young men can do. If even they were nearly overcome, can’t you see that even someone as fast and clever as you are might not survive on his own?”

  For the first time, Khalid actually appeared to be really listening. “You mean like that pale, dark haired lady? The really pretty one?”

  We all froze. Was he talking about Morgan?

  “What lady, Khalid?” I asked in as neutral a tone as I could.

  “I’ve…I’ve been watching you guys for a while. She is often watching too.”

  “Today?”

  “No, I didn’t see her today, but I wasn’t really looking.”

  “What makes you think she’s a bad person?”

  Khalid shrugged. “I just feel it. She’s…cold, somehow. I can feel darkness when she is nearby. Somehow, I know she might be able to see me, even when I’m invisible, so I stay as far away as I can.”

  I tried to sound more reassuring than I felt. “If she is the one I am thinking of, that was a good thing to do, Khalid. She is definitely one of the bad people we were talking about.”

  “I don’t want to upset our ‘guest,’” said Dan, who still had a grip on one of Khalid’s arms, “but how do we know he isn’t really working with Morgan? Maybe he isn’t even a little kid at all.”

  Khalid, who had seemed marginally calmer while I was talking to him, began looking very wary, again ready to bolt at the first opportunity.

  “He’s not a shifter, if that’s where you’re going with that question, Dan,” replied Nurse Florence quickly. “I would have picked up some hint of that while I was working on his injuries. As far as his being an ally of Morgan, well…I can’t tell. Khalid, I need to ask you to trust me. I know you have natural defenses that prevent people from seeing into your mind. Can you lower those, just for a minute?”

  Khalid’s eyes filled with horror, as if Nurse Florence had just suggested cutting open his skull to look inside. I could understand the reaction. Most people don’t really want somebody else rummaging around in their heads, and Khalid hadn’t exactly had a life that would inspire him to trust others. Unfortunately, someone who really was in league with Morgan would have the same reaction. As much as I sympathized with the kid, we couldn’t have him around unless we knew for sure.

  “Khalid,” I began gently, “if you have been watching us for a wh
ile, you know we aren’t bad people, right?”

  Khalid did give Shar a hard look first—which Shar returned—but then he nodded yes.

  “Then you know we wouldn’t really do anything to hurt you.”

  “But you want to see into my mind! That’s…wrong!”

  “It’s the only way we can help you, Khalid. We have to be sure you aren’t working with one of the bad people—”

  “I’m not bad!” he protested loudly.

  “But how do we know that? All we know about you is that you tried to steal one of our swords. Please, Khalid, try to look at this situation from our point of view. We need some way to know you, to know that you aren’t out to get us.”

  Khalid thought about the problem for a moment, then said, “I know someone who could tell you I’m a good person.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked with an indulgent smile.

  “Gianni,” he replied innocently.

  My heart skipped a beat. Yeah, I did want to trust Khalid, I did want to help him. Still, the idea that he had been around Gianni without my knowing gave me the creeps. I made a valiant effort not to let my uneasiness show.

  “How do you know Gianni?” I asked. The sentence came out more tonelessly than I wanted. Dan raised an eyebrow, but Khalid seemed oblivious.

  “I’ve been near here since early November. I…I can take care of myself, like I said, but sometimes…it’s nice to talk to someone my age. Every few days I stand at the front of the middle school right when school lets out and kind of pretend I’m just coming out of the school myself. Sometimes I say ‘Hi’ to some of the people coming out, but usually they don’t talk to me much.”

  Considering that Khalid looked like something the proverbial cat dragged in, I wasn’t too surprised, especially in a fairly upscale community like Santa Brígida. I was surprised that one of the adults at the school hadn’t noticed a homeless kid hanging out near the school, but if he only showed up right as school was getting out, he might have blended well enough that no one noticed from a distance.