Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (29 page)

“Eva!” called the golden-haired woman. “Come in now, please!”

People near the doorway moved out of the way. I noticed all the guys my age who had come to see me at various times were all there now. Through the doorway came someone else who looked vaguely familiar. She was a very beautiful strawberry blond, with a nicely curved body, but, again, not as lovely as my Alcina. She looked at me very sadly. I jerked ineffectually at the ropes again.

“Are you ready?” asked the golden-haired woman; I guessed Viviane was her name. The one called Eva nodded. “Everyone else join hands. This is going to take all of us.” I could see them all joining hands as Eva advanced toward my bed. I tried to pull away, but being tied down, I really didn’t have any place to go.

The room began to fill with golden light. It was everywhere, but in particular, it formed an aura around Eva, making her look like an angel. I wasn’t fooled, though. This magic would be bad news for me. I could just feel it. I strained against the bonds, but it was no use.

“It’s all right,” said Eva, bending over me, the golden light now almost unbearably bright. She bent over quickly and kissed me on the lips. I hadn’t been expecting that, or I would have tried to twist my head away from her. As soon as her warm lips touched mine, I felt a jolt of powerful magic burning into me, reaching into my heart, into my very soul. I screamed then, screamed until I was out of breath. I could feel things melting, shifting, transforming within me, and I was powerless to stop any of it.

The worst part, though, was the feeling that Alcina was fading, diminishing, vanishing from within me. I fought to hold on to her, I struggled with every ounce of will I had, but she slipped through my fingers as if I were trying to hold on to mist. She was still in my heart, but she was shrinking, she was shriveling…she was gone.

I looked around me as my memories flooded back, feeling colossally stupid. “What…what happened?”

Nurse Florence looked at Gwynn, who nodded, presumably to confirm that I was back in my right mind, and then turned back to me. “My best guess is that Morgan played us. She gave us enough truth that we believed her statement about the power required to lift the second casting of the awakening spell. In fact, it took far more power than we had anticipated, and that is what Morgan was counting on. I think she expected us to try to reverse the spell without her. She figured, correctly as it turned out, that we would so drain ourselves in the process that when Carla’s coma ended and Alcina emerged, she would be able to escape from us, which is exactly what happened.

“Assuming the stories about Alcina are true, bewitching men is one of her specialties. She can make them forget everything else if necessary, remembering only a total devotion to her—a fake devotion, but her victims have no way of detecting its falseness.”

“But that shouldn’t have worked so easily on someone like me,” I protested, feeling my cheeks redden. Perhaps I should have had her clear the room, but I knew my friends were staying to make sure I was all right, and I couldn’t really blame them for that.

“Normally, no,” replied Nurse Florence. “But remember how exhausted you were. Your natural defenses were much weaker than normal. Also, there were…other factors. We’ll discuss them later.”

Yeah, just what I needed right now—a little hint of mystery to obsess over.

“But what happened after that?” I asked. “I don’t remember very clearly.”

“We had to keep you from full consciousness,” said Gwynn in a tone that came as close to being apologetic as he was ever likely to get. “If we had not, you might have tried to escape and hurt yourself or somebody else in the process.”

“Stan!” I said, suddenly remembered what had happened when Alcina first took control and feeling extra guilty about it. “I hit you! Shar, I drew on you! I’m…I’m so sorry.”

“Forget it, man,” said Shar. “You weren’t yourself—literally.”

“Yeah, and anyway it was a pretty sissy punch,” said Stan with a big grin. “I could have punched harder than that before I started working out.”

“Oh, well, I’ll be sure to hit harder the next time!” I said with a wink. “Nurse Florence, from what I remember, it must not have been easy to break the spell.”

“It wasn’t,” she agreed. “Alcina hit you with all the power she had, and you became so convinced you loved her that you fought any attempt we made. Even working at only partial capacity, your resistance made reversal more difficult. And then the standard way of breaking that kind of spell is by reminding the victim of the person he really does love. The problem we had was that your current love was for Carla, who wasn’t here and wasn’t going to be. So we…”

With mounting apprehension, I realized where this conversation was going, but surely Nurse Florence wasn’t going to start exploring my former love for Eva right in front of her and Dan.

“So we brought Eva. You used to care about her, you know, when you were twelve,” said Dan, looking profoundly uncomfortable.

“Yes, and then Gwynn and Nurse Florence put everybody’s willpower together—”

“And everybody’s feeling of friendship for you,” put in Carlos.

“Yes,” continued Eva a little nervously, “and they channeled it all through my kiss. Wow, I’ve never felt anything quite like that. It was like…” she left the thought unfinished.

Dan was still looking uncomfortable. He must have wondered how a crush he thought ended four years ago could have been powerful enough to break the spell, even with a lot of help. Well, that was one thing he was going to have to keep wondering about!

“We hoped that remembering not only what you used to feel for Eva, but what you felt for all of us, might be enough to break the spell,” said Nurse Florence just in time to keep the silence from becoming too awkward. “As it turns out, we were right.”

“I guess I’m just lucky I have friends like all of you,” I said, meaning every word. “Now, could somebody untie me?” They all laughed at that, since in the excitement it had kind of slipped their minds that I was tied up, even though they were standing right in front of me.

“I think before we do that, there is a certain faerie maiden who would like to pay you a visit,” said Gordy with a snicker.

“You should talk, faerie fu—” started Dan, who stopped at a glare from Eva.

“So it looks like everything is pretty much back to normal,” said Stan, who stepped over to help untie me.

“What passes for normal with us, anyway,” I observed, rubbing my wrist as soon as it was free. “How long have I been like this?”

“About two weeks,” said Shar as he reached over to reclaim Zom.

“Two weeks! What…how are we going to explain that to people?” I had visions of our secrets being revealed to the whole town.

“That’s just a little over a day back in Santa
Brígida,” said Nurse Florence in her best calming voice. “And you know me better than to think I wouldn’t provide cover for all of you. I got word to Vanora, who concocted some elaborate story about a special opportunity for a few select students to spend 24 hours with a visiting Nobel laureate. The story was so full of holes I could have driven a bus through it, but you know how the adults of Santa Brígida are about Carrie Winn—she speaks, and they accept whatever she says, especially if she suggests that their children are as wonderful as they already know they are. When you come back, you’ll get a little applause and go back to your regular routines, with no one any the wiser.

“By the way, Tal, your security plan for Santa
Brígida seems to have worked. As far as we can tell, Morgan didn’t attempt any kind of attack, even though we’ve been gone longer than we thought we would be. Vanora’s griping about having to keep that system going for so long, but once you get settled in at home, we can talk about what to do next.”

“Of course, now Morgan has what she wants,” I said ruefully.

“Maybe not,” cautioned Nurse Florence, “but we can worry about that later.”

Once untied, I discovered that my muscles were very stiff, but a little magic from Nurse Florence brought them much closer to normal. “You may need to do stretching exercises for the next few days, just to be sure,” she said, “but I used magic to keep any muscle atrophy from occurring, and after all, it’s not like you were out of commission for six months.” She frowned a little. “I did the same thing with Carla. If I hadn’t, Alcina wouldn’t have been able to make such an easy getaway; she would hardly have been able to move at all.”

“No one can blame you for that,” I said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

By now Nurse Florence and I were alone in the room. I had thanked everybody, they had assured themselves that I really was OK, and now they were preparing to leave. It was a good thing we were alone, because at that moment I began to realize that something was wrong.

I had started to think about Carla. I worried about her, naturally. I still felt guilty about the mess she was in, and I still felt determined to rescue her from Alcina.

What I didn’t feel was any romantic love at all. There was a void in my heart where that love used to be, an aching hole that became more and more obvious to me. Nurse Florence could see my growing horror in my eyes.

“Tal, what’s wrong?” she asked, looking very concerned.

“What, what has happened to me?” I asked, much more shrilly than I intended. “I…I don’t feel anything for Carla anymore.”

“Tal, I was going to wait to tell you this until we got back to Santa Brígida, but…well, there is no easy way to say this. Your love for Carla was never real in the first place.”

“WHAT?” I didn’t mean to shout. Well, maybe I did. In about thirty seconds I had gone from being grateful to Nurse Florence for curing me to angry with her for somehow ripping a piece of my soul out in the process.

“Tal,” she said gently, “think back to Samhain. You told me yourself you could feel Carla broadcasting raw power, including mental images of the two of you, uh, having sex.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she was able to cast a spell on me. That’s ridiculous! She wouldn’t even have known how!”

“For shifting that kind of basic emotional response, she could maybe have done it instinctively. You’ve told me yourself how quickly you developed feelings for her.”

“But my mind is strong enough to block that kind of enchantment!” I protested. “You know that. Even with full power, Alcina couldn’t have taken me so easily unless I was completely drained. So how was an untrained caster like Carla able to do it? That just doesn’t make sense.”

Nurse Florence was trying hard to ignore my mounting anger. Her tone remained the same calm, rational tone she always used to deal with people who were not in full emotional control. “You were not exhausted then, but you were distracted…and on some level, I think you wanted it.”

“Are you crazy?” She tried to put her hand on my shoulder, but I brushed it away.

“You loved Eva, but you didn’t see any way you could ever be with her. Carla was attractive, and obviously, as you might say, ‘into you.’ You didn’t really love her, but you thought your life would be a lot easier if you did. How hard would your mind have fought against something you wanted to happen?”

The hell of it was, she was right. I couldn’t admit that yet, though, not even to myself. “If all of this is true, why didn’t you do something about it before?”

“At first I wasn’t sure. After the battle on Samhain, all of us had magic residue all over us. I was suspicious of how fast your relationship with Carla progressed, but I also thought it might be partly guilt. As the days passed, and I could still feel foreign magic on you, I became more certain, but I made the mistake of thinking maybe you were better off that way. You were right; at least in the short term, your relationship with Eva couldn’t go anywhere. With Carla there was a chance, at least there was if we could cure her. If we hadn’t been able to, I would have told you the truth and let you choose what to do about it.”

“But you didn’t give me a choice! You knew this process would make me stop loving Carla, and you did it anyway!”

“You were hardly in a fit state to be asked, Tal. At that point, I doubt you would even have known who Carla was.”

I stared at her, the accusation plain in my eyes.

“Yes, Tal, I knew that if our plan worked, your love for Carla would fall in the same way your love for Alcina would. I lied to the others, Tal, to protect the friendship among you, Dan, and Eva. Even amplified, there’s no way a crush you had four years ago would have broken the spell. The spell broke because you have feelings for Eva now. Your artificial feelings for Carla masked your real ones for Eva, but they were still there. And thank God they were, or you might have been enthralled by Alcina forever.”

And that’s when I realized just how far in hell I really was. I had been so focused on losing my feelings for Carla that I hadn’t even thought about Eva, but Nurse Florence was right. When I did think about Eva, I thought immediately about making love to her, and not just because she was so beautiful that every straight guy who saw her wanted to do her. No, I could have handled a physical attraction. Damn, if not I would have taken that gorgeous faerie woman up on her offer. No, my feelings were not just physical. I wanted to make love with Eva because I loved her; I loved her every bit as intensely as I had loved her for the last four years. I loved her even knowing that the only way to be with her was to betray Dan, an idea that hadn’t been quite so terrible when he was hostile to me, but now that our friendship had been restored, now that we were comrades in arms? No, I could never do that. So where did that leave me? The girl I could have I didn’t love at all. The brand of the girl I could never have was seared into my heart, and until that wound healed, I didn’t see how I could ever love another.