Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (22 page)

“I…don’t…want…this!” I forced the words out.

“Oh, dear,” said Ms. Winn, in Eva’s voice. “If you want me to believe that, you really need to wear looser fitting pants.”

By now I was bright red. She was using embarrassment to keep me off balance, and it was working. Besides, she still looked exactly like Eva. I could feel my resistance eroding by the second. I would bed her if I stayed. And I would lose myself in the process.

I managed to rip myself back one step, two steps, turn toward the door. Somehow, Ms. Winn had locked it during the early part of our conversation.

I drew White Hilt. The fire on the blade was less than that in my heart, but it would suffice.

“Wait!” shouted Ms. Winn, suddenly herself again, to my mingled infinite relief and infinite frustration. “There’s no need to go hacking through my door. Taliesin, I was just trying to give you what I thought you needed—and wanted. I didn’t mean to upset you or frighten you. I am your friend, and your protector. If you wish, we will never discuss this subject again. And I’ll just unlock the door. No need for White Hilt tonight.” She brushed past me, produced a key from somewhere, and, good as her word, unlocked the door. I let White Hilt burn out and put it back in its scabbard.

“Taliesin,” she said quietly. I think she was going to pat me on the shoulder but thought better of it. “I am sorry. I have overstepped; I know that now. Do you forgive me?”

I nodded, though in truth I was the furthest thing from forgiving her.

You see, I had realized a fourth thing about Carrie Winn.

She was the enemy.

I know some of you think I must have all kinds of sexual hang-ups, and that’s why I recoiled so hard, perhaps blaming Ms. Winn for my own neuroses. Nonsense! Would any of you really settle for someone who just looked like the one you loved, but wasn’t really that person, was in fact a very different person that you most profoundly did not want to have sex with? If so, which one of us is really the sick one?

I put on the most emotionally neutral facade I could manage. I even tried to joke a little with her. She walked me down to the ballroom, I had a couple of dances for appearance’s sake, and, just when I figured I would scream if I had to stay any longer, the evening ended. In fact, Ms. Winn, in what I was now sure was a phony effort to seem sensitive, sent everyone home at almost exactly the moment when I desperately wanted to be gone.

On the way home Stan babbled non-stop about how great the party was. I didn’t have the heart to tell him all was not as it seemed. Tomorrow would be soon enough for that.

Tomorrow would be a quite a day for conversation.

CHAPTER 13: MAKING PLANS

I got through my parents grilling me about the party—barely. I wished I could have erased the memory of Ms. Winn’s effort to seduce me and truly joined their enthusiasm. From their point of view, to be among the few high school students invited into Awen was yet another sign I was destined for success, and I didn’t begrudge them their excitement about it. Nonetheless, the whole conversation gave me a headache, and having to conceal it from them only made it worse.

By the time breakfast was over, I was daydreaming about what life would have been like without my sudden “awakening” at age twelve. My grades wouldn’t have been as good, my band would still have been terrible, but I would have been friends with Dan without all this complicated weirdness to wade through, Eva would still have been my girlfriend, and the two of us would doubtless have been going to tonight’s homecoming dance together, losing ourselves in the music and not having a care in the world. Most important, I would not have to worry what mythological monster I was going to have to tackle next, or what new strategy Ms. Winn was going to use to threaten me, or whether or not I was going to go over to meet Stan and find his bloody corpse in the gutter.

Well, enough feeling sorry for myself for one day! Apparently, I was stuck with the life I had, for better or worse, and the old one was as dead as I would be if I didn’t figure out a way to play the hand fate had dealt me.

After school I had a meeting with Nurse Florence and finally told who my enemy really was. To say that she was upset with me for not having talked to her earlier would have been a huge understatement.

“Do you have a death wish?” she asked in a tone of voice that cut into me with her disappointment.

“What was I supposed to do?” I countered defensively. “Either one of you could have been the enemy, but neither one of you ever mentioned the other. Suppose I had guessed wrong and told the enemy about my ally. Wouldn’t that have been worse?”

“I suppose,” she conceded. “But how could you have not known, after seeing so much of me?”

Because I was trying not to be superficial and assume that the hot chick had to be the good one.

“You have done a lot, especially helping to rescue Stan, but wouldn’t a clever enemy have tried to lull me into a false sense of security? And Ms. Winn wasn’t exactly acting like the spawn of Satan, well, at least until last night.”

And that brought us to the truly awkward part of the discussion. I felt I needed to tell Nurse Florence about the attempted seduction, but that’s a pretty awkward topic for a teenage guy to take up with a woman. My dad would have been a better choice—if he would have believed a word of it. Fortunately, Nurse Florence knew exactly what to say to keep me from feeling completely awkward, and she even managed not to call attention to my blushing. She did, however, want to discuss Winn’s goals, a topic that
did
make me feel more awkward.

“I doubt that someone like Carrie Winn would do such a thing unless it served some purpose in her mind. Perhaps we can figure out what her purpose is, based on what she has been up to lately.”

“I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “It seems pretty pointless to me.”

“Think, Tal. There are only a finite number of possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Could she conceivably want a child by you?”

I almost fell off the chair. “What for? She certainly couldn’t claim me as the father, since I’m underage. Why would a public figure like Carrie Winn want to mother an illegitimate child?”

“There could be something about your bloodline…but I agree, if she wants to keep her public image, she would be risking a lot—and I hear she is gearing up for a campaign for the state senate.” I thought about all the posturing on the night Stan was rescued. So Carrie Winn used the situation to generate more favorable political buzz.

“If we assume the political career is not just a ruse of some kind, we can safely rule out trying to have you get her pregnant. Well, what else could she have to gain?”

“Keep me off balance, maybe. The offer certainly had that effect, though I had a strong feeling she wanted me to accept it. And she seemed genuinely surprised by that refusal.”

“Your instincts usually seem to be good, so let’s go with that for a moment. She wants sex with you, but not a child by you? What’s the point?”

“It must be my irresistible charm,” I quipped, struggling to keep a straight face.

“No, seriously.”

“Well,” I said, trying to come up with a decent answer to that question and failing, “maybe she has something in mind like in the movie
Scream
. The idea there was that virgins were more likely to survive.”

“That’s the best you can do? A horror movie? Well, if you will recall, in many early cultures, the virgins were the ones who got sacrificed.”

“So she doesn’t intend me as a human sacrifice? Well, let’s celebrate.”

“I can do without the sarcasm, thanks anyway. Maybe we should go back further for cultural antecedents.”

“I know!” I said, thinking back to my much earlier lives. “She wants to ruin me for a grail quest. Galahad was a
virgin
, if I recall.” Now it was Nurse Florence’s turn to try to keep a straight face.

“That theory would work a lot better if we had any realistic chance of mounting a grail quest at this point, but it is hard to see how she could be too afraid of that. No, I was thinking of Circe in the
Odyssey
. Remember that if she had taken Odysseus to bed without the special protection Hermes arranged for him, he would have been lost.” I thought a little about the analogy, chewed my lip a bit, and realized this was the best theory we had.

“Yeah, the situation could have been very threatening, I guess, but why does Carrie Winn care about me one way or the other? What makes me so special that she would have to lure me to bed in the first place?”

“That is the right question, for sure. Why does Carrie Winn, who has pretty substantial wealth and power, feel she has to meddle with a sixteen-year-old? Sure, she knows who you are, I mean your previous lives, but so what? You haven’t shown any inclination to attack her.”

“So we end up where we started, with a lot of questions and precious few answers,” I said glumly.

“No, we aren’t exactly at square one. The reason she wants you does lie somewhere in your identity. She wants something from one of your previous lives, or she wants to use your abilities for her own purposes, or at least make sure you are neutralized as a possible enemy, but I’d say the last is the least likely. Had she really just wanted you out of the way, surely she could have just killed you.”

“Maybe that little unplanned jaunt into Annwn was an attempt at just that.”

Nurse Florence leaned forward a little in her chair. “That could be, I suppose, but someone like Winn could easily have dispatched you in a less spectacular way, like having that
pwca
you thought was Stan get the drop on you. She clearly knew who you were some weeks before you knew who she was, and at that point you were much weaker than you are now. No, if she didn’t strike then, simple murder is not what’s on her mind.”

“Perhaps I’ll get a better idea on Halloween. She’s asked the Bards to play at another big party she’s throwing then.”

Nurse Florence’s jaw dropped. “You aren’t thinking about going, are you? And on Samhain, the most dangerous possible time?”

“I don’t see how we are ever going to know what she’s up to unless we give her another chance to show her hand,” I said in the best reasonable tone I could manage.

“Listen, Cowboy, you aren’t getting near Awen again if I have to tie you up and throw you in some little corner of Annwn.”

“You said yourself she wasn’t trying to just kill me.”

“That doesn’t mean she won’t if conditions change, such as if you figure out whatever her plan is and get in her way, or even slip and reveal to her somehow that you know she is your enemy.”

“Whereas, suddenly having nothing to do with her won’t tip her off at all. Look, I’m not thrilled about this any more than you are, but if I suddenly seem hostile, or even aloof, that could be far worse than playing along, and you know it.”

Nurse Florence sighed and gave me a worried smile. “I admit you have a point. But the more time you spend with her, the greater the danger. And what about your other band members? Do you really want to put them in danger?”

“I’d have to magic them to stop them from going at this point. Anyway, lots of other people will be there. The press will be there. Carrie Winn can hardly afford to do something noticeably violent with so many potential witnesses.”

“I suppose you have a point there also. Well, if your mind is made up, I will help you—but I still won’t let you back over there until after you complete some homework I’m going to give you.”

I wrinkled my nose disdainfully. “Just what I need.”

“No, I’m serious. Right now she knows far, far more about you than we know about her. Going into her lair blind again is too dangerous. I’m willing to work up some additional magic defenses for you, but you must do your part, with Stan’s help, if you like, and gather what information you can.

“First, you need to try to figure out who Carrie Winn is.”

“I thought that was pretty obvious.”

“No, her public facade is obvious enough, but who is she really? She seems to possess enormous magical power. Mortals with that kind of punch don’t exactly grow on trees in this era. Is she a reincarnation of some past power, as you are, or is she someone who just lived straight through, as Morgan seems to have? Is she even human? I don’t see any signs of faerie blood, but she could hide them easily enough.”

“You are not exactly talking about a simple Google search, you know.”

“No, but she seems to employ a veritable army from what you have told me. I’m not just talking about her security. She has drivers, maids, gardeners, cooks, and many others. They all live somewhere. At least some of them must have family, friends, people they talk to. I have never heard any particular gossip about Carrie Winn, but someone, sometime, must have seen or heard something we can use, perhaps something they attached no particular significance to.”

I realized how tense I was when a knock on the door made me jump. Stan stuck his head in.

“Is this a private party, or can anyone join?”

“Sure!” said Nurse Florence. “Come on in. This conversation concerns you, too.”

She quickly filled Stan in on what she wanted me to do.

“Would it help if we could get a list of all her local employees?”

“Absolutely!” replied Nurse Florence quickly. “You have an idea.”

“Sure. I designed the website for Winn Development Company, and they want me to do some updating this week. I’ll be sitting at a computer tied directly to the office server. I’m willing to bet a simple employee list isn’t going to have much security around it, so for sure I can get all the company employees. But I think I remember the office being networked with her house. Her home employees are probably not part of the company—though they could be, since it’s privately owned, not publicly traded—but we might just luck out.”

“Way too dangerous!” I said, shaking my head emphatically.

“I’ll be safe,” said Stan, with a little smile. “I’m not the one whose bones she wants to jump.” I blushed despite myself, but I was not about to back down.

“If you’re caught…”

“Carrie Winn hasn’t even been in the office most of the time when I was working before. I heard she doesn’t come in much, anymore—she does most of her work from home, another pretty good indication she could have a connection to the work server. And I doubt every single employee she has is evil, much less some kind of monster.”