Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (6 page)

“But,” said the voice in a firmer tone, “make no mistake. There will be others who will seek to harm you. Some of them will be human. Evil, but human. The day will come when you will shed another man’s blood.”

“NO!” I almost shouted. “I don’t think I can, and I don’t know if I would even if I could. Today I let my instincts, and maybe my past selves, take over a little. But I am still me, and the person I am is not a killer.”

“Would you kill if it were the only way to save Stan? Or your parents?” Nice. Now I had visions of Stan with his guts ripped out, of my parents lying in pools of their own blood.

“If, as you say, others will try to kill me, then shouldn’t I get as far away from people like Stan and my parents as I can?”

“NO!” This time it was the voice that nearly shouted. “If you leave now, anyone pursuing you will go straight for those you love, as a way of drawing you back. They are actually in less danger with you here than with you gone.”

“Then maybe I should search for a way to separate myself from my past lives. I have thought about that. I bet I could do it if I put my mind to it.”

“Tal,” said the voice calmly, almost sympathetically. “You have already carried this burden for four years, and it isn’t fair that it has come upon you so early in your life or that it has already asked so much of you, but there is no help for that now. I doubt you can go back to being as you were, but if you did somehow succeed, that would just leave you defenseless. Those who would have come after you will still come after you regardless. Nothing you can do now will alter that.”

Despite myself, I let out a little sob. The numbness had begun to fade, and now to the reality of today’s kill was added the certainty of more and more and more. Kill or die yourself. Kill or let your family die.

You out there! Yeah, you, the one snickering about what a big wimp I am. I’ll be happy to trade lives with you. Then we’ll see who the wimp is.

“Tal,” said the voice again, somewhat more insistently, since I hadn’t responded to its last statement, “time is short. Yes, you made a mistake today. You ran after a shifter with no real plan. Yet, at a great disadvantage, you still won. The most powerful of your previous selves, the one you call Taliesin 1, would have lost and paid for it with his life under the exact same circumstances.”

Okay, this was the wrong time for me to massage my ego, but I had to know what the voice meant. “What do you mean?”

“Taliesin 1 would have died because it would never have occurred to him to redirect the fire from White Hilt in the way you did. You are not as at home on a battlefield as he would have been, yet even under the pressure of the battlefield you thought your way out of certain death. Your mind, with its modern experiences, can conceive of things Taliesin 1 could not, like lasers, for example. That is your strength. Develop that strength. And stop trying to do everything yourself. Dan will come if you call; he won’t remember most of the time, but he and I made a deal that binds him to help you in time of need. However, he is just the beginning. Arthur had his knights of the round table. Urien of Rheged, the master of Taliesin 2, was never without allies. Find people you can trust, and make a fellowship of your own. Much will be asked of you, but to stand alone will never be asked of you.”

“But the earlier Taliesins were subordinate to people like Arthur and Urien.”

The voice sighed at that. “You may find an Arthur one day, but the ways of the world are different now. A good man cannot wait for someone else to lead; sometimes he has to lead himself. Now you must go.”

“Wait! How can I contact you if I need to?”

“I will contact you if need be, perhaps through Dan, perhaps through someone else.” Abruptly, Dan’s eyes came back to life, and he glanced down at his watch.

“You got about two minutes, Tal. Maybe you should go see the nurse and just go home for the rest of the day.”

“Oh, my God! What about the body in the woods?” Yeah, I should have asked the voice that, but my mind was working very sluggishly.

“Already gone,” said Dan as matter-of-factly as if he were discussing the football team’s prospects in the upcoming game. “Ashes.
Pwca
bodies disintegrate pretty rapidly after death.” I didn’t even ask how he knew that. What would have been the point?

I got up and started to reach for my old clothes.

“I’ll find some place to toss them. They’re ruined; you’ll never get all that blood out.”

I shook Dan’s hand, thanked him again, and left just quickly enough to avoid the period 3 students coming in to shower after PE. I took his advice and went home. God, how much I longed to sleep. But as I walked home, I knew my mind was trying to adjust to a life changing far, far too rapidly.

Before yesterday, life had seemed simple—well, as simple as anyone’s life could be if that person remembered all his past lives. There were even moments when I thought of my abilities as being at least a little cool. Then Stan got too close to my secret, inadvertently breaking the
tynged
and unleashing all that had followed. I now knew that supernatural creatures were not a thing of the past; indeed, the world seemed suddenly infested with them, and a good portion of them seemed out to get me, for reasons that were not immediately apparent. I had one ally, though, an ally whose power over the human mind made mine seem puny in comparison. Yes, I could manipulate people, but I could never have gotten Dan, arguably my nemesis at school, to act like my best friend, especially for such a long period of time. That kind of work required a mojo far, far beyond what I had. But why would such a powerful…being need to remain in the shadows? And how did so many creatures, both good and evil, suddenly know every little detail about me? The
pwca
had known all about my interaction with Stan the night before, as well as enough of Stan’s personality to play him flawlessly, to say nothing of knowing that I was carrying White Hilt that day. The owner of the mysterious voice knew all about my previous incarnations. Was there any corner of my life, no matter how small, that was truly private anymore? I feared I knew the answer to that one.

I didn’t know whether I entirely trusted the voice yet, but it had one thing right: I needed more allies. Someone I could trust more than anonymous voices or old enemies suddenly turned into friends. When I got home, I let Mom fuss just a bit, then sang her to sleep. Then I paid a call at Stan’s house, put his mother to sleep, and told him everything, every secret, every relevant scrap of information, from the moment I could remember my past lives until today.

CHAPTER 5: LIFE CHANGES

To say that Stan was skeptical would have been a gross understatement. Even though he had proposed the reincarnation idea himself just yesterday, he had done so only because he could not think of any other rational explanation, and perhaps also because one of the students on his science Olympiad team was both scientifically minded and a firm Hindu believer in reincarnation, making the idea seem more respectable to him. But reincarnation was one thing, outright magic quite another. He did me the courtesy of not laughing in my face, though he questioned every detail. He would have made a great investigative reporter, but right now I needed my friend, not an interview.

“Stan, even you have to admit that science can’t explain everything.”

“Yet,” he added pointedly. “That doesn’t mean there is no scientific explanation for those things. It just means we haven’t found it yet.”

I sighed inwardly. I couldn’t really blame Stan for being who he was, and he was a born scientist. What would you expect from someone who finished the highest level high school math and science courses by the end of freshman year and now took special online college courses in both subjects as a result of some deal between UC Santa Barbara and Santa Brígida High School? I bet the powers that be at UC Santa Barbara thought they could recruit Stan and students like him that way; if so, they obviously didn’t know Stan’s parents.

I glanced nervously at my watch. In theory, I could keep his mother asleep for as long as I needed, but his father would be home soon. The more people involved, the more complicated keeping them asleep would become, and I was already feeling spread thin to the point of transparency. At the same time, I didn’t feel as if I could just leave Stan as things were. I wanted, no, I needed him to believe me. Well, there was not too much question about the best way to shake that skepticism.

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ What would science have to say about this?” With that, I pulled out White Hilt, realizing with a sickening jolt that I had forgotten to clean the blood off. The blood… No, I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted by anything. I grasped the hilt firmly, and the blade was engulfed in flames.

Stan’s eyes widened in shock, and he pulled back as far as he could.

“Tal, damn, are you trying to burn my house down?!” I hadn’t meant to frighten him, but I had never seen him look so scared. I got another jolt when I realized his face looked almost like that of the
pwca
as it had been burning. I willed the blade to return to normal, and it did.

“What the hell!” exclaimed Stan, his voice shaking in a way that suggested he might be close to tears. Okay, so I had picked the wrong demonstration.

“Are you crazy? We could both have been burned.”

“Stan, we were never in any danger, I swear,” I said patiently. “You have been the scientist all afternoon. I need you to be the scientist again. Take the sword yourself.” I held it out to him, and at first I thought he would refuse, but curiosity got the better of him, and he grasped the hilt, moving the blade slowly in his direction and looking at it carefully. Then he smelled it.

“I don’t smell anything combustible.”

“What did you think I did to get it to burn like that, pour gasoline on it? Do you really think I’m nuts? More to the point, do you really think I would do anything to hurt you?”

“Well, no, but…”

“No buts. Stan, you can see for yourself there is no physical reason for the sword to burst into flames like that. It just does when it is in the right hands.”

Stan spent a good twenty minutes examining the sword, making me more and more nervous about the time. My dad would be home soon, too, and he would find my mom asleep and be unable to wake her. I needed to get back home.

Finally, he handed the sword back to me. “Do it again,” he said hoarsely, almost like a command.

“Are you sure?”

“Do it again,” he said in a voice marginally more like his normal one. I held up the sword, and once more it burst into flames.

Stan clearly longed to be in a lab, but he made do with what observations he could make, viewing the sword from all angles, putting his hand close enough to feel the heat, that kind of thing.

“Show me how you can reshape the flame.” I obliged, causing the flame to jut up toward the ceiling, though I was careful to make sure it didn’t actually get too close.

“Well, I can’t explain it. Will you let me take it to a friend at UC Santa Barbara?”

At that I snapped. “Stan, I came here to share something important with my friend, not be a lab rat.” The intensity of my tone made him cringe away from me. “Dude, I almost died today. And I could be dead tomorrow. I need you to be my friend, Stan, not make me your project for the science fair.” To my horror, I realized I was crying again, tears of exhaustion and frustration, tears of fear that I might lose his friendship. Stan started crying too, but I wasn’t at first sure if he wept because he felt for me or because he thought he was alone with a dangerous lunatic. Then he hugged me, and for a few awkward moments I wept in his arms as his body shook with his own weeping.

Eventually we both pulled ourselves together. “I’m sorry, Tal, I’m so, so sorry for not just believing you.”

“Hell, Stan, I was there, and I hardly believe it myself. But now that you know the truth, maybe you can help me.”

“Sure. Anything. What kind of help do you need?”

I wouldn’t have thought it possible for such a simple question to flumox me, but it did. What exactly did I want from Stan? I had to suppress a snicker as I visualized Stan stabbing a shifter with his protractor. As potential knights of the round table went, Stan was definitely going to be combat challenged.

“Ah, I think I know,” he said thoughtfully. You had to give the kid credit for resilience. Just a few minutes ago his emotions had been riding roughshod over him. Now he was back in control and evidently several steps ahead of me.

“Yes, I know exactly what to do.”

Well, you tell me, and we’ll both know.

“Didn’t that voice tell you that your strength was being able to conceptualize things differently from the way your ancestors did, and so come up with new solutions?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“So what advantage does that give you that your ancestors didn’t have?” I started to formulate an answer, but the question was evidently rhetorical, since Stan continued almost immediately. “The voice referred to lasers. Your ancestors didn’t have to deal with modern technology. It wasn’t part of their worldview, but it is part of yours. Well, a little anyway…”

“Is that a cheap shot about my computer skills?”

“Pretty much. Anyway, you can do a lot, but can you, let’s say, erase a computer hard drive by singing to the computer?”

“I have never tried.”

“Well, let’s try, then.” Stan got out of bed and walked over to his desk. His computer, sleek, fast, and new as hell, booted up quickly. “I just made a backup earlier today.”

That’s sure not what I what have been doing on a “sick” day, but Stan really had been sick.

“Okay, go ahead and erase the hard drive,” Stan continued. I tried for a while, but aside from entertaining Stan, who enjoyed listening to me sing in Welsh, I couldn’t get as much as a momentary screen flicker from his computer, much less erase its hard drive.

Stan shook his head after a while. “This isn’t working. And yet you can manipulate the human brain, a far more sophisticated computer than this.”