Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) (8 page)

For Stan the experience was practically life-changing. A lot of the players offered him tips during his workout, complimented him on his efforts, and made small talk of a kind normally reserved for team members. It was the most sustained positive attention Stan had ever gotten from jocks in his life, not counting me, and it was clear that the whole experience was doing wonders for his self-esteem, just as I knew it would. But the workouts were just the beginning. High school society is like a complicated ecosystem, and our interaction with the team changed our relationship to the rest of that system. Sometimes the players hung out with us outside of workouts. Sometimes we had lunch with them before practice. Rapidly our social status soared far above its earlier position. I was used to being something of a loner, except for Stan, and so I didn’t really care…oh, who am I kidding? I loved it, I loved it just as much as Stan did, if only because being part of the football clique gave me times during the week when I could forget about whatever diabolical forces were hiding just out of sight, waiting to pounce on me.

Stan liked our changed circumstances for a completely different reason. He put so much effort into running with me and weight training with the football team that it wasn’t long before he started looking more muscular. Not that he was ripped, or anything—that would take months and months, if it happened at all. Not all guys can build muscle that way. But he was clearly getting some definition; his arms and legs looked less like match sticks, and his chest had begun to make his shirts look a little too tight. As if on cue, puberty started giving him some breaks. In just a few weeks, his voice got decidedly less squeaky, and he began a growth spurt that made him seem, if not like a junior, then at least like a sophomore.

Imagine my surprise to overhear two cheerleaders talking about “the little cutie,” and then realize that they were talking about Stan!

“That’s my boy,” I said to myself, and walked off whistling, not for some magic purpose, but just because I felt like it, something I hadn’t done since I was twelve.

As for me, I knew I was much more combat-ready now. I also knew that my rise to social prominence made me a more desirable catch, and that I even had a potential choice of girlfriends. Sure, their attraction might be somewhat superficial. I was, after all, the same person I had been when those girls hadn’t really known I was alive—a little more muscle and a different rung on the social ladder hadn’t changed that—but, when all is said and done, sixteen-year-old guys, with or without memories of a thousand prior lifetimes, aren’t necessarily looking for spiritual fulfillment in a relationship. They are, almost invariably, looking for…oh, let’s just be honest, sex. Now I would like to think that wasn’t all I was looking for—I’m not a complete dog. Nonetheless, I’d be lying if I’d said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. The societies in which my earlier selves had lived had somehow generally avoided trapping people in the weird paradoxes of our society, in which girls are discouraged from having sex and guys are encouraged to have it, by their friends (and sometimes, more covertly, by their fathers) if not by society as a whole. I had always been very careful not to lay that kind of trip on Stan, who had been until just recently too tightly wound anyway. In fact, with his social status changing, I’d actually given him a “wait for the right girl” not-exactly-abstinence-but-pretty-much-the-same-in–the-short-run talk. Stan giggled a little bit over my mixed efforts to give him brotherly advice. I didn’t think he realized how close he was to getting picked up on the female radar, and perhaps it was just as well. I never told him about the cheerleaders. I didn’t want to get his hopes up, or, even worse, make him feel as if he had to do something right away.

Like a rock hitting the surface of a pond and sending out ripples, the changes Stan and I were going through affected others as well. My mom gradually stopped looking at me as if she expected me to break into a million pieces. My dad’s transformation was even more gradual, but I couldn’t remember seeing him happier than the day I told him I was thinking about trying out for soccer. (Truth be told, Dan twisted my arm a little bit on that one, but I was glad he did.) Hell, even Mrs. Schoenbaum loosened up a bit, partly because Stan seemed to be able to take the time to work out and still be the academic star she needed him to be, and partly because the high-priced private college counselor she had hired thought the experience would be good for Stan. (It’s truly amazing how the most mundane advice can sound like the wisdom of Solomon when you are paying big bucks for it.) Anyway, I got the big invite to Rosh Hashanah dinner at Stan’s. For the first time I could remember, Mrs. Schoenbaum didn’t treat me like some juvenile delinquent out to corrupt her son. I made what could have been a serious mistake, though. I joined in a conversation with Stan’s cousins and slipped into Hebrew again without meaning to. But you know what? Nobody noticed.

It was as if I were a member of the family.

September would, in fact, have been the teenage version of bliss, except that I needed to think about more than just all the usual teenage things. That part of my life lay across the surface of a much more complicated reality, masking it but not erasing it. As well as my life seemed to be going, there was still the need for combat readiness in the background. I was taking care of the physical part, but there was also a mystical part. I needed to master all of my abilities, and I hadn’t tried either shifting or entering Annwn, the Otherworld. Depending on who my enemies turned out to be, they might be capable of either—or both. I needed to be able to do whatever a potential adversary could, and as long as I could access some of my abilities only as memories from previous lives, I would not be able to count on them in a battle situation. Then there was the question of getting my magic to interact with modern technology more effectively.

So much to do, so little time to do it—in more ways than one!

CHAPTER 6: PRACTICE IMPERFECT

I confess, I was a little nervous about trying to change into an animal. I must have watched too many werewolf movies as a kid, particularly the ones in which the wolf seems to have to rip itself out of its human form. Even though I could remember the experience from my past lives, and so I knew shifting was really nothing like that, the whole idea still gave me the creeps. As a result, I decided to start with a more familiar subject: Stan. (If the
pwca
could do it, I was sure I could as well.) That whole idea gave Stan the creeps, but he played along, letting me study him for some time.

“Okay,” I said at last, “I’m ready.”

“Let’s get this over with, then,” replied Stan.

I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and began to sing, letting the sound surround me and the magic flow through me. (The singing was not strictly speaking necessary, but I had learned that song made any of my magic workings stronger, and I needed to feel confident in my first shift of this lifetime.)

It took me a few minutes to achieve the right state of mind, but once I did that, I simultaneously felt a momentary, almost electrical jolt throughout my body and heard Stan gasp. I glanced over at the mirror and saw two Stans side by side, though one was wearing baggy clothes that were clearly too big for him.

“Wow!” I said and realized that the voice still sounded like mine.

And that was the biggest problem with shifting into another human form, at least if the purpose were to impersonate that person, as Uther had when he took on the shape of Gorlois to lay with Gorlois’s wife, Ygraine. (Not that I had any such thing in mind, at least outside the realm of fantasy!) Changing was easy enough with a little practice. Changing in such a way that I could fool other people who knew my subject well required a high level of exactitude, which in turn required an almost excruciatingly intense focus. Other forms of magic I tried, from shifting someone’s mood a bit to shifting the weather, seemed like child’s play by comparison. The first time I had Stan’s body right, but not the voice. The second attempt I didn’t get Stan’s curly black hair; I kept my straight dark brown hair instead. The third time the eye color was wrong, a darker brown than it should have been. It took days of practicing concentration before I could do a shift that Stan pronounced satisfactory. To put the transformation to a real test, I changed into some of Stan’s clothes, went downstairs, and fooled his mom. So far, so good.

Next came variations. Could I be basically Stan, but deliberately get one or more characteristics to vary, as the
pwca
had been able to do? I tried taller Stan, buffer Stan, and several other alternate forms, and each one worked. Once I had the basic pattern of a person down, making custom alterations came naturally.

While I was at it, I realized that I could cheat on workouts really easily by just shifting my own body into a more muscular condition. That didn’t seem right to me, but in any case I couldn’t maintain a shift indefinitely, so I still needed to keep my real body in shape. However, adding muscle mass temporarily might be a good gimmick in battle, at least if I were fighting someone much stronger than my natural form. In just a few days, I felt that my combat readiness had improved substantially.

But these successes brought me right back to the need to practice non-human forms. In some ways shifting into an animal form would be easier, unless I had to imitate a specific animal for some reason, like someone’s pet dog, for instance. Then I would need the same precision I would for a human impersonation. Just being a dog, though, as long as I got all the parts in the right places, shouldn’t be hard. Actually, the shift itself was less trouble than basic logistics, like what to do with my clothes before and after a shift. The first time I tried a dog, Stan and I were on a quiet stretch of beach. When we were sure no one was around, I shifted into a rather handsome German shepherd, if I do say so myself. I frolicked in the waves for a while, as some dogs like to do, and fetched a stick for Stan a few times. Stan praised my movements as being very dog-like, at which point it seemed like a good idea to become myself again, but then the reality of the situation hit me: how could I shift back to my normal self without being stark naked on the beach? Even though nobody was around, someone could always appear unexpectedly. I had to shift my German shepherd vocal cords back to a close enough approximation of my own to be able to explain the problem to Stan. He laughed himself silly, but then he laid a beach towel over me so I could change back without inadvertently flashing someone. From then on, most of the animal shifts got practiced in my bedroom or his, not in the open.

My only other problem with shifting was Stan’s tendency to ask too many questions about the process. Once he got over the initial shock that I could actually perform such a feat, the scientist in him took over again, and he wanted me to provide him with all kinds of data. When I changed into him, was my blood type the same as his? Was I the same genetically, or was the resemblance only superficial? If another shifter morphed into me, did that give the shifter all of my other powers? I didn’t really have the answer to any of these questions, but I did give him some data based on my observations during shifts. For instance, assuming I shifted correctly, physical attributes like strength would be the same as the form I shifted into, so that changing into a grizzly bear made me as strong as a grizzly bear. Changing into a fish (which I only tried once) enabled me to breathe under water. Mental attributes stayed the same, so I kept my own intelligence. If I was a dog, I still thought like me. If I was Stan, I still thought like me. Too bad—there would have been times when shifting my brain to his during a math test would have been a real advantage! As far as whether the physical form was the same all the way down to a molecular level, I doubted that, but I could not provide the evidence Stan wanted. Then he would start going on about the equipment he’d like to get to test me with, and I had to remind him that he couldn’t very well make his bedroom into a lab without attracting his parents’ notice. All of this science talk would have been easier to take if I didn’t feel like I had just run a marathon after a series of shifts. Maybe with more practice, shifting would not hit me so hard, but right now it made me feel as if I had donated blood every day for a week. How the
pwca
had managed so much shifting around in such a short period of time was beyond me, but I guessed that
pwcas
, as natural shape shifters, had more innate resistance to the strain of shifting than a human would.

As for visiting Annwn, that wasn’t tiring it all, just impossible. I knew from the memories of Taliesin 1 exactly how to open a doorway into that realm, but every time I tried, I felt as if I were trying to open a door inward, but tons of rock were jammed up against it on the other side, and it wouldn’t budge. I concentrated until I thought my head would split open, I sang until I almost made myself hoarse. Nothing. Stan, who insisted on interpreting Annwn like a parallel world in a science fiction story, hypothesized that conditions had changed in the last 1500 years, that Annwn was now on a different frequency, and all I needed to do was to find the right frequency. Well, if so, that was more easily said than done.

I wasn’t any more successful trying to force my magic to interact with technology. Stan devised all kinds of simple tests for me to practice with, but I couldn’t even perform a single mouse click with magic, no matter how much I concentrated, no matter how much I sang.

Still, if I didn’t have a new arsenal of technological tricks up my sleeve, neither did my enemies, who had been singularly quiet since the
pwca
incident at the beginning of the school year. For that matter, so had my anonymous ally—just a few words of advice from time to time, delivered via Dan. No warnings, no prophecies of doom.

I began to wonder if maybe I wouldn’t end up in the middle of some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil after all. My life would never be entirely normal, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be peaceful—and happy.