Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (37 page)

Given the fact that Samhain had made Eva and me comrades in arms, she got out of bed, quite unselfconscious about being in her satiny-looking nightgown that some guys at school would have given their left arm to see her in. Her reaction would have been quite different if she had been able to read my mind. I guess it was fortunate so few people really possessed that ability.

She quickly threw on a fairly heavy looking green robe, I re-opened the portal, took her in my arms, and guided her through it. Contrary to what you might think, putting my arms around her was necessary, since we would probably be over water in Alcina’s realm, and I would need to fly straight up as soon as we reached that side of the portal.

Just as I thought, I did have to fly up to avoid sinking into the ocean. I felt Eva’s soft warmth against me and longed to make that flight last forever—but the others were waiting, and we might have hard work ahead of us. I linked my mind to Goleta Beach again, opened up another portal, and sailed through it.

I set Eva gently down on the grass near the pier and led her over to where Dan was still being held unconscious. By now the shimmering light of Khalid’s wish had faded completely.

“Good! You’re here,” said Vanora. “We had more power at our command when we broke the same spell on Taliesin, but I think Alcina was not able to establish as effective a hold on Dan…because of the distance, and the fact that she wasn’t making eye contact.” The last part gave me the odd feeling that she was actually sparing me embarrassment for having been so completely and quickly controlled. She was being…almost human.

Since I wasn’t really aware of the preparations they had done last time, Vanora and Nurse Florence organized everyone. Basically, Eva would kiss Dan to remind him of his true love. We three casters would blend her love with the friendship of everyone else, amplify it as much as possible, and hit Dan with it. An ordinary love spell wouldn’t require that much magic to beat, but Alcina’s specially crafted version was about the most powerful one around.

We moved Dan from the dock to the grass so that we could form a ring around him, with Dan and Eva in the center. Vanora and Nurse Florence established the connections among all of our minds, we let our emotions flow, I sang to make our magic more potent, and then we channeled all that raw power into Eva. Without being told, she knew the moment had come for her kiss. She bent over, kissed Dan tenderly on the lips, and her love swept through him like a flash flood, washing away the stagnant muck of Alcina’s evil and restoring Dan’s mind to normal.

Dan sat up, looking totally embarrassed and stuttering apologies for what he had done under Alcina’s influence.

“I’ve been there, Dan,” I said quickly, helping him to his feet. “You couldn’t have stopped what you were doing.”

“I could have hurt someone, even killed someone,” Dan protested.

“But you didn’t,” replied Carlos. “We’re all OK, and now you’re OK. Life is too short for guilt trips.”

“That sounds like excellent advice,” said Nurse Florence.

We heard rumbling, and, looking across the parking lot, we could see Vanora’s security force arriving on the scene. Well, better late than never.

“Hey, it’s like four-thirty in the morning,” said Carlos. “Where are we going to say we were this time? A pajama party at Carrie Winn’s place?”

“After Stan called me, I made sure your parents would sleep until morning,” replied Nurse Florence. “With any luck, they won’t even know you were gone.”

“Good job!” I said. “Let me just make sure Dan is all right, and we can be on our way.” To my surprise, Dan stiffened, as if in fear of my getting into his mind.

“Dan, you know I’m not going to go poking around unnecessarily. I just want to make sure there are no lingering traces of Alcina’s control.”

“Wise precaution under the circumstances,” agreed Vanora.

Dan seemed to relax a bit. “Of course, Tal, I guess you have to. Let’s make it quick, though.”

I put my hand on his arm and let myself gently enter his mind. It took me a few minutes to be sure; this was not a job I could afford to rush. Finally, though, I convinced myself that there was no alien force left in his mind. Well, except…

Except there was some kind of darkness, nowhere near the surface, and seemingly unconnected to Alcina’s magic. Nurse Florence had mentioned something similar before around the time of the boxing match. Dan had seemed unreasonable then, vengeful against Stan as a result of a little fling Eva had faked when she was angry with Dan. A stressful time, to be sure, but Dan hadn’t acted like himself at all. What was it Nurse Florence had said? Something simple, like “There is a darkness in him.” At the time she wasn’t sure if the darkness was a product of hostile magic or not, but she figured that at the very least an enemy could exploit it.

Once I had gotten Dan, Stan and I all back together as friends, Dan had started acting like his old self, and I had forgotten the whole thing. But tonight he had been fighting to kill, his violent response to Alcina’s commands much different from what mine had been. Somehow that darkness within had played a role in making him the berserker who nearly made Gordy and Carlos into hamburger—would have, in fact, but for David’s intervention.

When Alcina controlled me, I hadn’t known who my friends were and certainly fought some of them, but I never entertained the idea of using deadly force. Hell, I would have if Alcina had directly ordered it, probably, but I was pretty sure Dan was acting without any direct kill orders.

Talk to Nurse Florence about it! Don’t try to fix it yourself on impulse.

I knew I should do exactly what part of me was thinking. Besides, I wasn’t in the habit of probing around more than necessary in my friends’ minds.

Still, if that darkness was the product of some external force operating on Dan, it wouldn’t hurt to figure out what it was. The presence of an alien force all that time suggested a currently unknown enemy, someone who had been around as long as Ceridwen had been getting ready to kill me, maybe even before. Didn’t that possibility demand some quick investigating? On the other hand, if the darkness was somehow an inherent part of his mind, I could easily withdraw and discuss the problem with him later.

My mind slid toward the darkness, but the thing had a thick skin, and my gentle probe bounced off of it. I couldn’t remember seeing anything quite like this in anyone else’s mind, but that didn’t prove it wasn’t natural in Dan’s. Again I probed, this time somewhat more forcefully, and again I was repulsed. Either magic was involved, or this part of his mind was something that Dan himself wanted desperately to hide.

Yeah, I know—I should have backed off, but I had the idea that I was probably dealing with hostile magic, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it would work toward some evil purpose. Perhaps it would even kill Dan. How could I risk my friend’s life over squeamishness about probing too deeply? Surely he would understand.

Gently but firmly, I turned all my strength toward piercing the darkness’s defenses, and this time they cracked before me.

God! If I had one do-over for my life up to that moment, I would use it to make myself back off before it was too late.

Within the darkness, I saw in searing clarity the memories that Dan was trying to keep under lock and key, memories of four years ago. I saw him convincing Eva to stop visiting me. Yeah, my condition had been bad enough in real life, but here was Dan, luridly exaggerating it, making me seem hopeless, making me seem like someone who would just drag Eva down with me. The memory was so hauntingly real I could even look into Eva’s eyes and see her heart breaking as he went on with his malicious fictions.

I also saw scenes of Dan poisoning her parents against me. When I got out much faster than his stories had suggested was possible, he worked on Eva again, convincing her that I was not as well as I seemed, that I was on a pharmacy full of meds just to seem vaguely normal, that I could go over the edge at any time. My changes in interests probably lent just enough color to what Dan was saying to make his stories seem more plausible. Then he added the finishing touch, just for good measure: he said I no longer loved Eva, didn’t really remember our relationship in fact, and when Dan had tried to remind me, I had become very upset and had another relapse. “If you really care about him, Eva,” I could hear him saying, “you will leave him alone. If he has any hope of becoming more stable, we can’t afford to upset him again.”

How could Eva have believed all that trash? I had to remind myself that she was twelve at that point, just as I was, and Dan was the sagacious thirteen-year-old—and, next to Stan, my best friend. Yeah, she believed him because of how close to me he was! And all the time he was stabbing me in the back; he was twisting the knife deeper and deeper. Stan was staying in the hospital until someone physically removed him, and Dan, my other best friend, where was he? Stealing my girlfriend, that’s where! Using her love for me to make sure she stayed away from me! You would think she would have realized he was lying when she found out the truth about my situation, but that happened four years later, and somehow she didn’t make the connection.

Now so many things made sense. When Nurse Florence had dream-walked him while vetting him as a possible ally for me, what she had seen had convinced her that he felt betrayed by me, that when I abandoned common activities like soccer that we used to do together, I was abandoning him. I had no doubt that was what he told himself on days when he couldn’t look himself in the mirror. He was somehow twisting the whole thing around in his head, making it my fault, disliking me as a pathetic attempt to cover the cesspool of guilt at the core of his soul. That also explained his outbursts when he thought Stan was stealing Eva. Yeah, everything was as clear as a bloody, bloody auto accident, but not one I was watching. No, it was my guts strewn all over the freeway.

Dan saw the change in my eyes, in my face, even before I said anything. I wasn’t looking in a mirror at that moment, so I don’t exactly know what friendship dying looks like, but I bet Dan could tell me—if I didn’t rip out his tongue first!

“Tal,” he said shakily.

“You bastard!” I shouted. “All these years I thought…I didn’t understand what had happened. I thought it was about me. And all this time it was you!”

“Tal, what’s wrong?” asked Nurse Florence.

My response was to punch Dan as hard as I could in his handsome, all-American-boy face. He reeled backward, and everyone was in motion, either to support him or to grab me.

“What are you doing, man?” asked Gordy. By now he and Shar had my arms, though I was struggling mightily against them.

“What am I doing? You really want to know what’s going on? Here, let me show you!”

“Tal, no!” shouted Dan. Despite the volume, there was a note of begging in his voice. I ignored it. I still had the images of Dan’s betrayal in my head. It was child’s play to blast them into everyone else’s minds, together with enough of my hospital experience to reveal how much he had lied and to show that, far from having any insight into my condition or even any excuse for misunderstanding it, he had never set foot in the hospital at all.

The restraining hands dropped away from me. Everyone looked stunned, some even as blank as zombies, but once what I had showed them soaked in, surely they would all turn on Dan. He had tried to isolate me, and now he would be the one who would be isolated. But I wasn’t through yet. Oh no, not by a long shot!

“You used the worst thing that ever happened to me, Dan! You exploited it. You profited from it. I want you to know how I was feeling then. Crazy, huh? Full of meds, huh? You have no idea. But you will, my friend, you will!” I raised my left hand, now cloaked in bloody red light. “You will know it exactly.”

I could see Dan cringing away, but he could never run fast enough to outrun the awakening spell.

“Tal, you mustn’t!” exclaimed Nurse Florence. I could feel Shar a half a second from knocking me down when I dropped my hand.

“No, Dan, I’m not really going to do that to you. Destroying lives is your specialty, not mine.”

I could tell Dan wanted to say something, but the human brain can only process so much so fast, and his was clearly overloaded. Well, I couldn’t imagine anything he could say that would be worth hearing ever again. However, nobody else jumped in either, leading to an awkward silence of epic proportions.

Vanora recovered first and started barking orders at the security men, who had frozen in the middle of moving Morgan and Alcina into two of the nearby vans. Nurse Florence pulled herself together then, gave me a quick shot of healing, and then went to heal Dan’s more extensively damaged face. I could hardly believe that, but I had to remind myself she was a healer and would probably have done the same for Morgan if necessary.

By that point I was beginning to focus on Eva, whose expression was such a mix of guilt, revulsion and longing that it was effectively unreadable. Angry as I was with Dan, I was not so out of control that I would invade her mind. She looked at Dan then, and I could read the condemnation in her eyes, and so could he. He did not even attempt to explain himself, perhaps still tongue-tied. But what could he have said, really?

Then she looked at me. I don’t really know what I was expecting, maybe a lingering embrace and roll credits, standard movie happy ending. That was not what I got. I could tell she was feeling guilt for having fallen for Dan’s stories and for not realizing, even when she learned more of the truth, that Dan had lied to her. That was all I could tell with certainty. I did not see old love rekindled. I did see a tear slide down her cheek, then another, then another. I think she whispered, “Sorry!” to me, and then she turned away, moving toward the parking lot. I wanted to follow her, but David unexpectedly blocked my path when I tried to move in that direction.