Comedy or Tragedy?

A "Hidden Among Yourselves" Teaser

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Have you ever thought about what your life would be like as a movie, particularly what genre it would be? When I was younger, my life seemed to be almost a fairy tale, one that was going to include a scene with me and my girlfriend riding off into the sunset, with a feeling of “happily ever after” hanging in the air.

Yeah, happily ever after. Well, might as well forget the fairy tale. I’d settle for a sit-com. Hell, I’d have sold my soul…uh, scratch that. The way my life had been going, I might just have the opportunity to sell my soul—literally. Better not to tempt fate. Let’s just say I would have given a great deal if my life could be a sit-com, even one in which the hero doesn’t get the girl. I’d even have settled for a pretty dark comedy. On most days, though, I could feel tragedy lurking nearby, a sourceless shadow on a seemingly sunny day—incongruous but mockingly real, nonetheless.

Today, however, I had some hope for comedy when I woke up. Perhaps it was the angel sitting on the edge of my bed, wearing a face oddly like mine but otherwise looking as if he had stepped out of a Renaissance painting. Yeah, he had a blindingly white robe and wings to match. I might have been shocked if I hadn’t seen the same thing so often before.

“Taliesin, today is the day that you forgive Dan Stevens,” the angel announced solemnly, his voice sounding a lot like mine.

They’ll be giving ski reports from hell before that happens, I thought, though not loudly enough for him to hear me.

“Jimmie, quit screwing around!” I tried to sound angry, but I didn’t really feel angry. It wasn’t Jimmie’s fault that he wanted me to resume my friendship with his brother, Dan. Jimmie’s habit of taking the form of an angel and pretending to be my conscience was starting to get on my nerves, however.

“Taliesin!”

“Knock it off!” I ordered, as loudly as I could. My parents might still be in bed, and if so, I didn’t want to wake them, though it was pretty likely Mom was already up.

Jimmie hesitated for a moment, but evidently, I had succeeded in sounding just angry enough to convince him that this was not the time. There was a momentary ripple. He seemed undecided about which form to switch to. Then he took on his nine-year-old form. He really preferred the sixteen-year-old one these days, but he probably figured I couldn’t stay mad at his nine-year-old self. He was right. After all, nine was how old he had been when he died. I had never told him how much it hurt me to see him as a nine-year-old. On the other hand, the sixteen-year-old form looked a lot like Dan, and having a constant reminder of Dan around wasn’t exactly a nonstop thrill ride either.

“I’m sorry, Tal,” he said, his eyes focused on the carpet. “It’s just…well, you know I can’t move on until this fight between you gets settled.”

How could I forget? You bring it up about once every half hour!

“I know, Jimmie. I told you that I’m working on it.”

He nodded but still didn’t meet my eyes. Maybe he was too afraid he would able to see what I was really thinking if he looked into those eyes.

Yeah, I know—I’m a bastard for not forgiving Dan. I was single-handedly keeping Jimmie from being at peace, a fact that someone managed to point out virtually every day. I would have forgiven Dan already…if he hadn’t so completely ruined my life.

I know how melodramatic that sounds, but I promise you, I’m not really a drama king. You be the judge. When Jimmie died, I had been nine and Dan ten, the three of us inseparable. Dan and I had gotten through the loss of Jimmie together, become even more like brothers. Then, after I turned twelve, everybody thought I lost my mind. What really happened was that the witch Ceridwen cast a spell on me that caused me to remember all my previous lives, and it took me some time to pull myself together after that. While I was in the hospital, Dan had convinced my girlfriend, Eva, that I was far worse than I really was, that I would be better off without her, and that her being with me would actually hinder what little chance for recovery I had left. Then, as you might guess, Dan, playing the sympathetic friend, managed to end up with Eva as his girlfriend.

At the time, I had no idea why Dan didn’t visit me in the hospital, or why he cut me off so completely even after I got out. Nor could I figure out why Eva stopped coming and became evasive. I thought she couldn’t handle what had happened to me. What she really couldn’t handle was Dan’s version of what happened, the idea that she might make my situation worse. I was too insecure to push, and so I watched her slip away from me and into Dan’s arms.

A few weeks ago, I found out the truth—and I made sure Eva knew it also. In case you haven’t figured this out yet, Eva was supposed to be my happy-ending girl, the one I ultimately had the fairy tale life with. She broke up with Dan, but she didn’t get back together with me. I couldn’t blame her, really. I knew she couldn’t just flick her emotions on and off like a light switch. But I did blame her a little, despite myself, for writing off her earlier feelings for me as just “puppy love.”

I didn’t know about her, but I was no dog. I knew what I had felt then, and I knew what I felt now—not that anyone else much gave a damn, one way or the other.

Not wanting to rehash the recent past anymore, I convinced Jimmie to go take a walk while I took my morning shower. I bet you expected him to just disappear or something like that. Unfortunately, Jimmie was with me more or less 24-7. Something about me since the awakening of my past lives brought out any latent magic in ordinary people and kept supernaturals like Jimmie operating at full power all the time, so he could maintain his haunting without ever needing to rest. Even more eerie, although he could change shape or become immaterial when he wanted to be, he was solid most of the time and could pass for human without difficulty. I’m sure all the neighborhood ghosts, if there were any, must have envied him.

I guess I should have mentioned earlier who I was. Aside from being the universe’s punching bag lately, I had lived many lives before, hundreds of them. That’s why my awakening had been so traumatic. The human brain was never meant to process that much information, and mine had at first reacted by making each set of memories into its own personality, giving me something like the ultimate case of dissociative personality disorder. I had managed to reintegrate these past-self personalities into my own, but the experience left me radically different in at least one way—with a little effort, I could make use of the memories, and even the skills, of my previous lives.

The most memorable of those lives was Taliesin, my namesake and King Arthur’s bard. Taliesin had helped me rebuild my mind, as well as leaving me his music and his magic, among other things. If I wanted to, I probably could become one of the best musicians in the world. If I wanted to, I could also become a sorcerer powerful enough to rival even Merlin. My, or rather the original Taliesin’s, peculiar origin, particularly his transforming taste from the cauldron of knowledge and his rebirth through the womb of Ceridwen, had left me with an ability to learn unfamiliar magic and even to create completely new magic much faster than anyone could normally do. Taliesin himself had never had the need to use those abilities to the full, but I had been under almost constant attack for the better part of a year, and I had learned how to get maximum mileage out of those talents, mostly because I had no choice.

Are you thinking, “What’s he crying about? Having magic sounds pretty cool.” You know what? I had felt that way myself at times. But let me be clear about one thing: I would give it all up in a second if going back to the original me meant that I could have Eva. I really would!

I got out of the shower feeling marginally better—until I heard a floorboard creak in my bedroom.

Jimmie had promised not to come back until I was ready to go to school. Anyway, he usually didn’t make that board creak, even when he was solid. Mom and Dad didn’t come in without knocking, and if they didn’t get an answer, came in, and discovered I was in the shower, they would have just gone downstairs, at least until I was out of the shower and dressed. Nobody else should have been in the house. No one. And if Mom or Dad had an early morning visitor, that person certainly wouldn’t have been in my bedroom.

The floorboard creaked again.

Ever since Morgan le Fay had been captured and turned over to the appropriate authorities in Annwn, the Welsh name for the Celtic Otherworld, I had gotten sloppy with my security arrangements. While Morgan was still at large, I had the house extremely well protected. A powerful enough spell caster might have been able to break in, but not without my knowing. Spells like that need to be renewed often, though, and I hadn’t been bothering lately.

Now an intruder was in my room, and I was about as poorly set up to defend myself as I could have imagined.

Of course my sword, White Hilt, as well as anything else that could have been useful, was in my bedroom. Not only that, but since the bathroom was my own and was entered through my bedroom, not through a hallway, I hadn’t bothered to take clothes in with me. It wasn’t as if I had a suit of armor in my bedroom, but somehow in a fight for my life, having to worry about keeping a towel around me seemed inconvenient, to say the least. Well, there was no use worrying about that now. I wrapped the towel around myself as securely as I could and reached out with my mind to see if I could tell who was on the other side of the door.

What I felt was so intense that I trembled and nearly fell to my knees. Rage red as blood and hot as an inferno burned through my brain. No, not just rage, but rage focused with a laser-like, deadly intensity—rage desiring only to kill and kill and kill, a truly unquenchable fury. I had never read a serial killer, but I could imagine such a mind being like that. No, not even a serial killer could be quite like this. Surely nothing human could be. Whatever it was wanted to tear the door between us to splinters with its…claws, but instead it was waiting, waiting for me to open the door so it could take me by surprise. Well, maybe I could give it a little surprise, but I needed to take care of a couple of things first.

“Mom! Get yourself and Dad out of the house—right now!” I thought to her as urgently as I could. Fortunately, Mom knew about my…special nature. I couldn’t really keep it from her once I inadvertently stimulated her latent psychic ability. I didn’t know how she could get Dad out of the house without a lot of questions, but I knew she would find a way. She had to, because, though the…thing in my bedroom apparently wanted me, there was nothing preventing it from charging downstairs and killing both of them if I somehow managed to hold it at bay.

“OK,” replied Mom. I sensed her question, but I ignored it. I had to move fast now.

“Nurse Florence!” I broadcast much more strongly this time, as our resident Lady of the Lake was on the other side of Santa Brígida. “I’m up against some kind of supernatural intrusion at home. Get the guys here—yesterday!”

My adventures over the past few months had had the side effect of sucking in some of the guys at school. They were combat trained and armed with a variety of supernatural weapons now. Even so, I didn’t want to bring them into such a dangerous situation with so many unknown variables. Unfortunately, I had little choice. This wasn’t just about saving my neck. If I couldn’t contain this…whatever it was, it might not stop with killing me. If the intensity of its rage was any reflection of its power level, it could probably slaughter everyone in town before breakfast, then head on to Santa Barbara and be done there before lunch.

At that point, the rage in the next room hit me like a sledgehammer, and I missed Nurse Florence’s reply, if there was one. Whatever it was, it had figured out I knew it was there. So much for surprising it.

At almost exactly that moment, the bathroom door exploded in a shower of splinters, and I realized just how right I had been—what came charging into the bathroom was definitely not human.

It was tall enough to have to crouch on its way in, I suppose to save the split second it would have used tearing out the doorjamb. Its exact form was hard to make out, as if its uncontainable rage kept it in a constant state of flux. It was midnight black, black as the altar on which Ceridwen had once tried to sacrifice me. In that blackness, though, were swirls of red, as if the thing had already slaughtered someone and was drenched in its victim’s blood. There was a projection on top of its body that roughly corresponded to a head, but no discernible facial features except for eyes, blazing red like blood on fire. There were flickering arms and something like hands, even fingers, and from each finger projected a dagger-like claw, also glistening red as if already bloody.

You know the old expression about your life flashing before you right before you die? Well, mine was flashing at this point. I barely had time to realize just how hopeless my situation was. The bathroom was small, with no room to maneuver. The thing was charging at me too fast for me to be able to do much with magic, and I was unarmed, so unless its menacing appearance was all illusion, I wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight.

I crouched and thought about trying to dodge around it, but again, the bathroom was just too small, and the creature was clearly too fast.

I had faced death before, but somehow, those other times had not made me any more accepting of it.

I could see one of the claws sweeping down toward me, ready to rip off my face—and I was completely out of options. I tried to duck, but I was already so low to the ground that there was really not much chance of getting below that swing.

And then Jimmie, now in his sixteen-year-old form, slammed into the thing from behind. Even though Jimmie’s older shape was athletically built, I doubted he could do much to that swirling mass of hatred. However, the impact jolted the thing just enough that its claw missed me by about the width of a three-by-five card. Distracted by the unexpected interference, the undulating mass spun around, and its claws ripped through Jimmie’s throat in one smooth motion.

I gasped, forgetting for a fraction of a second that Jimmie was already dead. Even after I remembered, the sight of that nightmare creature ripping him to shreds was almost more than I could stand. For once, I was glad I had been in so much combat recently, since I was able to start functioning on autopilot. Though Jimmie’s body appeared to be mortally wounded, if not already dead, he was still fighting the creature, and it could have been confused by the obvious discrepancy. While it was preoccupied, I scrambled past it—a risky move, but there weren’t a whole lot of options—and Jimmie’s pseudo-body continued to baffle the attacker. Miraculously, it didn’t try to gut me as I ran behind it, and I was in my bedroom in seconds. Once there, it was an easy matter to grab White Hilt and shoot intense flame in a surgically precise blast right at the creature.

As I had suspected from its appearance, the shadowy being, though solid enough to smash doors and rend flesh, was not solid in the same way that I was. Still, it was physical enough for that volcanically hot burst to affect it. Its substance shuddered, writhing in the heat, though it did not actually catch fire. Dropping the fragments of Jimmie, the thing charged at me, but I had a steady stream of flame going now, getting increasingly hotter, and the creature backed away, gray smoke rising from it. It was hard to gauge its intelligence, but because of the sheer magnitude of its emotions, I doubted it had much room for very sophisticated thought. It did, however, have enough thought, or at least instinct, to realize that it could not retain solid form for very long without burning in flames that potent, and so it let go of its physical shape, flickering back into an immaterial state—and then tried to pour itself into me, to possess me, to destroy me from within.

I should have been safe, because most supernatural forces can’t possess someone with a strong enough will, and, at the risk of sounding cocky, mine was pretty strong. However, there was now a chink in my armor. A few weeks ago, I had toyed with dark magic. I did it for a good purpose, but no intent can redeem dark magic, and I had accidentally created a tainted reflection of myself—Dark Me, I called him. I had managed to reintegrate him into my mind in the same way I had earlier integrated my past selves, but now I could feel him inside me, ready to burst forth, like an old wound ripping open. I could beat this intruder…but could I beat it and him at the same time?

Again, Jimmie came to the rescue. Instead of reassembling his mangled physical form, he, too, had become immaterial and jumped straight into my brain. I could feel his support, his reassuring warmth, and the light he radiated that somehow could keep Dark Me at bay. However, Jimmie was not all that restrained him. Even Dark Me could tell that this new darkness trying to twist into my soul like serrated knives was different from him.

Dark Me was like deceptive shadow, tricky, dangerous to anyone who stood in his way, but still somewhere close to light. The intruder was more like the absolute blackness of a planet whose sun had died a millennium ago. Dark Me wanted to rule the world, more or less, but this gibbering whirlwind wanted only to destroy—and if it managed to kill me, Dark Me would never get what he wanted. Under those circumstances, there was no way Dark Me would risk siding with the invader. I could feel the old wound close, even feel Dark Me’s support as he faded back into whatever gloomy recess of my mind from which he had come.

Even so, the raging, homicidal hurricane within me was not easy to subdue. Its sheer intensity made even Dark Me’s sulking, twisted energy pale by comparison. Though it was an outsider in my mind and therefore inherently vulnerable, its strength seemed ancient and deeply rooted. It was not something to be easily dismissed.

Finally, I felt its hold give way, and it shrieked out of my mind and out of the house, frightened perhaps by the ancientness of my previous lives but more likely by Jimmie’s light. I would have liked to trap it, perhaps even to destroy it, but the way my body was shaking told me getting rid of it was probably the best outcome I could have hoped for.

In a moment Jimmie popped out, still in his teenage form but looking more pale than usual. “Tal, what was that thing?”

“I only wish I knew,” I replied, walking somewhat unsteadily into my bedroom and sitting on the bed. “Even the original Taliesin never encountered anything like it, as far as I can remember.”

Jimmie shuddered. “If I hadn’t already been dead, it would have scared me to death.”

I smiled at him. “If you hadn’t already been dead, I might have been. I’m not sure if I could have handled that thing without you.”

Jimmie snorted derisively. “You know you could have. I just helped you win a little faster.”

Even a little faster could be important at this point. I could hear the front door slam, followed by the sound of my parents arguing. Evidently, whatever hasty pretext Mom had used to get Dad out of the house had caused some kind of friction between them.

I glanced over at the gaping hole where the bathroom door had once been and at the scattered wood fragments and splinters. I had no time to fix the damage now, but leaving this mess for someone to stumble upon was too big a risk. It took only a few moments to weave a convincing illusion that would make any normal person believe the door was still intact, and everything was as it should be.

How exactly I was going to fix it later, I wasn’t sure—the original Taliesin’s repertoire did not include carpentry spells, and I hadn’t had any reason until now to develop magic like that. Well, there wasn’t much use in worrying about the problem right now. I needed to get dressed and downstairs as fast as possible to figure out what was happening with my parents. Humming a little and accelerating myself to faerie speed, I was ready in half a minute and bounding down the stairs with an invisible Jimmie drifting along behind me.

Mom and Dad were still arguing when I reached them, though they stopped as soon as they saw me. We all made awkward small talk, and I peeked into Dad’s mind, just enough to tell what was going on. Mom had gotten him outside on the pretext that she had heard someone calling for help, and then she had insisted they do a thorough search, even when it was obvious to him that there was no real emergency.

With just a couple of little tweaks, I quieted his irritation, not that hard a job considering how much he loved Mom. We got through breakfast, and Dad was off to the office in a considerable hurry. I would have followed him out the door, but Mom put a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I knew she wanted to talk.

“Tal,” she said nervously as I turned in her direction, “I don’t like it when you do that.”

“Do what?” I asked. There were so many things she could have been referring to at this point.

She looked momentarily annoyed herself. “You know perfectly well what I mean—mess around in your father’s head like that.” Her psychic senses were getting stronger all the time. Just a few days ago, she only got general impressions of what I was doing with magic. Now she could apparently see exactly what was going on.

“I only do what I have to do,” I replied patiently. “You know I don’t intrude in someone’s mind unless I have to.”

“Did you really have to, this time? Your father and I could have handled that disagreement on our own.”

“In this case, it was my fault. My mess, my responsibility to fix it.”

Mom looked distant for a moment, as if she was not quite sure how to respond. Finally, she said, “I’m proud of you for taking responsibility, but what happened wasn’t your fault, was it?”

“I guess not,” I conceded. “Still, that doesn’t keep me from feeling responsible.”

“Did you do that with me very often, before I could sense what was going on?” she asked worriedly.

“I told you when I first convinced you that you weren’t going insane. Sometimes, I had to manipulate you or Dad or both to keep you from finding out what was really going on, to keep you safe.”

She laughed, but the sound was more hollow than her normal laugh, almost fake. “I wish sometimes that you were still doing that and that I had never learned the truth.” Then, almost immediately, she realized how her statement sounded. “Oh Tal, I didn’t mean it like that. I love you, even though you’re different now. And I want to love you for who you really are. It’s just that it was easier the other way. Now I know when you’ve been in great danger…just like today, right?”

I nodded. There would have been no point lying about it. She would have known the truth, regardless of what I said.

“What was it?” she asked, clearly dreading the answer but needing to know.

“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you when I find out. I promise.”

She nodded, still clearly dissatisfied. “A word popped into my head even before you sent your message: ‘phonos.’ Do you know what that means?”

This time, it was my turn to shudder. I knew all too well what it meant.

---

Surprisingly, Tal’s encounter with the phonos is the least dangerous attack he’ll face. Many other perils lie within the book.

Hidden among Yourselves is the third book in the Spell Weaver series. To find out more, you can visit the series page.

I’ve started a new Spell Weaver novella, North of Midnight, in serial form right here on Substack. If you’re interested, the first episode is embedded below:

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