Faerie Mischief at the Valentine's Day Dance

An "Evil within Yourselves" Teaser

The next installment of The Epic of Gilgamesh is still under construction. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this excerpt from Evil within Yourselves.

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Titania, faerie queen of England, has come to beg Taliesin for help against a mysterious and powerful adversary who may have corrupted not only the faerie realms, but Olympus as well. Nicneven, queen of Scottish faeries and witches, is planning an attack for reasons unknown. A high-level demon lurks nearby. Tal, having difficulty restraining his dark side, has raced off to deal with all of these menaces.

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Carla, a powerful sorceress in her own right, has been left to keep watch at the high school, much to her annoyance. But as it turns out, there is more to watch than she thought…

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I wished about ten times a day that Tal could get over the idea that I needed to be protected, and this was one of those times. After all, I had all the power of my past self, the sorceress Alcina. If some Scottish faerie queen was attacking, I could take care of myself just as well as he could—but here I was, ready to babysit Robin Goodfellow while Tal threw himself into deadly danger. No, I wasn’t fooled by the excuse that I would need to make sure Robin didn’t botch everything up. Tal wouldn’t admit this, maybe even to himself, but he was being overprotective. Again.

Damn chivalry!

I spared a few seconds to wonder if I should have stayed on Olympus with Artemis. Then I got the band to take a break by pretending to feel faint.

And that’s another thing: the band members had also been with us on Samhain when we fought Ceridwen. They knew perfectly well that I wasn’t some frail flower who had to be protected, even though they had been unconscious during the most dramatic parts. I could have told them what was really going on, for that matter, but I didn’t want to risk being overheard. I didn’t blame them because I had to lie to them. I blamed them because they believed that particular lie so easily.

Not having to perform, I was able to devote my full attention to watching for Robin Goodfellow. He was invisible, but, like Tal, I could generally see invisible beings if I knew one was around and concentrated hard enough.

Sure enough, I could make out someone moving surreptitiously but very fast near the back of the gym. He was wearing a tunic of such bright green it was practically a neon light, and he looked almost completely frazzled.

“Robin! Over here!” I thought as loudly as I could. Tal was better at projecting his thoughts, but I did it well enough to get Robin sprinting to the stage.

“My lady,” he whispered with a quick bow, “we must join Taliesin and my queen at once. Can you call Taliesin’s men over here?”

I broadcast as well as I could to Shar, Gordy, Carlos, and Jimmie. It took a couple of minutes for them to extricate themselves from their dates, but they had caught the urgency in my call, and except for Jimmie, they were pretty used to this kind of emergency.

Once they had reached me, I motioned for them to be quiet and whispered to the still invisible Robin, “You need to cover our exit so no one will follow or miss us. Perhaps a sleep spell—”

“Where’s the fun in that?” whispered Robin. He winked at me and said, “Tell Taliesin’s men to stand right next to you.” I got us together quickly, and Robin used his wand to draw a magic circle around us. I could see it glowing faintly, though of course, the guys could not.

“What do you mean, ‘where’s the fun in that?’” I whispered worriedly.

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“Shush!” replied Robin, putting a finger to his lips. “I must concentrate.” At that moment I noticed he carried a willow flute as well as a wand. He stuck the wand in his belt, put the flute, pulsing with magic of its own, to his lips, and began playing for all he was worth.

I had seen Tal channel magic through his music before, but Robin, perhaps motivated by the urgency of the situation, played almost hysterically, energy pulsing wildly in every note. Everyone outside the circle seemed momentarily stunned, and I thought for a second that Robin had just been teasing me and was going to put them to sleep after all. The frenetic quality of the music should have told me differently. Robin clearly had other things one might do in bed on his mind.

I couldn’t read people’s thoughts the way Tal could, but the emotional feedback from hundreds of teenagers suddenly overwhelmed by sexual passion would have been hard to miss even if I had not had any magic at all. Suddenly, as if on cue, dozens of couples locked together in steamy embraces. I had to do something while all the clothes were still on. Oops, well, most of the clothes anyway.

“Stop it!” I hissed at Robin. He winked again and played on, even more energetically. I could feel the power of his music swelling to unbelievably high levels. I had only felt such power once before, from the lyre of Orpheus. How Robin had endowed his flute with that much mojo I had no idea—and no time to worry about his methods. I needed to find a way to stop him, though, and quickly.

I could hear Gordy chuckling behind me…until he saw his date in someone else’s arms. Then he had to be restrained from jumping out of the magic circle. I could hear the guys tussling a little but had to focus on Robin. I tried knocking the flute out of his hands, but he dodged away from me. The band members, just as entranced as everyone else by the music, had climbed off the stage and were looking for single girls. I didn’t have much time before someone did something that couldn’t be undone—even by magic!

Unfortunately, in trying to restrain Gordy, the guys had scuffed the magic circle enough to break it. I knew because I was staring in Robin’s direction, and suddenly he was looking fine. He was looking hot. No, more like volcanically hot.

Think about Tal, I told myself. If Tal had been able to resist Aphrodite herself, surely I could resist this little…adorable…sexy…

The guys, including Jimmie, had gone racing toward their dates. Thinking about Jimmie helped me reinforce my feeble grasp on sanity. I felt more protective of him than I was of anyone else in the room. Physically, he was the same age as Tal. The problem was he’d been dead from age nine to age sixteen, and handling instant puberty was hard enough without being overstimulated by some…really, really gorgeous faerie.

Maybe if I closed my eyes and pretended he was Tal…

I threw myself at Robin. For a split second I think he imagined he was about to get lucky.

I had to depend on the fact that faerie anatomy and human anatomy were basically the same.

Yeah, apparently they were. At least similar enough for a kick in the crotch to put Robin out of action. He dropped his flute and fell to the floor, clutching himself. Again I congratulated myself on having taken those self-defense classes.

Fortunately, his spell was apparently not completely woven. People snapped out of their hormonal frenzy almost immediately. Also fortunately, at least as far as I could tell from where I stood, no frontiers had been crossed.

Unfortunately, we had lost any chance of making a quick, unseen exit. Oh, we could still get out, but I’d have to use some very hasty magic and take the chance it wouldn’t be completely effective.

“Young man, put your shirt back on!” I heard Principal Simmons order someone across the room. I gave her some credit for gathering her wits so quickly, though it seemed to me she should have spent a minute or so being ashamed of the way she had been rubbing up against Coach Miller just a few seconds ago. At least he had managed to resist. Still, I didn’t think that was a story I’d be sharing with Nurse Florence any time soon.

“Get the hell over here…now!” I barked at the guys, but they weren’t all situated in such a way that they could come back right away. Gordy had paused in his search for sex long enough to punch the guy who was all over Gordy’s girlfriend. Looking more closely, I could see the guy clutching his nose. There was blood, and the guy was mumbling something about his nose being broken.

None of Alcina’s specialties—generating overwhelming love, commanding sea creatures, and changing people into other forms—would be much use now. I could make myself or any of the guys invisible, but most of them were in very public situations, and I couldn’t just make them disappear right in front of everybody—particularly not Gordy, who was in the grip of two teachers, and poor Carlos, who was being yelled at by Principal Simmons and seemed unable to find his pants. Apparently he had moved faster than most other guys. Well, if it had to happen to one of them, at least Carlos was a swimmer and used to appearing publicly in his Speedos. All things considered, he probably looked better in boxers than most of the guys in the room would have, anyway.

Robin had gotten up and was eying me as if deciding which faerie curse to cast on me.

“Sleep spell now!” I forgot to whisper. In fact, I came pretty close to shouting. Luckily, the room was in such chaos that no one seemed to notice. Any teacher looking my way would have seen a fully clad girl yelling nonsense at thin air and figured I was the least of the problems right now.

“Mortals anger faeries at their peril!” said Robin in what I imagined was his best effort to seem ominous. Needless to say, my patience with macho nonsense was pretty much exhausted by this point.

“Yeah, well, faeries anger me at their peril! Now, do what I tell you, or I’ll cut off your manhood and throw it to the nearest dog!” I was drawing on things Alcina might have said in the same situation and had no intention of doing anything of the kind, but Robin didn’t know much about me except that I was a formidable sorceress and clearly had a temper. He muttered something about the good old days when women knew their place, but he did pick up his flute and start to play, a soothing tune this time. In about two minutes almost everyone was asleep. I had warded myself enough to be unaffected, and Shar must have had the presence of mind to touch the hilt of Zom, his sword that protected its wielder against magic. He and I awakened Carlos, Gordy, and Jimmie while a sullen Robin Goodfellow eyed us with mischief—or murder—in his heart. We had to help Carlos find his pants, which slowed us down a little, and I made a mental note to speak to the crimson-cheeked Jimmie, who looked thoroughly mortified, later. No, actually, I should have one of the guys do it, but right now there was barely time to think, much less play mother to the poor boy who lived under the same roof with his parents but couldn’t tell them who he was. Later I promised myself to take care of him, though.

“Should we bring Eva?” asked Gordy, rubbing his reddened knuckles. For a moment I froze.

Why did references to Tal’s ex still bother me? I couldn’t really say. Maybe it was that I had been in Eva’s shadow for so long while Tal had eyes only for her. That time seemed like a half-forgotten dream now. Tal and I shared a bond more real than anything he had ever had with Eva. Still, the past sometimes refuses to stay in the past; as someone whose past-life persona had once controlled me and still remained a part of me, I knew that better than anyone.

“No more than we should bring the band members or Natalie,” I said, hoping no one had noticed my momentary hesitation. “They know about us, but Tal still wants them treated as civilians and not involved any more than necessary.” He had never actually said that in so many words, but I was sure he it was what he wanted. And if not, well, it was definitely what I wanted, and he would understand.

“I’m more concerned about the guy with the broken nose, Gordy. What were you thinking?” I asked as we returned to where Robin was standing.

“Like everybody else, I wasn’t,” said Gordy, his tone a cross between apologetic and defensive.

By now we had reached Robin, moping in the corner. “Well, we need to fix this mess before we can let any of them wake up, but Nurse Florence would be better at healing the nose, and Tal would be better at rearranging memories. I could try, but with this many people—”

“There is no time, anyway!” burst in Robin angrily. “We need to rejoin Taliesin and my queen immediately.”

“Which we could have done already, I’ll point out, if you hadn’t decided tonight would be a good night for a Roman orgy!” I said in a scolding tone. I would really have liked to hate Robin at this point, but despite his centuries of life, he managed to remind me of a child—a very obnoxious one, perhaps, but still a child.

“Roman? It would have been a perfectly Celtic party, in honor of Saint Valentine!” Robin snapped defensively.

“If Saint Valentine had actually ever met you, he would have denounced you as an imp of Satan and had you burned at the stake!” I snapped back. “No more arguments! Draw your swords, everyone, and be ready to attack at will. I’m just about to open a portal.” Robin pulled out a small silver blade, clearly of faerie manufacture. Gordy’s fear-evoking sword glistened as if eager for battle. Carlos’s drowning sword sparkled with muted blueness. Jimmie’s Black Hilt, the dark twin of Tal’s sword, shimmered with cold. Shar’s Zom blazed with emerald waves of antimagic. As soon as I conjured up the portal, I would draw Artemis’s bow, and we would be ready. I would have liked to retrieve the dragon armor for the guys, but Tal had stored it in his attic behind wards only he could get past. I now realized that plan might not always be the best idea, but I couldn’t do anything about it until Tal got back. I focused my thoughts, summoned a portal…and then cringed as someone on the other end crushed it. Could this night get any more frustrating?

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The mysterious crushing of Carla’s portal is the least of her worries. Though they don’t know it yet, she and others will soon face their most dangerous adversary yet. Nor can they rely on each other, for they are about to learn that sometimes, the person you trust to have your back will be the one to stick a knife in it.

Can they survive this kind of disaster? The answer lies within the book.

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I’m currently writing North of Midnight, an all-new novella in the Spell Weaver universe, set about three years after Evil within Yourselves (and with some new characters).