Read Online Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) by Bill Hiatt - Free Book Online

only to get us all killed on the freeway.)
    Fortunately, we made the short trip home without incident. I dropped off Gianni first, got my obligatory hug from Mrs. Rinaldi, which Stan and Dan both kidded me about, excused myself from staying for what was now a very late dinner, dropped off Dan, and then headed for Stan’s place, which was only about three doors from mine.
    “Tal, can I ask you something?” Stan asked.
    I had a weird moment of déjà vu. Those were exactly the words Stan used before he knew about my unusual “situation,” when he first asked me about some of the discrepancies in my life. I shook the feeling off. That time I had been caught by surprise. This time I knew exactly what Stan was going to ask. He was going to start a conversation about why he wanted his awakening spell reversed—at least, that’s what I hoped he was going to ask about.
    “Ask away,” I replied. I didn’t really want to start what could be a complicated conversation after the day I had just been through, but if something was bugging Stan, I definitely wanted to know about it.
    “Tal, I…what the heck?” He sounded so alarmed that I braked and then glanced in his direction.
    The shirt that I had mended was hanging in tatters again.
    We were only about two minutes from his house at this point, and there was always the possibility that someone could already have seen us, so I didn’t want to spend longer mending the shirt again than I had to.
    “Sorry, Stan. I must be more tired than I thought. I’ll fix you right up again…unless you want to tell your mom one of your lady friends tried to rip it off of you.”
    Stan looked surprisingly worried, and his cheeks reddened. “Tal, she’d ground me until I’m fifty-five. I can’t…”
    “Relax, dude,” I said with a chuckle. “I was just kidding! Here, let me fix that for you.” I leaned over, humming a little bit to heighten the spell, and pulled the surprisingly stubborn threads back again.
    “You need to start wearing more cotton, Stan. These synthetics are giving me more of a headache than usual.”
    We both breathed a sigh of relief when the job was finally done. “I’m sorry that took so long. I guess I really am tired.”
    “I guess you’re rusty. What’s it been, a month since you saved the world? You need to work out more, I guess,” replied Stan with a grin.
    I chuckled again, but more so Stan wouldn’t worry than because I really thought the situation was funny. I had thought—hell, we had all thought—that defeating Ceridwen meant we wouldn’t have to constantly watch our backs. We knew Morgan had survived on Samhain, but with Ceridwen gone, we assumed that she would have no further reason to hang out in Santa Brígida. Now we knew she had been here the whole time, spying on me and looking for her long-lost sister. At the very least, now we all had to be extremely careful. Hopefully, Morgan now believed that I was going to cooperate with her, but one careless word from any of us could reveal the truth—with bloody consequences.
    I let Stan off, drove to my house, got the car in the garage, and had a very late dinner with my parents. Visiting Carla was still a built-in excuse. Neither one of them ever questioned me, pretty much no matter when I came in. I could tell that Mom in particular still worried about me, but I had gotten to be a very good actor in a very short time, and both of them were convinced I would get over my grief eventually.
    I had to admit that this particular night the acting was more of a chore than usual, both because I was worried about Morgan and because I suddenly had at least a glimmer of hope that I might finally be able to bring Carla out of her coma. I would have loved to share that news with them, but I would have been hard-pressed to explain, since they knew nothing about my…unusual nature.
    At some point in the last your years, I probably should have told them, but after I finally got out of the hospital after