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

that covered that wide an area, but it was worth thinking about who or what Morgan might lash out at when she discovered she had been tricked.
    After a while, though, I realized I was just covering the same ground over and over again. I undressed and slipped into bed, turned the lights out, and fell asleep puzzling over Stan’s shirt. Yeah, I had been tired when I mended it, but still, I had never had one of my spells deteriorate like that before. It did not occur to me until much later to wonder whether the spell I had cast in the hospital room to keep anyone from eavesdropping might have reacted in the same way…
    That night I had an unusually vivid dream in which I was naked with Carla in her hospital bed. Yeah, it was one of those dreams, so I will spare you the details. In the beginning I was just holding her anyway; she was every bit as comatose as she was in real life. Later, though, she was conscious and extremely eager to take our “relationship,” or whatever it was in real life, to the next level. Hell, to take it up several levels.
    I knew it was only dream sex, but it felt more real somehow than any of the intimacies I could remember from my previous lives. To say my whole body was on fire sounds trite, but that’s the closest I could come to it. We were both on fire, burning as one flame, giving ourselves to each other unreservedly.
    Then I realized that the woman in my arms, despite making love to me as if we had both been created for the purpose of making love with each other, was not Carla. She looked like her superficially, but when I looked into her eyes, someone else was looking back.
    Alcina .
    I woke up hoping I hadn’t screamed aloud, because I think I did scream in the dream. I listened, but I didn’t hear anything like my parents jumping out of bed to see what was wrong. I looked over at the clock. It was three in the morning, but I knew I wasn’t getting any more sleep. I would have liked a shower (yeah, a nice cold one!), but I knew that would wake my parents up. I would have liked to play a little music; I hadn’t had much time to practice the harp recently, and playing always relaxed me, but again I could hardly avoid waking up my parents in such a situation, so I steeled myself to wait for morning.
    I did get up once to study myself in my bathroom mirror. (You’ve done it yourself, so don’t smirk.) I knew the timing was a little odd, but I was having a hard time getting Alcina out of my mind. Even though that encounter had only been in a dream, it did get me to thinking. Ceridwen had tried to lure me to bed. Carla, though the memory hurt now like trying to crawl through barbed wire, had very much wanted to bed me. Morgan had just tried to lure me to bed. Granted, that last one was probably strategy, though Morgan had complimented my looks when she met me for the first time (in this life) in Annwn on Founders’ Day. And Ceridwen’s attempted seduction really didn’t have anything to do with her overall strategy; if anything, her attempt ended up undermining her whole plan. It got me to ask the question that most popular guys ask at some point: was I really that hot? (Of course, most guys don’t have to contend with interest from supernatural beings who have murderous intentions, but I was trying hard not to think about that aspect of my situation.)
    I couldn’t see anything special about my face. I guessed I had a good smile, but even so it was quite the heart melter Dan’s was. My brown hair was pretty much run-of-the-mill it seemed to me, but I did try to keep it decently groomed, which was more than I could say for a lot of the guys at school. As for my body, well, I flexed a little bit and studied myself from different angles. I wasn’t as powerfully built as Dan or Gordy, and certainly not as Shar, though I had been working out a lot and had pretty good definition, certainly better even than two months ago. However, girls seemed to like tans, and my skin was pretty pale