Free Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) by Bill Hiatt Page A

avoided trapping people in the weird paradoxes of our society, in which girls are discouraged from having sex and guys are encouraged to have it, by their friends (and sometimes, more covertly, by their fathers) if not by society as a whole. I had always been very careful not to lay that kind of trip on Stan, who had been until just recently too tightly wound anyway. In fact, with his social status changing, I’d actually given him a “wait for the right girl” not-exactly-abstinence-but-pretty-much-the-same-in–the-short-run talk. Stan giggled a little bit over my mixed efforts to give him brotherly advice. I didn’t think he realized how close he was to getting picked up on the female radar, and perhaps it was just as well. I never told him about the cheerleaders. I didn’t want to get his hopes up, or, even worse, make him feel as if he had to do something right away.
    Like a rock hitting the surface of a pond and sending out ripples, the changes Stan and I were going through affected others as well. My mom gradually stopped looking at me as if she expected me to break into a million pieces. My dad’s transformation was even more gradual, but I couldn’t remember seeing him happier than the day I told him I was thinking about trying out for soccer. (Truth be told, Dan twisted my arm a little bit on that one, but I was glad he did.) Hell, even Mrs. Schoenbaum loosened up a bit, partly because Stan seemed to be able to take the time to work out and still be the academic star she needed him to be, and partly because the high-priced private college counselor she had hired thought the experience would be good for Stan. (It’s truly amazing how the most mundane advice can sound like the wisdom of Solomon when you are paying big bucks for it.) Anyway, I got the big invite to Rosh Hashanah dinner at Stan’s. For the first time I could remember, Mrs. Schoenbaum didn’t treat me like some juvenile delinquent out to corrupt her son. I made what could have been a serious mistake, though. I joined in a conversation with Stan’s cousins and slipped into Hebrew again without meaning to. But you know what? Nobody noticed.
    It was as if I were a member of the family.
    September would, in fact, have been the teenage version of bliss, except that I needed to think about more than just all the usual teenage things. That part of my life lay across the surface of a much more complicated reality, masking it but not erasing it. As well as my life seemed to be going, there was still the need for combat readiness in the background. I was taking care of the physical part, but there was also a mystical part. I needed to master all of my abilities, and I hadn’t tried either shifting or entering Annwn, the Otherworld. Depending on who my enemies turned out to be, they might be capable of either—or both. I needed to be able to do whatever a potential adversary could, and as long as I could access some of my abilities only as memories from previous lives, I would not be able to count on them in a battle situation. Then there was the question of getting my magic to interact with modern technology more effectively.
    So much to do, so little time to do it—in more ways than one!
     

 

    CHAPTER 6: PRACTICE IMPERFECT
     
    I confess, I was a little nervous about trying to change into an animal. I must have watched too many werewolf movies as a kid, particularly the ones in which the wolf seems to have to rip itself out of its human form. Even though I could remember the experience from my past lives, and so I knew shifting was really nothing like that, the whole idea still gave me the creeps. As a result, I decided to start with a more familiar subject: Stan. (If the pwca could do it, I was sure I could as well.) That whole idea gave Stan the creeps, but he played along, letting me study him for some time.
    “Okay,” I said at last, “I’m ready.”
    “Let’s get this over with, then,” replied Stan.
    I closed my eyes, slowed my