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

back without inadvertently flashing someone. From then on, most of the animal shifts got practiced in my bedroom or his, not in the open.
    My only other problem with shifting was Stan’s tendency to ask too many questions about the process. Once he got over the initial shock that I could actually perform such a feat, the scientist in him took over again, and he wanted me to provide him with all kinds of data. When I changed into him, was my blood type the same as his? Was I the same genetically, or was the resemblance only superficial? If another shifter morphed into me, did that give the shifter all of my other powers? I didn’t really have the answer to any of these questions, but I did give him some data based on my observations during shifts. For instance, assuming I shifted correctly, physical attributes like strength would be the same as the form I shifted into, so that changing into a grizzly bear made me as strong as a grizzly bear. Changing into a fish (which I only tried once) enabled me to breathe under water. Mental attributes stayed the same, so I kept my own intelligence. If I was a dog, I still thought like me. If I was Stan, I still thought like me. Too bad—there would have been times when shifting my brain to his during a math test would have been a real advantage! As far as whether the physical form was the same all the way down to a molecular level, I doubted that, but I could not provide the evidence Stan wanted. Then he would start going on about the equipment he’d like to get to test me with, and I had to remind him that he couldn’t very well make his bedroom into a lab without attracting his parents’ notice. All of this science talk would have been easier to take if I didn’t feel like I had just run a marathon after a series of shifts. Maybe with more practice, shifting would not hit me so hard, but right now it made me feel as if I had donated blood every day for a week. How the pwca had managed so much shifting around in such a short period of time was beyond me, but I guessed that pwcas , as natural shape shifters, had more innate resistance to the strain of shifting than a human would.
    As for visiting Annwn, that wasn’t tiring it all, just impossible. I knew from the memories of Taliesin 1 exactly how to open a doorway into that realm, but every time I tried, I felt as if I were trying to open a door inward, but tons of rock were jammed up against it on the other side, and it wouldn’t budge. I concentrated until I thought my head would split open, I sang until I almost made myself hoarse. Nothing. Stan, who insisted on interpreting Annwn like a parallel world in a science fiction story, hypothesized that conditions had changed in the last 1500 years, that Annwn was now on a different frequency, and all I needed to do was to find the right frequency. Well, if so, that was more easily said than done.
    I wasn’t any more successful trying to force my magic to interact with technology. Stan devised all kinds of simple tests for me to practice with, but I couldn’t even perform a single mouse click with magic, no matter how much I concentrated, no matter how much I sang.
    Still, if I didn’t have a new arsenal of technological tricks up my sleeve, neither did my enemies, who had been singularly quiet since the pwca incident at the beginning of the school year. For that matter, so had my anonymous ally—just a few words of advice from time to time, delivered via Dan. No warnings, no prophecies of doom.
    I began to wonder if maybe I wouldn’t end up in the middle of some cataclysmic struggle between good and evil after all. My life would never be entirely normal, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be peaceful—and happy.
    But you know what they say about the calm before the storm.
     

 

    CHAPTER 7: FOUNDERS’ DAY SURPRISES
     
    One bright morning in September, a big crowd of students made getting in the front door difficult.
    “What’s up?” I asked Stan.
    “Oh, just the