Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) Read Online Free

but they were both graying and sagging a bit, and their faces where lined with more worry than the last four years should probably have given them. But of course, I reflected, it wasn’t really the last four years that had done that, but me.
    Well, I decided that was enough guilt-tripping for one day. I finished my breakfast as fast as I could and managed to get out of the house with minimal fussing on my mom’s part, though I did end up with a jacket I didn’t really think I needed.
    However, once outside I had to admit, though grudgingly, that she might have had a point. We were only a few blocks from the beach, so marine layer was not uncommon, especially in the morning. Still, mid-August tended to be warmer than this, if not exactly on a par with “Indian summer” in areas further inland. Despite myself, I shivered a little bit as I finished zipping my jacket. And talk about fog! It wasn’t perhaps quite “John Carpenter” thick, but I really couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me.
    The situation was made more uncomfortable by the fact that I had a backpack on my back, my guitar case hanging from my left shoulder, and my fencing bag hanging from my right. Carrying all that was a hassle, but I didn’t want to be caught unprepared. I needed the contents of the backpack for school, and, given the ominous signs last night, I didn’t want to be too far from a musical instrument. The harp would have been my first choice, but it was too large for me to drag along with me. As for the fencing equipment, let’s just say one of the foils only appeared to be a foil; it was actually a little something special I might need at some point. I might be doomed, but if death came for me, I intended to die fighting.
    Unless of course something attacked me right now, in which case I was so awkwardly weighted I could be knocked over pretty easily.
    I stumbled a few steps and glanced back at my house, partly to make sure Mom wasn’t watching. If she was, she wasn’t going to be seeing much. That Spanish colonial revival architecture-on-steroids monolith that we called home was already little more than a large grayish white blur, the fog washing out the roof tiles to vague brown smudges, the landscaping to greenish black swirls.
    I staggered on down the street, passing more Spanish colonials. Even though the neighborhood, and indeed most of the town, had been the product of a single development, the architects had gone to considerable lengths to vary the basic pattern, so that no two houses were exactly alike, but in this fog, they were just a row of more or less identical grayish white blurs. I had to really concentrate to keep track of which one was Stan’s. It would be mildly embarrassing to knock on the wrong door in a neighborhood where I had lived basically my whole life.
    Luckily, I got the right door, and Stan answered it. His parents were always superficially nice to me, but his mother in particular seemed suspicious of me, as if I had some evil plan to recruit Stan as a roadie for my band, introduce him to drugs, and just generally mess with his destiny: graduate high school with honors, graduate Stanford with honors, become a famous scientist, win a Nobel prize, the works. For the record, I wasn’t even sure what use a roadie would be for such a small band, and I didn’t do drugs, but one thing my parents had certainly taught me was that parental fears aren’t always rational.
    I said hello to him and asked if he was ready. He was—and probably had been for an hour, if only to keep his mother from fretting over him—so we got as quick a start as we could, given my load. I wasn’t eager to talk to him, though, after what had happened last night, so I whistled instead, and he didn’t interrupt. In fact, I was using the whistling to instill in him the feeling that the silence shouldn’t be broken. Probably the damage was already done anyway, and I could just as well have shouted my secret in the center of