Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  She knew she should tell Terry—but she shrank from it, from telling him how easily she had been lured, how little effort it had taken to bring her to the verge of stepping across to a place where she might have been worse than helpless.

  “It’s fine now,” she said, turning away from the bathroom. “Go back to sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”

  “So do you. Go back to sleep.”

  “I will. Good night.”

  “G’night,” he slurred, turning back into his own room. “Who’d be playing music at this hour?” Thea heard him mutter as the door shut behind him.

  The words froze her again, just for a moment. He had heard the same thing as she had heard, the guitar music, the ghost melody. It had been real, not just a dream or a figment of her imagination.

  That “other” she had spoken to Magpie about, the one like herself, the one who was probably creating the spellspam magic—Thea had believed that he or she would have to be of the professor’s household or have access to it, if what Terry had said about the second Nexus computer being used to send the stuff out was true. But it had been only a theory, until this moment. Until she stood at a portal of another world, and knew that she had been right.

  Given the sudden unreliability of e-mail, Thea had been given a cell phone by her parents for the summer. But it seemed Professor de los Reyes’s house did not like foreign electronics. The power sockets would obligingly appear when a plug was waved before them, but actually plugging anything in—especially things concerned with computers or communication devices—proved problematic. Thea’s hair dryer performed just fine, but she didn’t dare try her computer again before talking to her host, and her attempt to plug in her cell phone charger was no more successful. But that was academic, anyway, seeing as her cell phone appeared to be unable to connect to any kind of service from the house or the garden.

  Breakfasts were apparently much less formal in this household than dinners were. After a frustrating early wander in the garden with the unresponsive cell phone, Thea came back into the house to be greeted with the delicious aromas of ham and eggs, maple syrup, and fresh-baked pastries.

  The dining room appeared deserted when she peered inside, but breakfast was all set out, as were a small stack of white china plates and a neat rack of silverware. A shallow silver heating pan with a cover floated in midair over a small blue flame; upon investigation, it contained a ham omelet.

  Thea suddenly felt ravenous.

  She spooned out a serving onto a plate. A nearby toaster chose that moment to pop up with an English muffin toasted just the way Thea liked it. There was butter in a small round dish on the table, and four kinds of jelly in glass jars each covered with a different metal lid—one looked like a pile of grapes, one like half a strawberry, another like a raspberry or blackberry, and one like half a peach or an apricot. When Thea reached for the raspberry jam, the lid lifted off and a silver spoon dipped into the jelly pot, took out precisely the right amount, and dollopped it onto the two halves of her muffin.

  Thea was sure that the people who lived in this house on a regular basis found all this very ordinary. But she spent the rest of her breakfast keeping a wary eye on the jam jars, just in case they decided to serve her again. Once or twice a lid trembled on the verge of popping open, as though Thea’s thoughts were enough to trigger it, but she quickly looked away and things settled down again.

  She was peeling herself a mandarin orange, after having polished off what was on her plate, when she realized that she had company.

  Beltran de los Reyes was lounging in the doorway of the dining room when she looked up, arms crossed across his chest and one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb. He was dressed in jeans and a camouflage-print T-shirt, his narrow, aristocratic feet bare and possessed of toes almost long enough to be called Alphiri. As Thea looked up, he straightened and pushed his uncombed hair back behind his ears.

  “Breakfast okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s fine—I mean—it was here, I thought it was okay to just help myself….” She flushed, but it was more with resentment at being caught off guard than with guilt. The flush deepened when Beltran laughed, stepping into the room.

  “It’s breakfast,” he said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

  “But last night…,” Thea began, impelled despite her better judgment to try and explain herself, but Beltran waved a hand in her direction, sauntering off toward the omelet pan.

  “Dinner is different,” he said. “If we had to stand on ceremony for breakfast, we would all starve. Isabella rises at noon if we’re lucky, and Father, like all insanely intelligent people who have too much stuffed into their brains, rises before dawn because otherwise the day isn’t long enough.”

  “It’s almost nine,” Thea said, still holding her half-peeled mandarin. “What’s your time?”

  “If I can find something intelligent to do, then I’ll get up early to do it,” Beltran said laconically, spooning a huge quantity of something onto a plate. It had been an omelet when Thea had investigated the pan, but now it looked like it contained something entirely different, poached eggs maybe, accompanied by strips of roasted red pepper. This time the toaster yielded four pieces of sourdough toast. A pan Thea hadn’t even noticed and could have sworn hadn’t been there a moment ago produced a pile of hash browns with just the right amount of crispy crust baked on top. Almost as an afterthought, Beltran glanced over at the pastry plate and an apple Danish did a somersault from its resting place and landed neatly on the side of his own plate. He shot a sideways look at Thea as he came back to the table balancing all this, and caught her staring at the hash brown pan.

  “What?” he said. “Would you like some hash browns? Help yourself.”

  “But it wasn’t there,” Thea said. “When I came in.”

  “You probably weren’t thinking about it,” Beltran said. “This is an Elemental house. It will come up with what’s necessary.”

  Thea had heard the term, but it had been buried in adult conversation to which she had not been paying attention. She now filed it away under “Ask Aunt Zoë.” In the meantime, she was aware that Beltran was staring at her.

  She flushed again, and hated herself for it. She had never been particularly self-conscious about her appearance—she had grown up the only girl in a family of brothers, and she had never been primpy, self-obsessed, or vain. But now, in the house where Isabella de los Reyes lived and under the scrutiny of Isabella’s brother, she found herself suddenly wishing she were taller, or blonder, or somehow more worthy of notice on a purely physical level.

  Which confused and annoyed her, because she had met this particular young man only the night before, had formed no special opinion of him other than perhaps a faint dislike, and the very idea that she had felt even the least need to appear agreeable to him made her feel suddenly crabby.

  “What?” she said, more sharply that she had intended. “Have I got omelet on my nose or something?”

  His thin lips stretched into a strange smile, and his eyes glittered behind his glasses. “Not at all,” he said. “I was just…curious.”

  Thea bent over her mandarin, peeling it with studied attention, letting her hair fall forward to cover her face. “Anything I can help you with?” she said, aware that she was coming across as appallingly rude, but seemingly unable to help herself.

  “I was just wondering what it was about you that made Wiley run,” Beltran said conversationally.

  “Who’s Wiley?” Thea asked, looking up, bewildered.

  “My tutor. Cary Wiley. He was supposed to be here all summer, and then we got notification that you and that other kid were coming. At the moment your name came up, all of a sudden, Wiley had business elsewhere…business that would last precisely the length of your stay here.” He gave Thea a sharp look, but his voice was as light and unconcerned as though he were discussing the weather forecast. “Anyone would think he was running away.”

  “So what makes you think it was
me?” Thea said. “Maybe it’s Terry he’s afraid of.”

  “That’s just it; he isn’t usually afraid of anyone,” Beltran said, his tone still as lightly conversational. “But it was your name that did it. I was just curious. You don’t look dangerous to me, but Wiley may know things from your dark past that even my father wasn’t told….”

  “I don’t have a dark past,” said Thea, exasperated. “I don’t have a clue why your tutor decided to leave.”

  “Double Seventh,” Beltran murmured.

  Thea stared at him. “Yeah, so?”

  “So nothing,” he said. “My father might be the authority on a lot of things, but odd magic is something that’s right up his alley, having had me.”

  “Odd?” Thea said, frowning a little.

  “Odd,” Beltran said, shrugging his shoulders. “You know, strange. Weird. I’ve always been schooled by tutors, in this house—I’ve been known to…forget where I was, sometimes. I guess they just don’t think I could be trusted to find my way home from, you know, an actual school, not without a nanny. Even if the rest of it didn’t make the idea of sending me out into society a little scary.”

  “Why would it be scary?”

  “Like I said,” Beltran said, and crossed his eyes, sticking his tongue out. “I’m strange.”

  “We’re all strange, when it comes to that,” Thea said.

  “Well, yeah,” Beltran said, returning his face to its normal parameters. “I suspect that’s the reason you washed up here.”

  Suddenly acutely self-conscious under his apprising gaze, Thea put the remnants of her mandarin on her plate and pushed her chair back with such force that she nearly overturned it.

  “I have to go,” she said in a high-pitched voice she barely recognized as her own. “The professor is expecting me at nine.”

  She picked up her plate and the dirty silverware, looking around for somewhere obvious to put them. Beltran laughed softly, as though he had won some sort of a game.

  “Just leave them there,” he said. “The house will take care of it. And you don’t want to keep Father waiting.”

  Thea all but threw the plate on the table and fled his uncomfortable presence, pursued by the sound of soft, mocking laughter as she made her way across the tiled floor of the entrance hall toward the professor’s office.

  2.

  SHE AND TERRY, WHOM she discovered loitering self-consciously outside the closed double doors that led into the professor’s inner sanctum, entered together. Sebastian de los Reyes held court in a room paneled in Spanish oak and redolent with the scent of leather-bound books and a whiff of wood polish. He greeted the two of them with a regal nod from behind a vast antique desk, inlaid with leather. A couple of neat manila folders and a red leather journal book lay in front of him, together with a bronze desk lamp with an antique patina and a green shade, a pewter cup containing a single fountain pen, a couple of small photographs in silver frames, and a brass egg-shaped ball on an elaborately carved pedestal with tiny dragon-claw feet at each corner.

  “Come in,” the professor said, “you are punctual and this is good. We will have a talk before we decide what needs to be done with the two of you this summer. Terry Dane, shall we start with you?”

  “Sir,” Thea said, her heart beating rather fast, seeing as she was basically derailing the professor’s plans for the morning, “there’s a problem that we need to fix first—before Terry is free to speak….”

  She quailed a little, as the professor’s bright raptor eyes turned a sharp glance on her.

  “Oh?” he said. The voice was a little cool, but not as forbidding as Thea had been expecting. She took a deep breath.

  “You’ve probably been told that he cannot speak of…of anything magic,” Thea said. “It’s an allergy.”

  “An allergy. Yes.” The professor steepled his fingers before his face, his elbows on the desk, the golden signet ring on his finger glinting.

  “I can…fix it,” Thea said, her throat dry. “I was able to, back at the Academy. But the problem is…”

  “Yes?” the professor prompted.

  Thea swallowed. “I need a computer to do it,” she said. “I brought a laptop, but it needs to be plugged in to recharge the battery, and when Terry and I tried to do it, the thing just…”

  “Ah,” the professor said, one eyebrow rising. “You ran afoul of the Elemental framework. My house does not permit devices capable of potential…damage…without my express permission, and without them being under my control.”

  “Sir, that’s the reason they sent me here,” Thea said bravely, lifting her chin. “What I do, I do with a computer. If not my own, then I need access to one that works in this house, with your permission.”

  “This isn’t insurmountable, but it will take a little bit of time to deal with,” the professor said. “In the meantime…Terry, too, was sent here because he is connected to the Academy Nexus.”

  Thea inadvertently glanced around for eavesdroppers; Terry, however, merely nodded.

  “I have here letters of reference from a number of people, including your principal and at least two high-ranking Washington people,” the professor said to Terry. “Your connection to this Nexus has already been approved. This is one of the hubs of known magic in this world, but I think that it has already been established not to cause you any of your usual…difficulties. We will deal with the laptop situation later—but under the circumstances…” He frowned slightly, tapping one long finger on his desk, and then rose from it in one elegant fluid motion. “I have had students staying here with me before, working on certain aspects of their chosen field where I could mentor and assist them—but neither of you is quite the store of student that I am accustomed to. I was hoping to spend some time getting to know the special circumstances that brought the two of you to me, and to postpone the Nexus itself until at least our next interview, but it seems that if we are to get anywhere today those plans need to change. Please do me the courtesy of staying silent and in your seats.”

  “Yes, sir,” Thea said meekly.

  The professor crossed the office to a wall completely covered with bookshelves. He stood before the shelves for a few moments, his hands clasped behind his back, looking for all the world as though he was scrutinizing the shelves for a particular volume. Then he casually let his hands fall away from each other and reached for a book with his right hand while his left rose in a tiny, arcane motion too fast for the eye to follow. As the book he had extracted fell into his hand, the bookshelves shimmered gently, as though a veil had been dropped between the wall and the professor, and then dissolved away altogether to reveal a wall bare of both decoration and any working parts, other than a small niche that contained a built-in desk barely large enough to contain a flat monitor, a slim keyboard, and a tiny cordless optical mouse. There was only just enough room left over for the professor to lay down the book he was still holding; he did so, and tapped something on the keyboard. The monitor blinked and came to life. The professor tapped some more and then turned his head marginally.

  “Well,” he said. “Bring a chair over, if you please, and let me see what it is that we are up against here.”

  “Thea,” Terry murmured, rising slowly out of his chair.

  “May I?” Thea said, getting up off her own chair and carrying it over to the keyboard. The professor made room for her, but hovered over her shoulder, still within arm’s reach of the keyboard.

  “Tell me what you are doing as you do it,” he instructed.

  “I’m just…writing it down,” Thea said, settling down to type. “Nothing different—this room, you, us…but one sphere removed, a world where Terry’s allergy doesn’t exist.”

  “Fascinating,” the professor murmured, bending slightly at the waist in order to read over Thea’s shoulder.

  She hesitated for a moment when she was done, her hand hovering over the ENTER key. “Will your house…accept this?”

  “I have no idea,” the professor said. “The
exact circumstances have never come up. However, I am present, and I am able to countermand any erroneous responses on the house’s behalf.”

  “What is an Elemental house?” Thea asked.

  “Now is hardly the time to discuss that particular issue,” the professor said, with just a hint of rebuke. “Please proceed.”

  Thea flinched at the cool reprimand in his voice, and hunched over the keyboard. The wraith of Cheveyo stood at her elbow, shaking his head. Questions, always questions with you, Catori…

  She closed her eyes when she hit ENTER, but nothing happened—beyond the now-familiar tiny shiver as the worlds she had shuffled settled back down around her, in the new and different conformation.

  “Say ‘spellspam,’” Thea said over her shoulder to Terry.

  He cleared his throat. “Spellspam,” he croaked. The professor looked up in professional curiosity, waiting to see if Terry would choke on his own words—but the house had apparently accepted Thea’s instructions and was happy to allow the existence of the world-bubble Thea had created.

  “Fascinating,” the professor repeated. “I do believe you are something I had lost all hope of seeing before I die. Something genuinely new. I have never, in any aspect of my professional capacity, seen this done before. I have had a suspicion that maybe…” He had been about to say something, perhaps something confidential, but caught himself, breaking off in mid-sentence and striding back to his desk. “All right,” he said, briskly businesslike once again. “I have the basic information in these folders, but it is clear to me already that they have told me nothing at all of what I really wish to know. So—we will talk. Start at the beginning, please, and tell me everything. Even the things you consider unimportant.”

  “I didn’t really start—,” Terry began.

  “I was always—,” Thea said at the same time.

  The professor sighed and lifted a finger.

  “One at a time,” he said, “would be infinitely more useful.”