Worldweavers: Spellspam

by Alma Alexander

  When Zoë’s rental car rolled into the gravel driveway, Thea raced down the front steps and flung open the passenger door. She squeezed into the backseat, and beckoned to Terry, who had remained frozen at the top of the stairs.

  “Come on!”

  Terry came down the steps somewhat more slowly and climbed into the front next to Zoë.

  “Terry, this is my Aunt Zoë. Aunt Zoë, this is Terry Dane. Go!”

  “We met, I think,” Zoë murmured, putting the car back into gear and pulling away as Terry slammed the door shut. “You were the second ghost in Paul’s study.”

  “Yeah. Um, hi,” Terry said. He fastened his seat belt, and then turned to Thea.

  “Is now ‘later’ enough for you?” he asked plaintively.

  “Where to?” Zoë asked in the same instant.

  She and Terry glanced back at one another, and burst out laughing.

  “Okay, Thea,” Zoë said, still grinning, “I am enjoying the cloak and dagger, but I think I need to hear the rest of this. The Ghirardelli place down on the waterfront has a nice little café—what say we go out and grab a bite to eat?”

  “You know how you thought that spellspam were sent through the second Nexus?” Thea said, curled up in the backseat.

  “That’s what I just spent nearly three hours talking to the man about,” Terry said, sighing. “I was hoping that we could change the—”

  “Have you ever considered,” Thea said darkly, “that the professor himself might be behind it all?”

  2.

  ZOË’S FOOT SLAMMED ON the brake, and the car bucked like a rabbit; someone behind them honked impatiently.

  “What?” Terry said, aghast, turning around to face Thea. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “There’s all kinds of strange things going on in that house,” Thea said, sounding a little defensive. “And—well—he has the know-how. And he controls that place. I don’t see how anything involving the Nexus could have happened without his knowledge, at the very least. But there’s more than that. Corey’s been inside that house.”

  “Corey?” Terry said blankly.

  Zoë lifted her gaze for a moment to meet Thea’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Her eyebrow was raised. “Corey? Your Corey? The trickster Corey? He’s here? You’ve seen him?”

  “No,” Thea said grudgingly. “But I was talking to Beltran at breakfast…he said he’s got this tutor, and the guy left the house as soon as he got wind that I’d be there this summer. Beltran called the man Wiley, Cary Wiley…”

  “That’s pretty thin…,” Zoë began, but Thea interrupted.

  “Yes, but then the professor mentioned this tutor again, this morning,” she said. “And something he said…he said that he thought this Wiley guy might have left because he acquired…what he thought might be spellspam problems. The professor said, remember, something about feathers popping up? Just nod…” Terry did, keeping his mouth shut. “And that’s when it clicked—Cary, Corey, Wiley, trickster, it all fit, and the last time I saw him he was having trouble keeping the raven feathers from popping up where he didn’t want them, and it…had nothing to do with spellspam…. It was probably my fault.” She gulped, and then plowed on. “And the professor seemed awfully cavalier about that—a tutor with feathers on his face? Surely someone like Professor de los Reyes could have seen through a Corey disguise? And then there’s the guitar music…”

  “What guitar music?” Terry asked.

  “Last night. When you came out of your room, you know, when you thought you heard something?”

  “When I saw you in the hallway, yeah, what about it?”

  “I had heard something, too,” Thea said. “That was why I was there. And there was something…strange going on in the bathroom. Even for that house.”

  “Thea,” Zoë said, “stop. I think I need a triple espresso before you start on any more of this. I need a caffeine buzz for any of it to make any sense whatsoever. Help me keep an eye out for parking spots…”

  “We can’t be anywhere near the place yet, and anyway, Aunt Zoë, what’s with the car? Wouldn’t it have been easier for you to ’port?”

  Zoë was shaking her head. “Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said. “I don’t know the city, and if I just used ’ports to get from one place to another, how would I ever get to know it?”

  “That is a one-way street, I think,” Terry said diffidently as Zoë started to turn.

  “Oops,” she said, swerving back into the street she had been on. “Next one, I think.”

  “You just get lost,” Thea said.

  “I know,” said Zoë, flashing her a quick grin in the rearview mirror. “It’s fun. Sometimes the shortest road to a place is found when you take a wrong turn.”

  “You sound like you might have written that horrid ‘go somewhere interesting’ spellspam,” Thea muttered.

  “We can’t all be doing it,” Zoë protested.

  “Are they still happening? I haven’t been near a computer for a while,” Thea said.

  “Oh, yes,” Zoë said. “Annoying stuff. The latest one’s been going around like an epidemic—make your heart’s desire fall in love with you. I’ve been told that it’s hard to put your hand on a red rose these days, so many of them have been snatched up by poor bespelled lovelorn people trying to win their so-called true love’s heart.”

  “Well, at least it’s harmless enough,” Thea murmured. “Getting a red rose is hardly like getting a pair of penguins or a Chinese magazine subscription.”

  “Don’t you think we should change the subject, at least for a little while?” Zoë said, glancing at Terry. “It’s rather rude to have a conversation that one of us can’t take part in.”

  “I’ve done nothing but be rude ever since I got into that house,” Thea said. “One way or another, I’m always doing or saying the wrong thing. I didn’t even say thank you for the cell phone.”

  “What?” said Zoë.

  “Well, mine doesn’t work. That house doesn’t like it,” Thea said.

  “But you called me.”

  “That was on Larry’s cell.”

  “Who,” Terry said plaintively, “is Larry?”

  “The prodigal son,” Zoë said. “Larry Starr, is it? He’s back?”

  “You know him?” Thea asked.

  “Never met him, but in his own way he stirred up just as much drama in the community as you ever did,” Zoë said. “His father practically disinherited him when he…”

  “Parking spot,” Terry said.

  “You can’t fit in there,” Thea objected, surveying the tiny gap that Terry had spotted.

  “Want to bet?” Zoë said, beginning to edge in.

  “Without magic?” Thea said.

  Zoë glared at her. “Just a smidge would do it,” she said.

  Thea smirked.

  “Right,” Zoë said, “now it’s a challenge.”

  Terry clutched the dashboard as Zoë edged backward and forward for some minutes before wedging the car in between two other parked vehicles so closely that Thea, after scrambling out of the back of the thing and inspecting the car’s position, found that their car’s bumpers were actually touching those of the car in front.

  “Okay,” she said, “but getting out…”

  “You never said anything about not using magic then,” Zoë said. “Now come on. You can tell me the rest of what’s been going on when I’ve got a cup of coffee in front of me and my strength back. Come on, Terry, let’s go and talk about everything except the real reason you guys are here, for a little while at least, so you can join the conversation…”

  Thea straightened from her bumper inspection and stuck out her tongue at her aunt. At least Terry was grinning again, she was glad to notice. She felt rather contrite about dragging him out at all—given his handicap and knowing that he couldn’t take part in whatever she needed to talk over with Zoë.

  And then she noticed a sign, and had a better idea.

  “Hold up!�
�� she called after Zoë and Terry, who had started walking away. They stopped and turned back; Thea was still standing a few steps away from the car, fishing in her pockets. “Aunt Zoë, do you happen to have a couple of bucks on you?”

  “Um, sure…why?” Zoë said, and then shook her head sharply as she followed Thea’s gaze to a swinging sign advertising a cybercafé and realized what her niece was thinking. “Thea, no,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Why? All I need is access to one computer, for a very short time, and I can deal with…”

  “But then what? You leave? And someone else turns up…? It’s a Terranet café, they sell time by the half hour—and you remember what happened when you were doing this back in your father’s study?”

  “I should have gone to get my own laptop before we left,” Thea said, casting a mutinous glance to the ground. “I didn’t think.”

  “Well, I have a better idea,” Zoë said. “Come on.”

  Thea fell into unwilling step behind her aunt. The walk took longer than Thea had anticipated, but once inside the Ghirardelli café they seemed to be in an alien world whose atmosphere was only barely enough oxygen and the rest nebulized chocolate. Zoë paused and scanned the patrons already seated at the tables. At least two people were sitting there with laptops open in front of them. One was a young man with a shock of unkempt hair, a pair of earphones in his ears, and a somewhat glazed expression on his face, his fingers beating a tattoo on the table next to his half-drunk cup of coffee.

  “That one,” Zoë said. “He smells just oblivious enough that he wouldn’t notice if a meteor hit him.”

  “What are you doing?” Terry said, fascinated.

  “Borrowing the laptop,” Zoë said. “Thea, how much time do you need?”

  “Only a few moments—enough to type in a couple of sentences—”

  “Do you need to get back in to erase it, after?”

  “Send it in an e-mail,” Terry said. “I can check quickly to make sure that he doesn’t keep copies.”

  “How much time?”

  “Two minutes,” Terry said, exchanging a glance with Thea.

  Zoë nodded. “Okay. Give me a sec.”

  “What are you doing?” Thea whispered.

  “Stealing two minutes for you,” Zoë said. “I’ll rig up a short-term time-lapse spell. All that anyone else will see is someone who went by his table and took his coffee cup—and people will see what they want to see, and assume that it was someone working here cleaning up. He won’t remember anyone at all. When I say go, you have two minutes, max—get in, type, get out. Thea, set up entry and exit. We won’t get another shot at this.”

  She turned away for a moment to concentrate on the spell, and then motioned Thea forward with a wave of her hand. “Let’s go,” she said abruptly.

  Thea began to move and then hesitated as Zoë fell into step beside her. “Where are you going?”

  “I want to see what it is exactly that you’re doing,” Zoë said. “I promise I won’t interfere, I just want to look over your shoulder.”

  “But don’t we need a lookout?” Thea said, glancing around.

  Nobody seemed to be paying attention. In fact, most people seemed frozen in mid-motion, a precariously tilting cup halfway to their lips, forks about to spear something on a plate.

  “I didn’t realize just how dangerous everyday life looks from a different angle,” Thea said, suddenly diverted by the spectacle.

  “Your two minutes are running,” Terry said.

  Thea risked another glance around the room. “All right, then.”

  The young man whose laptop they were appropriating appeared equally frozen in time, perhaps in mid-blink, because his eyes were half-closed as his hands hovered above his keyboard. Thea pulled the laptop out toward herself.

  “E-mail software already open,” Zoë said, glancing at the screen.

  “No!” Thea yelped, yanking the computer away. “You don’t have the dreamcatcher filter, you don’t know what he has in there…”

  She wore her own dreamcatcher, the one that Grandmother Spider had sent her, on a thong around her neck; she fished it out with nervous fingers and peered at the e-mail open on the screen—and was rewarded with precisely what she had hoped not to see, an e-mail squirming with magical energy, now powerless to harm her but radiating its message out to anyone close enough to see it. It was one of those misdirected Cupid’s-arrow e-mails that Zoë had mentioned earlier—Falling in love is easy, the subject head cajoled.

  “If it’s so easy, why do we need you?” Thea said, obliterating the e-mail and hoping that Zoë hadn’t seen it for long enough to be affected, or else that she had already been exposed, and was immune. She called up a blank e-mail and typed in Terry’s address, and then with another quick glance over the top of the laptop and around the room, typed in a few short sentences, paused as if she were done, suddenly smiled mischievously and added a few more words, and then hit the SEND button. “Okay, Terry,” she said.

  “Move,” Terry said, reaching across her. She shuffled under his arm to give him access to the keyboard, and he made a few quick keystrokes of his own, his eyes darting quickly from side to side as he scanned the screen.

  “Time,” said Zoë warningly.

  “Done,” Terry said, pushing the laptop back into position.

  They moved away briskly, making for an empty table across the room; the stasis bubble broke even as they reached it and pulled out chairs to collapse into.

  “You should get one of those palmtop computers,” Terry said. “Little ones, you know. You can slip them into a pocket. They won’t do all that much, but at least you can tap a few words into it if you need to, like today, and some of them recognize handwriting with a stylus on the screen—and it’s easier to carry around than a big laptop…”

  Zoë laughed, a little unsteadily. “Young man,” she said, “I don’t think that’s an entirely safe suggestion. I don’t know that I’d like the idea of letting Thea loose in society with means to juggle reality as she chooses. Speaking of which, did it work?”

  “Terry, say…”

  “Spellspam,” Terry said carefully, and then drew a deep breath. “There. Yes. Now start again. What possessed you to accuse the professor of sending out spellspam? What possible reason could he have to risk throwing away a lifetime of scholarship and reputation?”

  “He sounded awfully ferocious about it in the study,” Thea said. “And then there’s the guitar…although Larry, or Lorenzo, or whatever his name is, did say that everyone in that house played the guitar….”

  “But that’s just it, Thea, I don’t think I heard the guitar, precisely,” Terry objected.

  “You heard something,” Thea said. “Or at least you said you did, at the time. You must have heard something, or you’d never have come out there.”

  Terry scratched his head. “Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe we both were.”

  “Maybe it’s Isabella,” Thea said.

  “No, it most certainly is not!” Terry said, sitting up in outrage.

  “Why not? Tess said that she’d applied for an internship at the FBM, which means she’s got the know-how…”

  “She wouldn’t do stupid stuff like that,” Terry said sharply. “She’s only just starting to build a reputation—why on earth would she gamble her future away on this kind of idiocy?”

  “Guys,” Zoë said gently, “while this is fascinating, I might point out that we have an audience.”

  Terry’s head whipped around. “Where?”

  “Third table over. Close to the wall there. I can smell him listening.”

  Thea, twisting in her seat, saw a man sitting at the table Zoë had indicated, his head down as he nursed a mug of something between gloved hands. He wore a sort of cowboy hat, pulled down over his forehead, and his feet, stuck out in front of him, were shod in snakeskin cowboy boots.

  And, as he turned slightly toward them, apparently aware that he had been seen, those eyes.

&
nbsp; “That’s Corey,” Thea said in a low voice.

  Corey tipped his hat to them with a languid motion, pushing his mug away with the other hand. Then he got up, pushing his chair back very slowly. Thea tensed for his approach…

  …and a moment later found herself staring at an empty table, and a roomful of people who seemed to have only just restarted an interrupted movement or conversation.

  “Where’d he go?” Thea said, her voice unnaturally shrill.

  Zoë was scowling. “That slubberdegullion,” she snapped. “He must have been watching us all along. That spell I did was pretty basic; it would certainly not have affected him—and he just up and used it against me. The exact same thing.”

  “But if he’s here…,” Thea said, her eyes darting around nervously for any long-fingered, pointy-eared folk who might have been trying to pass as human. Where Corey was, she had instinctively grown to expect to find Alphiri…and if he was here, so were they, and the stakes had just gotten higher.

  “I’d better take you back,” Zoë said. “And perhaps we’d better not do any more excursions until I can call in the heavy artillery. I can handle a lot of things, but I don’t know how I’d do in hand-to-hand combat with the Trickster himself, especially if he has reinforcements waiting.”

  “It’s a long walk back to the car,” Terry said grimly.

  “We’re not going to take the car,” Zoë said. “We’ll ’port back—there has to be a public ’port square within a block of here. I’m not sure where the closest one is to the professor’s house, but we can figure that out when we get there. I’ll come back for the car later. I won’t risk the two of you any more than necessary…and whatever you might think about the professor right now, Thea, behind the walls of that Elemental house is probably where you’re safest right now.”

  “But Corey was there…,” Thea began.

  “He isn’t there now,” Zoë said, “and that’s how it’s going to stay. I’m going to go in and have a word with the professor, whatever that pompous housekeeper of his has to say about it.”

  “I wrote in something about the car when I sent my e-mail,” Thea said mournfully as she was being shepherded toward the door of the establishment. “It would have been fun to have been there when you tried to get out of the parking spot.”