“If any funny business happens when I go back for it, I’ll try to forgive you,” Zoë said. “Now hurry up.”
The first public ’port they stumbled on had a substantial line already in place. Zoë eyed it with misgivings and shepherded Thea and Terry away.
“We don’t want to be standing around there for too long,” she muttered. “There’s got to be another one just around the corner.”
The ’ports were plentiful in the area, but they all seemed to be thronged, and it took them almost twenty minutes to find one that Zoë deemed acceptable, with only two couples ahead of them in the line. The other ’porters were efficient in their passage, and it was only a few minutes until it was their turn.
Zoë gave the professor’s address and asked to be deposited at the nearest ’port location.
It turned out that a visitor ’port pad was on the landing of the steps leading to the professor’s front door. This was unusual. Very few individual homes had private ’port facilities—they were expensive to maintain and could be tricky if allowed to get run down. However, as everyone kept saying, Professor de los Reyes’s house was no ordinary home.
“Oh, good,” said a voice as the three of them took a moment to blink and regroup, “at least you won’t be late for dinner. Madeline was angry enough that I’d let you two go out at all without my father’s signed permission.”
“Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, “that’s Larry.”
“Ah, the aunt,” Larry said, smiling. “Your hotel’s receptionist has a lovely voice. Let me know if you need to use my communication devices again at any time, Miss Winthrop—”
“Excuse me,” said a voice behind them, from the front door.
They instinctively parted like an enchanted sea to allow the passage of Isabella de los Reyes. She wore leather jeans that fitted her like a second skin and a bomber jacket of faded brown leather over a black turtleneck, with her hair loose and falling over her shoulders like a golden cloak.
“There you are,” Larry said equably to Isabella. “I was starting to wonder. Well, if you will excuse us, I’m taking my little sister to dinner out on the town. Good luck, inside!”
He had been standing beside a great big gleaming beast of a motorcycle; he tossed a spare helmet to Isabella as he spoke. Larry swung his long legs astride the motorcycle and kicked it into life. It roared as Isabella hoisted herself gracefully behind him.
“Later!” Larry said, saluting the trio on the stairs. Isabella didn’t even turn her head as the motorcycle surged forward and roared down the driveway, spraying gravel.
“Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” Thea muttered.
When she got no response, she glanced up at her two companions. Terry looked like he had a particularly bad case of concussion, his eyes glazed and fixed in the direction in which the motorcycle had disappeared—but that wasn’t unexpected. Terry wasn’t wholly rational where Isabella de los Reyes was concerned.
But Zoë was another matter. She was standing there with her hands at her sides, a silly grin on her face and her eyes unfocused.
“Aunt Zoë?” Thea said, tugging at her sleeve. “Are you okay?”
“You never told me he smelled like summer,” Zoë said languidly, staring after the vanished motorcycle.
There was an awful silence. “The e-mail on the laptop in the restaurant,” Terry said.
“The spellspam?” Thea said faintly.
Terry nodded. “The one that was open when you grabbed it to write in your own. She saw it. I was too late.”
To: [email protected]
From: Jack Pott < jackpot@international_ lottery.com >
Subject: You Won!
Your name has been pulled by our completely impartial computer program from MILLIONS of people! You’ve just won the ultimate Net Lottery! Your opening this e-mail will notify us that you have received your prize!
1.
THE THREE ON THE doorstep might have been distracted by Larry and Isabella, but either Isabella had conscientiously closed and locked the door behind her or the house had taken care of that detail. If Thea had hoped that they could simply slip inside unobserved, the locked door put an end to that idea, and Terry reluctantly lifted the large brass knocker on the front door and brought it down hard, three times.
They might have expected the door to be answered by the housekeeper, but it was Beltran who opened it and stood there staring at them in a manner at once vacant and disconcertingly knowing.
“About time,” he said, leaning bonelessly on the doorjamb. “Father was a little disconcerted to discover that you had both done an unsanctioned flit.”
Terry glanced at him with a raised eyebrow, looking back at Thea, but held his peace.
“The professor knew that my aunt was out here,” Thea said as she followed her two companions into the house.
She was barely one step behind them, but she knew immediately that she had crossed an entirely different threshold. She should have tripped over Terry’s heels, but there was nothing in front of her but empty space—nothing like the professor’s elegant entrance hall, just a large room full of a diffuse greenish light with walls that appeared something rather like a cross between mist and mirror and shimmered deceptively just outside the corner of her eye.
A flamboyant guitar chord came drifting in from somewhere, disembodied, oddly triumphant, confirming her instinctive recognition of the place that she had stepped into. This was the world that had beckoned from the guest bathroom the other night, music and all, and this time…this time she had been distracted, and the doorway had been cleverly concealed from her until it was far too late.
She froze. Only her eyes moved, raking the insubstantial “walls” of this room, but there was nothing here to give her any kind of clue; she put out a careful hand behind her, feeling for the doorjamb that should have been there. And then froze, again, at the sound of soft laughter coming from somewhere behind and to the left of her.
“Gone,” a voice said. “You’re through it, and it’s gone, that door. There was no further use for it.”
“Where are the others?” Thea asked carefully.
“They’re back at the house, of course. Only you are not.”
“Okay,” Thea said, exasperation overcoming caution, “where am I? And who are you?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t figured that out already. After all, isn’t this the sort of thing you do yourself? Make a world to your own specifications?”
Thea moved her head just a fraction, sweeping the formless green light that shifted and shimmered around her. “I usually do a better job than this,” she said.
“Ooh, temper,” said the voice, with an inflection of fake admonition. “They said you had that. That, and pride.”
“Who said?”
“Well, Cary said that they said that.”
“You’re…Beltran, aren’t you?” Thea said carefully.
That knowing laugh came again. “Hardly,” the voice said dryly.
“You are,” Thea said. “You just proved that. Beltran was the only one with a connection to Corey.”
“Cary,” the voice corrected.
“Then he didn’t introduce himself properly,” Thea snapped. “Where are you?”
“You’re allowed to move,” said the voice pleasantly. “It’s all quite solid, I assure you—you won’t fall through a hole into forever or anything like that.”
Thea whirled, trying to catch a glimpse of the invisible person to whom the voice belonged. She had thought it was Beltran’s, at first—but it sounded…oddly older, more worldly, more like Larry than like Beltran, except that this didn’t feel Larryish either.
Whoever it was, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was talking to the other, the one like her, the one who had originated the spellspam. The idea that it might have been the professor himself was swiftly dismissed—the voice didn’t sound that old, and the professor would have had no need…of this. Of the green light and the mirrors, and the drama of
it all.
There was nobody behind her when she’d turned—not that she expected there to be—but that maddening, knowing laugh came again, from a different direction this time.
“Oh, come on,” it said, needled, challenged her, dared her to forsake caution. “Explore, do. You know you want to.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “And walk straight into some trap…”
“Something not unlike the one you’re in now?” the voice inquired, dripping with fake concern.
Thea curled her hand, very gently, keeping the movement as hidden as possible; her fingers stretched into the green light…and yes, it caught, a ribbon of it floated into her palm.
I can weave this stuff. There is a way out of here. But I need time…time to figure this out….
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked, still raking the concealing mists with her eyes, keeping him talking, keeping him focused somewhere else, somewhere other than on the hand that had now threaded three green ribbons between her fingers and was braiding them into a slim rope.
“Well, I figured we needed to talk,” the voice said. “That’s partly why they sent you here, you and Terry—they want to figure it all out, and you’re their only real hope for doing that. But—he can only come at it from the outside, and I built my fortress well. You…you could stumble in here. Without warning. Cary warned me about that. And I wouldn’t want to be caught napping. So, I figured…we should talk.”
“You’re right,” Thea said. She had a hand-span of green light-braid now; she tugged at it experimentally, and it felt firm, attached to…something. “But not right now. I have…other things to do right now. Perhaps we’ll meet again, now that I know where to look.”
She wrapped the light-ribbon around her hand firmly, and pulled—and in her mind the Barefoot Road unfolded, the sickly green falling away from her as the reds and golds of the familiar mesas rose around her.
As soon as she felt her bare feet firm on ground that she recognized, she let go of the ribbon of green light, all but throwing it away from her, watching it tear and shred into nothingness, fading before it hit the Road. The light of Tawaha was warm on her neck and shoulders, but she shivered anyway, the memory of the green light touching her with icy fingers.
She was half-expecting to see Cheveyo waiting there again, but she was alone. The worlds she wove were her own now. She found herself missing him acutely for a moment, but then quashed the feeling, aware that it would probably bring him to her if she let it—and she couldn’t stay here in the red mesas, not right now, not with the trouble brewing back at the professor’s house.
She let her eyes drop back to the Road at her feet as she started walking, her hands briskly and urgently weaving the light and sounds of San Francisco around her.
It was Zoë she wove the absence of, Zoë whose shape she reached for as she found her way back to the professor’s house, praying that she wasn’t about to blunder through some (to her) incorporeal wall straight into the professor’s study—but she emerged instead, somewhat disconcertingly, into her bedroom, with Zoë apparently asleep on Thea’s bed. Zoë’s bare feet, with their painted nails and one delicate silver toe ring, poked out from underneath a coverlet flung across her hips and shoulders, neatly curled up against each other like two sleeping cats.
The Tiffany bedside lamp was on; outside, it was pitch dark.
Thea swallowed. “Just how long was I gone…?” she murmured to herself.
Zoë sighed and stirred under the coverlet and Thea hesitated, torn between waking her aunt to find out what happened and letting her sleep. She glanced around the room, noticing her laptop sitting where she had left it, with its power cord coiled helplessly beside it and the power socket its usual blank square on the wall below.
The professor said he would fix it so that it would work—and now, more than ever, Thea needed access to the place where her power lived in this world. She decided she would let Zoë sleep, and hesitated, briefly, before picking up the power cord—but when she waved it in front of the blank wall panel the power socket obligingly presented itself. After a moment of holding her breath, Thea pushed the plug in and then reached out and switched the machine on. This time, things seemed to be working. The laptop hummed into life, precisely as always, giving no indication that there had ever been any trouble with it at all. The Elemental house had apparently decided to be hospitable.
Thea waited impatiently for the machine to boot up, grabbing it off its perch and sliding down against the wall until she was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the computer across her lap. When it finally beeped its readiness, she called up her word processing program and typed furiously for a few moments, pausing every now and then to reword a phrase more precisely—who knew what would be important when the crunch came? Just as she was about to hit the ENTER key, a sleepy voice startled her.
“Thea…? Is that you? What happened?”
Thea hit ENTER and took a moment to glance at the screen to make sure everything was well before putting the laptop down on the floor and scrambling to her feet. By the time she got to the bed, Zoë was sitting up, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands, her bare feet on the floor.
“How long have I been asleep?” she asked. “I feel tired enough to have slept for three days…”
“I was hoping you knew,” Thea said.
Zoë woke up a little bit more. “It’s been a madhouse here for the past…oh, for a while…I don’t really remember much of it in the beginning, apparently I had to be deprogrammed after the spellspam back at the café, but I do recall being coherent enough to have asked what had happened to you, and nobody would tell me, and then Larry came back, and then…I don’t remember much more than that, other than weird dreams and waking up and seeing you…. What were you doing back there?”
“I got lucky,” Thea said soberly. “I was just…making sure that I didn’t get caught again, with the hole in the cage plugged up this time.”
Zoë clutched at Thea’s arm. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine, now,” Thea said. “Are you?”
Zoë nodded distractedly, kneading the back of her neck. “I feel so stiff, like someone broke bones and set them wrong,” she said. “I think I need coffee, and you…I think you’d better talk to the professor. He was not happy, earlier—that much I do remember.”
“Yeah, that makes me really look forward to seeing him,” Thea murmured. “But I think I have it figured out—at least halfway.”
“Just tell me again that you’re really all right,” Zoë said insistently. “I couldn’t face your parents if something happened to you while I stood there like a mooncalf batting my eyelashes at a man…”
“You said he smelled like summer,” Thea said, suddenly remembering the last thing she had heard Zoë say before she was dragged off into the green world.
“What?” Zoë said sharply.
“I guess you don’t remember that,” Thea said. “Are you still sweet on him?”
“Who? Lorenzo de los Reyes? I never was, Thea,” Zoë said, a little defensively. “It was just the…”
“The spellspam, sure, but you are sounding rather like Terry does when he talks about Isabella, and he doesn’t have the spellspam excuse.”
Zoë snorted. “I am not a lovesick teenager.”
“Yeah, right,” Thea said, grinning. “Are you up to going in search of that coffee?”
“What time is it?”
“I have no idea,” Thea said, realizing that she had managed to lose her watch. “Let me double check…”
She crossed back to the computer, hit the SAVE button, and glanced at the toolbar.
“It’s almost eight o’clock,” she said. “It’s still early. Do you have any idea where Terry is?”
“Last I knew, with the professor, but that was hours ago,” Zoë said. “Why do I suddenly feel as though I’ve just bitten into a not-quite-ripe orange? What is it that you’re cooking up on that computer of yours?”
“The professor said I could, so long as I told him about it, and this was important,” Thea said. “I’m okay, Aunt Zoë, I promise…but I really would rather say this once, to everyone.”
Zoë slipped off the bed, shaking off the coverlet. “Let’s go, then—I’m starting to get really spooked here. I knew that the stuff was around; I should have been more careful….”
“Perhaps Terry is right,” Thea said as she walked toward the door, “I really should get one of those palmtop computers, something I could carry in my pocket. That way you’d never have had to poach someone else’s.”
“On the whole,” Zoë said, falling into step beside her niece, “I would rather suffer the consequences than let you loose into the world with a computer in your hands.”
“You don’t trust me?” Thea said, a little taken aback.
“Thea…you disappeared. What is it now?”
Thea had come to a sudden stop at the top of the curved stairs into the main hall. “I thought I heard…music….”
Zoë tilted her head to listen. “Sounds like a banjo to me.”
Thea let out the breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. “At least it isn’t a guitar,” she said, starting down the stairs. “He seems to have a liking for dramatic guitar.”
“Who does?” Zoë said, following her closely, her eyes narrowed. And then, as Thea glanced around in eloquent silence, flung up a hand in a defensive gesture. “I know, I know, you only want to say it once. But are you still convinced that it’s the professor who’s doing the spellspam?”
“No,” said Thea.
Zoë sighed and followed Thea the rest of the way down the stairs in martyred silence.
There was a muted wash of light coming from the sitting room. The French doors to the patio were open and there was a shadowy figure outside strumming on something that definitely looked and sounded like a banjo.
The music stopped as she and Zoë entered the room.
Worldweavers: Spellspam Page 16
