Worldweavers
Spellspam
Book 2
Alma Alexander
The second book for Sonja, the second sister
Contents
1.
THE FIRST HINT OF serious trouble came, as trouble always…
2.
TERRY BLINKED, HIS FINGERS curled around Thea’s hand, staring at…
1.
THE PRINCIPAL DID NOT show them the Nexus. Not then.
2.
THE AIR IN THE shed stirred as though a breath…
1.
OPEN THE WINDOW.
2.
THE “IDEA” ARRIVED IN a manila envelope later that morning.
1.
TELL PRINCIPAL HARRIS THAT I will send…Paul Winthrop’s last words…
2.
“OY,” SAID HUMPHREY, AFTER a beat of silence.
1.
THEA WOKE SUDDENLY, WITH a start. She was in a…
2.
AUNT ZOË ANSWERED THE phone at Thea’s house. “Your father…
3.
THEA REACHED UP SLOWLY to draw the thong necklace over…
1.
THEA HAD NOT BEEN able to take Humphrey May into…
2.
BEFORE ZOË HAD A chance to wrestle Thea’s two suitcases…
1.
DINNER PASSED IN A sort of formal daze. Everyone sat…
2.
SHE AND TERRY, WHOM she discovered loitering self-consciously outside the…
1.
THE PROFESSOR KEPT THEM both in his study for almost…
2.
ZOË’S FOOT SLAMMED ON the brake, and the car bucked…
1.
THE THREE ON THE doorstep might have been distracted by…
2.
THEY WERE IN TIME to see Larry pause in front…
1.
“YOU CAN’T SEND HER back there alone! She barely got…
2.
THEA COULD SEE THEM from the back—her aunt’s hair mussed…
1.
WHEN THEA WOKE THE next morning, Zoë was gone from…
2.
THEA’S SMILE WAS WIPED off her face. “What?” she said,…
1.
THEY STOOD SIDE BY side in silence for a moment,…
2.
EVERYONE TURNED TO LOOK at her again.
1.
THE ELEMENTAL HOUSE REMAINED chaotic for some time. Luana and…
2.
THEA GAVE THEM AN abbreviated account of the eventful few…
1.
IT DID NOT TAKE Diego de los Reyes long to…
2.
SHE WOKE SEVENTEEN HOURS later.
3.
THE HOSPITAL COULD FIND nothing physically wrong with Beltran, and…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Alma Alexander
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
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1.
THE FIRST HINT OF serious trouble came, as trouble always does, unlooked for, stealthily, catching everyone by surprise. It was the day that LaTasha Jackson suddenly turned into an Anatomy teacher’s aide.
Things came to a head during a free-study hour in the comfortable, plush silence of the school library, each student to his or her own cubicle, some finishing homework, others reading. Still others sat furtively hunched over their desks, loose hair covering contraband earphones, trying to hide a music-player-shaped bulge in their pocket. One or two, bored, drew cartoons or wrote snatches of deathless prose that they imagined would turn into a novel someday. The incorrigible chatterboxes whispered and giggled softly to one another from adjoining cubicles. But, on the whole, everything was quiet, and Thea liked it that way. She wasn’t doing anything particularly scholastic, but that wasn’t because she was goofing off—she usually managed to have most of her work done in reasonable time, and hardly ever needed to resort to trying to write an essay five minutes before it was due. What she used her free study periods for was simply reading. She would meander down the library stacks at the beginning of the hour, pulling out a book here and there to check it out as a title caught her eye, and finally settle on something that interested her.
She was engrossed in a book about the social customs of chimpanzees when a bloodcurdling scream rent the air from the north corner of the library, where the computers slated for student use were situated. Thea jumped, dropping her book on the desk with a thump and losing her place, pushing her chair back on its castors to peer around the edges of her cubicle.
Dozens of other heads were popping out from other cubicles, watching in appalled horror as something ghastly leaped back from a computer screen, overturning a chair and sending it flying, and raced down the length of the library and out through the double doors at the far end.
The only reason Thea even remotely recognized this apparition was LaTasha’s trademark hairstyle, dozens of tiny braids finished off with trade beads in garish shades of pink and mustard yellow. The face beneath those braids, however, was something else indeed.
She looks like she’s been skinned! was the first thought that came swimming into Thea’s astonished mind. And then she shuddered as she realized that this was precisely what LaTasha was. Skinned. Or at least looking like a reasonably good imitation of it. But there was no blood, Thea thought, frowning. Surely there should have been…but no…there was just…
That was it, in a nutshell. Instead of LaTasha’s skin, which typically was the color of coffee lightened with a touch of cream, her face was a complicated mass of red muscle, striated bands coming down from her temples to wrap around her mouth, neat folds across her nose and cupping her chin, round orbs around her alarmingly protruding eyeballs, with startling and somewhat unnerving glimpses of stark bone structure underneath it all. Her hands, held out in front of her, looked the same way—a naked, tangled mass of tendon and sinew. But no blood. It was like her skin had just gone see-through, somehow, revealing the building blocks of the body that lay beneath.
There was a swelling of noise in the library as students surged out of their chairs, clustered in tight little knots, the librarian on duty frantically whispering something into a telephone, her hand cupped protectively around the mouthpiece.
For some reason it was only Thea who backed away from the pandemonium and edged almost furtively toward the computer LaTasha had been using.
An e-mail was open on the screen, an e-mail that LaTasha should have known better than to open—anything addressed to [email protected] should have been immediately suspect, at the very least as an advertisement, unwanted junk mail, spam. But what followed was not merely spam:
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LaTasha was fourteen years old, and painfully self-conscious of the imperfections of her skin, which was cursed with large pores and periodic zit infestations that made her look like she was coming down with the measles—a
nd that was in addition to an unfortunate scar left behind by her brush with the real measles, which she had had as a toddler. It sat, a small but (to LaTasha) eye-wateringly obvious pit, underneath and to the outside of her left eye.
“It makes my eye droop,” she had often complained to friends. “Look, it makes me look like a Saint Bernard puppy, all mournful and woebegone. Who’d want to date that? They probably all think I’m going to bore them silly with family tragedies. Like I’d had a twin who was stolen by the Faele or something and never came home. Oh, it’s hopeless!”
Perfect skin. The thing had offered perfect skin. That would have been irresistible to someone like LaTasha, who blamed hers for all the injustices in her life—if she could only get perfect skin, she’d be happy, she knew she’d be happy.
Something surfaced briefly in Thea’s mind, and then submerged again before she’d had a chance to grab at it. Instead, she sighed and reached out instinctively to clear the screen, as though that e-mail could be used as some sort of evidence against poor LaTasha. Her hand hovered above the red X that would close the e-mail screen; then she hesitated.
The word was clear. Not perfect.
“Clearer than you could ever have dreamed of,” Thea whispered as she hastily clicked on the red X. “Oh, my fur and whiskers…”
Clear.
Transparent.
“But that is a spell,” Thea muttered to herself, frowning.
She lifted her head to look back across the library, where a couple of staff members were restoring order to the chaos of milling students. The librarian herself, still cradling the telephone receiver, was staring straight back at Thea and at the now-blank computer on the desk beside her. With a sinking feeling that she was still unable to properly articulate, Thea bent her head to hide the sudden color in her cheeks and inched away from the computer desk toward the sanctuary of the stacks.
Everyone knew, of course, that computers were impervious to magic. Computers were where magic was stored, because it could do no harm there, and besides, this was the Wandless Academy, which was both magicless and shielded. There could not have been a spell that broke those two defenses—there could not have possibly been such a spell. And yet, Thea had seen the evidence streak out of the library before her very eyes. And other people’s eyes. And obviously LaTasha herself had been affected. Thea paused for a moment to consider how she would have reacted if she had happened to glance at her hands on the computer keyboard and had seen something that looked more like it belonged on a butcher’s block or an anatomy dissection board than the familiar limbs she was used to.
It had to have been a very effective illusion spell…and it had been transmitted by computer.
Which, of course, was impossible.
Computers couldn’t do magic.
They had talked about this a lot, Thea and her friends, since they had returned to the Academy for the new semester. Terry, the computer genius, had naturally asked questions that were practical and to the point.
“Are you saying we can all do this tripping-between-the-worlds thing?” he had asked Thea one day in September, tapping his fingers on a desk. “By ourselves? That first time, we all seemed to be involved….”
“Well, you all came after me into the Whale Hunt, when we were after the Nothing, and I wasn’t there to start it,” Thea said.
“Yeah, but that time I found the thing on the computer screen and just hit ENTER again, so it was you who started it; we just followed.”
“Do you think anyone could have followed?” Magpie said, sounding frightened. “I would hate for people who don’t care or understand to be able to blunder around in a world like that—it was the sea of my own ancestors….”
“We could try it again,” Tess began.
“They locked up the computer room,” Ben said, shaking his head.
“We have my laptop,” Terry said.
“And anyway, we would just get into real trouble,” said Ben, scowling at the interruption. “Besides, they made Thea promise…”
“Yeah,” Thea said morosely, “they made me promise.”
“That can’t last,” Terry said. “They want to know, they’ll come and rope you back in—maybe all of us, for all I know—before too long. This whole thing is too big for just a handful of people. Sooner or later it’ll come to the attention of the politicians. And then it’s anybody’s game.”
“You think the Federal Bureau of Magic will get involved?” Ben asked.
“Principal Harris said something about shifting the balance of trade,” Thea muttered. “If the Alphiri get wind of this…”
“I’ve always thought,” Magpie said, turning to stare at her roommate, “that you were a bit obsessed with the Alphiri.”
“Oh, yeah?” Thea said, rounding on Magpie with some asperity. “I’m telling you, they’re everywhere. Every time I turn around outside the school, I see them—they’re all over the place—in the banks, in the coffee shops, in the streets. They’re just waiting for something to happen, to confirm whatever it is that they think they already know, and the moment they think they’ve done that…”
“You really think they’re going to snatch you?” Magpie asked, chastened.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” Thea muttered. “But I’m afraid of them.”
“The Alphiri have always been everywhere,” Terry said. “Ever since they turned up. But all that aside, Thea’s right. If any of this comes to threaten our relationship with the Alphiri or any of the other polities, you bet the Feds will come in. And if they can’t use you, Thea, they will probably—”
“Terry,” Tess said sharply, “you are starting to sound awfully like Dad at his most pompously pessimistic.”
“Caught between the government and the Alphiri,” Thea muttered. “Terrific.”
Terry shrugged. “Someday I’d like another stab at it,” he said, “see if I can’t figure out what’s going on. But until then—just do what they want, and lie low, and stay out of people’s way.”
“Double Seventh at last?” Ben said, with a curious little smile. “Coming into your own?”
Thea tossed her head. “Sometimes,” she said trenchantly, “I wish I’d never figured out how to do any of this. I wonder if I shouldn’t have just shut up about everything and been content to keep Frankie company.”
“Hiding a light under a barrel doesn’t put it out,” Magpie said.
“You are starting to sound like Cheveyo,” Thea said, with a wry grin.
“It’s big,” Tess said, “and yeah, it’s unusual, but there’s all kinds of weird and unusual talents amongst those of our kind—this thing you can do might turn out to be no more than an aberration, after all. An accident of magic. We all know that computers are inert; all that you might have done, when they get around to finding out what’s behind it all, is discover how to use one to focus what’s already inside you. The fact that you were anywhere near a computer might have been a complete accident….”
“Still,” Terry said doggedly, “watch yourself.”
“Computers can’t!” Tess said. “We all know that!”
That was the foundation of it all, of course—the truth that their world was built upon. Computers were impervious to magic and safe from it. It was what all five of them had still believed, despite evidence to the contrary, until that day in the library when a spell transferred by computer had turned LaTasha transparent.
On the day of LaTasha’s transformation, none of the others had been in the library. When Thea rounded up her friends less than an hour later and told them what she had observed, it was hard for everyone to accept the obvious.
“It must have been something else, something you missed,” Tess insisted.
“Tess, she ran out of there screaming, looking skinned. I saw it, the librarian saw it, a whole bunch of other kids saw it, and we all saw the same thing. The only person they know of who can do anything with magic on a computer is me—and they will know I was in the library at the time.�
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Terry gave her a startled look. “You think they’ll blame you?”
“But you weren’t at a computer,” Tess said.
Thea looked up. “Oh, yeah, I was,” she said, a little desperately. “I should have known better than to meddle, but she ran from the computer…and I…wanted to see…I turned off the computer. I have no idea why I did it, but I did it, and the librarian saw me.”
“She couldn’t possibly have known what you were doing, or even that you hadn’t been there all the time,” said Ben.
Thea threw him a grateful but exasperated glance. “That just makes it worse,” she said. “The librarian might not have known anything, but she will tell them that she remembers seeing me at that computer. And then everyone else will jump to their own obvious conclusions. It’s all tied in.” She looked at all of them with pleading eyes. “I need to talk to my parents…. I need your help….”
“Thea,” Terry said, understanding immediately. “No.”
“What?” Ben said, bewildered.
“She wants to go back, go home…go back that way. Thea, you promised them you wouldn’t.”
“That was before any of this happened. Whatever happened to LaTasha…it’s going to get out. I want to talk to my father in person…. I need a safe place….”
“The computer lab?” Tess said pragmatically, leaving out the ethics of technically breaking and entering, never mind broken promises.
“Do you think Twitterpat knew something?” Terry said sharply, looking up. “That there’s a trace of an answer in there somewhere? Is his own computer still there?”
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