“Well,” said a familiar voice, “I’m glad to see you came to no harm. Neither of you.”
Thea, who had happened to glance at her aunt just as Larry spoke from the shadows outside, was a little astonished to see Zoë’s cheeks flame into a violent blush—but she had no time to react to that, seeing as Larry had laid aside his instrument and stepped back into the room.
“I think my father would very much like a word with you, young lady,” Larry said, smiling at Thea.
“I thought you played the guitar,” Thea said, incongruously.
Larry glanced back to the outside table where he’d left his instrument. “I do. I also play the banjo. I rarely play it in this house. But this has been…an unusual day.”
“Where is…the professor?” Zoë said faintly, sounding so unlike herself that Thea turned to look at her again. Zoë quelled her with a quick and violent look—Not now!
“Last I saw, cloistered in the study with young Terry. I will go and get him, if you like—or would you rather go seek him out there? The study is one of the most—how shall I put this—secure rooms in this house,” Larry said.
“We’d better go there, then,” Thea said.
“Very well. I’ll go ahead, and warn them you’re coming,” Larry said.
“Thanks,” Thea said, with visions of the Elemental house’s defenses being turned on her if she tried entering the study without express permission.
Larry gave them a small bow and walked past them and into the hallway. Zoë turned to follow, but Thea grabbed her by the elbow.
“Something is still going on between you and Larry,” she whispered. “Isn’t it?”
Zoë shook herself free. “Don’t be silly, Thea!” she said, and again the voice was completely unlike her—coy, almost arch. Her eyes slid away from Thea’s as she started in Larry’s wake. “Come on, we’d better keep up.”
Thea, shaking her head, fell in behind.
2.
THEY WERE IN TIME to see Larry pause in front of the study door, with his head bowed, before the door was flung open by the professor himself. His eyes bored into his son, and Larry lifted his head without speaking, indicating Thea and Zoë with a nod.
The expression on Sebastian de los Reyes’s face was a potent mixture of fury, frustration, fear, and—as he saw Thea—relief. He actually closed his eyes for an instant, as though a prayer of gratitude was passing through his mind. When he opened his eyes again he was his usual self—stern, aristocratic, commanding.
“You had better come inside,” he said. “I think we are all owed an explanation.”
“Thea?” Terry stood behind the professor, a barely respectful pace or two away, trying to peer past his shoulder into the hall. “Is that you? Are you all right?”
“She doesn’t appear any worse for wear, from what I can tell,” Larry murmured. “I did a scan, when she walked in. There’s a…residue. But she is all right.”
“I think I know who it is,” Thea said faintly, standing in the hallway, everyone’s eyes on her.
“Do you still think it is me?” the professor said, lifting one eyebrow. He glanced around as though his protected, secure, warded house harbored spies in every shadow. “You’d better come inside,” he said, stepping away from the door and motioning them in. He lashed Larry with another sharp glance, and then let his eye stray briefly to the silent and still rosy-cheeked Zoë. “All of you.”
Larry stepped into the room past his father, without looking at him. Thea followed him, brushing her hand against Terry’s in passing. Behind her, Zoë brought up the rear and Thea heard the professor close the door.
“This would not have happened if you had not left the house without my permission,” the professor said. “The house protects you. It is—”
“Not from within,” Thea said, scraping up the courage to interrupt. “There are holes in your armor, even from outside, because otherwise I would never have been able to walk back in. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s already inside, the thing you want to protect against. It’s inside your walls, and all the cannons face outward.”
The professor folded his arms. “In case you failed to understand this, Galathea, I am responsible for you while you are in my care,” he said icily. “What happens to you under my roof is mine to answer for. And you chose to slip out of that protective net and pursue your own suspicions…? It was rash at best, and certainly foolish. You had better have a very good reason—”
“I was scared!” Thea blazed. “I could not use the only way I knew how to protect myself, because your house would not let me—but last night, before we came to see you, I was lured out of my room by guitar music, and then there was something very strange going on in your guest bathroom, across the hall from my room—there was a green light, and that music, and I knew that if I stepped inside I would not still be in this house at all. It was only Terry coming out of his room that snapped that spell, and stopped me—he thought he heard something, too—”
“I’m not sure what I heard,” Terry said, a little lamely, when all eyes turned to him. “Honestly, I barely remember the whole thing. I think I might have heard that guitar she says she heard, but I might have just been dreaming…”
Thea was shaking her head. “No, something protected me. You might have been dreaming, but you were there when I needed you.”
Terry smiled, almost bashful.
“And then, in the morning…I ran into Beltran at breakfast, and he said stuff that I didn’t really connect at all—until I came into this study and you, Professor, talked about this tutor who had to disappear because you thought he had a spellspam problem—the feathers…?”
“Cary Wiley,” the professor said. “Yes.”
“It wasn’t spellspam. I gave him those feathers. And we saw him again, while we were out—following us, listening to us. I know who he really is, Professor, and it isn’t who you think. When did he come to this house?”
“Oh…a few months ago. I…” The professor actually furrowed his brow. “Do you know, I am no longer sure. It seems very…hazy. My son has always been home-schooled, for reasons…we don’t need to go into right now. But Cary is just the last in a long line of—”
“Not Cary. Corey. He is the Trickster himself, one of the ancient spirits of this land. He came for me, before—and I escaped before he could deliver me to the Alphiri. And now…he has come for Beltran.”
Everyone stared at her. The professor went so far as to allow an expression of ludicrous astonishment to linger on his face for fully half a minute before he got his features under control.
“That’s preposterous,” he began, narrowing his eyes. “I would have known…”
“I should have known,” Larry said suddenly. “I could smell it when I came into the house this time—but I couldn’t resolve it, canid or corvid, and I didn’t pursue it. But I could smell him. I could smell the shadows he had been hiding in.”
“You’re like my Aunt Zoë?” Thea said, briefly diverted. “You can smell someone’s absence?”
“Larry’s a felid,” Zoë said faintly. “He’s a cat-shifter.”
Larry gave Thea a shrug and a quiet smile. “Sorry,” he said. “It never came up. For the record…” He blurred briefly, and in the place where he had been, a serval cat stood with its tail twitching gently, turning its head to look at everyone in turn before it re-blurred and turned back into Larry.
“No me desconcierte para fomentar, mijo11,” the professor murmured, without meeting Larry’s eyes. The younger man kindled briefly as though in anger, but then quelled himself with a visible struggle.
“Professor…where is Beltran?”
It was Zoë who asked, careful not to look in Larry’s direction, so careful that the effort was almost visible to Thea, a glass wall Zöe had raised between Larry and herself.
“He…,” the professor began, and then tailed off again, his mouth working in a expression of chagrined self-reproach. “I was angry,” he said, and he was speaking di
rectly to Thea, which made her shiver a little. “And I was afraid. I should never allow my anger to rule my common sense…but there were too many things going on when you chose to return to this house. You and Terry had both disappeared without leaving word about your whereabouts, and then Isabella outright defied me, and Lorenzo admitted to knowing about the first incident and backed Isabella on the second…and then you returned just as I was dealing with that situation, and your aunt came into this house under an outside cantrip or charm, and we had to deal with that, and just as I cleared that up—with the necessity of keeping her away from the object of her bespelled affections for at least a day…”
“And then I came home and walked into the middle of this,” Larry said, “and made things worse.”
“And they had to put a sleeping spell on your aunt,” Terry added. “Because that was the only way to keep them apart for long enough to…”
“I don’t remember any of this,” Zoë said, her cheeks scarlet again, keeping her eyes firmly on the professor’s oriental carpet. “But where is Beltran now?”
“I remember seeing him just as we walked inside,” Terry said. “And then I lost sight of him.”
“I said something about going to his room,” the professor said. “I do not recall precisely what, but something along those lines. And I assumed that this is where he went.”
He hesitated for a moment, and then let his crossed arms drop to his sides. “I will find out…”
“I will go,” Larry said quietly.
“Be careful,” Zoë said as he opened the study door, quickly, almost unwillingly. For a moment he looked back, and this time they did manage to catch the other’s eye.
“I’m always careful,” he said, and slipped out of the door, closing it behind him.
“You’d better get back to where you were,” the professor said to Thea. “Last night. The thing you saw in the corridor.”
“Terry came out and broke it,” she said, “and the spell, whatever it was, went away. It didn’t come back that night, but then, when we came down here…I saw…that.” She pointed to the guitar that still sat by the armchair in the window. “All I could think of was the music. And then you spoke of Corey as though you had no idea who he was…or didn’t want to know. And then I thought—of all the people in this house—you control the computer, you had access to everything, you control this house…and then I came out of this room, and the first thing I heard when I left it was…someone playing the guitar.”
“Larry,” Zoë said quietly.
“Yes, but I didn’t even know that he was here, or who he was; all I heard was the guitar, again…so I went to see, but there was no green light that time, and he seemed normal, but he did say that in this house everyone played the guitar, and all of a sudden I didn’t know if there was anyone I could actually trust…. I wanted to talk to you, Aunt Zoë, but my phone still didn’t work—and his did—and he called you for me—and on the way out I grabbed Terry because I needed to talk to him, too—and the rest you know.”
“She may,” the professor said pointedly. “I was not there.”
“Oh, okay, that’s right—” Thea stopped, flustered.
“We went to a café,” Terry said, “and we needed a computer…because Thea’s hadn’t worked, and I couldn’t, you know, talk at all without that intervention—so she tried to talk us into letting us use a Terranet café on the way.”
“That would have been appallingly reckless,” the professor said.
“I thought so, too,” Zoë said, “which is why I then cast a quick stasis spell so that we could, you know, borrow very briefly the computer of someone else who was already there—just long enough for Thea to do her thing—but then I wanted to see what she was doing, precisely, and there was an e-mail open on the screen…”
“Which was the one that caught you,” the professor said.
“And then I smelled someone listening to us,” Zoë said.
The professor frowned at her. “Smelled…?”
“She does that,” Thea said hurriedly. “She can smell things other people see, stuff like that. She told Terry and me that someone was listening to us, and I looked around and recognized him.”
“Him?”
“Corey. Your Cary Wiley. The tutor. He heard everything we were talking about.”
“And what, precisely, were you…,” the professor began, but the door of the study opened a crack and Larry slipped back inside.
“He isn’t in his room,” Larry said. “He isn’t anywhere, as far as I can tell. Isabella is in her room, but she is sulking and won’t talk to me—she said her brother wasn’t in there with her. I tend to believe her; it would take someone hardier than Beltran to stay with Isabella in this mood. But he’s gone, Father. He doesn’t seem to be in this house at all. He did, apparently, leave you a message….”
“Well, what is it?” the professor snapped, the tone of his voice belying the sudden devastation in his eyes.
“I printed it out—it was left on the screen of the computer,” Larry said, handing his father a sheet of paper.
“The first one was fun,” the professor read out loud, the paper shaking ever so gently in his hand. “Remember the three days Isabella wouldn’t come out of her room? She opened one of my mails, like I knew she would. She’s always had a thing about her nose, it looks good on me but she thinks it wrecks her profile—so when I sent her an e-mail about ‘making your nose smaller,’ she opened it—I knew she would—and her face turned into a Persian cat’s, she looked ridiculous—that’s when I knew I could do it, this computer spell thing, and it was wonderful. Cary came soon after, once I’d sent a few out and watched them catch people, and said that THEY had noticed what I could do, and they could help—if I could do the things that they wanted…so I practiced. And it was easy, from here—I could send directly from the backbone…” The professor’s hand dropped and the piece of paper dangled from his fingers as he stared at the place where it had been. “You were right after all, Galathea,” he said wearily. “It was me all along. I was using the Nexus…as the backbone, as my connection to Terranet, to the world, as it had to be, with the Nexus being what it is. I thought I had put up adequate firewalls for any outside attacks…”
“You had, sir,” Terry said. “That, and this house…”
“Yes, but I was using it for my own family’s Terranet connection,” the professor said. “In hindsight, that seems as rash as anything I have accused you of doing today, Galathea, but it seemed like the obvious thing to do at the time—the Nexus was my family’s entry to the ’net, and of course…Beltran could…use that.”
“Have we established where you have been when you disappeared, Thea?” Larry said. “You may be our only lead to find Beltran.”
“But he said…the voice said…that he was not Beltran,” Thea said slowly.
The professor suddenly froze. “What was that?”
“When we all came back and I followed Terry and Aunt Zoë through the door…they came into this house, and I—went—somewhere else—that place with the green light that I’d caught a glimpse of last night, upstairs. And I didn’t see anything—anybody—I just heard a voice, and it sounded like Beltran, and then it didn’t—I was pretty sure it was him but there was something—different—”
“This is all my fault,” the professor said, and sat down very suddenly on the edge of his desk.
It was Larry who crossed the room in two long strides to support his father, and help him down into a chair. But then he stood back, crossing his arms in a manner disconcertingly like the professor at his imperious best, and his face set into harder lines.
“I wasn’t enough, was I, and you tried to get what you wanted another way,” Larry said.
“This is…a family matter,” the professor said faintly.
“Not anymore, Father,” Larry said. He looked up over his father’s head at the other three. “He loved my mother,” Larry said. “She was perfect in every way—beautiful and aristoc
ratic, and gifted beyond measure in magic. He made this house for her, you know—his father and his grandfather both knew the last great Elemental mage personally, and it was his own imprint that this house was wrought in. But she gave him one child—me—and she bequeathed to me no more than the ability to become a serval cat, and a love for words and music. He wanted another child, someone more suited to what he wanted, and my mother loved him enough to try and give him that—and then died of it, her and the baby, both. Complications at birth. I don’t know all the details, I was barely twelve years old then.”
Sebastian de los Reyes looked up, but Larry refused to meet his eyes.
“I was sixteen when he married Dorotea Rodriguez,” Larry said, his voice dropping another notch, changing into something deeper, darker. “She was neither Spanish nor aristocratic—but this time he married a woman simply because he wanted her. But he still wanted those other things—the things that my mother could not give him. By the time Isabella was born, I was long out of this house—I had started writing music, and songs, and poetry, and I was living a life that was anathema to my father, failing in my duties to this family. And Isabella was pretty, and gifted, and the apple of his eye—and even I, when I came home infrequently, fell under her spell—but then, then, Dorotea was pregnant again, and this time it would be a son…except that it was not. It was two sons.”
Zoë let out a small gasp, as though she knew what was coming; Thea reached for her aunt’s hand, and Zoë’s fingers wrapped themselves around Thea’s tightly, almost painfully.
“You asked her to choose, didn’t you?” Larry said, turning to his father at last. “You only wanted one. But Dorotea…held an older magic than even you knew or could cope with….”
“One twin was born,” Zoë whispered. “And the other…was not.”
“Was not born,” Larry said. “But lived, nonetheless. And sometimes found a way to exist in the living brother’s body. You were right, Thea. It wasn’t Beltran…it was Diego.”
“Lorenzo…,” the professor said, very quietly.
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