Worldweavers: Spellspam (19 page)

“Cheveyo said…that only gods and fools are
completely unafraid. Those who know they cannot be hurt and those who don’t believe they can be,” Thea said. “He said the rest of us would do well to know when it is good to be afraid.”

“A wise man, this Cheveyo,” Larry said. “Who is he?”

“Long story,” Zoë said.

“Another one?” Larry said, smiling. Zoë blushed. “Well, you owe me one, after tonight. What do you think,” he said, turning to Thea, “do you feel ready to go back to your Elemental bedroom and try and get some sleep? Tomorrow…might be a long day.”

“All right,” Thea said. She got up, freeing her hand from Zoë’s. “Are you coming up, too, Aunt Zoë?”

“Oh, go on,” Zoë said, finally laughing out loud. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

“Good night,” Thea said, turning to go at last.

“Good
morning
,” Larry said. “In theory, at least.”

Thea turned once, at the door of the sitting room. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she said. “The Alphiri…were watching me all the time. They tried to
buy
me when I
was little. They wanted what I could do. But…so can Beltran…I mean, Diego…how come they’ve been content just sending in Corey? Why haven’t they got Diego already? And what if they
do
…?”

W
HEN
T
HEA WOKE THE
next morning, Zoë was gone from the room again—but there was a note laid on her bedside table, propped up against the Tiffany lamp.

“…an Elemental house,” Thea finished out loud, grinning, and extricating her bare feet from her covers. “Fine. I want a waffle, and I want fresh
strawberries. And I mean
fresh
. Let’s see how you deal with
that
, house.”

The house maintained a dignified silence, and Thea dressed, stuffed her feet into a pair of scuffed ballet flats, and opened her bedroom door.

The bathroom across the corridor appeared to be occupied, but the door wasn’t closed, just pulled to and left slightly ajar. So was the door to Terry’s room; Thea paused in the middle of the corridor.

“Terry?”

There was a sound of rinsing and spitting from the bathroom.

“Out in a sec,” Terry said.

He emerged from the bathroom a moment or two later, his hair still standing up on end from being slept on.

“Any serenades in the night that I should know about?” he asked.

“No, I just had midnight lemonade with Larry and Aunt Zoë,” Thea said, “and found out a few more things about this place. I’ll tell you over breakfast. Wait for me, I won’t be long.”

Terry nodded and Thea slipped into the bathroom to brush her teeth, brush her hair, and run
a washcloth over her face. She inspected her chin in the mirror, but the thing she had thought was turning into a magnificent zit turned out not to be life-threatening, and she decided to leave well enough alone. Terry was waiting in the corridor when she was done, running both hands through his own hair in an effort to make it sit flat.

“That’s what they invented combs for,” Thea said.

Terry stuck out his tongue at her in a manner that suddenly forcefully reminded Thea of Frankie. She wondered what her brothers were doing with their summer while she was dreaming up her favorite breakfast in the world’s only original Elemental house and preparing to chase down cyber-ghosts. Her mood momentarily swirled into a potent mix of homesickness, smugness, and pure terror—and then she got distracted by remembering the waffles and the fresh strawberries that ought to be waiting downstairs for her. She thought she could see the smell of those strawberries, much like Zoë might have done—a faintly pink mist hanging in the air of the corridor and leading down the spiral staircase.

The breakfast room was deserted. Terry
appeared not to have thought too hard about his own breakfast because he just got bland, generic fare—eggs over easy, hash browns—but Thea’s strawberries proved every bit as fresh as she had specified, and she bit into them with gusto while they rehashed the previous day’s events.

“
Find him
, they said,” Thea said. “What if I do? Do they send in the cavalry?”

“They didn’t the last time,” Terry said.

“You mean with the Nothing?”

“You figured that one out. You and Magpie and Ben.”

“And you and Tess,” Thea said. “We all shared that one. The idea, the execution.”

“Yeah, the execution,” Terry murmured. “And the responsibility. You have no idea how long, after, Ben moped about that whale. And we all knew that it was the right thing to do, then—that he even had the whale’s blessing, that it was traditional, that it was the way things were always done.”

They looked at each other, understanding the unspoken thoughts.
We killed something. Even with the built-in absolution of a willing sacrifice…we bear the guilt of it.

We.
If Thea went after Diego, she would have
to go alone—or he might never let himself be found.

And if she found him, there would be choices. Choices that would be far, far more difficult than luring a mindless monster into the body of a willing sacrifice.

“That was different. That was not…real. It wasn’t a
person
.”

“We all heard it scream, in the end,” Terry said. “If that last cry was anything to go by, it understood what was happening, which made it alive enough for any given definition of sentience. It
understood
.”

“It may have grown into a set of senses, but I don’t think it started with them,” Thea said obstinately. “And it was a monster, in every way. Aunt Zoë said it smelled like carrion. We knew it was dangerous to our kind, that it killed. We lost people we knew to it.”

“Twitterpat,” Terry said.

“And others. Maybe they were strangers, but they were no less dead. We knew…”

“Well, it’s the same thing here,” Terry said. “Except that this time we have a monster who is like us, who has a face, who maybe has a motive we could understand.”

“Diego hasn’t killed anybody,” Thea said stubbornly.

“But is that because he won’t?” Terry said. “Or is it because he can’t yet, because he hasn’t figured out how? If he comes up with something that kills…well, he already knows how to send it. He’s had enough practice runs. He’s also had enough hits to know that it will work, that it could be devastating. It could even change our world. Permanently. He’ll be a ghost in the machine, but he could control everything from it.”

“All we need to do is switch off the computers,” Thea said, perking up. “Wouldn’t that work?”

Terry snorted. “Right. Like you could turn off every computer in the world. At the same time. Think again. It’s like trying to switch off electricity—it would be like going back to the Dark Ages. We already depend far too much on them—how would you get everyone to give up the convenience and the speed, the sense of
security
that they still mean to most people? And there are so many computers out there now, in so many homes, how do you police a shutdown? It would only take one twit who didn’t shut down
because he knew better…”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about any of it?” Thea said.

“They’ll tell you what you need to do,” Terry said after a pause.

“I know,” Thea said bleakly. “That’s partly what I’m afraid of.”

She stabbed the last strawberry with her fork and filled her mouth with it so that she would not have to say anything more.

It was precisely at this moment that the breakfast room was graced by the presence of Sebastian de los Reyes himself.

“Good morning,” the professor said. He looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept much, but he was much more his usual self than the night before—autocratic, august, apparently in control.

Thea swallowed the last mouthful of her strawberry as Terry scrambled to his feet.

“Good morning, sir,” Terry said.

“Was Lorenzo here when you came down, by any chance?” the professor inquired.

“No, sir—haven’t seen him,” Terry said. “But we haven’t been here long…”

Zoë suddenly poked her head around the
door. “I thought I heard voices,” she said. “Good morning. You have a lovely garden, Professor de los Reyes.”

“Thank you,” said the professor.

“My mother used to like it,” said Larry, following Zoë into the room. “And it’s always been pleasant in the early mornings.”

The professor chose not to pursue that remark. “I have coffee in my study, if everyone’s done with their breakfast,” he said. “We should finish our conversation from last night. There are decisions to be made.”

He swept everyone with an imperious glance, and Thea slipped off her chair, pushing her plate away. Terry was already at the door.

“Professor de los Reyes,” a voice called out in the hallway as the professor led the way out of the breakfast room, “may I have a word?”

“Yes, Mrs. Emmett, what can I do for you?” the professor said courteously.

“It’s Sam, sir…”

Larry, who had poked his head around the door, ducked back into the breakfast room with the others.

“Don’t look now, but it’s Madeline with Convalescent Boy,” Larry said quietly.

“Convalescent Boy?” Thea said. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Sam is always ailing with something,” Larry said. “She had him quite late in life, and every time he clears his throat, she calls an ambulance.”

“He isn’t at all well,” Madeline was saying out in the corridor. “I’d like the morning off so I can get him to a doctor. He seems…”

“What are his symptoms, Mrs. Emmett?” Larry said suddenly, stepping out from the breakfast nook.

Thea stared at Sam, who was huddled up against his mother, shivering. His face alternated between a ghastly, pallid, waxy look and a flushed feverishness, with a scattered rash across his cheeks and forehead; he hung on to his mother’s arm as if the very act of standing upright made his head spin.

“I can’t make sense of it,” Madeline said. “That’s why I want him to see a doctor. He’s got a slight fever, a bit of a rash…he’s complaining of being dizzy, and of being nauseous, and of a ringing in his ears, and he says he couldn’t sleep a wink last night but I can’t keep him awake this morning, he actually fell asleep with his face in his cereal…”

“I don’t feel so good, Mom,” Sam said in a thin, reedy voice.

“I think he’s going to…,” Thea began urgently, but was swiftly overtaken by events. Sam’s lips trembled, his throat worked a few times as though he was fighting a rising gorge, and then he lost the battle and threw up a thin, greenish stream of vomit—some of it pooled in evil-smelling puddles on the clean tile floor, but the bulk of it landed squarely on the professor’s hand-tooled leather slippers.

The professor’s face did not change from its expression of courteous concern. He did not even look down at his feet, keeping his eyes on Sam—who stood with his head buried between his hunched shoulders, weaving slightly on his feet and looking thoroughly humiliated and miserable.

“Oh, I am
so
sorry,” Madeline gasped. “Let me just…Sam, do you want to sit…I’ll go get a mop…I’m so sorry, sir, I don’t know
what
the matter is—it could just be a bad flu, or some sort of allergy…or an overindulgence in junk food…”

“Overindulgence, but not in junk food. Tell him to spend less time in front of the computer,
or at least to be more careful with it,” Larry said. “No doctor will help him. It’s no wonder you can’t pinpoint a disease—those symptoms cover half a dozen of the things listed in that spellspam e-mail last night. You’d better bring him into the breakfast room so he can sit down, and we can counter the spell. And count yourself lucky that he didn’t catch something worse. He might have prowled the halls as a werewolf last night. Er…I think I can manage a cure, Father, if you want to go and…slip into something more comfortable on your feet before we continue our meeting.”

“My son will do what can be done, Mrs. Emmett,” the professor said. “Would the rest of you like to wait in the study?”

His self-control slipped just a little as he eased his feet out of the offending slippers, a fleeting grimace of distaste on his face as he took a step back, avoiding the noxious pools on the floor. He did not even look at the ruined slippers as he turned away, leaving them in the hallway for the house to clean up, and climbed the stairs in his stocking feet.

“Go,” Larry said, shepherding Sam and his trembling mother into the breakfast room. “I won’t be long.”

“This is from
last night
,” Terry said. “Any more…stuff…turn up? Have you checked the mail this morning?”

“There’s at least two,” Larry said. “We’ve got more crud to deal with in the short term, but if he’s upping his output, maybe he’ll run out of practical jokes faster than he can keep up with it.”

“Or think of more and more dangerous ones,” Zoë said darkly.

“I always leave the worst-case scenario for the last resort,” Larry said.

“If you plan ahead for it, you might never have to deal with it,” retorted Zoë.

Larry shrugged. “Then I’d be worried all the time,” he said, heading into the breakfast room.

The other three made their way slowly to the professor’s study, but Zoë hesitated at the door, her hand hovering over the door handle and then dropping away. “I think we’d better wait for one of them to come back,” she said. “Other people’s studies always smell dangerous, like you ought to leave them unmolested, and in this house I wouldn’t want to trip any alarms.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Larry said, coming up the hallway, close enough to have overheard the
remark. “You
were
invited.”

“You fix him?” Terry asked as they filed inside the study.

“Of course, all it took was a direct reversal, and that’s easy to do if you know what you’re up against. He’s his usual healthy hypochondriac self, and after his mother got done being worried to death about him, she got good and mad—and he’s now banned from using the computer. For three days.”

“Like that’s going to help,” Thea said. “Unless the spellspam stops…”

“Actually, one of this morning’s offerings gave me an idea,” Larry said. “
Enhance your senses
, the thing said, and I have no doubt it will be driving people insane. Spectacles and hearing aids are fine for people who have a deficiency in those departments, but can you imagine people with perfectly good hearing suddenly being able to
hear everything—
someone walking in high heels across a tile floor would be enough to send you over the edge, not to mention the sound of a faucet dripping on a different floor of your house—and the voices in your head, if you can hear every word, every whisper, maybe every thought…”

“You didn’t see that one, did you, Aunt Zoë?” Thea said, suddenly sobered. With her own exotic abilities, Zoë was already operating under a sensory overload which most ordinary people would have been hard-pressed to cope with.

“No, I was careful this time. Safety in computing.” Zoë said.

Terry was actually wincing. “Imagine trying to butter a piece of toast,” he said. The memory of the scrape of a knife on the rough surface of crisp toast suddenly made everyone shudder.

“Or touching
anything
,” Thea said, unable to pull her mind away.