Worldweavers: Spellspam Read Free

in that corridor, but it was not guarded, other than by the keypad lock. Terry detailed Ben and Magpie to stand guard at eitherend of the corridor outside the computer lab and, his laptop open on his knee, calmly hacked the code for the lock. Ben’s head snapped around at the sound of the door opening, and then he abandoned his post, trotting back to Terry’s side, shaking his head.
    “Remind me not to make you mad at me,” he muttered at Terry as he slipped past into the dark and silent computer room.
    Terry merely smiled and cast a last look up and down the corridor before clicking the door shut behind him.
    “That was easy enough,” he said to the others, “but it may well have triggered an alarm somewhere. We may not have all that much time. Thea, is the laptop all right, or would you rather fire up one of the desktops?”
    “I’d rather not leave anything on those machines,” Thea said.
    Terry pushed the laptop over to her. “Go for it.”
    “Tess,” Terry said as Thea began typing furiously at the laptop’s keyboard, “stay on the door. If you hear anything…yank us back. Fast.”
    “How?” Tess said, staring at the computers. “Don’t look at me like that, the last time I wasin there with you…”
    “Just hit ESCAPE ,” Thea said without taking her eyes off the screen.
    “And hit DELETE the moment you see us return,” Terry added. “I’ll deal with erasing the whole thing properly later, but I don’t want it on-screen if anyone blunders in here.”
    “Okay,” said Ben, straddling a chair beside Thea’s, leaning his crossed arms across the back of the chair and resting his chin on them. He had not been happy with this whole idea, but he was someone who could be trusted to deal with any emergency.
    Thea paused for a moment, looking over the few terse sentences she had typed in. She had not bothered to make her passage grammatical or even coherent—just fragments of sentences, glimpses of details, woven into one perfect image of home. Not just the reddish cedar wood of her father’s bookshelves and the usual desk accessory of Paul’s favorite mug half full of cold and forgotten coffee, but also the soft, worn, chocolate-brown leather of the two small armchairs on the patterned burgundy rug, the musty smell of books, a faint cinnamon smell of concentration, and the lemon-zest whiff given off by activeelectronics, the familiar softness of the upholstered computer chair. Thea had put her aunt Zoë in that chair first, and then smartly backspaced until she erased her aunt’s name, putting in her father’s instead, then erased that and put Zoë back in. She wasn’t certain —she wanted her father, but she wanted the buffer of her aunt’s presence, too—but she did not have the luxury of spending too much time on this. She hesitated and then reached a hand out behind her, without turning around.
    “Terry.”
    “Ready,” Terry said instantly, slipping his hand over hers.
    Their fingers touched, and the computer lab winked out.

2.
    T ERRY BLINKED, HIS FINGERS curled around Thea’s hand, staring at his new surroundings. Paul’s study was perfectly rendered, but it was empty.
    “Damn,” Thea muttered.
    “Is something wrong?” Terry said.
    “Yeah. No…just wait a moment. Damn, I knew I should have made up my mind before I…”
    The study door began to open even as Thea spoke. Aunt Zoë stuck her head into the room, glancing around, and then froze as she noticed Thea and Terry in the middle of the room. She threw a quick, careful glance behind her and stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.
    “Thea?” Zoë asked incredulously.
    “Is Dad here?” Thea asked.
    Zoë nodded her chin toward the closed door.“I just called him. What are you doing here?”
    “I don’t know what’s going on, but something is happening and I’m not sure what to do. All I know is that it wasn’t me, but they’ll never…”
    “Thea,” Zoë said, “you’re babbling. What’s the