Worldweavers: Spellspam Read Free Page A

matter?”
    “Spellspam,” Thea said.
    “What?”
    “Spellspam,” Thea enunciated. “Tell Daddy to check his e-mail. And tell him to be careful….”
    The door opened again, admitting Paul Winthrop into his sanctum. “It’s a fine thing,” he was muttering, “when you’re summoned to your own study by…Thea…? What are you doing here? Who’s your friend?”
    “Sorry, Paul,” Zoë said, glancing at him. “It just felt…strange in here. I thought something smelled dangerous.”
    “I’m Terry Dane, sir,” Terry said. “I think we’re in trouble. We can’t stay long, but something happened…. Thea will explain.”
    Paul and Zoë listened without interruption to Thea’s account of the events in the library, but when she had finished, Paul shook his head.
    “Can’t be done,” he said. “It can’t be done . Let me see….”
    He crossed the room and slipped into his computer chair, tapping on his keyboard. Even as he began typing, Zoë suddenly subsided into one of the armchairs.
    “Oh, boy,” she said softly.
    Paul turned his head marginally, his hands hovering above the keyboard. “What, Zoë?”
    “I thought it was just some sort of bizarre coincidence, but now…”
    “ What , Zoë?” Paul said, swiveling in his chair to stare at his sister-in-law, who had gone very white.
    “There was an e-mail,” Zoë said, “that I got a couple of weeks ago—and deleted, because it was spam. It offered me ‘a free gift,’ just for looking at the message. Well, I thought I had deleted it, without looking at the message, but obviously they meant it literally. And I just got this weird thing…”
    “What?”
    “Well…a gift subscription. To a Chinese magazine. In Mandarin. I got my first two issues yesterday. I thought someone was playing a prank on me. I never connected it to the e-mail, not until now. But what if…”
    There was an awful silence. “I’ll look intoit,” Paul said, his voice very low. His hands had dropped from the keyboard and were gripping the arms of his computer chair, hard. “Even so—it shouldn’t have touched the Academy—”
    “The students can access webmail on the school network,” Zoë said. “That’s an open forum, it’s not like a dedicated e-mail program—webmail is nearly impossible to set up filters for, impossible to regulate—anything that pops into your inbox just sits there, ready to make mischief. And it looks as if that might be more than enough. The Academy might have done better to have allowed e-mail contact with the students’ own accounts and software, if they allowed it at all. This way, there’s no control over any of it.”
    “This would probably be the worst possible moment for Patrick Wittering not to be in charge,” Paul muttered.
    “What should I…,” Thea began, and then flinched, startled, looking behind her.
    “Yes,” Terry said, “I felt it. There must be someone coming. We have to go.”
    “Thea, be careful,” Paul began, even as his daughter winked out of his study and thin airclosed behind her. “Tell Principal Harris that I will send help—”
    His voice broke off, as though a door had been slammed on him.
    “What is it?” demanded Terry, turning to his laptop as he and Thea found themselves back in the computer lab.
    “Sorry,” Tess said. “I thought there was someone coming. I told Ben to call you back.”
    Ben was pushing back from the computer even as she spoke, looking sheepish. “Sorry,” he said. “You said to hit DELETE .”
    “Okay. It’s okay. Let me just get rid of this….”
    “It was weird to watch it from the outside,” Magpie said. “You were kind of…there, but see-through.”
    “Transparent.” Tess giggled, suddenly light-headed. “Like LaTasha’s skin.”
    “That’s not funny,” Thea said, the only one of them who had actually seen the results of that particular spellspam. “I wonder how she’s doing—I should have gone to see her.”
    “You were so intent on doing this