Worldweavers: Cybermage Read online

  Worldweavers

  Cybermage

  Book 3

  Alma Alexander

  For Sara, the youngest—

  child of the new millennium,

  who has never known a world without cybermagic

  Contents

  1.

  THEA HAD STARTED THE new school year at the Wandless…

  2.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Humphrey May to show himself.

  3.

  UMPHREY STARED AT THE paper in his hand with an…

  4.

  “THERE YOU ARE,” HUMPHREY May said. He was sitting in…

  5.

  “MAKES SENSE,” HUMPHREY MAY said. “By all the accounts I’ve…

  6.

  IT TOOK THE BETTER part of an hour to explain…

  7.

  THEY HAD BEEN A team only twenty-four hours before, but…

  8.

  “LET ME GET THIS straight,” Terry said. “You want to…

  9.

  “I SHOULD HAVE FIGURED,” TERRY said, after a moment of…

  10.

  “OKAY, ONE MORE TIME,” said Ben, ticking his points off…

  11.

  “CHEER UP,” SAID KRISTIN. “It could be worse.”

  12.

  “IT FEELS,” A YOUNG, dark-haired Nikola Tesla said in a…

  13.

  “I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND bad news,” Ben said.

  14.

  “I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND bad news,” Thea said as…

  15.

  TERRY, WHO HAD ALREADY half pulled his laptop out of…

  16.

  You haven’t felt Alphiri fury. Not yet. Not completely.

  17.

  IT TOOK BOTH TOO long and no time at all…

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Alma Alexander

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  THEA HAD STARTED THE new school year at the Wandless Academy with enthusiasm and a sense of purpose—but then things began to unravel with unnerving speed.

  The first unpleasant surprise was her roommate. Thea actually did a double take when Magpie all but fell into their room, a large and apparently heavy backpack on her back and a smaller duffel bag in each hand.

  “Hey!” she said, dumping the bags on the floor in an untidy heap. “Back at the salt mines, eh?”

  Magpie’s right ear had been pierced at least a dozen times along its edge, and it was lined with tiny silver rings, giving it the appearance of being sheathed in chain mail. From each earlobe dangled long earrings wrought from copper wire and some sparkly crystal.

  But something else was different. Something far more disquieting.

  “Your hair,” Thea said, startled.

  Magpie flicked back from her face a long braid that had been dyed an improbable shade of platinum blond. A purple bandanna sewn with sequins held back the rest of her hair, which had been hacked into uneven layers as though attacked by a straight-edge razor. A couple of rats’-tails, left long on purpose, were hanging from the back of her head.

  “You like it?” Magpie said, craning her neck a little to catch a glimpse of herself in the dresser mirror. “I just got bored—I’ve worn my hair the same way since I was in the cradle. My cousin Clarice did it. She trained as a hairdresser before they kicked her out of beauty school for, I don’t know, being too weird for the clients or something.” She turned to give Thea an appraising look.

  Thea covered her own hair with both hands. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Magpie laughed. “You might actually, you know, like it.”

  “But you were so proud of your hair last year,” Thea said plaintively.

  “It’s a change.” Magpie shrugged. The platinum strand persisted in hanging over her face like some strange visiting-alien tentacle, and Thea couldn’t quite tear her fascinated gaze from it.

  “You usually travel lighter than that,” she said, eyeing the pile of baggage on the floor.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much room makeup bags take up,” Magpie said airily. She rooted around in the smaller of the duffels and came up with about seven different lipsticks, which she spilled on top of the dresser.

  “Since when do you wear so much stuff on your face?” Thea asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “And what on earth do you use this one for? It’s black!”

  Magpie shot her a coy look from under lashes spiked with mascara. “It’s fun,” she said. “You’re welcome to try them, if you like. Even the black one.”

  She was still bubbly, full of her usual brand of charm and high spirits, but it was different, somehow. Magpie was focused on different things now, and Thea was finding it unexpectedly difficult to reconcile the new Magpie with the friend whom she had come to know and even depend on. This was not the same Magpie who would cuddle close a wild creature wrapped in a ratty blanket. It wasn’t as though they had suddenly found each other to be complete strangers—they were still friends, on the surface—but there was something missing, something that Thea couldn’t quite put a finger on until she woke abruptly one night from a choppy and unsettling dream, nearly two weeks after their return to the Academy.

  “Shhh,” Magpie whispered from the shadows, “it’s just me. Go back to sleep.”

  “What have you got now?” Thea said sleepily, propping herself up on one elbow.

  “Got?” Magpie echoed, sounding surprised. “What have I got?”

  “What sort of critter have you picked up now?” Thea asked. Then she caught her first real glimpse of Magpie, who was standing in a patch of moonlight that had slipped through the half-closed curtains. The dim light caught a hint of gelled glitter and dark eyeliner, and her mouth was a dark slash on her pale face. She was dressed in something tight and black, with the ensemble completed by a short flouncy skirt that barely came past the tops of her thighs; on her feet were a pair of lace-up sneakers with platform heels.

  “No critters,” Magpie said, even as Thea completed her astonished inspection.

  “Where are you going?”

  Magpie’s sudden grin was a disconcerting flash of white teeth in the moonlit shadows; she looked like a cat suddenly yawning to bare its fangs. “I’m meeting Gary over by the pond,” she said. “Be a sweetie, and if Mrs. Chen asks…”

  “I’m not going to lie to Mrs. Chen!”

  “You would have if I were out with a sick raccoon!”

  “It’s not the same thing at all!”

  “Whatever,” Magpie said, after a beat of awkward silence. “I gotta go, he’ll be expecting me. I should be back in a couple of hours. Don’t worry; I already know all the tricks of keeping myself out of harm’s way.”

  “Wait a sec, I don’t…” Thea called, but Magpie didn’t wait for an answer. By the time Thea got to the door of their room, opening it a crack to peer into the corridor, Magpie was already gone.

  They didn’t share lunch the next day, with Magpie defecting to a new crowd of friends in the cafeteria who apparently found life a lot more amusing than Thea did. As Thea stood with her tray, Magpie did look up, but neither she nor any of her companions seemed inclined to invite Thea to join them. Feeling oddly hurt, Thea looked around and saw Ben sitting at one end of a long table, picking at his food without much enthusiasm. Across the table from him, Tess, her own half-finished lunch on the tray in front of her, had her nose buried firmly in a textbook. She was taking several college-level classes that year, and had been entirely wrapped up in the workload ever since they had all come back to school. Now that a rift had opened between Thea and Magpie, Thea was suddenly aware how little she
had seen of her other friends since the beginning of the semester.

  “Hey,” she said to Tess, pausing beside the table.

  Tess looked up. “Hey yourself,” she said.

  “Mind if I join you guys?”

  Tess threw a quick glance at the large wall clock that hung above the cafeteria double doors. “I’m almost done—I’ve got class in ten minutes,” she said apologetically.

  “You’re always rushing to class these days,” Thea said, slipping into a seat beside Ben.

  “With a bit of luck, I’ll be able to graduate early, too,” Tess said. “Terry already has enough credits to graduate at the end of the year if he wants to.”

  “You plan on graduating this year too?” Ben said, sounding a little astonished. “Why is everyone in such a hurry? What about you, Thea? That summer thing that you and Terry were on…”

  “It wasn’t for academic credit,” Thea said. “I don’t think it counts, really.”

  “Besides, it all seemed to end rather prematurely,” Tess said. “With the FBM descending on everything and taking over. I was half expecting banner headlines in the Daily Magic Times, but they must have kept a pretty tight lid on the whole thing. Mom told me a little about it, after, and Terry filled in the rest.”

  “He could talk to you about it?” Ben said sharply. “How? He can’t utter a word about magic without choking on it, that allergy of his—”

  “Not in our house,” Tess said, rolling her eyes a little. “Good grief, my parents took care of that when he was really little, as soon as they figured it out. Otherwise he wouldn’t have lived long past his first attempts to talk—not in our household. With Mom and Uncle Kevin involved with the Federal Bureau of Magic on a daily basis, they had to clear the house for Terry or else. It’s just that it had to be drilled into him that he couldn’t breach that topic anywhere else—anywhere that he wasn’t directly supervised or didn’t have access to the antidote—same way that it was hammered into me that I could not eat anything outside our home unless I was absolutely one hundred percent certain of where it came from and that magic wasn’t one of the ingredients. Hence the Academy—here magic is pretty much absent, and it was considered to be a safe environment.”

  “Yeah, until the whole spellspam thing descended last year and he started to turn blue when he so much as tried to open his mouth about it,” said Ben. His nose wrinkled as though he was expecting to sneeze, but it was a reflexive action since there was no real magic present to trigger his own allergic response—only a vivid memory of it.

  “Can we talk about something else?” Thea said, a little sharply. Every time she thought she had dealt with the whole experience of the spellspam epidemic at school that led to her summer encounter with Diego de los Reyes, something about it made her heart beat a little faster. She could not seem to quite shake the guilt of it, the sense of having been personally responsible for what had finally happened to Diego.

  “Spellspam?” said an unexpected voice from the far end of the table. “What did you have to do with that?”

  In some way they were all misfits, every single one of them who wound up at the Wandless Academy, removed from their usual social and magic-rich environment by their inability to function within that world. But even at the Academy there were circles within circles, cliques within cliques, and students who invariably wound up on the lower rungs of the totem pole. It was one of these unfortunates who had had the temerity to interrupt the conversation: Kristin Wallers, a pudgy girl who wore her dishwater-blond hair down around her face in an attempt to hide the two prominent front teeth that stuck out like small tusks. Her large blue eyes had a self-conscious gaze that was half hope and half resignation.

  Kristin wasn’t part of Thea’s circle. One of Thea’s first instincts, in fact, had been to pretend that she had not even heard Kristin speak, lest she, Thea, be observed in actual conversation with a social outcast. But there had been a twinge of…sympathy. Something. The way Kristin had responded with such instinctive and overpowering curiosity, even concern.

  Even that might not have quite been enough had Thea not happened to glance over at where Magpie was just getting up to leave, giggling over some shared joke with her new friends. There was a new and jagged hole in Thea’s life—the place that Magpie used to fill.

  “Sorry,” Kristin said into the silence that followed her interruption. “I couldn’t help overhearing. That three wishes thing…that got me pretty good.”

  “Oh yeah? What did you wish for?” Ben said, curious in spite of himself.

  Kristin gestured at her mouth, a tiny, helpless motion that suddenly made Thea give her a sympathetic smile.

  “I’m sorry. What happened? Didn’t it work?”

  “Of course it worked,” Kristin said. “In the way it usually works. My first wish was something along the lines of, ‘I wish my teeth would go away!’—and of course they did. All of them. Then I rushed to repair the damage and wished for ‘them’ to be back, and of course the only ones that came back were the ones I wanted gone. I’m pretty sure there must have been a way of putting things right, even then, but I panicked and just used my third wish to put things back the way they were. And there I was, back on square one.”

  “Ben saved us,” Thea said. “He figured it out, long before we got into any real trouble.”

  Ben squirmed at that. “Just by being in the right place at the right time,” he muttered.

  Kristin smiled a lopsided grin, made into a thing of horrid fascination by the protruding teeth.

  Tess glanced up at the wall clock again, but she, too, was curious now. This was the Academy, and questions were not asked—but Kristin herself had opened the door.

  “What…happened?” Tess said, with a small, diplomatic nod in the direction of Kristin’s mouth.

  “Beware of Faele bearing gifts,” Kristin said morosely.

  “A Faele did that to you by accident?”

  “Nuh-uh. But the one who was supposed to be the last in line to bestow the Faele gifts when I was born wasn’t there. Somehow my mother had managed to insult one of the Maledicent tribe, while she was carrying me, and they sent a representative along to the gift-giving and made sure she was last and wished…this on me. It isn’t fixable, you know—not by mundane medicine, not by reversospells, not even by a veiling spell or masking spell. It’s a Faele gift, and it shines through everything. That’s why they sent me here—in an ordinary school there would be constant badgering and teasing about it, and constant, constant questions about why I don’t do the simple things to deal with it. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  That was the longest speech Kristin had ever given in Thea’s hearing, and she suddenly seemed to realize that, dropping her gaze and flushing a bright pink underneath her curtain of hair.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “I’m sure you’ve other things to do.”

  By now Thea was genuinely interested. But Tess was already stuffing her books into her bag, and Ben was gathering up the remains of everyone’s shattered lunches to take back to the disposal units. Thea slipped out of her seat, hoisting up her book bag, and then hesitated, just for a brief moment, as she glanced back at Kristin, the only one who had not moved. Out in the “real” world, Thea had been an outcast, the one held back in Ars Magica classes in order to make repeated attempts at doing the impossible, and all of a sudden she felt a rush of sympathetic understanding for Kristin.

  “See you later,” she said, and then turned and scurried away in a self-conscious manner—missing a thoroughly astonished look from Kristin.

  Thea’s next class happened to be biology, which ordinarily interested her, but that day she found herself staring outside at a handful of deciduous trees that still clung to the gold of their fall foliage and glowed among the dark cedars. She had to drag her attention back to the class by main force and at least look as though she was paying attention—because this was one of the teachers who taught through sarcasm and mockery, and any daydreaming, if the culprit was caught
, was punishable by being publicly humiliated as the butt of some cutting joke. She escaped notice, but at least one other poor sap in the front row felt the lash. Thea, wincing on his behalf, noticed Magpie openly giggling with every appearance of enjoying her classmate’s humiliation. She was not the only one, to be sure, but it just seemed another alienating thing to add to the list.

  The class seemed to last forever. The day had darkened into late-autumn afternoon when the final bell went and everyone scrambled for their books and the door. Thea remained at her desk for a moment, scribbling down a few halfhearted notes about the homework. She was the last person out of the door, stepping into a corridor crowded with people scurrying frantically to get to their next class, dodging and weaving between stationary knots. She glimpsed Tess through the throng, lingering before her open locker and smiling up at someone Thea could not quite see. The crowd thinned for a moment, and Thea got a glimpse of the back of a male head as it bent to obscure Tess’s face with a kiss. Then the crowds closed in again and Thea, whose own locker wasn’t too far from Tess’s, found herself hesitating, unsure of her reception if she turned up just at that moment, uncertain if she ought to have known that Tess had a boyfriend. They were, after all, supposed to be friends.

  Thea suddenly felt very lonely. For a year she had tasted the comfort and security of being part of a group of friends who hung out together, who had shared something. But now, things were regressing to the bad old days, the days when Thea was alone and miserable, the family failure.

  “Hey,” said a familiar voice right beside her, making her jump.

  “Missed you at lunch,” she said, turning slowly to face Magpie.

  “Just catching up with some friends,” Magpie said chirpily, tucking her blond tentacle behind an ear. “I saw you were making some new friends.”