Worldweavers: Spellspam (27 page)

T
HE HOSPITAL COULD FIND
nothing physically wrong with Beltran, and sent him home after twenty-four hours.

“I should go and see him,” Thea said to Terry as the two of them sat out on the patio the day after Beltran had come home. “I feel…responsible.”

“You hardly know the guy,” Terry objected.

“Not true,” Thea said. “I met…the other half of him. I know that much of him. And I can’t help thinking…wondering…how much of Beltran was in Diego?”

“You mean how much of Diego was in Beltran,” Terry said. “Sometimes…you sound as though Diego was the one that was real and Beltran was the one that was the shadow.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Thea said.

Terry gave her a strange look. “You can be very weird.”

Thea slipped off her chair. “I think I’ll stop in and at least say hello,” she said.

“You mean good-bye,” Terry said. “We’re more or less on our way out of here. Assuming they are letting him have visitors, anyway.”

“You coming?” Thea said, pausing at the French doors.

Terry sighed, slipping off his own chair. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “He sure did get a raw deal.”

The door to Beltran’s room was ajar, and Terry and Thea slowed down in the corridor as they heard voices coming from within. A woman’s voice. There was something about it that was familiar, something else about it that made that familiarity seem…strange.

A softness. A gentleness. Almost the kind of tone that a mother would use to a sick child.

“Madeline…?” Terry hissed to Thea as they hesitated outside the door.

“Isabella,” Thea whispered back, even as the voice inside the room fell silent.

Terry knocked softly.

“Who’s there?” The imperious voice belonged to Isabella de los Reyes.

Thea stook a step into the room, poking her
head past the door.

“It’s Terry and me,” she said. “We just thought…we’d come by and see how Beltran is doing.”

Terry followed Thea into the room and now they both took in the sight of Isabella, her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail and wearing a faded T-shirt and ratty jeans, sitting cross-legged on the bed where her brother sat propped up with several plump cushions. There was a book in her lap. Apparently she had been reading to him.

Isabella’s usually alabaster skin was suffused with an unaccustomed blush, as though she had been caught doing something illegal.

“Beltran is fine,” Isabella said, with a hint of frost. “He needs rest…”

“It’s all right,” Beltran said suddenly, his voice oddly husky. “I
want
to talk to her.”

Isabella glanced down at him, and then she uncoiled from the bed, laid the book down on the bedside cabinet, and skewered the visitors with a diamond-hard, haughty stare.

“Do not,” she said, “tire him out.”

She walked out without giving them another look, her cheeks still flushed. She had looked
embarrassed. Caught out in a weak moment, showing tenderness.

When Thea turned back toward the convalescent’s bed, Beltran was looking at her, a very faint smile curling his lip as though he knew what she was thinking. It was almost a Diego face: knowing, sardonic. But at the same time, it was not. There was a pain there, a sense of deep loss, of emptiness.

Thea stared back at him in mute silence, trying to find the words with which to address Beltran, dismissing those that she would have used to Diego, suddenly aware there were tears in her eyes.

“I know,” Beltran said suddenly, breaking the silence between them. “I
know
what you’re thinking. And it isn’t true.”

“But he is gone,” Thea said helplessly.

“Yes,” Beltran said, dropping his eyes. “He is gone. I remain. Half of me remains, maybe.”

“Don’t say that,” Thea said, her heart giving a queer lurch.

He shrugged. “What’s left?” he said. “I was apparently just the puppet for a shadow show. Isabella told me some of what happened—how stupid is that, being told what happened by
someone else, when you’ve been part of it all along? I was the one with access to a computer, I was the one with the hands to type what Diego wanted…but I typed what Diego wanted, and I have no memory of doing any of it.”

“God,” Terry said, his professional curiosity aroused now. “How do you mean? How
did
he…you…get past the failsafes and the security firewalls? I’ve seen the safeguards and filters the professor has in place, and yet you and Diego just slipped under it all like a shadow. You said
you
were the one who typed it in, who dealt with the Nexus—can you remember any of that? Anything of what you did?”

“So you can stop me from doing it again?” Beltran said with a wan smile.

“That’s not what I…” Terry said, abashed.

“But that’s what I’m saying. I don’t remember, any of it. None of it is me. I don’t really know Diego—I don’t remember being him—but from what everybody tells me, he was special, and intelligent, and unique…maybe even an Elemental…and now all that’s left is me. And I’m empty.”

An echo of a thought came back to haunt Thea. She had been thinking of Diego when she
had thought,
We are alike
. But she recognized what Beltran was saying, too. This twin, too, was like her. Like she had once been, before the unexpected gift had made itself known. Beltran, like Thea, was part of special circumstances—and Beltran, like Thea, found himself locked into a pattern of being the One Who Couldn’t.

Impulsively, she crossed over to the bed and hugged Beltran, who pulled back a little.

“It wasn’t your gift,” she said, letting go and sitting at the edge of his bed. “It wasn’t
your
world. It was his world, his place in the world, and you were forced to live it. But now he’s not here anymore, and the only world that’s left is yours, and it’s going to be what
you
make of it.”

“And what if it’s nothing?” Beltran said

“You know how you throw a stone into a pool, and it makes circles in the water…” Thea said, half-smiling, remembering her own conversation with Grandmother Spider.

Beltran gave her a strange look. “What has throwing rocks into pools got to do with it?”

“If you think of it like…” Thea began, but someone cleared their throat at the door of the room and she stopped, turning. Isabella stood there imperiously, arms crossed, one eyebrow lifted.

“I thought I told you not to tire him out,” she said.

“We’re just talking,” Thea said, glancing back at Beltran, and then realized that Isabella was right, that Beltran’s eyelids were drooping and that he had let his head sink back against the cushions. She slipped off the edge of the bed. “Okay. We’ll let you rest. Can I…is it okay if I write to you?”

“I’d like that,” Beltran said, very softly, and let his eyes close.

Thea and Terry sidled past Isabella as though guilty of a transgression, refraining from speaking until they reached the grand staircase.

Thea caught sight of Terry’s expression and finally couldn’t hold it back any longer.

“Who knew she had it in her?” she murmured, just loud enough for Terry to hear. “Who knew Isabella de los Reyes had a heart after all…?”

The summer internship had ended early, and Thea had gone home. It had been a relief to have a homecoming, this time, where she could spill everything for her parents and not hold back and try to work things out on her own, as when she had returned from Cheveyo’s last summer.

“But, Thea,” her father said to her, “let’s get one thing straight. You really can’t go running off on adventures on your own—please, you
have
to understand that. After you graduate high school, we will see what we can do next. Maybe even Amford.”

“Anthony will have a fit,” Thea said, unable to suppress a small gloat. Anthony, the eldest, had been the star of the family for too long not to put up some sort of fight if it looked like Thea might be on the way to upstaging him. Rubbing his nose in it, just a little, was something that Thea was rather looking forward to.

“
Thea
,” Ysabeau said reproachfully, but not without an answering grin.

“Look at it this way,” said Zoë. “Maybe he can finally score a date with Isabella. He can always say he’s
your
brother…”

And then the rest of the summer slipped by without anybody really paying attention, and September came in with its first sprinkling of gold in the crowns of the trees, shorter days, and cooler nights.

Thea’s bags were already packed, ready for an early-morning departure for school on the following day. Another season, another year spinning
into its close. Another year coming up full of Mr. Siffer’s moody mathematics and Signe’s trips into field and forest and Magpie’s wounded creatures squawking or whimpering or chirping in a box in her closet.

The first traces of a chill that spoke of fall were in the air in a park near her home as Thea leaned on the parapet of an arched stone bridge spanning a ravine and facing a rushing waterfall. It had rained in the past few days, and the falls tumbled into a chaos of foam and sparkling water, spilling into the brittle autumn sunshine—not yet the torrent they would become in the aftermath of the harder rains of late autumn, nor the wild white water that tumbled over the rocks in the wake of spring snowmelt, but a bigger presence, nonetheless, than the barely-there veil of water which was the falls’ normal state in the hotter, drier summer months. The scent of fall tangled into the rush and roar of the water; the trees sighed and whispered in the silence as the first touch of fall color began to touch the maples and the alders. Thea liked to come to the falls just after it had rained, when the creek was cold and the trails muddy and empty of crowds. This was a place where she could think, where she felt
close to the pure magic of water and stone and tree and sky.

A late-season jogger came trotting past on the bridge and paused as she came abreast of Thea.

“Excuse me, would you know the time?” the jogger asked politely.

“September,” Thea said with a little smile, in the finest Aunt Zoë tradition.

The jogger gave her a cross sideways look and turned away, the expression on her face leaving no doubt of her opinion of today’s rude teenage generation. But Thea had already forgotten her—this time she was not here just to say good-bye to her waterfall for the season. This time she had come for more than that.

The fingers of her left hand had been playing compulsively with something in the pocket of her anorak; now she finally brought it out into the sunshine and held it in the palm of her hand—a small painted charm of a carousel pony. She had hung onto that, in the wake of what she had done that summer, a symbol, a potent reminder of all the things she had fought not to allow to overwhelm her. She had brought it here, to the falls, to the place where she had always found peace—and here she would leave it, and hope that some
of the sting would be drawn from it.

She closed her hand into a fist over the charm, hesitated for a moment, and then flung the tiny painted carousel pony and all its memories with all her strength into the roaring falls. For a moment it caught the sun and glittered with an improbable jewel-like sparkle—and then it was gone, vanished into the white foam.

“Not alone,” she murmured. “Just the first.”

Cover art © 2008 by Cliff Nielsen