Spellcrash (4 page)

Snap. Wind filled the room, tugging at my tweeds. “It will be the biggest blow our world has seen since the Titanomachy, a
hypercane
. And you are the butterfly who gave birth to the winds.” Her eyes closed.

Snap. Lightning struck the butterfly in her hand, burning it to a crisp. “You must not trust Zeus.” Her free hand went to her forehead.

Duh,
I thought.

Snap. The thunder came, and a golden apple replaced the ash on her palm. “You must not trust any of us.”

Double duh. Family.

She gave a little gasp. “Not even me.”

Wow, the hat trick of duh.

Eris handed the apple to me. “The stakes are—no.” She gagged, then doubled over and vomited behind the couch, clutching at her head the whole time. “That’s all. Go!” I glanced at the apple and swore. On it were the words, “For the specialist.”
CHAPTER TWO

“Cryptic metal fruit, you gotta love that.” Melchior held the apple up in one hand, peering thoughtfully at it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. “Especially the kind that starts wars. I wonder whatever happened to the original.” He sat on the rail of the main lanai of Raven House.

“I don’t know, Mel. Aphrodite’s not the most thoughtful of goddesses. I’m guessing that ten seconds after the contest was over, she forgot all about it in favor of the next shiny thing to catch her eye. It’s probably playing doorstop in one of her thousand and one bedrooms.” I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the deck rail beside Melchior, looking past him to the sea. Raven House sits on the Island of Kauai in a Decision Locus that is largely devoid of people for reasons I’ve never bothered to look into. It’s a beautiful and bizarre place, a product of my somewhat twisted subconscious messing with the stuff of probability by means of the faerie-ring network.

The style lies somewhere between Tiki-Modern and Neohedonist. The world’s fanciest Hawaiian-themed hotel rendered in acres of black-veined green marble and vast expanses of tinted glass.

The view is fabulous. The half-moon of white sand and blue sea that is Hanalei Bay is backed by the near-vertical tropical forest of the mountains beyond. The latter provides a great sweep of velvet green punctuated here and there with ragged patches of rusty soil and waterfalls like threads of diamond. Breathing the air is like drinking a really good piña colada, sweet, heady, and pure tropics.

Speaking of which . . . I reached a hand back behind me. A cold drink filled it a moment later. I took a big sip, then choked and almost snorted it out through my nose in the next instant when it tasted nine kinds of wrong and far too strong. I managed not to drop the glass, but only just.

“Absinthe?” I hacked, and turned half-around to face Haemun.

“Not right?” The satyr shook his head sadly and looked contrite, though a tiny twinkle of mischief in his eyes made me doubt his sincerity. “Then yours must have been the piña colada.” He plucked the glass from my hand and exchanged it for another on his tray.

Haemun is the spirit of Raven House made manifest, a combination butler, cook, valet, bartender, and wicked commentary on my subconscious. From the waist down he’s a goat. From the waist up . . . He’s got a lot in common with the traditional satyr there; human head and torso, curly hair, tiny horns. But his beard is a very sixties soul patch, and his aloha shirts are loud enough to violate most urban noise ordinances. The current one showed a complete luau scene, only all the participants had tie-dyed octopuses where their heads should have been. It made for a sort of Jerry Garcia dropping acid with Don Ho and H. P. Love-craft vibe. Haemun can also read the needs of the house’s occupants . . . most of the time. Witness the replacement drink I was even then lifting to my lips.

“I’ll take the absinthe,” said a deep, growly voice from the direction of the stairhead that led down to the beach.

Fenris, back from his latest attempts at surfing—I’d shown him the basics the previous evening after Eris released me. He seemed to have fallen in love with the sport despite the obvious handicaps involved with being a giant wolf. I turned toward the stairs, took a swallow of my piña colada . . . and then went to my knees when pain lashed my eyes and clawed at my right hand when my glass exploded.

“Down!” Melchior yelled somewhere behind me, followed by the sound of more shattering glass.

“Mine.” Fenris’s voice came out as an angry snarl, and I heard claws scrabbling on marble before a blurry gray streak raced past me.

Melchior arrived at my side in the next moment. “Boss, are you all right?” I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t know yet. While the pain in my eyes had stopped getting worse, the signals from my hand had a shocky feeling I didn’t like one little bit.

“What happened?” I demanded.

Melchior didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he whistled a binary spell string that I recognized as “Better Living Through Chemistry” before jabbing a hollow claw freshly full of morphine into my right wrist. Not a good sign, that.

“Just hang on, Boss. I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks.”

“I can’t see shit, Mel. What happened?”

“Assassin. High-powered rifle, I think. If you hadn’t turned when you did, we’d be picking up pieces of your skull. As it is, the bullet hit your drink, and maybe your hand. It’s hard to tell what’s what with all that blood.”

Damn it, damn it, damn it.
“Should I be scrambling for cover?”

“I expect Fenris has it under control, but getting off the balcony sure couldn’t hurt.”

“Guide me.” I closed my eyes to minimize distractions.

Melchior caught hold of my right wrist and tugged. I followed on hand and knees.

“Let me give you a boost.” Haemun wrapped a helpful arm around my waist.

After we slipped into the shadow of the roofed portion of the lanai, I let my next worry surface.

“How bad are my eyes?”

They felt like they were getting better but . . .

“I didn’t see any blood or glass fragments, but why don’t we have a closer look now.” Melchior halted our forward progress, and I felt his tiny fingers tugging at my eyelids.

I let him open them, and a blurry version of my inner lanai materialized. Mel’s attentions hurt, but I tried to hold still.

“I think they’re fine. You just got sprayed with alcohol when your piña colada exploded. That’s bound to sting something fierce, but I don’t see you going all Oedipus Rex anytime soon.”

“You have no idea what a relief that is, Mel.”

“Actually, having met the bundle of spite and bile that is your mother, I rather think I do. Just a second.” He whistled another string of binary, something extemporaneous this time. A moment later, I felt warm saline washing out my eyes.

“Much better.” I blinked several times as something like normal vision returned.

Haemun had flipped over a Hawaiian-print sofa, putting at least a visual block between us and anyone pointing a gun in our direction. So, temporarily out of the line of fire, check. Eyes functional, check. Time for item three on the triage list.

My right hand was a mess. Reflexes are a wonderful thing, except when they aren’t. Mine had closed the hand into a tight fist when the initial pain hit. Not the best plan in the world when your drink has just been converted into a rapidly expanding cloud of alcohol and broken glass.

“Ugly.” I rotated my half-open hand this way and that, trying to ignore the blood and focus on actual tissue damage.

“Can you move it?” asked Melchior.

“I guess I’d better try.” Not that I wanted to.

Pinkie? Ow. Ring finger? Ow! Middle fi—aieee! Grit teeth. Index—owowow, not good. Bite
tongue. Thumb? . . . Okay.
I flipped my right hand over and looked at the back. After a moment, I pointed at it with my left.

“You see that bloody spot, just inside the knuckles, between the index and middle fingers? Exit wound?”

Melchior nodded. “I think you’re right. Haemun, hold his wrist.” The satyr did as told, and I turned my head away. Even through the morphine, what Melchior did next made me want to scream.

“Small-caliber, high-velocity,” he said after a while. “Very clean shot, and it doesn’t look like it hit the bone or any major tendons. About as good as you could hope for, but once we get all of that glass out of your hand, we’re going to need to get you to someone who stitches better than I do. Hands are touchy.”

“I can do it,” said Haemun.

The satyr sounded as surprised by that as I felt. His reaction turned me back to face him once again.

“Really?” asked Melchior. “I didn’t know that about you.”

“Neither did I,” I said.

“That makes three of us,” said Haemun. “It wasn’t until Master Melchior said what he did that the knowledge came into my head. Though, when you consider the way you two live, it’s no surprise that Raven House would come equipped with a decent field surgeon.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Where do you want to work? I think I can crawl a bit farther now.”

“No need for crawling,” said Fenris from somewhere beyond the overturned couch, his voice sounding strangely muffled. “I got the shooter. I had to kill it, and it’s the weirdest damned thing I’ve seen in a very long life.”

I’m not sure what I expected Fenris to drag around the couch, but I know I got something entirely different. Different, and deeply unsettling.

“Why is a spinnerette trying to kill you?” asked Melchior.

That was a good question. Fenris dropped the limp body of the spider-centaur on the ground at my feet in a grim parody of a Labrador bringing a duck to its master. This one was longer and thinner than most, reminding me almost of a scorpion. I’d never seen one quite like it. It was also rougher and less refined than the normal model.

“I take it from your reaction that you two recognize this thing?” he said.

I nodded. “The spinnerettes are part of the network Fate built to control destiny in the days before Necessity created the mweb.”

“They work for Fate?” The huge wolf settled back on his haunches and started to scrub his mouth with his tongue like a dog eating peanut butter. “That’d sure explain the taste.” Fenris and his family disliked their version of the Fates every bit as much as I did mine, if somewhat less personally.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “They used to, but once Necessity’s network came along, Fate decided to surplus the lot of them.”

“Is that a fancy word for kill?” asked Fenris.

“I guess it is,” I said after a moment’s thought. “The whole thing happened years before my time, and with mixed results as you can see. It’s how my grandmother Lachesis always talked about it, as though the spinnerettes weren’t really alive—I guess I picked it up from her.”

“Have I mentioned recently how very screwed up your family is? Especially your grandmother and her sisters?” Melchior got up and went to walk around the dead spinnerette, leaving the job of picking glass out of my hand to Haemun, who had produced a pair of tweezers from . . . well, somewhere.

Lachesis isn’t really my grandmother. There are actually quite a number of generations between the middle Fate and me, but no one sane could argue that the great sprawling family of the Greek gods is anything other than monumentally screwed up. Witness Eris’s little game of psychologist. Or, more to the proximate point, the fact that the Fates still hadn’t publicly acknowledged that the various webgoblins, webtrolls, and webpixies are fully autonomous individuals. An awful lot of Melchior’s friends and relations had also been “surplused” by my grandmother and her sisters over the years.

“Do you want to jump in here?” I asked Fenris. I wanted to distract myself from the way Haemun’s sharp little tugs seemed to transmit themselves all the way up my arm, as though he were actually pulling yard-long threads out of my flesh. “Melchior’s absolutely right.”

“Nope.” He wrinkled his nose. “My father is the god of mischief. My mother is a Jotun. My brother is a world-girdling snake. My sister is
literally
half-dead. I don’t throw stones at anybody’s family. The ‘kill’ question was strictly for clarification’s sake. I want to make sure I understand what’s really going on around here.” With his nose, he indicated the corpse. “If these things don’t work for Fate anymore, whose side are they on?” I shrugged. “Necessity, maybe. At least the only one I’ve had dealings with was.” The thought gave me a nasty little chill. “Back then, it saved my life. Now . . .”

“Now we have to wonder if the goddess that really runs our MythOS wants us dead,” interjected Melchior.

“Well, that’s no—” Fenris gagged abruptly, swallowed noisily, then started coughing. “Oh hell.

Not this again.”

The coughs got harsher and harsher, quickly reverting to gagging. Tail down, and looking more than a little embarrassed, the giant wolf turned away from me and quietly threw up—splash, thud. The raw chaos that served as Fenris’s answer to stomach acid immediately began eating a hole in the marble floor, while the severed hand that came up with it just lay there and twitched for several seconds. Finally, Laginn rolled over onto his palm and walked toward the spinnerette, leaving little smoking fingerprints in his wake.

“I wish you’d warn me before you do that,” Fenris said to the hand. “That’s the second time we’ve made a mess in Ravirn’s home.”