Codespell (14 page)

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Authors: Kelly Mccullough

Tags: #Computer Hackers, #Magic, #Fantasy Fiction, #Computers, #Contemporary, #General, #Fantasy, #Wizards, #Fiction

BOOK: Codespell
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My mouth suddenly felt very dry even if it was virtual. Tisiphone might like me and have her eye on me as potential boyfriend material, but her duties to her mother would always take precedence. She
would
kill me if she thought I’d acted against Necessity.
“I want to find out what happened to Shara,” I said. True.
“And? You didn’t break into Fate’s server just for that. Not at this late date. You could have had a go at the Necessity gateway earlier if that was all you wanted, back before the mweb servers went behind the firewall.”
“I also wanted to contact Necessity,” I said.
“What about?”
I paused. How much did I want to tell Tisiphone? How much did I
have
to tell her to stay on her good side and avoid triggering her protector duties? As I weighed what to say, her expression hardened.
“I’m waiting.”
I decided to go for it. If my suspicions about the Fates and Nemesis were right, the Furies and I were very much on the same side.
“Sorry,” I said. “I want to tell you everything. I’m just not sure this is the best place to talk about it. I will if you insist, but . . .”
“Fate may be listening?” Her eyes narrowed.
I nodded. “Among others.”
She lifted her head and sniffed like a cat testing the wind. “Hmm. Perhaps you’re right.” She grinned and arched her back, again like a cat. This one had been at the cream. “Shall we go back to your place then? You show me what you’ve got, and I’ll show you mine?”
I swallowed hard. That wasn’t all that was hard. Tisiphone had that effect on me. I opened my mouth to say yes, then snapped it closed again. What was I doing? My place was no longer exactly safe. Even if it were, I still had Cerice to think about. Of course, she seemed to have abandoned me and returned to House Clotho. But did that constitute a breakup? Or even a time-out? I just didn’t know anymore.
“Maybe we should try for another venue,” I said finally.
Tisiphone looked disappointed. “Ashamed to take me home?”
“No. It’s just that home is
difficult
right now.”
“Well, Necessity’s realm is unreachable, which locks us out of my place. Any other suggestions?”
“There’s always the traditional cheap motel,” I said with a grin. I can never resist a hook like that. “Or—”
“Or what?” demanded a voice seemingly from thin air.
Again, I jumped. “Cerice?”
“Oh hell,” said Melchior.
With a swirl and a flash, Cerice’s virtual self arrived a few yards away at a point midway between Tisiphone and me.
“That hurts, Mel,” she said. “I would have expected more from you.”
“Cerice,” he sighed, expanding his projection back to normal size, “I love you, but you have the multiverse’s worst timing and a knack for jumping to conclusions. You don’t know what’s going on here, yet you assume the worst.”
“I know enough. I’ve been monitoring you ever since Asalka caught you on the way in.”
Maybe that explained the erect feathers feeling? But no, it was still going.
“I knew she was too good to be true,” said Melchior. “I just knew it. All that hero stuff was just a put-on.”
“It wasn’t, you know,” said the troll, likewise suddenly appearing. She looked almost heartbroken. “I really do feel that way about you. But I’ve been assigned to Cerice to help crack the Necessity problem. She used to work with you and Ahllan in the familiar underground, and she was part of the group that defied Fate. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Not mind being betrayed?” Melchior shook his head. “You’re kidding, right?”
“It wasn’t a betrayal,” husked Asalka, looking at her feet. “At least, it wasn’t supposed to be.”
“Unlike you and her and a cheap motel!” said Cerice.
“It was a joke,” I said. “You know me, Cerice. I’m
always
joking.”
“I didn’t find it funny,” said Cerice.
“Neither did I,” agreed Tisiphone, looking suddenly angry. “Were you leading me on so you could betray me, too?”
“I didn’t betray anybody!”
“No, it was all just a ’joke,’ ” said Cerice.
“I’m not the one who abandoned me at that party without so much as a good-bye,” I answered. “Abandoned me to get shot at, no less.”
“My grandmother needed me,” said Cerice. “Besides, what’s all this about getting shot at? Did you piss off the rent-a-clops again?”
“If you hadn’t hung up on me so quickly the last time we talked, you’d know the answer to that,” I said. “And
your
grandmother is
my
enemy.”
“No. I am.”
The voice came from behind me. It was deadly cold, and though I had only heard it a few times of late, I recognized it instantly. Nemesis. I turned around and found Dairn. Or rather the goddess wearing his body.
“Dairn!” snarled Cerice. “What the hell are you doing here? I ought to have Asalka use the security admin system to fry you for what you did to Shara.”
She started forward, and I put out an arm to stop her.
“That’s not Dairn,” I said. “It’s—”
“Nemesis!” snarled Tisiphone. Red light exploded behind me like a wall of tinder bursting into flame, and a sledgehammer of heat struck my back.
“Oh shit,” said Mel, looking back that way for a brief instant before he made himself small and scarce.
I glanced over my shoulder and was inclined to agree. I had seen Tisiphone on the hunt—when she came after me. I had seen her in battle—against Eris. And I thought I had seen her angry—I was wrong.
Her fiery wings were fully extended and burning so brightly my eyes watered. Her hair looked like a torch in a wind tunnel—a great billowing banner of flame. Hate and rage twisted her face into a snarl of the sort normally reserved for nature-program footage of lions defending their cubs. Her claws were all at full extension, and her knees were bent as though she were about to pounce. Pounce!
I wrapped Cerice in my arms and took her with me as I threw myself to the ground. Before we’d hit, I felt a rush of scorching air pass through the space where we’d just been. Hot pain kissed the back of my neck, and I smelled burning hair.
Still holding Cerice, I rolled over and over to put out any lingering fires. We came to rest a few yards away, and I glanced back to the place where I had last seen Nemesis. My eyes found a madly tumbling ball of flame and shadow. It was accompanied by an awful chorus of grunts, growls, and rending sounds.
“Time to go?” the mouse-Melchior whispered into my ear.
“Yeah, I think so,” I agreed, and disentangled myself from Cerice, climbing to my knees.
“Are you staying?” I asked her.
“Just go,” she said, turning her face down and away from me. “Please.”
“Cerice?” I caught her chin and gently lifted.
When her eyes met mine, they were full of tears. “I hate you,” she whispered.
“Do you?” I asked. “Do you really?”
“Yes. I hate you . . . and I love you. Why did you have to become what you did? Why did you have to go somewhere I can’t follow?”
“Oh, Cerice . . .” I felt tears in my own eyes and blinked them away. “I never asked for this. You know that, right?”
“And I never asked to fall in love with you. Look, we don’t have time for this.” She pointed toward the ongoing battle. “You can’t be found here, and if that doesn’t attract Fate security I don’t—”
She was drowned out by the sudden blaring of Klaxons.
Oh shit squared.
“Melchior?”
“I don’t know, Boss. We’ve got a real—Down!”
I dropped. Something hot and heavy clipped my left shoulder hard enough to roll me over. It felt like I’d been branded, and I could smell burning leather, so I rolled over a couple more times.
“Stop!” yelled Melchior. “Not an inch farther.”
I stopped and looked in the direction I’d been rolling. I was almost on top of what looked like an out-of-control bonfire. It was Tisiphone’s wing, still hot with rage though she wasn’t moving. I tried to get to my feet, but my left arm didn’t want to work. I swore. Nemesis could be on me in an instant.
That was when I remembered the nature of my environment and willed myself to my feet. The pain was real, and the damage, because it had happened to the part of me that made me me, but the world was virtual.
I glanced around, trying to make sense of the incredible cascade of sensory information coming at me from all sides—bells and flashing lights, Melchior dancing and yelling that we had to get out now, Cerice bawling. Where was Nemesis? Why hadn’t she tried to kill me yet? It was because of the giant spider.
Giant spider? Something very like one—a black-widow type. It had the right number of legs, and a spider’s fat body, but where its head should have been was a woman’s upper half. I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t tell much more than that because it was wrestling with Nemesis. Since it seemed to be winning, at least for the moment, I focused my attention on Cerice, reaching for her shoulder.
“Go!” She shrugged me off. “Before it’s too late. Use the time the spinnerette’s buying you. I don’t want to be your death.”
“I think it’s too late to run,” I said, looking beyond her.
In the distance I could see dozens of approaching figures—the forces of Fate.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN
“It’s not too late,” said Tisiphone, her voice a little thready—she’d taken some pretty solid hits.
She was covered with scrapes and cuts, but she’d forced herself to hands and knees. As I watched, she lurched to her feet.
“I can save you,” she said, putting out a hand. “But you’ll have to trust me completely.”
I looked back at Cerice. Something about the moment felt terribly final, as though I were making a choice between lovers, and not just an escape.
“Go.” Cerice repeated herself. “I can’t help you. She can.”
“Cerice . . .” I said.
“Don’t make this any harder than it already is,” she said.
I took Tisiphone’s right hand. Claws sprang out on the left, and she sliced the air, tearing a hole in the fabric of reality and exposing the Primal Chaos beyond.
“Trust me,” said the Fury.
She jabbed my thumb with a claw, drawing virtual blood—blood she touched to her tongue. Then she looked meaningfully at Melchior.
With a sigh he extended a mousy paw toward her. “I don’t think that . . . spinnerette’s going to last much longer against Nemesis.”
Tisiphone quickly repeated the process. When she was done, Melchior hopped into my pocket.
“We’re in your hands,” I said to Tisiphone.
She pulled me tight against her and enfolded us both in her wings.
Sensory disconnect.
I felt as though we were enclosed in a blanket of fire. Heat and light surrounded me, and yet I didn’t burn. There was nothing in the universe but me, Tisiphone, and the flames. I knew Melchior was with me, but in virtual-mouse form, he barely registered. No, what I was really aware of was Tisiphone’s long, naked body pressed tightly against mine.
She tensed, then bent her knees and sprang. I felt us cross over the boundary between cyberspace and chaos, felt the raw stuff of the multiverse as a sort of pressure beyond the fiery cocoon of Tisiphone’s wings. From chaos all things were formed, and to chaos they will return, eventually to be reborn again in new shapes.
I had always known that, yet I hadn’t. Not really. I had known it as you know a fact. Now I knew it like a lover—intimate, involved, intoxicating. I was a chaos power in the heart of my own element, and unlike the last couple of times I’d been here, I was aware, a discrete point within the sea of chaos rather than a diffuse probability of awareness. I felt the pulse of creation-in-destruction, a wild rhythmic sort of music of the spheres beating against my soul as though I had become a Dionysian drum.
“Alone at last,” whispered Tisiphone, her lips brushing my ear.
Then she nibbled my neck. I felt the contact like a bolt of lightning running straight from her teeth down my spine. The sexual charge was incredible, beyond anything I’d ever felt before.
“I want to be inside of you,” I said without thinking, without even being aware that I was speaking—as though the words were saying me.
She ran her tongue up the side of my neck to my ear. “Sounds lovely.” Then she laughed, low and sexy. “You know, in a way, you already are—every single inch of you.” She squeezed me with her wings at the same time she slid a hand down the front of my pants.
It was the most erotic thing ever, that double enclosure. I ran my fingertips down her ribs and around, cupping her buttocks, pulling her even tighter against me.
She caught my ear in her teeth and whispered . . . “Oh, damn.”

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