Spellcrash

by Kelly McCullough

  “Subtle,” I replied. “Almost as much so as usual.”

  She snorted with amusement, and the whole statue routine vanished. In its place stood Discord.

  How to describe a goddess whose stock-in-trade is change? Start with her height. Without the ever-present stiletto heels, she usually stands in the neighborhood of six-five, and today was no exception. Her skin shifts from onyx black to eighteen-karat gold in the blink of an eye and back at the next blink, or occasionally between blinks—think taffeta and hallucinogens. Her hair, equal parts midnight and blond, hangs to her waist, thick and straight and silken. Her body is perfect, no matter what your definition of perfect might be—that’s part of her magic. She wants you to want her so much that you’re willing to ruin yourself chasing after her though she can never be caught—again, part of the magic.

  For me, today, she wore an elegant face with high-arched brows, sharply defined cheekbones, and bee-stung lips, though that almost certainly said more about my current appetites than it did about her real appearance. The goddess dress was gone, replaced by black leather pants, tight but not obscenely so, and a thin gold turtleneck that made the pants look baggy. The sandals had become a pair of knee-high boots with delicate golden chains around the ankles.

  Her eyes . . . were my own, only more so. The tumbling madness of chaos fills the eyes of Eris. Knowing the same disturbing effect looks out at the world through the slits of my pupils is one of the things that makes meeting her gaze one of the least comfortable aspects of any encounter between us. Doubly so now that I know that Loki comes equipped with the same package. It says things about my place in the cosmic scheme that I don’t particularly like to hear.

  “How’s tricks . . . ter?” she asked.

  She always knows exactly what not to say. Hence, “Discord.” I sighed. She laughed and winked again.

  Finally, I laughed, too. “You’re impossible, you know that, right?”

  “Honey, that’s my primary job description.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “What makes you think I want something?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m not anywhere near as stupid as I look. So far you’ve called me ‘dear child’ and ‘honey,’ and you haven’t yet done that whole magical come-hither thing you do when you’re trying to get my goat.”

  “Are you saying I’m losing my sex appeal?”

  She gave me a pouting look that would have made a monk regret his vows of celibacy. It certainly redlined my libido gauge, but it did it the old-fashioned way, with moist lips and artful posture and none of Eris’s patented magic-most-sensual special effects. Once I’d put my tongue back in my mouth and my eyes back in their sockets, I was able to shake it off easily enough.

  “Not in the least,” I said. “We both know exactly what I meant; it’s just that one of us is playing games. If that’s how it’s going to be, could we at least move this to a poker table. I’m used to you fleecing me at cards.”

  “You’re getting harder to manipulate,” she replied. “That’s quite unfair.”

  As she finished the sentence I found myself seated at a round table covered in green felt. Eris sat across from me wearing the traditional green eyeshade of a house dealer and holding a deck of cards. Around us the temple had become a cross between a high-end Riviera-style casino and a thoroughly equipped video arcade. On my right, slot machines shared wall space with the latest successors to the PacMans and Galagas of my childhood. On my left, a roulette table backed against a sunken pit holding a giant-screen TV, a couple of couches, and a suite of gaming consoles. Castle Discord is an infinitely mutable Greatspell taking whatever shape Eris wants at the moment.

  “What’s your game?” she asked, flicking the cards from one hand to the other in a fancy cascade.

  “I think that’s my question actually, and I’m not playing anything until I know the stakes.”

  “You want stakes? All right, I’ll show you.”

  Eris bent the deck between index finger and thumb, then flicked the center with her middle finger so that the cards shot straight across the table at my face. One by one, in the instant before they would have hit me, they turned into butterflies, each patterned in the suit of the original card. Soon fifty-two red and black butterflies were dancing around my head.

  “And every one a potential hurricane,” said Eris with a wicked smile, “but only if I weight the odds right.” She snapped her fingers, and the butterflies vanished—off to cause havoc-weather if I knew her at all. “Those are the stakes.”

  “Ooh, obscure and portentous. What more could a guy ask for?” Now it was my turn to snap my fingers. “Oh, that’s right, specifics.”

  She sighed and shook her head in the manner of a teacher with a particularly slow student. “You want to know everything?”

  I nodded, and the world changed around me. I sat in a high-backed leather chair and was wearing a tweed suit. A pipe was tucked in the corner of my mouth, and a notebook rested on my knee. Eris lay at full length on a chaise beside me, one arm thrown dramatically across her face.

  “I had a very unhappy childhood, Doc,” she said. “My father was a dominating bastard who thought he should be the king of the gods. My grandfather was worse—he ate my aunts and uncles one by one and would have eaten my father, too, if the old man hadn’t gotten him first. Not surprisingly, I began to act out as a teenager. Wild parties.” A ghost of a bacchanal manifested itself around us. “Skimpy clothes.” Eris’s outfit went briefly as ghostly as the bacchantes. “Attention seeking, really.” The party went away, replaced by a heavy golden apple thudding down on a long marble table. “But I was just a product of my environment.” A hundred scenes of divine Greek depravity flashed by in an instant. “My family is the very definition of dysfunction and abuse.” She caught my eyes with her own. “Or should I say our family, cousin mine?”

  I spat out the pipe. “Is this going somewhere?”

  Eris shook her head sadly and sat up. “You really ought to be able to read between the lines by now.” She touched the side of her head. “This is going to give me such a migraine, and I promise that I’m going to take it out of your hide later.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I know. I am Eris, but also Discord, both goddess and power. Straightforward hurts me when it aids order against chaos.” Her brow wrinkled in pain.

  Eris snapped her fingers and produced a butterfly wearing the jack of hearts on its wings. “A storm is coming.” She let out a little gasp.

  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 diffe
rent. 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.