Codespell (23 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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“It’s all right, little one,” said Tisiphone. “Though if that’s what I think it is, I’m not sure I’ll thank you for delivering it.”
“It’s a robe,” I said. “I asked him to find something for me to wear.”
“Look,” said Melchior, setting the robe down, “why don’t I just leave it here and let you two talk in private?” He backed out of the room and vanished again.
Tisiphone makes him nervous; not that I can blame him. Tisiphone makes me nervous . . . when she’s not terrifying me. She’s a Fury, the very embodiment of vengeance and destruction. She could tear me limb from limb without breaking a sweat. But then, another part of my brain noted, maybe that’s what makes her so damn sexy.
Just then she bent and picked up the robe, highlighting the long, lean lines of her legs and the hard muscle of her ass. My mouth went a little dry as she carried it over to me and sat on the edge of the bed with it in her lap. Or maybe the sexy thing was just that she’s absolutely smoking hot.
She put a hand on my thigh. “How badly were you injured? And where?”
“Uhm, that leg actually,” I said.
“Oh.” She snatched her hand away. “Did I hurt you?”
“Not at all. She got me in the back of the thigh. It’s not too bad really. Mel did a bang-up job on the patching front.”
“Would you like me to take a look at it?” she asked.
“Maybe later,” I said, a touch too quickly.
I wasn’t quite ready for her to be poking around under the blankets that provided me with my only covering. From the smile she flashed, I think she knew exactly what my objection was.
“I know a thing or two about wounds.” She put her hand back on my thigh, a little higher up. “And about taking care of them. You pick stuff like that up in my profession.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. It was a sobering thought, but one I couldn’t give proper attention with my libido whispering to me about the hand on my thigh. “I . . . look, could we stop flirting for a minute or two? I’m getting serious psychological whiplash here between the part of me that wants to pull you under the covers and play with fire and the part that thinks I should be running for the hills.”
She made a brief try at pouting but couldn’t seem to sustain it against the grin that followed.
“Now, what fun is that?” she asked. “If I’ve got you that far off-balance, shouldn’t I move in for the kill?” Her hand slid a little higher on my thigh, and she winked.
“Tisiphone, please.”
“Please what? Take my hand away?” She lifted it. “Or please crawl under the covers and ravish me?” She caught the edge of the blankets and lifted them a fraction of an inch.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “That’s why I asked.”
“Oh, all right.” She dropped the covers and put her hands firmly in her own lap. “But it’s much less fun this way.”
As was so often the case when dealing with Tisiphone, I was once again reminded of a cat. This time it was a cat pretending at patience by folding its tail around its legs and looking disinterested. I suspected that we both knew this was just a fresh game, but at that point I was willing to take whatever I could get.
Including the ravishment,
whispered my libido, and I didn’t try to argue. Just as it would be foolish of me to pretend Tisiphone didn’t scare me, it would be silly to pretend I didn’t want her. Both feelings would have to wait.
“Thank you,” I said after a long moment. “We have things we need to talk about, and it’ll be much easier this way.”
“But ever so much less fun.”
“Probably,” I said. “How about if I promise to flirt with you when we’re done?”
“Deal, though I won’t swear to stop at flirting.”
“Deal.” I stuck out my hand, and she solemnly shook it.
I shivered a bit then because I couldn’t help but think of the threat Megaera had made me when last I’d seen her.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tisiphone.
“Megaera . . .”
“Threatened to kill you if you didn’t stay away from her sister?”
“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you guess? Does she do that sort of thing a lot?”
“Only when Alecto or I show any signs of interest in a new man,” said Tisiphone, “but that’s not how I knew this time. She told me about it.”
“She did?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, the threat is no longer operative.”
“That’s fine for you to say,” I said, “but does she know?”
Tisiphone nodded. “She may not be very happy about it, but she knows that she’s not to touch you. I made it very clear that if she kills you, I’ll be quite cross with her.”
“Great.” Somehow I wasn’t all that reassured.
“Ravirn?”
“Yes.”
“Since we’re already talking about difficult entanglements, I have to ask: Are you still with Cerice? Or has she gone back to House Clotho?”
“We’re not still together,” I said.
“That’s what I thought. I think I’ve come up with a better plan for how to have this conversation without all the tension and distractions.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ravish first, talk later.”
With that astonishing Fury speed, she caught the edge of the blankets and flipped them away. Then, very deliberately, and very slowly, she climbed farther onto the bed, kneeling with her face a few inches from mine.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Will that work for you?”
I put a hand on her right side just beside her breast with its fiery nipple. “Promise not to burn me?”
She giggled. “No. But I promise that you’ll like it.”

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Later. Much later. Tisiphone and I lay side by side on the bed, she on her stomach, me on my back. Contrary to her intimation, she had not burned me, though I’d experienced fire in some ways I would never have thought possible.
“Kind of lends a whole new meaning to the term
burning bush
,” I said.
She moved very quickly then, sitting up and flipping me over so that I lay facedown across her lap and giving me a solid swat on the ass.
“Rule one, no bad redhead jokes.”
“I meant it literally,” I said. I didn’t bother to struggle—she was much stronger than I was, a fact that had made our sex more interesting in a number of surprising ways. “Besides, if you’ve got the temper to match the hair . . .”
She swatted me again. “Rule two, no redhead stereotyping. The temper comes from being a Fury, end of story.”
“What’s rule three?” I asked.
“Don’t make me tell you rule three.”
“Is that the rule or—ow!”
She’d swatted me again, letting the very tips of her claws get involved this time.
“All right. No rule three. Can I move now?”
“No,” said Tisiphone. “I want to take a better look at this bullet hole. I don’t like the way it interfered with things. It’s been a very long time for me, and I want you healed up properly so that I can catch up.”
“That sounds like fun. How long is a long time?”
“Seventeen hundred years,” said Tisiphone.
“Wow. If the last hour is anything to go by, catching up is likely to kill me. Maybe we could—ow!” She’d just prodded my scab.
“Sorry. This is going to hurt. Probably quite a lot, but it should really speed things up.”
“What’s—OW!”
It felt as though Tisiphone had dropped a bit of liquid fire on the wound, and it was now burning its way along the track the bullet had taken deep into my flesh. For that matter, considering her nature, maybe she’d done exactly that. Whatever it was, I lost track of everything but the pain for a good minute or two.
“How’s that?” she asked just as the pain peaked.
“It’s damned . . . huh.”
Where everything had been agonizingly hot a moment before as though someone were probing the wound with a fiery dagger, it now seemed as though the blade had been quenched. I could feel the path the bullet had taken as plainly as I might a breeze on my face, but it no longer hurt. Rather, it felt like an ice cube drawn along the line of sunburn, pleasure and relief that almost bordered on pain.
Experimentally, I flexed the muscles of my leg. Much better. Still stiff and sore, but I thought I might be able to put aside the cane now.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes. What did you do?”
“Wrong question,” she answered.
“Fair enough, tell me the right one.”
“Ask me what I’m
going
to do,” she said.
“All right. What are you—oh.”
Her hand slid between us where my thighs rested across hers, catching and guiding.
“I wasn’t done with ravishing just yet,” she said. “Is that all right with you?”
“Yeah, fine.”
More time went away.
I lay half-on, half-off of the low futon, pressing my forehead against the cold stone of the floor and desperately trying to shed heat. Tisiphone was sitting cross-legged on the far end of the bed, grinning. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t even really look mussed, and I felt like I’d just run a double marathon.
“You win,” I said, when my breathing had slowed a bit. “I surrender unconditionally.”
“That’s no fun,” she said. “I refuse your surrender and demand a rematch at a later time.”
“That idea does have its merits,” I said with a small grin of my own. “I’ll need a week or three to recover first.”
“Not likely.” She snorted and poked me with a foot, though she kept the claws retracted. “Hostilities could resume at any time and with no warning. You’ll just have to learn to be prepared.”
I laughed and pushed myself back up into a sitting position. “You’re merciless. You know that, right?”
“
Fury
. Duh. It’s in my job description. Hell, it
is
my job description. I will promise to give you at least one hour from this moment so that we can get that deferred conversation from earlier out of the way. Where were we?”
“Discussing the fact that your sister Megaera’s going to slice me into neat little ribbons when she finds out about us.”
“She won’t, you know.”
“You sound awfully confident,” I said.
“I am.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because we agreed that we need you in one piece.”
“
We
being you and Megaera?”
“We being Furies Inc.,” said Tisiphone.
Suddenly feeling colder, I reached down and pulled a blanket over my lap.
“Would you care to elaborate on that?” I asked.
“Necessity is broken.” Tisiphone’s voice was flat and hard, with just the faintest hint of pain underneath. “That’s bad and needs to be fixed, but it’s not our only problem.”
“Nemesis,” I supplied.
“She’s part of it, but we’ve handled her before, and we will this time, too—more finally. No, it’s what she represents that’s the major worry.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” I said.
“You should be. In this we share many enemies.”
“You mean the Fates?” I asked.
“Yes, and maybe Hades, though we’re less sure of him. This is causing the three of us a great deal of distress. I think I’ve told you before that full autonomy doesn’t suit us. Necessity made us that way in response to Nemesis, who had the opposite problem. Under normal circumstances, we would probably place ourselves under Fate’s orders until we restored Necessity.”
“But?” I asked.
“But we believe Fate is trying to usurp Necessity’s throne. That’s what you think, too—the message you were trying to get across at the Necessity gateway, before we were interrupted by . . . events, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said, appreciating her discretion in not criticizing Cerice by name. “The way Fate grabbed total control of the mweb servers seems telling to me. Especially when combined with the wholly unexpected reappearance of Nemesis. ”
“It did to my sisters as well. Alecto in particular is quite smug about already having broken the alliance we formed with the Fates in the first days after Necessity went silent. Megaera argued against it, and Alecto likes to show her up.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask about that and about Persephone, ” I said. The Fates had ordered the Furies to kill me then, and they very nearly had.
Tisiphone looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I am sorry. I had no choice in the matter. You know that, right?” I nodded, and she continued, “I suppose you’ve been wondering why we cut our fresh tie to Fate so soon.”
“The question had crossed my mind,” I said. “I’m not complaining, of course. I’m much happier with you when you’re not trying to kill me.”
Tisiphone stepped off the bed and began to pace. “When it became clear that it was Persephone and not you who was responsible for the damage to Necessity, it also became clear that the Fates had tried to use us to settle their score with you. That didn’t sit well. We don’t like being used, not even a little.”

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