Spellcrash Read Free

half inch in front of my eyes to a hairbreadth in front of my groin. Smiling grimly, she slipped through the cut she’d made into somewhere else and was gone. I’m almost certain the reason I didn’t come back with a snide remark before she departed was because I couldn’t breathe and not because she’d scared the bejeeburs out of me. Almost.

    “You’re an idiot, you know that, right?” Melchior’s normally pale blue face had darkened to something in the neighborhood of indigo. “Why are you always trying to get yourself killed?”

    “ I’m not,” I said, “but the Raven might have other plans.” Melchior looked away.

    One of the problems with becoming a power is the loss of some degree of autonomy. Take Cerice’s comment about her temper. Among the things she would have inherited when she became a Fury was an extra-large helping of little-f fury. In my case, becoming the Raven had amped the daylights out of all of my worst tendencies toward risk-taking and mischief-making.
    Ravirn the hacker and cracker was a trickster. The Raven is a mask of the Trickster, one that all too often wears my face rather than the other way around.

    Take my response to Cerice as Fury. The old Ravirn would probably have been appalled on her behalf and at least tried to think before speaking. The Raven? Not so much. The part of me that was the Trickster didn’t care about whatever madness had driven Shara to use her position within Necessity to offer Cerice Tisiphone’s place as a Fury. Nor about the madness that had convinced Cerice to agree. It cared about winning the conversational duel no matter how much of a callous ass that painted me.

    On the lemonade-from-lemons side, the Trickster isn’t big on self-doubt, so I have trouble hanging on to morose. At least, when no one is actively shooting at me, I do. I rolled backwards and up onto my feet.

    “Forget it, Mel. I’m sure life will drop a bucket of bricks on us soon enough without my help.”

    “Now, that’s reassuring.” Melchior shook his head and started to pace. “Do you think she really meant that about Shara?”

    “The hiring-decision thing?” I shrugged. “I don’t see how else you arrive at Cerice as Fury. We still don’t know what happened with Necessity to get us sent off to the Norse MythOS. It’s possible that was a symptom of a complete and unfixable crash, and that Shara’s running the show now.”

    “Care to clue a guy in here?” Fenris asked me.

    “Sure. Necessity is our version of MimirSoft—the goddess in computer shape who keeps track of the gods and all the infinite worlds of probability. Because of a couple of minor miscalculations on my part, she caught a virus that just about ate the entire multiverse.”

    “To say nothing of the hardware damage your duel with Nemesis inflicted,” said Melchior.

    “Well, yeah.” I looked at my feet. “There’s that, too, but that wasn’t really my fault.”

    “So that mess you made with Mimir and Rune wasn’t exactly outside your normal mode of operations,” said Fenris.

    “More like his specialty,” said Melchior.

    The wolf whistled. “No wonder Odin wanted to get rid of you. Between that and your little self-aware laptop buddy here”—he indicated Melchior with his nose—“you’re something like the ultimate biological malware.”

    I shrugged. “I prefer to think of myself as a hacker and cracker, but you might have a point there.”

    “So who’s Shara?” he asked.

    “That’s complex. She used to be Cerice’s webgoblin and familiar. Laptop by day, miniature purple Mae West by night, or something like that anyway. Now the part of her that’s really her is trapped inside Necessity and—if what Cerice said is true—she may be running the whole show.”

    “Should I assume that’s your fault, too?” asked Fenris.

    I looked away.

    “Wow.”

    “I hate to interrupt,” Melchior said, coming to my rescue, “but I’m thinking this might not be the safest