Free Spellcrash by Kelly McCullough Page A

stuff; it made me sound a hell of a lot more noble than I actually am. “I lived.”

    “Really?” Thalia opened her eyes wide, and wisps of chaos danced in the depths. “Don’t play games with your grandmother, young Raven. You died that day.” She conjured up a finger puppet of me and waved it around. “Or the original Ravirn did, at least. He ceased to exist, devoured utterly by the raw stuff of chaos, just like your cousin Moric.” She raised her finger and blew on it—the puppet dimmed and vanished in the manner of a blown-out birthday candle.

    I looked away. I’d killed Moric, and even though I’d been forced to it, I still regretted it.

    “The Raven that remade himself from that same substance may have a lot in common with the Ravirn that was. He may wear the same face, make the same sorts of jokes. Even keep the same company.” She glanced at Melchior. “But the eyes of humor look beyond the surface of things. I see you as you really are—a shape of chaos bound by will. I am not fooled by the mask you wear, the illusion of flesh.” Thalia leaned forward and pinched my cheek, hard. “And such a sweet illusion it is—a grandmother’s joy.”

    “The hardware may have changed, but Ravirn’s operating system is pretty much the same,” said Melchior. “That’s what really counts. And this version is at least as unstable as the original.” Thalia laughed. “True enough, but is that more of a bug or a feature?”

    “I’d call it a core system requirement,” said Melchior, slipping into a Groucho Marx accent.
    “The boy’s design specs ain’t right, if you know what I mean.” I laughed along with the rest of them, though perhaps more ruefully.

    As it all too often did, midnight found me staring at the ceiling. Melchior snoozed away beside the bed in laptop shape, underlining my sleeplessness with his calm. Some of my insomnia comes from the nature of the Raven. The chaos light that lives in my eyes and the way that raw magic rejuvenates me make sleep both harder and less important for me. But I had stronger reasons for insomnia this time.

    Tomorrow morning, I would have to step fully back into the madness of life among the Greek gods. I would have to begin to deal with the problems of Necessity and Hades and whatever Cerice was up to with Zeus. Waking would plunge me into the maelstrom. And, though it was utterly irrational, a part of me felt that not going to sleep meant not having to wake up, and that not waking up meant the morning would never come—that by putting off sleep, I might put off everything that would come with tomorrow.

    It was a ridiculous conceit, and yet I found myself slipping from bed for perhaps the dozenth time since I’d retired after Thalia’s departure. This time, after pulling on a loose silk robe, I wandered over to the huge walk-in closet that Raven House had supplied me. When I’d first arrived, the closet had mostly been filled with clothes in the black and green I favored, but one corner held a small stock of Cerice’s red and gold. Over the course of our relationship, the balance between our clothes had waxed and waned due to both our efforts and some sort of ongoing magical adjustment mechanism on the part of the house.

    Now, though our fire had long since gone out, there remained one spot of red and gold, one item that neither my forebrain nor my hindbrain had ever felt ready to cast aside irrevocably: a gown.
    I took it from the rack then and carried it out into the bedroom, laying it across the blankets. A full-length brocade dress, it was both elaborate and gorgeous. Though I had never admitted it to Cerice, this dress produced by my subconscious was a near duplicate of the one my sister Lyra had worn for her wedding, different only in the colors of the fabric.

    When Cerice dumped me, I’d sent most of the clothes she left behind on to her apartments on Clotho’s estates. But somehow, I hadn’t been able to part with the dress. It might have