Spellcrash Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 different. 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.

    “Not exactly,” I replied. “They used to, but once Necessity’s network came along, Fate decided to surplus the lot of them.”

    “Is that a fancy word for kill?” asked Fenris.

    “I guess it is,” I said after a moment’s thought. “The whole thing happened years before my time, and with mixed results as you can see. It’s how my grandmother Lachesis always talked about it, as though the spinnerettes weren’t really alive—I guess I picked it up from her.”

    “Have I mentioned recently how very screwed up your family is? Especially your grandmother and her sisters?” Melchior got up and went to walk around the dead spinnerette, leaving the job of picking glass out of my hand to Haemun, who had produced a pair of tweezers from . . . well, somewhere.

    Lachesis isn’t really my grandmother. There are actually quite a number of generations between the middle Fate and me, but no one sane could argue that the great sprawling family of the Greek