Mythos by Kelly McCullough Page A

cousin Tyche, Goddess of Fortune, I dropped the stick and took Tisiphone’s arm, very gently shaking her. When that didn’t get my head sliced off, I began to get a very uncomfortable feeling in the depths of my stomach.
    Bunching her wings as much as I could—she’d taught them not to burn me—I knelt and lifted her in my arms. She was seriously heavy. Her wings are more a tool of magic than flight, and she is both tall and very muscular. I’m stronger than any human, but Tisiphone outclasses me in that department as an Olympic weight lifter does a two-year-old child.
    “I think it’s my turn to ask some questions,” said Ahllan after she’d whistled us all across the threshold and into the appropriate scale. “High on my list is how you came to be traveling with that?” She indicated Tisiphone with a hard look. “I’ve been wondering since you first arrived.”
    “That’s a long story, and I’ll be happy to tell it as soon as I get her set down and covered up.”
    Ahllan frowned but led the way back toward the chapter house. I couldn’t really blame her. I’d had a while to get used to the idea of a Fury as friend, then a lover. Ahllan’s last experience with the Furies before her involuntary exile involved having her home torn to shreds by Tisiphone and her sisters. That they were hunting me at the time probably made the present association seem even stranger.
    “I’ll take care of it.” Melchior drew Ahllan aside and started explaining about the destruction Persephone had wrought on Necessity and the way our attempts at fixing it had drawn Tisiphone and me together after my relationship with Cerice hit the wall.
    I sent up a silent thank-you to Melchior as I continued on to the chapter house, with a mental note to make it verbal later. A lot of that personal history was still tender ground. Having Melchior as a familiar was fantastic. Having him as a friend was priceless. The hand, apparently interested in finding out more about us, wandered after them.
    While they all talked in the main part of the building, I settled Tisiphone on the couch with pillows to keep her wings from getting too badly squished and found her a blanket. She didn’t really need it, since she’s pretty much impervious to the elements, but it seemed right somehow. And maybe it was. When I tucked it up under her chin I heard a very faint rasping. It was the sound of the claws of her left hand—the one I’d left above the covers for treatment—dragging along the blanket as they retracted. Though she still hadn’t woken up, a quick check showed that all four sets had slid back into whatever pocket of reality they lived in when they weren’t extended—something I’d wondered about more than once, since six-inch claws simply won’t fit into three-inch fingers.
    Next I made a quick raid on Ahllan’s healing supplies for an antibiotic to apply once I’d cleaned out Tisiphone’s wounds. As I sat beside her and dabbed at the bite on her arm, she moaned and blinked her eyes open.
    “Wha . . . Where am I? What happened? Ouch.”
    “Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . hurt you.” I blinked several times. “Did you really just say ouch?”
    “Uh, yeah. I did. What’s that about?”
    In the time I’d known Tisiphone, she’d suffered countless bruises, a broken wing, a truly hellacious puncture wound in the shoulder, and more cuts, slashes, and bites than I could count. She had never, not once, made the slightest complaint about any of it.
    “I couldn’t help notice that you don’t seem to be healing as fast as normal either,” I said. “You’ve still got blood oozing out of cuts that aren’t all that deep and are at least twenty minutes old. Shouldn’t they be scabbed over?”
    She nodded her head on the pillows, and I wondered once again at the minor miracle that allowed her hair and wings not to ignite anything she didn’t want them to.
    “That’s not the only thing that’s strange,” she