Spellcrash by Kelly McCullough

and shook Laginn.

    When she set him down, he looked rather befuddled by the whole thing. Haemun bustled up just then with a chair and all the other accoutrements of dinner for Thalia. I waited until she’d settled before leaning back and giving her my best skeptical look—the one with that raised eyebrow.

    “What’s up?” I asked. “You normally don’t go for the low-hanging fruit like that. Hand some?
    Shake? You’re up to something.”

    “Me? No. No, not at all.” She nodded vigorously, contradicting her words. “What makes you say that?”

    “I don’t get it,” said Fenris, his ears lowering in confusion.

    “Then you don’t want it bad enough,” replied Thalia. While she spoke, she pointed at me, then tapped her ear, before making little dancing-spider motions.

    “Wha—oh.” I shifted gears as I realized what Thalia was telling me—there was a bug in my house. “Joke’s on me, I guess.”

    We spent the next twenty minutes playing polite-but-empty conversational games for the benefit of anyone listening in while we ate. It was excruciating.

    Finally, Thalia rose from the table. “Why don’t you give your old grandmother the tour?” she asked, though she knew her way around well enough.

    “Of course.” I came around to her side of the table and took her hand in the crook of my arm.
    “Where would you like to start?”

    “Anywhere is fine, child.”

    As we slowly circled the lower level of the house, Thalia kept wrinkling her nose and sniffing the air very quietly. After a second round past the dinner table, she shook her head and indicated the stairs with her eyes. More sniffing as we made our way through the public areas of the upper floor. When we reached my bedroom, she abruptly stiffened and slowed her pace.

    “How does Haemun put up with you?” she demanded. “This place is a sty. You must never put a single item of clothing away properly. Look at this!”

    She pulled me over to the chair beside the bed where I’d dumped the tweed suit Eris had inflicted on me. She lifted the jacket by its collar, swinging it this way and that. Then she sniffed it here and there in a way that rather reminded me of how I’d decided if something was safe to wear in my college days.

    “That’s strange,” she whispered to herself. “How did . . . Ah! Clever Discord.”

    “This is a laundry disaster.” She handed the jacket to me. “It’s going to need special attention.
    Hang on to it while I run and explain things to Haemun.”

    While I waited, I made a very thorough inspection of the jacket. I found nothing the least bit out of the ordinary. Well, nothing beyond the fact that Eris had ruined a perfectly good set of leathers when she transformed them into tweeds for her psychologist shtick. Thalia returned a few moments later, followed by a baffled-looking Haemun carrying a big glass jar labeled
    “sugar.”

    It was empty, but not for long. Thalia took the jacket from me and somehow managed to stuff it into the empty jar. When she screwed the lid back on, I could see that someone had scratched a short program in hexadecimal into the lid—a spell of sealing and silence. I started to open my mouth then, but she put a finger to her lips and held the jar up to her ear, shaking it once or twice before finally nodding.

    “There. We can speak freely now. Haemun, would you take that and put it someplace safe?”

    “What’s going on?” I asked, as the satyr departed with the jar. “And what did Eris do about it that was so clever?”

    “You’ve got a spy in your house, and she changed your clothes for you.”

    “A spy? Not a bug?” I decided to let the Eris part of the question rest a moment since Thalia’s initial statement only confused me more.

    “In this case, they’re one and the same. ‘The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout.’”

    “A tiny spinnerette? In my clothing? And one that managed to hitch a ride with me somehow?
    That’s hard to believe. It