Read Online Mythos by Kelly McCullough - Free Book Online

her voice. She turned her gaze on the hand. “I guess you and I have something in common, though I didn’t get bitten half so hard.”
    The hand bobbed.
    “Figured out what you want us to call you yet?” Melchior asked the hand.
    Again, the bob. Then the hand very carefully drew letters on the floor for us. It had to do it twice before we figured it out.
    “Laginn?” I asked.
    The bob.
    “All right. I wonder what it means?”
    “Let me just do a word search,” said Ahllan, though she didn’t stop doctoring Tisiphone. A few seconds later, she let out a little bark of laughter. “Apparently our new friend is something of a literalist.”
    “How so?” asked Melchior.
    “Laginn is Icelandic for ‘deft,’ ” she replied, “or, as we might say, ‘handy.’ ”
    Laginn bobbed approvingly.
    “Laginn it is,” said Melchior. “I hope you come in yourself—handy, that is.”
    “Ow. Damn, that stuff stings.” Tisiphone looked almost as surprised to have said it as the rest of us were to hear it. “Sorry, Ahllan; please keep going. I really appreciate your taking care of me like this.” The troll was painting a vivid orange something onto the long scratches on the side of Tisiphone’s head.
    “I don’t get it,” continued Tisiphone, closing one eye and wrinkling her nose in an obvious attempt to ignore the pain. “I’m normally not this much of a wimp. What’s happening?”
    But I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t know a lot of answers. Where were we in relation to anyplace we actually knew? How did we get here? How did things really work here? How were we going to get home? For that matter, what happened next?
    As if in answer to that last, Ahllan let out a long yawn and stretched, cracking so many of her joints that she sounded a bit like troll popcorn.
    “Children, all this running around has tired me more than I care to admit. Why don’t we close this chat session down until tomorrow morning so I can get some sleep.”
    “Fair enough,” I quickly agreed. She looked awfully tired, and I wanted to spare her more stress. “Where do you want us?”
    “How would you feel about sleeping in Shakespeare’s bedroom? There’s a miniature of the Stratford-on-Avon house where he grew up on the far side of the park. It’s my first fallback if this place becomes unlivable for some reason.”
    “Sounds good to me. Tisiphone, do you want to join me?”
    She nodded and smiled wanly before shrugging off the blanket and getting up.
    “Melchior, here’s the gating address.” Ahllan’s expression became abstracted for a second.
    “Got it,” he replied, then glanced at the hand. “What about Laginn? Should we take him with us or leave him here or what?”
    “Better leave him here,” said Ahllan. “He didn’t come in through one of the spelled doors, and I don’t know what the autosizing subroutine would do with him.” She looked at Laginn. “I’m sorry; we’re being rude. Do you have a preferred gender, or would you prefer ‘it’? I know you used to be part of a ‘he,’ but I don’t know whether that means anything to a hand.”
    Laginn shrugged, or got as close as something with no head and no shoulders could to shrugging.
    “All right. Then, for simplicity’s sake, ‘him’ it is. Do you want the couch or a chair or what? I’d offer you the bed, but I don’t think my bones would agree to the deal.”
    The hand snagged Tisiphone’s fallen blanket and dragged it over to a rug by the stove.
    “If that works for you, it’s fine by me. Good night, children.” Ahllan headed for a curtained-off area on the side of the room.
    We headed for the power outlet and Stratford-on-Avon.
     
     
    Forestdown Estates really had to be the strangest place I’d visited this side of Castle Discord. That the builder had created miniatures of the outsides of the buildings was a little odd. That he had also done up the insides, including stuff that no one looking in would ever see, was downright