WebMage by Kelly McCullough Page B

why."
    "Thank you. I wasn't hacking Atropos.web just for the challenge on the night I crashed the mweb." My lips tingled, but only slightly, and Cerice nodded as though she'd been expecting that. "I was looking for a memory crystal. Atropos is trying to shift the balance between Fate and free will." The numbness increased dramatically, and I heard my voice go uncertain and shifty. Damn, damn, and double damn , I thought.
    "That's more or less her job description," said Cerice. I was losing her.
    "I told you that you wouldn't believe me. Please, just listen for a while."
    "All right." She agreed, but her expression hardened.
    "This is a little more drastic than usual. She wants to eliminate chance and choice completely. What's more, I think she can do it if her spell works." I hopped to my feet and began to pace. The tension was simply too great for me to hold still.
    I told her everything that had happened since Atropos had approached me about Puppeteer. Every word came out sounding like the desperate slitherings of a pathological liar, and my mouth went so numb I lost all track of my tongue. By the end I'd bitten it pretty badly at least twice. I couldn't feel it, but I could taste the blood in the back of my throat. I studied Cerice's face, trying to gauge her reaction. Her brow was wrinkled in an intense frown of concentration. It wasn't the expression I wanted, but it was better than I'd expected.
    "You don't believe me," I said. A statement rather than a question.
    "No," she replied, and it felt as though someone had hit me in the stomach. "But I know you're telling the truth. It's an amazing feeling. The emotional half of my brain is sure you're the biggest liar since Hades told Persephone the pomegranates were delicious and completely harmless. But at the same time, the thinking half knows you're telling the truth."
    "What?" She was supposed to be calling me nasty names and walking out of my life. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to happen, but I'd been bracing for it so hard that her actual response left me severely off-balance. I stopped pacing to face her. "How do you know?"
    "It's not my secret to share," she said.
    She reached up and caught my right hand. "Poor payback for your courage in telling me an unbelievable truth, but the best I can offer at the moment. Thanks for trusting me."
    "You're welcome."
    I looked down at the place where our hands were joined and tried to find the right words. What can you say when "I like you," isn't half-strong enough, but you haven't yet gotten to "I love you"? Was it even fair to be talking about such things when I didn't know whether I'd be alive to follow through on them? No words came.
    "What are you thinking?" she asked after a time.
    "That I don't know how to tell you what you mean to me," I answered. "That you have grown very dear to me. That I would like more than anything to have the leisure to follow where that leads me."
    "Really?" she said, and cocked her head to one side quizzically. There was a long silence before she whispered, "How very odd."
    My mouth went dry, and my heart felt as though it had been transformed into a particularly anxious and fidgety hedgehog. I couldn't face those blue, blue eyes any longer and turned my gaze downward. For several minutes we remained like that, unmoving. Then Cerice reached up and placed a finger under my chin. With surprising strength, she lifted my head until I had to face her again.
    "How very odd," she said again. "Because, despite my better judgment, I've grown quite fond of you, too." She pulled me down to her level and kissed me.
    We went back to Cerice's room then, and for a very long time we just held each other. When we did eventually make love, it was with a slow, lazy passion and gentle twining of limbs that was more about tenderness and discovery than sex. Later, Cerice opened an ltp link and sent me through to the U of M. There was a risk my passage through the mweb might be noticed, but Cerice refused