CODESPELL
CHAPTER ONE
Zeus wants you!
I flipped the invitation open again. A paper rendition of the big guy popped out and pointed his finger at me. It was tipped with a lightning bolt.
Zeus wants you!
For spring break. Summer has come early to Olympus, and it’s here to stay. At least that’s what I hear from Persephone’s mother, who has officially canceled winter. Call it global warming or call it Raven, whichever suits your fancy. In either case, it’s time to celebrate changing times in the pantheosphere. So come on up to the real eternal city for a party on the edge of forever.
Below that were details: time, place, dress code, rules of conduct—the usual boilerplate for a divine party, banning duels and personal violence—and a personal note scrawled in a bold hand:
House Raven will be expected to make a formal appearance.
Zeus
House Raven—that meant me, though I still prefer Ravirn. Ravirn, the Raven. Persephone’s freedom and the end of winter. Zeus. A divine blowout where I would have a target painted on my back.
Was it any wonder I had insomnia?
OK, maybe that’s a little dishonest. It wasn’t just the card costing me sleep. It was the way I could read it in the dark—by the light of my eyes. My recent upgrade from demigod 2.0 to 2.5 or whatever version I was on at the moment had come with some dubious “perks,” including glow-in-the-dark eyeballs.
Oh, sure, I could put “Raven, Chaos Power” on my business cards now, but inside I was still plain old Ravirn, a very young and very late entrant into the Greek pantheon. And a tired one. Did I mention I wasn’t getting enough rest? I desperately wanted sleep. Now, there’s a perk I could go for.
Morpheus, Phobetor, Phantasos. We call these gods of sleep the Dreamers. Unfortunately, they don’t always call back, not even for family. The relationship’s distant, but it’s there. As the umpteen-times great-grandson of the Greek Fate Lachesis, I’m pretty much related to the whole damn pantheon. It didn’t help.
I’d tried e-mail, voice mail, snail mail. . . . So far, nothing. I was starting to have serious thoughts about giving hate mail a go. For most of my life I’d thought of sleep as something of an annoyance—unnecessary downtime. Now that I’d come face-to-face with serious insomnia, I couldn’t wait for another visit from Morpheus and co.
Damn my eyes!
They used to look a lot like the rest of my immediate family’s. Which is to say, two of them, slit-pupiled, with all the usual bits in the usual places. Then I died. . . . No, not died actually. Ceased to exist, which was much better. Dying would have put me in Hades’ power, and the Lord of the Dead hated me as he hated few living beings.
I blamed Persephone for that and a whole lot more. My invite from Zeus, the eyes, Hades’ attempts to kill me. When I’d rescued her from Hades the place, Hades the god had gone kind of nonlinear. He’d pushed me to the very edge of death, and I’d decided to try to take him with me, opening a hole into the place between worlds.
Primal Chaos poured through into the here and now. It consumed Hades’ offices and a good bit of the surrounding underworld. I hurt him badly, though I didn’t quite destroy him. I couldn’t say the same for myself. Chaos is caustic stuff. It ate me alive—poof, Ravirn all gone. Actually, more like aieee! Ravirn all gone, but you get the picture.
That’s one place where the Raven thing saved me. Ravirn 1.0 would have died. But 2.0—born of my conflict with Fate—had managed to imitate my Titan ancestors, creating a fresh body from chaos through will alone. Call it version 2.5. There were some changes in this newest model, most notably my glowing eyes. Chaos looks out at the world from the slits of my pupils now and lights my way with its tumbling infinitude of glowing colors and shapes.
It’s a little disturbing. No, I’ll be honest, it’s a lot disturbing. Chaos burned away my body, and now it burns in my eyes. Cerice hates it. I glanced over at my lady fair. She was asleep, curled on her side with her back to me. I couldn’t see much beyond her ashen hair. When we slept face-to-face, she caught a flash of light every time I blinked. She didn’t like the new look, not one tiny little bit. I guess I couldn’t blame her, not considering how I felt about it.
I felt . . . like getting up. I stretched and sighed. It was pretty clear the Dreamers had decided to skip my stop again. There was no point in tossing and turning until I woke Cerice. Sighing, I rolled out of bed. My silk robe, green and black—the colors of House Raven—lay over the back of a chair. I grabbed it though I didn’t need it in the warm tropical night. I also grabbed the invite as I headed for the lower levels. I wanted to look it over again.