Stri grinned. "Will do, Mommy Dearest. You gonna hunt them down? Or are you going for more finesse than that?"
She raised a single eyebrow at him, giving him the stare she had used when she was a twenty-two-year-old mother with no magical powers at all. He cringed. Of all the tricks in her bag, that one was the most effective--at least with Stri.
"Guess you"re going for finesse," he said.
"Have I ever done anything else?" she asked, and he looked away.
"I"ll trace them," he said. "But there are rumors they"re heading into Faery, and I"m not going in there again."
Last time he did, he ate some of the food and lost a hundred years before Eris even noticed he was missing.
"Just trace the Fates," she said.
"Why can"t you do it?"
"Because if I do," she said, flipping open her cell phone again, "they"ll think I"m up to something. If you do it, they"ll think you"re just creating trouble."
"I"m not someone who should be ignored." He crossed his arms, and the tattoos bulged.
"No, darling, you"re not," she said, glancing at the divided television screen. "You"re something to be tolerated, and you should be proud of that. Now go away and let Mommy take over the world."
He peered at the television too. "I still think you should put me on the air."
"Busy," she said, just like she had when he came in.
"Jeez, Mom, I"m doing you a favor."
"No, dear," she said, picking up a pencil to dial with so that she wouldn"t break a nail. "You"re doing me a job. Now get out before I stop cleaning up after you and you"ll be in trouble with the Powers That Be."
"If the Fates are really gone, that won"t matter," he said.
"We"ll see." Eris dialed, but stopped before the last number. " "Bye."
Stri frowned, his pout looking perfectly natural on his tattooed and pierced face. He waited just long enough for her to catch the full impact of the look and then he vanished, leaving a cloud of red smoke that smelled of cherry bombs.
With a wave of a hand, Eris made the smoke disappear. She wished she could make everything else that bothered her disappear as quickly, but that would be obvious, and she hated nothing more than the obvious.
She smiled. Everything was going well. She was even ahead of schedule. With the Fates gone, her life would get a whole lot easier.
She might even abandon some of her finesse and reveal a tiny corner of herself.
The last time she had done that, the world had taken notice.
It would take notice again.
*Chapter Three*
Vivian was dreaming of a world filled with homeless kittens, kittens that people kept dumping on her doorstep, expecting her to take care of them. They were little and they seemed to be multiplying as.e.xually. Every time she touched one, there would suddenly be two, but she couldn"t stop herself from picking them up.
Then the kittens started pounding in unison, as if they all wanted to join the cast of "Stomp", and she kept telling them to stop, but they wouldn"t. It took her a few minutes to realize that the pounding really existed.
She sat up and rubbed a hand over her face before glancing at the fancy CD alarm clock that Travers insisted she buy. 6:45 A.M. Light was coming in through the sides of the linen shade, but the bedroom was still dark.
Her heart was pounding and her eyes were made of glue. She hadn"t had much sleep. She"d stayed up, reading and rereading Kyle"s comic book, missing her family already.
It felt like she was in a hotel. She"d only been living here for a week and everything was unfamiliar.
Even though it was her nightstand against her bed, her blue sheets and pillow cases surrounding her, her specially built comic book shelves holding all the boxes of her collections, the arrangement was different than the one she"d had in LA. And she wasn"t used to the sounds of the building yet.
Somehow she hadn"t thought the walls were this thin.
The pounding continued. She flopped back on the mattress and pulled a pillow over her face, wishing her neighbor would answer the d.a.m.n door. Who pounded at someone"s door this early in the morning anyway?
"Vivian!" a female voice shouted. "Vivian, please. We know you"re in there. Please let us in!"
The voice sounded panicked. In fact, it sounded so panicked that it kept changing tone. Soprano, alto, mezzo-soprano. How weird was that?
Then Vivian pulled the pillow off her face. No one knew her here. No one except her landlord, and she had gotten the impression he hadn"t paid much attention to her application, only to her check.
She hadn"t gone to the police yet to see their file on Eugenia, and she hadn"t gone to the lawyer. Vivian was waiting until Travers left, which had taken him five days longer than he had promised.
That mezzo-soprano/alto/soprano voice wasn"t his. And that was the only thing she could be sure of.
She got out of bed, grabbed her robe, and shoved her feet into her bunny slippers. She opened the bedroom door and stepped into the combination living room/dining area. The floor-to-ceiling windows sent a cold draft across the hardwood floor.
Sunlight poured in, making her gla.s.s-topped dining room table sparkle.
Vivian braced one hand on a chair as she made her way to the door. The pounding grew louder the closer she got.
"Vivian!"
Maybe this was some kind of scam to get someone to open her door in the middle of the night. Or the earliest part of the morning, as the case may be.
"Let us in!"
Vivian peered through the peephole. Three women were crowded on the landing. Three gorgeous women, all the same height, with movie-star good looks.
"Please!" cried the blonde closest to the door.
The other two were looking over their shoulders down the stairs as if they were afraid of something outside.
Vivian made sure the chain was on, then pulled the door open until the chain caught.
"Do I know you?" she asked, peering into the hallway. The women looked in her direction. They had bright eyes and matching expressions--sort of a combination between exasperation and panic.
"Of course you know us," the redhead snapped. "Let us in."
"I don"t remember meeting you," Vivian said.
"Please!" The brunette sounded terrified.
Vivian was a sucker for terror. When she was a kid, she used to pretend that she would rescue people who were terrified and save them with her psychic powers.
As if that would ever happen.
But the fantasy was real enough to get her to consider unlatching the chain. "This isn"t some kind of scam, is it?"
"Scam?" the blonde asked.
"No, it"s not," the redhead said.
"Please!" the brunette said again, in that exact same terrified tone.
Vivian gave up. If they were going to mug her, they were going to mug her. Their frightened act was convincing. She closed the door to unlatch the chain--and heard squeals of dismay from the hallway. Then she undid the chain and pulled the door open again.
She was nearly bowled over as the three women ran inside.
"Oh, thank you!" the blonde said.
"You"d better spell the door," said the redhead.
"Or maybe the entire building," the brunette said.
Vivian frowned. She was probably still dreaming. That was the only explanation. But her feet were cold despite the bunny slippers, and she had that woozy feeling she usually got when she woke up badly. To her recollection, she"d never had that feeling in a dream before.
"What is going on?" Vivian asked. "Who are you?"
All three women gaped at her. Even though they looked very different--the blonde was blue-eyed and delicate; the redhead green-eyed and zaftig; the brunette brown-eyed and model-thin--they had the same expression on their faces.
"What do you mean, who are we?" the blonde asked.
"You know who we are," the redhead said.
"No," Vivian said. "I"m sorry. I don"t."
"Oh, no," the brunette said.
"Are you telling me that Eugenia told you nothing?" the blonde asked.
"About what?" Vivian asked.
The women were very close to the door, huddled against it in fact, and it took Vivian a moment to realize that she was preventing them from moving deeper into the apartment.
Downstairs something banged. She hoped it was only a door.
"I"m Atropos," the brunette said.
"And I"m Clotho," the blonde said.
"And I"m Lachesis," said the redhead.
Then they all stared at her as if she should recognize their admittedly odd names.
"I"m sorry," Vivian said. "I"ve never heard of you."
"We"re the Fates!" they said in unison, and that was when she knew she was dreaming. Kyle"s comic book was coming back to haunt her. Either that, or Aunt Eugenia had been involved in something even stranger than usual.
"Are you a rock group?" Vivian asked, deciding to play into the dream rather than fight it.
"A what?" Atropos asked.
"A rock group," Clotho said quietly. "You know, like in those beach party movies."
"Annette Funicello?" Lachesis asked, and then shuddered.
"We"re not that shallow," Atropos said.
"No, no, no," Clotho said. "We"re the Fates."
"You know," Lachesis said, just in case Vivian missed it. "The Fates."
Vivian was apparently staring at them blankly because Atropos said in exasperation, "Shouldn"t we have fallen into human mythology by now?"
"I thought we had," Clotho said. "The Greeks referred to us properly."
"And then the Norse," said Lachesis.
"Who got it wrong," Atropos added as an aside, "calling us the Norn."
"The Weird Sisters," they said in unison.
"As if we"re sisters at all," said Clotho.
Vivian"s head was spinning. She was beginning to suspect something was seriously wrong here-- she was awake and this still wasn"t making sense.
"And that Wagner," Lachesis said, "dressing us the way he did."
"No sane woman would wear those clothes," said Atropos.
"I don"t think that was him," Clotho said. "I think it was the director."
"I still didn"t like it," Lachesis said. "I"d rather be a Valkyrie--"