And it had worked. Her hotline got to be known as the hotline to call. But she had to shut it down. There weren’t that many real psychics walking around Los Angeles, and most of the real ones didn’t want anything to do with her little idea.
Eventually, there were too many calls for her to handle. Even though she was minting money, she had to close the doors—and then she slept for what seemed like two months straight.
That was just before Eugenia died.
“Some good?” Clotho said.
“You would have done more good if you had had training,” Lachesis said.
“Training in what?” Vivian asked again.
“Magic,” Atropos said.
“But Aunt Eugenia wasn’t a magician,” Vivian said.
“No,” Clotho said. “She was a mage, just like you will be some day.”
“A mage,” Vivian said, trying to wrap her mind around the difference between mage and magician, besides the spelling and the number of syllables.
Another car alarm went off, and then another. The three women clutched each other’s hands.
“He’s getting close,” Lachesis said.
“This was a stupid idea,” Atropos said.
“We agreed on it,” Clotho said.
“We were forced into it,” Lachesis said.
“It’s too late,” Atropos said. “We made the choice.”
Vivian glanced out the window. Three cars in front of the building across the street were blaring, their headlights blinking on and off. She had no idea what could have set them off.
“All right.” Clotho’s delicate mouth was covered in chocolate. She didn’t seem to notice. “We’ll do our best to explain, but since your mentor failed on the job, you’ll probably not believe this.”
Lachesis handed Clotho a napkin, then said, “Before we do this, perhaps we should ask her about Blackstone.”
“Blackstone? The magician?” Vivian asked.
“Yes!” they said in pleased unison.
“Do you know him?” Atropos asked.
“I know of him,” Vivian said, wondering how she could know a man who had been dead for a very long time.
“Good,” Clotho looked relieved. “Then you go to his restaurant.”
“What?” Vivian asked. That spinning feeling had returned.
“What’s it called?” Lachesis looked at her companions. “Quixote?”
“Quixotic?” Vivian asked. “It’s next door.”
The women smiled at her as if she’d won a prize.
“I’ve been there. What does it have to do with Blackstone?”
“He owns it,” Atropos said. “Or he did. It wasn’t open this morning. Do you know why?”
Viv shrugged. “It doesn’t serve breakfast. I’m sure it won’t open until eleven or so.”
A dog started barking nearby, big deep, scary barks. The car alarms were still going, and Vivian thought she heard another one flare up.
“Eleven’s too late,” Clotho said. “We’ll have to explain.”
“All right.” Lachesis took a deep breath, and the others followed suit. They leaned toward Vivian in one swift movement.
Another bang sounded below, and all three women jumped.
“There are mortals, and then there are the magical,” Atropos said, looking toward the door.
“You are one of the magical,” Clotho said.
“Yeah, right,” Vivian said.
“No, really,” Lachesis said. Then she frowned. “That is the correct modern response, isn’t it?”
“What?” Vivian asked.
“Never mind,” Atropos said. “We’ll update our slang later.”
“If there is a later,” Clotho said, and she too looked toward the door.
Vivian heard more banging, and then the sound of firecrackers.
“Oh, no,” Lachesis said.
“He’s found us,” Atropos said.
“Quick,” Clotho said. “We must wrap this place in tinfoil.”
“What?” Vivian said.
“Tinfoil,” Lachesis said. “Have you got tinfoil?”
Somehow that question seemed logical—at least coming from these women.
“I have some,” Vivian said, “but not enough to wrap the apartment in, and besides, that would take all day.”
The banging stopped, but the sound of firecrackers continued. It faded and blended into the sound of sparklers. Then smoke came in under Vivian’s door.
“Oh, no,” Atropos said.
The smoke filtered across the floor in tendrils, white and thick. The movement was orderly, and the smoke was odorless.
Vivian got up and ran for the phone. She had to call the fire department.
The three women climbed on their chairs.
“Your conventional friends can’t help, Vivian,” Clotho said.
“We need you to do something,” Lachesis said.
Vivian picked up the phone. “I can’t stop fire.”
“There is no fire.” Atropos peered at the floor. The tendrils of smoke were feeling their way over the couch, around the end tables. Once, it seemed like the tendrils stopped and sniffed the air.
“You must imagine this building encased in glass,” Clotho said, her voice breathless.
Vivian started to dial 911.
“You must, Vivian,” Lachesis said. “That’s the only way to help us.”
“Imagine it and projected it outward, as if you were pushing the image out of you,” Atropos said.
“Look,” Vivian said, still clutching the phone. She hadn’t quite finished dialing. “If you guys believe in magic, you do it.”
“This isn’t magic, per se,” Clotho said. “It’s a psychic’s trick. But you have to do it.”
Her voice went up as the tendrils got closer. Vivian’s floor was lost in a sea of white. Throughout the sea, white telescope-like things poked out of the smoke and sniffed. Fingers felt the surfaces. This didn’t look like any smoke that Vivian had ever seen before.
“Please, Vivian,” Lachesis said as she moved her feet away from a poking smoke finger. “Just try it.”
“If it doesn’t work, then dial your friends,” Atropos said.
The other three glared at her as if she had just given bad advice.
The smoke curled around Vivian’s legs. It was cool, not hot, and she thought she felt tiny pinpricks against her skin.
“Imagine a glass case?” she asked.
“Around the entire building,” Clotho said.
“Then push it away from you,” Atropos added.
Vivian closed her eyes. It took her a moment to envision the building—she’d never really looked at all of it, just the interior—and then she imagined slamming a glass box over it. She pushed the image away from her mind, and actually felt something leave her with the force of a sneeze.
She staggered, caught herself on the telephone table, then opened her eyes.
The smoke was gone.
“You did it!” Clotho shouted.
“I wasn’t sure it would be possible,” Lachesis said, sinking down into her chair.
“We’re saved,” Atropos said, reaching for a truffle.
“For the moment,” Clotho said.
“I don’t understand.” Vivian set the phone down. She was shaking, and she felt a little weak. “What’s going on here?”
“That’s what we want to explain, dear,” Lachesis said. “Now that you’ve bought us a little time.”
FOUR
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, they cut them off?” Eris leaned in the galley of the corporate jet, fingering the tiny half-made pastries the chef had been working on when she kicked him out. Her cell phone was pressed against her ear, but still she worried about the talent in the cabin overhearing her conversation.
“They did!” Stri’s voice whined at her, so loud that it hurt. She slid deeper into the galley and pulled the privacy curtain closed. “I was using smoke feelers. They were in the building when this thing landed on them, cutting them off.”
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“Smoke feelers?” Eris took the tiny bottles of alcohol, arranged in alphabetical order, and began to move them around. “You were using smoke feelers?”
“Well, I had to make sure the Fates were in the building—”
“I told you to mark them and then leave them alone.” In the very back, where it was hard to reach, she knocked a few of the bottles down.
The jet’s engines droned and then cut back. It was climbing, trying to reach the right altitude for the flight back to New York.
“Ah, Mom,” Stri said. “We’re talking the Fates here. They’d notice a mark.”
“More than they’d notice smoke feelers?” Her voice rose. “What else did you do?”
“Nothing.” His tone was sulky. It didn’t matter what language he was speaking in—his native Greek, Latin, Russian, or English—he always sounded sulky when he was lying.
“What else did you do?”
The curtains switched. Noah Sturgis shoved his square face, made unnaturally shiny by too much plastic surgery, into the gap. “You okay, Erika?”
He didn’t really care about her. They both knew that. He wanted to know if there was some story brewing, something that would boost his career.
God knew it needed boosting. His biggest claim to fame was that he had once been groomed as Dan Rather’s successor. But that had been years ago, and each major network had cut him loose. Eris had picked him up for a song, and pretended she didn’t regret it.
“Go away, Noah,” she said.
“If it’s important—”
“If it’s important, I’ll tell Kronski.” Kronski was KAHS’s news director, and theoretically the person in charge of Sturgis. But no one was really in charge of Sturgis.
“Mom?” Stri almost shouted the word.
“Mom?” Sturgis mouthed. It was well known that Erika O’Connell was single, childless, and proud to be both.
“Go away,” she said again, “or I’ll cancel your fancy new contract.”
“Mom?”
“Shut up for a moment,” she said to her son.
“You’ll have to tell me about this,” Sturgis said and pulled the curtain closed.
“Now, what?” Eris said to Stri.
“If I can’t smoke them out, I’d like to go in after them. I hear they’re powerless, and it would feel so good—”
“No,” she said. “They’re mine.”
“I’m not bringing them to you.”
She almost said that Stri wasn’t supposed to bring them to her, and then she realized that he was right. Because he had screwed up, the Fates knew someone was out to get them. They’d be cautious at the very least, or defensive at the very most.
And who knew which Powers That Be remained on their side?
“Of course you’re not,” she snapped, as if the change of plans had been her idea. “They dropped something on your smoke feelers, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it a protect spell?”
“No,” he said. “Something else. Sharper. Over the whole building.”
How odd. She couldn’t think of a spell that would do that. “You will stay there, monitor that building, and not do another thing until I get there. Is that clear?”
“Just pop in, Mom, and—.”
“First of all, I can’t pop in. I am at work. And secondly, your stupid errors might be drawing the wrong kind of attention. So I will be there as soon as I can get the pilot to fly north. And when I arrive, you will not call me Mom.”
Stri laughed. “Okay. But I’m only doing what I do.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, and hung up. She stuffed the cell phone in the pocket of her red suit coat, and leaned against the galley wall.
She hated it when he was right. He wasn’t named Strife for nothing. She had done that deliberately, hoping he would cause trouble, and he always had. She should have expected nothing less.
Next time, she’d send in a trusted minion. If there was a next time.
Stri was right about a few other things. Eris should pop in. But she was traveling with an entire bevy of reporters and news cameras. Disappearing from a jet in mid-flight was not a good idea in these circumstances.
But she would have to come up with some reason for diverting the plane. If there wasn’t a news story in Portland, Oregon, she was going to have to make one up herself.
She hated doing that. Those stories usually ended up going on forever, until she was so sick of them, she wanted to make them disappear—which, of course, she couldn’t do.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter this time. She was so close to the Fates that everything could change. And once she had gotten rid of them, the most important step in her plan would be complete.
That was what she had to focus on, not her piddly little international corporation. Sometimes she got so focused on the details she forgot about the important things.
Like controlling the world—not just through the media, but in all things.
Including magic.
***
Dex sat up in his darkened bedroom, dislodging three sleeping cats and his familiar, an Irish wolfhound named Sadie. She stretched out in his warm spot. His Siamese cat, Nurse Ratched, was sitting on his nightstand, purring. She never purred.
“You woke me, didn’t you?” he asked her.
As if in answer to his question, she jumped on his lap and demanded to be petted. He did so absently, remembering the dream he’d forced himself to wake up from.
He’d been dreaming of kittens, millions of abandoned kittens that someone kept leaving in his store. Every time he turned around there were more kittens, and he finally realized that not only were they being abandoned, they were reproducing right in front of him.
Asexual reproduction, like worms did. The kittens weren’t exactly dividing themselves in half, but they were doubling, like some computer program gone amok.
He realized that the doubling was going to go on until there were more kittens than space on the Earth—and just as the panic set in, the Fates appeared.
They were pounding on his front door and begging for his help. Yet it wasn’t his help they wanted. He got the sense that somewhere, in this horrible place, there was something good. There was someone good.
And even though he wanted to refuse the Fates, the kittens pulled the door open, sucking him into the trap….
That was when he’d forced himself awake to find Nurse Ratched staring at him in the semidarkness. He glanced at the alarm clock—an old analog model he hadn’t changed since the 1950s. Seven-thirty. Too late to go back to sleep, too early to open the store.
He stretched and slid back under the covers. Ratchy kept purring and butting his chin. She was hungry. So was he.
Time for his day to begin. Even though he didn’t want it to. Even though he had a feeling that that dream was some kind of warning.
***
Somewhere in the middle of the Fates’ explanation of the magical world, Vivian broke out another box of chocolates. Dark chocolate imported from Switzerland this time, the good stuff, the stuff she’d been saving for a particularly hard day.
This, she knew, was going to be that day.
All four of them still sat at her dining room table, picking over the chocolate and drinking too much tea.
The car alarms had stopped outside—at least for the moment—but Vivian didn’t feel any safer. She kept checking the base of her door for more smoke, even though the Fates told her that she had taken care of it.
They told her many things. They told her that in addition to the world Vivian had seen her entire life, there was another world, one she’d probably heard of through myth, fable, and legend. Some of the people she saw on the street—indeed, some of the people she’d seen at Quixotic, the fancy restaurant next door—were mages who had lived hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
Most of these people were mentored. Men came into their magic around age twenty-one, but women didn’t come into theirs until menopause—giv
ing them time to have children and live a little before the burdens of magic fell on them.
(Burdens was Atropos’ word. Clotho and Lachesis disagreed with it.)
The magical were governed by laws, just like the nonmagical were. Only the magical had one set of laws worldwide, laws that had been in existence for millennia. The Powers That Be (and as they said that phrase, the three women bowed their heads and spread out their arms in some sort of obeisance) created the framework for the laws and the Fates enforced them.
These three women claimed to be the Fates.
“The Greeks said that we spun the web of life,” Clotho said.
“Atropos handles the shears, which can end the life in a moment,” said Lachesis as Atropos looked at her empty hands.
“Lachesis assigns people their fates,” Atropos said, still looking down.
“And I spin the web,” said Clotho. Then her expression saddened. “Or I’m supposed to, anyway.”
Vivian rubbed a hand over her face. The only reason none of this made her think they were crazy—or she was crazy, for that matter—was Aunt Eugenia.
This life is more complex than you’d think, Aunt Eugenia had said on more than one occasion. And one of her favorite phrases was, You’d be surprised just how much magic there is in the world.
“Okay,” Vivian said as the Fates paused for breath. “If you have that much power, what do you need me for?”
“They’ve imposed term limits,” Lachesis said.
“Who has?” Vivian asked.
“The Powers That Be,” Atropos said.
“Although we think someone might be behind this,” Clotho said.
“Just one of the Powers, lobbying the others,” Lachesis said.
Vivian shook her head. She wasn’t following this. “What do term limits have to do with this?”
“Our term is up,” Atropos said.
“We must reapply for the job we’ve done for thousands of years,” Clotho said.
All three women sounded indignant. All three of them grabbed more chocolate. Vivian had never seen anyone eat so much chocolate in her life.
“And there are new requirements for the job,” Lachesis said, “which I believe—”
Simply Irresistible Page 4
