“I meant,” he said, enunciating carefully, “I’m looking for Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.”
“Oh, them,” said the last girl, who had trimmed her red hair so short it looked like a crew cut. “They’re not the Fates any more.”
“What?” Dexter took a step forward.
“Yeah,” said the first girl. “We are.”
He felt his stomach twist. “What do you mean they’re not the Fates any more?”
“Hey, bud, don’t you pay attention in class?” the second girl asked. “They’re done. We’re the Fates now.”
“Or we will be,” said the third girl, tugging on the rings jutting out of her right eyebrow.
“What do you mean, you will be?” Dex was feeling the beginning of panic. As much as he disliked them, he couldn’t imagine the magical world without the Fates.
The first girl pulled bubble gum out of her mouth, twisted it around her index finger, and then chewed the gum back in. She didn’t look more than twelve. “Well,” she said around the gum, “all we gotta do is a good job.”
“Yeah,” the second girl said, nudging the first girl in the ribs. “Right now, we’re the Interim Fates.”
“Whose bright idea was this?” Dex snapped, and all three girls looked stunned.
He could tell from the look on their faces that he’d just made a classic error.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “The Powers That Be chose you.”
“We needed fresh blood,” said the first girl, speaking out of turn. Didn’t she know that the Fates were supposed to speak in order? And the girls hadn’t genuflected when he mentioned the Powers That Be.
The twisting feeling in his stomach had gotten worse.
“At least that’s what we were told,” she continued. “You know, they’d been doing it, like, forever, and they were beginning to screw up, you know, so it was time to bring in new ideas, new thoughts, new people.”
“You?” he asked.
“Us,” the second girl said with a grin. “Isn’t that just the spiffiest news you ever heard?”
“Spiffy,” he repeated. “I don’t suppose you’re Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, having a little joke on me.”
“No way,” said the second girl.
“Who gives their kids those weird names, anyway?” the first girl said.
“They were perfectly normal names in their day,” Dex said, amazed he was defending the Fates. “What’re your names?”
“Tiffany,” said the second girl.
“Brittany,” said the first, “and she’s Crystal.”
Crystal didn’t seem to be paying attention. She had returned to the book she was studying, frowning at the page.
“You sound more like pop stars than Fates,” Dex said.
Tiffany and Brittany grinned. “That’s what we want to be. We want to bring the Fatedom into the Now. You know. It was so Last Week.”
“Last Century,” Brittany said.
“Last Thousand Years,” Tiffany said, and giggled.
Dex didn’t feel like giggling at all.
“But this is a lot harder than we expected,” Brittany said. “You know, like, we’re supposed to know who you are just when you arrive—”
“You’re magic, right? Because otherwise you couldn’t get here, right? They don’t let, like, non-magic people in the door,” Tiffany said. “Right?”
She was asking him? “No one trained you for this job?” he asked, then wished he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“Well, like, we, um….” Tiffany let her voice trail off. She looked at Brittany, who grinned at him.
“We lied on our application,” she said. “Not lied, exactly, but we said stuff we shouldn’t have.”
“Yeah,” Tiffany said. “You’d think they would’ve known.”
“But I heard that the old Fates chose their replacements. That wouldn’t be right, would it?” Brittany asked.
It would if they wanted to keep their jobs. “They weren’t fired, were they?” he asked.
“Like, who knows?” Brittany said. “They’re gone, we’re here, and we’re going to get the permanent job.”
“Just as soon as we figure out what we’re doing,” Tiffany said.
“Or maybe not.” Crystal slammed her book closed. “This is way harder than anyone said it would be. You know we’re supposed to keep track of what all the mages are doing all the time? Most of them are old and, like, who cares?”
“Besides, we can’t make that work any more than we can make the name thing work,” said Brittany. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Never mind,” Dex said and spelled himself back to the store. As he did, he heard Tiffany say, “The old ones all have weird names.”
“No kidding,” Brittany answered, and then their voices mercifully faded out.
He appeared in the back of the store, right in front of Vivian. Her face was gray and the circles under her eyes had grown deeper.
“You’re back,” she said. “Thank God.”
And then she fainted.
SEVEN
VIVIAN WAS CRADLED against a man’s hard chest, his muscular arms supporting her back. She kept her head against him, and her eyes closed. If she didn’t move, it didn’t hurt, but she had the sense that it would if she did anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all.
The smell of pet food was strong here, but if she kept her fact turned toward him, she caught his nice clean scent instead. Masculine, with just a hint of something—sandalwood?—buried faintly in his aftershave. Attractive, whatever it was.
She’d always wanted to be held like this. Fantasy cuddling. She would have to choose though: Superman? Batman? She’d even settle for Wolverine if he looked like Hugh Jackman had in the movie. But not Spider-Man. She’d never been real fond of Spider-Man.
“Vivian?” He had a deep superhero voice too. Bass, with just enough tenor. What’d they call that? Baritone. Rich and warm tones, masculine without the scary Darth Vader vibe. “Vivian, are you awake?”
“No,” she said, without moving.
“You have to tell me what’s going on. I can’t spell your pain away, which means it’s coming from an external cause.”
Spell. Pain. She didn’t want to think about that. Or about the fact that the man holding her was—Superman. She smiled a little. Maybe Batman. Golden Age, anyway. Not Silver Age, not Bronze Age. Collectible. D.C., not Marvel.
“Vivian, please. Don’t fade out. I need you to stay with me.”
A cool hand on her face. Large hand, long fingers. Gentle. She could stay like this forever.
“Tell me what’s going on. Did the Fates do this to you?”
Fates. The pain whooshed back into her head twenty times stronger than before. She must have moved somehow.
She opened her eyes. Dexter—he preferred Dexter—was looking down at her. Maybe she had made him up. Maybe he was a vision from Kyle’s comic book. Square jaw. Dimple in his chin. Electric blue eyes and hair so black that there was blue in it too. It curled over his forehead just so.
How could a man be that good-looking? It wasn’t right.
Maybe it was right. He had strong arms too. He wasn’t struggling with her weight. She felt like she was floating.
“Vivian,” he said. “Stay with me. Did the Fates do this to you?”
“Do what?” she asked.
“Hurt you somehow?”
She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t. She must have moaned, because his arms tightened around her. “No.”
He didn’t believe her. How come she knew what he was thinking? She sometimes knew what people were thinking, but only flashes, strong flashes, and then rarely.
“I think it’s the glass,” she said.
“Glass?”
“Around the building….”
He frowned, squaring his face even more. His eyebrows were two straight lines across his perfectly horizontal brow ridge. He didn’t understand.
She would have to
explain. She wasn’t sure she had the words to explain. Her mind was too busy for words. Except the few she was sparing now, and they were forced, difficult, something she had to struggle with.
Then his eyebrows rose. “Are they in a building? The Fates?”
“My building,” she said.
“And you always keep it guarded?” he asked. “Using a psychic’s glass jar image?”
“Never done that before,” she said. “It’s harder than it sounds.”
“Oh, crap,” he said, clutching her closer. “Those stupid women are trying to get out.”
“No,” Vivian said. “I think someone’s trying to get in….”
And then she closed her eyes again, letting the words fade and the darkness take her once more.
***
The private landing strip at Portland International Airport was as far away from the terminal as it could get. Eris stepped onto the tarmac, the stench of jet fuel in her nose, and wished she hadn’t adopted this identity.
Erika O’Connell was internationally famous. She couldn’t spell herself around the planet willy-nilly. She had to use her magic with circumspection—and she usually did, often channeling her power through mages with less power than she had, or even the occasional unsuspecting mortal.
But she couldn’t do that now. She had to walk, catch a cab, and somehow find a reason to go downtown—create some kind of crisis, do something that would be worth her A-team’s time.
Noah Sturgis was right behind her, his deep announcer’s voice carrying over the whine of the jet engines. “I have dinner at the Rainbow Room tonight, and I’m not planning to cancel the reservations. It took me a week to get them. Me! Imagine.”
Imagine that he wasn’t as popular as he thought he was or as big a star as he thought he was. Eris moved farther away from him so that she couldn’t hear any more of the conversation.
A young maintenance worker hurried toward the jet, his orange jumpsuit so large that it bagged around his body. Eris caught his arm.
“Where do we get a taxi?” She had to shout to be heard over the noise.
He was thin and blond, with that open friendliness so common to the West Coast. “Where’re you going?”
“Downtown.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. You’d better just stick around the airport for an hour or so. There’s some kind of thing going on downtown.”
Eris glanced over her shoulder. Sturgis was still talking to Kronski at the base of the jet’s stairs. Suzanne Gilbert, the real reporter of the group, bent forward under the weight of the overnight bag she had slung over her back.
The camera operators—all three of them women—lugged their gear down the stairs, their arms looking as muscular as a man’s in the morning sunlight.
“What kind of thing?” Eris asked, turning her attention back to the maintenance man.
“Dunno. Radio says car alarms have been going off, and there’ve been like instant fires that just spring up and go away. They think maybe there’s been a gas leak or something. So they’re quarantining the downtown.”
“Really?” Eris knew it wasn’t quite a gift. Strife was screwing up again. But it would help her get her team down here.
“Yeah, and at least one building’s shut off. No one can get in or out. It’s weird. We’ve been watching it on TV when we’re not dealing with all this.” He gestured toward the tarmac.
Another jet passed by overhead—a commercial jet that had just taken off. Its silver side winked against the clear blue sky.
“Perfect,” she said softly.
“What?” he shouted, leaning closer to her.
She smiled. Her smile could be charming when she wanted it to be. “Thank you.”
He nodded—no one said ‘you’re welcome” here—and hurried off. Only then did she realize he hadn’t answered her original question: she had no idea where to get a taxi—particularly one driven by someone willing to go downtown.
“What’s the scoop?” Sturgis asked as he reached her side.
That had been a nice trademark line twenty years ago, but it wasn’t now. Eris ignored him.
“Where’re we going?” Kronski asked.
“We’re going to rent a car,” Eris said, “or a van, something large enough to carry all of us. And you’re going to figure out how to get us downtown. Apparently the entire main area is cordoned off.”
“You weren’t kidding when you said something big was going on,” Kronski said as he hurried away from them.
Sturgis watched him go. The jet engines behind them wound down, and the whine faded. Eris’s ears ached.
“You’re the only person I know with sources this good.” He looked at her sideways, which in his pulled-and-tightened-and-tucked face made him look slightly evil. “How do you do it?”
“Trade secret.” She smiled. “And don’t bother to ask anymore, because it’s a secret I’m not planning to share.”
***
Vivian was going to die, right here in his arms, standing among the bags of cat food and the empty boxes in the back of his store. Dex smoothed her curls away from her face. Her skin was clammy and cold. If someone from outside broke through that glass she had built around her building, they would destroy her mind. And it looked like they were close.
He couldn’t believe someone was harming her. He cradled her against him. He had just found her and he might lose her.
What was wrong with the Fates? Why were they making a novice who hadn’t even come into her magic defend a building?
He didn’t have time to figure it out. He just had to solve it. He clutched Vivian even closer and did a location spell. He centered the spell on Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. If that didn’t work, then he’d try to find the building Vivian was talking about.
For a moment, he continued to stare at the unfinished wood walls in the back of the store. Then the world whirled, and he was crouching on the hardwood floor of a newly remodeled apartment.
The Fates sat at a glass-topped table, picking through a nearly empty box of chocolates. Light from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind them was opaque, and outdoor noises—someone’s car alarm kept going off—were muted.
“Henri!” Clotho stood and held out her arms as if he were her long lost son.
“Not a moment too soon,” Lachesis said as she stood also.
“Someone keeps trying to break in,” Atropos said.
Dex rose, Vivian draped in his arms.
“Oh, no,” Clotho said.
“What did you do?” Lachesis asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Someone’s trying to break through the glass she put around this building.”
“And she’s not strong enough,” Atropos said, as if she were having a revelation. “Of course.”
Lachesis came over to him and touched Vivian’s forehead, as if she were trying to spell the pain away. But Vivian didn’t open her eyes. He could still feel the pain radiate through her back and into his skin.
It was as if they were hooked up somehow, as if there was a direct pipeline from her personality to his.
He had no idea what was causing it, but it had become important to him.
She had become important to him.
“You ladies need to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Vivian is in no condition to be part of your game.”
“Oh, Henri,” Atropos said, “it’s no game.”
“We have no powers,” Clotho said.
“What?” This day was getting worse by the minute. “You have more powers than the rest of us combined. What’s going on?”
“Had,” Lachesis said.
“We gave them up,” Atropos said.
Vivian didn’t stir. She seemed to be getting weaker. He couldn’t worry about the Fates at the moment. He had to worry about Vivian or she might die. If the Fates were testing him, he would fail. He wasn’t going to let Vivian die because the Fates had some misguided sense of justice.
Dex carried Vivian to the blue and g
old couch pushed against the wall. With one hand, he grabbed all the matching pillows and placed them against the couch’s arm. Then he eased Vivian onto the cushions, careful to protect her head so that her pain wouldn’t get any worse.
The gray color of her skin hadn’t changed. The circles under her eyes looked deeper. The vibrancy she’d had when she had shown up at the store not an hour before was fading fast. And, considering how much pain she had been in then, that vibrancy couldn’t have been close to the kind she had when she felt good.
The Fates watched him closely, as if he were some kind of test subject. He turned his back on them, smoothed the curls from Vivian’s forehead, and kissed her ever so lightly. Her skin vibrated with agony, and he couldn’t absorb it, the way he sometimes absorbed other people’s pain.
This pain was something else, not internal, but external. The mark of an attack that Dex couldn’t see or hear.
He had to fight magic with magic. And then he would be able to help her recover.
He clenched a fist and uttered a “protect” spell. Weaving it carefully, he spread his protection around the building, making certain the spell included Vivian’s glass jar vision as well. He wanted to make certain nothing could break her image from the outside. He cared more about that than he did about protecting the building itself.
Or the Fates.
He made the spell as strong as he could. In all his years of fighting crime and evil, he had learned how to make spells even more powerful than his so-called mentor had taught him.
Dex didn’t know if the Fates had seen this extra power of his or what they would do once they knew it existed.
But they had seen it now.
He was sacrificing everything for Vivian—a woman he had just met.
A woman, it seemed, he had been waiting for all his life.
Beside him, Vivian sighed. Her color was improving. Some of the pain had to be easing.
Before he congratulated himself on finishing the spell properly, though, he checked it—mentally testing its walls and shields so that nothing could get through.
He had woven the spell as tightly as he had ever woven a protect, and it seemed to be effective. He hoped it would hold until he had time to deal with whomever or whatever was out on the street, trying to break in.
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