I was pretty sure I felt the grate of claws against bone that time, but damned if I was going to squeal for her again. She stepped closer and, in a move so fast I barely saw it, wrapped her right hand around my neck.

  “I could tear your throat out without half-trying,” she said. “I’d like to, like to see you and Hades have a lot of time together to discuss how he feels about you, but Tisiphone would almost certainly find out I’d done it, and she’d be mad at me. That wouldn’t serve my purpose, which is to remove you from my life and my sisters’ lives with a minimum of fuss and bother. So, what I’m going to do instead is give you this one friendly warning to go away and stay away. If you don’t follow my advice, I’ll have to live with Tisiphone getting mad at me. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t answer. The claws on her right hand came out, pricking my neck.

  “I said, ‘Do you understand?’ ”

  I still didn’t answer. With horrifying speed, her right hand released my neck and plunged down the front of my pants. The tips of her claws just touched me, itching but not hurting.

  “Last chance,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” She retracted her claws, squeezing me ever so gently. “Neither is this.” What had been erotic with Tisiphone was terrifying from Megaera. “I wonder why.” She laughed a cold little laugh and released me, stepping back. “Good-bye for now”—her claws flashed out between us and the world ripped—“and hopefully forever.”

  She was gone. Relief flooded through me, and I dropped to my knees. Melchior put an arm around my waist.

  “Can we go home now?” he asked. He sounded as wrung out as I felt.

  “If, by home, you mean back to our bodies, I’m all for it. If you mean Raven House . . .”

  “Yeah. I know. Hang on to me, I’ll drive.”

  A few moments later, I was sitting back in my own flesh-and -blood body in Castle Discord staring at the athame sticking through my left hand. Catching it between my right thumb and forefinger, I yanked it free and set it on a handkerchief that had appeared on the desk while I was out. Blood began to drip on the floor. I sighed and whistled the seven-note spell that heals athame wounds.

  In an instant the hole in my flesh closed itself, leaving behind only a faint scar. I prodded the thin white line in my palm with my pinkie—not even tender. Amazing really. Clotho coded the spell ages ago, and it’s a damn good one. It’s simple and elegant, and I haven’t the faintest idea how she managed it.

  Once or twice I’ve considered playing with it to see if I could reverse engineer it, then reapply the principles to hack up a really outstanding healing program that would work on any injury, but I haven’t had the courage to actually try it yet. I’m pretty sure the spell shouldn’t work at all and that the only reason it does is that it taps deeply into both the chaos magic of our blood and the permanent enchantments built into athames. That means one mistake with the hack, and my blood could end up doing something magical and unpredictable—never a good idea.

  “Are you just going to sit there and stare at your hand all day?” Melchior asked through his somewhat tinny speaker. “Someone might get the impression you’d been experimenting with pyschoreactive chemicals.”

  I grinned. “ ‘Have you ever looked at your hand? I mean really looked at your hand?’ ” Then I shrugged. “Sorry, Mel. It’s just been a hell of a day.”

  Now that he had my attention, he switched back to text—he doesn’t like the way he sounds as a laptop. That it has. So, now what?

  Now I call Tisiphone, I typed.

  You’re not serious.

  Of course I am. We never got to talk about why I needed to get through to Necessity or what was going on with Nemesis.

  That’s going to make Megaera awfully angry, he texted.

  How angry will Tisiphone be if I don’t call her? I typed back. She’ll think that whole seduction scene in chaos was a deception, that I was just trying to get into her pants to distract her from my business with Necessity.

  She doesn’t have any pants, or hadn’t you noticed? Still, you may have a point. If you do, if it wasn’t just a ploy, you also have a problem. Namely, what are you going to tell Cerice?

  I buried my face in my palms briefly, then went on. I’m not sure. I felt drunk out there in the chaos, but I don’t know that that’s much of an excuse. I really wanted Tisiphone, and I don’t think that’s just because of the magical equivalent of beer goggles. I sighed. Ask me again later. Maybe I’ll have an answer by then.

  It’s your neck.

  And it still itched where Megaera’s claws had scratched me—the virtual wounds had followed me back to the real world by the magic of the athame. I scratched at the cuts. What was I doing? I didn’t know anymore what I wanted from Cerice or how to deal with her. And Tisiphone? I needed her help against Nemesis if I could get it. That was it. Uh-huh. That’s why I wanted to talk with Tisiphone before I dealt with Cerice, right? Maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d even come to believe it.

  Melchior. Vtp tisiphone@— I stopped typing.

  The only address I had for her was tisiphone@necessity . . . , a fact that was disturbing in its own right—the dot-dot-dot thing that they use makes my bones itch all by itself—but at the moment it had the added problem of being attached to the incommunicado system that was the goddess Necessity. How was I supposed to get ahold of her?

  You OK out there, Boss?

  Yeah, but I . . . Run Melchior. Please.

  “So let it be written, so let it be done,” he said as soon as he’d finished his transformation back into a webgoblin. “What’s up?”

  “How exactly do we get in touch with Tisiphone now that Necessity is a black hole?” I asked.

  “Good question. I suppose I could try to reproduce that thing she did when she called us on Olympus back when Necessity initially went off-line. Let me think about it.”

  I nodded and waited while he stared off into space for a while. Right after the Shara virus had initially seized control of Necessity’s security systems, Tisiphone had sent us a message using something that wasn’t quite a Vtp link. She’d called to warn me that the Furies were temporarily placing themselves under the orders of the Fates and that the first thing the Fates were likely to order was my death.

  After a while, Melchior finally stopped looking abstracted and nodded.

  “Yeah, I think I can manage it.”

  “Does that mean you figured out what she did?” I asked. “Or just that you have an alternate address?”

  “Neither really. It’s more like I’ve got an idea of how to interact with the phenomena in a way that will probably get a message back to her.”

  “How very authoritative.” I grinned.

  He spread his arms in a “who knows” kind of way. “It’s weird stuff. The Furies do funny things with the interface between chaos and reality and the mweb.”

  “Like the way they get around,” I said.

  “Yeah, and look at what Tisiphone did when she rescued us from Fate security. Impossible, but here we are. I assume it has something to do with being the children of Necessity. When you’ve got the computer that runs the universe on your side, you get to cheat.”

  “Root-level authority for reality.” I whistled. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before. “I could do some amazing things with that kind of access.”

  Mel shuddered theatrically. “I don’t even want to think about it. Now, are you going to make the call or not?”

  “Yeah. Melchior.” I waved my hands in a vaguely magical way. “Voodoo telephony. Tisiphone. Please.”

  He opened his eyes and mouth wide, letting misty multicolored light pour out. It formed a rough glowing globe with a bright fiery spark at its core, rather like a lightning bug hovering in a fog. Several long seconds passed without anything else happening. No fancy three-dimensional picture. Nothing.

  “Is it working?” I asked. “Do we have a connection?”

  “I ’ink ’o,” said Melchior, without closing his mouth.

  “Tisiphone?” I called into the fog.

  No response.

  “Tisiphone, are you there?”

  Still nothing.

  “Tisiphone, call me back when you get a chance. We need to meet.” I looked at Melchior. “Do you think she got it?”

  He nodded and shrugged at the same time.

  “I guess we hang up then.” I looked into the fog one more time. “Call me.” Then I made a cutting motion to Melchior. “Please.”

  He closed his eyes and mouth, and the globe dissipated. “That is the strangest sensation.” Wisps of light slithered from between his lips when he spoke, like fog in photon form, and more trailed from the corners of his eyes.

  “I’ll take your word for it, Mel. It doesn’t look like much fun.”

  “Honestly, it’s kind of cool in an ‘it really tickles when I barf’ kind of way.” Then he shook his head. “No, that makes it sound much worse than it is, and I actually think I could kinda get to liking it.”

  “Well, that was fascinating,” said Eris.

  With the words, the room around us changed. We were no longer in a scroll-lined Alexandrian library, but rather in Eris’s game room. It was one of the most-often-repeated features of Castle Discord. Though its shape and contents changed slightly from visit to visit, there was always a big felt-covered card table, arcade-style video games, and pool or billiards.

  Eris sat at the card table—octagonal this time—with her feet up on the felt and her velvet-upholstered chair leaning back on two legs. She had changed her clothes again—loose black jeans, with contrasting gold T and high-tops. She looked casual but cool and distant. My chair from the library remained, now sitting directly across from hers, and Melchior had shifted seamlessly from desk to table. He quickly sat down on its surface, his legs crossed goblin fashion.

  “Which bit did you find most compelling?” I asked.

  “The part that happened at the gates of Fate shortly after you left,” she said. “I’ll tell you about that in a minute. First, I want to hear how it all looked to you.”

  I was tempted to play coy just for the irritation factor since she would certainly have done so if our positions were reversed. But I just didn’t have the energy. I quickly filled her in on my expedition.

  “Huh,” she said, when I finished. “Very interesting.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “A number of things. Perhaps most of all the actions of the spinnerette. I wonder whether it was operating on its own and, if not, who it answers to.”

  “Any theories?” I asked. I was more than curious on that front as well, especially after Cerice’s suggestion that the Fate Core itself might be developing a personality.

  “Not a one, not about spinnerettes at least.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to look into that. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

  “About what?”

  “Tisiphone, of course. I said she’d make a great match.”

  “Look, just because she gets me hot, that doesn’t mean we should pick out china. Hell, you get me hot when you want to, and pursuing that’d be pretty much the same as suicide on my part.”

  “You say the sweetest things sometimes,” said Eris, shifting her position and tightening all of her clothes with a thought.

  My mouth went dry, and my own clothes tightened in the most inconvenient place. Then she relaxed and let the sexual glamour fade.

  I growled and shook my head in exasperation. “Look, could you just drop it? I already have a girlfriend . . . sort of.”

  “That brings us back to my side of the story and that theory I mentioned,” said Eris. “You know, I think I’m going to enjoy this.”

  “Great. That pretty much guarantees I won’t.”

  “Exactly. I followed you from here to Fate’s firewall. That was a very interesting trick you used to get in, by the way—Ahllan’s old back door. I’d wondered how she managed her underground railway. Slick. After you went in, I decided to wait around outside to see if anything interesting turned up.”

  “And?” I said when she stopped there.

  “Guess who came along only a few minutes after you did?”

  “Not Tisiphone,” I said. She’d arrived by some more direct route. “Nemesis?”

  “Give the boy a gold star,” said Eris. “Slipped in the exact same way you did, too.”

  That was interesting. I didn’t think anyone but the AIs, Cerice, and I knew about that back door. “Then what happened? ”

  “Not much from my point of view. At least not until all the sirens and alarms started going off. I figured that was about it for you. From the sounds of it, it would have been, too, if not for Tisiphone. Don’t throw away what she’s offered you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know how you feel on the subject. Can we move on now? Maybe get to the important bit that you’re holding back for dramatic effect?”

  “Ravirn, honey, it’s got nothing to do with drama. It’s all about another D entirely.”

  “Discord,” I said. “Yes, I get it. You make people’s lives difficult because that’s what you do.”

  She made pouty lips. “You’re not half so much fun as you were back when we first met.”

  “Maybe I’m getting used to you,” I said. “I certainly get tired of you from time to time. Are you going to get to the point or not?”

  “I’m pretty sure your girlfriend’s sold you out to Fate and that Fate and Nemesis are in partnership against Necessity. ”

  I’d kind of guessed that was where she was going, but hearing it still felt like a slap in the face.

  “Evidence?” I asked.

  “One, from what you told me of your own venture into the mweb servers, Cerice was monitoring the back door Ahllan left and should have been aware of the arrival of Nemesis. If so, she did not warn you. Two, after the commotion died down, Nemesis came back out from behind the firewall unscathed. She did so through an actual portal and not via the Fateclock hack. That means the Fates let her out. Unless they didn’t know who she was—unlikely at best—that suggests an alliance.”

  “Circumstantial,” I said.

  Eris held up a hand. “True, but there’s still number three. The one who showed Nemesis out was Cerice.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “By itself, no,” said Eris. “But on top of everything else . . . She has returned to Fate. Do you think Clotho would assign a webtroll to anyone she didn’t trust absolutely? That’s an enormous amount of computing and magical power, especially for a programmer of Cerice’s caliber.”

  She had a point. Cerice is a better coder than I am. I can outhack her and outcrack her, particularly under time pressure, but that’s the raw, quick, and dirty stuff. On any project that rewards patience and forethought, she’s got me cold. She could do a lot with a webtroll. Would Clotho surrender that kind of power to Cerice if she really believed there was any chance of her returning to Raven House and me? I didn’t like the idea at all, but I couldn’t just dismiss it.

  “Oh, and there’s four.” Eris smacked her forehead theatrically. “I almost forgot four.”

  “What’s that?” I asked warily.

 

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