“Not right now, OK?”

“All right, but be careful.” His face took on a brief look of concentration. “Thought so. This DecLocus is completely off the mweb now, too. That’ll cut down on possible nastiness, but you never know what might be lurking in one of these backwater worlds.”

I nodded, to let him know I’d heard, and made a show of loosening my rapier in its sheath, but I didn’t answer. I really needed to be alone and think.

When we’d stopped in Garbage Faerie earlier, I hadn’t had time to do much more than glance at the place. It had been afternoon then. It was night now, but still quite light. Twin moons hung low in the sky. I walked toward the front of Ahllan’s shattered home. It drew me like a magnet, this ruin I had caused. The rotting husk of a place where I had once found refuge—it suited my mood perfectly. To put it bluntly, I felt like shit.

Not all that long ago, I’d beaten the system, defeating Fate in a battle over the future of free will. At the time I’d figured everything that came after would be easy by comparison. Sure, I’d picked up some heavyweight enemies and gotten the crap beat of me, but I was alive and in love and triumphant. All that I’d needed to make the victory complete was to save Shara. After fighting Fate—my own family—how much trouble could Death be? Orpheus had managed it, and let’s face it, he wasn’t the sharpest twig on the Olympian family tree.

I’d even been right. Cracking Hades hadn’t proved to be much of a problem. At least it hadn’t seemed that way at the time. But now? Now I was beginning to think I’d been set up. The question was, by whom?

Ahllan’s door lay in a broken heap just inside the threshold. I stepped over the jagged bits of wood and into the hall beyond. It used to be that the low ceiling made me want to stoop. Now it lay open to the sky, more a ravine than a hallway. The first door on my right led into the domed living room, or it had. The roof had caved in, and the doorway was choked with rubble. There would be no more cozy teas here. I wandered deeper into the house, arriving at my onetime bedroom. I turned in, sitting on the edge of the dust-covered futon.

This was the first bed I’d shared with Cerice. Things had seemed so much simpler then. I’d known who my enemy was. Atropos. OK, it had turned out that she was only one-third of the problem, but still I’d known I was up against Fate. Now, I was so turned around that I was wondering whether Cerice might be the enemy. She certainly had the brains and the talent, but despite my suspicions, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Maybe because I didn’t want to. I might regret it later, but for now I mentally put her aside. So, who else was there?

Shara? That was silly. She was a webgoblin, not a power, and she’d still be trapped in Hades if I hadn’t gone in after her. Yet the gorgon who pushed us out of Necessity’s system had worn her face, a fact certain to land me in a world of hot water whatever the cause.

Ahllan would be a likelier choice if she hadn’t vanished. Atropos’s old server was a wily webtroll who’d managed to run a guerrilla operation against the Fates for years without suffering detection. Shara had been part of that network, a key player even. But what would Ahllan have to gain?

I didn’t have enough information, and there were too many players. The Furies, Hades, Persephone, Eris. Hell, even Cerberus.

He might do a fine impression of a big dumb dog, but he was tens of thousands of years old and deadly smart. Not to mention, he was in the perfect position to get me in and out of Hades in one piece. That bore more thought.

Rising from the bed, I went back into the hall. It ended at a metal pressure hatch salvaged from the USS Arizona. It was twisted now, half-off its hinges. The steps beyond took me down into what had once been Ahllan’s workshop for electronics and magic. The basement should have been pitch-black, but the air shafts that led to the surface had been ripped wide open by the passage of the Furies, and silvery splotches of moonlight made it almost as bright as outside.

I walked to the electronics bench and set a rack for chips upright. Its contents had spilled across the long table. I began to pick them up and sort them. I worked mostly by touch, counting pins with my fingers and dropping them back into the appropriate bins.

Cerberus. What had Kira said about him? That there were really four dogs involved. Bob, Dave, Mort, and the master intelligence, Cerberus. What must it be like to be a pack instead of a person? A group intelligence? And one with mixed loyalties, if Kira was right.

There was a faint scuff behind me and the sound of a throat being cleared. “Ravirn?”

The voice was barely above a whisper. Gentle, feminine, apologetic.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “I don’t want to talk to you yet, Cerice.”

“I’m not Cerice.”

It didn’t sound like Shara either. I felt a chill as if someone had lightly run a finger up the back of my neck. Tempering an urge to draw my sword, I turned around slowly. Tisiphone stood in the center of a rough circle of silver moonlight, the terminus of one of the air shafts.

“I just dropped in,” she said, glancing at the opening above her.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“We can move very quietly when we want, part of the job.” She seemed subdued, something I’d never seen in her before.

“Oh.” That didn’t sound good, but I didn’t have a lot of options. She was between me and the door. I didn’t have a spell prepped, Melchior was a long way away, and sword or pistol would be foolish at best. I’d just have to stall for time and hope someone above had seen Tisiphone make her entrance. Not that I was sure that would help. “Should I be running?”

“I’m not here officially. Or perhaps I should say that, officially, I’m not here.” She half smiled.

I half smiled back. Maybe the current situation wasn’t going to result in any blood loss. I’d like that. Especially since the blood would almost certainly be mine. “All right then. If you’re not here, where are you?”

“En route.” I must have rolled my eyes or something, because she apologized. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be cryptic. I’m just not very good at this.” I wanted to ask what she meant by “this” but didn’t get the chance. “I’m supposed to meet my sisters at . . . No. I probably shouldn’t tell you that. I’ve got . . . boundaries I mustn’t cross. Suffice it to say I’m supposed to be meeting my sisters so that we can go on to Castle Discord and ask about what you and Eris found out.”

“But that’s not what you’re doing?” I made the statement a question. I wanted to know more, though in a way I already knew the worst. If the Furies were on their way to Eris, my grace period was coming to an end. Once Necessity found out about Shara, or whatever the thing wearing her face was, she’d start handing out death warrants.

“No,” answered Tisiphone. “I came here instead, because I needed to talk with you first.”

“With me? Why?”

She stepped suddenly closer then, moving into shadow, hiding her features. “Don’t you know?”

I shook my head though I was beginning to have suspicions.

“I—I want to get to know you better.”

I’d never heard of a Fury hesitating about anything before, and here Tisiphone was doing it for me. Heady stuff, and scary. I’d have to watch my step. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“I think you are,” she said, though she sounded more wry than angry. She touched her lips. “This body is more than just a shell for the soul of vengeance. It’s part of who I am, a woman as well as a goddess. That’s very . . . hard, sometimes. I tend to frighten men. You understand?”

I did. On the list of men she frightened, I was currently occupying the top slot. But at the same time, I felt sorry for her. She seemed so vulnerable right now, a condition antithetical to her nature as a Fury. That had to hurt.

I smiled as gently as I could. “Maybe I do understand, Tisiphone. I don’t know that I would have this time last year, but I was just plain old Ravirn then.”

Things had changed for me when Clotho named me Raven. Though I hadn’t known it at the time, she’d transformed me. OK, maybe that was stretching it. If Eris was right, Clotho’d just acknowledged the reality of the changes I’d wrought on myself through my conflict with Fate. Whatever the case, I was no longer what I’d once been.

If I felt this conflicted about becoming even the minor power I now was, how much harder must it be to fill one of the more important boxes on the cosmic org chart? What would it feel like to be the personality trapped inside the role of Fury? I don’t know if what I was thinking showed on my face or what, but Tisiphone nodded then.

She cocked her head to one side. “I think you really do understand, at least to some degree, Raven.” The last word came out as a whisper.

“I’d rather you didn’t call me that,” I said.

“And sometimes I’d rather that no one call me Fury. That name obscures the Tisiphone underneath. But often we don’t have choices. I am what I am, and there’s no denying it. Nor can you deny what you’ve become. But perhaps some good can come of that. I could never have offered ‘plain old Ravirn’ what I’m offering the Raven.” She stepped closer still, close enough to touch, and I had no doubt about what she meant.

“Thank you, but I just can’t.”

“Why not?” she asked, reaching out and touching my cheek. “Am I so horrible to you?”

“No. Not at all. You are . . . beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying, like a forest on fire. I’m flattered that you find me so appealing. If my life were different, I might want to spend some time getting to know you as the woman inside the Fury. But—and I’ll be honest with you because you’ve been honest with me—I might not. I know this will hurt you, and I’m sorry, but you have to put me high on the list of men you frighten.”

“I know that,” said Tisiphone, her voice rough and husky, “but I think you could overcome it with my help. No, I know you could, if you wanted it badly enough.”

“Maybe. But even if that were true, I couldn’t give you a yes. I’m with Cerice.”

“But she won’t claim you! She barely even acknowledges you have a relationship!” Anger flared in Tisiphone’s eyes. “She denies you. I would never do that.”

“All that may be true,” I said. All that and more. Like the fact that I was out here all alone because I’d had another fight with Cerice, and on top of that I was more than a little bit worried that my lady fair was an evil genius. “Cerice and I may be a bit of a mess right now. We may even be on the way to not being a couple anymore. But that’s not decided yet. Until it is, I can’t do anything but tell you no.”

“And if you do break up?” asked Tisiphone.

“No. I won’t play that game. For now, all my ‘ifs’ belong to Cerice. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Your loyalty is one of the things I find most attractive. Damn.”

She turned away, walking across the room. For a brief moment, moonlight touched her again, and I thought I saw something sparkle on her cheek. It couldn’t have been a tear, could it? Not on a Fury. I wanted to go to her, to give her some comfort, but I couldn’t. Not here. Not now. Not the way she wanted.

“Tisiphone?”

“Yes,” she turned quickly, and this time I was sure I saw tears as she came back toward me.

“If it helps at all, turning you down is one of the harder things I’ve had to do.”

“It doesn’t help, but I thank you anyway. It’s probably for the best, really. Furies don’t exactly get a lot of time off. My complete lack of a love life for the last couple of hundred years speaks to that all too clearly.” Her laugh was bitter and brittle, too close to the tears she’d already shed.

“Even if I did say yes,” I said, “I’m poison. Too many powers want to make an end of me. Your job would probably come into conflict with any feelings you had for me before too long. Then what would you do?”

“Silly boy,” she said, her tone mixing mocking and regret. “It already has.”

“What?”

“I told you when I arrived that I was supposed to be on my way to meet Megaera and Alecto so that we could all have a nice little chat with Eris.”

“And?” I asked.

“And when we do, she’s going to tell us that the two of you found a twin to your girlfriend’s webgoblin haunting Necessity’s server cluster. At that point we’ll almost certainly be sent to take you to my mother.”

“How do you know about the twin?”

“I never left Castle Discord,” said Tisiphone. “I stayed and listened to the whole thing.”

“Including the part where Eris—”

“Said you should take me as a lover. Oh yes. For that I owe her something, though I’m not yet sure whether it’s kudos or curses. That conversation’s a big part of why I’m here. Eris reminded me that they don’t exactly mint new powers every day. The roster of possible partners for a Fury is somewhat limited, and over the years, history and bad blood have narrowed it even further. Once you had your fight with Cerice, I decided I had to at least take a chance.”

“But how did you manage it?”

“Brute force is not the only tool of the hunter, not by a long shot.” With those words she suddenly faded—not away, but very close.

Like a chameleon, she changed her colors to match the background. I could see her, but only by keeping my eyes fixed on her. When I blinked, she was gone. I didn’t know where until I felt her breath on my face, her hands gently sliding into the hair above and behind my ears.

“I shouldn’t be here,” whispered a voice inches from my ear. “I came to warn you as well as to make my offer. I’ll have to leave soon, and then we’ll be on opposite sides again. It would be good for you to have a friend in the enemy camp, wouldn’t it? Someone who could slip you information and sidetrack pursuit. Someone who could convince her sisters to go easy. All that can be yours for so little. A kiss even.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Is a kiss that much to ask?” I could see her face again, or at least see where it was, by the tears tracking down her cheeks. “It’s been so very long since I felt another’s lips touch mine.”

“It’s not the kiss. That, I’d give you for free. It’s the promise such a kiss would make. If you went easy on me for the price of a kiss, I’d owe you so much more. Surely you see that?”

She faded back into view and sighed. “I do. Sadly, I do. Then I’ll have to find a way to deflect pursuit without even so much hope as a kiss.” She slid back and sighed. “Would you really have given one freely if I hadn’t made it a matter of bargaining?”

“I would.” Moved to pity by tears on the face of a Fury, I said, “And I will.”

Stepping forward to close the distance between us once again, I caught her shoulders in my hands and touched my lips to hers ever so gently. They burned, not with the fire that lived within her, but with a passion I found hard to resist. But resist I did, pulling away. She caught me in a fierce hug.

“I—I—Damn! I don’t want to let you go.”

“Then don’t,” said a bitter female voice. “Not on my account, honey.” Cerice!

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, as Tisiphone released me.

“Really? Then what is it?” Cerice had come halfway down the stairs by then.

“How dare you!” Tisiphone moved toward Cerice. “You don’t deserve Ravirn.”

“And you do? This time last year you were trying to kill him.”

Red light filled the room as the fires in Tisiphone’s wings and hair, banked till now, flared into brilliant life. She flexed her hands, and the soft fingers that had so recently stroked my cheek grew long claws hard as diamonds. If I’d been in Cerice’s shoes, I’d have been running, not walking, back up those stairs. Instead, she advanced on Tisiphone.

“So, when you can’t hunt for real, you poach?”

“I could shred you like paper,” said Tisiphone, “but I won’t, for Ravirn’s sake. I’d rather not have your shade hanging between us in the future. Patience is another hunter’s virtue, and it’ll be ever so much simpler to wait for you to drive him away, then pick up the pieces.”

Pain flared on Cerice’s face, and she swung her hand back as if to slap Tisiphone. It was the pain in her expression that did it for me. The bigger pattern finally fell into place in my mind. Somehow I managed to get between them, preempting Cerice’s suicidal impulse before the blow could fall. I dragged her away from Tisiphone.

“Let me go,” demanded Cerice.

“No.”

“Please,” said Tisiphone. “Pretty, pretty please. I promise not to hurt her . . . much.”

“Cerice!” I said. “Listen to me. It wasn’t what you think it was. You can believe me, or you can tell me you don’t trust me. Which is it going to be? Because I can’t take much more of this.”

“I . . . I believe you,” she said. “I’m just crazy right now. Everything in my world seems to be falling apart, and I keep taking it out on you because you’re there, and you’ve been willing to deal with it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you back at Castle Discord, but it’s all so hard now. What Eris said about Shara . . . was that true? Is some part of her really living inside Necessity’s network?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I think I know why. But I need to talk to Shara about it. Now.” I let Cerice go and turned to look at Tisiphone. “How soon do you have to leave? I think you should hear this as well.”

“I should never have come at all,” answered Tisiphone with a sigh. “What’s a few more minutes? But you’ll need to hurry.”

“Done.” Pushing Cerice gently in front of me, I headed for the stairs. She might have agreed to believe me, but I still wanted to keep her away from Tisiphone.

As I stepped through Ahllan’s front door on Cerice’s heels, I found Melchior waiting just outside.

“It’s about ti—” He stopped abruptly when Tisiphone appeared behind me.

“Uh—” He made vaguely concerned pointing gestures. “Do you . . .”

“Yes, I know I’ve got a Fury following me. She’s on our side. Sort of. Maybe.”

“Very decisive, Boss. I’m deeply reassured. Does she know that?”

“I do,” she answered, “though side isn’t quite the right word, and my reasons are complex. Ravirn, it’s your show, but I don’t have much time.”

“Got it. Melchior, where’s Shara? I need to talk with her.”

“Here,” said a quiet voice from just beyond the edge of the circle of light provided by Tisiphone’s internal fires. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Persephone.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders sagged, and she looked both frightened and relieved. Waiting for that other shoe to drop couldn’t have been easy. “Then you do know.”

“Not really, but I have some guesses. Persephone set me up. When she said she wanted something from me, I assumed it would come after I e-mailed you out of Hades, a quid pro quo. But that wasn’t it at all. It was e-mailing you out of Hades that she wanted. She needed to have you go out electronically, not embodied. I didn’t see it till now. Very, very slick.” Shara nodded glumly. I knelt and looked her in the eyes. “Why didn’t you tell us what happened to you in Hades? Or for that matter, where you went after I hit send that day?”

“I—I didn’t remember any of it at first. Then I started to get flashes, but they were awful, wrong, like they were coming from someone else’s head. I remember incredible pressure to stay in Necessity’s system and do her bidding, and just as much pressure to leave because I knew you’d die if I didn’t come home. I felt ripped in two. Maybe I was ripped in two. I don’t know. I’m still fuzzy on details, especially about the early stuff, what happened in Hades. Persephone did . . . things to me. I know that much. She messed around with my core programming, the bits that make me, me, a complete recompile. That’s part of why it’s so hard to remember; I’m not who I used to be, not entirely.”

“I’ll kill her,” said Cerice, her voice flat and hard.

I couldn’t help but remember how torn up I’d felt when I thought Melchior might die. To some of my family, our webgoblins are nothing more than convenient tools, but for Cerice and me, they’re our best friends and, in some ways, our children. I understood her rage, but I didn’t know what to do about it. She had every right to be mad. I certainly would have been furious in her place, but at the same time, she hadn’t met Persephone. I was still trying to think of something to say when Tisiphone cut in.

“Not a good idea, girl, but that’s no surprise.” Her tone was sardonic, cutting.

“Did I ask you?” demanded Cerice.

“No, but you’re being a fool again. While I’d encourage that on the Ravirn front—the sooner you drive him away, the happier I’ll be—killing Persephone is the stupidest suggestion I’ve heard in a very long time. And in my profession, I get to hear a lot of stupidity. Death would put Persephone in Hades year-round, and she’d take summer with her.” She paused, and a thoughtful look crossed her face. “Of course, chances are you’d just get killed in the attempt. Maybe I was too hasty. Go for it.”

“Fuck you,” said Cerice, but she nodded reluctantly. “Fine, I’ll just have to find some other way to make her pay instead.”

“There’s nothing you could do to her that would hurt her any more than she’s already hurting,” I said, remembering my encounter with Persephone and her terrible anguish. “Her eyes are pain, Cerice. That pain is what gave me the key to the whole thing, actually. You looked so hurt a few moments ago that it reminded me of Persephone. Then everything just sort of fell into place.” I spread my hands in a minishrug. “Well, mostly. I’m not sure about some of the details, but I’m getting there. Shara?”

She sighed. “I was kind of hoping you’d forgotten about me again.”

“No such luck,” I said, though I felt for her. There had been more than one occasion when I’d have killed to make powers forget about me. “Can you tell me why she didn’t just send you through the network herself? Why she needed me? And more importantly, what’s happening to the mweb?”

“I’m not sure,” said Shara. “I have some ideas, but this isn’t a spy movie or superhero comic book. It’s not like she confided her evil plan to me in a burst of overconfidence. She just stuffed a bunch of new code into my OS and left it at that.”

“So,” I stood and started to pace, “why don’t you speculate.”

“I don’t think she can actually touch Hades’ computer, the one in his office. She’s got complete freedom within the underworld, but she’s not allowed any outside contact. That much I got from the little she said about the changes in my OS.”

“But she IM’d me when I was going through Hades’ e-mail,” I protested. “Heck, she showed up when I was reading an e-mail from her. That was on his computer.”

“No,” said Melchior. “Actually that’s not quite true. Yes, she appeared exactly at the moment you accessed an e-mail from her, but it was dated June. That means she sent it from outside the underworld. And the IM box appeared between you and the screen, not on it or even touching it. She never actually accessed the computer.”

“You’re right. Why didn’t that strike me as odd?”

“Abject terror is kind of distracting,” said Melchior. “I did wonder about it at the time, but I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, so I let it slide. Later, it seemed less important than our more immediate problems. Sorry.”

“All right, so she needed someone else to physically input Shara. But why did she pick me? How did she even know I was there?” Then it hit me. “Of course. Cerberus. Kira said that Dave was Persephone’s dog and that for all of them Persephone’s commands came next in priority after Hades’. I didn’t break into the underworld, Cerberus let me in. That’s why he was so much more friendly the second time we visited. Persephone guessed what I was up to and ordered him to befriend me. We were set up from day one.”

“Probably,” agreed Shara. “Persephone’s a manipulator. But I can’t blame her. Not really.”

“How can you say that after what she did to you?” asked Cerice. She looked horrified.

“You haven’t met her,” said Shara. “You haven’t seen her pain. Think about it. What she did to me was bad, but it was one time, and it was out of desperation. But what Hades has done to her, brrr.” Shara shivered. “When Persephone was barely a teenager, Hades kidnapped and raped her. He raped her not just once, but repeatedly. He’s still doing it. Three months out of every year she has to leave her mother and go back to live with her rapist. It’s been going on for thousands of years, and it’s never going to stop. Really never. True immortality means no breaks. Ever. She can’t even kill herself, because then she’d be with Hades full-time. No, I can’t blame her for what she felt she had to do to me. It was wrong, and I wish it hadn’t happened, but I just can’t judge her.”

Shara had put her finger on something that had been tickling the back of my brain as well. The goddess changed the way you saw things. I had to stop whatever she was doing to the mweb, and I had to fix whatever was wrong with Shara. The network was simply too important to allow anyone to destroy it, and while I might have busted Shara out of Hades, I clearly hadn’t finished the task.

I should have hated that, hated the idea that I’d been set up, that something I’d been tricked into doing had loosed whatever was devouring the mweb and messed up Shara. But I couldn’t seem to work up a good head of outrage. Maybe that was because my new ties to chaos caused me to see the mess in a different light. Or maybe it was just because Persephone had pulled off a hell of a hack, and my inner coder had to tip its hat to her. Whatever the reason, I felt more sympathy for her than anger.

“I guess I’d never thought about it like that,” Cerice said to Shara, visibly deflating. “Can I at least be mad on your behalf?”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Shara. “That, a stiff drink, and maybe some TLC from blue boy over there, and I’ll be halfway to recovery.” The latter came with a wink in Melchior’s direction and some of her old Mae Westian growl.

I was glad to hear it. I hated to bring her mind back to the problems at hand, but Tisiphone was fast approaching the foot-tapping stage of impatience, and we still had some ground to cover. I turned to Tisiphone.

“Does that give you enough to work with?”

“As far as keeping my sisters off your back? Not by half. I believe you, and the case against Persephone works for me. But I don’t operate independently. Necessity has final say over matters involving Fury-level action. Even in lesser matters, I’m only one vote out of three. Megaera and Alecto are not stupid. They know how I feel about you, and they’re not going to believe anything I say on your behalf without solid proof. Neither will Necessity. Finding that proof needs to be job one. I’d try to get it, but I don’t know when I’ll next have a chance to get into the master servers. If you can find it yourself, it would sure help your case.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You and your sisters are the security administrators for Necessity and the mweb’s core architecture?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to hack into that system to do what you can’t?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And if I get caught? I’m guessing you won’t be bailing me out.”

“No. I’ll probably have to kill you. If that’s what Necessity decides, it’s what I’ll do.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and her fires dimmed. “In fact, in full-on Fury mode I’ll even enjoy it. Tisiphone the individual and Tisiphone the Fury are fundamentally different creatures, with fundamentally different agendas. I’m sorry.” With that she opened her wings and leaped skyward.

Before she’d climbed fifty feet she brought one clawed hand around in a vicious slash, tearing a ragged hole in the stuff of reality. A moment later, after she’d passed through, it closed behind her.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Shara, “about my part in all this.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Persephone messed around with your OS, changed who you are. Like Tisiphone said, the individual and the role aren’t always in sync. Sometimes none of us has a choice.” Did that include me?

I didn’t know the answer to that. Not anymore. I’d made some truly crazy decisions in the rush to break Shara out of the underworld. Was that plain old Ravirn’s love of a challenge? Or the Raven’s trickster nature calling out for risk taking? Who was I now? And what?