Broken Fate Read online

  I head straight for my workspace when I get home. As I stalk past her desk, Lacey glances up at me. “Problems?” she asks, a gleeful smile on her face.

  “Hell, no,” I say and keep walking. I’m not about to confide in her. She’s just one more thing on an ever-growing list of things that piss me off.

  I lock myself in my workroom and crank my iPod to its maximum volume. The stirring strains of “Summa For Choir” fill the cavernous space. The piece usually calms me, but today it doesn’t even begin to soothe my churning emotions.

  I put in several hours’ work before there’s a knock at the door. Stomping over, I yank it open, thinking that if it’s Lacey I’ll get the thrill of slamming it in her face.

  It’s not Lacey; it’s Chloe. She covers her ears against the wall of sound that spills out the door, and I reach over to crank the volume down.

  “Ah, I can come back later,” she says. Chloe knows that music this loud signals a bad mood.

  “No, it’s okay. I’ve pretty much worked off most of the mad. Now I’m working on the depression.”

  She pulls the door shut behind her and takes a seat on the stool by the door.

  “So what’s up?” I ask when she doesn’t immediately say anything. I snip a few more lifelines and let them drift to the floor.

  “Nothing much. It’s getting late, and I wanted to see if you wanted me to bring your dinner down here.”

  “No, thanks. I have a break coming up in a little while. I’ll raid the fridge later.”

  “Want to talk about it?” she asks, spinning around and around on the stool.

  “About what?”

  “Whatever’s got you blasting down the walls with that music.”

  “Alex is mad at me,” I say as I sweep lifelines into boxes for Thanatos.

  “For what? I thought things were good with you two.”

  “For this,” I say, waving my hand to encompass my desk, my shears, the lines hanging from the ceiling, and the ones on the floor.

  “Ah. He hates your job.”

  “Not so much the job. He’s surprisingly cool with the fact that I kill people. It’s the time that the job requires that’s the problem. He wants more time than I can give.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. And there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve only got one more day this year that I can take off from work completely. I don’t have a substitute or any kind of helper. And I can’t even invite Alex to spend time with me while I work because it violates yet another one of Zeus’ rules.”

  Chloe doesn’t answer right away. She just keeps spinning. While she thinks, I take the boxes of lines to the delivery door and send them off.

  “Here’s my idea,” she finally says. “Invite him down here.”

  “Which part of ‘That’s not allowed’ did you miss? Zeus would go ballistic. I’d probably be struck down by a lightning bolt before Alex could clear the basement door.”

  “But what if Zeus doesn’t know?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Zeus knows everything. Omniscient god, remember?”

  “Not everything,” Chloe says.

  I stop and turn to her.

  “Do you really not know that our workspace and, by extension, this house, are shielded from him, just as they are shielded from everyone but us? No other god can know what the Fates do. It keeps them from trying to influence us… and us from being influenced by them. Zeus only knows what we tell him, and Hermes is the only god allowed in our workspace, and he can come only when he has a message from Zeus. In other words, this space is private.”

  I’m floored. Sure, I vaguely remember Zeus saying something about the sanctity of our work and about being immune to outside corruption, but I missed the part about him not knowing anything that goes on in our workspace. I’m not sure he was ever that explicit, but I’m guessing that Chloe tested it somehow. Three thousand years of paranoia for nothing. Damn.

  “Get over your rule-breaking phobia and bring Alex here,” she continues. “Zeus won’t know. He’ll know when you bring Alex to the house, but not what happens after he clears the front door. If he asks, just tell him you had dinner together or played on the Wii. That’s not illegal, and Zeus can’t prove otherwise. Anyway, he trusts you. His natural assumption will be that you’re telling the truth.”

  I stare at Chloe. She’s the good girl, the one who never breaks the rules, and here she is concocting a devious plot. “I think my respect for you just shot up about ten notches. You’ve got a bad-girl streak in you.”

  “I’ve done it before, you know. Brought someone to our workspace? Just to test the limits. Remember when we lived near Kilimanjaro, and I was in heavy like with that Sherpa?”

  I nod. I knew she’d tested this somehow.

  “I invited him to hang out with me a few times when you and Lacey were out. I knew he would be discreet. He thought my job was witchcraft, and he was too scared to tell anyone from his village, anyway. Of course, when we broke up, I had to flush his memory, but you won’t have that problem since Alex is dying.”

  “And no one ever found out?”

  “Nope. Not a soul knows, except you. Go get Alex. Bring him here. Mom’s gone out and Lacey’s in her room, probably planning how to doom someone else. No one will know but me, and I won’t tell. You two can lock yourselves in here, and no one will know.”

  I rush over and hug her. “You are the best,” I say.

  “I know,” she says, a mischievous smirk on her face.