Phi could only stare at Iry, unaware quite how dazzled her face was. "How could they?"

 Not the pod. She had grown up among them, part of an extended family. Fine, she might not like Don and his friends, she might have forged her friendships outside the pod, but that kind of violence-

 Murder, she corrected herself. Don't dress it up in words. It was murder.

 "You ain't the first to ask that," Iry answered. "Odds are good you won't be the last."

 Questions piled up behind her eyes, clogging her thoughts. "Tell me. Please."

 They were my grandparents. Surely I should be screaming or crying or...or doing anything but sitting here. feeling like I'm caught up in someone else's nightmare.

 "Everythin' I know's hearsay," he cautioned her. "It might not be completely-"

 "I need to know, Iry. I just don't understand how it could happen."

 He cleared his throat. "Ain't much to tell. You already know the first bit - Marie runnin' off in the middle of a snowstorm because she couldn't marry Laurie Ivan, your dad goin' after her...the whole pod finding out. As you can imagine, there was chaos the next day. Lots of anger."

 "Alwyn?"

 "'Course. He was livid - all his plans upset, his precious seer refusin' to look into the future-"

 "Mom?" she said in disbelief. "We're still talking about my mother?"

 His eyes were very gentle. "She's changed a lot, Marie. Was a time when she was too busy with the present to give a damn about the future."

 Phi couldn't imagine it.

 "Marie had Alwyn over a barrel, an' both of 'em knew it. The Pack was causin' trouble an' had been since Aurora died, so he needed to know what was comin' more than ever. He had to agree. But mark me, he wasn't happy."

 "He was behind it all, then."

 "Yeah, Alwyn was the drivin' force. But he wasn't alone, an' he was clever about it. Ain't no one can prove he had anythin' to do with it - but we all know."

 My own great-grandfather. Oh god.

  All she had known was collapsing, leaving her naked, defenceless, astonished. The foundations of her life had melted away at the slightest touch, as if forged from lies and cobwebs.

"How...how did it happen?"

 There was pity in his eyes when he looked at her, and it stung. "He was clever, Alwyn - him an' those who helped him. They didn't act at once, nah, they waited. It seemed like everythin' was settlin' down. An' then the pod went down to the lake one mornin', an' found your grandparents there. All four of 'em, floatin' in the water. Drowned. Someone had held 'em down 'til even a dolphin didn't have any choice but to breathe water. An' surprise, surprise, Alwyn had a cast-iron alibi."

 From his mind, she caught an image: the lake in winter, a sheet of grey, and people crowded round its edge. Someone wailed, and she saw a woman turn away from the crowd, her face unmistakable even with the decades wiped from it - her mother on her knees in the gravel, a cloud of brown hair pulled ragged between her hands, screaming at the sky.

 No more, please, no more...

The scene vanished.

 "I didn't mean you to see that," he said gruffly. "Sorry. It's just...they were my friends too. An' I sometimes wonder if I could'a done anythin', if I missed somethin' that might'a saved 'em..."

 "I've never seen her cry," she mumbled. The image of her mother was etched into her eyelids, bright and terrible. "She's always so calm...I didn't know. Why didn't they tell me?"

 She didn't expect an answer, but still it came. "Because they were scared. Lots of people blamed 'em. Weren't their fault - Alwyn was waitin' for an excuse, waitin' to shed some blood, 'course he was. He hated disobedience, an' he needed to control everyone. But he wasn't willin' to dirty his hands, so he found someone else to do that."

 Phi stared at him, her eyes hard as flint. "Who do you think it was? You must have some idea."

 He hesitated.

 "Please. I need to know. I need names. They were my family, and someone in the pod betrayed them."

"These are guesses, Delphine. Nothin' more. I'm an outsider-"

 "So what?"

 Surely he can see this is nothing to do with genetics - I can't let this lie, I can't live not knowing, always looking at the faces of the pod and wondering...was it you? Will you kill me just as easily because I want more than this?

 "You know more than I do right now. Please tell me."

 His head turned fractionally; to the painting over his mantelpiece and the girl who was a livid ghost of herself.

 "They're all gone now, " he said shortly. "All of 'em except one...Laurie Ivan. He was crazy about your mother - always said he didn't need her to tell him his future 'cause it had her in it. Stupid really: if he'd asked, if she'd looked...might have avoided a lot of heartache later. There ain't nothin' as bitter as love turned to hate, an' with that much love...that's gotta be a lot of hate."

 "Why didn't anyone do anything about him?"

  "No proof. An' they didn't want to think it was him." Iry shrugged. "He was your dad's best friend. Dan was the dreamer an' Laurie was the doer. An' your mother felt somethin' for him, even if it wasn't the kind of all-or-nothin' love he felt for her. After, they pitied him 'cause he'd lost her. They didn't want to believe he did it."

 "Then why do you?"

 His lips skinned back, baring a savage grimace, and Phi flinched, unnerved by the rage that shook his voice and gleamed in his eyes.

 "I was cheated of the girl I loved too, an' if I met him who took her now, I'd rip out his damn throat without stoppin' to think about it. Love denied is violent, an' it devours you. It will murder, an' it will torment, an' it can't forgive...it never ends. It has no mercy."

 She didn't dare look away from those bestial eyes. It was a predator shining out from his face, something dreadful and denied, and she was afraid that if such hate were as indiscriminate as he thought, the slightest trace of submission might provoke him.

 And then he bowed his head, only a man again, full of regret.

 "Remember that," he said quietly. "Watch out for it."

 Dumb, she nodded, and tottered from the chair to the door as fast as she could.

~*~

 When the sunlight hit her, she felt like Orpheus stepping from hell, bereft, shaken. The sheer normality of it all - Jo and Riose chatting by the gate, heat bristling on her skin, birdsong somewhere distant - seemed out of place.

 "Phi?" Jo, concern grazing her words. "You okay?"

 Nothing's okay. How can it be?

 But somehow, she dredged up a waxen smile. "Later, please. I just want to get home."

 Is this what the pod did too? she wondered as they left the big bad wolf far behind. Played happy families and waited for it to end, enduring, turning a blind eye whatever the horror? Alwyn built the cage, but they walked in. They might have been afraid, but they did nothing.

 And while they waited, while they feared, Aurora died. My grandparents died. My mother will die for them, because they cannot face what the future might bring. They can't even face the past.

 They've spent their whole lives just getting by, telling themselves it would all be over soon.

 I can't turn a blind eye. I won't. And...

 And she knew where that thought led her. Her parents had no power to break the contract that they had made on her behalf, and there was no way in hell she could break it. Not knowing that she would sacrifice them. Yet nor would she be made Don Ivan's pawn.

 That left one option.

"Riose?"

 He glanced over, giving her a small, quizzical smile.

 "I need to talk to you later."

 ~*~

 Avy was angry: Zeke could see it from the moment he stumbled into the throne room, feel it crackling in the air and along the sorcerous bond that held him.

 A glance at Don Ivan's smirk told him why.

 The magical fetters hauled him down until he was prostrate, forehead pressed to the cold stone floor. The humiliation was nothing new, but he still resented it bitterly.

 "I was following your orders," he mumbled against the stone, his back starting to ache from the pressure she kept on him. "You wanted me to get close to Delphine Thetis - to win her trust. What better way? No one was harmed-"

 "Tell that to the wolf with the broken leg," Don cut in.

 A few casualties are to be expected. Her voice was thoughtful. Well, Zeke, I had not suspected you had a mind for such intrigues.

 The weight on his spine eased, and he knelt up gingerly. He knew better than to get to his feet when Avy was in a mood like this; she was mollified, but not yet convinced.

 "You can't live in the court of the Soulless King without picking up a few tricks."

 And you could not spend a lifetime with Avarice ap Sangager, watching her manipulate people with deft and heartless guile, without learning that the best way to disguise your intentions was with a veil of truth.

 If it was a shot at Don Ivan, he didn't notice. "None of which alters the fact that I had Phi in my grasp - I could have made her agree to anything, anything you wanted, and instead this idiot let her run back to tell tales about me and the wolves to anyone she pleases!"

 "Your carelessness is not my problem," Zeke dared to say. He could show no weakness here, not with Avy's judgement looming over him like a guillotine. "But you're mistaken if you think she would have fallen at your feet. Those wolves had to give her a beating before they dumped her in that cesspit. She was a mess when I got there. It was my understanding that she was supposed to be biddable, not broken."
 
  You are correct. Avy's blind eyes turned to Don. I have little patience for such ham-handed incompetence, Poseidon. Each time you mistreat Delphine, you give her another reason to hate you - and ultimately, we need her cooperation, just as we need the influence she brings.

 Don's face was a masterpiece of barely suppressed anger.

She turned her attention back to him; Zeke waited for her reprimand, sure some punishment would come.

 But when she spoke, her voice was mellow and wry. You have done well. You have gone a long way towards winning her trust.

 Zeke only stared, dumbstruck. The cycle of duty and pain had been so constant he'd forgotten there had ever been another life; when she had been a glorious seductress, full of charm and laughter and secrets, glowing like a star in the Soulless Court; and he had been the only one she trusted.

 Then the years crashed back into her words and she was old again, the ancient on her pitted throne.

 The command was accompanied by power, hooking around his neck and forcing him forward. He had to crawl to her feet. Her nails, yellowing, brittle, dug into his chin as she yanked his face up. This wasn't going to be pleasant.

 He felt the flow of magic, wrapping around him like chains. The air was saturated with power, heavy, clammy, her free hand rolling a clutch of horns in her fingers.

 By the bond between us, by the magic that binds us, you will reveal nothing of our plans to Delphine Thetis or anyone else, Avy commanded, and the spell sank into him, a trap waiting to be sprung. Not by word or thought or deed. And should you break this agreement, may your heart tear in its cage and your skin rip from your bones and your blood become thorns in your veins.

 Two of the horns dissolved into dust as she ended the spell. She was serious, no doubt about it: she had to be to expend so much of her precious store of magic.

 Her mouth gaped in a mirthless smile, baring her greying gums. Not by word or thought or deed.

 He had seen this vow used before, long ago, and seen too the consequences of it, twitching in agonised heaps upon the ground. It had been a sport for a time, binding people with impossible promises, and watching as they failed: don't breathe. Stare at the sun without blinking. Bring me a handful of moonbeams by nightfall.

 And his own promise seemed just as impossible.

~*~

Irked by his encounter with the old hag and her loathsome slave, Don Ivan trudged home.

 A heavy, still hush shrouded the house. So it was one of the bad nights. No surprise there - he'd been expecting it after the relative calm of the last fortnight.

 He passed by the living room, a glance enough to confirm his father was slumped in his chair, a half-empty bottle of whisky on the table beside him. Laurence Ivan grunted a greeting, one that he didn't bother to answer.

 His mother was just where he'd known she would be: sat at the vanity table in that peach silk dressing gown that she always wore. Her loose chignon and straight back were the picture of elegance. The bruise she was powdering over was not.

 "Again?" he said. "What set him off this time?"

 "Me, I'm afraid." Her voice was cool and controlled.

 "You shouldn't provoke him."

 "No? Should I just let him drink himself into a stupor, then?"

 "Why not?" he countered. "At least he'll be the one waking up with a headache."

It was an old argument, one they'd played out ever since he was old enough to understand that other fathers didn't hit their wives. The vocabulary was a little more sophisticated, to be sure, and so was his understanding of it all, but they still trod this battleground in tired tandem.

 She patted down a strand of hair, the same bright blond as his own. "It's not the headache I object to. It's the heartache." Her laugh was silvery, and yet so bitter. "Twenty years, sweetheart, and even though I'm the one who got the ring, she got the man. I thought he'd get over her, but it isn't me he's trying to drown in the bottom of that bloody glass."

 "No," he pointed out levelly. "But it's you who gets in the way of his fists."

 "At least he sees me then. I have to live with being outshone by her in public. Precious Marie, the prophetess who loves us all so much she'll die for us." Her voice was tart and mocking. "But you will have to forgive me if I refuse to be outshone in private - not even by her, but by the memory of the girl she was twenty years ago! God only knows why I put up with it!"

 She snapped the compact shut and it felt like his heart jumping hard, afraid suddenly.

 "You still love him, don't you?" he asked, unsure.

 She must have seen something in his face that made her turn, softening. "Of course I do. Don't look so worried, sweetheart. It's a little tiff, that's all. Just because your father can drive me up the wall doesn't mean he could ever drive me out of the house."

  Yet she hesitated, her eyes dark and vulnerable.

 "It's just hard to know he'll never love me like that," she said, and he saw her swallow. "Don't make my mistake. Don't love too much. It only hurts."

  Moved, he went forward to brush a kiss on the bruised cheek she offered. So many of the pod knew her as distant, but she was his mother and he still remembered the stories she used to tell him as a child, the cookies she had baked, the way she'd wipe mud from his face with a cloth and a little amused sigh.

 "You're twice the woman she is," he swore. "And she could never outshine you - she's just a rattling bag of bones who can't even get out of bed. You're Mrs Ivan, and you'll be the mother of the next pod leader. What's she got? An ugly death and a family she's torn to shreds because she didn't love Daniel Thetis enough to live for him."

 "There is that," she acknowledged. "Now let me finish my make up, sweetheart. I've got dinner with the girls in fifteen minutes and I want to look my best."

 ~*~

 They left her at the door, but Phi knew both had picked up on her mood. Jo gave her a rough hug, and murmured something about lunch tomorrow; even that much kindness almost overwhelmed her. As long as everyone pretended things were normal, she could cope.

 Her father was waiting for her, unusually pale. At the sight of him, everything Iry had told her seemed to solidify and become real, and she wanted to flee so she wouldn't have to have this conversation.

 How long you've kept silent, she thought. How strong you've had to be for us all. How did you do it?

 "I..." He cleared his throat. "I'm so sorry, baby."

 "Dad..." she said helplessly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

 He spread trembling hands. "I didn't want it hanging over you. We couldn't forget, but if you didn't know...baby..."

 Something in his tone frightened her. It was so lost, so despairing. She'd never heard him sound like that, not even when they first realised her mother wouldn't get better.

 "Dad-" she began, but he spoke again, his voice rough.

 "I still miss them, you know. You don't ever get over it." And then he put his head in his hands, and to her dismay, she saw his shoulders shaking.

 Her father was sitting at their kitchen table crying, and she didn't know what to do.

For a moment she wanted to weep too, an urge so violent that her hands shook with it. To let all the fear and confusion and grief overwhelm her...but she couldn't. Her father had spent so many years being strong for their family, trying to mend all the rifts of the past, trying to make something better - all for her and her mother. All for them.

 They were his parents, she thought. God, god, how did he get through it? How has he been able to bear knowing that they died because of something he did?

 Because he had the temerity to love the wrong person.
 
 He needs me to be strong now. I have to make the decisions. No one else can do it anymore. The choice has to be mine.

 And so do the consequences.

  "It's not your fault," Phi said, the half-lie tripping off her tongue uneasily.

 A muffled, gravelly laugh. He lifted his head, wiping at his eyes. Strange how the grief peeled away the years from his face, so she had a glimpse of that boy her father once was. "I'm afraid it is. And I just keep making the same mistake. I swore I'd never let our pod be divided again...and here I am. Doing to my own daughter what Alwyn did to me. I've been an idiot, Phi."

 "Dad..." she implored, frightened by the bleak words.

 "I thought it was for the best. I thought you and Don were on the way to love, I thought I could mend the rift with Laurie, I thought...oh, a hundred things. And the one thing I never thought was to ask you what you wanted. I'm sorry, baby. I got it wrong."

 "Isn't there any way to break the contract?"

 He closed his eyes; without animation, he looked old and weary, a man waiting for the end days. "No. That's why Laurie insisted. He knew we couldn't risk it happening again. No one wanted that."

 Except maybe him, she thought, Iry's voice echoing in her head with an oracle's cool accuracy.

 Nor do the Furies.

 And all her hopes of salvation were distilled down to them, and a desperate throw of the dice.

 "I'm sorry," he said, tears rough in his voice.

 She nodded, feeling like she had aged decades within her skin. "Me too."

~*~

 Don went back to the lounge in a thoughtful mood. He sat down in the chair opposite his father, noting that the glass was already almost empty, that Laurence Ivan's eyes were glazed. Neither of them said a word about the bruises, a conspiracy of silence that had lasted years already and could endure many more.

 When his father reached to pour another glass, Don almost missed his words, soft and slurred. "How did it go?"

 "Well enough, I suppose," he answered. "You were right - she punished him, though I thought he was going to sweet-talk her out of it at first."

  His father's voice was dead, detached, as it always was when he spoke of Avarice, as if he had amputated the memories of his own meetings with her long before. "Never. She has no compassion left in her." He paused, then came the familiar question. "She didn't ask anything of you? Offered you nothing?"

 "Nothing," he said swiftly. He hadn't mentioned the new powers she'd given him, knowing his father would be furious, but the reminder of them gave him a twinge of unease.

  "Good. All her gifts are poisoned."

 Don had never dared ask, but now, emboldened by the knowledge of just how close he was to succeeding where his father had failed, he spoke up. "What did she do to you?"

 The words hung there, spinning like spiders dangling from their webs, and his father's hand clenched around the glass.

 He took a long draught; and another, and another, and then the glass was empty, and perhaps he'd burned away his fear because the face he raised to Don was terrible, contorted in rage and pain.

 "I always knew you'd ask," he said in a thick, funny voice. "And I thought, when he does, I'll have to tell him. 'Cause he's bold, my son, and he's reckless, and if he's anything like his father, he'll think he's smart enough to outwit that old witch on her stone throne. He needs to know that he isn't, and he needs to know that she'll give you whatever you want, but she'll ask her price, and you'll pay until the day you die. You'll pay in your dreams and you'll pay in your memories and you'll never forget her. That's her price, you see. She wants to be beautiful again, but if she can't be beautiful, she'll take being feared. As long as she's remembered."

 Slack, poised in recollection, his father could have been someone else if not for the features Don recognised as his own. His expression was awful, but Don was riveted.

 "I went to her, like you did, and she promised me the same things. She'd give me Marie and the pod if I'd give her Ryar's bones and horns and all their healing power. Seemed fair to me, so we struck our deal. I thought it'd be easy. I didn't want anyone hurt - Dan was like my brother. But he was too soft to lead us, and we needed a strong leader. I wasn't a Thetis, so I wasn't suitable and I didn't know how to persuade people. But she did, Avarice.

 "She'd been sat in that pit for years with her powers, listening to everything that happened in the valley. She knew all their secrets and all their desires, who to talk to and what to say. I listened to her and did as she said. Bit by bit, they came round. Some of the elders started to question Alwyn's choice of Dan as the heir. Then more people. I could see that Alwyn was starting to look at me differently. That's why he betrothed me to Marie, why he started to ask me about the important issues. It was going perfectly."

 His father paused, and his mouth twisted in a bitter grin. His face seemed skeletal, his eyes too bright.

 "But all the while, Marie was falling for my best friend. And then that night came. She left me for him - she left me! I went to Avarice, stumbling through the snow, half-frozen, livid. I thought she'd know how to help me. But she just told me that now I was guaranteed the pod if I just played this right. She didn't seem to understand that Marie was everything."

 "What happened?"

 His lips drew back in a sneer. "She told me to let them break the blood-oath. Let them be the traitors, not me - that I'd win every heart in the pod with one act of mercy." A strange, rippling moan slipped from his mouth. "But not the heart I wanted. Not hers!"

 No need to ask whose heart he meant. Don despised Marie Thetis for making his father this, almost as much as he loved his father for fighting on despite it all.

 "Avarice didn't understand - she couldn't, but I didn't see that it would make much difference to our plans. I asked her for power - to scare off some of the Pack, I told her, but in truth, I needed it to overcome Dan's father. He was a formidable man. She granted me it, but on the condition that I would use it only for protection. It was protection, what I did. It was!"

 Don agreed. But he suspected Avarice wouldn't.

 "I didn't realise then how many of the pod Dan had infected with his pacifism. Alwyn gave me permission to punish them, and I made sure that the Laveaus and the Thetises learned not to break blood-oath."

 Vicious satisfaction rung in his voice, burned in his zealous eyes. At moments like this, his father seemed most alive, flushed with justified anger and a pride that Don respected. His father, the strong one, willing to do what others would not dare for the good of his people.

  "But the pod were weak. They didn't see it as justice - they forgave them. I was the one who'd been abandoned, but they treated Dan and Marie as if they hadn't brought the entire mess on themselves. Alwyn saw how it was going, and he made Dan his heir to keep the rest of them happy. I think he even admired him a bit, you know, for having the balls to defy him." He snorted. "He'd spin in his grave if he knew how pathetic we've become."

 "Avarice," prompted Don.

 "I went back to her after it was done. She was...furious." All the emotion was pared from his voice, leaving it flat, but his face was gaunt and eerie, full of shadows. "I had lied to her, she said. I'd been beguiled by a pretty face. I had to understand that all women were the same in the dark, and she would teach me the lesson so I would never be fooled again."

 His body spasmed, as if in memory of some old horror. His voice fell to a hoarse whisper. "The things that happened in that cave...that she made me do...there in the darkness, what she made me do while she wore Marie's face..."

 Aghast, Don could only stare at his father, who shuddered with the intensity of it. He looked sick, a man dispossessed of hope or comfort.

Shaking, Laurence Ivan reached for the bottle, and as he drank and drank and drank, Don felt the sinister shape of what his father tried so hard to sear from his mind. But the feeling that rose in him was a surprise: not pity, not compassion - but contempt that his father, who he had always held in such esteem, could have ruined his chance of glory so completely and so foolishly.

 And as he thought of his own poisoned gift, he was more determined that he would succeed. The price of failure was all too clear.

~*~

  Riose met her outside the school, which seemed a hollow shell without students bustling about the campus. She was perched on the low wall by the doors, hands tangling nervously. It was no surprise that he was late, but it didn't do anything for her nerves. He came slouching up the road as if he had all the time in the world to play with. In a way, he did.

 He stopped just short of her, hands in his pockets, saying nothing, giving away nothing.

 "You know what this is about," she said, gazing up at him. It felt oddly official: this was not her friend, but an agent of the Furies, and a deadly creature in his own right.

 "I can guess. You should know this is dangerous, Phi. They can break blood-oath, but their methods may drive you to madness or suicide."

 Madness didn't seem much of a threat compared the last few days, which wouldn't have been out-of-place in a lunatic's hallucinations. And she had known from the moment Riose mentioned it that it would be dangerous. Of course it would be.

 It didn't take away the fear, but nothing would.

 She decided, and somehow the finality of it all strengthened her. There would be no more uncertainty: just her and them.

 She met his eyes dead on. "It's the lesser of two evils."

 He grimaced. "I doubt it somehow. But if this is really what you want-"

 "It is."

 He continued, regret soaking his voice. "-then you need to persuade the heads of the Furies. All three of them."
 
 The Grieving Fury, the Viper Fury, and the Demon Fury. If they refused her...would she even return?

 But the alternative was worse. It made her half-smile: not even the Nightworld's foremost mercenaries could match the thought of decades bending to Don Ivan's will, his concubine, his toy doll, his catspaw.

 "I'm positive." She took a deep breath. "I want to meet them."

 He searched her face, his eyes questing and intense. Whatever he found didn't satisfy him. "Will you tell me what you found out about the pod that made you choose the Furies?"

 "Eventually, I guess." When I've learned to cope with it. When I can bear to unravel the web of lies they made so carefully and so thoroughly. "But not now. Just...understand that it was enough."

 Riose gave her a curt nod, slipping back into formality. "I'll see it's done."

"Thank you," she said.

 "Don't thank me. I've done you no favour."

 It had begun. Now there was no backing down: no way but forward.

 Forward to escape, she thought grimly. I will not be another of the pod's fatalities, I will not be a victim beneath their blind eyes, brought down by apathy. I want my freedom - and I've got a fight on my hands.

 One I have to win.

 This was his guilty secret: sweat trickling down his back as he stared at the phone. So often when he spoke about the Furies, he was flippant and cool. Inside, he was always anything but. He had not entirely escaped - obligation tied him to them still, and now he was entwining himself with them once again.

 And worse, taking a friend with him.

 Riose began with Nightfire, because he anticipated the endless warfare of conversation with Blue Malefici; barbs, concessions, danger.

 So when the phone was answered, and that aloof, precise voice said, "Orage," he was steeling himself.

 "I need-" he began, and got no further.

 "I assume this is about Delphine Thetis, and that pesky blood-oath she wants to get rid of."

 Thrown, he stammered out, "It...it is."

 "The answer is yes. I'll even offer my home as the meeting place." Amusement crept into his voice. "The Furies haven't heard a request like this in a hundred years, and haven't ever agreed to one. Let's see if your mermaid can make history."

 "What do you get out of it?" he asked.

 "Entertainment, of course," Blue said, and put down the phone.

 ~*~

 Next came the Grieving Fury. He half-expected her to treat him with formality - he'd heard she kept the two aspects of her life separate, as he himself had tried to do, but Chatoya Irkil exchanged small talk and pleasantries before she gently prompted him. "I assume this isn't a social call."

 "No. I'm calling on behalf of a friend."

 "The same friend I healed at The Chill? Delphine Thetis?"

 "Yeah."

 "The same friend who has Aspen digging through the archives to find out about blood-oath?"

 "Uh...yes."

 She sighed. "I can guess why you're calling. She wants to meet us."

 "As soon as possible. Blue's offered his house." He paused then added, "I think he's looking forward to it."

 "I'm sure he is." She sounded grim. "All right, Riose. I'll hear her out. If I was going to be married to Poseidon Ivan, I'd probably do the same, especially after what he did to her."

 This was new. "What did he do?"

 Silence. "Nothing pleasant, Riose," she said. "I didn't realise you didn't know."

 "Phi never told me."

 "And you didn't look at her file?"

 "She's my friend!" he snapped, indignant.

  Her laugh was soft and startled. "What a cynic I've become. But not so cynical that I won't hear her out. I can't promise I'll help her, Riose, but I'll listen to what she has to say, and I'll judge her fairly."

 "That's more than enough," he assured her.

 "Sometimes I wonder," she said, and she too hung up, leaving him feeling hopeful.

 ~*~

 He left Therese until last, knowing she would not accept anything less than his presence. Their relationship was a strange one, dual-sided as a coin. On the one side was his sister, always teasing him, pushing him, guiding him where she thought it necessary. On the other sat the Viper Fury, imperious, complex and contrary. And dangerous. Very dangerous. She moved from one to the other with terpsichorean swiftness, so he was never sure where he stood with her.

 It was the Viper Fury who let him in, scorn gleaming in her black eyes, a meaningless smile on her lips.

 "Sit down," she said, fitting deed to words. "It's been a while."

 "You were busy," he pointed out, hearing the accusation.

 She tilted her head. "Never too busy for family, even little brothers who don't call."

 He bared his fangs at her, as he had when he was young and loved to try and scare her with his ferocious faces. "I'm here, aren't I?"

 "So you are. But - call me a cynic - I don't think it's a social visit. What brings you to my door?"

 "Delphine Thetis," he answered.

 Her eyes narrowed. "The pod girl. What does she want with the Furies? Or has someone finally told her the truth about her parents?"

 Another puzzling allusion. He was almost beginning to wish he had read Phi's file. But he couldn't profess ignorance in front of Therese, so he feigned indifference.

 "That old story? No. She wants to break a blood-oath her family made."

 Interest sparked in her face. "Does she indeed. Do all your friends want to be human, Riose?"

 You would see it that way. "She doesn't want to be human. She just doesn't want to marry Don Ivan."

 "Hmm. She's thinking with her heart and not her head then," Therese remarked. "If she put her mind to it, she could make him her puppet, an ego like his. Still, I can't fault her courage." Her eyes fixed him, intense. "Or yours."

 Mine…? "What do you mean?" he said cautiously.

 "It's about time you stopped toying with that girl, don't you think? Celia Slone, that's her name. Not hard to find out, Riose." Throaty, slow, she let the implicit threat dangle. "You don't feed from her, you treat her like an equal, and you let her know about us. People have begun to wonder whether she should be alive."

 Heat rushed up his body, mixed with the chill of fear. "She's just a friend."

"She's human, little brother. They weren't made to survive our world."

 "I know," Riose answered, meeting her eyes - so dark, so much older than her years, familiar and alien at once. And gentler than they used to be. "You've told me often enough. I got the message a long time ago."

 "And chose to ignore it," she commented. There was no anger there, only a kind of weariness. "She will break, you know, one way or another - and you'll have only yourself to blame. Hope she forgives you, because I doubt you'll ever be able to forgive yourself."

 He doubted she realised that bitterness laced her voice, faint, but discernible to one who knew her so well.

 There had been a human boy, years ago who had intrigued his sister. She had hunted him and played with him, as was her way, and then something had happened between them - something that had left scars on her, invisible, deep, wrenching. She never talked about him, nor was it easy to define exactly how she had changed - Riose could only say that she lived her life as if in the boy's shadow, which stretched long and black across time, thrown by whatever sunset he'd vanished in.

 Is that why you speak to me of forgiveness? Are we so alike, still searching, still hoping?

 "I'll protect her," he said, only hearing the insult - as you did not - when it was too late, when the words were splattered across the air.

 But her mouth merely drooped into a sad curl. "If you mean that, Riose, leave her be. It will spare you both, I promise."

 "Why do you care?" he demanded, truculent. Who was she to tell him how to live? He was tired of hiding from his friends. "She's nothing to do with you."

 "She's someone you love," she said, her voice neutral, careful. "And I may not like it but...I do understand."

  Riose stared, astonished by the confession. "Do you?" he blurted.

 Her feline smile held mockery. "Perhaps I too know something of love, even if it is only for a little brother who doesn't know any better. But be careful, Riose. You're not as tough as that arrogant brat who got himself admitted to Nightfire all those years ago."

 "I don't think that's a bad thing."

 "You wouldn't." She surveyed him and then said, "Ask me what you came here to ask."

 "Will you help Phi?" he said, hearing the plea in his voice.

 "Yes. But tell your siren she had better sing for her life. Nothing less will do."

 All emotion was gone from her. Her eyes were vast and deep as an underground lake, and he had no doubt she meant it.

 He didn't mean to, but the question escaped. "What about Celia?"

 "She's your concern. I have no interest in her, but I can't speak for others."

 He opened his mouth - and she cut him off with a single glance.

 "Go away, Riose. You have what you wanted. Go back to your life - and try not to ruin it."

 He went.

 ~*~

 She walked down to the lake that night as she had every night before. It was her bolthole, her sanctuary. Yet now, coming to it on the wings of Iry's revelation, it took on a new and sinister light that made her stomach turn to think of it.

 She could find no peace. The old funeral rite echoed bitterly in her mind - she knew just what the waters brought back to her on the foam of every wave - until even the slap of the swell seemed mockery.

Why was she even here? There were no answers, only all these old, hidden truths circling with the relentless patience of vultures.

 And then she felt his presence, and understood exactly why she had come.

 "I didn't know if you'd come back," Phi said, and silently, the words flowered inside her like orchids to hang, vibrant, new, astonishing.

 But I hoped.

 ~*~

 Zeke stepped from the shadows. "Neither did I."

 "Were you here then, too?" she asked. Her voice was low and quiet but held an edge of wariness, as if she was expecting an answer she didn't want to hear. "Did you know?"

 "Know what?"

 Her tone eased. "About my grandparents."

 "Did...something happen to them?"

 Whether it was laughter or gasp, the noise she made was outraged. "You could say that. The pod drowned them because my parents didn't do what they were supposed to."

 He was an intruder, more truly than he had been when she was just a voice around which he wrapped his dreams, layer on layer.

  "I'll leave you alone," he said.

 She whipped around, her eyes imploring, one hand stretched out to him. And her voice was throaty and poignant, striking him hard.

 "Don't go."

 In those two words, he heard an echo of all those requiems that she had poured forth to the night sky.

 "I don't want to be alone here," she said quietly. Her smile was crooked and sad. "It's the only place where I can be...me. No one needs me to be strong or to pretend not be afraid. I don't have to be the dutiful daughter, or pretend I don't care what the pod say behind my back."

 "I'm sorry," Zeke whispered, knowing it was inadequate.

 He could feel her still, as he had been able to when he rescued her from the pit. That was new, and a little frightening - somewhere in the core of him, she rippled like water disturbed by a thrown stone, delicate and ever-changing. He didn't understand why it was: only that he knew her heart as if it beat against his own. He felt her grief and her anger, and ached for her.

  "Sorry," she said, the word acid on the air. "I've heard that a lot. They're all so sorry about what happened. But here it is, happening again. Another blood-oath made to be broken. Another girl drawn to the boy with fire in his eyes."

 His world went quite still, quite silent. "Me?"

 "You," she said. "My friends think you're dangerous. They're probably right. But I don't think you're a danger to me."

 He opened his mouth to tell her the truth - and felt the first knot of pain, furled beneath his ribs as Avy's vow took hold. He changed his warning to a neutral, "Why not?"

 "Don't you know?"

 Zeke could only look at her blankly. "Know what?"

 "I thought about it. Why you came to listen to me every night. Why I kept coming back here - why I came tonight. And it seems so obvious now."

 "What does?"

 Phi blinked. "You really don't know, do you?" she said with something close to amusement. "You're my soulmate."

 ~*~

 "What are they doing?" Finn elbowed him. "I can't make out anything."

 "Just talking, I think," reported Riose from the reassuringly thick undergrowth. Part of him knew that this was underhanded, and that Phi would murder the pair of them if she had any idea they were watching her.

 "Huh. Bet that won't last." The witch squinted out in the darkness. "Are they lying down? Oh my god! Is she-"

 "That's a tree, Finn," he sighed. "They're over there."

 "Over where?"

 He silently cursed his friend's complete lack of night vision. "Never mind. Just believe me when I say nothing nefarious is going on."

 "Good. I don't trust that guy."

 Riose refrained from pointing out that Finn didn't trust anyone with a Y chromosome who showed the faintest trace of interest in his female friends. Besides, he agreed. Whatever this Zeke was, power wafted from him like smoke, a constant low-level presence. "Keep it down. If she hears us, we're dead meat."

 "Sorry." The lull didn't last. "You think he's really her soulmate?"

 He hesitated. He'd mulled over it, discussed it with Jo while they waited outside Iry's house, and something she'd said had stayed with him.

 "He's dangerous," she'd agreed with a little nod. "But so what? We all are. And when I walked in...there was this atmosphere between them. Something happened."

 "What?" he'd asked.

 Her eyes narrowed, and then she said slowly, "Intimacy of a kind that scares the hell out of me, darling. The way they looked at each other, no one and nothing else existed in the world. It was empty except for him and her and whatever they saw in each other. And Phi wasn't the slightest bit afraid."

 Now, as Riose watched this girl, this friend, this utterly unknown creature who was still so unafraid, he answered, "I think so."

Finn swore. "Then he'd better not hurt her."

"Not on our watch."

 Both of them knew it meant late nights, lies, hours spent scratched and itching in the prickly undergrowth. Until they were sure Phi was as safe as she could be, though, this was the only option-

 A hand pinched his neck so hard he had to muffle a yelp.

 Oh, no.

 "Boys, boys," came the amused chiding of Jo from where she was sat on a groaning Finn's back. "I thought we might find you here."

 It was Celia causing him severe pain and equally severe regret at getting caught. "I knew you weren't going to drop this stupid idea," she hissed in his ear. "I've seen that look on your face a million times."

 "Acute agony?" The soft smell of her was maddening, spicy and exotic as Scherezade. It brought his predatory urges rising to the surface and he stamped down on them firmly.  

 "No, your road to hell look."  

 "My what now?"

 "It's the one where you're thinking 'it's for the best' even when you know the rest of us would disagree," Jo explained helpfully.

 "Acute agony comes later, when you've done the stupid deed and been caught," Celia resumed, digging her nails into his skin to drive the point home. "Phi does not need you two lumps to look after her."

 Finn managed to raise his head from the dirt to say, "She's snuggling up to the supernatural equivalent of lighter fluid. I'd say she really does."

 "Really?" demanded Celia, her voice a low, harsh hiss. "You think you have the right to make those decisions for her? Then what makes you so different from her parents, idiot? What makes you any different from Don Ivan?"

 And he couldn't answer. Neither of them could, because Celia had struck it true.

 "You can't live her life for her. You can't keep her safe. And there is no way in hell you can know her own heart better than she does."

 When Celia let go of him, Riose turned to face her with an apology stuttering on his lips, but the grimness of her face, the glittering shards of her eyes made him reconsider. She was too angry to take it as anything but an affront.

 Finn, however, had not gleaned such wisdom. "It isn't her heart that bothers me. It's his. What does she know about him?"

 "More than you or I, darling, if he is her soulmate." Jo might have let him up but she looked like she was seriously considering squishing him again. "Let it be."

 "But-"

 She grabbed his hair and twisted. Finn winced.

  "It wasn't a suggestion," Jo purred.

 He ceded at last, muttering, "I just don't want her hurt."

 She sighed, and her fingers tangled in his hair briefly, tender, comforting. "None of us do. But it's her choice."

 Celia had lost her ire, but her face was no less bleak and when she spoke her words had the clarity of a diviner parting time to glimpse the future. "You've seen what happens when you only live for other people, Finn. You've seen her mother."

 That shut him up as nothing else could. "All right," he said gruffly. "Let's get out of here."

 ~*~

Phi had expected a multitude of reactions. Disbelief had not been on the list.

"That's not possible."

 "Why not?"

 "How can I have a soulmate?" he demanded. "I was made, not born."

 "So were the mer," she said levelly. "Do you think Ryar would have made anything soulless?"

 A sudden smile sprang to his mouth, and she was surprised by how glad she was to catch a glimpse of the boy who'd flirted with her at the lake. "She wouldn't know how. And it would explain a lot." He paused, and his face took on a soft, tentative quality. "I guess after so long, I just assumed I'd always be alone. It's hard to believe...a soulmate...you...me...us, you know?"

 Yes. If it were true, there was an 'us', a shapeless entity composed of words and touches and emotions, some twisting, churning lightning thing that held the promise of joy and grief in equal measure.

 I might love him. I might loathe him. And either way, I'm scared.

 But she held out her hand, ignoring the butterflies that swept around her stomach, and dropped all the shields that she kept around her mind. "There's an easy way to find out."

  As they stood there, fire and water, she realised just how much she wanted it to be so - to know that she was not alone, had never truly been alone in all those nights when the waters absorbed her tears and her voice, that he had been waiting as she had; hoping, yearning, not understanding that the gap in her heart was shaped to fit him. It subsumed her fear, it kept her steadfast in the silent night.

  And then he took her hand-

  She was awash in sensation, gasping, astonished. Knowing it was true was no substitute for this - for  warm white light that dazzled her like a desert sun; of heat that swept over her with tidal inevitability, and then...

 Him. She could put no better word to it than that. She was two, bisected: she was the girl stood at the water's edge gripping his hand so tight that the pain impinged - barely - on the edge of this place, and she was elsewhere, surrounded by everything he was, almost overwhelmed by it. Beside a silver sea which might have been water and might have been fire, she stared at him, and was amazed.

  He blazed in this other place, the true fire that he hid under a human shell. It was a shell, she realised, an empty thing that could only throw out a feeble echo of what he truly was.

 His hair was a pale gold that she thought shifted in unseen winds before she realised it was fire; his skin glowed as if with the deep heat of metal in a forge, and beyond it all in this place that was not a place, his power. Only now, feeling the force of some apocalyptic inferno held back solely by his choice - his control - did she understand just how little she had grasped of his strength.

 He could have blasted her to ash with a touch. And equally, he could burn her up inch by precious inch, and turn the lake to steam, the trees to charcoal at the same instant without needing to think about it. She knew now why they had named him angel, djinni, devil.

 You said you were fire and I didn't realise what you meant. I thought it was a metaphor, but it isn't.

 I understand now.

 Fear rose in her - and then she looked into his eyes, and saw they were unchanged, and full of awe and utterly open to her.

 "I won't hurt you," he said, and she knew it for a vow, fierce, intent. "I promise."

 He could not lie - not here, not to her.

 After the last few days, she expected to be cynical and aloof, to bar her heart against any more pain. And yet she found herself half-smiling, feeling as if she had something true to pit against the disappointment and the lies.

 "I believe you," she said.

 And back in that colder, duller world, she let go of his hand - and he was just a boy again, with fire and wonder simmering in his eyes.

 "You really are my soulmate, aren't you?" he whispered.

 No, not just a boy. Not now.

 "Yes," she said, and left that other word unspoken, a small, bright ache filling that gap in her heart which had waited for him so long and so patiently.

 Mine.

 ~*~

 The silence existed between them like a pool then as they sat by the lake, quiet, not entirely comfortable but not hostile: merely waiting. He wanted to look at his hands, to see if the imprint of her glowed on them like a brand; he wondered if she knew what she looked like in that other place, if she knew what she looked like in this one.

 Zeke wanted to touch her again, to feel her presence like a boundless sea of grey and turquoise and dark, swirling blue, meeting him and matching him in some way that he couldn't define.

 "What happens now?" he said.

 "Now?" Her hair ruffled in the breeze, and they were close enough that strands brushed his cheek and shoulder. It was a dreadful distraction, but a welcome one.

 "Now we know."

 "What do you want to happen?"

 It was a guarded question, and for all that he knew she was his soulmate, he had not ventured into the depths of her soul, and he wouldn't until he was invited. Those were her secrets to keep, her trust to be earned.

 And what of your secrets? whispered a treacherous voice. Not by word or thought or deed.

 There has to be a way round it, he thought. I just have to find it. I need time.

 He met her eyes, turned to thunderclouds by the night sky, churning, turbulent, fierce. And beautiful, as he had always thought of her and not known it.

 "I want to come back tomorrow and see you again," he said, linking his hands around his legs so she wouldn't see them shake. "And the day after that, and the day after that. I want to have all the conversations we would have had if I hadn't been too shy to talk to you. Well. The conversations that don't involve calling me a pervert or a stalker, that is."

 She inclined her head, eyelashes tilted, coy, a half-smile on her mouth. "I guess that depends how many times you saw me naked."

 "Just the once. And I didn't mean to. Not that it wasn't, you know, a nice sight..."

 "Nice?"

 The arch curl in her voice released tension he hadn't realised he felt. They were playing again, as they had been when they were two strangers by the lake. "Obviously when I say nice, I mean amazing."

 "Damn right you do."

 He grinned, made bold. "So will you meet me again?"

 "I think I might," she agreed, but under the flippancy there was a weight to the words that thrilled him. "Provided you promise not do anything to besmirch my reputation."

 "Are you sure you want me to promise that?"

 Her eyes were smoky and unreadable, but her voice had a note of laughter. "For now. Until I know you better."

 He held up a hand like a Boy Scout swearing an oath. "No besmirching without your express permission, until you know me better."

 "Good enough." She leaned forward, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of hunger in her eyes, an echo of his own desire in the bow of her arms propping her on the ground, in the space she stole between them. "Tell me something about you I don't know."

 "But...that's everything," he pointed out.

 Her eyes danced. "Zeke, I'm getting to know you better."

 Oh. "What do you want to know?"

 "Anything. Something...no one else knows."

 He hesitated, not because he didn't know what to tell her but because it was hard to break a lifetime of silence, of keeping his thoughts within fortifications, deeply buried because the only opinion he was required to hold was whatever Avy ordered. The first word was a release and every one after was saturated with guilty pleasure.

 "I'm scared of spiders," he confessed.

  "What? Really?"

 She was smiling, and he couldn't help but smile back because it was so stupid. "Really. It's something about the way they move - their legs, they just scuttle. I used to incinerate them, back in dragon times, but then one day I flashfried a spider that turned out to be a courtier sneaking away from an affair. Now I don't dare in case I wind up with another naked man rolling around on my floor."

 "Let me get this straight. You're a big fiery demon, and you're unmanned by bitty things with eight legs."

 "Some of them are not bitty!" he said indignantly. "And have you seen how many eyes they have? It's like there's dozen of tiny minds watching you."

 She snorted and it turned into full-blown chortling. "That…that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard."

 "Well, let's hear something better then, Miss Congeniality," he challenged. "Tell me something about you I don't know."

 She fell silent, and he could see she was making a decision. At last, she said in a voice soft as the whisper of breaking waves, "The first song I ever heard was 'Beyond The Sea'. I could sing along to it before I learned to talk properly. My dad used to play it to me every night. He won't play it anymore."

 Sadness twisted her mouth, and she seemed reduced, curled in like a flower against the frost.

 Meaning to comfort, he reached for her, just to brush the back of her hand, but she reached for him too and suddenly their fingers twisted together, and she was clutching him so tight her nails bit into his skin.  The soulmate link whirred into life, and he caught her sorrow, and with it, a welter of fragmented thoughts: two people dancing in a warm room, massive to a child's eyes...it was a sad song, really, a love song - and he didn't play it because of someone...  

 She let go and Zeke thought she would vanish into the night, the brief, dizzying intimacy too much. She was poised for flight, muscles tense as if all that held her was her stare searching his face.

 "I'm scared too," he said softly. It was true. What lay before them was immense, an intimacy that knew no impediment and no end. It was entirely possible to lose your own identity beneath the onslaught of a soulmate link if you were not strong enough. He had seen it happen: it was not some benign force of destiny - it was an urge primal and violent, spawning hatred as easily as love, terror as easily as wonder. To surrender to it required tremendous hope.

 He had thought all his hope lost; he had been wrong. It had burst forth like the genie from the lamp, laying forth wishes and dreams.

 She gave no answer - but then he felt her fingers, fumbling for his.

 And into the darkness, Phi whispered, "Tell me something about you I don't know."

 Everything I can, he thought as he unravelled his heart in front of her, a boy and girl holding hands by the lake. Everything I am.

 Phi got out of bed the next day with something to look forward to.

 Her mind was out by the lake, beside Zeke once more, listing all the things he had told her, remembering the warmth of his hand in hers.

 She smiled at herself in the mirror, feeling ridiculously light and happy and full of hope.

 ~*~

 Don Ivan was woken by pain. It sheared right through his body, fingers to feet, and he could do nothing but curl up around it, snarling into his pillow. Ragged breath in, even that small motion hurt.

 It felt like cramp, like every muscle in his body had seized up in spiteful unity. His fingers were hooked into claws, his calves locked into rigid bars. Maybe it was a heart attack. Meningitis. Maybe-

 And then, between stabs of pain, he knew.

 Three days, the hag had said. The drug had worn off, and he'd forgotten to go back.

 If it was a drug, maybe he could wait it out. Part of him tried not to remember her saying I'd recommend you come here before the cramps start, or you may not make it back.

Shuddering, sweat beading on his shoulders and neck, he waited for the pain to stop.

~*~

When she saw her mother, Phi felt her heart sink. Adrift in the bed, she was thin and grey and small against the deliberately bright hues of the bedroom. Her wedding ring seemed to weigh down her bony fingers, its winking gold all the colour Marie Thetis had left.

 "Your breakfast is getting cold," pointed out Phi.

 Her mother gave her a faint smile. "I'm not that hungry. You look very pretty today, sweetheart."

 "Do I?" She accepted the change of subject. Easier, that, than the alternative. "Must have inherited it from you."

 For some reason, that wiped the smile clean off her face. "You've grown up so much in the last couple of years. You'll be an adult soon."

 "Not that soon! I'm only sixteen, Mum." She didn't understand the sadness in her mother's eyes. "Too young to do…anything."

 Even that subtle hint was too much. Her face hardened. "Like get married?"

 "Exactly like that," she said, nervous.

 "Do you think we did this to make your life difficult?" her mother demanded. "I've seen it, Phi. I didn't just do it for the good of the pod - if I hadn't supported the blood-oath-"

 "You supported it?" She reeled. It was the most tremendous betrayal she could imagine. "How could you? After last time?"

 She knew the words were unwise the instant they passed her lips. Her mother's face was terrible, her eyes blazing with a cold light that seemed the only life in her withered body.

 "Do not question my motives. Everything I have done - everything - has been for the good of the pod, and for your own happiness. Do you think I would do anything to hurt you? I gave birth to you. I have spent my life working to give you the best of all futures - and believe me, Delphine, I know exactly which future that is."

 "Really?" she challenged, reckless. Having gone so far already, she had nothing to lose. "I thought you couldn't see everything."

 For the first time in weeks, a flush streaked her mother's cheeks like warpaint. "Do I need to see every minute of your life? This will take you to happiness. If you marry Don, the pod will have another Golden Age. You'll have children who adore you - two of them, you'll end the feud between the wolves and us, you'll be everything I could possibly have hoped for." Her voice cracked. "Can you blame me for wanting that?"

 "But it isn't what I want. I won't be happy with him. I don't even like him."

 "You won't be the first to marry someone you didn't like." The hardness of her words was barely softened by her soothing tone. "But time will cure that. You will come to love him, Phi. Ask Jess. She didn't want your godfather either, but that changed."

 "So have the times. I don't want to love someone because I've got no other option. That's…that's awful." Phi searched for the right words, the ones that would make her mother see. "How can you say that to me? You didn't marry Laurie. Are you telling me that you'd have given up all of this if you had the choice? Dad, me, all of it?"

 She didn't flinch; all her gentleness vanished. "If I had known, I would have learned to love Laurie and forgotten your father."

 The words were a knife to her heart. "How..." she whispered. "How can you say that?"

 "Don't look at me like that. You'd say the same if you had gone to the lake that morning, if you had seen…"

 "I might think it," she said, lost. She hardly knew the hard-eyed woman in the bed. "But I don't think I would have said it. Not even to the daughter you clearly regret so much."

 She couldn't stay any longer. If her mother called after her, she didn't hear it.

 ~*~
 
  The pain was getting worse. His vision was blurred and greying, and breathing was difficult around the knots and whorls in his chest. He slipped into brief, hallucinogenic dreams. Cartoon creatures, shapeless things with great triangular teeth and multitudes of eyes chased him through the woods. He twisted and turned, body bent into strained shapes.

 Rough shaking rousted him from the nightmares. "Don. Son! What's wrong?"

 It was his father. He'll be so angry with me, he thought fuzzily. "Avy. Took…took something from her."

 A great stillness existed between them, and then Laurence Ivan said huskily, "What?"

"Drink. Dragon horn. Made me…strong." His whole body jolted into convulsions. He couldn't stop - he was pain and rattling bones and fear, he was dying surely…hands clutching him, a litany of his name in a panicked voice…

 It stopped. Desperate, he searched for the blur of his father and found it. "Need more. Need to go back. Take me, please."

 There was no answer. He knew it was a difficult request - to ask his father to return to the cave that haunted him so, but he was his son, he had to help, he had to…

 "Please!"

 Still no answer. Then he felt hands sliding under him, gentle as when he'd been a child and demanded to be slung on his father's shoulders, and Laurence Ivan lifted him as if he weighed nothing. There was no sound except his breath, quick and jagged and frightened as Don's own.

 Safe, trusting his father, he slid back into the voracious grasp of nightmare and pain.

 ~*~

 After that, Phi needed comfort. The kind of comfort you could only get from people who understood the sheer maddening ways of parents and constricting traditions of the Nightworld.

 Most kids grew out of treehouses at a young age. Her friends had been no different. Unfortunately, they'd grown out of treehouses and into trees.

 The old oak was out on the very edges of the wood, and so vast and obviously unnatural that only a witch could have grown it. Its sprawling branches were perfect for five or six people to sit on, and so she found her friends. Finn was nervous as ever and clinging to his branch for dear life; Jo and Riose were quite comfortable and Celia reclined in pride of place at the junction of all the myriad boughs.

 Their chorus of greetings startled a sparrow into flight. She waved up at them, and their grins, their health, their very presence were a potent antidote.

 She scrambled up next to Finn, who gave her a sleepy grin. "What time do you call this?"

 "Sorry. I had an argument with Mom," she said glumly.

 "About the wedding?" Celia said, her face understanding.

 "Of course. She won't back down. You know what? She even supported the Ivans when they suggested blood-oath."

 Indignant exclamations filled the air.

 "Yeah," she said. "She'd seen it. My perfect future shacked up with Don. Two kids, apparently."

 "Oh, hell no!" Finn yelped. "That means you'd have to sleep with him at least twice! Where's the life where you and I are living in sin and raising a brood of ginger arsonists?"

 His silliness made her laugh. "I don't think Mom would consider that a perfect future."

 "And she's quite right," Jo declared, "any future which involves bringing more ginger children into the world is clearly a vision of anarchy."

 "Hey!" Finn objected, stroking his hair protectively. He gestured at Phi. "You're closest. Push her out of the tree. Show her the wrath of a ginger assassin."

 "So she won't back down?" Riose said quietly, ignoring the banter. Phi knew his question was motivated by more than friendship.

 "Of course not," she sighed, yet their flippancy had swept away most of her pessimism. Inevitable as the Furies were, at least she had some chance of success. "You know my mother. It took a year before she'd let any of you in the house." She glanced at Finn. "And she's still not sure about you."

 "For the last time, I didn't mean to set the curtains alight," he said patiently. "It just happened. It's hard being a growing boy, you know. Normal people get mood swings. I got spontaneous combustion."

 "Speaking of firebugs…" Jo said, far too casually, "have you seen yours lately?"

 Suddenly four pair of very interested eyes were on her, and she couldn't stop the smile on her face. "Yes."

  "Ooh, you look like the cat that got the cream," Celia remarked.

Jo's eyes glittered. "Something tasty, at any rate."

She couldn't fault their almost psychic ability to know when something was going on. "I was, um, at the lake last night."

 "And what, um, happened that put the smile on your face?" Jo said slyly.

 A blush scorched her cheeks. "I met him."

 Finn was scowling. That was nothing new. "Your stalker?"

 "My soulmate," she corrected.

 There was a small shocked silence, then a barrage of questions assaulted her.

 "Darling, so he is, then! Did you get up to no good?"

 "What was it like?"

 "Did you find out what he is?"

 "You understand that doesn't make it any less creepy, right?"

 She ignored the last question, which was of course Finn. "Ri, he's an elemental. Fireblade made him. And would I tell you if I had, Jo?" To Celia, who looked eager for every detail she said, "It was…amazing. I don't really know how to describe it. It was…scary and huge and fantastic all at once."

 "Scary?" echoed her human friend, frowning.

 "Yeah. Every time I touch him, it's there, this pull, and I could get so close to him that we wouldn't be two people anymore, you know? We'd just be one. There'd be no difference between my thoughts and his, nothing he wouldn't know, no privacy or mystery or anything but each other every minute of every day."

 Jo grimaced. "Not my cup of tea."

 "Mine either," she confessed. "He's my soulmate, but he's still a stranger. I don't want him to be a stranger."

 "Pity," muttered Finn, loud enough for them all to hear. She gave him a pinch, and he glared back.

 "Then what do you want?" Riose said, his eyes piercing.

 She struggled for clarity. "I want to get to know him. I want to know if I like him enough for it to be more than…than…than some guy I happen to share this random connection with. If he's going to know all my secrets, I need to know he's the sort of person I can trust with them."

 He nodded. "Sounds like a good idea. You said Fireblade made him?"

 "He said…" His words came back to her. "He was a gift for a woman. A slave."

 Finn's eyes were very blue, and a little peevish. "Could be a sob story."

 "It's easy to check," Riose said thoughtfully. "Someone, somewhere will know."

 She had a feeling she knew who the someone might be. From her disturbed expression, Celia did too. But…but part of her demanded confirmation - was afraid that it would be a lie or a trick. Most of all, she feared that Don was somehow involved. It wouldn't be the first time.

 "Do your parents know?" For all her languid poise, there was nothing idle in Jo's question.

 "No," she said simply. The rest she kept to herself, but couldn't help wondering: would it change things? But it always came back to her mother's words, back to if I had known, I would have learned to love Laurie and forgotten your father.

 They didn't ask, but she knew that eventually she would tell them everything. For now, it was too raw, too astounding for her, but when it became real, she would need them all more than ever. They were her family, after all, just as much as her father and her mother, who regretted her.

~*~

 World seesawing, distorted, the sky lurching. Roaring lions, biting him; jaws on his arms, his legs, everywhere. He was being eaten alive, but he was still screaming and shouting, or was that only in his head?

 Darkness above and below, all bumping, sounds of monsters in the dark - wheezing, wailing, thundering things…

 Cold liquid that spread through his body and then sweet, sudden relief.

 ~*~

 Don came to in her throne room, feeling as if he had slept for a hundred years and woken hungry for the world. He felt invincible again, the rented power coursing through his veins, but now he knew it for a lie.

 Hands helped him up. His father was wan, eyes dark and distressed. "I warned you," he said heavily.

 "I know. I thought…"

 "You were wrong."

 Recovered? Avy's voice was sugary-sweet. Perhaps you will listen to me now, Poseidon. Be glad your father is a wiser man.

 Laurence Ivan wouldn't look at her. "Not wise enough to protect my son."

 "It wasn't the pod I wanted."

 The name brought life back to him; he raised his head and said slowly, "I did have her. She was taken from me."

 "Don't play your games with me. I am done with them."

 "You have my son." The glance he flicked at Don was accusatory. "You don't need me. And you can offer me nothing I want."

 Not even a dying woman's last hours? A curious grinding sound reached them: the horns scraped between her fingers. Marie Thetis will be dead within a month, my word upon it. Help me, and I will give you the last of her life.

 "The dregs, is that it?" he said, hostility pouring from him.

 His father's face twisted, and Don saw that he had been wrong to think him broken, useless. The ambition burned just as keenly in him; the goal was different, that was all. He had always known that his father did not love his mother as he did Marie Thetis. He had not known that the love was more than mere ash.

 Triumph softened Avy's voice, mimicking compassion. And wouldn't you want to hear what she has to say?

 So my mother was right, thought Don. She was the second choice - she still is the second choice.

 He didn't doubt his father's love for him, for what else could have persuaded him to come back to this heartless cavern knowing what might wait there for him? Yet it made him uneasy, a little afraid, to think that his family was not the secure triad he had thought; his mother was the outsider, passive, waiting for love that would never come.

 He pitied her. Yet it never occurred to him to despise his father for it.

 "What do you want?" Laurence Ivan said in a low voice.

 A trifle, she said, and as her words unfolded, Don Ivan began to understand - and to respect - the immensity of the plan she laid before them, and the riches she would bring them.

 It was worth the price, he thought as his eyes lingered on the empty cup and the droplets beading its rim. In the next two weeks, as he followed her instructions to the letter, as he drank down her elixirs again and again, the thought repeated, and became conviction.

 No matter her price, it was worth it. It must be for his father to pay it twice.

~*~

 After that discussion, Phi found that life fell into a pattern while she waited for Riose to come back to her with a date to meet the Furies. It wouldn't be soon, he warned her: they would not set aside their high games for one bothered shapeshifter. Weeks, maybe even months.

 She avoided the pod except for Jess and her parents. Even seeing one of them in the street made her wonder if they had known about her grandparents…if they would do the same again.  

 Her friends wrapped her up in days of gossip and idle amusement. Jo told them coyly about a certain boy she had in mind, and fed them developments. Riose was quieter, his smiles rare and fleeting while Finn grumbled constantly about anything that came to mind. Celia scolded and chivvied, but Phi caught the anxious looks she sometimes gave Riose. The days peeled off like petals from a rose, and they were all uncertain what lay at the end.   

 Her conversations with her mother reached polite stalemate. They did not discuss her marriage: Marie Thetis seemed to think it forgotten and Phi didn't trouble to correct her. She was still picking at her food and had grown thin and hollow as a reed. Worry soon replaced any anger Phi felt.

 As for her father…he was working harder than ever and at home he spent most of free time with her mother, trying to coax food into her. Often they spoke in low, intimate voices, and every time laughter blossomed on the air, Phi felt relief sluice through her. If they were laughing, it couldn't be that bad.

  Sometimes they all sat together and chatted about old family holidays, the pod, anything past or current. Never the future. After all, her mother already knew it.

 Phi was afraid that she and her father did too, but she pushed back the fear. Her mother had been this ill before and recovered. That didn't make it any better each time it happened, but it gave her hope. She needed it badly.

 And chasing hope, every night she slipped out of the house after her parents had gone to bed, and made her way down to the lake.

  It felt like chains falling off with the first lungful of warm night air. Against the confines of her mother's room, the sky seemed limitless, ever-changing as the yellow walls were fixed, the careless spray of stars bright counterpoint to the pills lined up in neat bottles on the bedside table. The pale moon glowed above it all, freed from her nest of clouds while Marie Thetis endured the long confinement in her bed.

 It was all that her home was not: wild, limitless, alive.

 Phi didn't walk down to the lake anymore - she ran, wind snatching at her hair. The minutes mattered suddenly. He mattered.

 He was always there, sitting on the springy patch of ground that they had deemed their own, placed to catch the breeze that carried away some of the turgid heat. And every night, she watched for the look on his face when he saw her, and every night she was not disappointed when he got to his feet, delight unashamed on his face: the boy with the fever-bright eyes, burning for her.

 ~*~

 It had been awkward the second evening, last night's confessions between them. But then he'd given her a shy and enchanted smile and said only, "I didn't know if you'd come back."

 "And miss your spider stories?"

 Zeke's sigh broke the tension. "I'm going to regret telling you that, aren't I?"

 She grinned, seating herself, and patted the ground beside her. "Oh, I don't know. It was kind of charming. Once you got past the crazy."

 "Fear of spiders is not crazy," he argued, settling down.

 "No. But fear of spiders because 'it's like there's hundreds of tiny minds watching you' is."

 He mock-scowled. There was a respectable gap between them, and part of her felt tempted to close it - to lean into that gentle curve between his neck and collarbone. She didn't though: it was too intimate. "And I suppose you aren't afraid of anything?"

 "Could be," she said nonchalantly. "Of course, you could always ask, and find out."

 He leaned in, one arm stretching behind her back but not touching her. His breath tingled on her ear, and his voice was husky and teasing. "If you insist. So, Delphine Thetis…"
   
 And all her nights were poised and perfect upon the simple request:

  "Tell me something about you I don't know."

 ~*~

 And so night after night, she learned and was learned: not knowing what he might choose to tell her, only sure that it was true.

 "The first sound I remember was the ocean," he told her. "Fireblade made me there - forged me, I suppose - because he wanted to be able to destroy me if I went wrong. I came from the fire spitting sparks, not knowing anything except how hungry I was and how afraid, and then I heard the waves crashing."

 He paused, his face wistful.

 "I thought it was someone's heart beating, like mine. It was cool and dark and peaceful, everything I wasn't, and it seemed like heaven." Zeke sighed, but his eyes gleamed with humour. "And then of course Fireblade opened his mouth and spent the next three hours spouting triumphal, self-glorifying tripe about how amazing he was and how he'd made me in his own image. He turned out to be wrong about that one, thank god, because the thought makes me die a little bit inside every time I think it."

 ~*~

 "I can speak six languages," he said one evening.

 "Six! I can get by in Spanish, and that's it."

 "Two of them are dead," he pointed out. "And the other four have changed a lot. But I needed to know them. I travelled a lot. Inevitable, really, if you happen to live in the court of the Soulless King when he's having a world-conquering week."

 "Say something in one of them," she entreated.

 He looked a little embarrassed, but then he said something soft and liquid and low that sent pleasant goosebumps rippling over her skin. When he finished his eyes were full of heat, and she felt breathless.

 "What did it mean?"

 "Just an old poem," he said elusively. "It was quite famous for a while."

 She'd never seen a poem that could put that sort of look on anyone's face. "Tell me," she beseeched him. "Please."

 "There are songs which are beautiful and songs which are true, and they are just music. Then there are songs which are both, and they are the beginning of wonder."

 She smiled. "That's lovely." Then a thought struck. "That's a very short translation."

 His gaze slid away.

"Is there more?"

 "I don't know how to translate it," he said in what was an obvious and appalling lie. Curious, she touched his cheek before he could think to stop her - and felt the heat there, echoing that which had simmered in his eyes.

 "What does it mean?" she persisted.

Exposed, he looked slightly panicky. "Not tonight. I need time to think about it."

Unsatisfied at this half-victory, she said, "But you will tell me?"

 "Eventually. Just not now."

 Seeping through his skin to her fingers, came a chasing, secret thought - escaping him unnoticed, she was sure. It woke a warm, restless glow in her.

 Not yet.

~*~

 Thursday rolled in like a hearse. She fled the house that night because the healer had come, bringing the whiff of futility with her. But even here she could not drive her mother from her mind. The image lingered: her hands shaking feebly, calling out for people who couldn't answer until she was drugged into sleep.

 "Tell me something about you I don't know," he said quietly.

She swallowed hard. There were other things she could tell him, but this one was omnipresent, a ghost laid over everything she did.

 "My mother…" She stumbled, not because she didn't want him to hear, but because she didn't want to say it. "My mother is dying."

 It didn't matter that her mother regretted her birth then, it only mattered that she was not getting better, that she would never dance in the living room with her father again.

 "What am I going to do without her?" she whispered. "How do you live without your mother?"

 "Phi…" he said helplessly, huskily, and the compassion in his eyes undid her.

 Quietly, because she didn't want to fuss, because she had already cried these tears a dozen times before, she drew up her knees and let her forehead rest on them.

 Why didn't you stop looking when we asked you? she asked, and the tears crawled down her face. Why couldn't you just live?

  He put a gentle arm around her, and she leaned into his shoulder. "What am I going to do?" she asked him, and Zeke offered her no answer. He only stroked her hair while she stared out at nothing, a song that her father refused to play echoing dimly in her head.

~*~

 "…and then," he said dryly, "Fireblade burst in naked, waving his namesake - well, both his namesakes, I suppose, if the rumour in the court was anything to go by - screaming that someone had violated his wife and there would be hell to pay. When he saw Ryar sitting there, I'm not sure who was more surprised. Apparently Ulryat had needed an excuse to wage war on the Eastern Lands, and that was what she came up with."

 It was the next night, and they sat facing one another, Phi shaking with laughter. She had been afraid that he would be wary of her, or that she would be embarrassed by her outburst, but he'd been waiting as usual, and the warmth in his eyes had quelled all her fears.

 "Your stories have a lot of naked people in them."

 "Product of the times. They didn't see human skin as different from fur or scales, and at that point, nudity was very much de rigueur in the court. It was a seriously unfortunate time to spend most of your life kneeling in submission."

 "How so?"

 "Imagine what was at your eye-level."

 She covered her mouth to hide a grin. "Ouch."

 "Exactly. But then Bhari arrived and brought Eastern fashion with her, and every slave in the court blessed her for it. We didn't bless her for much else, but for fashion...yep, she might have sold out her own people to Kheo, but she sold out to Prada first."

 ~*~

  The more he knew, the more Phi found herself telling him. There were certain stories she couldn't tell him, certain things she couldn't say unless he understood the people she had had all those adventures with. But until she tried to tell him, she didn't realise how difficult it was to describe her friends, to put them into tidy boxes of description and anecdote.

"I've known Celia since we were kids," she told him, and when she trailed a finger over his arm, he saw the image she held in her mind: a clear, pretty face with piercing eyes that concealed well her strident voice; a voice, in truth, that would not have been out of place on an army parade ground. Masses of wavy black hair, the caramel skin of India, a stubborn jaw. "Some horrible vampire pushed me over in the playground, and she beat him up. She's never let being human get in the way of kicking ass when she has to."

 His mouth twitched. "Sounds like someone I knew once. Who's the boy, though?"

 "What?"

 He bounced the image back to her, and to her surprise, she saw that Riose hovered behind Celia's shoulder, a faint but noticeable presence.

 "That's Riose," she said. "He was the vampire who pushed me over, actually."

 "I hope you got your own back," he said solemnly.

 "I did," she admitted. "I became his friend and stealthily borrowed large amounts of money from him over the years."

 ~*~

 Slowly, Phi grew comfortable with him, and as the nights passed, she found herself wanting to laze in the circle of his arms, as she might with Finn or Riose - but with other, wilder thoughts filling her mind. Thoughts of his mouth, curving in a certain way, of how he said her name, of the heat of his skin.

 She didn't speak these thoughts or venture any further into the link that bound them. In truth, she was a little afraid. It seemed to good to be true, too wonderful that he should be here, now; already she felt she hovered like an eagle in the high vault of the sky, that some immense, dizzying fall lay before her, and she was not sure if she had the courage for it.

 And yet every day she was bolder. It became quite thoughtless to leave her hand in his, to send him a thought, an image, a query on the wings of a touch. She knew the cadence of his words, she mocked him and teased him, she was honest and true and herself.

 She was waiting, though she didn't know what for.

 ~*~

 He was lying flat on his back, gazing up at the sky, mulling over an answer while she waited impatiently.
That night, he had been quiet for a very long time but finally he said, "The most beautiful place I ever saw was the palace of clouds. The royal family of the forestlands lived there and it was right at the very heights of the rainforest, so that every morning it appeared out of the mists as if someone had dreamed it."

 She slid onto her side, watching the rise and fall of his chest. His eyes were closed, and he looked utterly peaceful.

 "They'd grown it from the forest so that it lived still - it was full of sunlight and never silent, this huge series of rooms connected by bridges. You could always hear the rain on the leaves in the afternoon or the waterfalls running through the rooms. There were no guards or weapons, and every morning, someone sung up the sun."

 The wonder in his voice made her ache.

 "What happened to it?" she whispered.

 He opened his eyes and they were shadowy, far away from her. "Kheo tore down the palace and enslaved the people. There was no one left to lure the sun back to its halls, and so it fell into ruin. But even in another country, the slaves still sang every morning, because they said that it was all that kept darkness from the world."

 "Do you think they were right?"

 "I wasn't sure." His gaze focused on her, steady, fire rising in it, and his voice was raw and marvelling. "And then I heard you, and it seemed entirely possible that one voice could call back the sun."

 She was amazed, her breath stolen, and then she stammered out, "Me?"

How solemn he was. "There's no one else."

 Yes, she thought, feeling the truth of it ring up and down her bones. There was no one else in this night, only him, only the space between them shrinking and shrinking…

 His lips on hers were tentative, tender. The thrill of attraction she felt was a shock - and then she knew what she'd been waiting for. She was almost savage in response, heated as he was hesitant, and his gasp, his answering smile curving against her mouth felt like victory.

 And she knew what it was to be fire, to burn in his arms, hot, demanding, fierce.

 When at last air eased between them, he looked dazed. He held her like she might shatter in his arms.

 "Tell me-" he murmured, and she silenced him with a finger on his lips. Even that mere touch was electric. She had never felt more alive.

 "What was the rest of the poem?" Phi asked, sure, heart racing, all her world shrunk down to now.

 His fingers slid through her hair, reverent. "Some women are beautiful, and some women are true, and they are just women," he answered. "And there are women who are both, and they are still just women."

 His eyes were bright, afire, as if the sun had set in them - and she the voice who had called it back.

"Then there is you," he said softly. "The beginning of wonder."

When he kissed her again, for one sweet moment she saw herself as he did. How her hair tumbled about her, how candid and unwavering her gaze was; a certain wild way she had of throwing back her head in laughter.

She was astonishing, a light in his shadowed world.

 "Tell me…" he said.

 "No," she whispered. "Show me."

 It was with unsteady hands that he drew her down beside him. He sang in her blood, in her bones, in the very flush of her skin where his kisses fell and in those moments, against all the cruelty of the world, she was no longer alone.

 Then there is you, she thought. The beginning of wonder.

 Those days were bliss when Phi thought about them later; between and elsewhere days, full of potential and blushing heat. Her mind idled out by the lake, full of starry skies and him, turning inexorably away from her fear. Such times should perhaps have been ominous, swollen with gloom, but she had lived her life in the shadow of prophecy, and so - free - she thrived upon the uncertainty.

 But like all things, it ended.

 The moment she heard her father calling that Riose had come to see her, she knew. It twisted in her heart like a knot of barbed wire as she went downstairs; her peace gone, one way or another.
 
Riose knew it too. It was the way he held himself, very tall and straight, as if he were a prison guard come to escort her to the electric chair.

 Hopefully, that was a long way from the truth.

 "We haven't seen you in a while," her father was saying. "How's your mother?"

 "Mom's fine," Ri answered. "She misses the bridge nights, though."

 "Ha! She misses depriving Albert and I of all our golf money." His voice softened. "Marie misses her too. Tell your mother we'd love it if she could come to visit one night."

 Both conspicuously avoided any mention of illness. It was simply accepted, unspoken. All her friends' parents knew, and at first there had been flowers and cakes and get-well-soon cards, but soon had come and gone, and they no longer came to visit. Perhaps they thought it wouldn't be welcome, perhaps mere uncertainty kept them away - or perhaps, thought Phi with mild surprise, they had been waiting for an invitation.

 ~*~

 There had to be a way. If there was one thing Zeke was sure of, it was that: there was some way to keep Phi from the pod and Avy. He had been born in a world where the impossible was commonplace - why shouldn't he make it so again?

 He had searched the vow she made him swear, seeking some loophole. Simple as it was, he could find none. And then it occurred to him that perhaps he did not need one - he needed only to endure the pain long enough.

 The day then, found him labouring over a piece of paper in the only place where he ever found anything close to privacy. Aurora's headstone gleamed almost white in the slanting sun; he was far more focused on the words that formed slowly.

 His hand cramped - he gasped, and forced himself to form the 'e'...

 The pen skidded across the page and he was clutching his arm, which felt as if his bones were splintering in his skin. Wait for it to pass, wait and try again...

 But it didn't pass. The more he willed the pain to stop, the stronger it grew until he was snarling against it, until he knew that it was hopeless, that it would never stop-

 And just as abruptly, it was gone. He was left panting for breath, and bemused.

 Cautious now, he picked up the pen with nothing more than a twinge in his fingers, then began again.

~*~

 As they passed her mother's door, ajar as always, she spotted them. "Is that you, Riose Orage? Are you going to say hello to an old woman?"

 He stepped in with a little grin. If he was shocked at her mother's decline, he didn't show it all - instead, he went over to kiss her cheek. "You're not old, Mrs Thetis. You can't be, you're younger than my mom, and she cuts off my allowance every time I hint she's getting decrepit."

 The rustiness of her mother's laugh was painful to hear. "How is Kim?"

 "She's got a new man." Riose sounded slightly grumpy. "She keeps trying to tell me all about him."

 "Not interested, eh?" she said fondly. "Well, I would be, so tell her to give me a call! And mind you behave yourself in Delphine's room," her mother added with a flare of parental protectiveness.

 "Mo-om," she groaned. Still, it was progress. Three years ago the boys hadn't even been allowed in the house because they weren't pod and therefore weren't trustworthy.

 "I always do," Riose reassured her. "Finn's the one who misbehaves."

 Marie Thetis raised her eyes heavenwards. "Yes, I recall my curtains vanishing in a ball of fire that would have made Jerry Lee Lewis ecstatic. Go on with you then, and don't forget to tell your mother!"

 She sounded oddly wistful.

How lonely she must be, thought Phi with new, painful understanding. Hardly anyone in the pod comes to visit except when they want their future read, and they always treat her with such reverence, and almost…almost as if they're afraid of her - as if she's already a martyr to their cause.

 "Why don't you have a bridge night here?" she suggested. "Dad could bring up the picnic table, and you could invite Mrs Orage and Mr Farrier round."

 Her mother's face lit up. "Do you think they'd come?"

"Of course they would," she said fiercely, swallowing down a lump in her throat. "They'd love to see you."

 "Definitely," Riose added. "I know my mom still keeps Thursday nights free, just in case."

 The sweet, hopeful smile on her mother's face wiped away some of the lines that pain had left. "Then we'd better find something for her to do, hadn't we?"

 They left her after summoning up her father to discuss the great bridge party, and Phi found herself blinking away hot, unexpected tears.

~*~

 When they got into her room, Riose took one look, pushed the door to and then wrapped her up in a gentle hug until she felt less shaky.

 "I didn't think about it," she confessed into his shoulder. "I didn't realize how alone she is."
  
 "I didn't either. I know my mom's wanted to come and see her, but she wasn't sure if she should."

 If she had, wondered Phi, would we be in this state? Or would have my mother have talked about the marriage with the Farriers and Mrs Orage, and Mrs Slone? I don't know, but I think if she had there would have been someone else to fight my corner.

 All these years of segregation and we have hurt only ourselves.  

"So," she said, pulling herself together, "you'd better tell me why you're here."

 "You know."

 "They've set a date."

 She saw that his bottom lip was ragged, as if he'd gnawed it. "This afternoon. Three hours, Phi. Listen, I can't go in with you, I can't tell you what to say, but I know them all. You can't go in emotional or you'll make yourself just another victim to them. Be organized. Make your case. You have to be calm and logical - and bold."

 "Bold?"

 He half-smiled, but he was tense as a tightrope. "Not many people dare to be. My sister will like you for it and the Grieving Fury will respect you for it."

 "And the Demon Fury?" The name tasted odd, fairytale-foreign on her tongue.

 He hesitated. "He won't like you or respect you for it. But he might let you live. Show him a trace of fear though, and he'll crack you right open and exploit every secret you thought you had. He's always been cruel, but for some reason, he's become worse in the last few years. Fear is just a goad to him."

 "He let you leave."

 "No. He let me leave on condition, so I haven't really left at all. I owe him a death." His eyes were haunted and vulnerable. "And I don't know who, but I'm afraid I can guess. I've made a terrible mistake, Phi."

 "What could you possibly have done?" she said uncertainly.

 She would never forget the look on his face because it was a mirror of her mother's when she spoke of her past, and the choice she so regretted.  Although his voice was quiet, it was full of dread.

 "I learned to love. He won't excuse that."

~*~

 Sweat poured off Zeke as he struggled to write. The pen shook miserably, the letters barely readable. Each was more malformed than the last.

 What was I writing? Something…telling her something...

Slowly it came back through the pain. The truth. Yes. By word and thought and deed, vow be damned.

 And then he saw a reddish splotch on the paper. He stared. Another. The unmistakable scent of blood.

 He turned his hand, disbelieving. Blisters were bursting on his hand in their dozens, and suddenly he couldn't hold the pen - even the air hurt his skin, everything hurt from his fingertips to his shoulder, he was red-raw - it wouldn't stop, it wouldn't go away and for the first time in his life, Zeke knew the pain of fire.

  Awful, all-consuming, it spread over his back, and he arched away from the ground, barely lucid, his mind chattering madly: I'll stop - not again, never again, not this…

 When he came round, aching and grim with the knowledge that he would have to find some other way, nothing remained but a small, shiny mark on the ball of his thumb. He stared at it, this reminder of what he had learned: even he, who was fire, could be burned.

 ~*~

 Calm. Logical. Organised. Make my case.

 It was good advice, she had no doubt, and though apprehension underlay all her thoughts, she felt surprisingly calm and clear-headed. At last her life was back in her own hands: she would be judged on the merit of words, and passed or failed.

 Like an exam or a class paper. And then she knew what to do.

 Notepad, pens, reason. She wrote the question: why should the Furies help me to break blood-oath and to avoid my marriage?

 It was no different from any other question she'd ever been set. She could have been comparing Shakespeare to Jonson, picking holes in the European Declaration of Human Rights, arguing for war or against nuclear power.

 Just as if it were an essay and she forming an argument, she began to make notes, to write, to order her thoughts, and then to siphon the emotion from them. She clarified, she edited, she took her own heart and shaped it into oratory and saw in it a truth that was just as powerful and passionate stripped of its emotion as it had been when clad in her anger and her self-pity and all her outrage.

 It kept her busy. It kept her together. She needed both.

 ~*~

 "This is no joke," Don answered the wolf who'd spoken up with such unabashed cynicism. "It needs to be done."

 He gauged their responses. Most were thoughtful; some were eager. One or two were anxious - those, he noted carefully. He could afford no wavering.

 "By us," Susie sneered. "So we take the blame for it."

 "Who will blame you?" he asked levelly. "The one is entirely natural, and the other…a tragedy, of course, but half of them expect it already and the other half will be won round. It is necessary."

 "Killing the pod leader?" This was a new speaker, one of the nervous ones. Don marked him carefully - thin, blond, guarded. "Why? You're betrothed to the daughter, aren't you? If you get her, the pod's yours."

 "The pod is mine when Daniel Thetis dies," Don corrected. "Which is likely to be at a ripe old age. The last leader was ninety-three. I don't intend to wait fifty years to get my hands on the pod."

 "All right, but why not the seer?" the boy asked. "She's just as powerful."

 "And she's half-dead already. It won't take much to push her to the end - a few more readings, and I can convince enough people to ask for those."

 "The pod's never been without a seer." That was one of the older ones. "Never. Why's that going to change?"

 Don mentally counted to ten. "Because the first vision every seer has is their heir. When Marie Thetis was born Helga Arryn was all over her like a rash. That woman grew up knowing the instant that Helga died all the power would pass to her. But Marie Thetis has seen no one. She is the last."

 "Who's to say she's telling the truth?" demanded Susie.

 "No one in the pod has shown any signs of a seer," he said with exaggerated patience. "No extraordinary hunches. No dreams. No amazing coincidences, no unbelievable luck. They all rely on Marie Thetis to tell them the future. It's time they relied on someone else. Me."

 "And you'd make us reliant on you too," remarked the quiet boy. Seth. Sam. Something or other.

 Several of them shifted. Don considered silencing him with a little power, but decided against it. They already knew what he was capable of. Words would persuade them better than force here; and he had both in quantity.

 "I'd make you great," he said. "I'd make you more than scavengers hiding in the trees. There was a time when you were respected as we were - when we were close enough to be one people. Think of it: the best of the pack and the best of the pod, one race."

He did not speak the rest of it. A certain amount of culling would be inevitable. There were too many headstrong characters among the Pack; too many who would not be biddable. He wanted their ferocity, but he wanted them...trained. Brought to heel, if you would.

 "What do we gain?"

 He raised his eyebrows politely. "Isn't it obvious? Power. The riches of the pod. Respectability. Friendship." He smiled. "Marriage to a mermaid, if you're lucky."

 There was some laughter at that. Several of them had eyes for the pod girls, and Don had rapidly decided those he would match with the Pack to breed his new warriors. Eventually, he supposed, he would set aside Phi and find himself some worthy wolf. Among the scruffy vagrants before him, there were a few whose wildness concealed beauty.

 "So you'd just sweep aside decades of hate, is that it?" drawled the old one, whose skepticism was becoming irritating. "All for a little power?"

 Don met his eyes. "No," he said, his voice strong. "For a lot of power."

 When the old one laughed, he knew he had them.

~*~

 Waiting was the worst part. When the doorbell rang, Phi was out of the house and calling goodbyes to her parents in a flash, her stomach a Gordian knot of panic.

 She had expected silence from Riose: instead he couldn't seem to stop talking. All his knowledge of the three Furies poured out him with a sort of desperation, as if by sharing it he might save her from them.

 "...and whatever you do, don't challenge Therese about love or feelings and definitely don't tell her she lacks them. She'll either laugh at you, or she'll do her best to harm you. She would have only laughed once, but something happened - a boy, and I think perhaps she loved him, or she hated him, or she just wanted him so much that it hurt. It changed her forever, whatever it was. She won't talk about it. And she can't bear to be reminded in any way. Avoid love, Phi. It means so little to them."

 He rattled to a stop, and when she glanced at his face, his eyes were stormy, distraught. He strode along as if he expected the ground to split open under his feet.

 And so much to you, she thought with pity. Oh, you have learned to love, haven't you?

 This was not the cool, mature boy she knew; he was jangling and edgy, as if all this emotion buzzed like electricity in his heart.

 "It'll be all right," she said, not knowing if it was true.

 "Today maybe," he answered grimly. "But tomorrow? The day after? As long as I'm theirs, they'll use me to get to you all."

 The woods formed narrow shaded tunnels that curved like a madman's sickle smile, on and on and on. They walked the very edge of the Ghost Roads until they turned a corner to a small house which slid forth from the thickets and trees as if it were a secret in itself.

 It had an air of decrepitude; paint peeled on the window frames, broken tiles were matched by gaps in the roof like blackened teeth. Creepers gripped the walls in a stranglehold, but there was one sign of life: an obscenely large ginger cat nestled on the rusted car, one eye on them and the other shut, giving it the look of a particularly hairy pirate.

 She didn't need Riose to tell her that this was it. His face was full of tightly held back grief, as if he was already saying his farewells to her.

 "I'll see you later," she told him deliberately.

 He only turned away, shoulders hunched.

The front door was open. You're no threat to us, it seemed to say. Come in, if you dare.

Feeling like Goldilocks, she did.

 Silence hung about the house like a spider, occupying even the brightest corners. The sheer ordinariness of the place made it all more surreal; it smelled of fresh paint and coffee, and the varnished boards squeaked under her feet as she went down the wide hallway to the door there.

 She hesitated, then knocked.

 "Come in, little fish," said a woman's voice, low and throaty.

 Last chance to run.

 Feeling as if she stood on the verge of madness and revelation, Phi steeled herself, and stepped over the threshold.

 ~*~

 The lounge was large, and a shaft of sunlight danced into her eyes from a mirror. Only by walking into the very center of the room - and them - could she avoid being blinded.

 There was no mistaking the woman who reclined along the length of the green couch as if she were a Roman goddess. Her features had the same distinctive stamp as Riose's, but her eyes were large and dark and unreadable, and though her shining lips held a smile, it had no sincerity.

Phi did not hesitate. She dared not.

 "You must be Therese," she said with assumed confidence. "Riose warned me about you."

 Her laugh was all smoke and daggers. "I'd be disappointed if he didn't. And what did he say, little fish?"

 That you knew love once, and it changed you.

 "That you'd play devil's advocate because it suited you."

 "Then who plays the devil?" she said with a sly, serrated smile.

 Phi couldn't stop her eyes sliding to the man sat on the floor, so very conspicuous. She didn't need an introduction to know he was Bane Malefici: the mere fact of his presence gave it away, but his beauty marked him as surely as scars.

 When she was young, Riose had told tales of him - tales whispered in dark rooms and quiet places, of a man who loved death with such savagery and such ferocity that he shattered his own heart trying to hold it.

The sharp, prominent bones of his face might have been the broken pieces; all angles and arresting shadows to Therese's plush curves, contradicted only by a generous mouth. His eyes were calculating and impersonal and quite, quite disturbing.

 "Are you volunteering me for the job?" he said. His voice gave her a jolt. It was smooth and low, a whipped-cream voice with an arsenic dusting. "Very presumptuous."

 "Very perceptive," corrected the third person, turning away from the window to settle onto a chair. Phi recognised Chatoya Irkil with disbelief. "You're certainly in the market for souls."

 How could this woman, who had seemed so very ordinary in the Chill, be the infamous Grieving Fury? How could Cougar Redfern have looked at her with such starving fascination?

 "This soul, yes," Bane Malefici acknowledged, dragging Phi's attention back to him. "But what are you prepared to sell it for, Delphine?"

 Gathering herself, she achieved something like composure. "What I need. A broken blood-oath."

 "And why should we help you, little fish?" Therese asked, eyes shrewd.

 The afternoon of preparation came back, and suddenly it was all there before her, clear and sharp and logical.

 Later, she could not remember the exact words she used; she only knew that she was calm as she spoke of past, of future, of pod politics and family ties.

 She laid her reasons before the Furies like bones, solid in the afternoon light. All her fear was crushed inside her chest, unseen, and somehow she met their eyes and she answered their comments and their questions with little more than a stammer.

 They were all unreadable in their way; Therese's smile, impenetrable, meaningless, flashed like a knife, whether in silence or sudden, incisive comments. If Bane Malefici seemed to be barely listening, the deft questions he hurled at her soon shattered that illusion. And as for Chatoya Irkil…this was not the woman she had met at The Chill; she wore only polite attention, and a warmth in her eyes that was as distant as it was constant.

 She came then to the last, her feet a mass of ache from where she had stood so long, her throat sandpaper. "There is only one other reason they want Don and me to marry - to legitimise him as my father's heir."

 "A common practice among your people," commented Therese with icy accuracy. "Why should you be the exception to the rule?"

  Phi shifted from blue eyes to green eyes to black eyes, and she saw with sudden clarity that they were not so much older than herself. Each had risen through the Furies with meteoric swiftness, each was legend in their own right.

 And she knew then what she needed to say - the words were fire on her lips, blistering, right.

 "A true leader needs no legitimacy. They don't need anyone to speak on their behalf, to tell the world that they should be chosen - they are their own evidence, in their words and their actions and even their thoughts. If Don needs me to gain the support of the pod, then he shouldn't lead us. If he wants the pod, then he must win them as my father did - with respect."

 "Very true," Bane Malefici remarked, and it seemed there was a note of triumph in his voice, though who it was directed at, she could not say.

 "And what of your mother's visions?" said Chatoya, thoughtful. It was the first time she had made any comment. "As you said earlier, she has kept your pod safe. Why shouldn't she do the same for you?"

 "Because I don't want to be safe. I want to be free."

 "Do you think you can outrun your destiny?" the witch persisted.

 My destiny burns for me beside a lake. I think I have no urge to be outrun by him. "No. But there's a difference between fate and the future. There are countless futures - as many futures as there are choices, it's just that in each future there are some choices you'll face time and again. Those are your destiny - the constants, my mother calls them, the certain uncertainties. She just picks what she thinks is the best."

 She swallowed. And she gives up a piece of her life each time she does it, until she has given away so much of herself that there's nothing left. She chooses for us all, our private, lonely, wretched goddess.

 "And sometimes..." she told them, the truth heavy in her heart. "Sometimes she is wrong."

 ~*~

  Below the arches of the cave, Avy is restless. Her dream seems within her grasp at last, and yet she is suspicious. She had so many dreams once, and time decayed them before her eyes as it has decayed her body. All that she has lost taunts her: her beauty, her love, her status, her faith, her admirers. When she thinks of all that will be restored to her, she is almost frightened.

 She has been monstrous so long, she can barely begin to imagine how it feel to be herself again.

 It will be different this time, she swears. There is no dark and glorious court, for one thing. The days of fire, lived as if there was no tomorrow - as inevitably came to pass - are vanquished. She must learn the ways of shadow and slowness, and learn again the foibles of others, for she will no longer be alone. Though there are none fit to be her companion, she will take her pleasures where she can.

 She cannot free Zeke, of course. She has known that since the start, but as long as her curse binds him, he will not betray her. When the time comes, she will find some cold, dark abyss where his spark will dwindle, where no one will notice him trapped in the grip of eternal winter. It is not quite a kindness, but it is close.

 In her eyes, the past whirls on in dizzy splendour. The future mirrors it: this in-between time will never have been.

 She waits. She hungers. She hopes.

 ~*~

  "So your part is done, little fish," said Therese, and for the first time there was no amusement in her voice. "The rest is down to us. No one has ever dared come before all three of us and ask for our help in breaking blood-oath. If nothing else, you have written part of our history today."

 "I'd rather write my future," Phi said frankly, all her poise trembling on the edge of hysteria. She felt drained, empty. Had it been enough? Oh, please...

 The ripe, dark mouth curled like a petal. "Few get such freedom. What do you say, Bane?"

 Phi quailed under Bane Malefici's gaze: it was piercing and slow and drank her in as if she were blood in his mouth. All of Riose's warnings flooded back - she recalled him saying he might let you live as if that were the best she could hope for. And she was clinging to her control, she was-

 "Yes."

 The word stopped her still. She stared at him, but events were already rolling past.

 "And I say yes," Therese said firmly, and her large, liquid eyes gleamed with something close to glee. "Chatoya?"

 Phi felt delirious - the future swung open like a gate, she could be free, she could be-

 "No."

 It was like a physical blow. Her legs sagged - she stumbled, but caught herself to stare into those moss-soft eyes that she had seen much closer, that had been so kindly, so compassionate…

 "But why?" she whispered.
 
 Her face was drawn. "It was not an easy decision, Phi-"

 "Delphine," she said through numb lips as all her hope came toppling down like dominoes. Don't pretend we're friends. Don't pretend that your decision has no consequences for me. "My name is Delphine Thetis. Though I don't suppose I'll keep it much longer."

 The witch did not flinch. "-but I don't need to explain it to you. Just…just trust that I've done what I think is for the best."

 "Trust you," she repeated - anger came crashing through the disbelief, a hot wild rush. "Do you know what Don Ivan is? Do you have the faintest idea what he's capable of?"

 "As it happens, yes."

 "And you'll hand me to him, knowing what he is? How is that for the best? Best for who, exactly?"

"For everyone."

 "I didn't come here for everyone," she said, her voice fraying, scratching the air like a trapped animal. Her last way out was gone - there was nothing left but the future and the past knitting like a wound, with her cowering amidst blood and mud and bone, where Don Ivan had left her in a childhood pitted by fear of him. "I came for me."

 Chatoya gazed at her, and Phi saw the Grieving Fury for the first time: sorrow glowed in her, brought strange and wild beauty in her gentle, heartbroken eyes. She wore her hair like mourning finery, black, shining, stark. "I'm sorry. That wasn't enough."

 "And what would be?" she whispered.

 Silence was her only answer. It was, of course, not enough.

 The door slammed. They were enclosed in silence.

 Therese sighed. She supposed the girl would run home to shed her tears and then she would become the dutiful daughter she had tried so hard not to. It didn't bother her that they had refused Delphine; but it would bother her brother. And that, she regretted.

Power saturated the air, thick as honey. It puzzled her...

 Then she saw the way that Chatoya and Blue were staring at each other. There was no mercy in either of their expressions, and she thought that any observer would have been hard-pressed to find love within the loathing there.

"Interesting decision," he remarked.

 "What's that supposed to mean?" Chatoya snapped, leaping to her feet.

 "I think you've misunderstood the process of a bargain. They get something they want; we get something we want. Whether it does any good for anyone is irrelevant."

 "Not to me."

 "No? Then tell me exactly who will benefit from your altruism today."

 "Why do you care? She's one shapeshifter."

 "She is not 'one shapeshifter'," Blue pronounced with absolute disgust. "She is the child of the pod's leader and the pod's prophetess. She is a mermaid in the truest sense of the word and an extremely influential member of the pod - a society, I might mention, who own most of the land in this town, the lion's share of the power and who have never had a single member of their species in the Furies, for reasons that you might know if you had bothered to do the slightest bit of research!"

 "You seem to have forgotten what else she is," Chatoya threw at him, quivering with anger. She was vibrant amidst the muted palette of the room, her face white, fierce, passionate, her eyes sharp and dark as holly leaves. "She's just a girl. She's far too young for any of this."

 "As you were too young?"

 That barb hit home. The air surged - gripping, brief - before Chatoya controlled herself, barely.

 A thin black halo hugged the witch's body as Therese quietly marked the exits and activated the defensive charms she always wore in case things became nasty. Nastier. She was not fool enough to watch a lover's tiff when the lovers in question had apocalyptic powers and an apparent need to antagonize one another.

 "I had no choice," Chatoya said stiffly. "You took them all away."

 "Ah, the sweet taste of irony." Blue licked his lips slowly, and her eyes narrowed at the gesture. "No, wait, it's just the appalling coffee Therese made."

 "Don't bring me into this," she remarked. "Though he has a point."

 Chatoya's attention snapped to her as if she were glad to get Blue out of her head. Which was quite possibly the case. "Meaning what?"

 "Riose would not have let the little fish come unless he was sure she understood what she faced. She knew what lay before her - and she made her choice. You denied her. You have taken away her choice."

  "I will not hand any more children to the Furies." She turned away, but there was no mistaking the bleakness in her voice. "No future that waits for her could be worse than us."

 Therese gazed at her rigid back in disbelief. Did the fool really believe that? Did she not yet understand that everyone had their price, that sometimes in the balance of two terrible choices the Furies were not the worst?

 Blue's laughter had a hard, cutting edge. "How little you know."

"I've read her file. I know what I have left her to." She sounded tired and hollow.

 "I doubt it." He stood - sleek, swift, he went to her, blocking her from Therese's vision. The afternoon light mingled their shadows into one united shape, but such closeness was a threat, the intimacy of pain in the guise of pleasure. "You guess. You assume. You do not know what she fears."

 "But I know you." Her whisper was rough, and Therese heard the anguish in it. "I know myself."

 "Those are your fears," he said, contempt searing his voice. "And your mistake."

 The crack of her hand on his face was like a gunshot.

 "My only mistake was you," Chatoya said coldly. In a blast of churning power she swept from the room, leaving Blue behind and entirely still except for the rosy mark that slowly bloomed on his cheek.

~*~

 Phi barely noticed the world passing by her, her heart still unable to believe what her mind knew so solidly to be true. She drifted through the trees with the air of a ghost, barely extant in her own life.

 How could they have refused me - how could she have refused me?

 The conversation with Riose in the music room reverberated through her; this despair was an echo of that, deeper, truer, ever more violent. With that in mind that she found herself on his doorstep, ringing the bell until it shrilled endlessly through the house. She needed answers, she needed him to tell her that it was not hopeless.

 When he opened the door, his face was flushed with sleep, his hair rumpled into a dark mess, but those turquoise eyes widened at the sight of her, at her obvious distress.

 "Phi!" he said, and the sheer astonishment in her face told that he had genuinely believed she might not survive. Relief swamped him - quickly overtaken by comprehension. "Did they…"

 "She refused," she said flatly. "The Grieving Fury."

 He frowned. "Just her?"

 "Oh yes. Guess why she said no."

 His gaze was level, very shrewd; she glimpsed one of the Furies then, and found him colder and more calculating than the boy she thought she knew. "Because Malefici said yes."

 Bemused, she shook her head. "That wasn't what she said."

 "Huh." His raised eyebrows implied that was of little importance. "What was her reason, then?"

 "That it was best for everyone," she mimicked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. "Except me, but apparently I don't matter."

 The anger was stoked to raging temperatures in her; she was flushed, trembling, half a thing of fire, and it felt bittersweet - consumed as she was, at least it staved off the despair that she was not willing to fall to. Not yet, not while there was the slightest chance left.

 Riose peered at her. "Why is it best for everyone? What does she honestly think Don Ivan's going to do for the pod?"

 "I wish I knew," she said, the truth silent and stinging on her tongue: I don't know what he will do for us. I only know what he has done to me. That was enough, too much, no more. "What can I do to change her mind?"

 His lips parted, but she saw the sorrow that crept over him. "Phi…"

 "Don't tell me nothing, Ri, don't tell me that," she hurled at him ferociously. "I won't accept it."

 "It's not your choice." His gentleness was that of a man breaking dreadful news. "It was always theirs. If they said no…"

 "One of them said no," she corrected him, refusing to give in so easily. She would not slink back to Don to be demeaned and afraid for the rest of her life. Raking through solutions, she searched frenetically until- "Wait. Why…why did you think Chatoya only refused because Bane Malefici agreed?"

 He looked taken aback by this change of tack. "They can't stand each other. It's common knowledge."

 And suddenly her mind was spinning into top speed, moving with the swiftness of someone who understood the intense, visceral power of loathing - who knew just the savagery it could rouse.

 "She'd refuse just to annoy him?"

 He wavered, a line furrowed into his forehead. "Possibly, but I don't see what this has-"

 Suddenly the hope was back, roaring, mighty, burning her up like fever. "So tell me, Ri, don't you think it'd be a perfect revenge for him to help me anyway?"

 "No!"

 He grabbed her, and his hands were crushing on her shoulders - he shook her, a wildness in his eyes that she'd never seen before.

 "Don't go to him," he said in a fast, low voice. "Don't do it, Phi. You don't know what he'll want in return, you don't understand what he's capable of."

 "Oh, Ri…" she said sadly. "You're probably right. But don't you understand? I know exactly what Don's capable of. I've always known."

 "What on earth did he do that makes Blue Malefici look like the soft option?"

 Part of her wanted to tell him. It would be shared then, like carving a cancer out of her flesh for the world to examine. But she did not want to dredge up those memories, she could not bear to have it play out behind her eyelids again as it so often did in her dreams and her idle moments.  

 "It was a long time ago," she said. "It's in the past. But I don't intend it to be in the future."

 He let her go with a hiss of frustration. "Phi, please. Don't go to Malefici."

 "Will your sister help me instead?" she challenged.

 If time had wheeled backwards through the decades, little though she knew it, it could have been Aurora there. She had the exact same imperious tilt to her chin, the same level, compelling gaze, her hair afire about her pale face: her demands equally impossible. Iry Lupine would have known, and feared.

 Riose did not.

 "No." The words were grudging.

 "And the Demon Fury?"

 His silence, reluctant, furious, was all the answer she needed. They stood in mute and mutual regret, she understanding his chagrin, yet unable to give up this last frail thread of hope.

 He turned away with a hiss, and she saw that there was nothing more to say. It seemed best then to leave, showing him her back because he would not show her his face. She hoped she hadn't destroyed their friendship, but what other way was left to her?

 Then she stopped, and turned back to him.

 "Thank you, Ri."

 "I told you," he snarled, and the self-loathing in his voice was dark and blistering. "Don't thank me. I've done you no favours."

 "You have," Phi told him. "You let me make my own choice."

 He glanced back, and his face softened, confusion wiping away some of the hatred he bent inward so effortlessly. "I wish you'd chosen differently."

 She smiled, though it was a flimsy mask for all her doubt and dread. "I don't."
  
~*~

 The burn on his hand still hurt. If anything, it seemed a little larger, but perhaps that was his imagination. Zeke had never had a scar. Wounds aplenty, yes, but that was just part and parcel of a slave's life in the court of the Soulless King, and none ever marred him for longer than a few hours. Mere minutes if Ryar had been around.

 He paced the confines of the clearing, restless. Occasionally he rubbed at the burn, unconscious of the gesture.

 There must be some way around this. Not by word or thought or deed; neither Phi, nor anyone else can know of her plans. Our plans, I suppose they must be.

 But only of her plans. She put no proviso on anything else - on knowledge of my existence.

 He didn't know why that thought lingered, what it meant, only that some nagging certainty had caught him. Thoughts of Avy were interspersed with far sweeter thoughts of Phi: flashes of her auburn hair vivid as autumn leaves tumbling down to carpet the ground. Of her faithful weight in his arms, of her kisses which had not tasted of desperation or obligation.

 He swung between them like a pendulum, the two inextricable in his mind. While Avy lived, Phi was in danger. All the pieces of herself that she'd given him glittered brightly in his mind, stars against the unforgiving future that had lain before him with the surety and tenacity of nightfall.

 Faces cycled past, brought to life by her voice - the friends she held so dear, Celia and Finn and Riose and Jo, her parents, the merpeople-

 Jess Arryn.

 He stopped, wire-tense, suddenly seeing what should have been clear so much sooner. She had known him and she surely must have guessed he had something to do with Aurora. Her and that other one: what was his name, the boy - old now, surely?

 Another face from Phi's gifted memories - lone wolf, she'd called him with a fond note in her voice, but Zeke could strip away the years and see the pack boy that had adored Aurora so intensely. Iry. That was it. Iry and Jess, still here.

 His mind raced. Yes, they would recognize him. Surely they would question him - they would need to know - and if they plucked his secrets out by force, well then, what could he do about it?

 It was risky. No doubt there. He could not tell them - they would have to seize his secrets. They would have to be ruthless, angry, beyond mercy.

 He closed his eyes, and thought of Aurora at her last, raving and vicious. He remembered the look in the wolf boy's eyes when she left him to run to Zeke - jealousy acid in his stare, his heartbreak as public as everything had been between Pack and pod.

 Yes. He could do it. Someone had to - Zeke would not play the Pied Piper, leading Phi to death.

 Grey of her eyes, flashing into his mind, so very steady and unafraid. And he thought of a world he'd once known, buried deep in a distant land, where people had sung back the sun and it seemed to him that the eyes were the exact, soft colour of a morning sky waiting for the light to return.

 It haunted him as he left the grove, determined that her wait would end. The past would not be forgotten lest the future - and her - tumble into dust with it.

~*~

 The winding walk through the forest seemed to take less time. Perhaps it was because she half-ran, dodging through the dappled shade with a gambler's reckless speed.

 It gave Phi a cold jolt to see the house slide forth from the thickets like a cloud. The cat still spilled across the car hood in a mass of ginger fur and flab. She felt oddly timeless, as if all three of them would still be within. Only the lengthened shadows and the now-closed door told her that she had aged, entered, been denied.

 She hammered on the door so hard it hurt, and when it swung open, she only just stopped herself from thumping Bane Malefici - a mistake, she suspected, that would have cost her.

 His narrow gaze swept her but before he could say anything, before she could have the sense to be frightened, Phi jumped in.

 "I want that blood-oath broken. The decision was wrong." Defiant, she stepped over the threshold, so close to him that if he hadn't slid back with something close to distaste, they would have been pressed together like hands in prayer.

 "Do come in," he drawled, but sounded amused. "Your persistence is admirable. Your rudeness is not."

 "Neither would be necessary if you hadn't turned me down."

 "I did not turn you down." There was no inflection on the words - but it meant something. It was not a flat out refusal.

 "No," she agreed. "Which is why I've come back."

 "If you were wiser, you would have approached Therese."

 This was unexpected. Honesty, she decided, was the best policy. "Riose said she'd turn me down."

 "She would. As I said, wiser." Something eerie and indescribable stirred in his eyes, and suddenly his hand was around her throat, light, the promise of pressure there. "You don't want to bargain with me."

 Fear crawled up her spine then, scraping like a bitter winter wind. He must have felt her pulse jumping against his fingers; perhaps it was that which made his lips peel back to bare fangs, his humanity rolling back with it to leave him absolutely unearthly, his pupils black as blood.

 The door slammed shut behind her. He had not moved, but the shadow that fell over them made it appear he had - it put strange hollows into his face, paring away all colour until he was monochrome, terrible, an angel corrupted into darkness and bone.

 Mud and blood and bone...

 Even he was better than that.

 "No," she said, her voice thin, slight as gauze. "I don't want to. But I need to."

 Both of them knew she needed him; he needed no one. "Then you will pay."

 "Yes," she answered, hopeless.

 Bane Malefici's smile was brilliant and cruel.

 ~*~

It was only a matter of a few polite questions. Jessica Arryn was well known enough for no one to be suspicious of a stranger asking for her, even one that kept his eyes aimed firmly at the ground.

 When he came trudging up the path to where she was weeding the garden, he must have appeared a ghost to her, unchanged by the years. He raised his eyes to her, coppery, gleaming, fire caged in flesh.

  "Hello Jess," he said quietly.

 The trowel thudded onto the flowerbed. Her hands were trembling, he realized.

 He could still see the laughing, mischievous girl buried beneath the seams of age and it made his heart ache. Nor had time snatched the steel from her, because she only straightened slowly and took him in from top to toe.

 "Now, I know I'm not senile," she said. "Which makes you real. And foolish, boy. Why have you come back?"

 "To explain."

 Her laughter was bitter. "I need no explanations from you."

 "Probably not." The little wooden gate squeaked as he opened it. The garden had the feel of her to it - a chaotic muddle of colours burst from every corner. "But I thought you might want one anyway."

  She held up a hand as if to stop him coming any closer. Her face was hard. "Why now? You've kept your secrets and your silence for decades."

 He hesitated, but this much of the truth at least passed his lips without pain. "I...no longer think it fair to keep them. I owe it to her and to you."

 "Yes, you do," she said with great calm and dignity. "And to another. He deserves to hear this too. You'd best come inside, boy."

 "I have a name. You knew it once."

 "So I did. I won't poison my tongue with it, though." Her scorn was a dreadful mirror in which to view himself. Part of him cringed. Yet unpleasant as it was, he needed her hostility. Without such a beginning, he could not make an end of this farcical pledge Avy had bound him to.

 The burn on his hand ached. It was too keen a reminder.

~*~

 Bane Malefici didn't offer her a seat. Phi took one anyway because she thought she would fall over if she didn't. Her heart was thudding relentlessly, her blood sloshing around her veins with such indecent speed that she felt dizzy and sick.
 
"I assume you understand exactly what breaking means," he said carelessly.

 "The…the blood-oath?"

 His eyes consumed her, spat her out as bones and truth. "What else?"

  Me. You'd break me for nothing more than procrastination if it suited you. Riose warned me, and the worst of it is that I listened and I believed, but still I have no other choice.

 She heard the treacherous quiver in her voice. "You'll take away the part of me that's mer. The contract was between two mer and this will make it invalid. Don can't marry me, but he can't punish my parents either."

 "Legally speaking, you're correct."

 She understood what he did not say: that there were no guarantees, that in rage and power denied, Don might still try to claim her parents' blood. But she hoped - she had to - that the Elders would step between them. She would do everything in her power to make it so, to make it public, visible, irrefutable.

 Phi licked suddenly dry lips. "How will you do it?"

 Something that might have been mirth flickered at the corners of his mouth. "Oh, I shan't do a thing. Tell me, Delphine, what do you know of your people's history?"

 It was a strange question. "I know about my grandparents, if that's what you mean, and about Aurora."

 "And of your very first days, when you were newly made by Ryar ap Sangager and sent across the sea?"

 "I know our legends," she said uncertainly.

 He gestured. "Enlighten me."

 She could read nothing from his face, which was still and white as unsullied snow. "It was the last days of the Burning Times. Things were desperate - Ryar had betrayed her own people to try and save the witches from annihilation, and hundreds of the dragons had gone with her, but it wasn't enough. There were more dead than living, and the witches were begging her to try and save them somehow. She took some of their children and she gave them her own power, so that they would be strong when they grew, but she knew they couldn't defend themselves…" She trailed off, feeling foolish. "Is this what you mean?"

 "It is."

 "She knew they couldn't defend themselves," she repeated, "and the witches could spare no one from the fighting - or at least, anyone who would volunteer to go wasn't likely to offer their lives to save a pair of freakish kids. So she went down to the ocean and she took the water and the starlight and the last of her hope and fashioned us from it. And then she gave the children to us and we took them far away from the war, over the ocean to a great, still land which knew nothing of fire and hatred."

 She snuck a glance at him. His half-closed eyes seemed sleepy, but she thought he'd made some small sound of contempt. Maybe it had been her imagination.

 "Later, when the war was over, we returned to find Ryar. But she was dead - killed by her own husband, who couldn't live with her betrayal. We searched until we found her body, here, beneath the lake, and we swore to guard her remains as we had guarded the children." She spread her hands. "We've been here ever since."

 His laughter was sudden, jarring, and jagged with scorn. "An interesting version of the truth."
 
 "Isn't everything?" she said flatly.

 His glance was shrewd. "How very cynical. And accurate. Do you want the truth, Delphine? Do you think you can bear it?"

 "Do I have a choice?"

 She felt tired inside. Her mother had always told it as a fairytale; and Phi had always accepted it as one, and yet…and yet the history of the mer was something she had always taken pride in. Against a world at war, they had saved lives and made some sweet idyll in a quiet corner of the seas.

 "Don't be ridiculous," he said bitingly. "It is part of my price."

 The fear was back, overwhelming. "And the rest?" she whispered. She had nothing to negotiate with - she could only take what he offered, and pray that the horror would have an end, if not a merciful one.

"A day and an hour."

 His eyes were dark as tar, heavy with desires that made her skin crawl. The metres separating them no longer seemed enough - she wanted miles between them, an ocean, the unending void of space.

 "I'm not sure I understand," she said hesitantly, afraid that she did and wanting to be wrong.

 "The day will be of my choosing. One day, Delphine Thetis, for which you are mine, and you will survive it."

 "Why?" she said, terror leaching her of all tact. Survive, yes. No mention of whole, unharmed, sane. Oh gods. Oh…

 His smile made him beautiful, a creature of icy edges, sleek, dazzling, sharp.

 "So that you will remember, and wait for the hour."

She could not turn back. It was too late - she was no longer sure if this was the better choice, if she had run mad beneath her desperation and her panic, yet now she had to live with it. Perhaps to die for it. "Which hour?"

 "The last hour of your life, Delphine," he said in a voice rich with promise. "It will belong to me."

 A story, a day, an hour. It sounded such a small price if she thought only of the words and not of the intent behind them. Such a small price to rouse such awful and intense fear.

But what else could she do?

 "Yes," she answered at last.  
 
 His voice was pure, purring triumph. "So be it."

 "When-" she began, tentative and he cut her off with a raised finger.

 "Why now, of course. Isn't it said that there's no time like the present?"

  Gods, she was afraid. She could not answer him; she was paralysed.

 "Although," he added thoughtfully, "you may think otherwise when this is done."

 ~*~

 "So."

 Iry Lupine had felt the touch of time less than Jessica Arryn. His hair was flecked with grey, but his face was still youthful and his eyes still burned with unholy anger. He stalked towards Zeke, his mouth grim - and then he hit him so hard that Zeke staggered back into the wall. The picture of Aurora rattled on the mantelpiece.

 "You've got a nerve," snarled the werewolf.

 Zeke wiped away the blood trickling from his mouth.

 Iry lifted his hand again - and Jess caught it in her gnarled fingers.

 "Not in my house, Iry."

 He barely gave Jess a glance. He could have shaken her off easily, yet the werewolf stood there, willingly shackled by her. "Then where, eh, Jess? Where's a fit place to kill him?"

 "There's no such place," the dolphin answered sharply. "I didn't call you here to spill blood on my carpet. I called you to hear what he has to say."

 "I'll hear," Iry said flatly. "An' then I've a few things of my own to say."

 Under that brutality shone a clear, profound grief.

  You loved her, Zeke realized with a clammy, sick feeling in his stomach. You still love her. And I took her from you.

 He had not thought it more than passing desire. Aurora had spoken of Iry as one admirer among many; merely the most persistent. But it had been more than that, and he had been too blind to see it.

 And would I have cared? I was so desperate then, so very selfish. Aurora had opened up a future that was better than what lay before me - she had me just as fascinated, just as spellbound as she did him. I think I would have stolen her away no matter what.

 And now…?

 The thought was sudden and frightening. Yet unbidden it unfurled in his heart, blazing like a flag.

 And now I have someone I am just as afraid to lose.

 He dared not follow it any further. To dawn-grey eyes and a mop of fiery hair, to…

 To the reason he was here. He drew himself up, jaw aching, and gave Iry the flashing, arrogant smile he had seen on Fireblade so often. "Then say them where she can hear too."

 "You took her."

 "I buried her," he acknowledged. He could not tell them why - of the ghastly fear that had haunted him, of the Burning Days come back to him and the terrible nature of all Fireblade's sorceries.

 A low snarl rolled over the room. There was no mistaking the hatred in Iry's eyes.  "Show me."

 Yes, Zeke thought, trying not to be too afraid. Find me out. Someone must.

 ~*~

 "What do I need to do?"

 Phi heard how flat her voice was. It didn't seem quite real, any of it. Here she was, sat in the Demon Fury's house. The sun was still shining, the clock ticked on - she felt the world ought to have at least paused in its spin, but outside the birds still trilled merrily.

 "Have a little patience," he said idly, and then - to her utter disbelief - picked up a book and began to read.

 She stared at him, but he didn't appear to notice. All his attention was devoted to the book. She focused on the title, and couldn't help but feel bemused.

 "Good book?" she inquired, unable to contain herself.

 "Educational," he said. "You might find some merit in it."

 "I think I've grown out of fairytales," she said acidly.

 She was surprised when he leant over and handed her the book, but then she caught the glint of malice in his eyes. "Are you so sure?"

 She dropped her eyes to the page. The words leapt up, and she was a child, Jess reading to her by the fading light of a summer sunset.

 Speechless with mingled fear and fury, she handed it back and he settled into the story again. Now though, a faint, malicious smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. She hated him for it.

Adding insult to injury, he had the gall to sit in front of her reading The Little Mermaid.

 Eventually, she could bear the mocking silence no longer. "I thought you said there was no time like the present."

 She gasped at the pain that hit her, twisting like a rotor blade inside her head. She was lost, helpless beneath the sharp agony, which moved with exquisite slowness through her - she tumbled in its wake, disjointed, thoughtless as world receded into black and red and grey-

 It ceased. He had not even bothered to raise his eyes from the page, but she felt the power that simmered about him like smoke.

  "You have a choice here, Delphine," Bane Malefici murmured, and a certain drowsy languor in his voice told her that he had enjoyed her suffering. "You can wait quietly and patiently, or you can draw my attention again and have an accurate preview of just what one day with me will mean. Which would you prefer?"

 Lips pressed together, she made no answer.

 "Precisely," he said, and thereafter nothing broke the hush except the rustle of a turning page.

 She could not say how long it was she waited - long enough for her shivering to stop, for the pain to be no more than a thin film of memory.
 
 And then a sound - the door opening, hasty footsteps…

A woman came into the room.

 She seemed evanescent and shadowy - as if the sunlight would shine right through her. Her moon-white hair drifted about her in shining, fluttering array, pale as her skin. It was not a lovely face, rigid with fear, the darkness of her eyes like bruises.

 But Phi knew the power that radiated from her because it was an echo of her own, magnified to a strength and a potency that could mean only one thing. It made even the strongest of the pod seem insignificant: for she was the true, clear note and they mere echoes.

 "Ryar," she gasped, not believing, not able to deny it.

 And Ryar ap Sangager, the first and truest mermaid, who should have been dust in her tomb beyond the lake, raised those fearful eyes to her and the pain there pierced Phi like a spear.

 It was true. It was her.

 Her voice was soft as breaking waves. "Yes."