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truffle.
    “For the moment,” Clotho said.
    “I don’t understand.” Vivian set the phone down. She was shaking, and she felt a little weak. “What’s going on here?”
    “That’s what we want to explain, dear,” Lachesis said. “Now that you’ve bought us a little time.”
     
    Chapter Four
     
    “What do you mean, they cut them off?” Eris leaned in the galley of the corporate jet, fingering the tiny half-made pastries the chef had been working on when she kicked him out Her cell phone was pressed against her ear, but still she worried about the talent in the cabin overhearing her conversation.
    “They did!” Stri’s voice whined at her, so loud that it hurt. She slid deeper into the galley and pulled the privacy curtain closed. “I was using smoke feelers. They were in the building when this thing landed on them, cutting them off.”
    “Smoke feelers?” Eris took the tiny bottles of alcohol, arranged in alphabetical order, and began to move them around. “You were using smoke feelers?”
    “Well, I had to make sure the Fates were in the building—”
    “I told you to mark them and then leave them alone.” In the very back, where it was hard to reach, she knocked down a few of the bottles.
    The jet’s engines droned and then cut back. It was climbing, trying to reach the right altitude for the flight to New York.
    “Ah, Mom,” Stri said. “We’re talking the Fates here. They’d notice a mark.”
    “More than they’d notice smoke feelers?” Her voice rose. “What else did you do?”
    “Nothing.” His tone was sulky. It didn’t matter what language he was speaking in—his native Greek, Latin, Russian, or English—he always sounded sulky when he was lying.
    “What else did you do?”
    The curtains twitched. Noah Sturgis shoved his square face, made unnaturally shiny by too much plastic surgery, into the gap. “You okay, Erika?”
    He didn’t really care about her. They both knew that. He wanted to know if there was some story brewing, something that would boost his career.
    God knew it needed boosting. His biggest claim to fame was that he had once been groomed as Dan Rather’s successor. But that had been years ago, and each major network had cut him loose. Eris had picked him up for a song, and pretended she didn’t regret it.
    “Go away, Noah,” she said.
    “If it’s important—”
    “If it’s important, I’ll tell Kronski.” Kronski was KAHS’s news director, and theoretically the person in charge of Sturgis. But no one was really in charge of Sturgis.
    “Mom?” Stri almost shouted the word.
    “Mom?” Sturgis mouthed. It was well known that Erika O’Connell was single, childless, and proud to be both.
    “Go away,” she said again, “or I’ll cancel your fancy new contract.”
    “Mom?”
    “Shut up for a moment,” she said to her son.
    “You’ll have to tell me about this,” Sturgis said and pulled the curtain closed.
    “Now what?” Eris said to Stri.
    “If I can’t smoke them out, I’d like to go in after them. I hear they’re powerless, and it would feel so good—”
    “No,” she said. “They’re mine.”
    “I’m not bringing them to you.”
    She almost said that Stri wasn’t supposed to bring them to her, and then she realized that he was right. Because he had screwed up, the Fates knew someone was out to get them. They’d be cautious at the very least, defensive at the very most.
    And who knew which Powers That Be remained on their side?
    “Of course you’re not,” she snapped, as if the change of plans had been her idea. “They dropped something on your smoke feelers, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Is it a protect spell?”
    “No,” he said. “Something else. Sharper. Over the whole building.”
    How odd. She couldn’t think of a spell that would do that. “You will stay there, monitor that building, and not do another thing until I get there. Is that clear?”
    “Just pop in, Mom, and—”
    “First of all, I can’t pop in. I