69

“Excuse me.”

The voice came from behind the new, improved, impossibly sensual Magodor. She glanced back, displeased. Can’t honestly say I was thrilled, either.

I said, “Go away.”

I could see parts of the street. There were no gods out there now. There was no strangeness at all. Just silence. My part of TunFaire was five minutes short of being back to the way things always had been.

“I cannot. I remain the Board agent assigned to you. And you remain the key to the untenanted temple on the Street of the Gods.”

“You sonofabitch. Godsdamned bureaucrat. Where the hell were you when my ass was in a sling?”

I caught a whiff of weed. Fourteen drifted up in a cloud, an all-time smouldering banger in his mouth. His eyelids drooped. He was happy. “You tell ’im, Chief.”

I guess my complaint was the last straw. Strait went off on all the grief I had caused him. I was amazed. You don’t often hear that much whining outside Royal offices, where some functionary always represents being asked to do his job.

“Go away, Strait.”

Open the temple, Garrett. It is the last act necessary in this divine comedy.

Maggie, snarling, leaned forward. Her lips touched my left ear. “Later, Garrett,” she whispered. Sudden pain. Blood trickled down my neck. A needle tooth had pierced my earlobe.

Then Magodor was gone.

Maybe Eleanor was on the job after all.

Magodor never came back. Thank you very much. Because I had a bone to pick with Miss Nastiness, and not the one you think.

All those clever hands at the last minute had made a certain very useful piece of cord vanish. A piece of cord I’d had in mind trimming some in the middle of a loop before I gave it up . . . Damn my habit of vacillating.

Spilled milk, Garrett.

Maggie never came back. She left me with some powerful curiosities, but I never went over to the temple where she set up as boss yahoo of the combined and restructured and now intensely feminist Shayir/Godoroth cult. Whenever I was tempted, I had only to touch my scarred earlobe, my thumping carotid artery, and I had little trouble resisting. If I still felt the tug, somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Nog is inescapable and I recalled who all else might be there waiting for me.

No pack of earth mothers, that bunch.

I was too busy to commit suicide, anyway.

The very next time there was a shakeout in the Dream Quarter, Maggie’s gang headed west ten places. They had managed to turn the near destruction of TunFaire into a public relations coup.

The really bad, horrible, awful part of the whole ordeal, more a cause for despair than any interdimensional hole with a starving tentacle factory stuck in it, came when a nasty little neighbor brat pounded on the drunken, leaning remains of my door and hollered, “Mr. Garrett?”

“What?” demanded the drunken, leaning remains of me.

“Mrs. Cardonlos told me bring this back to you.” He handed me a bedraggled, frosty, half-drowned parrot. At the exact moment that Morley Dotes chose to arrive, having hustled over to see if I was all right.

I cursed some. I whined some. To no avail. Mrs. Cardonlos tossed me a cheerful wave motivated by 190-proof malice. And the Dead Man sent, I had to prevent his being pulled through, Garrett. He is far too valuable to let go.

“Valuable to who?”

Morley stood there smiling wickedly.

As I carried the bird to his perch I wondered if I burned the house could I get him and the Dead Man both?