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we have to rip your arm off with it.” The other two licked their lips at the very thought. “But the teaching comes at a cost. It takes time you don’t have…that the world might not have.”
    The eye rolled again, and it was all I could do to hold on to it. When I turned my hand over and opened the palm to see what it was up to, the disembodied orb stared back at me. No, not stared …glared. If it could shoot lasers, I’d be toast.
    “So dramatic,” another sister cackled. “Death, destruction. Sickness, sadness, chaos, killings… It sounds divine.”
    “And when the hunger comes for us?” another sister asked. “When there is nothing left of the world but the bones?”
    The first hissed. “We will eat like queens.”
    “For a time,” she agreed.
    “What is this about death and destruction?” I demanded. “What about this price and the world running out of time? Stop speaking in riddles.”
    The toothy one stared at me. Or rather the eye stared and she seemed to look right through it. “Namtar, God of Plagues, has risen. Even now he calls his followers to him—the nosoi, the demons, the djinn. Already they converge. The apocalypse has begun.”
    “Apocalypse?” I asked, not happy when it came out semistrangled.
    “That is the cost,” agreed the so-far-silent sister. “You defeat Namtar and we will teach you. Otherwise, none of this will matter.”
    I looked to Apollo, hoping he’d tell me that they were pulling my leg, that they did this to everybody, but he met my gaze gravely. “It’s true,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”
    “Your vision?” I asked.
    “Cities laid waste. Billions dead. The Black Death, the Spanish Flu, cancer, AIDS…they are nothing by comparison. It has to be stopped.”
    “And I’m supposed to stop this thing?” I asked, horrified.
    “ We are,” he said, taking the hand not holding the bloody eye.
    I stared at the sisters. “So, basically, I save the world and you’ll teach me how to control my wings? It hardly seems like a fair trade.”
    “There is one more thing,” the toothy one told me, ignoring my protest. “You will need Perseus’s famed sword, forged by Hephaestus and coated with Medusa’s venomous blood when the hero severed her head from her body. It is the only chance you have against Namtar.”
    “And where am I supposed to find this legendary sword?” I asked, torn between stunned disbelief and abject fear. I’d been through so much already. Karma seriously owed me some downtime before saddling me with an apocalypse.
    “You’ll have to pry it from his cold, dead hands, of course,” one of the other sisters said with glee.
    “Now,” hissed the other toothless sister. “The eye!”
    She said it with such longing, such desperation, that I felt mean for what I was about to do, but only for a second. Only until I thought about the fact that we were standing in a cave loaded up not with treasure but with the remains of their kills. Then I felt much better about lobbing the eye between the sisters and watching it disappear into the pile of bones. They screeched and dove, scrabbling with hands and feet, pulling each other’s hair when it got in their way or gouging flesh.
    Apollo and I fled. We didn’t run, not with bones sliding beneath our feet with every step, but we hit the ledge as quickly as possible.
    “Can they be trusted to teach me?” I asked. “Once I’ve defeated Namtar— if I defeat him—can I trust them not to go back on their word?”
    “If you defeat Namtar, do you really think they’d dare get all up in your grill?”
    That put a feeble grin on my face. Apollo’s slang was years out of date. It was cute that he tried.
    “Besides, bargains are sacred. There’s no saying they won’t try to eat you afterward, but, by gods, you’ll know how to use your wings when they go in for the kill.”
    “That’s comforting,” I said.
    “Isn’t it?”

Chapter Three
    “Buttons aren’t rocket science.”—Tori Karacis
    I