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She touched the side of her head. “This is going to give me such a migraine, and I promise that I’m going to take it out of your hide later.”

    “I don’t understand,” I said.

    “I know. I am Eris, but also Discord, both goddess and power. Straightforward hurts me when it aids order against chaos.” Her brow wrinkled in pain.

    Eris snapped her fingers and produced a butterfly wearing the jack of hearts on its wings. “A storm is coming.” She let out a little gasp.

    Snap. Wind filled the room, tugging at my tweeds. “It will be the biggest blow our world has seen since the Titanomachy, a hypercane . And you are the butterfly who gave birth to the winds.” Her eyes closed.

    Snap. Lightning struck the butterfly in her hand, burning it to a crisp. “You must not trust Zeus.” Her free hand went to her forehead.

    Duh, I thought.

    Snap. The thunder came, and a golden apple replaced the ash on her palm. “You must not trust any of us.”

    Double duh. Family.

    She gave a little gasp. “Not even me.”

    Wow, the hat trick of duh.

    Eris handed the apple to me. “The stakes are—no.” She gagged, then doubled over and vomited behind the couch, clutching at her head the whole time. “That’s all. Go!” I glanced at the apple and swore. On it were the words, “For the specialist.” CHAPTER TWO

    “Cryptic metal fruit, you gotta love that.” Melchior held the apple up in one hand, peering thoughtfully at it like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull. “Especially the kind that starts wars. I wonder whatever happened to the original.” He sat on the rail of the main lanai of Raven House.

    “I don’t know, Mel. Aphrodite’s not the most thoughtful of goddesses. I’m guessing that ten seconds after the contest was over, she forgot all about it in favor of the next shiny thing to catch her eye. It’s probably playing doorstop in one of her thousand and one bedrooms.” I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the deck rail beside Melchior, looking past him to the sea. Raven House sits on the Island of Kauai in a Decision Locus that is largely devoid of people for reasons I’ve never bothered to look into. It’s a beautiful and bizarre place, a product of my somewhat twisted subconscious messing with the stuff of probability by means of the faerie-ring network.

    The style lies somewhere between Tiki-Modern and Neohedonist. The world’s fanciest Hawaiian-themed hotel rendered in acres of black-veined green marble and vast expanses of tinted glass.

    The view is fabulous. The half-moon of white sand and blue sea that is Hanalei Bay is backed by the near-vertical tropical forest of the mountains beyond. The latter provides a great sweep of velvet green punctuated here and there with ragged patches of rusty soil and waterfalls like threads of diamond. Breathing the air is like drinking a really good piña colada, sweet, heady, and pure tropics.

    Speaking of which . . . I reached a hand back behind me. A cold drink filled it a moment later. I took a big sip, then choked and almost snorted it out through my nose in the next instant when it tasted nine kinds of wrong and far too strong. I managed not to drop the glass, but only just.

    “Absinthe?” I hacked, and turned half-around to face Haemun.

    “Not right?” The satyr shook his head sadly and looked contrite, though a tiny twinkle of mischief in his eyes made me doubt his sincerity. “Then yours must have been the piña colada.” He plucked the glass from my hand and exchanged it for another on his tray.

    Haemun is the spirit of Raven House made manifest, a combination butler, cook, valet, bartender, and wicked commentary on my subconscious. From the waist down he’s a goat. From the waist up . . . He’s got a lot in common with the traditional satyr there; human head and torso, curly hair, tiny horns. But his beard is a very sixties soul patch, and his aloha shirts are loud enough to violate most urban noise ordinances. The current one showed