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  “Yiayia, this contact of yours—who is it? Anyone that clued in might prove a valuable contact on this case.”

  I didn’t expect the loaded silence that greeted me.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “What? Who’re you talking to—Deep Throat?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, missy. I’ll ask him myself if he knows anything, but you’re on their radar now. If he’s discovered talking to you, well, I don’t think the others would be any too happy. I can’t ask him to expose himself. He wouldn’t even be speaking with me if not—”

  I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or intrigued. “If not what?”

  “If not for our history,” she said, as if I’d dragged it out of her. “There, you happy? I said it.”

  Yiayia had a history? She couldn’t mean… No, no, I just had a dirty mind. Dealing with the gods would do that to a person. She’d known Grandpa since she was a teenager. Didn’t mean she’d never had any wild oats to sow, my troublesome inner voice chimed in. Eww! I responded, hopefully not out loud.

  “Okay, let me get this straight. Your contact is one of them—with a capital ‘T’. This sinister They to which group Apollo, who’s not only spoken to but hired me, belongs would get medieval on this guy’s ass if he talks to me? Have you started back on your soap operas? Been dipping your beak into Pappous’s bourbon stash? I don’t understand all the secrecy. You’d think They’d make some sort of flashy announcement, throw a parade complete with banners: ‘We’re here, steer clear, turn over all your beer’.”

  “Anipsi,” she barked. “Show some respect. Anyway, I’m not so sure nothing is afoot, which is why my, um, friend has to be careful.”

  Hmm, very interesting.

  I sighed heavily. “Fine, have it your way. Just promise me that your guy is not green and scaly.”

  “He’s not,” she answered stiffly.

  “Would you ask him for any scuttlebutt involving the fish-folk who had a beef with Circe?”

  “Yes, if you agree not to try to hunt him down. I know how you are.” I winced. “But now, my public awaits. We are in New York through Monday, but call me any time you have gossip. The next time I have to hear about you on the news, I will put on you the Spyropoulous hex.”

  I snorted. It was a good trick for psyching people out over cards, but somehow, I didn’t think I had much to fear. “Yes, Yiayia,” I said anyway. “I will call.”

  We rang off and I found that not only had my check arrived, but my waiter’s card had come with. No doubt he hoped to be remembered when it came time to cast my fictitious script.

  As I stared down at the card, inspiration struck. I had my very own Hollywood reference library on salary.

  I flipped open my phone again as I reached for my wallet, then halted the latter impulse. If I wanted to foster the idea that I was a wheeler and dealer, I’d need to exude a sense of entitlement, not comfort the waitstaff that yes, I really did intend to move on someday and leave my table to someone willing to shell out for more than a scone and a latte. Certainly, the image would do well for me service-wise if I dropped by in the future, which, given the proximity to the cop show, seemed likely.

  Jesus picked up on the second ring—always—said it gave the impression of too little to do to pick up on the first and too much to wait until the third.

  “Good morning, Karacis Investigations,” he said pleasantly.

  “Hey, Jesus. I need your expertise. Would you get on the ’net and look up everything you can about the mermaid flick that’s been filming out at Venice Beach? Cross-reference the cast list against Circe Holland’s name. See what you can come up with.”

  “Oh hey,” he responded, dropping the energized voice for his regular ennui. It just wasn’t worth the effort for little old me. “You mean investigate.”

  I didn’t need the Sight to figure out where he was headed—big client, money influx—Jesus was thinking raise. Ever the realist, I wasn’t ready to count my chickens before they were fully grown.

  “I mean assist in an investigation, yes.”

  He gave me a raspberry. “Spoilsport.”

  “Diva,” I countered.

  “That’s aspiring diva to you. Speaking of which, I’ll be out Friday; I have an audition.” He followed up with a dramatic sigh. “I’ll have everything on your desk when you return. You are coming back, right? You haven’t run off with your studmuffin? You still have time for us little people?”

  “And you are?” I asked.

  He very properly hung up on me.

  My waiter’s eyes glowed as I pocketed his card and placed my money in the leatherette bill folder. He thanked me without even looking inside. I envied him the optimism of youth.

  Chapter Six

  “Living is just what we do to entertain and sustain ourselves until death. So, latte anyone?”

  —Jesus

  Jesus fairly leapt out of his chair the second he saw the whites of my eyes.

  “Chica, you will not believe what I have found!” He paused dramatically for an appropriate expression of interest.

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” I obliged. I even sat in the reception chair beside his desk rather than make him follow me into my office to report.

  “You will not believe the half of it. I mean, I’d heard the production was cursed, but I had no idea…”

  “Jesus, any chance of you actually telling me what you learned any time today?”

  He sniffed, but was too about-to-burst to withhold data as punishment. “Fine, the highlights. You know about Sierra Talbot’s death, yes?”

  “Um—”

  He clicked his tongue in disgust. “She died in her bathtub three-quarters of the way through filming. No apparent cause of death. They’ll have to CGI the rest of her scenes.”

  Oh, that Sierra Talbot. “Go on.”

  “Okay, so that’s on top of walk-outs, damaged equipment. No big, right? Happens all the time. But here’s the thing, some of the actors and even the crew claimed they saw strange things swimming around in the water—like, mermen. That’s what the walk-outs were about—people too damned freaked to go near that water. And you know how freaked that’s got to be. I mean, hello, beaches are pretty much our raison d’etre. Besides, water’s going to swallow us sometime.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, aren’t you just Mr. Shiny Happypants.”

  Jesus gave me an answering eye-roll. “Whatever. I’m out. News, gossip, etcetera is on your desk.”

  He snapped his cuffs smartly into place and used the reflection off his computer screen for a last-minute touch-up of the hair before taking off.

  “Jesus, you’re a prince,” I called after him.

  He acknowledged me with an airy over-the-shoulder wave.

  I sighed and turned to the paperwork awaiting me in my office. With Jesus gone, it was too damned quiet. I never could think in silence. Before turning to the papers Jesus had stacked neatly in my inbox, I hit a key on my computer to wake it up and reached for my CD case. Smash Mouth called to me, but they always made me want to move. Good for cleaning or pacing, bad for reading. Offspring, I decided instead, especially since there was no one around to hear if I unconsciously hummed along. Jesus had threatened a strike the first time he’d heard me, asked if there was a level beyond tone deaf—seventh level of hell, maybe.

  Music playing, I kicked off my boots, propped my feet up on the desk and focused on the printouts. Two things stood out. One, there’d been a lot of noise about the mysterious nature of Sierra Talbot’s death at first, but no post-autopsy follow-up in the press. Maybe the reality was too much of a letdown after the buildup. Or maybe the police were keeping mum. If Sierra had been one of Circe’s clients and had her life force drained, cause of death might well have eluded the ME. And two, special effects were being done by none other than ILM. Hiero Cholas had been mentioned by name.

  I wondered if Armani already knew about a link between Circe and the little mermaid and if that was a contributing
factor to his consideration of the fetish angle. If I wanted to learn more about the official file on Sierra’s death, I was going to have to turn up something to trade. Hiero seemed as good a place to start as any. The trick was getting to him.

  I could think of only one way. I tried to tell myself that calling Apollo was perfectly natural. He was my client; I needed a connection he could provide to help the investigation. Anyway, the number he’d left probably only got me as far as his personal assistant. Even so, my heart started to beat faster. It felt too much like asking a favor—and favors generally came with strings.

  Still, I’d have to cave sometime if I wanted a look at Circe’s files, which I did now more than ever. ’Course, even if it turned out that Circe had repped Sierra and planted the nasty little clause in her contract, I couldn’t see any immediate connection to the fish folk. As trails went, it ranked right up there with Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

  I picked Apollo’s card off the edge of the desk where he’d left it and studied the number, memorizing for later reference, and froze as I found myself actually stroking the card with my thumb. Weird, weird, weird. Not to mention creepy. Which begged the question, could I really blame the strange obsession on Apollo’s godly mojo when he wasn’t even in the room? If not, what did that leave? I refused to consider myself a shoo-in for the starring role in Fatal Attraction II, though I was certainly in the right place for it.

  Moving on, I shook off the self-analysis. Probably, it was just the superior paper quality making me all touchy-feely. I had a job to do and failing to make the call would only be wussing out.

  I dialed the office phone, hoping with each ring to get bumped to voice mail, which was just stupid, since I’d get a lot further a lot faster if we connected. Besides which, if Apollo called back, he’d get me on his timing when I wouldn’t be steeled against the sound of his voice.

  For a wonder, the universe passed up an opportunity to thumb its nose in my general direction and a prerecorded voice popped on to ask me to leave a message. I did so—coherently even.

  I chewed my lip as I thought about other avenues for research. It was too soon to hear anything back from Yiayia, considering she was on stage and all. I thought briefly about trying to hack into her phone records to track down her contact, but I was strictly amateur. I could manage to infiltrate the average person’s home computer, but the phone company was another matter and not worth the jail time. Besides, I’d promised. Sort of.

  Luckily, my phone rang before I could contemplate any further felonies.

  “Karacis Investigations,” I answered in my receptionist voice.

  “Hello. Tori Karacis please.”

  My eyes nearly rolled up into my head. Hearing my name in that deep, resonant, vaguely accented voice was enough to give me palpitations.

  “Speaking,” I answered, determined not to show the effects.

  “Ah, I thought that it might be. You rang. Have you discovered something already?”

  The question was inevitable, and I was prepared. I fed him enough to satisfy him about the police investigation and my own leads with the standard disclaimer that it was early yet and that other avenues of inquiry were certain to materialize, yada, yada, yada.

  “I called because I need three things from you. First, an appointment to review Circe’s records—”

  “Fine,” he cut in and rattled off a number. “That will get you to Circe’s administrative assistant. I’ll tell her to expect you.”

  “Okay then. Next I need an introduction to Hiero Cholas.”

  “Hiero—why?”

  “Routine. He’s got ties to the nereids, having been raised by one if the myths have it right, and to the mermaid film via ILM. If either have any connection to Circe’s death, he’s a likely source of information.”

  “I’m not—” he paused, and I could almost hear him changing gears. I wondered what he’d been about to say and why he’d stopped. “I’ll see what I can do. Third?”

  “I’d like to talk with one of the oceanids or nereids myself if you can arrange it.”

  “Alas,” —Alas?— “that I can’t do.”

  “Why?” I asked when he failed to elaborate.

  “It’s—delicate. Let’s just say that an introduction from me, even if I knew how to contact them right now, would do you more harm than good.”

  Translation, I guessed, amounted to yet another failed affair where the pursuee ended up transmogrified, pregnant or stranded.

  A tart comment tickled the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back. Kicking a god when he was down, however much he might deserve it, didn’t seem the wisest course.

  “I’ll find my own path then. Thanks for your help.”

  “It is nothing. Please, call me any time. And I mean that.”

  His voice had lowered to phone-sex level on that last, and I was suddenly shivery in some very intimate places. I had to swallow to lubricate my dry throat before I could respond. By the time I did, it was too late. Apollo had disconnected, leaving my body humming completely out of sync with the dial tone.

  I deliberately forced my mind back along more fruitful pathways. Yiayia couldn’t be the only mortal who’d twigged to the whole “immortals walking the earth” concept. Maybe I could find someone on the web who was less discrete about giving away current info. I’d have to wade through a lot of crap probably, but if something big was churning up the rumor mill, as Yiayia had implied, there was a good chance I’d find something. The Internet was like one gigantic small town. The question was what in the world did I type in to find a needle in a haystack? I couldn’t very well just enter “trouble in godland” and expect all my problems to be solved.

  Or maybe I could.

  My fingers flew over the keys. No, no, I couldn’t. I tried about a dozen more searches in both English and Greek and followed hoards of completely useless links before finally lighting on a likely site.

  I browsed for a while, learning fun facts like that Zeus was currently performing at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas as Zeus Stormbringer, his act a “dazzling pyrotechnic extravaganza”. So heartwarming to see the gods using their powers for good.

  Then there were silly sections like the “Find Your Inner God(des)” personality quiz and the “Gotta Getta God” word search, but my favorite, the section I was searching for, was the rap sheet, a gossip-rag-styled list of hints, allegations and things left unsaid.

  It was intriguing to speculate on who’d starred in a series of porn films in the early ’70s under the names Ray Long and Venus Wells, not that the latter took a great deal of imagination. Venus—Aphrodite—too easy. And Ray, hmm, a sun god maybe, like—no, it couldn’t be. A grin spread across my face. Our very own Apollo? Well, hey, he wouldn’t be the first to transition from, ahem, adult film into mainstream theatre. Tracy Lords was probably the best known, but there were plenty of never-squelched rumors about Sly Stalone and Marilyn Monroe. I tried really hard not to linger too long on any images that wanted to take my mind off legitimate research—like finding a copy of one of those films.

  Lords knew how much time I’d wasted before finding a single hint of useful information halfway down the rap sheet: “Rumor has it that some pretty elemental forces are coming together to stage a comeback. So, what I’m wondering is, are we all about to be thrown together into one big melting pot, complete with scalding, or are we in for the mother of all clambakes? Only time will tell.”

  Even as rumblings went, it was pretty sketchy. I tried to puzzle it out. Was the rumormonger trying to be cutesy or was there a method to his madness? The former would be no help at all, so I focused on the latter. Elemental forces. Okay: earth, air, fire, water. Melting pot—water to fill it, fire to heat it, earth for the pot? Or maybe the people within represented clay or salt of the earth. Clambake—again maybe water from which the seafood came with fire for baking. Even if I was on the right track, I couldn’t see how that put me very far ahead. The list of water divinities stretched as long as my arm, from the
great Oceanus through Poseidon down to the lowliest nereid. And fire? There was Apollo, of course; Circe’s own sire, Helios; Hephaestus of the forge; even Zeus with his firebolts…

  I could think of only one kind of comeback and it involved worship, tribute and debasement for us mortal saps. At least I could probably rule out Apollo. If he were staging a coup I couldn’t see the sense of hiring me to poke around. Unless—unless Circe’s death put a hitch in his plans. But then why choose me if he figured I’d be too dense to shed light on his own closeted skeletons? On the other hand, what harm could little ol’ me do? It wasn’t as if I could make the midnight ride waving my lantern and yelling, “The Olympians are coming!”

  I was getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even know that Apollo was involved or that the rumors were true. Even if they were, these gods had been quiescent for thousands of years. Who was to say that they held the power to change things now? Wouldn’t they have risen up years ago if that was the case? It was probable that even gods had delusions of grandeur.

  Somehow, my logic didn’t entirely put me at ease. As Mel Brooks once wrote, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” In serious deconstructionist mode, I took that to mean that the reason terrible things happen is that moral, rational people just couldn’t grasp the enormity of the horror in time to stop the juggernaut. Plus, the bad guys cheat.

  Chapter Seven

  “Tori fears to go where angels tread, but doesn’t seem to mind digging in the dirt and turning up grubs. She must get that from your side of the family.”

  —Gus Karacis, second third of the Karacrobats

  It was hard to think of Hiero Cholas, a.k.a. Hephaestus, a.k.a. Vulcan, as otherly abled or physically challenged or whichever moniker was currently in vogue. He had swoon-worthy shoulders that glistened with sweat where they were exposed by his Atlas Gym T-shirt, as if he really had just come from the forge rather than an airy loft, his pied a terre in L.A. He did walk a bit stiffly, though not for very long before he seated himself behind a drafting table covered end to end with disassembled electronics, some still twitching like remote-control cars when someone in the vicinity was playing on their frequency.