For the Birds Page 5

  Winston shrugged. “You could always ask for Maalik’s help. He’s the only other one who knows about the Throne of Eternity. He understands the importance of this position.”

  I cringed at the mention of Maalik and dodged the subject. “Maybe I can find a way to check out the Fates’ records without them knowing. Meng Po wants a meeting with them, and Grim’s refusing to set it up. Maybe I can arrange the meeting myself.”

  Winston grabbed my arm. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Lana. The Fates don’t take deception lightly.”

  I sighed. “I don’t really have much of a choice, and tempting fate seems to be a specialty of mine lately.”

  Chapter 7

  “Fate is for those too weak

  to determine their own destiny.”

  -Kamran Hamid

  I am not a very good liar. I know how it’s supposed to be done. I know that lies should be spoken with confidence, and eye contact should be maintained, but I have a really hard time following these rules. Luckily, I was able to skip making eye contact with the receptionist at the Three Fates Factory since I spoke with her over the phone. The uncomfortable conversation I’d had with Grim came in handy too. I was able to stretch the truth, almost to its breaking point, in order to secure an appointment with the Fates on Thursday afternoon. I mean, Grim did say that I should talk to them myself, right?

  I watched Meng shuffle herself out of a cab as I waited across the street in front of the factory. The old bag had put on her most formal and elaborate kimono, and she was wearing makeup. Sort of. The colors all seemed a bit off, and I wasn’t sure if it had more to do with the fact that they were outdated or if it was because I had never seen rouge on a bulldog before. She noticed me and smiled a big awkward smile, full of yellowed teeth splotched with pink lipstick. I didn’t even try to smile back at her.

  The Three Fates Factory loomed above us, and I was sweating bullets under my work robe. I had left it on, since it looked more professional than the jeans and tank top I wore underneath. I’d come straight from my last harvest. Kate was in a better mood with me today. I’d cut myself some slack, in order to make the early afternoon appointment, so she got a fuller harvest docket. It would help balance out her and Alex’s little mishap on Tuesday with the chicken and the hounds.

  Kevin’s hearing was still a little iffy, so I’d paired him up with Josie for the day. They had both been giddy about it, so neither had bothered to question my early leave. I told them I had an appointment and left it at that.

  As Meng and I walked through the front doors of the Three Fates Factory, I decided that no matter how the meeting went, I was not coming back. No way. The Fates gave me the heebie-jeebies. I just wanted to find out something useful and get the heck out of there. Hopefully Meng would be a good enough cover, and my promise to her would be fulfilled too. Killing two birds with one stone was always nice.

  A semi-circle desk spread out in the lobby of the factory, where two souls were furiously typing and chattering into headsets. Down a wide hall to their right sat half a dozen baffle gates leading into the heart of the factory. Staggered office doors stretched down a hallway to the left. The ceiling was high and the walls were bare, save for several draped coils of fabric hanging behind the receptionists, probably intended to reduce echoing in the cave of a room.

  “Do you have an appointment?” One of the receptionists noticed us and slipped off her headset.

  “Meng Po, escorted by Lana Harvey,” I announced.

  “Ah, yes. The reaper.” She grimaced. “Atropos will meet with you in her personal office, third door on the right.” She pointed down the hallway of doors.

  I nodded my thanks, since I’d lost my voice, and apparently my senses.

  Atropos was not the Fate I wanted to see. She was the oldest of the sisters and the most grim, deciding the when and how of a soul’s demise by snipping their life thread with her abhorred shears. Of course, the shears were more of a metaphor these days. She kept them proudly framed in a shadowbox behind her desk, the bleached bone handle and silver blades contrasting against a soft black velvet backdrop. She still decided when and how humans died, but that was all programmed into souls nowadays, not by the spinning and cutting of thread.

  When Meng and I reached Atropos’ office, the door was open, but I paused to rap my knuckles against the doorframe anyway.

  “Enter.” Atropos was seated behind her desk with a pair of wide frames sitting low on the bridge of her nose. She motioned us inside with one hand, never taking her eyes from the file she was reading. Her desk was stacked high with them. All four walls of her office were floor to ceiling shelves, mostly stuffed with thick volumes containing faded Latin titles along their spines. Occasionally, a bronze or marble bust would peek out from a gap in the stacks.

  Meng nestled herself into one of the plush chairs in front of the desk, but I remained standing behind her, like a good escort. Even so, I felt out of place, not at all like the fly on the wall I had hoped to be. This was a room for gods to convene in. I had no business being here, and when Grim found out, he was not going to be amused.

  When Atropos finally looked up, she gave us a bored sigh and slipped off her reading glasses, letting them dangle from a cord around her neck.

  “Lana Harvey, I must say, I’m surprised to see you. Grim did say that you had balls though.” She gave me a lopsided smile and stood.

  As the most business oriented of the weird sisters, Atropos knew how to present herself. She was a classic beauty, in modest pumps and a black pencil skirt. Her navy blouse brought out the blue of her eyes, and her shiny black victory rolls were straight out of a glamour magazine from the forties. She made her way over to an oversized globe in the corner and flipped a latch along the equator, revealing a minibar beneath the top dome.

  “Drink?” she asked, pouring herself a lowball glass full of vodka.

  “No, thank you,” I said. My throat felt like sandpaper.

  Meng’s nose curled upward, but she echoed a polite, “No, thank you.”

  Atropos looked down at her for the first time. “Lady Meng, we finally meet. I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “Sooner would have been better,” Meng grumbled, “but today will do.”

  Atropos chuckled softly and sipped at her vodka. “And what, pray tell, is your business with the Fates?”

  “Your purification method no good. You need my teas,” Meng said matter-of-factly.

  “Is that so? How did we ever get by these past… what is it now? Thirteen? Fourteen centuries?”

  “By skin of teeth, you ask me. Too many souls go into sea. They come out, they know something, not solid, but enough to keep them from believing. We need them to believe if they to fuel the afterlives, and not just your factory.”

  “What exactly are you suggesting?” Atropos set her vodka down hard on the desk.

  Meng cackled, flashing her lipstick stained teeth. “You think I don’t see what you doing, girl? You think I am only one concerned?”

  “Well, won’t my sisters be disappointed to hear that you don’t approve of our methods. If they’re on schedule today, they should be in the roost. Shall we go see what they have to say about your teas?”

  Meng stood and smoothed the front of her kimono, waiting for Atropos to lead the way. We followed her out of her office and back down the hall. As I walked behind the two deities, I took in as much of my surroundings as possible, taking particular note of a door boldly labeled RECORDS. If there was a file cabinet somewhere containing details about high priority souls, that room was as good as any.

  We passed the receptionists in the lobby and pushed through the baffle gates leading to the other side of the building.

  The factory was a busy little hub. Several hundred souls worked for the Fates. Their duties not only replaced what the Fates were once responsible for, but also what many other deities used to do in order to prepare souls for reentry into the mortal realm.

  Some dei
ties were retired due to a reduced number of followers, and some were retired simply because they wanted to be. They welcomed the Fates takeover. There were a few deities who still took care of souls personally, but only if they were considered worthy and important to their particular faith. It was the same way with soul harvesting. Grim’s business took care of the vast majority of souls leaving the mortal realm, and the Fates took care of the majority of souls entering the mortal realm. It was a tidy little process that simplified things in Eternity for everyone.

  Reincarnation is a pretty big deal among the deities. Aside from Christianity and Islam, it’s accepted by most other faiths as a part of the soul cycle. Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, and even some tribal and traditional folk religions depend on reincarnation. Many Orthodox Jews believe in reincarnation as well. It’s one of the deeper teachings found in the Torah. Although Christianity and Islam do not promote belief in reincarnation, after a soul’s been in a hell or a heaven long enough, they’re more or less ready to go back to the other side. Even some of the deities prefer the mortal realm from time to time. Immortality can become unbearable if one doesn’t have something to continually occupy their time in a meaningful way.

  Atropos led us to the end of the hall where it bloomed into a cavern of a room half exposed to the sea, pushing in through a domed cage wall. Two giant concrete faces resembling Greek gods projected from opposite walls, spewing water into the interior pool, where it was churned into the soul matter by a rustic water wheel. The wheel scooped up bucketfuls of the mixture, sloshing it into a steaming trough on a conveyor belt. A dozen souls on either side raked through the solution, separating the soul matter with silver combs, before it disappeared into a fiery oven.

  Atropos pointed haughtily at each element of the process, starting with the faces on the walls. “Water from the Lethe, the Greek river of forgetfulness, imported from the Hypnos Caves. The elbow buckets of the wheel are a modified version of Hygieia’s bowl. The steam bath trough is a design of the Aztec goddess, Tlazolteotl. The purifying fires in the oven were provided by the Celtic goddess Brighid.” She looked back and raised an eyebrow at Meng. “Still doubting our intentions here?”

  Meng harrumphed. “Still room for improvement.”

  Atropos sighed. “The roost is this way.”

  We followed her up a set of stone stairs at the back of the room that led beyond the wall the oven was built into. On the other side, another room full of factory workers was busy gathering the soul matter after it passed through the oven. They handled it with great care. When I looked closer, I could almost see forms taking shape in the blobs of soul matter. Each blob was taken to another station, where it was scanned by a gadget that looked like the kind of thing used at a crime scene to find hidden blood evidence.

  Atropos waved a hand over the room. “This is where the souls are imprinted with their destinies.”

  More factory workers waited to take the imprinted little soul blobs up another set of stairs opposite of the set we were climbing.

  The roost was a circular room, sitting atop the factory. Arched, Grecian windows opened on all sides above a tall ledge. The two sets of stairs emerged out of hatch-like openings along the outsides of the room, as the center was occupied by a shallow pool. Clotho, the youngest of the sisters, stood at the other hatch entrance, signifying the end of the factory assembly line. She more closely resembled the ancient paintings of the sisters, draped in a simple Grecian toga. A clipboard was gripped in one hand, and she wielded a pen in her other like a baton, directing the factory workers as they carefully placed the new souls into the pool.

  The roost was called so because it was full of storks. They were luminous beings that were nearly transparent. I, along with most of Limbo City, was familiar with this part of the process. The ghostly storks that delivered souls to the unborn could be seen coming and going from the factory all day. I watched as one dipped into the pool, drawing a soul into its beak. It suddenly became more visible. The creature looked to Clotho, and they exchanged a nod before it took flight, leaving through one of the arched windows.

  “The storks were a gift from Venus,” Atropos continued. “The pools they nest in here are filled with ancient Nile waters, brought by Keket, the Egyptian goddess of childbirth. And the big cat napping under the lookout perch is one of the goddess Shashthi’s, the Hindu protector of children.”

  Meng seemed to pale at the sight of the panther sized kitty. It wasn’t much bigger than my hounds, so I didn’t feel quite as concerned.

  Atropos popped both hands on her hips and turned to us. “So tell me, now that you’ve toured the whole facility, where exactly do you suppose our sneaky betrayal is occurring?”

  Meng shrugged, and her kimono scrunched up on her shoulders. “My tea would still be asset.”

  Atropos rolled her eyes. “And what exactly can your teas do that our factory isn’t doing already? We already have plenty of water being imported from the Lethe—”

  “Ha! The Lethe,” Meng sneered. “My tea is special recipe.”

  “Is there a problem?” Clotho asked, circling around the pool to our side of the roost.

  “Old Lady Meng here thinks the best way to persuade us to include her nasty tea in the reincarnation process is by insulting our methods and accusing us of foul play.” Atropos raised an eyebrow at Meng. “Does that about sum things up?”

  Meng was stunned. She huffed her unease and spewed a few Chinese obscenities, trying to regain her composure. “How my fault if you find truth insulting?” she grumbled. “You cannot deny that my tea good for this job.”

  An amused grin spread over Clotho’s face. She stepped forward to lay a gentle hand on Meng’s arm. “Dear Meng, please, forgive my sister. Perhaps you would like to explain to us where you think your tea might be of most use?”

  With that tension dissipating remark, I decided to make my move. “I hate to interrupt, but could you direct me to your restrooms?”

  Clotho turned and blinked at me, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “They’re just past the receptionists’ desk.”

  “Thank you. I’ll return shortly.” I gave the deities a small bow, which only seemed polite in the company of so many, and hurried off to make my mischief.

  The factory souls would be busy working for at least another hour, so I didn’t run the risk of being spotted by one of them. The receptionists were really my only concern. They smiled politely as I passed the front desk. I could feel them watching me as I ducked inside the ladies’ room. This was going to require a little more stealth than I had planned on.

  I hated to do it, but it was my best shot at sneaking into the records room. I shut myself into the very last stall, clicked open my cell phone, and dialed Horus’s number.

  “Yes?” he answered on the first ring.

  “I need a favor.”

  “Yes?” he answered again, but less cheerfully.

  “Call the factory. Insist that you need to speak to Council Lady Meng immediately. Tell the secretary to take the phone directly to her.”

  “Okay. And what should I say to Meng once I have her on the line?”

  “I don’t care. Make something up. Tell her you need one of her teas desperately. She’ll like that.”

  “Hmm. Alright then.” He wasn’t even going to ask why.

  “Good. Thanks.” I hung up before he had the chance to change his mind.

  I tiptoed out of the stall and pressed my ear against the restroom door, waiting until I heard one of the receptionists answer his call.

  “Councilman Horus, how are y—oh! Oh, dear. She’s in the roost with the sisters. I’ll just page her—of course. Right away.” Her heels clicked as she scampered around the desk and down the opposite hall.

  I nudged the restroom door open and stole a glance towards the desk, making sure that the other receptionist was busy staring after her partner, before tiptoeing across the hall and down to the records room.

  I could hardly believe my luck. The door
was unlocked. I took a moment to do a happy little jig once I was safely inside. Then I set to work. The records room was no joke. This was surely what hell looked like for the cubical confined workers of the mortal realm. The cabinets in the room were divided into what I could only assume were files on souls currently in the mortal realm and souls residing in Eternity. There was a method to the Fates’ madness, I was sure of it. Although, it was lost on me. Everything was in Latin, too. Sucktacular.

  After entirely too long, I deciphered that the cabinets for the mortal realm were organized by date of death. I hurried to the front of the row, where the upcoming harvests would be listed, and opened a file drawer with sweaty hands. The files were arranged by time of day. I groaned and rested my forehead on the top of the file cabinet.

  If I couldn’t figure out which souls would be assigned to my unit, this was all for nothing. Even at that, there were too many files to read through each one in the next two minutes, which is about how long it would probably take before someone came to make sure I hadn’t fallen in.

  I quickly scanned the files until I noticed a section all marked for ten-thirty. I was guessing they went by Eastern European Time, the same time Greece was on. Surely those files were for a harvest that would be assigned to the Posy Unit. I pulled out the stack and fanned them across a long table behind me. My heart ached in my chest, it was beating so hard. I slipped my phone out of my pocket again and opened each file, snapping a quick picture of their first pages before closing them back. When I finished, I gathered up the files and stuffed them back in the drawer, quickly scanning for another large section marked with the same time.

  I had just finished my fourth round and was busy cramming files back into the cabinet when I heard a throat clear behind me. I gasped and spun around, shutting the drawer with my back.

  Lachesis, the middle sister of the Fates, stood in the doorway with her arms folded beneath her breasts. Her white summer dress was the epitome of graceful cheer, but her expression was full of malice. Tuffs of strawberry blond curls trembled around her face as she fumed. “Just what do you think you’re doing in here, reaper?”