Tez took an involuntary step back, butting up against the front of the vanity cabinet. “I know that’s not real,” he said, “but would you mind changing back? We don’t know if he has some kind of way of detecting whenever someone tries to impersonate him.”

“If he did, he’d get a lot of false alarms,” I said, but shifted back anyway. “And most of them would be from metalheads. Until we start seeing a string of dead has-been rock stars narrowing the field, I think we’re safe.” My eyes drifted to Grace’s bandaged hand. “The runes are what we need to watch out for. I’m not sure how much control Odin has over them, but it might be better to stick to phone messages for a while.”

Of course, my phone was still sitting in a police station in Singapore, a country no one was getting in or out of for a while. Out of curiosity I tested the waters, but it was like trying to warp into a solid wall: I could tell my powers were functioning, but nothing was happening.

Rather than responding, the eyes in Grace’s head rolled back, displaying the whites, and he slumped over backwards at an alarming angle. Tez stepped forward just in time to catch his torso before it hit the ground, but the pope’s vision was already clearing, and he batted the god of night away, rising back to his feet under his own steam.

I recognised the change in body language even as the threads of the pact shifted, and wasn’t surprised by the next words out of his mouth.

“In that case,” said Lucy, taking up a spot next to Tez, “I’d better be here in person.” He caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror and angled his chin upward for inspection. “I can’t remember the last time I had a Lust with this much nose-hair.”

“I thought you were still on shift,” I remarked.

“Not by much. And by all accounts Themis has her hands full, so if I happen to slip out early for after-work drinks I don’t see there being a problem.” He turned away from the mirror and gave me an appraising look. “They’ve already packed up your desk, you know. It’s just Lofn and I now.”

And given their shifts didn’t overlap, that was going to mean a whole lot of no one to talk to. “So they finally put that chair out of its misery, then. About time.”

“I’ll come up and say hi when I can,” offered Mayari.

“I’d appreciate that,” Lucy said with a smile.

Shitface had been quiet, but now cleared his throat. “Need I remind you we have more important matters to discuss than desk logistics.”

I cupped a hand behind my right ear. “Oh, what’s that? I thought I heard a part of Themis’ soul die just then.”

Despite my cavalier demeanour, it felt surreal to be having this conversation. Providence had been an immutable constant in my life for centuries. Like it or not, it had been a legacy. And now they’d cleared away my desk in only a day. I assumed there would have at least been an announcement of some kind followed by the usual tangential gossip accompanying a demotion. An uncertainty period. People would be talking. If nothing else, they’d have to spend time deactivating all my accounts. How those bureaucrats were ever going to cope without me there to add some entertainment into their dull lives was beyond me. I realised I was starting to frown, and forced my expression back to neutral.

“You’re right,” Lucy said in response to Apollo, giving the sun god a curt nod. “Odin is a problem. He needs to be dealt with. Soon.”

Sweeter words had never been spoken. “I have a plan,” I jumped in, thunking a fist into my opposing palm. “Two words: Poisoned –”

“- chalice,” Shitface finished, sounding bored. When I moved to protest, he cut me off with a raised hand. “You have no idea how many times I’ve had to sit through this spiel. I’m this close to being able to narrate it by heart.”

Even when it was technically on my side, prophecy was still one of those things I wanted to incinerate into oblivion. Or maybe that was just Shitface. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

“Alright, then,” I sniffed, keeping a handle on my temper. “It’s fine. I’ve only been working on this for hundreds of years, after all.”

“Don’t fret,” said Tez. “I think it’s a good plan. It’s very… you.”

I’d never told him the plan, to my knowledge. “You too?”

He shot me a sheepish look. “Ever since we made the pact, you’ve ended up talking about it in every version of the primary timeline I’ve encountered.”

I sighed. “Okay, point taken. But Lucifer and Mayari -”

“I’m aware of the plan,” Lucy interjected. Eight conversations, remember?

I looked to the one remaining person in the room who didn’t have prophecy or mind tricks to fall back on for support.

“I know, right?” she said. “Insufferable, but useful. Albeit mainly insufferable. Don’t worry about me. I can follow along and pick it up as we go.”

Cheated of my moment of payoff, I had to let it be.

Shitface rolled his eyes. “Are we all done? Good. And no, I’m not risking Athena’s bridle as bait. We have something better, anyway.”

Well, at least I knew which of the sisters it was, now. Athena had been one of the first to go from the Greek pantheon, refusing to cooperate. Apollo must have been holding onto the artifact for… a long time. I'd have thought by now there'd be a point where he’d have stopped thinking of it as hers and just claimed ownership. I wondered if he visited her in Facility A, wherever that was, or if the top brass had rules against familial interaction.

I pushed it out of my mind as Tez resumed speaking. “Are you talking about the spear?”

Lucy’s body went stiff for a moment, and his head snapped from one seer to the other. Curious.

“That’s the one,” Shitface confirmed. He leant back against the shower wall and slid his back down the tiles until he was squatting with the seat of his trousers not quite touching the ground, resting his head back against the marble. He closed his eyes, lines appearing in his centre of his forehead. “There are plenty of trinkets we could dangle in front of Odin, but if you want results, experience indicates the best option is the one Loki hates.”

“Wow,” I grumbled, giving him the stink-eye. “I think I preferred it when the blows were to the face. And as far as I’m concerned, I’m open to ideas. Not everyone is part of your little seer conference.”

“Relax,” said Tez. “We’re trying to find a timeline where you feel better about it.”

“In what universe is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Well, we haven’t found it yet.”

Lucy gave a small cough, attracting every eye in the room. “I have a feeling I know the spear you’re talking about,” he said. “Not only will Odin not be able to resist the trap, it’s capable of landing a fatal blow.”

There was only one polearm I knew of which met both criteria. I’d spent the better part of multiple centuries carrying out orders under its shadow, where it had hung from the rafters in the great mead hall of Valhalla. Comprised of a simple steel shaft embellished with miniature runes in precise columns, so small you’d mistake them for miscellaneous texture, every fraction of available space covered in them until the object oozed with more power than a team of expensive attorneys defending a class-action lawsuit.

Mayari leaned forward, her lips forming into a small ‘O’ shape. “Is it what I think it is?”

“Gungnir.” The word slipped from my mouth before I could take it back. One of my biggest mistakes had been delivering it into Odin’s hands. But it was long gone. Ground into powder by the tyrant himself.

“See, now we’re talking,” said Tez, with a brief snigger. “One well-placed stab with that and the All-Father won’t be fathering anything else anytime soon. Or,” he added, with a hasty glance in my direction, “you know, he’ll be dead. Less funny, but preferable.”

If anything could get rid of my tormentor for good, it would be Gungnir, it was true. Capable of tearing past protections and deceptions alike, very little could stand up to a direct strike from its piercing tip. Including me. Especially me, given it was a product of my own pantheon. If I wasn’t so certain it was gone for good, I’d be a lot warier of the situation.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, handwaving it away. “It was destroyed. Yahweh would never have allowed his enemy into the fold otherwise.”

Lucy shook his head. “Providence claims to have destroyed many things. Occasionally Dad’s intolerance can get beaten out by his avarice.”

Whatever Lucy was thinking of, it had to be a fake.

“If you think for a minute Yahweh’s chief spook is going to fall for some shoddy illusion on a stick, think again,” I said, pacing down the length of the room. “He’s hard to fool at the best of times, let alone regarding his prized possession. Not to mention these kind of artifacts radiate power. No matter how good your smoke and mirrors, you can’t fake that.”

Mayari looked disappointed. “Not even a chance of him being blinded by greed into overlooking a detail here or there?”

I tried to picture Tru getting close enough to Odin to blind him and had trouble envisioning a scenario where that didn’t end in another shower of purple glass, or worse. “That’s just it,” I pressed. “He already blinded himself once. How can you blind something that already isn’t there?”

“With something sharp and pointy,” she replied, ignoring the metaphor.

“It’s no illusion,” Lucy cut in. “The spear is real, its aura unmistakeable. I’ve been keeping it safe until the time was right.” He paused, staring ahead into the nearest mirror. “I guess that time is now.”

I searched his face and found nothing to indicate he was bluffing, though it was always hard to tell with him. “Every other threat to Providence got demoted or ground to dust. Why would Yahweh have spared this one?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy replied. “I was busy trying to organise a few million souls in Dad’s favourite dumping ground. But you were there. You saw him take possession of it. What did you see that day? Someone who was willing to throw away such power?”

I had seen it first-hand, crawling out half-delirious from the ashes of my former prison as it crumbled around me, an incidental casualty of the carnage created from the might of two divine powerhouses clashing head-to-head in a battle which had nearly destroyed half of Europe. Chariots of fire had roared overhead, valkyries falling burning from the sky. The same shockwave responsible for breaking my chains had done something to my captor – stunned him, rendered him powerless, I wasn’t sure; my brain had been too addled to process it all – just long enough for the enemy to swoop in and nab his precious skewer like a starved dog spying a bountiful feast.

If they’d been a little faster, they might have been able to end him with it too. But he’d scurried away, abandoning the fight, leaving his favoured warriors to be slaughtered all over again.

In the chaos, it had all been about where the next threat was coming from. No one had given a second glance to the corpse-like, ruined figure huddled in the smouldering wreckage. But I’d watched it all. Seen the tyrant strike Aesir and Vanir down with effortless precision, smiling the whole time. Until someone had run me through the neck with a standard-issue spear and I’d found myself waking up at the bottom of a mass grave several days later.

By that point, I hadn’t even cared. I was out of my bonds and Odin had fled. As far as I'd been concerned, Yahweh had just solved my biggest problem.

If only.

“It would still be insanity to hand Gungnir back to Odin, even as a trap,” I said. “I can tell you exactly what he’d do with it. He’d destroy me, then everyone else in this room, before moving on to anyone else in Providence he deemed a threat. He might even be able to kill Yahweh with it. Literally anything else would be a better choice.”

“Except that it works,” stated Apollo.

“Like hell,” I snapped. “I don’t care how much of a whiz-kid you are. We can’t take that thing anywhere near him. Trust me.”

The seer only snorted.

“Alright, then,” said Mayari. “What are our other options? There’s the bridle.”

“Leaving me with no way of controlling unruly miscreants? No.”

“You can have it back afterwards,” Tez suggested.

“No.”

Mayari sighed. “Tezcatlipoca?”

“I’ve got a spare foot these days. Wore it for long enough that it’s probably useful to someone.”

“Yeah, no,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Loki?”

I shrugged. “I can procure something for you, no problem. I hear we’re about to come into possession of a certain prisoner’s face, for instance.”

“In other words, you’ve got nothing.”

“Not yet.”

“It has to be something Odin would come for in person,” Lucy insisted. “Anything less, we might find ourselves dealing with the messenger instead. Wasted opportunity. We’re only going to get one shot at this. He’s not going to expose himself for any of our little trinkets. It has to be the spear.” He met my eyes in the mirror. “It’s the only guarantee we have.”

Damn it. They were all looking at me, waiting, as if I was about to spout a nugget of sage leadership.

“This is a stupid plan and we’re all going to die,” I muttered.