Nicole stared at the screen. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You can’t pay child support, but you and Ms. Dumb-Blonde can bop off to Mexico any time you feel like it? You son of a bitch.”

She logged off in controlled fury and shut down the computer. No point to sending e-mail now. Frank was off to sunny Mexico, Frank and Dawn and – god damn her – Josefina, though even in a well-nurtured rage Nicole couldn’t imagine Josefina doing the sights in Cancun with a pair of irredeemably Anglo tourists. Frank didn’t give a damn what happened back here in smoggy L.A. That was Nicole’s job. Women’s work. Sit at home mopping up puke and scouring Teddy Grahams out of kitchen tiles, while the big brave man went gallivanting off to play.

She trudged back into the bedroom. Time was when it had been a sanctuary, a place she’d made for herself after Frank left. She’d hauled the curtains and the comforter and the rest of the bedroom accessories off to Goodwill, got the dresser and the bedside tables refinished, dumped the king-sized waterbed that took sheets the size of Alaska, and bought herself a nice brass bed with a queen-sized mattress. She’d even painted the walls, got rid of the old ugly peach enamel in favor of a nice flat oyster white. She’d been proud of it then, determined to make it a new beginning: Nicole Gunther-Perrin, independent woman.

Now the bold Aztec print of the comforter was crumpled and dingy and flung half on the floor. The sheets still matched, but hadn’t been changed in a week. Justin had tried to climb the drapes and pulled the whole thing down, double rod and all. The window was naked but for the Venetian blinds that she’d used to open to let the daylight in, but she hadn’t done that since she could remember.

Not that, at the moment, there was any daylight to let in. If she bothered to look out, she’d see a dark stretch of yard and the fence that divided it from the neighbors’ swimming pool. She was glad the fence was good and strong and high, to keep the babies safe. She hadn’t had to have it built; just about all L.A. backyards were fenced, which still struck her as strange.

Both of Nicole’s babies were as safe as they could be, when their father had walked out on them and their mother had just been bilked of a partnership. She and Frank had planned to put in a pool themselves later, when the kids were past the drowning stage. Now they’d never do it. The yard was a nondescript patch of dirt with a sunburnt swingset and a sandbox that Kimberley and Justin could turn into a battlefield. These days, they never got to use it. They were always either at daycare or doing weekend visitations with Frank and Dawn.

It was all dark now, invisible. Nicole turned back to the disheveled bedroom. An impulse struck, to straighten up, make the bed, dust the tables and the dresser, pick up the scattered clothes and the pile of assorted shoes. Before she could start, a glance at the bedside clock changed her mind for her. Ten thirty-eight at night was no time to make her bed for the day.

She settled for shaking out the sheets and the blanket and pulling the comforter straight. It was an absurd thing to do, anal and rather pathetic, but at least she’d crawl into a more or less orderly bed. Sleep didn’t enter into it. She was wide awake, almost painfully so.

Well, and who cared? With Kimberley sick, with Josefina off to Mexico, and with her louse of an ex-husband off to Mexico, too, she could sleep as late as the kids would let her. Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez Feng would have to do without her services tomorrow – not that they’d shown much enthusiasm for said services. The kind they really wanted, the bend-over-and-take-it kind, she would not provide.

Her eye fell again as it so often did, on the one thing in the room that wasn’t Yuppie Eclectic Chic. Liber and Libera stood in their stone calm, clasped hand in hand, staring gravely out at a world they couldn’t ever have imagined, let alone created. They wouldn’t have stood for the crap that had landed on her today. How could they, with names like theirs? Nothing in their world or time had been as purely awful as this one she lived in.

She rested her hand on the votive plaque. It felt cool and smooth, inert but somehow subtly alive, the way carved stone can be when it’s very old. “I wish I’d lived then, ‘ she said. “It would have been a good time to be alive, not so… artificial as it is now. Not so hateful.”

She squeaked in surprise. Her hand jerked itself away from the plaque. She stared at the palm. It couldn’t be – of course it couldn’t – but it felt as if it had been blessed with a pair of tiny kisses.

Had Liber and Libera smiled quite so broadly before? Of course they had. They must have. She was tired. She was stressed out. She was imagining things wholesale.

She shook out the comforter again, for luck as it were, and to clear her own head; then climbed into bed. She hesitated as she reached to turn out the light. The lamp’s glow fell softly on the gods’ smiling faces. Her palm itched a little, and stung a little, as if it had had a tiny – doubled – electric shock. She shook her head firmly, steeled herself, and flicked out the light. Dark came down abruptly. Sleep came down with it, too fast almost to perceive. The last thing she remembered was a kind of dim astonishment.

In the dark, quiet bedroom, on the old, old plaque, Liber turned his head and smiled at Libera. She smiled back. Excitement sang between them. True, it was true. A prayer at last; a votary; a wish so strong, it had roused them from their sleep. How long it had been? Hundreds of years – a thousand, and half a thousand more. Bacchus, that simpering Greek, had never lacked for either prayers or devotees. Liber and Libera had been all forgotten.

And such an easy prayer to answer, though not – they admitted to each other – as strictly usual as most. Most prayers were for wealth or fertility or escape from the morning-after price wine inevitably exacted. Such a wish as this: how wonderfully novel, and how simple, too. Nicole had traveled to Carnuntum. This plaque, on which Liber and Libera’s power was now so singularly focused, had come from that ancient city. And, best of all, when the plaque was made, a woman of Nicole’s blood and line had been living in Carnuntum. Is it not wonderful? they said to one another. Is it not meant? Is it not a beautiful symmetry, as beautiful as we are ourselves?

What pleasure, too, in granting the prayer; what divine and divinely ordained ease. This woman’s spirit was as light as thistledown, for all its leaden weight of worry. Purest simplicity to waft it out of the flesh, to send it spiraling down the long road into that other, kindred body.

Such lovely days, those had been, so much more delightful than these, which were nothing if not dull. How perceptive of this woman to comprehend it, and how ingenious of her to utter a prayer they could grant.

Because she was so clever a child of men, and because they were, in their stony hearts, as generous as gods can sometimes choose to be, they granted her spirit a gift. As it spun backward through the years, they instructed it in the language that mortal men had spoken then, the beautiful Latin that was so little like the harsh barbaric rattle of its native English. It had not thought, silly thing, to ask; but how else could it share fully in those lively times, those vivid and brightly sunlit years before the world grew gray and old?

After all, they assured each other, they were granting her every wish, both expressed and unexpressed. They could do no less for their first worshipper in so many hundred years. Our blessing on you, they called after the swiftly flitting spirit. May all gods keep you, and prosper you, and give you joy.

Nicole’s dreams were strange. She rode a spiral through the dark. Spiral dance? Spiral galaxies? – No: a helix, for she went down, backward, as well as round and round. Damn, what did that remind her of? It was dim, shadowed, fluxing in and out of her perception. And yet…