“Honestly, you might help the poor child up.”

  The grinning hag shrieked as a plump hip gave her a deft body-check clear across the boiler-room floor. I expected to hear bones rattle when she hit the wall, but I was disappointed. Cushiony hands smelling of chocolate-chip cookies patted my face as the motherly one of the Three knelt before me, burbling tell-me-where-it-hurts noises.

  I closed my eyes, enjoying the fuss. I was in familiar territory here, even if I could never recall my own mother wearing such a perfectly starched and frilled June Cleaver apron, complete with the requisite pearl choker. The—whaddayacallit— the gestalt was the same, though. Since Bambi Yaga had slapped Mom into the depths of slumber, I hadn’t once had to tell a grown woman to knock it off, leave me alone, I was all right, I could take care of myself. I never realized I’d missed il so much.

  The pampering stopped without warning. I opened my eyes to bosom. Much bosom and very little leopard-print cloth containing it. “Are you going to sit there forever, like a zit?” I recognized the third voice straight off, without waiting for the inevitable trill of phony giggles to confirm it. Besides the Jungle Girl outfit, the lady had no other adornments except a curling fall of bright red hair and blue eyes big as golf balls, though not so googly.

  Now they all Three massed in front of me, each one extending a hand. I hesitated. I knew I was in the presence of power— 110, make that Power, or Yang wouldn’t have been so jittery—and I didn’t want to offend any one of them by refusing her help up. Since I only had two hands, this was going to be a tricky bit of diplomacy.

  They saw my predicament and they laughed. Then, as I watched, I saw the three hands—bony, pudgy, slim—blend into a single one. I gaped—who wouldn’t—but there was little time for wonder. The hand made an impatient “let’s get on with it” gesture and I took it automatically. One yank later I was standing up and surrounded by the Three.

  “No, dear, we are not the Norns,” said the motherly one. A frown line showed between her heavily plucked and penciled brows. “Unless you’re Norse. You’re not Norse, are you, dear?”

  I wasn’t. “Then you’re what?” I asked. “The Fates? The— what’s the Greek word?”

  “Moirae, darling.” Jungle Girl purred up at me. We were all sitting on a row of packing crates, only she had decided that the proper place for her was on the floor making like a boa constrictor around my legs. It made it kind of hard to enjoy the milk and cookies Super-Mom was pushing on me when my mouth kept going dry.

  “Unless he means the Eumenides, dear,” Super-Mom suggested. “The Furies. We do those for the Greeks, too.” “Doesn’t matter.” Bones sat stiff as an ancient Egyptian funerary statue, leering at me nastily. “We’re not them either. Not unless you’re Greek. Which you’re not.”

  Jungle Girl pouted. “I wish we knew what he is. If I’ve got to change iconography, I’ll have to wash my hair.”

  Super-Mom’s rosy cheeks dimpled over the knitting in her lap. “Why should that matter to us any more than our identity must matter to him? The old boundaries have long since broken, in this land. If they were ever firm from the beginning, which I doubt. He is what he is, and we are the Three. That ought to suffice all around, don’t you think?”

  “Okay, so no names. But if you can’t tell me who you are, at least you want to tell me what you are? " I never had learned when to quit. I looked from side to side, but wedges of impenetrable blackness had been set up all around our packing cases, as if someone had sliced a starless night into portable screens. From behind the dark, I heard muffled roars, snorts, and howlings.

  “Well, ladies, I do suppose he’s entitled to that much.” Super-Mom tucked her knitting aside where I couldn’t see it. Her two companions rose as if on cue and took their places to either side of her. The black behind them shimmered. So did they.

  “We are what you think we are,” said Bones.

  “More,” Jungle Girl twittered.

  “Or less,” Super-Mom finished. Taking dainty steps, they wove the figures of a dance.

  “If you think that Three of us are too many, we can accommodate your fancy.”

  “Remodel to suit.”

  “Refurbish, redesign, rethink.” A pirouette, and they were a single female form, but with three faces. A leap, and they were the Three again.

  “We are what you believe.”

  “We are what you think.”

  “We are what you need.”

  “What everything needs, if it’s to make sense.”

  “A beginning, a middle, and an end.”

  “And then a beginning again.”

  “Well, dear, it does make for steady work, having it that way.” Super-Mom tried to execute a bit of complex footwork and stumbled into Bones. “Whoopsy! Excuse me.”

  Bones glared. “Sometime,” she growled, “we ought to consider whether there are worse things than unemployment. An end, a final end with no new start to follow might be just the restful change the world desires. The ceaseless round can be quite tiresome.”

  “Now you’re talking like those wicked things we left behind us in the Leeside.” Super-Mom gave her gruesome colleague a severe stare.

  “Oh, pooh!” Jungle Girl waved away Bones’s distasteful notion. “If the world wants a once-and-for-all ending, good thing the world doesn’t always get its own way, then. Silly old world!”

  I followed their dance better than I followed their explanation. “I still don’t understand!” I cried. “What are you? You’re speaking in riddles!”

  “Oh no, dear, that would be poaching on someone else’s territory.” Super-Mom pinched my cheek as she whirled past. “Although we have been known to dabble.”

  “We played at beauty pageants with Paris of Troy.”

  “We had a fine round of blindman’s bluff with Perseus when we were the Gray Ones, although having just one eye to go around strikes me as rather stingy dealings.”

  “Babd, Maeve, and Morrigan.”

  “Artemis, Cynthia, and Hecate.”

  “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

  “Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe!”

  “Who said that?”

  All of them tried looking innocent.

  Bones paused in her part of the dance to clamp steely fingers into my shoulder and hiss in my ear, “We are so fond of games, we Three.”

  Her breath had an unpleasantly moldy tang to it. I jumped away and landed between the other two. They never missed a beat, so I had to shout my questions at them on the fly-by.

  “But whatever you are, you’re not monsters! Why were you trapped in the Leeside?”

  “Not monsters? Isn’t he a dear to say that!” Super-Mom took my hands and dragged me into her arms, where we did a waltz. In perfect Three-quarter time, of course.

  Jungle Girl cut in and had me doing the cha-cha-cha before I knew it. “/don’t think we’re monsters. We’re just the Three. We know an awful lot, and we do have this itsy-bitsy smidgy-widge of power ... or so I’ve heard.”

  Again cold claws dug into my arms and wrenched me away from my partner. Willing or not, I was caught up in Bones’s unyielding grip and prancing out a polka. “Legends name us the controllers of man’s fate, the guardians of man’s knowledge, the possessors of answers to all the questions man might wish to know. We decree the beginning, the middle and the end of every life, if you believe all that’s ever been said of us.” I struggled to get away, but Bones was a loyal partner. The one-two-THREE-fl«