Page 47

She nodded. “He stole Nancy Pilman’s bike, so I gave the bike a flat tire, caught Harry, and then Nancy miraculously received a coupon in the mail for a free tire repair.”

“Clever,” I said. Penny seemed to genuinely care about balance, even to the point of righting small-town wrongs.

Penny’s shoulders straightened. “People say ‘karma,’ when it’s most likely an injured or retired fury.”

Her comment caught me off guard. “There are more of you?”

“Not enough to start a political party, but enough to start our own band—if we were allowed within ten miles of each other.”

“There are rules?” How did I not know this?

“With the Fates? Always. One of the conditions of my early retirement is that I have to maintain a distance of a ten-mile radius from any other fury, active or otherwise.”

“No collusion,” I murmured.

Lines rippled across Penny’s brow. “Why would we need to collude?”

So many reasons. “Oh, I don’t know. It was the first reason that sprang to mind.”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t know why. It isn’t like I had much of a chance to make friends with other furies. We tend to work in isolation from each other.” She aimed a bright smile at me. “That’s why I like working in the Neighborhood. There’s more opportunity for socializing. I had no idea how much I would enjoy all the peopling.”

Since Penny was in a sharing mood, I decided to run with it.

“How did you become a fury, anyway?” I asked. “You don’t seem the type.”

“Because I don’t have talons and a thirst for blood?”

“Because you like people and you’re not—” I stopped short of saying, “like me.” “I’ve heard it’s a rigorous process.”

“The worst,” Penny said. “You only become a fury if you’re nuts or have no other options.”

“You don’t seem nuts.”

Her smile faded. “I was an orphan. I had nowhere else to go until the Fates took me in. Without them, I probably would’ve died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My mother died in childbirth. Everyone thought I was stillborn. They were so distraught over her that they just put me in the bottom of a metal cupboard next to the fireplace until they figured out what to do with the body. At some point, I cried out, and my older brother heard me.”

The Fates took advantage of an orphan girl. Color me not remotely shocked.

“I’m so sorry,” I told Penny—because I was. “What happened to your father?”

“He died a year later. People said he was too heartbroken to carry on, but I think it was more likely the whiskey. Years later, my brother told me our father was drunk more than he was sober. That it was a relief when he died.”

“But your brother was too young to raise you.”

Penny nodded. “We were put in foster care. He asked them not to separate us, but they did anyway. He was placed with a family in Iowa who eventually adopted him.”

“They didn’t have room for you?”

“They weren’t interested in another girl. They wanted Paul to work the land. Continue the family business.”

A different form of forced labor.

“I was in and out of foster homes until a fury rescued me from an organ harvester. She asked me if I’d like to meet the Fates. Naturally, I said yes.”

“How old were you?”