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stranger dressed in a giant mouse costume hanging on the wall?”
    Humans. I didn’t get it.
    Hades said, “It’s not our place to question; it’s our place to observe. Keep watching.”
    Poseidon hit another button on the remote, and the scene changed to a fountain spouting water into the air in tandem with glaring lights and symphony shouts set against the backdrop of a most uninspired building. I cringed. I found the melodic song of water in its natural state to be beautiful. Dressing it up with lights and trumpets was blasphemy. Like drowning a steak in ketchup.
    I had the sickening feeling that this outrageous human playground was where they wanted to send me.
    I wouldn’t last a day.
    The next image was indoors. A grand lobby of some sort, with creamy marble floors ribboned with swirls of darker colors that met acanthus-leaf rugs. A long reception desk hugged the back wall in an oval shape, and there were huge paintings depicting Olympus behind it. Centering the area was a likeness of the three Graces, the party girls of Olympus, surrounded by a gazing pool. Some mortals referred to them as the three Charities. It was a common misconception that the Greek and Roman pantheons were separate entities, but that wasn’t so. We were one and the same; it was just thatdifferent mortals called us by different names. Artemis, for example, was also known as Diana.
    Hades spoke. “You are looking at a lodging house called Caesars Palace. It’s more refined than other inns of the village, but it does have gaming and public water holes within its walls. It also has bathhouses and is quite popular with the mortal elite.”
    Again, the sea lord clicked over to another scene. More talking machines, more bells, whistles, flickering lights, and humans wandering about aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd.
    I rubbed my temple to stop it from throbbing.
    “This is one of the gaming arenas,” Zeus said.
    Another click, another image. This one revealed a ridiculous representation of sea horses lined up behind a liquor dispensary with a glass-ensconced water tank filled with floating fish. More gaming tables too. They seemed to be everywhere. Quite profitable, I imagined.
    “Caesar must be an aristocrat. Is he a descendant of the great statesman?” I asked.
    “The lodging house is named after Julius Caesar, but his descendents do not own the palace,” Hades said.
    That seemed silly. Why would anyone name a modern facility after an ancient general if he wasn’t a relation?
    The next image showed another public house, lined with bottles of elixirs and revelers gathered around tables, enjoying a dance performance. The silhouettes of two women, each behind a white screen, moved in a graceful rhythm, gyrating their curves and swirling their arms overhead. There was a sign off to the side that read S HADOW B AR .
    Hades turned to me. “This is the reason I called you here, Tisiphone. Several women have gone missing fromthis establishment. We’ve been monitoring the problem as of late because the police seem to be at a loss for answers. There is no apparent link between these females, and the baffling part is that their companions don’t seem to realize the women are missing until days later.”
    Missing women? That was the top-secret mission? Women went missing all the time in the mortal world. True, the perpetrators did not always meet justice, but we had resolved not to get involved with this class of crime long ago.
    I looked around the room from one god to another. Athena was smiling at me, while Artemis twirled a lock of hair through her fingers. The three brothers stood in silence. I didn’t know where Hermes had gone off to.
    “I don’t understand. This seems not to be a matter for a Fury. The new law states that only under the most heinous of circumstances should I return to the human plane to seek retribution for a mortal sin—acts such as enslavement, matricide, infanticide, genocide,” I said. There were more, but