Robert Asprin - E.Godz

"My pleasure."

"So, who have you got?"

"Got?"

"For batteries. You've been out there in the field same as me, courting the company's most important clients, trying to get them to promise their collective support to you as the potential head of E. Godz, Inc. Anyone who's given you his word has fulfilled the condition of implicit consent that the tapping spell requires. I know you've got Mr. Bones on your side already because he told me so."

"Same way I know that you've got Ray Rah and the Chicago group behind you," Dov said. "Who else?"

"Uhhh." Peez mouth twitched just a tad. "No one," she said in a small voice.

"No one?"

"Some of the people I saw wouldn't give me their support, and the others, well, I wasn't so sure that I wanted theirs. I never imagined I'd need their power to fight Mom or I wouldn't have been so picky." She shrugged. "Too late for regrets. What about the other groups backing you? Besides Mr. Bones, I mean."

"Uhhh."

Peez clapped her hands over her eyes. "Oh, Dov," she groaned.

"Hey, it's not my fault that Sam Turkey Feather wouldn't give me an answer while Mom's still alive! Can you blame him? And that guy out in L.A., the Reverend Everything—"

"Say no more. I felt the same way you did about him, at first, but he's not just a big phony out to skin the suckers."

"He's not?" Dov was reluctant to believe her. "Well, I wish I'd known that while I was out there. I might've swallowed my scruples and given him the hard sell."

"You did what you thought was right," Peez said. "We both did. Isn't it nice to know that even when we weren't getting along, neither one of us hated the other enough to want the company no matter what?"

"I guess so. But that still doesn't leave us with a lot of firepower to use on Mom." Dov drained his coffee mug. "What about that guy in Seattle? The sculptor?"

Peez turned so radish-red that the waitress hurried up unbidden with a glass of ice water. Peez took a big gulp, regained her self-control, and said: "He— Martin— He wasn't ready to make a commitment. A business commitment. What about Fiorella in Salem? She blew me off, so did she throw her support behind you?"

"To tell you the truth, Sis, we never got around to discussing that. As soon as she made me see what Mom was really up to, I forgot about everything else."

"In other words, we've got bupkis, or a reasonable facsimile thereof." Peez sighed, blowing sugar into new patterns on the table and her brother.

"Does this mean we just quit?" Dov asked. "After all she's put us through, we do nothing?"

"What can we do? Tell her we're wise to her and we won't play her little games any more? She'll just laugh and put her mind to creating new games."

Dov shook his head. "No," he said. "I'm not going to give up so easily. Like I said before, we still have one thing on our side that she can't counter. We'll just have to lay plans that rely more on surprise than power."

"Dov, I don't know about this. There's only so much that surprise can do."

Dov clasped Peez's hands firmly. "Peez, what's the worst that can happen? We make our move on Edwina and we fail. What's she going to do to us then? Kill us? I don't think so. Punish us? How? By sending us to our rooms with no supper?"

"She could throw us out of the company."

"Right. And that's the answer to my first question. Throwing us out of the company is the absolutely worst thing she can do to us. Know what? That's not so bad."

"It's not?" A glimmer of hope showed in Peez's eyes.

"Sis, if I say it's not bad, you better listen," Dov said, radiating confidence. "This is your baby brother talking, remember? The kid voted most likely to end up cleaning windshields or running for Congress? Without the company, what kind of a career can I hope for? I could fudge my resume from here to next January and it still wouldn't get me a job bussing tables at McDonald's. If I can risk the wrath of Edwina, you certainly can."

"I don't know." Peez looked away. "I don't exactly have a whole lot of highly marketable job skills either."

"Are you kidding me? You're brilliant, you're beautiful, you were born to organize, and you've got an inborn talent for management that most people would kill for!"

His words made her stare at him as if he'd just been dropped out of the belly of an alien mothership. "That's what you think of me?" she asked.

"Every word, good as gold." He crossed his heart with two fingers and held them up in a Boy Scout salute, though the closest he'd ever come to the Scouts was an ill- considered summertime flirtation with khaki shorts. "I saw how you were running the New York office. Granted, I was watching you because I was hoping to catch you screwing up, but I never could. That's how good you are." He sounded proud of her.

Peez stood up, leaned across the table, and planted a kiss on Dov's forehead before sitting back down. "Dov, if you can come up with a plan that can surprise Edwina half as much as you just surprised me, I'll be right behind you all the way. Got any ideas?"

"You know I do. But let's go get cleaned up a little first. I think we're starting to attract bees." He pushed his chair away from the table and snapped his fingers to summon the waitress. "Check, please!"

She had just returned with his credit card when Peez's cell phone rang. "Ugh! I thought I had that thing turned off," she said as she answered it. "I hate people who turn a restaurant into the world's biggest phone booth. I'll make this quick. Hello?"

"Hewwo, oo' mean ol' Peezie-pie," a quavery little voice assailed her ear. "Why oo' goes away an' weaves um's Teddy Tumtum all by um's self? What has Peezie-pie's naughty brovver Dov been saying 'bout Teddy Tumtum? Oo' much too smart to beweev all the lies he gonna tell oo'. Lots an' lots an' lots of lies, lies, lies! Oo' comin' back soon, 'cause oo' doesn't wanna lose um's onwy fwend inna whole wide world, isn't dat wight? Teddy Tumtum misses his ickle Peezie-pie, yes he does!"

"How dare you call me like this?" Peez snapped. "You're a fine one to talk about lies! I told you, it's all over between us. You used me! You pretended to love me, you led me to love you, and then you betrayed me! Maybe you think you can sweet talk your way back into my heart, play me for a fool again. Ha! I'd like to see you try, if only so I could have the satisfaction of telling you to go to hell all over again! All those years together meant nothing to you. All that time I thought you were devoted to me when you were really hers. Well, no more; she can have you. Get off my phone and get out of my life because we are through!"

Like her brother before her, Peez regretted that you couldn't slam the receiver of a cell phone, so she did the next best thing, throwing it to the ground and stamping down on it so viciously that it shattered.

Throughout the Cafe du Monde, every woman and a fair number of the men present broke into spontaneous applause as she stormed out, with Dov hurrying after, trailing little puffs of sugar as they ran.

"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but the way to Mom's heart is through the Internet," said Dov. He hunched over his laptop keyboard, his eyes alight with a zealot's wild devotion. From time to time he moved over to type in a few characters on Peez's laptop, which was set up right next to his own, attached by a tangled maze of wires, all of them glowing with the magic that the siblings had effectively used to double their electronic arsenal.

"How's it coming?" asked Peez from a short distance away. She sounded doubtful and with good cause:

The two of them had discussed potential strategies for hours on end, most of the way from New Orleans to Poughkeepsie, via airport limo and plane and train and taxi. They set aside all thought of using a rental car solely because they did not want the distraction of hands-on driving to eat into precious plotting time. They proposed and disposed and discarded unworkable portions of one scenario only to tack the useful leftovers onto the body of an altogether different scheme. They guzzled obscene amounts of coffee to keep themselves sharp, and the more coffee they drank, the more inspired every aspect of their conspiracy sounded.