I don't remember exactly when I stopped sleeping. It wasn't like there was a day where I went "huh - I wonder if I don't need to do this anymore?" It was more that I just got so engrossed in my work that it wasn't until a week later that it occured to me that I hadn't eaten, drank, or slept.

It just hadn't felt important. It apparently hadn't been important.

Even when I tried to sleep it was just too loud to truly enjoy the act. There were too many voices at once. I couldn't even close my eyes without hearing the prayers of countless billions of people. It was just too loud. Hell, I don't know if I'd even noticed the different memories of my past self since the last time I was on Earth unless I made the conscious effort to parse them out from the rest.

It wasn't a pleasant process. I had to go through so many different people begging - pleading - for someone to save them from the horrors in their lives. And even with al my power - the ability to summon myself to where they were - I was still just one man. I couldn't be everywhere at once, even I might wish it.

I could summon myself across galaxies in a moments - appearing as a skeletal nightmare cloaked in black fire and raining doom upon my enemies with sword and sorcery. But only one planet at a time, I could only answer a single prayer at a time.

I did, however, have armies, bureaucrats, and servants. So, even though it hurt every time I did it, I forced myself not to just appear everywhere at once. I listened, I recorded, and I sent people to help where I could. A more petty or selfish person might have suggested that I was using the pain of the people praying for me to help direct the flow of my war. But that wasn't true, I was just sending troops to save my people.

Honestly… I was just helping. Stars and stone, maybe I'd even believe that someday.

I was sorting through the endless waves of misery when I felt a weight upon my chest and groin, the steady cool pressure of a body upon my own. I bit back the feeling of blind rage at being interrupted for what was doubtlessly another young woman looking to woo the God King of Nekheb. The more I firmly asserted that I entirely wasn't interest in bedding some woman who saw me as a divine being, the more creative they seemed to get at trying to bed me.

Even Amun - with his seemingly supernatural ability to manage my household - wasn't up to the task of keeping them out of my room. I was half convinced the Jaffa were just letting them in because they found it funny, even if I knew that they'd never willingly allow someone to trespass in my quarters without my permission. Even so, it seemed like I was breaking the heart of some starry eyed teenager twice a week these days. I was breaking the hearts of young men nearly twice as much. And even once, befuddlingly, an Unas.

"You are not supposed to be here." I grumbled, not opening my eyes as I reached up to push the woman off me. When I pressed against the cool flesh, however, the woman didn't budge even against my enhanced strength. I pressed harder and she still didn't move.

Uh oh, uh… that didn't bode well. Especially because I could feel small motes of frost forming under the woman's weight. I reflexively clenched my hand out of fear, clutching the woman's small breast and eliciting a purr of ecstacy from her as she said, "Oh my, beloved… we are being forward, aren't we?"

"Lady Maeve," My eyes snapped open as I tried and failed to extricate myself from under the Winter Lady.

She giggled madly as I wriggled under her, her face and… well her everything turning a darker shade of pale blue as she managed to full body blush at the sudden friction. She had forgone her usual club-wear in lieu of the absence of anything at all, except for an elaborate pattern of gemstones stuck to her skin that ran along her face, arms, body legs, breasts and… other places - distracting places.

I supressed my inner caveman who was VERY ok with how things were developing in lieu of eveything else about me that was going full on "danger Will Robinson." Damn it - she wasn't supposed to be here. "I thought your mother forbid you from coming here."

"She did, then she reconsidered. She is fae. We do that on occasion." Maeve pushed my arms down on either side of me, holding them down as she whispered into my ear in a way that sent a chill of primal desire up my spine. "I had to make many promises to see you, beloved. Do you not feel special? Do you not feel loved?"

I felt terrified. Maeve was, charitably, psychotic. She was the sort of woman who thought that watching the Winter Knight rape someone was great fun and exchanged sex for the right to someone's first born child. Even as a god she was the sort of person you didn't knock boots with if you planned on living through it. Unfortunately, she also wasn't the sort of person whose advances got spurned without some serious consequences.

"Is that why you're here Maeve?" I replied in as neutral of a voice as I could manage with a naked Queen of Winter grinding against my hips. "To show me you love me?"

"Oh, Harry, I could show you things you've never dreamed were possible. And with your new body, you might even survive them." She purred into my ear as my blood ran colder than her breath. She chuckled as she flelt my body go taught under her. "Oh yes, Dresden. I know who you are. I am a Queen of Winter. Even if Mother chooses not to share information with me, I have my sources."

"What do you want, Maeve?" I asked, unable to entirely modulate the fear from my voice.

"I want to help you, Beloved." Maeve kissed my cheek, rolling off my chest to the ground. She knelt down at the waist in a way that couldn't possibly have been an accident, turning her back to me as she picked up my cloak from the ground. "I want you to prosper."

I took the grey cape and stole from her, wrapping them around myself as I stood up from my bed. "You'll pardon me if I'm not convinced."

"I give you my word that you will come to no harm for the duration of this conversation and that I will return you to your room, safe, sane, unharmed and unaltered." The Winter Lady snapped her fingers and a glamor climbed across her flesh, a blue bikini, black cargo pants, and thick black combat boots appearing from nothing. "But it is in your best interest to speak with me, Beloved. Or all that you have built may crumble in moments."

"And why should I believe that, Lady Maeve?" I replied, picking up my staff and scabbard from my dresser. "I am not inclined to trust the calculated truth of the Fae any more than the lies of men."

"Chronos is dead, Lord Warden." Maeve snapped her fingers, opening a portal to the Nevernever. "Mother's side of your bargain has been met. You bargained for the armies of Winter to help defeat the Force of Chronos. Chronos is dead. His forces are no longer his own, even if their war is still yours."

"Dead… how?" I groaned, realizing the obvious answer. "No, don't tell me. SG-1?"

"They are fantastically good at killing Goa'uld." Maeve purred. "I shall have to do something nice for them. I owed Chronos a violent death for his actions and Djer's Lament."

"How quickly does Mab plan to remove her forces?" I groaned - I was relying on those troops. Those armies were vital to keeping up the offensive against much larger armies. Mab's paths through the Nevernever were crucial in keeping my armies resupplied and allowing smaller forces to cover a significantly larger part of the Galaxy than they otherwise ought to have been able.

"Mother is amused by your war and would not deny her subordinates the carnage they were promised. I have negotiated for an extension of your deal until you complete a favor for an associate to whom I owe a favor." Maeve gestured to her portal. "One with sufficient clout to bribe Mother and knowledge of you to desire your specific assistance."

"I don't like being blackmailed, Maeve." I wrapped my Kara'kesh around my hand pushing my fingers through tallon tipped ends.

"I could tell Mother that you've elected to reject my kindness, Beloved, but I think she might take offense to that." Maeve caressed her neck in apparent ecstacy. "Oh… that would be such glorious violence. She would be so angry. She might even attack the armies that believed they were safe."

"Where does that lead?" I looked at the portal.

"Your Godmother's fortress on the other side." Maeve sighed. "Even I am unable to travel as far as we're going in a single trip. She has consented to arrange our travel."

Of course Lea was involved in this. "Fine. Let's get this over with."

I walked through the portal and into the courtyard of a massive structure on in the Nevernever. The first thing I noticed was the sheer size of this place. It was easily as large as Buyan, complete with the spindly spires and struts shooting up into the skies. Stars and stone, it wasn't just the size of Buyan. It was practically a carbon copy of it - just made out of stone rather than the cool, grey metal that covered all of the flying city and aged by so many years that the hard lines and angles of the architecture of Eden had been worn away by time and battle. The spires and walls had eroded to the point that they looked more like natural features than man-made structures.

The second thing I realized was that this place was under siege. I looked out from the open window and out across a roiling sea of black before I realized that I wasn't looking at a torment of water. I was looking at bodies - thousands of them. They were misshapen, horrible things with no sense of symmetry or order to them. I felt my knees shaking as I steadied myself on my staff. "Are… are those…"

"Outsiders?" Maeve looked out the window, purring in amusement. "Yes - perhaps now you understand a measure of how angry your Godmother must have been when you decided to make your home on Nekheb? You accidentally obligated her to retake one of the fortresses between us and the Inner Gates."

"Inner Gates?" I shook my head. "Don't you mean the Outer Gates… hell even those are just a metaphor."

"Oh no, Child, they're very real." Spoke the educated voice of my godmother as she entered the room. Her flowing red hair draped across a heavy suit of armor that seemed to be made of interwoven links of obsidian tipped with blue diamonds. Her armor was drenched with dark blood, dripping down on the ground. "Though I will admit that even I have never seen the inner gates. The Goa'uld pushed back as far as the Third of the Inner Gates before their efforts turned to their destruction, to my knowledge I am the first to have succeeded in reclaiming this much territory from the Adversary to date."

She pointed out another window, at a looming shape in the distance. "The wall and Outer Gates are that way if you feel inclined to fight your way back to them."

"I'm in the Outside." I all but screeched.

"Don't be daft, child." My godmother scoffed, sidling over to a stone throne in the style of the People of Eden and sitting on it so her legs dangled over the arm of it. "You wouldn't survive that, even as you are now. No, child, we are merely in the space between the penultimate and final gates between us and the home of the Adversary. There are others on the wall, armies of Winter fighting the creatures of the Outside"

"Oh… goodie." I looked out at the battle raging on the fortress walls. I could just barely make out the shapes of Sidhe warriors and creatures battling the monstrous outsider beasts. "Godmother… how long has this been going on?"

"Always." Lea replied, looking up at the ceiling, at the cracked glass patterns in the ceiling. There were shattered pieces of it along the ground from where some creature ripped it to shreds ages ago. "The war has always been and if we're lucky it always will."

"Do you need help?" I looked out at that roiling mass of monsters. "Troops? Ships?"

My godmother chortled, ficking a tear of mirth from the edge of her eye with glib amusement. She hiccuped with joy as she said, "Oh, Child - are you not stretched thin enough that you can't afford to open yet another war? This war is not yours yet child."

"Fuck that, this war opens into my bedroom." I pointed to where Maeve had opened the Way. "I'm in favor of having a metric ton more troops here."

"Lets perhaps get through the morning without reliving the Folly of Thoth's start, Beloved." Maeve chuckled in dark amusement.

"Ah… yes… that… yes." I had briefly forgot why we'd come in the first place. "Uh, so where are we going next?"

"To meet your contemporary, child." Lea looked at the elaborate silk clothing and jewlery beneath my heavy, grey cloak. She puffed her lip in disappointment. "I had hoped to indulge in properly dressing you for the occasion, but a life as Royalty seems to have improved your taste."

"Uh… Amun… dressed me." I admitted. "I wanted to wear jeans. I had them specially commissioned from one of the Industrial Age planets we found. He hid them and won't tell me where they are."

"Then at least one of you has sense." Lea snorted, gesturing to another wall to open a Way. "Go along and have your meeting. He will be waiting for you, I suspect."

"Who am I meeting, exactly?" I asked, looking warily at the Way. I didn't love the idea of a place so far away from Nekheb that I had to go through the edge of the Outside to get there.

"You'll see when you get there but he has requested a private meeting." Maeve leaned against the wall. "I will wait here till you complete your business."

"This is increasingly feeling like a trap." I replied dryly.

Maeve shrugged unconcernedly. "Paranoia is one of your more admirable qualities, Beloved but he has promised the same pledge of safety that I did. You are in no immediate danger."

"How immediate?" I groaned.

"At least till you get back to your bedroom." Maeve played idly with a dreadlock. "Given the price he paid - I doubt that he's asking for anything less that Herculean efforts."

"It's for your people," I reminded myself. "I'm doing this for my people."

I blinked at the sudden brightness of the world around me as I walked through the Way. The pure, white sands of the beach were warm against my toes as I stared out across a seemingly endless sea of blue water with white foam. Gulls cried out cheery sounds as they looked for food. I looked around and tried to place the location in my memory. I'd seen this place before but where?

A postcard? Yes - that was exactly where I'd seen this. I was in Greece… Rhodes? Lindos or something like that. It was one of those beach cities. But as far as I knew Earth only had one Moon, and it wasn't usually visible during the day.

A stick sailed over my head and into the ocean, followed soon after by three huge dogs panting heavily. Wait… not three dogs. One. One dog with three heads. One massive dog the size of a grizzly bear. One massive dog who I'd known the name of since I was eleven.

"Cerberus," I spoke the word almost fearfully. "That's Cerberus. That's the dog that guards the Gates to Hades."

"Not today." Replied a man with a thick Greek accent. "Today he is the dog that plays fetch in the ocean. One cannot always work or one goes mad."

"So that would make you Hades then, I assume?" I looked back at the man who'd thrown the stick. He was a pale man, tall and lean with a thick black beard and more jewelry than I would generally expect a man to wear. He was wearing cargo shorts and a dark black polo-shirt with set of scales sewn where I would normally expect the horse to be. Dark sunglasses concealed his eyes, but I could see the edges where black motes of shadow just peeked out.

"I am he." Replied the God of Death as he knelt down to a plastic cooler next to a folding chair. He rooted around in the ice before offering me a bottle. "Beer?"

"Uh… sure." I took the bottle and grinned in excitement. "Wait… is this from MacAnallys?"

"I thought that a taste of home would be a welcome change." Hades knelt down in the sand to take the stick from his dog. He nuzzled the dog's heads, scratching them furiously as he made silly noises at them before standing up and flinging the stick as far as he could. "I am familiar with the difficulty of being unable to always indulge in the comforts of home."

I almost choked on my beer. I coughed a couple times, wiping at my lips with the back of my hand. "Does everyone know?"

"Did you think that the other psychopomps were not going to research their new contemporary?" Hades flipped his glasses up, exposing eyes like endless pits of shadow. "I have access to the dead, Dresden. I learn their truths. You will too… in time."

"I… I don't know how to do this." I admitted. "All of this, the God thing. I don't know what I'm doing."

"Clearly." Hades snorted. "Fortunately for you Anubis was a fan of rampant bureaucracy, so your neglect of your afterlife has not caused significant damage without you since you elected to claim it. I have been able to mitigate the complications thus far but you need a more formal education."

"Sorry, are you offering to teach me how to be a god?" My heart pounded in my ears. Hells Bells, Hades had been a god since before the Folly. He might actually be able to teach me how to do this.

"I am definitely considering it." Hades flopped down on the folding chair and sipped from his beer as he watched Cerberus frolicking in the foam. "But I would not be able to do so without tying you to my pantheon. And I am… unable to authorize that. Under normal circumstance, perhaps, but you are at war with too many nations. If I tied you to us you would bring your wars with you. So, for now, I cannot but others might."

"Who would be?" I asked, already suspecting the answer. Hades might be the god who got out of the folly with his powers intact but he wasn't the King of the Gods.

"Zeus - for me to teach you'll have to win his favor." Hades took the stick and tossed it again, narrowly missing getting a tail across the face for his trouble. He smiled at the antics of his pup. "Fortunately for you, circumstances have provided you with the perfect opportunity."

"Oh," I asked, taking another swig of Mac's excellent beer.

Hades replied, "Someone killed Zeus at the Olympics."

"I'm seeing a problem with this plan." I replied glibly, taking the stick when Cerberus offered it and tossing it into the sea after scratching him behind one set of ears.

"Hardly. The memories of the Goa'uld are genetic. My brother had a contingency in place so that if he died, a cloned body of his symbiote and host would immediately be decanted from a secret facility." Hades shrugged. "I could have interrogated his shade to find out how he died, but the process he uses prevents their existence. I can only interrogate the dead while they are dead."

"And I'm guessing the backup only has as many memories as the last time old Mr. Lightning bolts backed up his DNA… so New Zeus doesn't remember what Old Zeus knew." I groaned. "You want me to solve the murder of a god?"

"And prove it wasn't my other brother who did it." Hades replied. "Poseidon went missing at the same time Zeus was found dead. He is currently a suspect in my brother's death yesterday."

"What makes you so sure he didn't do it?" I finished my beer and put it in the cardboard box of empty bottles. "Wasn't he second in line for being King of the Gods."

"Poseidon didn't give a damn about anything above the coast line." Hades scoffed. "Trust me, if you knew my brother you wouldn't bother asking. He was far to occupied keeping what was his to worry about taking what belongs to someone else. I've taken the liberty of telling Zeus to expect your aid."

"I can't go back to Earth, Hades." I shook my head. "Not that I don't want to go to the Olympics."

Hades burst out laughing, pulling a thick invitation from his pocket. "No, Dresden, the real Olympics. Not the mortal imitation of them. You're going to the true Olympic games."

I took the Envelope, cracking the seal and skimming it's contents - notably the date in Goa'uld standard. "This was written a week ago. Long before the murder."

"It was. My brother was just tickled that you were at war with the Titans." Hades smiled, apparently realizing my line of thought. "Ah… of course. You're wondering if I killed my own brothers and have arranged for an investigator to ward of suspicion given that I'm sending you for this purpose."

"It had occurred to me, yes." I replied firmly. "Given that you're third in line."

"Then let me resolve your fears." Hades stood up. "I can't rule."

"Why?" I asked.

"I'm a Psychopomp, Dresden. I have always been among the dead. I am not even able to be among them except for short bursts without risking something going wrong, in my doman. Even this conversation is longer than I would care to spend away from my realm." Hades brushed the sand from his legs before whistling for his dog to come. Cerberus came in an instant, blurring into shadow before appearing next to Hades. "I am not guilty of fratricide."

I can't say exactly why, but I believed him. "Is there a time limit to this?"

"I hardly think that's necessary." Hades snorted. "Once it becomes apparent that you're trying to solve this murder you'll find the killer out of pure self-interest. They will very much want you dead."

"And if I solve this murder, what do I get. Lessons in how to be a god and the armies of Winter helping me finish the wars I'm fighting?" I pocketed the invitation.

"The wars you're already fighting, yes." Hades chuckled. "Don't consider this a blank check to start more wars."

"Why?" I scratched the back of my head. "Why are you doing this?"

"Other than needing someone to solve my brothers murder and the Winter Queen recommending you as an excellent Private Investigator?" Hades smiled. "Dresden, how familiar are you with my legends?

"Enough to know how wrong Disney got them." I shrugged, "You aren't a devil, you're more of a caretaker in the legends."

"I'm a judge of character, Harry." Hades took another beer from the cooler and tossed it to me. "More than that can wait till you've proved yours. Now, take that with you, Harry. You've got a lot of work to do."

I pulled off the bottle top as I walked back through Lea's still open Way.

Harry Dresden, Pantheon P.I.

I should get business cards.