RIGHT, sorry for the delay, I forgot this was a thing.  Here is Part V, set about six days after the last bit.  Parts I, II, III, and IV are also available

It was a Friday morning again when Jack woke himself up from a dream with shouting in a language he didn’t immediately recognize.  This would have alarmed him more if he hadn’t discovered, over the past several days, a native speaker’s knowledge of German, Japanese, Welsh, Spanish, and Slovakian, as well as passable fluency in a handful of other tongues—including, to Anansi’s supreme satisfaction, Akan.  The shouting was new, though, and as his brain caught up to the adrenaline in his veins, he vaguely recognized it as Russian, diphthong vowels dripping from hard consonants.

Jack tried to recapture the sound of his words, as if he could collect the echoes from where they had settled in corners of the room and hollows of the blankets, reassemble them into speech.  He opened his mouth and let his lips move to form the syllables he had heard.

“Something meshok moi,” he said aloud. “Popast’v meshok moi.”

“What’s that, Jack?” asked a familiar harsh voice, and Jack blinked at the man in his bedroom doorway, tall and delicately boned with black feathers woven into his long dark hair and flashing eyes like pools of ink.  He stood with the lanky grace and smug expression of one who knew they weren’t supposed to be where they had found themselves, and intended to remain in that place until forced out.

“Popast’v meshok moi,” Jack repeated, and Kutkh raised thin black brows at him.

“Well, now,” he said.  His voice was as hoarse and rough as a raven’s, hiding emotion and expression in the grating of stone.  “You’d better not say that down at Ninkasi’s on Wednesday, or the Reaper will jump out of his skin.  What little of it he has,” the god muttered.

“Because the Grim Reaper is afraid of being told to ‘get in my bag,’” Jack said, and his skepticism crept through into his voice.

“He would be if you were the one saying it,” Kutkh said, baring his teeth in a grin.

Jack sighed and levered himself up until his elbows were propped on his knees, feeling his head protest at the movement.  “How did you get in here, Kutkh?”

“I scared off Hugin and Munin and picked the lock on your living room window,” Kutkh said immediately, and Jack gave him a look.  “What’s wrong?”  Jack pointed wordlessly to the window and, beyond, the bright sunlight, raising his eyebrows when Kutkh sulked.  “As my lord orders,” Kutkh said, tone so thick with amusement Jack imagined that he could taste it, and walked over to push open the glass pane.

“You have a nice day, Kutkh,” Jack said, and was awarded a magnificent roll of his eyes before the black feathers seemed to flutter down to cover his skin. The raven left in his place gave Jack another distinctly mocking look and a croak before fluttering out the window. Jack sighed and sat on his bed for a moment longer before he reeled to his feet and closed the window.  Kutkh could at least be depended upon to get Hugin and Munin to leave—even obscure trickster gods could successfully jockey for position against a pair of birds, no matter who those birds worked for—but on the other hand he was much more likely to help himself to Jack’s apartment.  It was a dubious tradeoff.

When he walked into Idunn’s, flinching minutely at the jangle of the bell, Idunn took one look at him and handed over a cup of black coffee rather than his usual liquid confection.

“Hi, Jackie,” Idunn said as he gratefully accepted the coffee.  “Dia, there’s a hangover muffin set aside for him, could you grab it for me?  On the house,” she added in Jack’s direction, as usual, and he smiled.  Every Friday, Idunn made a massive batch of hangover muffins, probably as penance for her brother-in-law’s determination to get Jack drunk.  Every Friday, she had to reserve one so that the college students—who knew their business and probably could have given Thor a run for his money with regard to alcohol tolerance—didn’t clean her out.  Jack knew for a fact that there was a roaring black market trade in her hangover muffins at the college.

He shifted his coffee to one hand and took the muffin with a kind of reverence. His hangover was less crippling than some weeks, but the first bite of the nut-strewn pastry still brought a sudden loosening through his shoulders and skull.  The light turned from painful shards determined to bore through his eyes to the plain yellow glow of the bulbs overhead.  The muffin was gone all too quickly, leaving only a vague ache behind his temples and a faint trace of the humming nausea.

Idunn guarded her recipe with all the ferocity of a trained Rottweiler, and Jack didn’t push to know what kind of magic she infused the muffins with.  It was a good system.

“You seem less miserable than most Fridays,” Diane noted as she checked over the espresso machine.

Jack shrugged.  “I was luckier than usual last night.  Kutkh broke into my apartment again, though,” he said with a frown.  “So luck is relative.”

“So you won?” Idunn asked, and Jack grinned, brow wrinkling as if bemused.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I did, actually.  At almost everything.  Hell,” he laughed, “even dice!”

“Almost everything?” Idunn repeated.

Jack’s lips tugged to the side, considering, and he admitted, “Unfortunately being on a lucky streak doesn’t seem to apply to strategy games, so those went about how they normally do.  It’s kind of cheating to be who-knows-how-old playing against a guy who just hit twenty-two.”

“Still feeling lucky?” Diane asked, her berry-painted mouth curling up like a cat’s smug smile.

“Depends on what you’re offering,” Jack countered without thinking, but the words, bright and challenging, sat easy on his tongue.

Idunn flashed her rare grin, all her teeth showing as her eyes danced, and she rummaged through the tip jar for a large gold coin that was probably from one of the Greeks, with the Parthenon embossed on one side and the head of Zeus on the other.  “You win, your coffee’s free too.”

“If I win two out of three, do I get a bagel?” Jack asked.  With the departure of his hangover, he was realizing that he was more than a little hungry, and the pastry case was beginning to look remarkably tempting.

“If you win all three, you won’t pay all week,” Idunn promised.

“How can I resist such a prime deal,” he said with another laugh, and accepted the heavy drachma into his palm.  Giving it a thoughtful rub, he felt it warm quickly to his skin—not pure gold, then, some part of his brain informed him, probably electrum.  

He flipped the coin once, called “Tails,” and caught it without a flicker of hesitation.  The Parthenon shone, and he grinned.  Another flip, this time followed by “Heads,” and another perfect catch, and the head of Zeus stared out of the metal.  Jack grinned, feeling a strange flood of glittering warmth through his veins, better than alcohol or adrenaline, and threw the coin a final time as Idunn watched.

“Tails,” Jack said confidently before the coin thudded back into his palm, and when he revealed it on the back of his other hand, it was the Parthenon again. He palmed the coin again and his fingers moved as if he had spent his entire life practicing, tucking the drachma away so that, when he spread his hands, it was nowhere to be seen.

Idunn, who had just lost a week’s pay from her most religious customer and a coin worth approximately a college tuition between the inherent and historical value, beamed and clapped as though he had just resurrected someone from the dead.

“That was impressive,” Diane admitted as he produced the coin from what must have looked like thin air.  “Where’d you learn it?”

Jack let the coin roll over his knuckles, a shimmer of pale gold, and shrugged again.  “Not sure. I just remembered how to do it, I guess.”

“I’ve never seen you do that,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“I have,” Idunn said, her sweet face in serious danger of cracking in two around her broad smile.  “He thinks he’s really clever.”

“I am really clever, thank you very much,” Jack said, as quick and automatic as if it was an old joke, and he pocketed the coin.  “I’m exactly as clever as I think I am.”

“And lucky to boot,” Idunn said.  

Diane cocked her head at him, sidling up behind Idunn and resting an elbow on her boss’ shoulder.  “Don’t you have work, Deorum?”

“Yeah,” Jack admitted.  “I should probably go.  I’m working with Lucas today.”

“And that motivates you to get something done?” Diane asked, her eyebrows arching toward her hairline, and she flicked one of her thousand tiny braids off her shoulder.  “Anansi’s going to be jealous.”

Jack laughed again, feeling that bright bubbling wash through his body and spill wickedly from his lips.  “Am I ever really motivated to get stuff done?  But Lucas and I have a deal.  As long as I’m within twenty minutes of being on time and don’t get distracted, he deals with any issues that turn up during the day.  And I’d rather talk to customers than force the espresso machine to cooperate when it inevitably breaks again.”

“Not a bad deal,” she said.

“It’s really not,” Jack said, grinning.  “Thanks for the muffin, Idunn,” he added, raising his coffee in a toast.  “See you later, Dia.”  He started toward the door, then turned around and held up the golden coin, a flash of sunlight made solid and stolen away.  “And thanks for this.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” Idunn said, voice dry and amused, “you can keep it, Jackie.”

“That was the plan,” he called back as he stepped outside.