by Sierra Dean
“What do you want?” The tension in his hands and jaw told me he wasn’t happy about this. That made two of us.
I rifled through my coat pocket and slammed the commandeered phone on the table in front of him.
“I have a phone, but thanks.”
I slid it back towards me and pulled up the call log, dialing the last number I’d called from it. Prescott’s phone started to ring right on cue.
“Go ahead. Answer it.” I held the smartphone out in front of me and waited for him to get his own.
When he did and read the number on the screen, all the color drained from his face. He hung up without answering.
“I can explain,” he began.
“For stalking me? This should be good. I’ve heard of being shadowed by death before, Pres, but this is insane.”
“I’m not stalking you.”
“What are you talking about?” Leo demanded. Apparently being left out of the loop wasn’t his cup of tea, and he had no interest in waiting until we were finished here to ask questions.
“This idiot was having me followed. And his henchman damn near broke two of my ribs. After punching me in the head.”
“Whoa.” Prescott’s hands balled into fists, and the anger in his expression was evident. “That was not part of the plan.”
“But you admit you had her followed?” Leo barked.
“I wasn’t having you followed.” He sighed and flexed his fingers, trying to chase off the rage. “I paid a guy fifty bucks to tell me when you left the marina, that’s all.”
“Why?” I’d ask him about the dead kids soon enough, but first I wanted to know what it had to do with me. There was a reason he’d wanted to know my movements, and that was bothering me more than a little right now.
I wasn’t sure if he had anything to do with the murders, but I knew without a doubt he was tailing me, so I’d start there and then work my way up.
When he didn’t answer right away, I slammed my palm against the table. Both Prescott and Leo jumped, as if simultaneously waking from a dream.
“Is it Manea?” I asked. Chances were good that after what Leo and I had done she’d be out to find a way to get her revenge.
Leo blanched at her name.
“No, she doesn’t know.” Prescott’s gaze cut to Leo and then back to me. “Can we discuss this privately?”
“I don’t think—” Leo started to protest, but I placed my hand on his arm and gave a gentle squeeze.
“It’s okay. Give us a couple of minutes, all right?”
He sat stock-still, moving his eyes from me to Prescott, and I could tell he was debating whether or not it was safe to leave me alone with the guy. Ladies and gentlemen, chivalry was alive and well in Seattle today. After a few more seconds he apparently remembered I could take care of myself, and got up from the table.
“I’ll be right outside.”
“Thank you, Leo.”
Prescott didn’t say another word until the curtain closed behind Leo and he and I were truly alone together in the booth.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“You can understand why I might not believe that, right? There’s something of a precedent for you wanting to kill me.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, and I winced rather embarrassingly. The guy could kill me with one touch, and I’d just let him take my hand.
Of course, Prescott’s gift wasn’t constantly running like King Midas’s golden curse. It was entirely up to him whether or not his touch would end a life, and right now he evidently had no interest in ending mine. Was he trying to prove he didn’t want me dead or show me how quickly he could have killed me if he wanted to?
Either way his hands on mine left me feeling deeply uneasy.
He registered my discomfort and pulled back, but left his hands flat on the table near mine. I didn’t withdraw. I hoped Prescott and I were past the point where he might take me out like that. It was a cheap if pain-free way to go, but not at all the death I had in mind for myself.
If I had my way, it would either be a blaze of glory or quietly in my sleep at age one hundred.
Scorched earth after taking too big a hit of lightning was far more likely. But at least that way I’d leave my mark, I guess.
“Look, the thing with the idol this summer…” He stared at the curtain, knowing how much this had to do with Leo. “That wasn’t my proudest moment. I was pissed off that you took advantage of our history, and you put me in a pretty dangerous situation by taking something that belonged to Manea.”
“Except it didn’t belong to her. It was from one of Seth’s children.”
The fact that we were arguing over who had ownership over the decorated skull of someone’s dead child was a fairly messed-up example of how weird our jobs were. But he was right, I had taken advantage of him in order to win the skull, and he was just as right to point out how much trouble I’d probably gotten him in with Manea.
That he was still alive and moving around with all his limbs was a testament to how good he was at his job, because a lesser cleric would have been obliterated for what Prescott had done.
If I thought of it from his perspective, no wonder he’d acted like he hated me. I’d have hated me too.
He went on. “I don’t want to hurt you. That wasn’t why I asked that man to track you for me. I didn’t ask him to follow you, please believe that.”
“Give me a reason to believe that, and tell me why you were keeping an eye on me in the first place.”
“Manea told me about the girl.”
I froze. I wanted to pull back, to get myself as far from him as possible, but I seemed totally incapable of moving an inch.
“What?”
“Seth’s girl on the beach. And the eleven others.”
“Eleven…” I had only read about nine bodies total. He was telling me there were three more I didn’t know about yet. Twelve in total. This was veering into deeply frightening territory very quickly. “Are you saying this to cover your ass?”
“Cover my… Gods, Tallulah, you think I did this?”
“Who else can just bounce from city to city on a whim, Pres? I don’t know many clerics who can kill someone without leaving a single mark on them and then vanish in the blink of an eye.”
“Of course you’d blame me.” He withdrew his hands and gave me the most pathetically hangdog expression I’d ever seen on his face before.
“Are you really surprised?”
He sighed, running his hands through his thick hair. “I guess I just want to imagine our history might have meant you believed I was a better person than that.”
“We’re clerics. The kind of people we are is entirely secondary to the whim of the gods we serve. You of all people should know that.”
“And why would Manea want to kill a bunch of future clerics?”
I opened my mouth to answer, then shut it again when I realized I didn’t actually have a ready response for his question. I’d been so willing to heap all the blame on him, I hadn’t really thought through why Manea would be asking him to do it. And she would have to be the one commanding it, because the second she learned he was using his gifts for his own agenda, he’d be a corpse himself. Just another member of her entourage of the animated dead.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
“She wouldn’t. She knows how the system works. And it’s not like Death’s Hands are a dime a dozen. Of any god, she knows how precious and rare an initiate is.”
Of course, I hadn’t thought of that either. Prescott had been Manea’s cleric for twenty years, starting when he was eight, and as far as I knew there still wasn’t an initiate in line to replace him. The one benefit of being a Death’s Hand, however, was she could keep him alive as long as it took to bring up a replacement.
“So she told you about the deaths.” She would be the first to know, after all, since she knew about all deaths as they happened.
“Yes.”
“Specifically the Rain Chaser.”
“Well…”
“Well what?”
His fingers twitched nervously on the table, and for the first time since he’d sat down he wouldn’t look right at me.
“She mentioned them more in broad terms. But when she told me a Rain Chaser was involved, I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I went quiet. “Prescott. Two months ago you tried to kill me yourself.”
“No.”
“You almost drove me off a highway.”
“No, I was following you, but killing you wasn’t my objective. I just wanted the idol back. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
I gaped at him. “I’m supposed to believe you suddenly care so much about my well-being all because a Rain Chaser was killed? That’s why you sent some creep to follow me? As if that’s so much easier to believe than you paying some schmuck to kick the crap out of me so you wouldn’t look guilty of killing that girl on the beach.”
Prescott looked right at me this time, absorbing every word I said, before saying, “I didn’t kill her, or any of the others.”
“Okay.” I believed him, but I kept my poker face up.
“But I had a good reason to have you followed.”
“I bet. Let’s hear it.”
“I think you might be next.”
Chapter Seven
There wasn’t enough whiskey left between my glass and Leo’s to make Prescott’s statement easier to swallow.
I drank it anyway.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I wiped a small drop of the expensive Irish liquor off my lip and gave him what I hoped was a withering glare. “You think I might be next. Aren’t you in a position to know?”
He squirmed uncomfortably, so either my stare or my tone was having the right effect. I’m told it’s a rare kind of person who can set death on edge, but I sure had a habit of getting under Prescott’s skin when the occasion called for it.
“I haven’t heard anything, so no, you’re not on a list.”
“And yet…”
“Look, none of these kids were killed by Manea’s hand. Murders are still something a little outside her realm. She’ll take the souls, but this isn’t how she operates, you should know that.”
“I try to know as little about how you do business as possible.”
“For like two seconds could you pretend not to totally hate me and just listen to what I’m saying?”
The funny thing was, I didn’t hate him. I didn’t trust him either, but I don’t know that I’d ever hated him. Once I might have even fancied myself in love with him, but I hated myself for that more than him. I’d been so stupid when I was seventeen, and gods help me but he was a beautiful, beautiful man.
And honestly, if you’re going to give up your temple purity—which we’re all told could be punishable by death—why not give it up to someone with the power to kill you?
I never said I was a sensible person.
In spite of the fact that my glare could have melted the skin off the face of a lesser being, Prescott went on talking. Maybe I was losing my edge. Or maybe he was used to being glared at. Both were equally likely.
“I think something bad is happening, and I’m worried that all the focus you put on yourself over the summer is going to make you an obvious target for some people.”
Yeah, that whole thing where Manea had put a bounty on my head had certainly raised my presence on some folks’ radar. Being chosen made each of us a bit of a celebrity in the public eye, but now I was on a lot more maps than I had been previously. When an ancient mountain deity tries to smear you across a highway, you know you’ve got some renown in the world of the gods.
“What tipped you off that something bad was happening? Was it the twelve dead kids?”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Yeah, you keep on saying that, and I think I might almost believe you, but I still don’t know why you had that guy following me.”
“If something happened to the girl, I thought the person who did it might be nearby still. I thought you might be the target.”
“Only me?”
“You. The other clerics too. But you’re the only one I know who makes a habit of going to crime scenes to look at dead bodies.”
“He says, like I do it for kicks.”
“I think between the two of us, you’ve been to almost as many crime scenes the last year as I have, and I’m the one whose job it is to kill people.”
I waved my hands. We were getting off track again, like we seemed to be in the habit of doing. Once we were together, we would snarl at each other like this for hours. There was no winning one of these fights, and frankly they wore me out, yet somehow I kept circling back to him time and time again.
“So you had all the clerics being followed then.”
“No. Just you.”
“Even though you thought the others could be in trouble too.”
“I don’t care what happens to an Infatuate or a Time Keeper. Yes, these kids dying is sad. Terrible tragedy. I don’t want to pretend it isn’t. Yes, I want to find out who’s doing it and make them stop. But I was only having you followed.”
“Because…you care?”
“Yes.”
I grimaced. “That’s fucking creepy, Pres.”
He spoke again, totally unfazed by my reaction. “Be that as it may, I’d rather be creepy than make plans to attend your funeral.”
“At least you’d know what to wear, I guess.” I nodded at his fancy suit.
“Hilarious.”
“Always.” His explanation had a taste of truthfulness to it, but all the same, I wasn’t totally satisfied with the answers he was giving me. It was a bit too sentimental, too romantic, to believe he was having me followed because he just cared so darned much.
I wouldn’t put it past him that he might have some emotional attachment to me. We’d known each other most our lives, and yes, the sex had been pretty great. But I didn’t imagine he spent his days pining over our lost love. That wasn’t really Prescott’s style.
The curtain rustled, and Leo popped his head in, shutting down any opportunity for me to keep asking questions.
Fine. I’d find Prescott again in Vegas, and we’d continue this conversation there.
“Tallulah?” Leo held up his cell, as if wanting to demonstrate that he hadn’t just barged in for no reason. “It’s Sido.” He handed me his phone, and I didn’t bother wondering why she hadn’t called me directly. I had a habit of ignoring her calls, and if she knew he was with me, reaching out to him was a lot more efficient.
Come to think of it, that was probably part of the reason she had him with me in the first place. He’d force me to answer the phone, and he’d cock block me from getting any action with the bad-luck priest.
Life sure was a kick in the ribs today.
I gave Prescott a curt nod and slid out of the booth. “I’ll see you in Vegas. And I don’t want to find out anyone else has been following me around, all right? I can take care of myself.”
He didn’t answer me, just leveled me with a cool, unreadable stare.
Whatever. I couldn’t control him. He’d do whatever he wanted anyway.
I left the curtained booth and made my way back into the main part of the bar. It was still empty, save for the bartender who was sitting alone in one of the booths, eating the stew we’d smelled earlier and reading the paper.
My stomach growled.
I tried to ignore my growing hunger and lifted the phone to my ear. “Sido.”
“Care to tell me why a homicide detective called me this morning to ask me for more details on a case you’re apparently working for him?”
I groaned, scrubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand, and then sighed when I saw how much of my makeup I’d accidentally wiped off. “That’s a long story, and I think you’ll want to hear it in person.”
“I’m sure I would, if you would ever deign to grace us with your presence here at th
e temple. You have responsibilities, you know.”
It took all my self-control not to scream into the phone.
Yes. I knew I had responsibilities. My whole wasted adult life was one series of responsibilities after another. Gods forbid I did something for myself, which I hadn’t even had a chance to do today.
“I’m on my way in now.”
“Don’t bother. Check the app and load up. You’re heading out right away.”
I wasn’t about to argue, this was just the way things went. “Where?”
“Nevada.”
Chapter Eight
My life fit inside one duffle bag and a pet carrier.
If pressed, I could be packed and ready to leave town in five minutes flat. Since I wasn’t particularly pressed at the moment, I gave myself ten minutes, allowing me to choose if I wanted to add a purple flannel shirt in with my five black T-shirts.
Because I knew I’d be going directly from the Nevada job onward to the Convention of the Gods, I also forced myself to throw a pair of heels and a black jersey cotton dress into the bag.
Whoever invented jersey cotton should have achieved their own form of immortality. That shit is so damn comfortable and doesn’t wrinkle. In my line of work anything that doesn’t wrinkle is worth its weight in gold.
I fixed my smeared makeup while waiting for Leo to return with his bag, and then spent the remainder of my ten-minute whirlwind coaxing Fen into his carrier.
“You have to come,” I said.
He sniffed, not moving from the pillow I’d left him on earlier that morning. His enormous ears and tiny, delicate face made him look like a cartoon character some days. When he gave me this much attitude, I amended that to cartoon villain.
“Fine. I’ll leave you here and take all the food with me. You weigh three pounds, and I’m gone for at least two weeks. Tell me how long you think you’d last without food.”
Fen lifted his head and blinked at me a little blearily. I could tell by the way he was squinting that he didn’t believe I’d do it—and I obviously wouldn’t—but all the same I had his attention.
“Your immortality only stretches so far, bud. Sure, old age won’t get you, but you still need to eat.” I gave my bag a dramatic shake, letting the kibble inside rattle in its plastic jar. Then I gestured to the open crate on the floor beside me. “Plus, you know how well they feed you at the convention.”
