by Sierra Dean
Finally, when I thought I could do so without throwing up, I opened my eyes.
Leo was pitched forward on the seat, his head cupped in his hands, taking fast, ragged breaths. His skin shone with sweat like he’d just finished running a marathon.
“Never again.” He shook his head without looking up. “You’re never doing that to me again.”
He must have felt it all too. What would that be like, having that kind of insight into your father? To know he was just a jumble of animal passions and ego.
I doubted it felt great.
“Never,” I promised, hoping it wasn’t a lie.
I glanced out the car window, which had gone foggy from all our breathing, and wiped a clear patch so I could look outside. Then I gently nudged Leo and waited for him to lift his head and see what I was pointing at.
The sky had become so dark it looked as if night had come early. Fat, rain-heavy clouds loomed overhead, like too-full gray balloons waiting to be popped.
Guess that made me the needle.
Chapter Twelve
I. Was. Soaked.
My T-shirt clung to me like a second skin, and my jeans were so heavy from the rain I thought they’d either fuse to my skin forever or fall down from all the extra weight.
What’s worse, the temperature had dropped sharply after the sun set, meaning I was not only drenched, I was also freezing my ass off. At some point several hours earlier, one of the firefighters had offered me his huge jacket, but my arms got so lost inside the sleeves I couldn’t work properly.
So I stood in my short-sleeve shirt and my water-logged denim.
I’d been managing the storm for about ten hours.
After the first hour, Rhys and Yvonne had fled back to the shelter of their cars. Two hours after that they’d left altogether. Leo had never bothered to get out of the Charger after our long-distance call to his father, but when I’d looked back a few times, he was still there, watching me.
Five hours in, the firefighters had pulled back, ceasing all their efforts. A couple of them had come to stand with me, as a sign of solidarity maybe, or more likely because they couldn’t believe what was happening. But even they had drifted off to drier pastures, most returning to the motel. Probably to take well-earned showers and drink well-earned beers.
Me, I was turning into a giant human wrinkle.
My hair had gotten so wet it defied being held in a ponytail any longer. Strands clung to my mouth and neck, tangled in my lashes, and generally made it impossible to see anything.
Thankfully, all I needed to see was the fire.
Over the course of the day the flames had gone from a raging tempest of smoke and skin-melting heat down to the burning embers of a grudge. The fire was dying. It wasn’t being quick about it, but it was taking its last gasps.
Had I just started the storm and left it to do its own thing, there was a good chance the clouds would have naturally drifted away, giving only the most minor reprieve from the wildfire. The bulk of it would have turned to steam before it could do any good. Real rain didn’t care whether it helped or hindered. It ran on its own schedule, had its own whims.
So I stood here, anchoring the storm in place. I held it down like a wild stallion that refused to be broken, and it fought me the whole time. The clouds wanted to move. The rain was ready to go, but I wasn’t ready for it to head down the road yet.
I couldn’t stop. If I took a break, sure I could call up the storm again, but only if I had the physical strength. And the second I let myself rest, I’d be dead to the world.
My entire body was numb. I was so fully exhausted that I might very well have been asleep on my feet the whole time and not noticed. Except the pain was real enough that I knew this wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t pain like in the car, where my nerves were exposed and then rubbed raw. This was more insidious. This was deep-inside-the-bone pain, the kind of ache that becomes a part of you to the point you doubt you could live without it, like it’s part of the glue holding you together.
At last, just before midnight, the rain doused the last of the fire.
I waited longer, until the firefighters—who had returned by then—could make sure that any flare-ups were under their control, and then I let the storm go.
The clouds didn’t break up immediately, but the rain did dissipate into a fine mist. The air was still choked with smoke, in spite of the downpour, and the mingling scents of burnt wood and fresh rain were enough to make a person dizzy.
Oh…maybe that was just me.
Leo got out of the car when he saw me stumbling towards him like the town drunk. I was bobbing and weaving enough to make a prizefighter proud, but no matter what I did I couldn’t manage to make my limbs work properly.
When I was a few feet away from him, my body stopped trying.
I collapsed, dropping to my knees in the slick, muddy grass, and Leo caught me under my arms before I went face first into the muck. I was done. Drained. My energy had been depleted, then rebuilt, then sapped again, over and over and over through the evening. And like a battery that’s charged too often without proper rest, there was nothing left to fill up now.
I was spent.
“Sleep,” I muttered, my face pressed into the damp material of his shirt.
“I think you might have earned a nap.” He stroked my hair in a way that felt tender, comforting, and not at all what I expected from him. It was nice to have him here, as much as I’d initially resisted the idea. Turned out having a partner who wasn’t a three-pound canid might come in handy from time to time.
Leo eased me into the passenger seat, and I meekly protested, “Seats’ll get wet.”
“Yes. They will.” He clicked my seat belt into place and made himself comfortable in the driver’s spot. Well, as comfortable as a six-foot-five man can be in a car designed for the convenience of a much shorter woman.
I must have drifted off before we were even on the road, because the next thing I knew there was a pillow under my head and someone was tugging my boots off.
“Goway.” I rolled over onto my stomach and tried to kick the person at the end of the bed.
“Tallulah, I know you’re tired, but you can’t go to sleep in those clothes. You’re soaked to the bone, and if I learned anything from my grandmother, that’s a sure-fire recipe to catch your death of cold.” The way he said it, with his honey-sweet Louisiana accent, was a pure delight.
“Good.” My face was pressed into the motel pillow, which smelled like fabric softener and something mustier. Age.
“No. Not good. You think I want to explain to Sido why I let you die?”
“She’ll replace me.”
Leo sighed, a very long, loud sound like something a parent might do to express their disappointment in a petulant child. “She won’t want to replace you. She actually likes you.” Under his breath he added, “Gods only know why.”
I laid still and let him pull my boots off my feet. He might be on to something. The longer I stayed in the soaking clothes, the colder I got.
“Leo.” My voice was barely over a whisper, and even saying that much felt like it used too much energy.
“Yeah?” My boots thudded to the floor next to the front door.
“Can you start the shower for me?” I was pretty sure I could manage to keep myself propped up when I was in it, but the idea of getting up, figuring out the motel tub, and waiting for the water to get warm sounded like more work than I was capable of.
“I’m not going to wash your hair or anything. Like, you’re hot and all, but this isn’t my sneaky way of seeing you naked, just so you know.”
I laughed into the pillow. Not a laugh, really, but a short little wheeze of amusement.
“Don’t worry, I can handle the nudity parts on my own.” Rolling back onto my side, I lifted my head to get a better look at him. “You never struck me as a prude.” I was smirking—at least I thought I was—so I hoped he’d know I was teasing him.
“I don’t want to see a woman naked unless
I’m going to be able to very thoroughly explore that terrain. And quite frankly, your terrain is like one of those treasure maps that leads people to their death. I would only be setting myself up for disaster.”
He offered me his hand and pulled me up into a sitting position. I still felt as floppy as a rag doll, but I did keep myself upright. Hurray!
“I’m not a cursed map,” I protested.
“Fine, but you do belong in someone else’s glove box.”
“This metaphor is getting weird.” I think I knew what he was suggesting, and it had nothing to do with my temple purity and everything to do with a certain unlucky priest. “Cade doesn’t own me.” I don’t know why I was protesting. I had no sexual interest in Leo, and this was about the least sexy scenario we could find ourselves in.
Okay, well maybe no interest wasn’t the whole truth. I mean, the guy was a demigod and looked like a walking slab of human perfection. I’d have to be dead not to find him attractive.
He wasn’t who I wanted, though.
“He may not own you, but I doubt he’d want me taking advantage of you in your hour of need, either.”
I snorted and rolled my eyes, which only managed to make the room start spinning. “Just run the shower, buddy. What Cade does and doesn’t want from me, or relating to me, is a discussion for another time. A long, long, long time from now.”
Leo ruffled my hair and chuckled. “If you say so.” He disappeared into the bathroom, and a moment later I heard the water running.
Left alone, I stared at the empty chair by the bathroom door, where Macha had been sitting earlier that morning, and suddenly a huge wave of nausea-inducing fear swept over me.
She’d given me two weeks to solve an impossible crime. Two weeks to figure out who or what was murdering would-be initiates. And I had absolutely no clue where to begin. Prescott said it wasn’t him, but all the same he was still someone I should keep in mind. Because who else would do something like this?
Someday, if I didn’t die first, there would be a week where I didn’t have multiple gods coming to me making demands of my time. Where I could, like, have a vacation.
I would sleep for a week straight.
Which was exactly what I wanted to do right now.
Instead I got to my feet and inched my way over to the bathroom, every muscle in my body screaming its protest. Lay down! Stop moving! Why do you hate yourself?
I didn’t hate myself.
The gods certainly seemed to, though.
I woke up several hours after my shower to find Leo filling Fen’s food dish. I said a silent thank-you to myself for remembering to put on pajamas—with pants no less—before I’d passed out.
“Most people break in to steal things,” I mumbled.
“It’s not breaking in when you have a key.”
“Says the expert.”
“I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of flexible legalities.” He chuckled and put Fen’s bowl on the floor, where the fennec proceeded to start wolfing it down at an alarming rate. Guess I’d forgotten to feed him the night before in my stupor.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
I sat up in bed, wedging the pillows behind me. Apparently I hadn’t bothered to get under the covers. Classic move. “I feel like I took a baseball bat to the head, and while I was unconscious, someone used that same bat to clobber me all over my body.”
He pulled the chair over from next to the door and plopped down, propping his feet on the end of my bed. Guess he was planning on hanging out for a while. I was actually grateful he was here, rather than having to wake up alone and achy. Chatting was a good distraction.
“You don’t have the things on your arms.” Leo jerked his chin towards my bare shoulders. “The spider-web ones.”
“The Lichtenberg figures?”
He shrugged. His enormous frame looked strangely comical wedged into the little chair.
“I only get those when I channel lightning,” I explained. “Everything else just makes me tired.”
“They make you a big baby.” He kicked my foot playfully.
“Pfft. Ask a guy to run you one shower and suddenly he’s an expert.”
“I like to think I know you pretty well.”
I gave him a curious look, wondering if I could say the same. “How are you doing. Really?”
“You just controlled a storm for almost twelve hours and you’re asking me how I am? You can pretend you’re a hard-ass, Tallulah, but I see that softie you’re hiding under the surface.”
“Don’t tell anyone. I have a reputation to uphold.” Fen hopped up on the bed next to Leo’s feet, gratefully licking his chops. “Seriously though. You’ve been at the temple for two months, left your whole old life behind. How are you doing?”
Leo’s expression went from teasing and happy to stone-cold in the span of an instant. Moments like this were stark reminders that he absolutely was Seth’s son. His father was a pro at those volatile mood shifts too.
“It’s different.” He pulled his legs off my bed, sitting up straighter in his chair. “You go your whole life knowing the only person you can count on is yourself, and that if you want something in the world you’re going to have to fight and claw for it, right?”
I nodded, somewhat familiar with that sensation, no matter how much the temple spoiled me.
“And now, suddenly, I’m rich. My father is a god. I can have whatever I want just by asking for it.”
“That’s good though, isn’t it?”
He leveled me with a humorless stare and snorted. “Put it this way. My mom knew he was a god. She knew what I would be. She didn’t ask him for help.”
I shook my head, not understanding that logic at all. “The temple would have looked after you.”
“The temple would have ruined me. I’ve been there eight weeks and I already know I would have been a selfish monster if I’d been raised as Seth’s son. And now that I know who I am, people expect me to jump for joy and be so grateful. Honestly, though, I wish I could forget it all and go back to squatting in empty apartments and stealing watches from tourists.” He sighed and looked away from me when my gaze stayed on his a little too long.
“I don’t get that,” I admitted.
“When you opened that link to my father in the car, he knew I was with you, I could tell.”
“And?” I doubted I was going to like the answer, but I asked all the same.
“I could feel his attachment to me. I knew exactly what he felt when he realized I was there. Nothing. It was like I was a pair of shoes he owned but never wore.”
I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to pick up his hand and squeeze, but I didn’t think he was looking for my comfort.
Instead I gave him a weak smile and said, “Welcome to the club.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Did anyone ever tell you that watching you eat is equal parts terrifying and impressive?” Leo stared at me with an expression that was, indeed, both awe and repulsion.
“No,” I said around a mouthful of pizza.
“You just turned an extra-large meat lover’s pizza into a personal-sized serving.” He nodded at the almost empty serving tray.
“Any pizza is personal-sized if you believe in yourself, Leo.” I sipped some Coke through a straw and smiled at him.
We had the little Lovelock pizzeria to ourselves. Whether it was because most of the residents still hadn’t returned or because no one was in the mood for carbs, I couldn’t have said, but I was grateful for the privacy.
And the garlic bread.
And the baked penne.
Leo took a bite of his own pizza slice and shook his head at me. “You’re a weird lady, Tallulah Corentine.”
“You would be too if you were me.”
I’d managed to get several uninterrupted hours of sleep after my shower, during which time Leo had become best friends with Yvonne. She had apparently washed and dried my soaking clothes, leaving me with a freshly laundered pile when I
awoke that afternoon. I only had two pairs of pants with me, so being able to wear my favorite jeans again was the best reward I could have asked for.
The people of Lovelock, however, seemed Hades-bent on making their gratitude known to Leo and me. The owner of the pizzeria, like Yvonne, kept insisting, “On the house, on the house.”
To which I naturally replied, “You don’t know what you’re promising.”
He didn’t seem to care. But he would be getting a pretty magnificent tip hidden on the table when he wasn’t looking.
Normally I didn’t like people knowing I was doing things for them, but perhaps I ought to take some credit from time to time. Sure, skipping out on the blame when things went wrong was a huge part of why I like anonymity. But I also really liked free pizza.
Because the whole town already knew who I was, I hadn’t bothered hiding the mark on the back of my neck. No one had any comments about the little black rain cloud, treating me like I was any other twenty-something girl with a tattoo.
Except no one was permitted to get a tattoo that resembled the mark of a god. The punishment if you were caught with a false mark was to have it scored from your skin. Literally scratched away until all that was left was a bloody mess where it had been. Any artist who was discovered doing a tattoo of a god’s mark would lose their hands.
Not metaphorically.
Their hands would be cut off.
This was considered a gentler punishment than what it used to be, which was death.
I’m sure there were still people out there with homemade marks, tiny tattoos they kept hidden as a form of rebellion, but no one would be dumb enough to flaunt a fake mark in public. The stakes were too high.
I tended to hide mine because I didn’t want the attention that came along with people knowing who I was.
What I was.
I picked up another slice of pizza and was about to take a bite when the bell over the door jangled and a moment later a chair was pulled up to our table.
Just like that, the pale-blonde teenager who had been spying on me when we first arrived was sitting with us. She stared at me with her inhumanly large eyes, like a child waiting for a magician to do a trick.
