by Sierra Dean
“Sure I did. Didn’t you get my text?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
All the air vanished from the world with those five words.
Didn’t you get my text?
“Your…your text?”
She nudged me out of the doorway and came into the room, and I let the door close behind us. She immediately made a beeline for Fen, cooing his name like he was her nephew and not just my familiar. “How’s my favorite little guy? Come see your Auntie Sunny.”
He complied without hesitation, running into her open arms and letting her scoop him up. If he were a cat, he would have been purring like a motorboat. Instead he made squeaky noises of delight while she rubbed his exposed belly, then playfully nipped at her fingers.
“Sunny, your text?” I was whispering, hoping she’d get the hint and keep her voice low so she wouldn’t wake Sawyer.
“Yeah, I sent you one this afternoon that said I’d see you tonight. Didn’t you get it?” She glanced up from petting Fen to look at me.
Beautiful, flawless Sunny. Center of my universe. The other half of my being that couldn’t be filled until we were in a room together.
She’d been the one who scared me half out of my mind with that godsdamned text message.
See you tonight.
It hadn’t been the killer. All my nerves and worry and panic, and it had been my stupid twin sister telling me she was coming to town early.
Once I finally got a grip and realized my error, I said, “You must have changed your number. I didn’t recognize it.”
She laughed, her voice like wind chimes or birdsong. “Oh that’s so me. I’m sorry, you must have been so confused. Well, you can add it to your phone now. Sorry.”
“I called you back. There was no answer. No voicemail.”
She scratched Fen’s belly and nodded along with everything I said. “Yeah, it’s a brand-new phone. I literally just finished activating it when I got on the flight. I sent you that text and turned it off. I really am sorry.” After setting Fen down, she dropped herself onto the couch and picked up the nearest Chinese food container, taking an exploratory sniff.
In spite of the fact everything was still fresh, she wrinkled her nose and set the box back down. “I can’t believe you’re still eating this garbage.”
I’d almost forgotten that all the Sun Worshippers were appallingly healthy eaters. The last time we were together she’d tried to sell me on the benefits of cold-press juicing. After she explained that her breakfast was a blend of kale, cucumber, mint, carrot, and beets with a hint of strawberry for sweetness, I’d stopped listening.
We might be twins, but there’s a lot more than blood that goes into making a person who they are. Sunny and I, for all our similarities, had grown into very different women.
She was the kind of person who went jogging for fun and drank herbal tea instead of coffee. I’d never asked, but I assumed she did yoga every morning. I mean, they didn’t call it a Sun Salutation for nothing.
Even her clothing indicated how different we’d become. I was dressed like a homeless concert roadie, and she was wearing a light cream linen tunic top over adorable blue-and-gold print pants. Her shoes were gold loafers.
She looked like she’d just stepped out of a salon after a deep condition and blowout.
I still had my hair in a messy bun on the top of my head where I’d put it for the bath.
How were we even related?
If not for the identical shape of our faces, I would wonder which one of us had been switched at birth.
I didn’t begrudge her any of this, either. Her perfect exterior and enviable health-nut lifestyle were all part of what made her Sunny, and that was someone I loved with every available fiber of my being. Sure, she made me look like an absolute scrub in comparison, but I relished the opportunity to be in her shadow because it meant I was close enough to be there.
I took one of the containers from the table and popped a chicken ball in my mouth, making an exaggerated mmm sound. “Come on. How long has it been since you had a trans fat in your body? Do you remember MSG?” I waved another chicken ball at her, and she rolled her eyes.
“You’re disgusting,” she chided.
“I’m a product of my environment,” I countered.
I’d been trying to make a joke, but she frowned a little. I think there were times she imagined my life a lot worse than it actually was. I liked to complain, but I really didn’t have it so bad. Sure, things weren’t as shiny and movie perfect as they seemed to be at Apollo’s temple, but it wasn’t terrible either.
Still, I think Sunny sometimes wished we’d been destined for the same life and not polar-opposite ends of the spectrum. She was sunshine, I was rain. That was what the Fates had planned for us, and it had a sort of poetic beauty to it.
I mean, we were so different on the surface too. I was all dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. She was tan and leggy, much better suited for her role in the sun. I tried to imagine myself sitting next to her at a pool, sunning myself like a lizard. I couldn’t do it.
That was the thing about destiny. We were precisely where we were meant to be. No matter what path we took, this was the destination.
I sat next to her on the couch, leaning my full weight against her, hoping to absorb a little of her heat. After this week it would be at least another year before I saw her again, maybe more. Our paths were unlikely to cross in the real world because of how different our jobs were. Sun and rain usually weren’t called for at the same time.
“I missed you, Lula-Belle,” she whispered, pressing her forehead against mine.
“I missed you, Sunshine Marie.”
We sat like that for a long while, breathing each other in, warming one another with our combined presence. I hadn’t realized how empty I’d been until she was there, filling me up. I was half a person made whole.
I hated imagining how things would be in a few days when she left me to go back to Arizona. How do you go back to being half when you know what it’s like to be complete? How does anything ever feel good again?
More than that, I hated myself for bargaining with her life when I’d been with Charon. How could I have made that promise to him, no matter what was at stake?
Part of me wanted to tell her what I’d done, but I still believed I would find a way to get out of the arrangement.
We spent an hour talking in hushed voices, catching up on five years of missed stories. We talked about everything and nothing. We didn’t mention our parents. They were like a dream we had shared a long time ago that neither of us really remembered anymore.
I also didn’t talk about Cade. For some reason he felt like a secret meant only for me that I couldn’t even share with Sunny. For one thing, she was a stickler for the rules, far more than I was. She would have been scandalized if she’d known some of the things that had gone on between me and the bad-luck priest.
Sunny might be one of the last true temple-pure clerics in North America.
At least she had been five years ago. If anything had changed since then, she wasn’t sharing those details with me any more than I was sharing my love life with her.
The funny thing was I think she’d have liked Cade.
I mean, they obviously knew each other in passing the way all of us did. But he was the kind of man who kept to himself. Up until our little cross-country drive this summer I had thought he kind of hated me. That was just the vibe he gave off.
I’d seen him smile more in the last three days than I had in a dozen years of acquaintance before that. I doubt he let people get close to him that often. I was so unaccustomed to seeing him happy I still didn’t fully trust it.
How could I explain all that to Sunny and make her understand?
You see, I know fraternization between clerics is forbidden, but there’s this grouchy guy who’s really mean to everyone and carries a cloud of bad luck everywhere he goes, and I’m sort of in love with him.
Of course, she’d jump for joy,
right?
Not so much.
As the morning sun turned the sky a pale-violet hue, I fell asleep for the third time that evening, curled up next to my twin sister, our fingers entwined and our legs wrapped around each other like we were back in the womb, and for a little while at least, nothing could touch us.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I knew right away Leo was going to be trouble.
Sunny and I met Leo and Sawyer—who had gone back to her own room to change first—in the Lucky Star lobby the next morning with a plan to grab some breakfast before the convention kicked off at noon.
The second Leo saw Sunny, his expression changed. He went a little…funny. All the smooth confidence and bravado was gone, and when he offered his hand to her as I introduced them, he actually stammered. “P-pleasure to meet you.”
Oh, Seth help me.
It seemed deeply unfair that in spite of us being twins, Sunny was clearly the one whose guy magnet worked better. Maybe it was the blonde hair? I didn’t think I was ugly or anything, but I could have been walking through the lobby naked and I doubt anyone would have noticed I was there if Sunny was standing next to me.
“You’re Tallulah’s sister?” Leo asked.
“Twin sister,” Sunny confirmed.
He looked between the two of us, like this must be some kind of test. “But…” He narrowed his eyes and stared at my face, then Sunny’s. “Look, I mean this as respectfully as possible, but are you sure? ’Cause, like…Tallulah is a lot darker than you.”
Sunny shrugged like she’d barely registered his disbelief. We were used to this by now. “Our dad was half-black. Grandma was black and our Grandpa was Italian. Hence Corentine. And then Mom was… What was Mom?” She looked at me for help. “It was one of those Scandinavian countries, but I can never remember.”
“Mom was Swedish. Really Swedish. Her parents moved to America right before she was born.”
Sunny tugged her hair, which she had braided before coming downstairs. “Hence this.”
“So you…” Leo pointed to me, “…are a black Italian Swede?”
“Sure. And you’re a half god. Let’s not bust open the DNA testing kits, okay?” I hated conversations like these so much, but they always seemed to happen more often when Sunny was around. I guess it was natural for people to wonder how we could be related when we were so different physically, but I also wanted to tell them to mind their own damned business.
Plus, I hated how these discussions painted me as the outlier. My DNA and Sunny’s were practically identical, so why was it everyone looked at me like I was adopted and not her?
This would have been so much easier if we had family photos to show people. See, here are my parents. Now do you understand how it works? I think it might have helped people do the genetic math a bit better.
We hadn’t been able to keep any photos of our parents, though. They represented our old life, and the temple was our new life. The less homesick we were, the more obedient we were, so they did whatever they could to scrub those memories from our malleable young minds.
Temple above family.
Temple above everything.
I took Sunny’s hand and squeezed it, suddenly grateful she had been destined alongside me. If she’d been a normal girl, I probably never would have seen her again. Since we were both stuck in this together, it meant I got to keep her, even if only for fleeting moments like this one. Maybe that was enough, if it meant having her at all.
I tried to imagine a life where Sunny was nothing more than a foggy memory, and it hurt too much to even fathom.
Divided was better than torn apart forever.
As impressed with me as Sawyer had been the day before, I was totally a second fiddle to how exciting my sister was.
Today Sunny was wearing a lightweight mint-green dress, and her hair was held back in a headband, the long golden-blonde braid hanging over her shoulder. I had no doubt she was wearing a bathing suit under that dress. Sunny was perpetually ready to spend the day at the pool, even in October.
Sawyer looked so dazzled by Sunny I thought the girl might need sunglasses to look directly at her. I could relate. My sister was sunshine, and I was the little black cloud that followed her around.
“So you’re a cleric to Apollo?” Sawyer asked.
We’d ordered our breakfast, and I was already on my second cup of coffee.
Sunny dunked a bag of chamomile tea in her mug. “I am.”
“What does that mean? I know Tallulah can make it rain and make lightning and all that cool stuff. What do you do?”
“Kind of the opposite, I guess. I bring sun. Apollo’s clerics do a few different things, but sunshine is my specialty.”
“Is Sunny your real name?” Sawyer asked.
“Well, Sunshine, but no one calls me that. Our parents saw our marks when we were born.” She tapped the place on her neck where her little black sun symbol was. “They knew what we’d grow up to be, so they named us accordingly.” Sunny smiled at me, and for a minute I felt like a cat basking in a perfect circle of warm light on a carpet. It was glorious the way she could do that to a person.
“So why didn’t they call her Rain?” Sawyer glanced at me.
“Or Stormy,” Leo offered with a smirk.
“You guys are hilarious.” I refilled my coffee, hoping my pancakes would arrive soon. I’d tried to eat some of the leftover Chinese before we came down, but Sunny had given me such a distasteful expression I felt too guilty to bother.
“Tallulah means leaping waters,” Sunny explained. “So they went with the theme.”
“Sunshine and Tallulah.” Sawyer made a face. “Sounds like your parents were hippies.”
That made me laugh, and when Sunny did as well, I briefly believed maybe things were going to be all right.
“No. Not hippies.” I gladly accepted my pancakes and bacon when the waitress returned, smothering each perfect golden disc with a layer of butter and syrup.
Sunny took her fresh fruit cup and cottage cheese, making the rest of us at the table look like gluttons. Sawyer, blessedly, didn’t seem to care if she was living up to the Sunny Corentine diet standard because she started to dig into her eggs and sausage with the kind of flourish that reminded me of myself.
Atta girl.
Leo, on the other hand, was far too interested in watching Sunny to actually focus on his omelet. The poor bastard was doomed. I’d seen this before. Sunny might as well have been born a siren for the way she sucked unsuspecting men into her orbit and then left them disappointed and brokenhearted when she failed to notice they existed.
It wasn’t malicious, but she was so oblivious to the effect she had on people she managed to leave a trail of distressed men behind her wherever she went. Leo appeared poised to become her next victim. Every time she smiled at him I could practically hear him falling in love with her.
Who could blame him? I was the founding member of the Sunny fan club.
We arrived at the Luxor with full tummies and a few minutes to spare before the opening speeches were made. Leo took Sawyer to the observation area where some excited bystanders had gathered along with the media. The seating around the stage was specifically reserved for clerics.
Several people were already sitting, some of whom I knew well, others whose faces I recognized but couldn’t immediately assign a role to.
Sunny and I stopped at the registration table and filled out our paperwork, then we were each handed a tote bag with our name badges attached to the outside. Instead of our full names mine just said: Tallulah, Rain Chaser, Temple of Seth and bore Seth’s sigil on the side, in case someone was too lazy to read the fine print.
Actually it was pretty clever. I knew the sigils better than most people’s faces, so having the symbol next to the name would help remind me who people were much faster.
Sunny was rifling through her purse and then did something to her name tag before she slipped it on.
When I glanced down, I saw she�
��d covered the black sun mark on her tag with a gold sticker version. She caught me looking and blushed. “We have the stickers in the lobby at the temple. They’re so much prettier than the plain black, don’t you think?”
She moved the tag side to side under the light so I could see the way the sticker sparkled.
My sister was an absolute gift.
I spotted Cade sitting a few rows from the front. He was still wearing a suit, this one a light-gray color, which was maybe just the tiniest bit too small, because it clung to his back muscles almost obscenely.
Throwing caution to the wind, I charged ahead and dropped into the seat beside him.
“Took you long enough, Spar—” My nickname stopped halfway out his mouth when he realized I wasn’t alone. “Hello.”
Like shutters coming down in front of a closed shop, he went from smiling to dead serious in a half second flat. It was instant and very weird to watch. He completely shut down.
“Cade, this is my sister, Sunny.”
He nodded at her politely, glancing down at her name tag. “Ah, you’re the new head cleric for Apollo, then. I was wondering who would replace Gina after she moved into the temple priestess position.”
“Someone’s been reading the newsletters,” Sunny said with a chuckle.
Cade ignored her teasing. “Tell me something, Sunny, are you a lot like your sister?”
“That depends on what you mean,” she hedged. Smart woman.
“Are you insufferable, stubborn, demanding, and a general pain in the ass?”
I slapped his arm. Sunny grinned. “Those are her best qualities. And no, I’m not. Those are strictly Tallulah traits.”
This time I slapped her. “You’re supposed to say, No, Cade, my sister is absolute perfection incarnate. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I would, but I’ve met you.”
Cade did the unthinkable and offered her a steely, tight smile. Since she was a relative stranger, this was a huge display of emotion.
“How do you guys know each other?” she asked.
Maybe I should have played it cooler when I walked over here. Obviously she had sensed there was a reason and was trying her best to suss it out.
