by Sierra Dean
I sometimes had that effect on people.
“You think he’d actually be stupid enough to try something here?” Imelda asked. “With this much security and all these clerics?”
“He’s desperate to show the whole world how little the gods care about humans. And if he has to kill someone on national television to make that point, I think he’ll try. Up until last night I thought it would be impossible. I still can’t imagine how anyone would be able to attack us here, not with all this security and power. But we aren’t watching everyone all the time. The previous evening, everywhere I looked there were clerics out in public. We assume we’re invincible, and sometimes that makes us forget we’re still human.” I hadn’t expected myself to say quite so much and found I was out of breath at the end.
Imelda listened to me, the open hostility gone from her face.
“I wondered why Cade was so adamant about the extra security when we spoke late last week. It would have been nice of him to share a few more details, but I suppose he thought he was doing what was right.”
She leaned back in her chair. For a moment we were both quiet, and the buzzing sounds of the morning lobby were the only things that filled the silence.
“Tallulah, I can’t cancel the convention. I think you know that. The public fallout would be extraordinary. We’d never be able to explain it. People look to us as human proxies for the gods they love, and that means we cannot show fear or weakness. It would give people reasons to doubt, and you know full well doubt is the frost that kills the harvest of belief.”
I’d heard those words tens of thousands of times since my childhood. If there was anything meant to brainwash our little cleric minds, it was that. Doubt is the frost that kills the harvest of belief. It meant no matter what, we couldn’t give the regular citizens of the world an excuse to believe the gods were indifferent to them.
Our whole lives existed solely so people believed they mattered to the gods. Take away belief and we were left with nothing.
I knew she couldn’t cancel the convention. I don’t think I even wanted her to cancel it. I just needed her to promise me she would take the necessary steps in order to keep everyone here as safe as possible.
She seemed to read this on my face because she said, “I’ll get more security on site immediately, and we’ll do our best to keep people close to their hotels for the remainder of the week. Although you know how well that will go over for the younger ones.”
I didn’t want to take that away from them, but I also desperately wanted to keep them alive.
“I know you’ll do your best.” I pushed my chair back from the table. “Thanks for making the time for me.”
Imelda looked up once more. “I can always make time where it’s needed, Tallulah.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The day passed in a fog.
Every time I saw a dumpy white guy, I was sure it was the killer. I was twice as jumpy as I’d been after the phone call. His appearance the previous night at the club was making things worse. A part of me hoped he would call me again, leave me more clues, give me something to work with.
Instead I got nothing but uncertainty and frayed nerves.
I tried my best to pretend everything was normal. I went to every single panel on my schedule. I agreed to a grievance meeting with the cleric for the wind goddess Oreithyia. It was basically a useless waste of forty minutes because Lettie, the cleric in question, wouldn’t yield an inch. She believed the winds shouldn’t be a part of my domain, and I believed she was a whiny dumbass. So, you know, it went great.
We ultimately determined that tornados and hurricanes fell under both of our skill sets, but that unlike breezes or gusts, they were far more a part of Seth’s domain because of their connection to the storm. She didn’t like that last part, but since she came away still in power of something, she felt like she’d won.
I had these arguments every year, and they were utterly pointless. The gods and goddesses would do whatever they wanted, and they’d make us do whatever they wanted, and if someone else didn’t like it, that was too damn bad. That was the long and short of every argument I’d ever had at every convention I’d ever been to.
It was like fighting with a brick wall.
Just because the brick wall was bloody at the end of the fight didn’t mean it had lost.
By the end of the day I wanted to go back to the Lucky Star, get into my tub, and stay there for the rest of the night. I’d eat my stupidly expensive room-service burger. I’d watch some shitty reality TV. I’d pretend the world didn’t exist for however long I could manage it, and then I’d start this whole routine all over again tomorrow.
I needed a few minutes to myself. Time enough to reset and start fresh. If I didn’t have that, I worried I was going to come apart at the seams from all the anxiety.
Sunny found me in the lobby of the Luxor. After the first day of the convention, Sawyer had realized how boring it was to sit around and not get to attend as many panels as she wanted, so she and Leo had gone somewhere else for the afternoon. They would return tomorrow to watch one of the more important public addresses.
I’d told him about a hundred times to not let her out of his sight, and even still I felt sick to my stomach.
My sister linked her arm through mine. “Did you have a good day?”
“I made it to the end. I guess that’s something.”
“Are we going out for dinner?” She glanced hopefully around me, and I wasn’t sure which of the men she was so interested in seeing. In spite of what I’d said to Cade the night before, a small part of me would have loved for her to be looking for Leo. It would be nice to see her show a real romantic interest in someone. There was no way things would work out between a sun cleric and a demigod, but it might do her some good to experience a basic human desire like lust. Even a little more flirting like they’d done on the dance floor could be beneficial for her. She spent way too much time with the other Sun Worshippers.
After seeing the two of them together the previous night, I suspected her feelings for him weren’t entirely friendly.
It was nice to know she was human, and not just the perfect poster child for clerics everywhere.
I rested my head on her shoulder, breathing in her scent. It was like fresh cotton dried in the sun. How could a person smell that clean?
“I think it might be a quiet night in,” I told her. “Would you mind terribly?”
She gave me an assessing once-over, then wrapped her arm around my shoulders as we moved towards the front door. “You look terrible. You could probably use an early night.”
“You’re so sweet.” I rolled my eyes.
“I don’t get to show my sisterly love often.”
“So you show it by telling me how awful I look?” I made a funny face at her. The sliding glass doors hissed open.
“Isn’t that my j—?”
Sunny was cut short by the sound of shrieking metal and exploding glass. The normal hotel lobby noises were replaced by screaming, crying, and a tinny ringing in my ears.
Sunny and I were flat on the floor, about five feet away from where we had been standing a moment before. The lobby was filled with chalky dust, a fire alarm was going off, and people were either huddled on the floor or running away from the doors.
It took me a second to realize I was on top of her. I didn’t remember grabbing her or shielding her, but my body was wrapped protectively around hers, and she was curled into a small ball underneath me.
“Are you okay?” Was I yelling? I could barely hear the words.
She blinked up at me, totally dazed, and when she finally realized what I’d asked, she started nodding. “I’m fine.”
At least I thought that’s what she said based on the way her lips moved. I couldn’t actually hear anything she was saying. It was as if my ears had suddenly been tuned into the wrong frequency and the soundtrack in my head was for a different movie.
I heard the sirens of a police car
or ambulance. I heard people outside the hotel calling each other’s names. Above all that was the ceaseless ringing in my ears.
Sunny climbed out from under me then helped me to my feet. Her eyes widened as she looked at me, and suddenly her hands were everywhere. She was investigating all my exposed skin with the thoroughness of a mother gorilla picking nits out of her baby’s fur.
I tried to swat her hands off me, but she kept right on poking away.
Only then did I notice her fingers were stained with blood.
“You’re hurt.” I must have been yelling because a few people turned to look at us.
She was shaking her head solemnly as she stared at her bloody fingers. She showed them to me. “This is yours.”
“Oh.”
I gingerly touched my forehead, and in a state of total shock, picked a piece of breakaway safety glass out of my scalp.
I thought it was called safety glass because it couldn’t hurt you.
How dumb was I?
I showed her the piece of glass and said, “Ow.”
Then, naturally, I blacked out.
Chapter Thirty-Four
If I had a dollar for every time I passed out due to injuries sustained on the job, I probably could have bought myself a nice helmet.
Or at least a decent takeout meal.
Maybe a new book to read while I was in the hospital.
I came to on a gurney in the middle of a sterile-looking hallway. A private room this was not. It took me no time at all to figure out where I was, thanks to the drunk frat guy passed out in a wheelchair nearby with a metal dish in his lap to catch his vomit. Drool was dripping from his mouth to the tin in a long, shiny strand.
He made a loud snoring sound.
I touched my forehead and felt the bump of stitches and some bandages. Surprisingly it didn’t hurt too much. I had anticipated a whopper of a headache, or at least something to tell me I’d been seriously hurt. Instead it felt like I’d stood up too fast under a low ceiling and hit my head too hard.
A life-threatening injury this was not.
Honestly, I’d probably patched myself up after worse without ever setting foot in a hospital.
There was no one else around me aside from the drunk guy, and he wasn’t exactly going to give me the lowdown on what had happened. My clothes were covered in a fine film of dust, but otherwise nothing looked ripped or damaged. I did a quick touch test, much like Sunny had subjected me to before I passed out. Nothing was broken or missing. Aside from the stitches on my forehead I seemed to be in fine shape.
I slid off the gurney, testing my footing. No issues with walking or balance. I felt lightheaded, but in the way I did if I went too long without eating. It was more likely low blood sugar than a sign of brain damage.
Since no one was around to stop me from leaving, I grabbed my jacket and went in search of the waiting room. A few other patients were lying on gurneys in the hall—a sure sign it had been a busy night in the emergency room—and I stopped to check them all, making sure there were no friends or acquaintances in the mix.
Nada.
I was all the way to the waiting room doors when a nurse caught sight of my stitched-up head, and said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m looking for my sister.”
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to return to your bed. You can’t go anywhere until a doctor has cleared you.”
“Then find me a doctor.” I ducked away from her grasp. “Because I’m not going back to that bed until I’ve seen my sister.” Sunny had seemed fine, but I had thought the same about myself up until I passed out.
I wouldn’t be able to rest easy until I saw her with my own eyes. I moved to bypass the nurse, and she sidestepped to block me.
“Ma’am,” she said impatiently. “You were involved in an explosion. Would you please have a seat?”
I didn’t want to be that asshole giving the nurse a hard time, I really didn’t. I knew how hard they worked. I knew how thankless the job was, how gross the tasks were, and how none of them got paid what they deserved. But I was going to punch this woman in the face if she didn’t let me see my sister.
Then, a man appeared from a nearby room, a knight in white lab coat, and moved between me and the beleaguered nurse. I wasn’t sure which one of us he meant to protect.
“She was at the Luxor.” This, apparently, was all the explanation he needed.
“I just want to see my sister. Please.”
He glanced at me. The doctor was a plain man, handsome in the way the best-looking middle-aged dad at a soccer game might be. He offered me a nice smile, and I relaxed at little.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Tallulah. Corentine.”
“All right, Tallulah, can you follow me for a second?” He took a step towards me, and I recoiled from him the way some people flinched away from touching Prescott.
“I want to see Sunny.” His unwillingness to take me to her was making me nervous.
“I completely understand, and I’ll make sure you do.” Again, the soft smile, a coaxing curl of his fingers trying to lure me forward. His name tag said Dr. Olson. “Just let me give you the once-over first to make sure you’re okay. Can I do that?”
I let him direct me to a bank of three plastic chairs and took a seat. The nurse, having handed me off to someone else, disappeared down a different hallway.
Dr. Olson stooped down in front of me with a little flashlight in his hand. He shone the light in my eyes, made me follow it, and checked each eye individually. He prodded gently at my stitches, took my pulse, and did a few other cursory health checks. When he appeared to run out of places to poke me and reasons to blind me, he jotted down a couple notes on a clipboard and patted me on the shoulder.
“My professional diagnosis?”
“Please.”
“You’ll live. I’d strongly urge you to have someone check on you periodically through the night. You don’t have any signs of a concussion, but it sounds like you went flying a good ways, and we always worry about brain injuries when someone is hit by debris. Can you hear everything okay? You were apparently pretty close to the blast when it went off.”
The blast. Explosion.
“There was a bit of ringing afterwards, but it all sounds okay now.”
“The ringing is a sign of tinnitus. It might mean there’s been some damage to the fine bones in your inner ear.” He tapped his own ear, just in case I wasn’t sure what they looked like. “Try to stick to low volume for awhile. No rock concerts. No monster trucks. Lots of Mozart and babbling brooks, that sort of thing.”
This doctor was weird.
“No rock concerts,” I assured him. “Now, with all due respect, can you please take me to my godsdamned sister?”
He nodded and got back up, giving me a hand out of the chair. He guided me to a small room where about ten people in dust-smeared clothes were sitting in plastic chairs, while a doctor in ER scrubs moved down the line, taking vitals.
“All right, Ms. Corentine. Make sure you come back immediately if you start to notice any nausea, signs of dizziness, or if that ringing comes back, okay?”
I nodded, but I was already standing in the door of the room, ignoring everything he said. As I stepped over the threshold, I scanned the dirty faces. Sunny had been sitting on the wall behind me and saw first, because she had her arms around my waist before I even realized she was in the room.
“Oh gods, I was so worried, Tallulah. They insisted I get checked out before they’d let me see you. And this is taking forever, and no one would tell me anything except that you weren’t in serious condition. I’m just so glad you’re okay.” This all came out in one long epic stream of words, and I could barely process them all they were spoken so quickly.
I managed to say, “I’m fine.”
A TV on the wall behind her was showing the local news, and the top story was Car bomb explodes at Luxor.
“A car bomb?”
I glanced from the TV set back to her, but she was too busy fussing with my hair and wincing at my stitches to pay any attention. The other people in the room looked exhausted and vaguely annoyed with us. I pulled her into the hallway so we wouldn’t interrupt the doctor.
“Sunny.”
“Mm?”
“It was a car bomb?”
“That’s what they’re saying, yeah.” She touched my bandage and made a little tutting sound. “No one was seriously hurt. Some stitches, cuts and scrapes. Another cleric has a broken arm that needed to be set. No one died.”
“And you’re okay?” My gaze raked over her, making sure there were no secret bruises or cuts she had been too stubborn to report.
She looked as flawless as ever. Compared to the other people she’d been sitting with she hardly even looked dirty.
“You protected me.” Her eyes were wide, damp with tears. “You jumped in front of me.”
I didn’t remember doing any of that. But of course I would have. I’d lay down in traffic for her. She was my other half. If I ever lost her, I could never be whole again.
“Can we go?” I pleaded. “I hate hospitals.”
“Sure. You might want to call Cade on the way.”
I blanched. Why would she suggest that? What did she know? The guilty expression on my face must have told her a lot more than I’d intended because she gave me a soft smile and touched my cheek.
“Lula-Belle, no man calls a girl forty-seven times in one night just to make sure she’s okay.”
I flushed. “Did you talk to him?”
“I answered on call forty-eight. I pretty much had to threaten him with death to keep him from coming down here. He feels…well, he feels very strongly about your safety, doesn’t he?”
Safety. “Oh gods, do you know if Sawyer called her foster mom?” This news would be all over the airwaves in Nevada. I had no doubt Yvonne was sitting at home right now looking up phone numbers for the National Guard.
