Thunder Road (Rain Chaser Book 1)

by Sierra Dean

  I loosened my hair out of its ponytail and let it fall down past my shoulders. I made a few nervous adjustments to be sure the back of my neck was covered. The last thing I needed was getting spotted in the middle of a raucous crowd of drunks on a hot summer night. Being a Rain Chaser in New Orleans didn’t make me the most popular person, either. Not all weather was my own personal doing, but I rarely got a chance to explain that.

  Leo, apparently noticing my unease, asked, “Are you hiding?”

  “We should both be hiding.”

  “Says the woman who forced me buy her beignets.”

  Ugh, logic. Point one for the big guy. “I don’t want any extra trouble.”

  “Seems to me like you’ve probably never gone a day without trouble in your whole life.”

  I made a face, but it wasn’t like I could disagree. Sunshine and roses weren’t part of my playbook, and he was right, trouble did have a habit of following me around.

  I had literally invited bad luck into my life. A therapist would have a field day with that one.

  “No one ever died eating deep-fried pastry, Leo. It’s too cruel a death for any of the gods to contemplate. I was actually doing us a favor, keeping us safe.”

  “Then by all means, there’s a great cupcake place down the block from my apartment. Maybe we can move in there.”

  “I know you’re joking, but you just described paradise to me.”

  Leo chuckled and pulled me out of the way of a loud group of men taking up the entire sidewalk. One took a look at me and grinned, flashing his teeth in an entirely too predatory way to be taken as a compliment.

  “Heeeyyy,” he drawled, his voice thick with an alcohol accent.

  “No.” I barely gave him a second glance, still walking.

  “Bitch, I said hey, can’t you take a compliment?”

  Overhead the sky was clear, but if this guy kept this up, I could muster a few fairly substantial thunderheads. Common sense and the hope of staying low key were the only things keeping my anger from getting the best of me.

  Leo had stopped walking though, his whole body suddenly tense and vibrating with anger.

  “Don’t.” I touched his arm—good gods the man was solid muscle—and shook my head firmly when he glanced at me. “We don’t need the attention. Let’s go.”

  The drunk guy, misinterpreting the situation as an invitation to be more of a douchecanoe, shouted, “Whatever, dumb slut. You’re not that hot anyway. I wouldn’t even let you blow me.”

  Fuck it.

  Leo moved to go after the guy, and as fun as that would have been to watch, this wasn’t his fight.

  And after the day I’d had, I was craving an outlet.

  I held Leo back with one hand, the group of frat guys already walking away and laughing like they’d won something.

  “Hey,” I shouted.

  The group paused, one or two sniggering loudly, all of them clearly smashed out of their minds. At least out of their senses, otherwise they wouldn’t be trash-talking a woman standing next to a guy who was six and a half feet tall and built like the second coming of Hercules.

  “What?” The chatty one sneered again, making a come at me gesture.

  “Seriously, I can’t give you a blow job? I’m super bummed. I was telling my friend here that I was so hoping some random guy in the street would offer to mouth-fuck me because otherwise how would I know my value as a woman?”

  The drunk guy wove uncertainly, and his friends stopped laughing. None of them seemed to comprehend the sarcasm. “Like…I mean if you want to. For feminism or whatever.” He rubbed his junk, and it was all I could do to not throw up in the street.

  “What are you doing?” Leo asked, keeping his voice low.

  Who even knew anymore? “You think it’s okay to say that shit?” This gave the drunk guy pause as he slowly realized I wasn’t actually flirting with him. “Do you think you can call women dumb slut in the street and it’s allowed?”

  “Whatever, bitch, don’t get your panties in a knot.”

  I crossed the distance between us and grabbed him by the front of the shirt, lifting him effortlessly and backing him against the nearest brick wall with a hard thump. His eyes went wide when he stared at me, and I knew my temper had gotten the best of me.

  “Y-your eyes.”

  Traitorous eyes. I couldn’t see them, obviously, but I knew what he was looking at. My irises would have gone dark and cloudy, and lightning would be flashing from inside, created on its own as a marker of my rage. Just like Seth. The same thing that had made Cade toss me in a cold shower.

  “She’s a priestess,” he shouted.

  This wasn’t actually true. I could only be a priestess if I was in the temple, and if I lived to see retirement, that’s what I’d become. But telling him what I really was would confirm which god I worked for, and I didn’t need Seth’s name showing up in any gossip blogs the next morning.

  I should have left well enough alone.

  “Shit, dude, just apologize,” one of his buddies said, his voice high and worried. “You don’t need an angry priestess messing your shit up.”

  I think the guy had expected his friends to rally to his aid, but instead they all backed up a half-dozen paces.

  And that’s when I saw him.

  The man stood apart from the rest of the growing crowd, and more importantly he stood out. He was rigid, barely moving as passersby nudged and jostled him. The suit he wore was too crisp, too tidy, like he hadn’t moved enough to wrinkle it. His skin was pale, almost waxen, and his eyes looked dead and empty.

  “I’m sorry. Lady, I’m sorry, can you let me go? Tell your god I didn’t mean it, okay. Here.” He rifled through his pockets and shoved a wad of wrinkled twenties into my hand where it was pressed against his chest.

  I looked down at the money, confused, still distracted by the man down the block. The frat guy took the opportunity and wriggled away from me, continuing to shout, “Sorry, seriously. I’ll never say that shit again. Tell your god. Shit.”

  Because it would matter to Seth what some idiot boy had said to me in the streets? Unlikely.

  I pocketed the money anyway, my gaze drifting back down the narrow, crowded street. People were traveling en masse towards Bourbon Street, where the music and merriment were loud and constant, and bad decisions flowed as freely as the booze.

  The man showed no signs of going in the same direction as the crowd. He seemed perfectly content to stand in place and stare at me.

  Dead men didn’t party, I guess.

  “We need to go,” I said to Leo, rejoining him near the lip of the sidewalk. He hadn’t tried to help me and was looking at me now like I was a totally different person.

  “Did that guy just pay you not to hit him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn, girl.”

  “Let that be a lesson to you. You should listen to me when I tell you to do things.” I glanced over my shoulder, and the dead man was still standing in the middle of the street. He hadn’t moved any closer, but the pit of worry in my belly was growing larger by the second. “And right now I’m strongly suggesting we get out of here.”

  Nudging him with both hands, I pushed Leo in the opposite direction to where the man was waiting. No power on earth could compel me to run towards death. I was foolhardy, not a fucking idiot.

  I used Leo as something of a shield to navigate us through the burgeoning crowd. Was it my imagination or were there more people out now than there had been only fifteen minutes ago? I could write part of it off as our proximity to Bourbon Street, but the sheer volume of pedestrian traffic had doubled or tripled in a short window of time.

  With both hands planted firmly on his back, I followed him through the crowd, pushing him so he’d understand my urgency wasn’t mere bluster. I’d have taken the lead, but he was a much more natural force to part the crowds, and I also wasn’t exactly sure which way we were going. I’d noted Leo’s address for Cade, but finding my way back without Leo
’s assistance would have taken twice as long.

  I didn’t spend a lot of time in New Orleans, and I was starting to remember why. Something happens to you when you spend most of your days alone, with only you and the road beneath your tires. People start to feel threatening and suffocating. The more people I was around at any given time, the more uneasy it made me.

  So add a crowd of hundreds to my existing dread about being stalked by one—or more—of Manea’s henchmen, and my anxiety was through the roof.

  “Maybe if you told me what you were running from, I could help,” Leo suggested, speaking over his shoulder to me.

  “I already told you death was coming for you, and you didn’t believe me at the time.” I had to shout for him to hear me, but the absurdity of my comments didn’t seem to bother anyone else around us.

  “You have to admit that’s a pretty hard threat to believe.”

  “I don’t care if you believe it or not, I only care that you move.”

  Leo jostled someone out of our way, and I spotted his hand darting out, undoing the guy’s watch even as his other hand was patting him on the shoulder apologetically. We were gone before the stranger had a chance to notice what had happened. He was so drunk it would probably be hours before he realized his Rolex was missing.

  Unreal. I was trying to keep us alive, and Leo was using the opportunity to skim low-hanging fruit from the crowd.

  “Seriously, man? Right now?” I poked him hard between the shoulders. How had I not noticed the extra wallets in his back pockets?

  The guy was good, I’d give him that.

  He handed me the watch, dropping it over his shoulder so I had no choice but to catch it, otherwise it would fall to the ground. “Hold on to this,” he said, his words half vanishing in the din.

  Around me beads were being hurled from upper balconies, and my shoes felt sticky against the cobblestone street. Every time someone near us would reach up to catch the plastic necklaces, shiny flashes of green, gold, and purple raining from the sky, Leo’s hand would move in, and he’d find another unsuspecting victim. Sometimes he took the whole wallet, other times it was jewelry, watches, loose cards in front pockets.

  Easy access for the owners was even easier access for the thief.

  By the time we were at the end of Bourbon and onto the comparative quiet of Canal, he was wearing four watches and had gotten his hands on at least a dozen other goodies I couldn’t see.

  I kept telling myself I didn’t care, but I was equal measures impressed and infuriated with him.

  Finding the parts of him that reflected Seth was difficult too. Unless he lost his temper, he had none of the righteous flare of the storm god. I’d known him less than three hours, but he wasn’t at all what I’d expected him to be.

  Though, to be fair, I thought he’d be a child.

  Out on Canal the crowds thinned, and I was able to see farther down the blocks in each direction. Mostly tourists and drunk college kids filled the street, and everyone was in motion, going about their business. I released my hold on Leo, the stolen Rolex jangling loosely on my wrist.

  “What had you so spooked back there?” He turned around so he was facing me. “You don’t look like much, but you can push like a fucking bulldozer.”

  I was still scanning the streets. “Which way is your apartment?”

  He nodded in the opposite direction from the way we’d come. He’d let me lead us in the wrong direction. If he was anyone else, I would have saved Manea the trouble and killed him myself.

  “Is this a game to you?”

  “No. But since I have no idea what’s going on, you’ll have to forgive me if I have trouble taking you seriously. I mean, you literally appear from out of nowhere in my apartment, tell me my real father is a god, tell me the goddess of ghosts relayed some very personal information to you, and then suggest I leave with you because the goddess of death wants me dead. Like…can you possibly appreciate why I think you might be making this shit up?”

  Well, if he put it like that.

  “Can you try to trust me for now, and believe me later? Trust that even if you think I’m crazy—which I’m not—that my goal here is to save your life?”

  “Isn’t this the plot of Terminator 2?”

  “I’m not from the future, you infuriating asshole.”

  “No, just sent by the gods.”

  I’d never wanted to punch someone so badly in my whole life, and that included the guy who’d called me a dumb bitch three minutes earlier.

  “When you meet him, I expect a thorough apology.”

  “Sure.”

  I was bumped from the side as a drunk girl on too-high heels passed us heading towards the party. I instinctively checked for my wallet after seeing how Leo played his game, only to remember I had nothing of value with me. The rumpled twenties were still in my pocket, untouched.

  I glanced behind me, wondering if the girl was working an angle, and I froze.

  They were everywhere.

  At least four of Manea’s undead were moving through the crowd towards us, oblivious to the people staggering around them and jostling them from all sides. Down Canal, to my right, two more were approaching slowly but steadily, and to my left were two more.

  I scanned my surroundings frantically, trying to find the best possible escape route that would get the fewest number of bystanders injured as a result. My gaze landed on an upper balcony, above a bar playing loud hip-hop.

  There, with beads draped from his hands and a slight, taunting smirk, was Prescott McMahon, and he was staring right at us.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I didn’t need Cade with me to be swimming in a sea of bad luck.

  Imagine how terrible things might have been if he were here.

  I shudder to think.

  “Leo, remember how I told you death was coming for you?”

  “Yeah, you’ve mentioned it a time or two.”

  I glanced at him from the corner of my eye and found that he had followed my gaze to the upper balcony and was watching Prescott with thinly veiled interest. Above us, death’s right-hand man waved pleasantly. He looked for all the world like a happy-go-lucky young man enjoying the energy of the crowd.

  “That man is here to make sure she gets you.”

  He snorted. “That guy looks like he’d cry during a fistfight.”

  “Maybe, but then he’d touch you once and you’d die.” I placed my palm on his chest for emphasis, drawing his focus back to me. “One touch. Boom.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  I had to grin. “In the short time you’ve known me, do you find I tend to exhibit much of a sense of humor?”

  “Does attitude count?”

  “Probably not.”

  Leo narrowed his eyes and breathed deeply. I was trying to get him to believe how much trouble we were in, but it was hard to pay attention to him when I was worrying about the undead henchmen moving closer. It didn’t matter whose orders they were obeying—Manea’s or Prescott’s—they wouldn’t stop until they’d done their job.

  If that was capturing us, we were screwed.

  If it was to kill me and take Leo, we were screwed.

  No matter how I looked at this situation, things didn’t have a happy ending. Without Cade here to help me I didn’t particularly like my chances against eight of Manea’s men, with nary a cloud in sight to draw power from. I might be powerful, and I could make rain from the flimsiest of puffy white clouds, but I couldn’t will a storm into being. Even when I’d bested Prescott by making it rain indoors, I had cheated. There’d been an open window in the room, and I’d drawn the clouds in from outside. I also couldn’t draw electrical energy from anything other than a thunderstorm, or Seth himself. So I couldn’t exactly touch the nearest light pole and zap them.

  Power is all well and fine until you run head-on into its limitations.

  “Run.” I gave him a firm push.

  “What?”

  “I can’t fight
them. And I can’t risk losing you to them. Run.” I pushed him again, and he staggered back a few feet, obviously taken aback by the force of my shove.

  For the first time since we’d left his apartment, he looked frightened in an appropriate way. How stupid had I been to go out in public? I’d believed with Hecate’s questionable help I had beaten Manea’s people here. I thought I had more time than this, time to plan and time to figure things out.

  Now I was back to thinking on my feet, and my feet were telling me to haul ass. Who was I to argue with that kind of flawless logic?

  Leo took me at my word for once.

  He grabbed me by the wrist so hard it made me wince, but he was running, and I was following him whether I liked it or not. We were flying down Canal with me desperately trying to keep pace with him. His legs were at least a foot longer than mine, so his gait was impossible to match, but I found if I really put the effort in, I could stay behind him without having to let go of his hand.

  Which was good because his grip was so fierce, if I hadn’t been able to keep up, he probably would have started dragging me along.

  Pedestrians shouted at us as we bumped and jostled our way down the sidewalk. Hopefully those same people would provide a good enough buffer to put some distance between us and Prescott.

  I was praying to Seth for all it was worth that they hadn’t figured out where Leo lived, otherwise we were running at top speed towards the people who wanted to get their hands on us.

  “I don’t suppose you’re borrowing that apartment of yours from someone?” My words blew back in my face, trailing behind us and disappearing into the din. “I mean, is your name on the lease?”

  “No.” It was only one word, but it gave me all I needed to put the extra pep in my step.

  There was a chance we might be able to lay low, if they didn’t know where to look. We hadn’t been able to find Leo in any online searches, and the reason was apparent now. He had taken himself off the grid. At the time it had seemed needlessly frustrating, but now I was grateful for his paranoia.