by Sierra Dean
I wriggled backwards away from him and managed to get myself up on both feet before he was able to catch his breath again. Now that we were on even ground, I felt considerably better about my chances.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he wheezed.
“Bullshit. If you didn’t kill her, why did you run?”
“I ran because you saw me.”
This gave me pause. “Huh?”
“I was just supposed to wait until you got back to your car and text this number, but when I looked up, you were staring right at me. Like you knew what I was doing. I panicked.”
This had to be the most insane story imaginable for him to cook up on the spot. It was so stupid it almost sounded believable.
“Give me your phone.”
I expected he might argue, but instead he reached into his back pocket and held the smartphone out to me, before sitting down in a puddle, still wincing.
I snatched the phone out of his hand and danced back a few steps. It might seem like he was down for the count, but then again he could be faking the whole thing. I wasn’t about to take any other dumb chances.
“Is it the first one here?” I asked.
He nodded.
I copied the number into my own phone, before using the man’s to hit Call. The phone rang twice, then a smooth, deep voice answered.
“I thought I told you to text. Is she on the move?”
My blood turned to ice, and instead of a quick comeback, I simply hung up. I knew that voice all too well.
Prescott McMahon, the cleric to the goddess of death, was having me followed.
Chapter Three
I hung up my jacket on the rack just inside my door and kicked my boots onto the plastic tray. I had my wet jeans off before I even got out of the front entrance, leaving the denim in a heap on the hardwood floor. The air was warm and inviting from the fire I’d left on in my hurry to meet the detective.
My apartment was the only cushy perk of my otherwise deeply unglamorous job. And oh boy was it a perk.
Which was almost cruel, given how little time I got to spend in it.
The front hall opened into a huge open-concept loft, with floor-to-ceiling windows giving me a perfect view of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier in the background, a crown of mist encircling its peak. I’d seen apartments on other floors and knew this had once been several one-bedroom units that were converted into a single, giant space. There was a balcony that gave me uninterrupted glimpses of everything from the Space Needle to Puget Sound. It was the kind of place a millionaire would sell both kidneys for.
I got to sleep here about sixty nights a year.
The walls were painted a soft glacier blue meant to mimic the early light of morning, and the furniture and fixtures were clean and modern. Sido had decorated the place for me when I moved out of the temple, and I’d left most of it exactly as she’d set it up. The only thing I had changed was the art, which was all photographs I’d bought during my trips crisscrossing the country. Portraits, landscapes, postcards from one-stoplight towns. There was a little bit of everywhere I’d been displayed on the walls.
Hanging on one wall was a neon sign I’d bought for fifty dollars from a motel that had been undergoing renovations when I stayed there. They were going to throw the old sign out, and I couldn’t bear the idea of the thing just becoming garbage. I had an affinity for motels with the dumbest, kitschiest names. Which was how a blue-and-orange sign for Rest for the Wicked Inn had come to find a home on my living room wall.
It had been turned into a Motel 6.
Rain was falling steadily outside, turning the skyline a slate-gray color to match the water.
I climbed over the low back of my charcoal sofa in a daze and pulled a knit blanket onto myself. A small chirrup sound came from the folds of the soft material, and a little canine head with enormous ears popped out. Fenrir, my fennec familiar, squinted at me with bleary eyes. He yawned wide, showing off his needlelike teeth.
“Sorry, Sleeping Beauty, did I interrupt your hard work?”
He snuffed, then curled up in the crook of space behind my knees. Clearly napping was more important to him than making a big stink. I couldn’t blame him.
I stared at the coffeemaker on my counter, wondering what mattered more to me: caffeine or sleep. Neither was going to blot out everything I’d been through today, but a nap would help me ignore it awhile longer. Coffee would pull everything into laser focus, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared for that.
Alcohol would be great right about now, but it wasn’t even ten, way too early for me to be pouring myself a drink. I buried my face in the couch cushions and closed my eyes, focusing on the slight rise and fall of Fen’s little body.
All I could see was the girl lying dead and pale on the rocks. All I could feel was the throbbing in my head and ribs.
Growling, I tossed the blanket onto the floor, eliciting an angry yip from the fennec, who went to the other end of the couch and curled up on one of the throw cushions. Good to know one of us could still rest.
I stomped into the kitchen and poured some of the lukewarm coffee I had brewed but not been able to enjoy earlier into a mug from a place in Wisconsin called Diner n’ Hash. I think they’d been going for a cute play on dine and dash, but I really just bought it because I liked the cartoon biscuit on the front.
My stomach rumbled. I’d gone out to meet Stowe without eating first, which was a dangerous move in and of itself. I got a little grouchy when I didn’t eat, and that was probably putting it politely. I didn’t spend a lot of time around other people, but I imagined I wasn’t buckets of fun to socialize with when I had an empty tummy. Now that I’d been running around and fighting, I was extra hungry.
I didn’t bother checking the fridge. I’d only been home two days since a weeklong trip to Missouri, and going out to the store hadn’t been high on my list of priorities. There was a bag of moldy bagels on the counter, which I sneered at but made no move to toss in the garbage. Cereal was pointless without milk. I peeked into the cupboard at my knees and found a half-eaten bag of chili Doritos and dumped them into a mixing bowl.
Room temperature coffee and spicy chips.
The Tallulah Corentine diet.
I made my way back to the couch, prepared to watch at least three straight hours of whatever was marathoning on HBO before letting myself think about Prescott. Then I noticed the red light of my answering machine blinking at me.
I’d briefly tried to have voicemail, like people who live in the twenty-first century, but since I spent weeks away and often didn’t bother to check my messages from the road, I kept hitting my message limit. With an old-school machine I was able to store more calls for some reason.
Yes. I still use a landline. I also had a cell phone, of course, but I was supposed to keep it strictly for professional use. Not that that really happened. But the temple would often review my call logs, which they never bothered to do with my home line.
The physical machine also made it less likely for the temple to snoop on my calls, which they could do with voicemail a lot more easily.
I put my coffee cup down but held on to my chips, my stomach rumbling louder now, and padded over to the machine to see what calls I’d missed since leaving the house that morning. My gut churned, half-expecting one of them to be from Prescott himself having realized I was on to him.
“You have two new messages,” the machine informed me. Great.
“Tallulah?” The woman’s voice sounded unsure, as if it thought I might just be screening my calls. Smart person, whoever it was. A long pause was followed with, “Shit.” The recording ended there.
Um, okay. That definitely qualified as weird. Coupled with everything else, it gave me a nauseous, uneasy feeling in my belly.
The next message started to play, and the same voice said, “Tallulah, it’s Deedee.” My gut clenched. I hadn’t heard from Deedee in almost a year, and the panic in her tone told me she wasn’t reaching out to me to gossip about
old times. “Can you…um…” Another long pause. “I can’t leave this on your machine. I’ll call you back.”
Silence hung in the air once the message finished playing.
Deedee, or more accurately Diana Lemaire, was a cleric to the goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, made her clerics the earthbound vessels of her love.
Anyone who wanted to be touched by love went through Deedee and the others in her temple, and they gave love, um, freely. In the form of lots and lots of sex.
Since Deedee and I were the same age, we’d grown up in similar circles, and I’d known her since we were both children. We weren’t exactly friends, because friendship wasn’t the sort of thing clerics indulged in—we were all too busy and our lives too disposable to become attached. But I liked her and she liked me, and if she was calling me now, sounding scared, I felt like it was my duty to do something to help ease that burden for her.
But I couldn’t do anything until I knew—
The phone rang, and I snatched it out of its cradle. “Deedee?”
“Oh thank the goddess, I was worried I’d get your machine again. I swear I was this close to calling the temple, but I know you hate that.”
“It’s fine. I’m here now. Are you okay?”
Her breath came out in a shaky little moan, and I couldn’t decide if it was relief or desperation that made the sound so tremulous. I gave her a few seconds to collect herself, and she finally said, “I didn’t know who else to call.”
So this was something she didn’t want to bring to her goddess or the temple elders. Interesting.
Our paths were very different. Deedee answered prayers through sex and kisses, whereas my job involved me being struck by lightning on a semi-regular basis. There weren’t many things I could imagine that might bring Deedee to me for help.
Whatever it was wouldn’t be good.
I wedged the phone between my chin and shoulder and made my way back to the couch, setting the bowl of chips on my coffee table so Fenrir wouldn’t indulge himself while I wasn’t paying attention.
Deedee spoke again, this time in a hushed voice like she had gone somewhere to avoid being overheard. Which, given how low on privacy temples were, was probably the case.
“How did you outsmart Manea?” she asked.
This sent a chill through me so powerful I had to pull my blanket across my bare legs to keep from shivering. The last thing I wanted to talk about right now was my close encounter with the goddess of death, or how she had literally risen the dead out of their graves to bring me down. Especially given that her cleric seemed to be having me followed.
Not to mention the whole thing where I’d needed to escape from the underworld in order to best her at her own game.
“It wasn’t like I solved a weird riddle or something, Dee. I almost died. Several times. I can’t exactly explain how I did it either.” It sounded like a lame cop-out even to me, and I was the one who had lived it. But really, what did she expect, a magical incantation to stave off death? If such a thing existed, I certainly wouldn’t go around handing it out to anyone who asked.
I liked her, but I wasn’t about to help her become immortal.
Eternal life tended to turn people into shitty bastards, if the gods were any indication.
“I’m not asking for me,” she countered, practically reading my mind. “You’re the only person I know who has met her. You’re the only person I know who has touched Prescott and lived to tell the tale. Things are going south over here, Tallulah, and if there’s a way to stay alive, I need to know.”
Why was she bringing up Prescott? This was all a little too timely to be coincidental.
Prescott McMahon was the literal right-hand man of death. Meaning he had the ability to kill someone with a touch, should Manea want them dead. Deedee was veering into dangerous territory by mentioning my past with Prescott right now, not because she knew he was following me, but because of what she was implying when she said I’d touched him and lived to tell the tale.
This was what I got for asking a sex cleric for romance advice when I was seventeen.
“What does Prescott have to do with any of this? Dee, you’re freaking me out. You leave me these messages that don’t say anything, and now you’re asking how to evade death. What kind of trouble are you in?”
She scoffed. “I think we all got into the same kind of trouble the day our parents ditched us.”
I thought about the girl on the beach, the one with the mark on her neck that promised her to Seth.
Had her parents been like mine? Had they believed her destiny meant her for better things?
I was willing to bet they hadn’t thought it would end with her lying dead on a beach in the Seattle rain.
“Besides,” Deedee continued. “Who else but Prescott am I going to blame when a girl with the mark of Aphrodite shows up dead on our doorstep without so much as a cut on her?”
Chapter Four
The room spun, and I was glad I’d already been sitting because Deedee’s words probably would have brought me down flat on my ass.
“Say that again.” I was barely able to form the sentence, but I had to know if I’d heard her right.
“The temple is going ballistic. We’re lucky to get one cleric every other year. Infatuates are getting almost as rare as Luckless Ones these days. This girl was important, and we didn’t even know she was coming until she was already dead.”
I bit my tongue, a whole flurry of emotions going through me. I wondered if I should tell her about the Rain Chaser I’d seen that morning. The mention of Luckless Ones, the clerics of the bad-luck goddess Ardra, brought a whole different sensation to me.
Now was not the ideal time to be thinking about Cade Melpomene.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t a natural death?” I asked.
“What even is a natural death these days, Lulu?” She heaved a sigh. “To answer your question, no, I don’t think her young nine-year-old heart up and quit on her suddenly. Something happened to her, I just don’t know what.”
If anyone could kill someone without leaving a single trace, it would be death’s whipping boy.
Except none of this was making any sense whatsoever.
I activated the phone’s speaker option and set it on the coffee table, then retrieved my laptop from where it had gotten wedged between the couch cushions the previous night.
“When did you say you found her?” I pulled up a police database.
“Just last night.”
I could see Manea using Prescott to get her revenge on me by killing the young Rain Chaser, as morbid and hideous as that thought was. But why would he kill an Infatuate? As far as I knew there was no ill will between Manea and Aphrodite. Not to mention these deaths had happened on totally opposite ends of the West Coast in the span of a day. That didn’t make it impossible, but it did make it unlikely.
“And she’s how old?”
“Nine or ten.” Her voice had calmed a little, I was guessing because she had found someone else to carry the worry for her. “Am I on speaker?”
“Yes.”
“Are you alone?”
“Constantly.”
She made a sniffing sound. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”
I stopped typing and stared at the phone with a look that might have made a gorgon proud. Of course Deedee couldn’t see my glowering, but it sure made me feel better. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just heard something that suggested you might have gotten lucky.” She laughed lightly at her own phrasing. “Or I guess unlucky.”
My pulse hammered. Nothing had happened between Cade and me when we were together in Louisiana. Well, maybe that depended on your definition of nothing. But we certainly hadn’t done anything like what she was implying.
“You’re going to be the one to get on my case about whether or not I’m temple pure? Really?”
“Hey. My body is a vessel for the goddess’s love.”
I scoff
ed. The report I’d been waiting for finally completed, and I scanned the information listed on the screen. As I took in the words, my skin felt colder and colder. In addition to the Jane Doe in Seattle and the one who I assumed was Deedee’s in Los Angeles, there were seven other unidentified bodies discovered in the last month, all kids under the age of fourteen.
“I have to go, Dee.”
“What? What did you find?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not good.” I hung up the phone before she could reply, and stared at the read-out on my computer. Nine kids.
As I opened each report, I looked for the medical examiner’s assessments to see anything about distinguishing marks. Sure enough the Los Angeles victim had a heart mark, the sign of Aphrodite. I already knew the girl on the beach had Seth’s mark on her. Each report told me what I already knew. These kids were all initiates. They were destined to become clerics, and now they were all dead. The gods they were meant to serve had no connection that I could tell. Seth, Aphrodite, Chronos, Brighid, Sif, Nemesis, Macha, Apophis and Ma’at.
I reviewed the list of names, which I’d jotted down on a Domino’s pizza napkin, and tried to make sense of them. Ma’at was the goddess of justice. Her initiate had been found dead in Washington, D.C. How was that not bigger news? Macha was one of the Morrigan, a harbinger of death and war, making her clerics rare and their work exceedingly risky. Killing one of her clerics should have been a huge deal. Others, like Apophis, were more befuddling. Apophis was simply the god of snakes. His clerics were uncommon, but nothing they did was particularly sensational. So why kill them?
The idea of killing children was in and of itself appalling, but clearly someone was targeting these kids because of their destined status. Was the killer’s plan to hurt the gods? If so, this person didn’t know much about the way deities worked. A god wouldn’t care one bit about a dead initiate. They didn’t care how rare some of their clerics were, as long as they had one. A god was an immortal being, and the life of one child was relatively meaningless in the grand scope of things.